By Cara Jepsen
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One of his first day jobs was jerking sodas for $4 a week at the flagship Walgreen’s on the south side, where new recruits attended school to learn the lingo. Horn considered Charlie Walgreen a good boss: “He would always say, ‘Don’t ever steal anything, just take it and tell me.’” Horn jerked at several soda fountains in Chicago before running away to New York City, where he worked alongside James Cagney, waiting on customers like Bela Lugosi. This was during prohibition; Horn would make seltzer and lime mixers for the stars, who frequently added their own hooch. Occasionally one of them would give him work as a chorus dancer. Later he became a headliner: “If you keep at it long enough, you end up being successful.”
“In those days if you did something wrong in the club, like heckling an act or being noisy, the hostess would slip a mickey in your drink and you’d want to leave. People would ask, ‘Where did he go?’ and they would say, ‘Oh, he just left.’”
A week before Horn was slated to play the legendary Palace Theatre in New York, he says, one of columnist Walter Winchell’s lackeys approached him and asked if he wanted a write-up. “If you got a Winchell write-up, your salary went up overnight,” Horn remembers. “But he always wanted a kickback. His manager would come to you and say it would be this amount and you’d be glad to pay it. I didn’t pay and I got in a lot of trouble. I told them to go to hell. I was very independent, and I figured it was supposed to be open and free and based on talent. A lot of people played there and got a bad write-up because they didn’t pay. They said they’d fix me, and I didn’t do the show. The theater manager sued. So I went to Europe, and that was it. They couldn’t get ahold of me there.”
Horn still keeps in touch with a handful of cronies. “We had 100 to 112 people in one show,” he says. “We didn’t make much money, but we all worked. Back then stars were really stars. People seemed more happy, and everybody loved everybody else, and that doesn’t exist today. It’s another world and it’s hard to get used to it, and there’s nobody around.” o
