Deftly skimming the talent pool

All high-class VIPs employ serfs, vassals, types who crash around, get the seats, start the applause, aggravate the agents, find the outfits. Zoos would term them animal trainers. They’re lessers who make the greaters survive.

Even a little talent needs a big manager. J. Lo’s photo is in the paper daily. Husbands she dumps, managers she keeps.

I can now tell stories only of those who are gone. The mortality rate on a manager’s personal happiness is high. Now, often, it’s large management companies.

Take performing artists who came through New York. Eddie Fisher. Manager type Milton Blackstone found gangly kid Eddie. Fresh from Philadelphia. He taught Eddie how to dress, how to act. Taught the then-nobody-nothing kid the business. He spoke for Eddie, thought for him, maintained publicity for him during his GI days. Pushed the kid’s recordings, so that week after week Eddie had hit after hit.

Then — kaboom! — little Eddie met biggie Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd who next trudged on to Burton and Burton, Warner and Fortensky. Seems little Eddie had other parts of his body that also made music. He quickly dumped guru Blackstone. His career then dumped him. Not grateful Eddie next quick SOS’d Milton Blackstone. Once on top again — he severed relations again. This resulted in an apology deal whereby Eddie had to pay Milton $25,000 yearly for at least 10 years.

These managers were tailors. Custom-make human beings to measure. They’d handle potential headliners’ needs and hone their beginning talent.

A biggie was Anna Sosenko. Plump, gray-haired, 50ish mass of fast-talking dynamite who found a nobody piano player in a Midwest saloon and created her into the queen of supper clubs — Hildegarde. In the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s nobody bigger in the high-priced gin mills. No. 1 star and their money went to Anna Sosenko, the queen of the night.

Anna: “Many have talent — so what? Someone has to nourish it, keep it going.”

Hildegarde’s hands weren’t attractive so Anna conceived the idea of her client appearing in gloves. Anna taught her to walk off without waiting for applause so as to leave the audience wondering and waiting. “I created the masterpiece,” she said.

Singer Hildegarde left us in 2005. Sosenko lived with her for a quarter of a century. Theirs was on a 50/50 basis. If Hildegarde’s thumbnail polish got scratched, Anna went to the manicurist.

Ted Collins created Kate Smith. All then had their own Svengali. Elvis had Colonel Parker. If Elvis had a cold, Colonel Parker sneezed.

Lou Perry, an ex performer with 40 years experience behind him, started the nightclub comedians Buddy Hackett, Alan King, Dean Martin. He lost all three.

Sighed Perry once: “I had Dean’s nose fixed, staked him coffee money and then to stardom. But his partner Jerry Lewis was broke. His wife was sick and he needed work desperately. An Atlantic City club owner — my friend — called him. Dean cried real tears. I felt sorry for him. I gave this guy Dean and Jerry as a special longtime personal favor to me. Years later I called Jerry for my own favor. He turned me down cold.”

Perry once told me: “I’d rather be alive to tell this story. Only in this ungrateful business can you take a kid, baby him, teach him everything you know, feed him — and then he walks out. That’s still better than owning 50% of a heart attack.”

From a friend: “Daylight saving time is terrible when you have a 5 o’clock shadow. Every spring my cousin has to set his face ahead one hour.”

Only in New York, kids, only in New York.