Eddie Cantor - Tributes

Tributes

Cantor was profiled on the program This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting person (usually a celebrity) would be surprised on live television by host Ralph Edwards, with a half-hour tribute. Cantor was the only subject who was told of the surprise in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

On October 29, 1995, as part of a nationwide celebration of the 75th anniversary of radio, he was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting Communication.

In 1953 Warner Bros., in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of The Jolson Story, filmed a big-budget Technicolor feature film, The Eddie Cantor Story. The film found an audience but might have done better with someone else in the leading role. Actor Keefe Brasselle played Cantor as a caricature with high-pressure dialogue and bulging eyes wide open; the fact that Brasselle was considerably taller than Cantor didn't lend realism either. Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film Eddie tells Ida, "I never looked better in my life"... and gives the audience a knowing, incredulous look. George Burns, in his memoir All My Best Friends, claimed that Warner Bros. created a miracle producing the movie in that "it made Eddie Cantor's life boring".

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced 1944 feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks that was RKO's top-grossing film that year. Probably the best summary of Cantor's career is in one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows. The Colgate hour was a virtual video autobiography, with Cantor recounting his career, singing his familiar hits, and re-creating his singing-waiter days with his old pal Jimmy Durante. This show has been issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person.

As talented as Cantor was, he is an excellent example of the mega star who virtually vanishes with the passing of time. His biographer, Gregory Koseluk, wrote in 1995 that Eddie "is all but forgotten," (from Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business ).