Knoxville's last "vaudeville" theater: Remember the Roxy?
by Jack Neely
They say that vaudeville, the live variety shows which were the origin of much of popular culture—which, before they killed it, influenced the development of motion pictures, radio, and TV—is making an unlikely comeback in the big cities, boosted by the success of movies like Moulin Rouge.
Vaudeville dominated entertainment in Knoxville for almost a century. In case we ever have another vaudeville theater, it may be fitting to recall our very last "vaudeville" theater, such as it was. It was called the Roxy.
Every man over 50 who spent his youth in Knoxville knows of it, if only by reputation. All you have to do is mention "downtown Knoxville" and they'll bring it up, always with a grin that says they're probably not going to tell you everything they remember, at least not with their wives listening.
Those who remember it argue about exactly where the Roxy was. Some picture it over on Wall; some try to put it somewhere in the vicinity of what's now Krutch Park. But according to the City Directory, it was at 413-15 Union Ave., just west of Market Square.
When the Roxy opened here in 1932, it must have surprised folks. It was in the wrong place, for one thing. Most of Knoxville's movie theaters, large and small, were two blocks away on Gay Street. This western stretch of Union had once been a quieter area of offices and apartment buildings. But by the 1930s, parts of it were run down. One elderly gentleman recalls the neighborhood was well-known for its proliferation of whorehouses.
Like a lot of theaters, the new auditorium borrowed the name of a big-city institution. One of America's most talked-about theaters in the early 1930s was New York's famous Roxy. The pride of show-biz wheeler-dealer Samuel L. "Roxy" Rothapfel, that Roxy opened in 1927 as a "cathedral of the motion picture," a 6,000-seat palace near Times Square. It was almost a city-within-a-city, with a restaurant and even a barber shop. At a time when entertainment was moving away from vaudeville and toward the motion picture, the Roxy was committed to combining the two, with a huge orchestra and elaborate stage shows.
Inevitably, "Roxys" began sprouting all over the country. Knoxville's Roxy was unlike New York's. But it may have started out with high hopes. Originally, Knoxville's Roxy featured a confectionery and a luncheonette, the Roxy Sandwich Shoppe, adjacent to the theater. There are rumors that it was once a legitimate theater; no one seems to remember that era personally.
It wasn't nearly as big as the still-new Tennessee or the Bijou or the Riviera, but with 475 seats including a small balcony, it wasn't the smallest joint in town, either. The Roxy competed with Gay Street's theaters with, among other things, cheaper tickets. When movie matinees on Gay Street were 9 cents, you could get in the Roxy for a nickel. They tended to play westerns: Gene Autry, early Roy Rogers. Between features and late at night, live performers took the stage. Though they called themselves vaudeville to the end, burlesque is more descriptive.
"We couldn't pronounce burlesque," says A.B. Luttrell. "We called it 'that Burly Q.'" Better known to thousands of Marshall Andy fans as "Frosty," the marshall's faithful white-haired sidekick on "Riders of the Silver Screen," Luttrell remembers the Roxy well. As a teenager in the '30s, he worked in Mr. Cameron's restaurant around the corner, and slipped into the Roxy every chance he got.
"They liked to let on like it was a vaudeville show," he says. "But it wasn't that good. It wasn't anything at all but old-time burlesque." Still, he says, "it was a good way to kill an afternoon" during the lull between meals at Mr. Cameron's. He says he went mainly for the movies. Luttrell's a well-known aficionado of B movies, but he says he always preferred A's, and he found them at the Roxy. He sat in the balcony to see them better.
"I could seldom afford to go to the Tennessee," he says. He says the Tennessee got the first-run movies, the Bijou got second run. Other theaters would get the third run. The Roxy was a fourth-run theater.
"You've heard of places called 'scratch houses?' They called some theaters that, I guess because you had to scratch fleas. The Roxy was a scratch house." But, he says, it was the best scratch house in Knoxville. He'd seen rats in a few other theaters, like the Crystal on Market Square, which was better known as "the Rat Race." He says the Roxy was a step up. He declares, "I don't think I ever saw a rat in the Roxy."
Descriptions of a typical Roxy show are blurry and varied, but many include a comic called Webfoot Watts, a clownlike character with a big nose and a sackful of tricks.
Older folks remember an earlier comic named Cotton Watts, who was said to be Webfoot's father. He'd tell a series of off-color jokes, often making broad hints about masturbation or venereal disease, and became well-known for a move, often imitated by Knoxville teenagers of the '30s, called the Cotton Watts Shuffle. Some remember hucksters roaming the aisles, selling candy loaded with "surprises" and packets of pornography advertised as "direct from Paris, France."
Gideon Fryer, now a retired professor of social work, remembers visiting the Roxy as a UT freshman in the late 1930s. "Typically, there was a comic, and a couple of guys doing stand-up," he says.
"It was comedy of the New York Yiddish theater kind. They'd introduce, and lead into the dancers. One or two of the dancers might participate in the comedy routine." And there was always a live band, a trio of piano, trumpet, and drums.
Then came what everyone was waiting for, the dancing. Typically there were four scantily clad dancing women. Fryer says their dance wasn't ballet, but consisted mostly of "gyrating to music with a bump-and-grind beat." The dancers were never nude, he says. "I don't recall any real bodily exposure. But there were hints of that. Fans and feathers were a part of the solo acts. They may very well have performed with nothing underneath."
Luttrell's a polite man, reluctant to describe the ladies in detail. "They had four dancing girls, and they would kindly—well, they were showgirls. They didn't mind kicking up their heels, once in a while.
"They wore shorts. They were dressed to fit the city codes, but sometimes they came pretty close to breaking those rules." He admits, "We got a kick out of seeing their legs."
"There were mature women, or they had lived hard," says Fryer. "They were not svelt creatures."
"Some in Knoxville thought the Roxy was vulgar," claims Luttrell. "One time somebody threw a stink bomb in there." It emptied the place. "Sometimes, those two comedians would get out of line," Luttrell allows.
Though Cotton and Webfoot Watts were regulars, the Roxy at least claimed to have traveling shows. "They would advertise that somebody was coming to town," recalls Fryer. "And the somebody looked pretty much like the crew that just left." Luttrell explains that in the '30s, it was usually just Cotton Watts' troupe swapping off with a troupe from a similar theater in Chattanooga. He does remember a few visiting musicians, like a young man who played popular songs on the guitar. In contrast with most of the entertainment, Luttrell thought he was especially good.
The audience was likewise fairly predictable. Fryer says "The regulars were generally unsavory old men from the Market Square: the bald-headed row, down front." Others remember them as mostly farmers, visiting from out of town. The balance of the audience was made up of young men, university frat boys, high-school kids, teenagers like himself. "Some couples may have attended, but it was mostly a male event."
The theater itself was in pretty poor shape, a fact for which many little brothers were grateful. A crack in the Roxy's wall allowed some kids to witness shows without ever having to admit to their parents that they'd actually been in the Roxy.
Many older folks remember being warned away from the Roxy. M.B. "Moose" Schwarzenberg sometimes drove downtown in his Model A with Bud Albers and some other Sequoyah Hills pals. "My dad said, 'don't you go in there—you might see something you don't want to see.' Well, I did, and I saw my dad!"
That's his story about the Roxy, and he admits, with a note of regret, that it's not true. Still, it's probably a better joke than most of those told at the Roxy. "I don't think he ever went in there," he follows. "I guess he didn't. He could have."
Schwarzenberg and his pals made an art of entering the Roxy. "We'd walk by, nonchalant, act like we're just walking down Union," he says. "And we'd all the sudden duck in." He doesn't remember much about the interior except that there were rats in the place and that the shows were "pretty raunchy. It was the closest thing we had to a wild show. The wildest thing you could do at the time." The biggest show of the week came on Saturday night; it was known as the Midnight Ramble. It was all burlesque, and may have been a tad gamier than the daytime version.
Crowds often got out very late, and Fryer suspects there was some symbiotic relationship with its dark neighborhood. "Union Avenue was notorious as a prostitution strip," he says. "Union was Knoxville's Sin Street." (It's a fact all the more remarkable considering that the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority was right in the thick of it.)
"The Roxy was part of the whole mix," he says. "People out for a night on the town would make the Roxy a part of the evening." He adds that he always suspected the dancers were, like the protagonist of Moulin Rouge, available.
In 1947, the Roxy was billing itself as the only vaudeville theater still operating south of the Ohio River. By then, its curtain was about to close.
Around that time, John Green was an apprehensive 6-year-old with an indulgent mother who would usually take him to any cowboy movie he wanted to see. He heard about one showing at the Roxy—Lash LaRue or Red Ryder, he can't remember which—and talked his mother into taking him there. It was a peculiar place in his experience, with pictures of women somewhere in the lobby.
"My mother was a wonderful woman. She'd take me to see any movie, anywhere. That's the only place I remember that she went in and looked around and just left."
The Roxy is the stuff of legend; the theater and its headliners, have appeared in a couple of significant novels: David Madden's Bijou and Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. Both are set during the Roxy's latter years; McCarthy's protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, "turned up Union Avenue, past the Roxie [sic] Theatre, Webfoot Watts and Skinny Green on the bill with all-girl revue." When his friend Harrogate paused at the ticket booth, "The girl looked down from her glass cage like a cat...."
The way some folks talk, you get the impression it was there forever. But the entire span of the Roxy's live-performance era was apparently not much more than 15 years. By most accounts, the performers left the stage forever in the late '40s; in the '50s, the Roxy was just a cheap movie house.
The Roxy was torn down for parking in 1959, just months before its namesake in New York suffered the same fate. Moose Schwarzenberg witnessed the demolition. He surprises this reporter with a footnote. With obvious pride, he interjects, "The beam in my house is from the Roxy!" When it was being torn down, he spotted a 30-foot I-beam he thought would be just the thing for a floor support in his new home in West Knoxville. He talked the salvage company out of it, and there it is. If only it could talk.
July 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 29
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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