Tim Boxer: We'll Miss Lou Jacobi's Wisecracks

by Tim Boxer
Special to the Jewish Week

Lou Jacobi always made you laugh with a one-liner or a two-step. Photo by Tim Boxer

I met Lou Jacobi many times, and each time I'd leave with a pocketful of one-liners. At the Stage Deli he asked the waiter, "What do you have that will give me heartburn right now instead of two in the morning?"

He asked a customer, 'What's the latest dope on Wall Street?" The customer said, "My son."

I won't be meeting Lou anymore. He died on Oct. 23 at age 95 at his home on Central Park South in Manhattan.

Born Louis Harold Jacobovitch in Toronto "on the seventh Hanukkah candle," Lou got an early start in show business. At age three his father Joseph, who sometimes served as a cantor, taught him to sing "God, don't desert me in my old age" from the Hebrew liturgy.

Lou's mother Fay was furious: "Why teach a three-year-old a song like that?" The father said, "Let him know what it is to grow old."

His father spent a small fortune trying to make his 10-year-old son into a concert violinist. Eventually Lou hung up the fiddle and stepped out as a standup comedian, raconteur and character actor. It was the Great Depression and his father was horrified that his son would become a bum.

In his repertoire Lou delighted in relating the story of a rebbe who grabs a Jew off the street and tells him, "I need you for a special job. Stand on the roof of the shul as a lookout for the moshiach." The man wanted to know if it's a steady job. "A steady job?" the rebbe exclaimed. "It's a lifetime job!"

Lou made his Broadway debut in "The Diary of Anne Frank" in 1955. He gave the play eight days to run. It ran two and a half years. Lou appeared in a total of 10 Broadway plays.

An unknown writer tried to interest Lou in his play. Lou declined. He sent the script again, and again Lou rejected it. After getting it a third time, Lou finally agreed to do it. With Lou in a major role, "Come Blow Your Horn" was a Broadway smash for 80 weeks and proved a huge success for the up-and-coming playwright by the name of Neil Simon.

Lou married Ruth Ludwin of Teaneck, N.J., in 1957 under a chupah outside during his filming of "Anne Frank" in Hollywood. It was a Hollywood wedding that Jack Warden and Jack Klugman said wouldn't last three weeks. It lasted until Ruth's death in 2004.

"Ruth had to do something about the Six Million," Lou told me. "She had gone to Israel in 1948 and became a founder of Hasolelim, a kibbutz in the Galilee. I visited in 1968 and it was a remarkable achievement."

In 1982 Lou told me about working with Peter O'Toole and Lainie Kazan in "My Favorite Year." It was a film for MGM which, he insisted, stands for "My Gantze Mishpocha."

Lou said he didn't have to audition for the director, Richard Benjamin. "For a secure director, who knows what he wants, you don't have to audition."

That reminded him of the young actress who auditioned 940 times over the years and was always rejected. One day she auditioned and the director said, 'You got the part." She said, "I'm sorry, sir, I only do auditions."

Tim Boxer is editor of 15MinutesMagazine.com.

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