Where is Imogene Coca?
Imogene always said that being on stage with a small spotlight is the most intimate place you can be.
Outside of that spotlight, there is little evidence of Imogene Coca. In a sentence: she was the sidekick to Sid Caesar on the 1950s variety show Your Show of Shows. That is usually all she gets in a History of Television textbook. That’s how I found her.
Your Show of Shows is a piece of pop culture trivia: it was an incubator for Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and many more comic writers and comedians who are now considered “the greats”. My History of Television class moved forward to study I Love Lucy and The Carol Burnett Show. As we studied female pioneers of television, I looked at the index for Coca, Imogene. She was mentioned in two pages only — both sharing her presence with Sid Caesar.
Outside of Wikipedia and Britannica, obituaries from June of 2001 honored her best. In all the literature and media I consumed about television history, I consistently heard “If there was no Gilda Radner or Joan Rivers then there would be no Tina Fey or Mindy Kaling…” All is true, but where is Imogene in this discussion? They say comedy is a man’s world which has led to the praise of notable female comedians. How can people trace their lineage and not find Imogene at the source?
Thankfully television was her medium and provided more evidence of her existence than any biography. In a way, I came to know her more intimately through her work. I had some facts for context. She was born in Philadelphia and raised in vaudeville by her father, Joseph Fernandez de Coca, and her mother, Sadie Brady. He was an orchestra conductor, and she was a showgirl and magician’s assistant. Philadelphia was a detail, but all other information could be assumed from her performances.
The first time I felt that I knew Imogene was watching her famous “Strip Tease” act. After hearing “Ladies and gentleman, Miss Imogene Coca!” I saw her teeter onstage in a great wool coat that made her petite figure appear as a doll wrapped in brown paper. She approached her act as someone would approach a child who needed to be cheered up. Somewhere in that woman was a ringmaster who allowed her features to widen and stretch to any shape or size. Large brown eyes can tell a story but Imogene’s eyebrows could explain a crime scene.
She pulled a bobby pin out of her dark bob haircut and held it up as a quarter someone would pull from behind your ear. She dropped it. She pulled another and dropped that, too. Delightfully, showcasing her hair made me think that she had more than a few inches. She was a tease and everyone was staying. To get them on their feet she waved for a drum beat. The swing music begins. She goes on to dance flapping her hands together like it’s raining cash. We get a peek at her ankle when she lifts her coat. Cowering at the thought of mischief, she turns away. But she’ll strip a few more bobby pins! Then out of her potato sack pockets, she pulls out a clothing brush.
Her grin and raised eyebrows turn into a smolder and pursed smacked lips. Whoa, whoa, the belt is coming off! She holds the belt across from her as a tango partner and sways her hips. That thin piece of fabric turns back into comedy when she brushes the belt from top to bottom. She throws the brush offstage and consumes the stage with the grace of a dancer, not a comedian. She takes her partner, the belt, and rubs it over the back of her neck like a wet towel from side to side. A special part of me was tickled when she wagged each leg a half Charleston.
Vaudeville was in her veins. Many actors can train in the Meisner technique or follow the methods of Stanislavski. They seek truth and pain. Vaudevillians indulge themselves in delight. Because many were plopped in the scene at birth, like Judy Garland and Rose Marie, there are no limitations. Even though they are performing live, there is no sense of reality. Their purpose is to please and that commitment takes over their soul. It is an art that cannot be taught today.
Imogene continues to roll her index finger down each button of her coat. A squat and a wave give us hope that something is coming. Oh, but Imogene cannot dare and collapses with a palm on her face. With each button, she points her nose to the sky and shakes her head “no” the entire time, but her smile invites us to believe “yes.” When all buttons are free, she hugs her coat closed. She turns her back to the audience and rips open her coat and shimmies with abandon. She skips back to show us her face and tussles her hair with imaginary shampoo. She dances away and gives a shy wave before she exits into the curtain. Applause erupts and the archive footage blurs a bit, reminding me that I am not in the live audience.
A dainty hand pops out of the curtain to lift the heavy coat. She drops it to the ground, a viewer whistles in hopes that she is finally naked and we get to see the real thing. The music stops. The audience follows with silence. Imogene hears her cue to hop out from the curtain, fully clothed in the exact same trench coat. Laughter prompts the swing band to soar. She continues one last dance to walk off with her new partner, the coat, soaking in the pleasure she has brought to a crowd.
I didn’t expect to devote that much writing space to her routine. But step by step, this is how I came to know Imogene. She bared her vulnerability on stage, detail by detail. But never enough to strip off the coat. Like the whistling man, I still wanted to know more. Since freshman year of college I asked, where is Imogene? My final semester I came closer to an answer.
My professor knew a couple with whom Imogene spent the last years of her life. Thanks to his generous efforts I was able to talk to his friend, a former actor. As we talked he calmed his dog, Fernando, named for Imogene’s father. Imogene loved dogs and he and his partner used to sit for her poodle.
He told me she was painfully shy, sweet, and kind. Three weeks after their run of the musical, Something’s Afoot, ended he received a phone call, “Hi darling…it’s Imogene…Coca.” As if there was another Imogene.
Finally, I had met someone who had heard those words firsthand. His thesis on Imogene: it was never about her. It was about her love and commitment to the craft. She did whatever was needed to put on a show, one-nighters, six-hour bus rides, dinner theater. At 83, she was performing and never complained because she was happiest when working.
She was a humanist, interested in why people do the things they do. A child of vaudeville, she was no Norma Jean with big plans to be a star; it was almost like joining the family business. Max Liebman, producer of Your Show of Shows, adored Imogene and threw her together with Sid. I had read that despite their many routines and deep connection onstage, the pair was very shy around each other offstage. Sid Caesar is a force of a performer and personality, proving how Imogene humanized him. In a 1977 sketch on Johnny Carson, Sid pantomimes taking a drive with his wife, Imogene, who pleads to “take the wheel”. Imogene softens his zero-to-one-hundred caricature to show a husband with a vulnerable decision between safety and affection for his endearing wife.
She was only educated until the eighth grade, but she read a book a day. She was an only child, loved mime, and hated escalators– all details I craved to know. She had seen Fanny Brice perform: the real-life Barbra Streisand of Funny Girl, an early female comic pioneer. I asked him about how she broke into the boy’s club of comedy. He said that Imogene never thought about being a woman as a barrier. Life was something to live and follow, not fight. Imogene did not understand the crassness of new generations in the eighties and nineties. She didn’t understand why they were so angry.
Her old friend had kept the coats from Imogene’s strip routine and let me in on a little secret. Chuck Walters, Hollywood director and choreographer, let her use his mother’s coat because their theatre had no heat. The coats now belong to the Smithsonian along with copious notes from Imogene’s mother. Her friend had boxes of Imogene’s memories and couldn’t find anyone who understood the value of Imogene’s legacy.
Imogene didn’t ask for glory. I begged for the world to honor her talent with an explanation of who she was. Learning about her privacy explained the lack of her public legacy. For as much as she loved performing, she was incredibly shy in her personal life. When interviewed and asked about her favorite skits she would often defer to someone else. That bashful inner being colored her work with the charm and empathy that made her the one and only Imogene Coca. She slipped through the cracks of publicists and star-makers who turned talent into items. Possibly because they couldn’t track the woman down who never stopped working.
Thank goodness for producer Max Liebman, who approached Imogene to be part of The Admiral Revue in 1949. To her, it was a job for this thing called television. NBC extended the show’s six-week run and created Your Show of Shows which continued for four years, 139 episodes. Imogene rehearsed for twelve hours a day, enjoying every second of it. Little did she know that families across the country were buying television sets to watch a tiny version of her sing and dance in their living rooms.
On a night off, she went to see Judy Garland perform at the Palace Theatre with her Aunt Gertrude. Sitting in the second or third row they noticed that the curtain should have risen about fifteen minutes earlier. An usher came from behind and tapped Imogene on her shoulder.
“Ms. Coca, we can’t start the show.”
“Is something wrong with Ms. Garland?” Imogene asked with concern.
Imogene turned to look down the aisle and saw a line of people waiting for her autograph. I imagine her large eyes cowering at the attention.
“After the show. I’ll do it then.”
This was her first glimpse into seeing what television meant to people outside of the box. Imogene was a show stopper onstage and sometimes off the stage, too.
When I mention Imogene to people who remember her, there is usually a journey in their face: recognition of the name, recollection of her brilliance, then a question of how I know who she is.
Imogene always said that being on stage with a small spotlight is the most intimate place you can be. This seemed to be the answer to “Where is Imogene?”
Imogene Coca passed away on June 2nd, 2001. Today is the twentieth anniversary of her death.