Not yet sixteen, and therefore too young to get a driver’s licence, every morning at 5:30 a.m. Saul would slide into the passenger seat of the Holiff Brothers delivery van beside Morris to hit the market. Their father, by some miraculous means, had been able to continue putting money into two policies he’d taken out when they were born, and when both policies had a mature value of about a thousand dollars, he agreed to turn that money over to purchase Louis Averbach’s fruit and vegetable business. Hauling cases and bags of produce, the brothers delivered to boarding houses and grocery stores until late in the evening. “Invariably, we would wind up with things like raspberries or strawberries or other fruit that could not be kept overnight. We did not have refrigeration. So no matter how hard we worked, the leftovers usually wiped out our profit and the day was just for nothing,” Saul later recalled.
When Morris joined the air force in 1942, Joel took over his sons’ business and continued to sell fruits and vegetables while Saul drifted through a variety of unappealing jobs. While toiling more than fifty hours a week in a menswear store near the old Palace Theatre in London, he discovered he had a knack for selling, but little else. He stayed in boarding houses and eventually wound up living in his sister’s attic, where Ann continued to look out for him, securing him a variety of jobs through Sam (whom Saul still considered his mentor) at the Paikin Brothers steel businesses in Hamilton. Although it was hard labour at the scrapyard — working the scales, clearing stoppages on the conveyor belt, and loading dump trucks with scrap glass for transport to Dominion Glass — the job allowed him to observe the Paikin family and their dynamics at an even closer vantage point, and he never tired of their rancorous and passionate interactions. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his own family, and he was drawn to it. One time Saul was recruited to chauffeur Sam’s father, Ora, on a buying trip to the scrapyards around Kitchener and Waterloo. As he drove, Saul realized he was being judged by the older man about his lack of knowledge of the Jewish religion. By the time he managed to cluelessly order bacon from a roadside diner in Hamilton, Ora had given up, and for the remainder of the journey his communication dwindled down to little more than withering looks aimed at his driving companion.
Directionless, Saul decided to follow in Morris’s footsteps and enlist with the Royal Canadian Air Force, where Morris was working his way up to becoming a general. The next few months were tough, as he waited to be called up. In the meantime, a job was secured at Silverstein’s, where he was paid a pittance to haul halibut out of freezer cars, with part of his paycheque going toward the purchase of his own cotton gloves, which wore out at the rate of about two or three pairs a week. It was frigid, miserable work. Finally, word from the air force came, and he travelled to New Brunswick, arriving on May 7, 1943, after a train ride in which he lost all his savings — several hundred dollars — shooting craps with people he later realized were professional con men.
Soon after he arrived on the East Coast, he started a diary. Paper was in short supply at that time, so he wrote on the backs of envelopes that had held letters from home. Many of the entries focused on working out his insecurities and his perceived lack of inclusion among the other RCAF members.9
“I shall never make a success if I always incite the anger of my fellow airmen. It seems no matter what I do, I either lose the friends I make, or make enemies of mere acquaintances. Why, I don’t know, but as my sister once told me, ‘Fifty thousand people can’t be wrong, I guess.’ I better start taking inventory. The conclusion is: talking too much, showing off, and inferiority complex,” he wrote. “Pete gave me a going-over. Told me I talk too much, ignorant, push myself, bad manners, possessive, use words I don’t know and always try to grab the limelight.”10
But Saul soon discovered a way in which the air force, where he was now a tail gunner on the Lancaster bombers, could supply the means for him to pursue his musical education. His brother had explained how, whenever he got a pass, he would finagle it to travel from New Brunswick to New York or Chicago for free. “All I did was to get ‘Permission to visit U.S.A.’ typed on my pass and get on the train to New York,” advised Morris. As a result, Saul saw more first-class music and theatre than some people observe in a lifetime. Harbouring a clandestine habit, an interest that could feed and enrich his life, lessened the sting of loneliness. These adventures were then relayed to Morris, who by this point felt obligated to offer his little brother some more advice about how to better work his passes and handle himself in the Big Apple.
“If they ask you how much money you’ve got, you say about four dollars in Canadian money. You show them your pass and say that you’re going to visit your uncle. They know that you’re full of shit anyways, so they don’t say anything,” Morris wrote. “If you haven’t already gone to New York, by all means see Hazel Scott at the Café Society Uptown. But stand at the bar — don’t sit at a table or it will cost you an extra $3. Also, go to 52nd Street where all the nightclubs are next door to each other. But watch out for these smart looking dames who will approach you. They’re nothing but pros and will take you for every cent you’ve got.”11
The travel also fostered an intoxication with America itself. “In New York City on Easter Sunday,” Saul wrote in his diary on April 9, 1944, “trotting down 5th Avenue with eyes wide open. American people are for me. They’re spending, earning and enjoying life. Saw Ted Lewis at the Versailles Club, Billie Holiday at the Onyx. Saw Phil Spitalny broadcast, etc., etc. Everything I’m seeing for the first time.”
By the time Saul received an honorable discharge from the air force in 1945 (despite having gone AWOL the previous month to catch a Bob Hope show), he was hungry for more showbiz. Expected to return to London, he lied to the discharging officer and said his parents had moved to Vancouver so that they would send him to British Columbia. Now armed with a flight sergeant’s rank, which gave him some perks on the train, he took a lower berth for free and headed out west. Tucked in his pocket was a book of stamped passes given to him by Morris, who had risen to the position of navigation bombardier instructor, which came with the authority to issue passes.
After a short stop in Banff, where he chased a girl for a bit, Saul ended up in Vancouver, and wandered into a jewellery store. There was nothing to lure him there beyond the name of London Jewelers, which seemed serendipitous given his point of origin, but it was a start. Before long, he struck up a friendship with the woman who ran the store and confessed an intention to hitchhike to Hollywood. “Wouldn’t you just know it? I have a connection in Hollywood,” she told him with a grin. “A Jewish jeweller, he belongs to a famous club there called the Masters Club, made up of Irish character actors who are famous, recognizable — not necessarily megastars, but you get the idea.” For the adventurous twenty-one-year-old Saul Holiff, that was all the connection he needed.
It was pouring rain as Saul stood on the edge of the highway out of Vancouver in a blue battledress jacket adorned with his air gunner’s badge. It hung wet above a pair of beige pants, from which he attached a long keychain to hang down in a way he thought was fashionable. In his pocket was thirty-eight dollars. As he shifted from one foot to the next in his air-force-issue shoes, with one thumb out, the other hand pushed rain from his eyes. Here I am heading off for California with no money, no brains, no destination … but I have a key thing, I have a Hollywood connection, thought Saul.
It turned out to be one of the most exciting connections in his entire life.
2
“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,