ENRICO'S WAS NEVER LIKE THIS

So although turned off by the actor Christophe Waltz who won the Academy Award which was apparently given him for over-acting, I went to see Big Eyes, being an admirer of Amy Adams who also managed to disappoint.  But oh, there was San Francisco in the time of Enrico's, where I used to more than hang out, with a man in a beret playing him, and everything except Sue Stanley, my irascible and wonderful friend from Paris, who married him.  I have no idea what happened to her, though of course must assume she is no longer with us, as she was older even when young.

     Sue was in the forefront of performers who wanted to sing my song 'Sex,' written when I was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, sung in a shaking voice at the behest of Janice Mars to Marlon Brando when he was thin and beautiful and in an apartment in Carnegie Hall.  That was the summer Marlon starred in and directed Arms and the Man at the Falmouth Playhouse, where he was terrible.  He never could do comedy.

      I visited Janice there, and roomed with Maureen Stapleton, as brilliant offstage as she was on, though already drunk as she was kind.  Janice, like everyone, wanted to sing SEX but I was hanging on to it waiting for its great sale to a major star which would have been Lena Horne except when she was rehearsing it to sing at the Waldorf, a friend came in and said "That's a great number.  I heard Rose Hardaway do it last night at the Apollo."  So that ended that, as Lena didn't know she was black.

     Rose Hardaway was a gorgeous black woman who came every night to the Mars Club in Paris where I was singing my songs, and said about SEX, "Chile, that's a great number.  Everybody in this business going to cheat you and lie to you.  But I'm telling you the truth.  I'm stealing your song."  I of course thought she was kidding.

It was a colorful time in every sense of the word.