Few Americans dream of becoming saloonkeepers but Bernard “Toots” Shor, the proprietor of a New York institution at 51 West 51st Street for almost 20 years, was an exception in every way.
Huge in stature—with a “rubber face that had crinkles and looked like putty,” according to friend Peter Duchin—Toots Shor, the man, was a larger-than-life character. Toots Shor, the restaurant, took on mythological proportions. “Toots’ was a part of the imagination of people who had never walked in there,” says journalist Pete Hamill in Toots: Bigger Than Life, directed and produced by Shor’s granddaughter Kristi Jacobson. “They knew it existed the way they knew the Statue of Liberty existed.”
Thanks to Shor’s expansive personality, his saloon was an establishment where one might find Chief Justice Earl Warren and mob boss Frank Costello on the same night, albeit not at the same table. In fact, the restaurant was usually filled with the famous, many of them Shor’s close friends—Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Walter Cronkite and New York Giants football hero Frank Gifford. But in Toots’s vernacular they were all just “crumb bums,” regardless of their achievements.
Frank and honest, this documentary portrays Shor’s life through vintage radio and television clips and an interview he gave to historian and author Edward Robb Ellis in 1975. Shor’s friends and family also regale the camera with anecdotes, ranging from hilarious to tender and sentimental.
Born in Philadelphia in 1903 to Orthodox Jewish parents, Shor grew up in an almost exclusively Irish and Italian neighborhood. When told by a boy on the street that they didn’t need Jews there, Shor ran home in tears to his mother. Her advice: Find that boy and fight him.
Shor took his mother’s words to heart and his willingness to fight eventually landed him jobs as a bouncer at speakeasies when he moved to New York in 1930. “He was big, he was strong, he was tough and he was perfect for the job description,” Gifford says.
Prohibition was in full swing and speakeasies depended on their bouncers, who had to know which people to let in. Shor befriended those people, including the mobsters who supplied the alcohol. These connections helped him realize his goal of owning his own saloon. A friend’s father financed his first restaurant. Ironically, due to gambling gone awry, Shor was broke the night his restaurant opened on April 30, 1940. “I put my hand in my pocket,” he told Ellis. “I had a quarter, a dime and a nickel. I said, ‘Well, I may as well go in flat-pocket.’ I threw the 40 cents across the street from us and walked in flat-pocket.” By the end of the year the restaurant had raked in over $600,000, a fortune in those days.
Shor brought friends from various walks of life together in a way that might be impossible today. This time capsule of a film portrays the era as much as it does Shor’s life. “It was a simpler time,” boxing writer Bert Sugar explains. Journalists and athletes were making the same kind of money, so it wasn’t strange to see them out together. They bought each other drinks, or—perhaps too often—Shor bought them all drinks.
Shor’s friends relish the chance to talk about the good times they had there. Once, after a bragging match over who could run faster, Shor and Gleason decided to race around the block. When Shor returned, Gleason was waiting for him. Only later did he find out that Gleason had taken a cab back to the saloon.
The magnanimous Shor was not enough of a businessman to sustain his restaurant. Over time, he lost a great deal of money, and Toots Shor closed in 1959. He opened two other saloons, but they were never quite the same.
As the film shows, Shor’s slide into debt and unhappiness paralleled the changing times. The one-time social lion couldn’t adapt to the scene of the 1960s, and that era did not understand the culture of his beloved saloon. As he said in 1975, two years before his death, “I’m in tough shape. I always said I was going to be a saloonkeeper for the rest of my life… I didn’t know things would change in our world.”
Through it all, Shor remained his brawny, yet sweet and giving self. When Ellis asked him if there was anything he regretted not achieving, Shor replied: “Are you kidding? Jiminy Crickets, if I were born tomorrow and God said, ‘What do you want to be?’ I’d say a saloonkeeper.” —Maxine Springer
