It's ten minutes until show time and the crowd pouring into the Royal Palms Inn's dining room is eagerly awaiting the entrance of "The Dear That Made Milwaukee Famous."
Befitting the East Camelback resort's reputation for "old-world elegance," the largely geriatric audience is decked out in debonair, if slightly dated, finery-- a look that shrieks of snowbird swank.
Furs, face-lifts and flashy gems are de rigueur for mesdames, while their steely haired and/or balding escorts sport dinner jackets, bola ties and golden golf-course tans. In short, it's exactly the sort of eveningwear you'd expect to see in the resort's Orange Tree Room--a hacienda-style dining hall featuring Spanish tiling, French paintings, pink swag draperies and, last but not least, twin palm trees popping through the roof. Fellini would have loved it.
While waiting for the show to begin, an aging fashion plate flutters her false eyelashes coquettishly as she fields compliments on her mink chapeau. At another table, an elderly ringsider in a huge blonde wig fusses with her stole while her somewhat younger companion, perhaps her son, furtively adjusts his own bathmat-size toupee. As the band winds up a stirring rendition of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Royal Palm Tree," couples who've been swirling around the dance floor head for their seats. Mismatched chandeliers that dot the ceiling dim briefly as a voice introduces tonight's featured attraction.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Hildegarde!"
The Orange Tree reverberates with applause, oohs and ahhs as the veteran chanteuse sweeps into the room to the tune of "Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup," her signature theme. Beaming warmly, she acknowledges the faithful with a wave of her trademark lace hanky. Then she removes her glasses (her one apparent concession to advanced age) and gets down to business. It's a business Hildegarde knows well. Now approaching her 85th birthday, the woman Eleanor Roosevelt dubbed "The First Lady of the Supper Clubs" has had audiences eating out of her hand for the past 64 years.
"People are starved for Hildegarde's brand of entertainment," the performer's manager announces during a phone call earlier in the week. "Four years ago, she played Carnegie Hall and I'm happy to say people were swinging from the rafters." And while the Royal Palms audience has refrained from scaling the inn's ceiling beam, they are still an enthusiastic crowd. Subdued but appreciative, many sing along silently as she wends her way through an eclectic repertoire that ranges from WWII standards ("The Last Time I Saw Paris" and "I'll Be Seeing You") to a comedy ditty about infidelity and incest in a Trinidadian village. But she really has them in stitches when she jokes about cosmetic surgery, a subject evidently near and dear to many women in the crowd. "These are real," she announces, tapping her teeth with a gloved fingertip. Then, pointing to her hair, "But not this." She may be lying through her dentures but the audience loves her for it.
Alternately singing, bantering with the audience, and pounding the piano, the tireless trouper's sixty-minute set flies by all too quickly. And by evening's end, she's inadvertently drummed up a lot of new enthusiasm for the little- known nightspot nestled at the base of Camelback Mountain. "She was great! This place is great!" gushes one customer as she strolls through the moonlit grounds of the Valley's last "Old Phoenix" resort. No small praise, especially coming from a thirtysomething woman who, never having heard of Hildegarde, had earlier confused the entertainer with the comic-strip character Broomhilda.
A CHARMING THROWBACK to bygone days when clubby little supper clubs ruled the night, the Royal Palms is currently the only game in town for nightclubbers seeking a little low- wattage star power with their steak and martini. Drawing patronage mainly from winter guests who descend upon the sixty-room inn annually, the dining room currently features name entertainment two weeks out of every month of the season--a period that runs from mid-December through Easter.
If the star-studded dining room is one of Phoenix's best-kept secrets, that's probably because the inn that houses it is also one of the Valley's best hidden hideaways.
Drive through the gates of the long white wall surrounding the 48-acre resort at 52nd Street and Camelback Road and "It's Another World"--to quote the sign hanging over the lobby door. Surrounded by a nine-hole golf course on one side and Camelback Mountain on the other, the 42-year-old Royal Palms Inn features a series of low-slung Spanish-style buildings revolving around a private home built in 1930.
Despite its proximity to one of the Valley's busiest streets, this Edenesque retreat drips with gentility and tranquility. Small wonder, then, that general manager Patricia Ryan claims that every act that's ever played the dining room is dying to come back.
Famous names are nothing new to the Royal Palms. Over the years, the inn's guest register has included the signatures of Ronald Reagan's brother, boxer Gene Tunney's widow, Sam Steiger, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. But it wasn't until four years ago that some of the famous folk started performing there.
"Actually, the acts were something of an accident," reports Ryan, the resort's manager since 1972. "I'm running a resort here--I'm not in the nightclub business."
Or at least she wasn't until pianist Carmen Cavallaro came to the Valley for a couple of appearances at the Sundome and Grady Gammage Auditorium several years ago. "I'd always admired Carmen, so I said to his booking agent, 'Why not have him stay here on a complimentary basis? He's just so great and I'd love to have him here for the prestige.'"
Inn result? "The Poet of the Piano" (no word on where this accolade originated) found the Orange Tree's intimacy so enchanting that Cavallaro became a seasonal attraction at the resort, drawing packed houses during his annual engagement.
"He was such a doll," recalls Ryan. "The first year he played here, I asked him how close to the piano I could place tables. His answer was: 'As long as my fingers don't get in their soup . . . ' We may not have the big name that someplace like the Biltmore has, but we could give him the attention that he so richly deserved. He'd walk in without saying a word, he'd do a medley, then he'd stand up and say, `Welcome to my living room.' You could have heard a pin drop. It was exciting."
Cavallaro was reportedly so popular that several California-based fans regularly traveled to Phoenix each winter just to attend the pianist's shows.
According to Ryan, Cavallaro's death last fall at age 76 put a serious damper on this season's entertainment line-up. "After he died, some lady called up and asked, `Who are you going to get to replace Carmen Cavallaro?" Ryan's voice turns glacial as she remembers her response: "There's nobody to replace Carmen Cavallaro!"
Still, the shows must go on. And they have--with varying degrees of success.
"With Patty Andrews, we just turned them away," says Ryan, who did boffo biz when the Andrews Sisters sibling played the room in February. Smiling, she recalls one nightmarish (though highly profitable) evening when an overbooking error led to 195 Andrews aficionados being crammed into a room that comfortably holds about three fourths that many customers. "It was unbelievable--we just couldn't take care of all the people who wanted to see her. It was always the same way with Carmen."
But Ryan isn't smiling as she recalls several acts that failed to carry their freight. "The others--I won't mention any names--well, they just didn't draw the way those two did."
Still, you don't have to be a show-biz astronomer to figure out which waning stars failed to light up the sky over the Royal Palms Inn. With Andrews' act a qualified hit and (at the time of the interview) the verdict on Hildegarde still waiting in the wings, the only other performers that Ryan could possibly be talking about are John Gary and Allan Jones, the only other names to play the room this season.
Unfortunately, neither of those names rang many bells when they appeared on the Royal Palms marquee earlier this year. Today, Gary is best remembered (if at all) for crooning middle-of-the-road ballads like "More" as host of The John Gary Show, a CBS summer replacement variety hour which ran for seven weeks, and that was 24 years ago.
(During his stint last January, Gary even acknowledged his semi-oblivion when he joked that his albums were still available--"at garage sales everywhere.")
Eighty-two-year-old Allan Jones rests on even more withered laurels: Were it not for the fact that he fathered Jack Jones, the singer would probably be known primarily as the romantic lead who wandered through the chaos in a couple of Marx Brothers flicks: 1935's A Night at the Opera and 1937's A Day at the Races.
Ryan blames the lukewarm reception to John Gary's gig on a fundamental fact of fame. "You either know who John is or else you've never heard of him," she says flatly, making it clear that from her standpoint, at least, ignorance is not bliss.
But Judy Eddy, the resort's entertainment director, theorizes that the singer simply had sung for his supper once too often. "You've got to remember that John had a lot of exposure here last year," she says, noting that Gary had already played a Sun City date several months before the first of his two Royal Palms dates this season. "He was out at the Sundome and he did a helluva job. But if an act's here every six months, of course they're not going to draw as well as the first time. People want to see a star like John only so many times a year."
Valley star-gazers apparently chose to ignore Allan Jones altogether. "He was good, but he just didn't draw," bemoans Ryan, who admits to booking acts that she herself would like to see. "Allan loves the room and wants to come back next year, but I don't think so. I have to get people in here to pay their salaries. Basically, what I'm looking for is big names who can draw."
Like Steve and Eydie, f'rinstance?
"Sure, we'd love to see them out here--but we could never afford them," rues Ryan. Ditto the McGuire Sisters, the trilling trio who priced themselves out of the Orange Tree after Phyllis McGuire (onetime girlfriend of gangster Sam Giancana) parlayed a slew of recent TV appearances into a big-money comeback in high-volume showrooms.
"The two sisters that live here in town had come out to see Carmel Quinn [an alum of The Arthur Godfrey Show] and they really loved the dining room," explains Ryan. "But the story I heard was that Phyllis--she's the one who loves the theatrics--thought the room wasn't big enough for all the choreography and all that. Oooh, they're the biggest! We were really disappointed that they won't be appearing here."
And while you're never going to see someone like Frank Sinatra scooby- dooby-doing the Royal Palms, there's an outside chance you just might see his son. "Frank Sinatra Jr. is supposed to be out here in April, but I don't know whether that's going to come to pass," says Ryan, sounding none too hopeful. "We had him out here one year, but he just won't impose on his father's songs. He's got a beautiful voice, he looks just like his dad, but he's got a five-piece orchestra and it's jazz. This dining room is not jazz." Ryan rolls her eyes. "If he'd just sing more of his dad's songs, they'd go crazy for him in here--they love that dance music. But he's totally independent and he's not going to ride on his father's reputation."
A risky venture at best, the celebrity nightclub scene (or what little remains of it outside New York City, San Francisco, L.A., and Chicago) has always been particularly dicey in the Valley.
Ten years ago, for instance, Scottsdale's Registry Resort laid an egg with its big-name policy after locals made it clear that if they were shelling out pricey Las Vegas-style cover charges to see someone like Lena Horne, they wanted to be in Nevada when they did it.
Not that anybody's ever going to accuse the Royal Palms of price- gouging. With a modest $10 cover charge for dinner shows (add a two-drink minimum for late-night cocktail performances), the Inn offers some of the cheapest entertainment in town--if your taste in entertainment runs toward the type of act willing to work for $10 a head.
"Acts like Steve and Eydie, stars who can command $15,000 a week and up, well they're out of our league," explains Judy Eddy, who's already drawing up a list of possible bookings for next season. "Margaret Whiting, Rose Marie, the Modernaires, Eddie Fisher--there's all kinds of people we can put in that room. It's sad, but there's not a whole lot of places for these people to work anymore. Not that they need to work--most of these people are very comfortable. Does Bob Hope need to work? Does George Burns need to work? These are troupers who are working at what they love best."
She'll get no argument from the Royal Palms most recent attraction.
"Retire?" sputters Hildegarde. The octogenarian songbird throws her hands up over her ears as if she's just heard a vile obscenity. "Why should I? I like what I do. It's a tough world, it's a tough life, but I'm not just going to sit back. It's just not my style, dear."
Not even if the Grim Reaper slips the maitre d' a ten spot, one suspects.
"Father Time is catching up, there's no doubt about it," Hildegarde admits. "But I'm staving him off as much as possible."
