Tuba Skinny Playing On Royal Street In Front Of 823 Royal My First Apartment in New Orleans

823 Royal was the first apartment that I had in New Orleans. Jack Newell and I rented that in January 1965. Jack was a merchant seaman at the time and was "on the beach". That is he was without a seagoing ship at the time.
I was waiting to go in the Peace Corps.
I went looking for work in the meantime and found an employment agency and a fellow working there by the name of Peter Dassinger Jr.
He sent me out on one sales job interview at a motel on Tulane Avenue. All the salesmen were in the bar drunk at 10 a.m.
Then Peter asked me if I would like to work in a Hollywood movie as an extra while I was waiting. I said yes. He also hired Jack Newell and we reported to an address on Bourbon Street to get our costumes to be extras in the movie THE CINCINNATI KID.

The place we had rented at 823 Royal Street was the slave quarters in the rear patio. The patio had a brick wall all around it separating it from the nearby residences.

Below is what I wrote about this a year or two ago.

In January of 1965 I worked as an extra on the film The Cincinnati Kid in New Orleans. My friend Jack Newell also worked as an extra. We got about a weeks work out of the job. MGM fed the crew and the extras 3 meals a day. Jack and I reported to a place on Royal Street to get our costume clothes from the 1930s era. Our first assignment was to drive the old cars 1930s vintage on and off the Algiers ferry. Then we did a scene that called for us to arrive early on a Sunday morning for the shooting of the jazz funeral parade which is used in the opening credits of the film. We are not at the graveyard but we are at the big parade that comes after the funeral. This took all morning and each time it got better as more and more booze was consumed. MGM paid all those extras with vouchers. They also provided a nice breakfast before we started that morning. We were both about 24 years old at the time.
We did another scene right outside Jackson Square. Since I was lined up next to Ann Margret I got to talk briefly with her and I asked her about Elvis Presley since she had just finished making Viva Las Vegas with him. I asked her what Elvis was like and she said he was a really nice person.
One morning we went in the Royal Orleans Hotel to get coffee for breakfast and Karl Malden came in and asked for something. He was tying his tie. I nodded at him and he nodded back. Since Tuesday Weld and Steve McQueen(who never showed his face except when filming)and other stars worked on this film it was somewhat of a surprise to me that the actor that created the biggest stir was Edgar G. Robinson. When he showed up to do the scene with the organ grinder and the monkey all the local Jackson Square people really wanted to see Edgar G. Robinson. He seemed to be the biggest star of all.
McQueen shot the scene at Preservation Hall where he looks in and sees Sweet Emma the Bell Gal singing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.






We had nothing to do but sit around in the back patio and watch him go in and out of his dressing room further back in the patio.
Tuesday Weld was very pretty. I remember her sitting in a chair outside Jackson Square and one of the MGM makeup women kept brushing her blond hair.

Below is the great scene in the movie where Ann Margret is cutting up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to make them fit.
Karl Malden tells her she even cheats playing solitaire.

More On Emil Van Horn Hollywood's Most Famous Motion Picture Gorilla

I have written two other posts about Emil Van Horn who I knew in New Orleans in 1965 and 1966. Click on the label Emil Van Horn below to read them.
  I found this just recently. This has the most information on Emil Van Horn I have ever run across.
http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/21567/t/BLONDE-VENUS-or-GORILLA-MY-DREAMS.html
    They say no one knows his birthdate or birthplace. I seem to remember him telling me he was Hungarian or at least if not that eastern European.
In the video below from Blond Venus Emil Van Horn claimed in a 1939 interview in the article above that it was him in this video. No one seems to be sure who it was.

Some Examples Of Charity Gone Awry, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished,Helping The Less Fortunate In A Land Of Plenty

 
I have written about Emil Van Horn elsewhere on this blog. He was "Hollywood's Most Famous Motion Picture Gorilla".   Check the list to the right of this to find what I have written about him before. He was down and out when I first met him in New Orleans in 1965. He was living with two or three other men in a small room in an old apartment building on Gov. Nicholls Street near Decatur Street. That was in the New Orleans French Quarter but it was a run down kind of place. They had one or two small rooms. Then the men disappeared. They may have been oil workers or maybe they shipped out on a merchant vessel.

Van Horn had no money so he became homeless. I had bought an old 1955 Studebaker and I wisely kept nothing in the car and the doors unlocked. I had discovered if you kept something in your car the vandals would break the windows to get in to steal whatever they could find. I figured I would let them look if they wanted to. I had nothing in that car but one pencil in the glove compartment.
  
Feeling sorry for Van Horn I told him he could sleep in the car. It went OK for awhile. But then one day I found a pee stained sheet on the back seat.  I told Van Horn he had to move out.  Where he went after that I do not know but he still continued to come by our apartment to visit during the day. I would let him sleep on the couch while I typed away.
  
One time I invited him to have the evening meal with us. I also invited two of our friends. They were polite but not much more. They were trying to join "society" in New Orleans and this was not what they had in mind.

When we moved to Washington D.C. we lived near Dupont Circle. Since the apartment did not have a washer and dryer I would take out clothes down the street to the laundramat. In the winter it was a place some homeless would sleep back by the dryers.

One of the bums asked me for some money. I told him I would not give him any money but I would give him something to eat. I told him to follow me the one block to our apartment. When I opened the door Rachel saw him and said, "Joe, don't bring that bum up here!" I told her I was just going to give him something to eat. We walked up the stairs. I told him to wait in the living room and that I would go get him something to eat. I went back to the kitchen and made him a sandwich. When I came back to the living room with the sandwich he had his back to me and was facing the mantle. He had his had in a box on the mantle that contained some small amount of money. I asked him what he was doing. He turned around removed his hand from the box. I gave him the sandwich and told hin to leave.

  I have a friend who worked with his wife helping the homeless in Washington, D.C. They used to work for a charity or their church and they would go around and deliver meals to the homeless in D.C.
    They did this out of a van. Crowds would gather for the free meals. He is a big guy and part of his job was to try and maintain some kind of order among the crowd.  One time he saw a homeless guy eyeing him. Then a few minutes later he felt a prick. The guy had stabbed him with a needle. My friend had to go to the hospital and get checked out and take some shots and be tested for aids. Lucky for him it was not an infected needle. They no longer do this charity work.

I have a friend here named Sam who plays the ukulele. He is homeless and plays his ukulele and also pan handles down at the train station in D.C. Union station is a good place to pan handle even though someone stole his ukulele when he went to the bathroom even though he had asked someone to watch his stuff while he was gone.

   I was told he did right well the two days before Christmas panhandling outside Union Station. He got 180 dollars each day. $360.00 for two days is not bad. Some gave him 5 dollars some gave him ten dollars and even a few twenties. Churches took up collections and put them in envelopes. The little children would put their one dollars or so in also. Then someone would deliver the envelopes to Sam and hand them to him.
Sam has dirty clothes and long hair. He really looks the part. He also has a sad expression on his face. Very rarely does he look people in the eye. He keeps his head and eyes lowered. Sam is a very smart well educated person. He has worked before but now he lives on the street. He keeps his possessions in a storage unit. He pays for the storage unit each month but does not have an apartment or a room. The homeless in Arlington get food every day from local churches. They had a Christmas meal from 2pm to 4pm yesterday at a church here in Arlington. Sam was there I was told by someone this morning.

  Sam has been banned from several places where he would go to get warm. One of them is the library. They have a rule that you cannot sleep in the library. They warn the sleepers once and then ban them the next time they catch them sleeping.

I first saw Sam last year sleeping out in the cold in a bus shelter. He would sleep in his sleeping bag all night and then later come in the McDonald's and go sit quietly in a booth and go to sleep. They let him do this for a long time. I finally went over and struck up a conversation with him. I was surprised to find he was so well read and well educated.  And he has talent also. He is quite good on the ukulele and is a good singer as well.
  But the people that come in McDonald's finally complained that he smelled bad and he was told to leave and not come back. So he stayed outside in the cold.

  Last year there was also a woman who slept out there in the bus stop shelters. She finally drove Sam away because she would not stick to one shelter. She kept moving back and forth to the one across the street and leaving a big mess which Sam said attracted rats. So he left and now sleeps somewhere down near the Central Library. He takes to metro into Union Station each day and comes back in the evening.
   I went looking for him today down by the library but he was not there. I feel he must be down at Union Station doing his thing.

A-SPAN helps the homeless in Arlington, Va.
http://a-span.org/HBMP.html

Emil Van Horn Hollywood's Most Famous Motion Picture Gorilla

http://members.shaw.ca/gorillagallery2/gorillamenclassic/emil_van_horn.htm
When I moved to New Orleans in 1965 I met Emil Van Horn. He told me his gorilla suit had been taken by his landlady in Pensacola,Florida because he could not pay his back rent. She kept his trunk with all his possessions as well. So his movie days were over. And his nightclub acts of Beauty and The Beast were over. He had been in Miami though prior to New Orleans because he said he worked as an extra in the movie A Hole In The Head.
It was during the filming of The Cincinatti Kid in Jan. 1965 that he walked in the back patio of Preservation Hall.Even though he looked down and out someone said dont laugh at that guy he is a member of Screen Actor's Guild.
Later in 1965 and 1966 I got to know him. At first he was living in a small apt. on Gov. Nicholls Street with a couple of other men possibly merchant seamen. Then they left and he had no means of making a living so he became homeless.
He would often hang out around the French Market Bar. He could get a small glass of wine or beer there for a dime. He drank as much and as often as he could.
He was one of many characters in the French Quarter at that time. There was the famous Ruthie the Duck Girl who walked around followed by a female duck and her ducklings. People and traffic would stop and they would cross the street.
http://www.eccentricneworleans.com/ruthie.htm
There was a poet named John Beecher a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe living in the Quarter at that time. Read about him here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Beecher
I used to see Emil Van Horn during the day and he would tell me stories of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. He told me of drinking with W.C. Fields. He said Fields would sneak off from his set and they would hide out and drink. The movie people would come looking for them calling for Fields but W.C. told Van Horn to be quiet and they kept on hiding out and drinking.
He told me of Clark Gable bringing his new car around to ask Van Horn how he liked it and whether he should paint a small stripe on each side.
One of the things Van Horn still had was a photograph of his own car from around the 1930s. He was very proud of that. It was a very impressive car.
He told me of being the guy in the gorilla suit in the W.C. Fields movie NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK.
Here is a list of movies that Emil Van Horn was in. Click on the link.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0887177/
Once Van Horn came by our apartment when I had somewhow locked myself out wearing only my underwear. I was sitting four flights up outside our door trying to figure out what to do. The doorbell rang. I went downstairs and it was Emil Van Horn standing there in his old overcoat. I told him my predicament. I borrowed his overcoat and told him to wait there for me as I went several blocks to our realty company Caruso Gall to get an extra key. It worked perfectly. Even though I had nothing on underneath the overcoat except my underwear that old battered overcoat did the trick. I guess I was barefoot also but stranger things than that are seen in the French Quarter every day.
The evening Van Horn walked in the back patio of Preservation Hall during the filming of The Cincinatti Kid in the scene with Sweet Emma The Belle Gal I was working as an extra in the film. They let me and some others sit in the back patio during the filming while they filmed in Preservation Hall itself. Also sitting back there were Al Rose and Bill Russell both big names in the music scene in New Orleans at that time.
Steve McQueen was using an apartment further back in the patio as his dressing room. He would walk by back and forth taking breaks from the shooting. He did not seem to speak to anyone.
Sweet Emma complained about the bright lights shining in her eyes. The movie people adjusted the lights. See my post on this blog about The Cincinatti Kid and the filming in New Orleans in Jan. 1965.
There was no part for Van Horn in that movie. Not even as an extra.
I found out some time later that Emil Van Horn died at Charity Hospital in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 1967.
He was a real gentleman. He was not a bum he was just down and out.
Here is a link to the flickr page with many photos of some the movies Emil Van Horn was in and other things.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=emil+van+horn
I have two other posts about Emil Van Horn. Click on the name Emil Van Horn in the label box below to read them.