Evening star., 1947-06-03

easy as brushing your hair out OF
your eyes. The poor devils to be
pitied are those who inherit the
Job in June when the regular
rounder goes away for o while
probably to investigate the truth OF
reports that there is life on earth
in daylight hours.
Stand-in night club writers usual
|ly know only what they have read
in the papers about such places. II
they are foresighted, which happens
about as often as quintuplets, they
may have stored few names in
their minds against the day they
will have to take over.
Moulin Rouge" they say to them
selves, "there1l always be Moulin
Rouge. In fact, there must be as
many Moulin Rouges as there are
Joe's Joints. And Delmonico's-how
long that has lasted, at least If 1t IS
the one where Diamond Jim Brady
used to try to out-glitter Lillian
Russell! Two nice places, either or
both suitable for starting of on the
mad whirl of gathering notes to be
worked into night club news. And,
when the gypsy spirit is at its mid
night peak, a turn to the left and
"a few blocks down there's the
Romany Room"
It's this sort OF stuff a man stores
away against the day when he will
be a temporary night club scribe,
just like hairy Hemingway char
acter making a road-map of African
oases.
1t only ends by teaching him what
kind of fool he has been, or filling
him with misgivings that maybe
all those regular night club columns
were a sheer fiction.
Moulin Rouge, Delmonico's and
Romany Room, indeed! And Club
Cairo, bah!
Where are they when man needs
them? Gone Is where they are.
Dark, boarded up and surrendered
to the spiders. No saxophones moan,
no violins cry in the nights there
now. No champagne bubbles, no
glasses tinkle, no tycoons on big
expense accounts suddenly develop
delusions that they can lead a band
better than that. No once stunning
coiffures fall at 2 am. into blurry
eyes that were sparkling only few
hours before.
The dead of night is dead, and 1t
is like being WinchelI with only
obituary notices to write. Bah. Just
bah. Not a siss or a boom on the
horizon.
Actually, it is not quite that bad.
1t only seems so to a man with
a dark night around him and an
empty white sheet of paper coming
up in the morning.
There are bright, brave spirits
still making news for the starveling
substitute, an ersatz Macarthur.
Two OF these are the Neptune
Rooms Bob and BERTHE Hellman.
The Hellmans, Heaven bless them,
have just completed project which
has brought them as close to in
finity as night club performers are
likely to get. Seven weeks ago, Bob
and BERTHE set out to make new
arrangement of Cole Porter's Begin
the Beguine." In view of the as
Economical number of arrangements
that have been made of this durable
wall of love, this struck even the
Hellmans as very probably being
impossible.
But they preservered, the He'll
mans did, and they now have a
Begin the Beguine" that is so dis
tinctive that we wish they would
call it "Beguine the Begin"
Then, to be sure, the Shoreham
Terrace will be taking over now
that it got started in the semi
frigid atmosphere of last Friday
night. But it did not rain and
Barnee and the band members were
brave in white dinner jeckets, and
nights will go on improving until
all the customers begin to feel like
old Wordsworth. Or at least char
acters in a well-tailored comedy by
Noel Coward
The Roger Smith, which used to be
the Powhatan and is known in some
die-hard areas even now as the
Roger Pcwhatan, is readying its
roof for Friday night opening this
week.
A note from the management says
there will be "devinite" news from
the place all summer. "Devinite"
is sa pretty sort of word, coined
obviously by a stenographer who
was dreaming of soft music in the
sky at night
X
Another piece of intelligence made
available to seekers after truth in |
night clubs is that Eddie Haywood,
the Club Balls startling pianist, Is |
a collector of miniature, or toy, |
models of the instrument he plays |
Eddie's home in Hollywood is glutted