Читать книгу The Man Who Carried Cash - Julie Chadwick - Страница 8

“SHOWBIZ HAD TO BE MY LIFE”

After an overnight ride in a truck, Saul emerged from the downpour of Vancouver into the record-breaking heat of a clear Hollywood morning. White houses rose up from the sidewalk, peculiarly massive and palm-fronted. Passersby confronted him with their friendliness and exuberant clothing in a manner that both rattled and dazzled him, and USO service members of all shapes and colours roamed the streets. By noon he had tracked down the Masters Club on Sycamore Street and was mixed into a crowd that was about 90 percent goyim and 10 percent Jews. Seated next to him were seasoned Hollywood actors like Jimmy Gleason — whose last role had been a small part alongside Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace — Guy Kibbee, Pat O’Brien, and Eddy Arnold. It was surreal. Just days before, Saul had watched Arnold play blind detective Duncan Maclain in The Hidden Eye. As he ate lunch, Saul kept glancing at Arnold and wondering where his guide dog was, before he sheepishly remembered that he was not actually blind.1

During the lunch, Saul asked around about work and secured the phone number of a man named Max Factor, who ran a cosmetics business over on Highland Avenue. Originally named Frank, he was the son of the original Max Factor, a Polish-Jewish wigmaker and former cosmetician to the imperial family of Russia, who escaped to America in 1904. Carried aloft by the burgeoning Hollywood film industry, Factor’s specialty was the creation of innovative products for film that were lighter and far more subtle than the heavy greasepaint that was a staple of the stage.

Trained in the business alongside his siblings, all employed at various levels of the company, Max Jr. apprenticed alongside his father in the laboratory. By the time he was poised to take over the cosmetics empire, they had together developed the original formula for Pan-Cake makeup — one of the company’s crowning achievements. Many film stars were reluctant to depart from black-and-white film and appear in the new Technicolor movies because the existing facial cosmetics were so unflattering and greasy. Spurred on by Factor’s innovations in makeup (a term he coined), Pan-Cake became the industry standard and looked so good, even off-camera, that starlets often pocketed it at the end of shooting. Once it hit drugstore shelves, public demand soared. With the subsequent release and wild success of Max Factor Jr.’s new Tru-Color indelible lipstick, by 1945 the company’s fortunes were such that it employed hundreds of workers. It was into this mix that a young Saul Holiff strode, and was hired to work in the factory as a “puddler.” Not unlike those employed in steel mills, his job was to ensure makeup ingredients were properly funnelled down a trough so that the mixing machine didn’t back up.2

Saul soon insinuated himself into the Factor family to the point that they invited him to celebrate Rosh Hashanah at the Bouchard Boulevard Temple with them. As Rabbi Edgar Magnum conducted the ceremony, Saul squirmed. Raised as an atheist, there had been no ceremony to mark his bar mitzvah, and he certainly didn’t feel as though he belonged in any schul. “I was an imposter, but as long as I kept my mouth shut I was Jewish and nobody recognized me for an imposter, so no one threw me out,” he recalled. This connection with the Factor family only further widened a door that had begun to reveal a glittering landscape of opportunity. Hollywood was leagues away from London, Ontario. In addition to Max Factor, Saul was awestruck by the examples around him of powerful Jewish entrepreneurs, directors, distributors, writers, actors — risk-takers, visionaries — real-life moguls who weren’t ashamed of who they were or where they came from. And they often came from poverty, like him. There were legendary names like Marcus Loew, who founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor, who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1889. Or the Warner family, Jews who fled Poland in the late 1800s and went on to establish Warner Bros. Studios. Moreover, even though he was uncertain and naive and unworldly, he felt included. They were kind and welcoming, offered him access into their world, and it was nothing short of intoxicating. Further passage into this milieu was next secured via the book of passes Morris had issued him.

“Each pass was a book of one hundred or something or other forty-eight-hour passes, and they went on for like eight months and he stamped each one of them legally, so as each date expired I’d tear it out. If any MP or American equivalent, police officer came up to me, in this ridiculous uniform, they weren’t quite sure what the hell it was, they didn’t know if I was a circus performer or a parachute jumper. But in any event it all looked very fancy with my air gunner badge and my key chain and this crazy hat at a strange angle,” Saul said. “But as long as I had a valid pass no one would bug me, and so for months every time I was queried, out came my passbook, valid pass. That valid pass gave me free food at the Hollywood Canteen, free street car or bus rides, free tickets to plays, dinner.”

Co-founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield, the Hollywood Canteen was an ambitious home front nightclub that provided free food, entertainment, and socializing to service members from both the United States and overseas. The club was housed in a converted barn and staffed primarily by volunteers from the motion picture and show business community, so it wasn’t unusual on any given night to find Rita Hayworth in the kitchen serving sandwiches, Hedy Lamarr and Betty Grable on the dance floor with soldiers, and Marlene Dietrich or Bob Hope entertaining onstage. The Canteen also had a blackboard where messages would be posted, and this led to all kinds of interesting developments for Saul.3

One of them was a girl by the name of Molly Polland, the personal secretary to iconic American film director Cecil B. DeMille. This connection gave Saul access to Paramount Studio and eventually an introduction to DeMille himself.

“It meant going to the commissary and watching people who I’d heard of all my life just casually goofing around having lunch. It led to watching endless movies in the process of being made. One of them was Monsieur Beaucaire with Joan Caulfield and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby,” he said. “Watching countless different situations as they developed, I would return to the studio. I remember Bob Hope playing a part of the barber and he decides to act silly and he takes the puff, that was used to dust all over in eighteenth, seventeenth century France, and he decides to put it all over Crosby’s face. Which broke everybody up but of course brought the scene to an end.” When it was a wrap, Saul managed to go off with Hope for a Coke and stood with him for a photo.4

Saul Holiff and Bob Hope at Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, 1945.

At nightfall, if there wasn’t much happening in the Canteen, Saul would return to his bug-infested dormitory behind Jimmy Gleason’s house on Cahuenga Boulevard and crawl into bed, his head spinning. It felt lonely and strange. He stared at the ceiling. This was like nothing he had ever encountered. I have to stay, he thought, but where is my place in all this? It was tough, and competitive. Maybe I can be an actor myself, or a radio disc jockey. He rolled over and scratched. Perhaps he could go home and prepare to return again, when he was ready to stay for good. One thing was certain: he had to focus on making connections here and ensure they were solid.5

Though Saul was thoroughly taken with the tinsel of Hollywood, there was trouble brewing under its facade. In the spring of 1945, tensions within the labour movement built to a head and more than ten thousand unionized studio workers walked off their jobs. Sparked by union infighting among set directors, the action hit many of Hollywood’s major studios and theatres. Led by former boxer and studio painter Herb Sorrell of the Conference of Studio Unions, battles were pitched against the rival International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union.

As spring turned to summer the struggle escalated, and by fall the picketers were still out in force. Clashes escalated between the unions, and the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, which included Ronald Reagan, voted to cross the picket lines. Some actors, such as Humphrey Bogart, then did so. But many others, like Bette Davis, did not. The conflict got so heated at one point that, fearing reprisals, Reagan would lie awake at night in bed with his gun, ear cocked for noises outside. By October, days of unrest and mass picketing outside the Warner Bros. studio erupted into a full-scale riot when more than three hundred strikers attempted to block the main gate. Several cars that tried to pass the picket line were turned over by picketers and tear gas bombs unleashed by Warner’s armed security guards. Conflict erupted among the firefighters, who were asked to turn their hoses on the strikers, and the crowd swelled to thousands. Police, security, picketers from other unions, and non-union scabs all descended into a brawl of fist fighting with chains, lead pipes, and monkey wrenches.6

It was at this time that Saul decided to visit the Warner Bros. studios armed with the rather naive idea that he would try to work his way into a face-to-face meeting with founder Jack Warner. He surveyed the striking throng, an obstacle he hadn’t anticipated. Tenacious as ever, he negotiated through the angry crowd as they as they moved in and out of the front gate and called for strikers to spike the gas tanks of vehicles with sugar. With no regular way to get into the studios, as they were closed up tight, Saul somehow wormed his way through to the office door. Glancing over his shoulder, grateful to be away from the noise, he approached the front desk.

Somewhere, he thought he had heard company president Jack Warner was born in London, Ontario. That makes us practically brothers, Saul thought with a smile. It was a stretch, but it might work as an “in” to get through the fortress gates. The secretary looked at him expectantly as he approached. “Ah, this is very difficult to explain, but my name is Holiff and I’m from London, Ontario, and Mr. Warner is from London, Ontario, and … I thought he might like to see me,” Saul blurted out.7

The woman blinked and then began to laugh. When she recovered, a buzzer was pressed and Saul was told that a person would be right out to attend to his request. The man who soon emerged introduced himself as Milton Sperling, son-in-law of Warner Bros. founder Harry Warner. After some chuckling at Saul’s explanation, he confirmed that a meeting with Jack wasn’t going to happen. But he could offer him a chance to check out the premises. “I never met Jack or Harry Warner; I never got into the inner sanctum at all. But I was invited in to wander around, any time I wanted, in the studio lot. Those connections in that studio were actually very valuable to me. While wandering in there, I came across and chatted with Cary Grant as he drove his Cord convertible beige car,” said Saul. It was a marvelous time, and that made it for him. Show business, one way or another, come hell or high water — it has to be my life, he thought feverishly.8

Unfortunately, life had other plans for Saul Holiff, and he soon fell ill with a severely infected wisdom tooth. In unbearable pain, he weighed his options. To get treatment would blow his cover — he was permitted to wear a uniform for only thirty days following his discharge, and it was already weeks past that point. He was in the United States illegally, wearing his uniform illegally, perusing the Canteen illegally, with a pocketful of illegal passes. No, he was certain that if he attempted to go to a veteran’s hospital under the guise of warranting treatment in the States, he would be discovered.

With a heavy heart he decided to return to Canada, consoling himself with the thought that he could surely find his way back to California when he felt up to it. In the meantime, he decided to follow through on his aspiration to become a radio disc jockey, and secured an audition with London’s CFPL Radio. By the time he arrived back home and went for treatment at Westminster Hospital, it turned out that not just one but all of his wisdom teeth were infected. During the subsequent painful extraction, the dentist — a tiny man with bifocal glasses who operated on clients while standing atop a little cart — cut down into his jawbone and muscle. Forty-eight hours later, Saul could barely open his mouth. “I was so unsure of myself, so certain that if I postponed the audition that I would screw it up and that would be the end of it, that I went and had the audition and I spoke, virtually strangling on every word,” remembered Saul. “I didn’t get the job. They waited until I was finished before they threw me out, mind you.”9

The failed audition marked the death of that particular dream, but not the end of his Hollywood ambitions. It was impossible to forget the way those weeks in California had illuminated his imagination. Though terribly insecure, Saul possessed a unique ability to bluff, to project an outward show of confidence, and the risks involved in travelling alone had only further developed this trait. Upon his return to London, he began to hone another skill that would take him even further: the art of self-promotion. Taking a page from his father’s book in how he had pursued chess coverage in the media, Saul contacted the local newspaper and it subsequently ran a piece on him and his adventures, titled “Blue Uniform Key to Hollywood Visit.” “Those people out there are the most willing and most generous hosts one could hope for or imagine,” he told the reporter.10

In the ensuing years, Saul drifted through a variety of jobs with moderate success, but none held deep appeal. In 1947, he completed a year-long accounting course and worked briefly as a bookkeeper for a plumbing and appliances company before securing a position as a waiter at the Windsor Hotel in Hamilton, the first restaurant-bar in Ontario to legally reintroduce liquor following the prohibition. Though he didn’t receive any training, he managed to save a thousand dollars within a year. “It was a disaster, but I made a lot of money,” Saul recalled. Despite the cash, Saul was not particularly service-oriented, so he answered a help-wanted ad posted by a shoe salesman and became his driver, hitting stores all over Ontario and Quebec. It somehow felt natural to be on the road; the endless driving suited his directionless mindset, and connections flourished with a variety of business owners throughout the province. But if he needed security or safety, there was none to be found at home. For whatever reason, his father made it clear he was not welcome to return.

“Not only myself, but mother also is fully convinced that if you ever decide to come and stay home, your life will be so miserable that you will be glad to leave as fast as you came,” Joel wrote to Saul in May of 1947. “I am not referring to weekends. You can come home any weekend you wish, but as for staying here permanently, I warn you accordingly, and I mean it. Now it’s up to you to act accordingly.”

London was clearly not an option, so using the contacts made through the driving job, within two years Saul went into business for himself. He bought his first car, a brand new 1949 Chevrolet Coach, and sold ladies’ dresses wholesale throughout northern Ontario. But he soon received another letter from his parents, and this one requested that he come home immediately.11

“It finally happened — my father had a heart attack after almost forty years of excellent health. They want me to go home and take over. It makes me think of a few years ago when he told me not to come home from Hamilton. Then, I needed moral support and strength more than anything,” Saul wrote in his diary. It sent him into a deep reflection about the nature of home, family, and the strained relationship with his father.

“I never heard the word [love] when I was growing up. It made me feel acutely uncomfortable when I did,” he later mused. “We never saw a display of affection, never experienced hugs and all that stuff. It just wasn’t part of our family scene. Being properly inhibited was. I always thought people using the word love were exhibitionists, or phony, or both. Something Holden Caulfield here. But if I thought about it at all, and if anybody ever said that they loved me, the statement was always suspect in my mind.”

Despite mixed feelings, he did return, and shouldered the small clothing business his father had nursed along since 1933. Saul renamed it Store at Your Door and rented a showroom and some facilities.12

The business did well, and Saul both made a living for himself and supported his parents at the same time. But it was both a blessing and a curse. For the next five years, Store at Your Door was just that — Saul would conduct business at customers’ homes, and he hated it. In 1956, having saved enough money, Saul renamed the business Saul Holiff Kustom Klothes and opened a showroom above a furrier downtown on King Street. With an innovative flourish, he christened the front part of the loft The Swatch Bar, and fashioned an area where customers could relax while perusing books of fabric samples. In the back, he carved out a tiny bachelor pad to cut down on costs. Weekly newspaper ads carried a variety of the catchy slogans and phrases he coined, such as: “If Your Clothes Aren’t Becoming to You, You Should Be Coming to Us.”

Saul Holiff greeting patrons at his Swatch Bar (London, Ontario, 1957).

Inexplicably, it was at this point that Saul fell into a deep depression. The store was up and running, but he had gone into debt to open it, borrowing money from his brother-in-law Sam, among others. The anxiety around this was crippling, and his tranquilizers weren’t cutting through it. Consumed by darkness, he wrote out a Last Will and Testament by hand on his Holiff’s custom stationery and then penned a suicide note. “Please go up the back stairs. You shall find my door open, and inside, my body. Please be kind enough to inform my brother, so that he in turn might inform my parents,” he wrote. On a separate sheet, he drafted a note to his family.

June 13, 1956

To my family —

Please forgive me!!!

I guess I’m a misfit or just a plain fool. Whether I am, life seems to have become too involved for me. I’ve caused you enough pain and upset. If anything or anybody is to blame for my situation, I suppose the fault is with myself.

Have courage to face this last source of unhappiness that I shall inflict upon you.

All my love,

Saul.13

Something changed his mind, however. Perhaps the note itself provided some catharsis, but after putting his thoughts to paper, Saul voluntarily sought out the assistance of a psychiatrist at London’s Victoria Hospital and was admitted to the psychiatric floor that evening. Over the next few months he was subjected to electroshock therapy; with help from the psychiatrist and his friends, Saul slowly surfaced from his self-imposed seclusion at the hospital and felt he could return to his life. “I emerged from a very serious blue funk, came to realize that I had unrealistically magnified my problems totally out of proportion and had completely distorted my financial situation in my own mind,” Saul later wrote. “I also came to the realization during that period, that my vanity (always a big factor), an oversized ego, and of course my biggest nemesis, self-deception, had led to and was responsible for most of my problems.”14

Back in the game, as the last vestiges of his youthful awkwardness faded away, Saul became attuned to the nuances of fine clothing and dressed in the latest fashions from New York. The outside world responded in kind. Respected by other men, he also began to receive attention from women who recognized him from the swarthy headshot splashed across most of his newspaper ads. Saul had always fared well with the opposite sex — while still in the family home on Wharncliffe Road, he somehow convinced his mother to allow his Dutch girlfriend to live in his room with him, despite her frustration at continually finding lipstick smeared all over his pillowcases. But now it seemed that every other week he had a different girl on his arm. Never one to retain what he learned only for himself, Saul then sought to pass on his knowledge of women to his nephew Larry Paikin, Sam and Ann’s son.

“If you want, I’ll take you out and get you laid,” Saul told Larry, who at nineteen years old was still a virgin and lived in a university frat house with about ten other guys, all of whom were big on talk and short on experience. Larry readily agreed, and, along with two friends, travelled with Saul to the nearby tobacco farming town of Tillsonburg, where there were a number of brothels.

“He took us to this farm house that had no electricity, they had kerosene lamps, and we walked in and sat down. I remember it was five dollars a shot. I went in and came out about ten minutes later with a big smile on my face and the second guy went in and came out, and the third guy went in and came out and the second guy went in again,” said Larry.

While all this was going on, Saul, ever the entrepreneur — and whose trunk was full of women’s clothes — seized the opportunity to offer some of his wares to the waiting prostitutes. “He sold all his samples to the girls while we were screwing our heads off,” remembered Larry with a laugh.

As Saul was growing up, his family had the rare distinction of being the only Jewish household in an all-gentile neighbourhood of wealthier and educated families, and as a result, Saul had long harboured a sense of inferiority that he channelled into a dedication to self-improvement and self-education. Deep into philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer since he was a teen, he consistently pushed himself ever further in his reading habits, and began to visit estate sales to add to the significant collection of books that was becoming his personal library. A subscription to Reader’s Digest offered him a monthly quota of new words that he regularly devoured and then worked to incorporate into his lexicon. Well-versed in a variety of topics, Saul soon developed into an adept conversationalist, which further broadened his affiliations. However, there were some circles that would always be closed to him, no matter how successful or charismatic he became.15

One day Saul decided to apply for a membership at the local YMCA, where he was active in a variety of capacities, such as their Speakeasy Club, Co-ed Club, and Fitness Club. On occasion he also modelled for a women’s organization. At his request, he was curtly informed there were “no openings.” Suspicious, he invented a different name and identity as an executive with General Motors Diesel, which had just set up shop in London, and phoned another department. Immediately the voice on the other end replied, “Come on in. Delighted to have you.” Armed with this evidence of discrimination, Saul took it to the board of the YMCA and, in the ensuing scandal, became their first Jewish member. But the exclusion stung, and it wasn’t the only example.

By then his clothing store had taken off, and Saul was a strong and regular customer at the Bank of Montreal. Naturally, he thought nothing of it when an invitation was extended for a special dinner at the long-standing London Club across the street from the bank. However, the hospitality would not last. “Some clerk had made an egregious error, and when they realized they had invited one of their clients that was Jewish, all hell broke loose as to how they could diplomatically un-invite me, so as to not cause some Colonel Weldon to have an upset stomach,” Saul later said in his diary.16

Amidst a sense he would never quite fit in no matter what level of success he achieved, the allure of Hollywood lingered. But what would his place be within that world? Saul decided to test his abilities onstage, and joined the London Little Theatre, where he performed in several plays, including Teahouse of the August Moon in 1957. “Saul Holiff, essentially a good actor and possessed of an easy stage presence, fell victim to a fault I have commented on earlier. This play was satire,” the London Free Press theatre critic said in his review of Little London Theatre’s production of The Torch-Bearers. “Mr. Holiff’s approach to the role was far too heavy. I wish he would smile now and then to let us know that he, too, is being made fun of by the playwright.” Of course, the reviewer couldn’t have known how his broken teeth made smiling an unpleasant endeavour.17

It felt as though the world was a finely tuned machine and Saul was the mechanic, with the success of his store and his venture into acting, which allowed him to finally enjoy the sensation of being liked — if not by all the reviewers, then at least by his fellow actors. But he soon began to wonder if the position he was destined to inhabit wasn’t on the stage, but behind it.

With that in mind, he turned to the emergence of a new music scene in Canada: rock ’n’ roll.

Teenagers in Canada were first introduced to rock ’n’ roll music via the radio, and there was no one more integral to this awakening of their senses than radio disc jockey Red Robinson. Based in Vancouver, Robert Gordon Robinson landed his first radio show at the age of seventeen, after he prank called CJOR’s afternoon teen show to deliver a spot-on impersonation of actor Jimmy Stewart. When the Vancouver Sun picked up the story as real, Robinson called again, in character as Peter Lorre, and host Al “Pappy” Jordan figured out the ruse. Invited on as a recurring guest, Robinson was then offered the show when Jordan left in 1954.

Immediately, Robinson began turning his audience on to doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll, and was one of the first white DJs in the country to play music by African American artists. “It was all black music, and this is where I faced a whole bunch of bullets — not real bullets, but verbal bullets. ‘How can you play all that nigger music?’ That’s what they said to me. And I said, ‘Because I happen to like it.’ And the kids at school liked it, I mean, that’s where I got the inspiration to play rock ’n’ roll, was the kids at school,” recalled Robinson, who wielded enormous power with his show and commanded an unprecedented 50 percent of the local audience.

The first-ever rock ’n’ roll concert on the West Coast took place in June of 1956 and featured Bill Haley & His Comets at the Kerrisdale Arena in Vancouver, emceed by none other than Robinson. “It was a rock ’em, sock ’em, knocked-out bunch of kids going crazy. It was nuts,” he said.

Out east, Saul thought he’d try his hand at promotion — and Bill Haley, whose smash 1955 hit “Rock Around the Clock” garnered him wide credit as the father of rock ’n’ roll, was high on his list. But first, he convinced two Hamilton-based businessmen to each invest $1,500 to bring jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong to Buffalo, New York, for a one-night engagement. Once the venue was secured, Saul felt he had a surefire winner on his hands. Armstrong was huge, and Saul was a fan himself. Then disaster struck. Elvis Presley was booked to play Buffalo on the same night, at the Memorial Auditorium. If there was a star bigger than Armstrong, or pretty much anyone in the biz at that time, it was Presley. It was a loss for all the promoters, and a personal embarrassment for Saul, as he had invited his brother Morris and his wife Joyce to attend the show. Ever the gambler — he was currently deep into penny stocks on the Toronto Stock Exchange — he shrugged off the losses and steeled his determination.

The next month, he scored the show with Bill Haley & His Comets and brought them to the London Arena for the first time. “In Britain they waited for hours to see the Bill Haley rock ’n’ roll show. He got the biggest welcome Britain’s ever given to a show personality.… And now he’s coming to London Arena,” crowed the radio spot Saul purchased on CFPL to advertise the show. “Join the crowd, see rock ’n’ roll at its best with the King of Rock, Bill Haley, when he appears in London with his Comets May 24.”

Saul Holiff stands with early rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Bill Haley, whom he promoted extensively in the late 1950s. London, Ontario, 1957.

The crowd was near capacity, but after the cost of promotion, posters, and rent of the arena, Saul made a grand total of $54. Undaunted, he pressed on, and by early August he hosted a dance marathon at the Lucan Arena with the Everly Brothers — who were currently enjoying the success of their song “Bye Bye Love.” The first marathon in the district for thirty-five years, the catch was that this one would feature four bands that played only rock ’n’ roll music, Saul told columnist Dick Newman. Judged by a panel, first prize was a new hi-fi recording set, and the venue featured a glass-enclosed mezzanine floor and modern air-cooling system that consisted of huge blocks of ice set in front of blower fans.18

Later that month Saul went on to promote a double bill with pop singer Jimmie Rodgers and a sixteen-year-old Canadian teen idol named Paul Anka. The son of an Ottawa restaurant owner, Anka was riding the wave of his monster hit “Diana,” penned when his friend Diane Ayoub asked him to write a song about her while they were at a high school party in Toronto. Saul felt certain about this show, and about Anka himself, who in his mind was destined to be another George Jessel.

Billed as a “rock ’n’ roll costume ball,” the show’s advance ticket sales included a draw for one lucky girl to have dinner with Anka and then dance with him at the arena. Despite the robust advertisements and Anka’s popularity, the show flopped. Clearly learning on the job, Saul continued to lose money on his promotions most of the time, and if he made anything at all, it was usually less than a hundred dollars.19

Despite this he remained convinced there was money to be made; he just needed to figure out how. And though he was personally more partial to the horns and strings of jazz and classical music, the challenge of promotion itself appealed to him more than selling clothing. He would soon learn that there were also other nuances, aside from the finances, such as the finicky and unpredictable nature of artists.

Edgy and zany, musician Little Richard caught Saul’s attention with a string of hits he released through the 1950s, like “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” so he phoned his manager and booked him for two dates in December. Two months before the shows, Little Richard’s management in New York phoned back to inform Saul that though the contract had been signed, these dates — and all others he had scheduled on his tour — were cancelled. While on a record-breaking tour in Australia, Little Richard had experienced an epiphany after a ball of fire soared overhead as he played at a stadium in Sydney. It was the launch of the Russians’ Sputnik 1, but already exasperated with the pressures of touring and the need for spiritual regeneration, Richard took it as a sign. Abruptly, he decided to leave his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, change his ways, and become a preacher.20

“I have a great favour to ask. This afternoon, Gale Agencies in New York phoned to tell me that two dates that were signed and sealed for Little Richard and his orchestra in London and Kitchener on December 20th and 21st, plus all of his other bookings, have been cancelled. It appears that besides needing psychiatric treatment, Little Richard has become a monk,” Saul wrote to Everly Brothers manager Wesley H. Rose. “I had made extensive arrangements for these dates, such as the securing of highly desirable auditoriums in both Kitchener and London and have now been left holding the bag. I know that Don and Phil are not booked for these dates and would appreciate having them appear for me at that time.”21

The Brothers were unable to fill the shows, as they wanted to be home for Christmas, but despite these setbacks, Saul persisted. The following year, he expanded to nearby cities and bought three dates for Alan Freed’s ABC-TV summer series The Big Beat, a show featuring Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. It was a smash, and the venue was packed to the rafters with more than four thousand wild, sweaty teenagers. By the summer of 1958, Saul promoted his first tour with the Everly Brothers and booked them for eight dates across Ontario and Quebec. Saul drove the boys to each city himself, during which he caught a glimpse of their notoriously acrimonious relationship and watched in the rear-view mirror as they fought bitterly “like cats and dogs” in the back seat the entire time.22

More dates followed with some of the most prominent names in rock: the Ink Spots, Sam Cooke, Frankie Avalon, Duane Eddy, Bobby Helms, Kitty Wells, Brenda Lee, Marty Robbins, Buck Owens, Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, Ferlin Husky, Faron Young, and Carl Perkins of “Blue Suede Shoes” fame. When rock ’n’ roll acts first began their crossover into Canada, they frequently travelled as package shows, primarily because many of them had only a few songs in their entire repertoire. As such, it wasn’t unheard of to have up to fifteen performers in a two-hour show.

Saul often postered his car to advertise the shows he was promoting. In the background is the theatre that advertised a contest to win a trip to Mexico, which Barbara Holiff won. Ontario, 1961.

In the early days, Carl Perkins performed in a country trio with his brothers Jay and Clayton, often touring with drummer W.S. “Fluke” Holland and the Isley Brothers, who were soul gospel singers. The first time they played in Canada they drove up in a brand new 1956 Fleetwood Cadillac for a date in the old mining town of Trail, nestled in southern British Columbia.23 “It was dirt roads, and not because it was muddy or anything, but because there were deep ruts in the road where people had been driving through and we all had to climb out of the Cadillac because it kept bottoming out. In some places we had to push that car,” remembered Fluke.

Saul soon booked them for a show in Ontario and got a first-hand initiation into the dynamics of wild rock ’n’ roll personalities. “Clayton Perkins, he’s Carl’s younger brother — craziest dude I ever heard of or met since then. We showed up, and Saul was standin’ out in front of the hotel, waitin’ on us, and we all said, ‘There’s Saul Holiff.’ And Clayton got out of the car and he ran up to Saul and jumped into his arms and bit him on his ear. The funny thing about that is, somebody like Saul — sophisticated, alligator shoes and all this kind of stuff, and someone we were all lookin’ up to — and this crazy boy gets out of the car, and Saul never forgot it. Every time I saw him after that, I’d always say, ‘Hey, Saul, how’s that ear of yours?’”24

With contacts firmly established with many big-name musical acts, Saul then turned to the business of making money. There had to be a way to utilize their star power in a way that was more lucrative for him than typical promotional work.

By the spring of 1959, Saul had expanded his other entrepreneurial endeavours and opened Sol’s Square Boy, a drive-in restaurant and the first in Ontario to offer push-button voice ordering from the comfort of your car. As a gimmick, everything in the restaurant was square — “including the owner,” Saul liked to joke — from the cube-shaped signage to the ice cream scoops and even the hamburgers. Square patties were advertised with the clever slogan that it was “four extra bites for your money.” A partnership project several years in the making, promotion for the restaurant was kicked into high gear and at times edged into the ridiculous. The grand opening of Sol’s Square Boy featured a full-page fake news story about a pair of gorillas that had escaped from the set of a jungle movie and were “cavorting” in the restaurant. It included a photo of Saul restraining men in gorilla suits, who were going after a couple of horrified “square girls” — employees at the restaurant. “You may not have to be a member of the ape family … but you’ll have a lot of fun monkeying around at the official opening of Sol’s Square Boy Drive-In,” ran the caption underneath.25

The grand opening day itself featured men dressed in gorilla costumes bouncing on trampolines outside the restaurant to illustrate the “crazy prices,” and a woman staged so that she appeared to be frozen in a giant block of ice to promote their ice cream floats and milkshakes.

Aside from posing yet another challenge and source of revenue, the restaurant also provided Saul with the perfect venue for cross-promotional ventures. It seemed a no-brainer to make the burger joint work together with the rock shows to draw in the lucrative teen demographic. A proviso was quickly embedded into the performers’ contracts that required they visit Sol’s Square Boy afterward to sign autographs; an event that would in turn be advertised on the radio. As London was a rather obscure Canadian city to the big acts from the States, to combine rock ’n’ roll music with hamburgers would not only allow the artists to forge closer ties with the very people who would buy their records but also increase the business at Saul’s restaurant as teens flocked there en masse after a show.

It was around this time that another American musician came on Saul’s radar. While negotiating further dates around an upcoming Carl Perkins show in London, manager Bob Neal brought up another possible client — a rising star named Johnny Cash. The charismatic young country singer had joined the Sun Records lineup in 1955 and was enjoying some popularity with his hit song “I Walk the Line,” written as an ode to his wife, Vivian Cash, to assuage her concerns about dalliances with other women on the road. This wasn’t the first time Saul had heard of Cash, who was on a whirlwind fifteen-day tour of Canada to promote his latest single, the rather saccharine “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” Just a month prior, he had received complimentary tickets to Cash’s show at the Palace Pier in Toronto with an offer that, as a rising figure in the world of promotions, Saul would have a ringside table and be introduced to the crowd by the emcee from the stage.

There was no mistaking that Cash was swiftly becoming a hot act in Canada. Given the volatile nature of promotions — so much so that he eventually named his business Volatile Attractions, though that was more of a reference to the stock market — Saul needed a musician who was a sure thing. Maybe this Cash guy would fit the bill.26