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How
Sam, Rose and Frank Maceo
Created the Fabled Balinese Room by
Bill Cherry | |
It
had been called the Chop Suey Café, the Grotto and the Sui Jen, all in a time
frame of about twenty years, and it was getting ready to undergo another name
change. This time it would be called the Balinese Room. And all of that was on
a 300 foot pier over the gulf beginning at the foot of 21st Street that the brothers
Sam, Rose and Frank Maceo had bought in 1922.
Before the Maceos got
there, at the front and a few feet back from the Seawall
on that spot, there had been a Mexican restaurant with a 250 foot fishing pier
behind it. I've never figured out who owned it.
Virgil Quadri, an MIT
graduate who was the store decorator for Marshall Fields in Chicago, had made
quite a reputation for himself designing nightclubs and showrooms as a sideline.
Sam Maceo's strong suit was that he continually traveled the major cities
of the U.S. to learn and copy from the best. The designs, the service, the entertainers,
the persona. It was on one of those trips that he discovered the Balinese Room
in the Hotel Claridge in Memphis. It was, he thought, exactly what needs to replace
the Sui Jen.
Maceo learned that Quadri had designed it, and he immediately
caught the train for Chicago. And that's how Quadri got to Galveston,
and that's how the Galveston Balinese Room got its name, its decor and its menu
and, in fact, that's also how it got its executive chef.
The
transformation of the Sui Jen to the Balinese Room was done by Quadri and New
York architect Harry Nordstrom. And newcomer to Galveston,
sound engineering genius Al Olson was retained to install an elaborate system
where every wire and every speaker would be concealed -- high fidelity Jensen
speakers tucked here and there long before the term 'high fidelity' and the name
Jensen were known to every audiophile on the planet. |
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Al
Olson
Photo courtesy of Kenneth Olson. |
Olson later became
one of Texas’ most sought after portrait photographers.
And like so
often happened while the Balinese construction was going on, Maceo had an afterthought..
He told Olson to wire the downtown Studio Lounge so that the performances from
the Balinese could be sent through dedicated telephone lines to an equally elaborate
speaker system there for the dinner guests to enjoy.
The Balinese's opening
date was set for New Year's Eve 1941, with the Governor of Texas, W.
Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, as the guest of honor.
And to headline
the opening, Maceo picked Toni Hart, a popular big band vocalist from New York,
who later became an Evangelical minister and instant wedding chapel owner in Las
Vegas. And there would be two bands B Phil Harris and Val Olman. You may have
never heard of any of them, but this was big time, believe me.
Sam Maceo
told the architects and contractors that by December 7, 1941, the renovations
were to be totally complete so they could be formally previewed by the Maceo family.
To show them what his fancy sound system could do, just after lunch, Olson piped
the music from the CBS radio network through it. Things were going fine until
the music stopped.
The announcer began giving the shocking news that Pearl Harbor had just been attacked
by the Japanese air force.
An immediately pensive Sam Maceo left the
showroom and went to the bar where he sat quietly by himself for about an hour.
And then he walked through the building and out to the street without saying a
word to anyone, not even to the members of his family. All started wondering if
the grand opening scheduled for just twenty-four days later would be cancelled.
Sam Maceo stayed in seclusion until a few days before the New Year's Eve
grand opening. Apparently no one knew what he was thinking. And then one afternoon,
he walked into the showroom, collared Quadri and Nordstrom and shocked everyone
when he went into a rage about how much he hated the design of the bandstand.
It would have to be completely torn out, redesigned and rebuilt. "Don't worry
what it costs, I'll pay. It must be exactly right!" he told them. "The
opening will have to be postponed," he added.
At 9 o'clock on the
evening of January 17, 1942, a huge crowd of invited guests, all dressed in formal
attire, came to see the latest, and what would turn out to be the most famous,
of the pier's transformations, the Balinese Room. |
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| The
photo shows the Seawall looking east from 25th Street. The first pier...the big
wide one is Murdock's. It was the oldest one on the island, and it, too, was totally
destroyed by Ike. The second pier, the long one, is the Balinese Room. In was
across from the Galvez Hotel. This photo is rather rare since it also has in it
the famous Mountain Speedway roller coaster. The Mountain Speedway was made totally
of wood. It was destroyed by Hurricane Carla in 1962. |
Over
the next 10 years, the entertainers who made the Balinese Room famous - stars
like Myron Cohen, Sophie Tucker, Larry Storch, Spike Jones, Vaughn Monroe, Jack
Fina, Carmen Cavallero, Duke Ellington, Edger Bergan and Charlie McCarthy, and
Phil Harris and Alice Faye - would start to die, one by one. And for some reason
show business couldn't replace them. And because of that, the Balinese Room started
down that road, too. Then Sam Maceo died. He was 57. His nephew Anthony Fertitta
stepped in to front the organization.
And that's when Galvestonians
had confirmed what they had always suspected - that there was only one Mr. Balinese,
one Mr. Studio Lounge, one Mr. Hollywood Diner Club, and one Mr. Sui Jen. He was
Sam Maceo, and when he died of cancer in1951 at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital,
it didn't take long to realize that there was one man on this earth who no one
could replace, not even Fertitta, even though like Maceo, Fertitta was good looking
and had plenty of ability.
It is impossible for me to conceive that there could ever have been a person who
was a guest at the Balinese Room, even if only once, who didn't find that place
and occasion as one of the most memorable and important of his life.
And the stylized and beautiful island life of which it was the cornerstone, the
trendsetter, hasn't even begun to be the same since.
Bill
Cherry's Galveston Memories March 6, 2008 column
Copyright William
S. Cherry. All rights reserved |
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What's
left of the Balinese Room after Hurricane Ike
Photo courtesy Julian A. Levy,
Jr., Nov. 2008 |
More on Balinese
Room: The
Balinese Room Had Two Last Hoorahs
by Bill Cherry
Balinese
Room Cashiered
by Mike Cox ("Texas
Tales" 9-18-08 column)
The Texas Rangers finally succeeded in eliminating
gambling at Galveston’s famed Balinese Room in 1957, but it took a Category 2
hurricane to cashier the old casino-on-a-pier once and for all. Coming ashore
on Galveston Island in the predawn hours of Sept. 13, Hurricane Ike... |
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Bill Cherry, a Dallas Realtor and free lance writer was a longtime
columnist for "The Galveston County Daily News." His book, Bill Cherry's Galveston
Memories, has sold thousands, and is still available at Barnes and Noble and
Amazon.com and other bookstores. | |
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