The enduring legacy of Cotton Watts
by Jack Neely
If I'm ever lonesome, I'll just write another column about the old Roxy Theatre. I got more response to that story last month than I've gotten to anything I've written lately and this time, so far, none of the respondents seem angry.
Lots of men in their 50s and 60s have vague memories of the Roxy, mainly when it was just a run-down movie theater on Union Avenue, near Market Square. But for more colorful memories of the place, you need to ask somebody over 70. They remember when the Roxy touted itself as the last vaudeville theater in the South.
The Roxy is a much more profound and complex study than I realized. One of the most interesting issues in Roxyology is the true identity of burlesque comedian Webfoot Watts, a regular at the Roxy for years.
One correspondent preferred not to sign his name, but claimed to remember the Roxy well. The writer thought the theater was bigger than we indicated, maybe even 700 seats; he goes on further to state that Webfoot Watts' real name was "Art" and that his wife was named Virginia, and that they lived around the corner on Locust. That jibes with the city directories, which between 1941 and 1945 (but not afterward) list an Arthur Watts who's an "actor" at the Roxy.
The anonymous source went on to state that the Roxy's principle musicians were Gus Schulz on piano and E.L. Bishop, a hairdresser by day, on drums. City directories confirm that, in the '40s at least, Gus Schulz was a musician at the Roxy; he lived in the old Tulane Hotel on Walnut. Everett L. Bishop, likewise; before he was mainly a musician, he'd been manager of the Bishop Beauty Shop on West Church.
The older Roxy enthusiasts, the ones who remember it back in the '30s, remember a comedian named Cotton Watts.
John Bacon, of Palm Harbor, Florida, heard about our quest by way of his younger brother, Walter. Bacon remembers Cotton Watts vividly, and wrote it down for us. "Cotton's signature was to wear oversize trousers held up with suspenders, and he would complete his act by doing what I have coined, 'the Cotton Watts Stomp,' and always with a pretty girl. Doing the Stomp, Cotton would extend his left foot, put his right foot behind him, and go up and down on his toes while thrusting his crotch to and fro. The climax would occur when Cotton would thrust his pelvis upward and forward while holding his pants outward, and the girl would pour ice down the front of his pants. Obviously, I can do the Cotton Watts Stomp much better than I can diagram it....
"One of Cotton's big laugh-getters was when the girl would do a series of circular gyrations of the hips, Cotton would say, 'When you get that wound up, set it for 9:00.'"
Bacon remembers one occasion when the bouncer tried to eject some UT football players who'd been heckling the performers; he was intimidated when the players stood up. He remembers that one of them was Len Simonetti of Neyland's 1940 squad.
You'd think the Cotton Watts remembered by Roxy regulars of the '30s and the Webfoot Watts recalled by those who snuck in the theater in the '40s must have been some kind of kin. In a column about his own memories of the Roxy, the late sportscaster Lindsay Nelson once wrote that he thought Webfoot was Cotton's son. Retired downtown merchant and local-theater historian Wallace Baumann says he'd heard that Cotton and Webfoot were brothers, but he'd since learned that they were cousins. Baumann says Cotton Watts got a gig in Atlanta, and that Webfoot replaced him at the Roxy. One elderly goateed gentleman I happened to meet on Market Street one rainy evening a few weeks ago says he knew Webfoot Watts. He says Cotton and Webfoot Watts were one and the same person. "They just started calling him 'Webfoot' because of the way he walked," he says.
In the city directories, Cotton Watts—"Charles Cotton Watts," as he's listed—shows up only once, in 1937, a "stage player" at the Roxy. He then lived with his wife, Louise, at the Park Hotel, which was just a few stomps from the Roxy.
Actors and musicians sometimes slip off the city directory's radar, so I don't doubt that he lived here much longer than that one year. There are stories that after Cotton moved to Atlanta, he found greater fame.
I thought it would be worth looking into. One internet site has Cotton Watts and his wife, "Chick" doing blackface routines at a place called the 98 Club in Panama City, Florida, in 1947. Was she the Louise Watts who lived with him in the Park? He was reportedly in Panama City until 1959, which made him, according to this source, one of the last blackface comics in America. (Roxy alumni don't remember blackface as being his principal specialty here.)
I was more startled at what I found in the library's reference department; I learned about Cotton Watts' career in film. In 1951, he and Chick co-starred with the legendary songwriter/performer Emmett Miller and a young Scatman Crothers in a minstrel-revival movie called Yes, Sir, Mr. Bones.
And in 1954 the Wattses appeared in a better-known movie called Jail Bait. Described as a "weird tale of murder and plastic surgery, padded to feature length with such irrelevant sequences as footage of a real blackface stage act called 'Minstrel Days,'" the movie starred Cotton Watts and Chick, as "themselves." If you haven't guessed, the director of Jail Bait was the incomparable Ed Wood. It is, for what it's worth, alleged to be one of his finer movies. Anyway, for those who can't resist the temptation to see old Cotton Watts just one more time, Jail Bait's available on video.
When we put that first Roxy feature together a few weeks ago, we looked through the usual sources and failed to find any photographs of the Roxy to run. However, the ever-resourceful web jockey Michael Haynes read the story and found that the Library of Congress has three shots of the Roxy, taken by an unknown photographer, apparently in the '30s, during Cotton Watts' heyday. It shows a busy two-story block of circa 1920 brick buildings, including the Roxy.
The marquee boasts, "HOME OF THE FAST ACTION-DRAMA — WESTERN PICTURE'S THREE CHANGES WEEKLY ALSO KNOXVILLE'S ONLY YEAR ROUND VOD-VIL HOUSE." It was, of course, "Adults Only."
Above and below are huge posters announcing Damaged Lives. Maybe it's the Knoxville premiere of the lurid 1937 movie about adultery and venereal disease. But some might have taken it as a critique of the Roxy's floor show.
August 8, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 32
© 2002 Metro Pulse
| 
