Viva Monte
Twenty years ago, in a book about the singer Dean Martin, my father was described with one sentence saying that he was a “front man” for the Mafia. In a dozen other books I’d read that mentioned my father, this description had never been used and it hurt to see it then in print.
I knew it was at least partly true, that he was in business with certain gangsters, but I also knew it wasn’t the whole truth. What I didn’t know for sure was what he actually did and with whom.
What I’ve found out in the years since then was that my father had been tarred with that brush of the Mafia since 1940. That was the year he created and opened the Copacabana nightclub at 10 E. 60th St. in New York City. That was also the year the FBI opened a file on him.
I vowed I would find the truth about what my father was and was not. I hoped that he was not just a front man but I needed to know for sure. Now I know.
My father was Monte Proser. He called himself a saloonkeeper and a salesman. Frank Sinatra called him “The Genius,” columnist Walter Winchell called him “Broadway’s Favorite Son,” J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy called him “a known business associate of Frank Costello,” and Frank Costello, the architect of the modern Mafia, called him “my new partner.”
Although this involuntary partnership with Costello started as a cautious necessity, when the Kefauver congressional investigations of the Mafia began in the 1950s and Monte was forever marked as a target of the government, Costello revealed his true character as a “stand up guy.” This incredible relationship that was tested, broken and re-forged over decades between the “kingmaker” of show business and the “Prime Minister” of the mob is the behind-thescenes story of my father’s life.
In the public spotlight, my father was the first to broadcast a live radio show from a nightclub, which he did from the Copa every night. He was the first to successfully run
a nightclub on the Upper East Side in Manhattan’s silk hat district, Fifth Ave. above 59th St. He was the first to define the Broadway staple, the showgirl, as delicate, demure and wholesome.
His showgirls, the Samba Sirens he called them, weren’t the big, busty tassle-twirlers of the clubs in Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen. They were your kid sister, the best friend of the sexiest cheerleader in school. The second year of the Copa’s unchallenged dominance among nightclubs was the season that produced a chorus girl named Jane Ball, my mother. It was September 1941 —America was about to enter its second world war in a generation.
Monte was the first major New York City club owner south of Harlem to feature black performers. He put Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole on his stage but, ironically, couldn’t bring them through the Copa’s front door. His attempts to seat blacks in the club caused even more fights than usual and threatened his license to operate.
This frustration and his unbridled confidence spurred him to even grander visions.
Convinced that he could create a nightclub for a mass, mixed-race audience, he made Madison Square Garden into the world’s biggest nightclub ever — complete with a 70foot waterfall, 70-foot palm trees and three big bands playing in rotation to over 4,500 wild jitterbuggers every night. He called it “Monte Proser’s Dance Carnival.”
My Dad was a supremely talented, go-for-broke, shoot-the-whole-wad, long-shot gambler. His struggle was to free himself from the clutches of the Mafia without getting killed, imprisoned or crushed by competitors. It was his private, lonely battle in America’s mid-century war against corruption. And ironically, the “stand up guy” who tainted and ruined my father’s career, in the end, became his savior.