‘Who’s Sorry?’ Not Last Ace, After 83 Years of Song, Dance

Irving Klein sings. Standing in the living room of his Sherman Oaks apartment, wearing a black derby he bought in 1938, Klein belts out a few stanzas of “Who’s Sorry Now?” loud and strong and only occasionally off-tune.

When he finishes, the 97-year-old man points a finger at a visitor.

“Now do you understand, young man, that you are talking to a living legend?”

Next comes a joke, the one about the woman wanting to divorce her lazy, unemployed husband. The judge gestures to the woman’s children sitting in the courtroom and says the husband must be good for something. “Your honor,” the woman replies, “if I depended on him, I wouldn’t have them either.”

That one got big laughs last month at the Sun Air Convalescent Home in Panorama City, Klein says.

“One crippled woman in a wheelchair, 89 years old, laughed so hard that she fell out of her chair.”

Klein tells a story. He can tell 20 stories, maybe more, during a two-hour sitting. The stories are always about him, his life. This one is about how he got started in show business. He was singing in a synagogue choir in Brooklyn when a vaudeville act, “The Three Aces,” walked by the temple. They heard a soprano voice wafting from inside and wanted to know who that girl was. It wasn’t a girl, it was young Irving. They hired him on the spot. Well, after his mother gave permission.

Challenges George Burns

“I was only 14 years old. That was in 1903,” he recalls. “George Burns claims he’s the oldest living performer still going strong but he’s not. I am.”

The renamed “Four Aces” remained together for 41 years, playing year-round in houses in every state of the Union, Klein says. Then, sometime around 1944, vaudeville died. Three of the “Aces” soon followed suit. Irving survived.

The aging singer, comedian and dancer has spent the last 40 years performing anywhere he can. He danced for loose change on the Staten Island Ferry. He moved out to California to work as a stunt man in Westerns and as a double for film star Adolphe Menjou. He’s done stand-up in bars on amateur nights and acted in small-time plays.

Most recently, Klein has been playing convalescent homes around the Valley, three or four times a week for $35 a show. And on Thursdays he entertains for free at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital. Just a few summers short of 100 years old, he refuses to leave the stage.

“I’ll never retire,” he says. “I’ll die with my boots on.”

Klein sits on the couch now. A slight man of just over five feet and 100 pounds, he appears far more youthful than his age. His voice and eyes are vibrant. He will shuffle to the bedroom periodically to come back with a hat or a photograph or some other memento. There are certificates of appreciation from the Veterans Administration and state Sen. Alan Robbins.

Klein tells stories. That is how you learn of his life, in a patch-work quilt of tales. Over the course of an afternoon, he’ll tell the same ones two or three times over and sometimes the dates or events get switched around.

“A lot of people say, ‘Ah, he’s full of bull,’ ” he complains. “Whether people believe me or not, I don’t care. What I say is truth.”

Even if it wasn’t, much of what Klein describes happened so long ago that there aren’t many people left who could dispute him.

Taking Enforced Break

Right now, Klein is taking an enforced break from his show business career. He twisted an ankle falling down the steps last month and is still recovering from a cracked rib, so the doctor told him to take it easy for a few weeks. Klein says he’s not one to stay in bed. It’s like being in prison, he says.

“A lot of people say ‘That guy’s not going to last much longer.’ But I fool them. I always do.”

Patty Hamilton, sitting on the couch next to him, nods in agreement.

“In August he had a pacemaker implanted in his chest and the doctor told him to come back in 10 years to have it replaced,” says Hamilton, Klein’s 47-year-old fiancee.

Fiancee? Well, the wedding was supposed to be next week, but with the ankle and the rib, it has been postponed until December. The two live together in a Hazeltine Avenue apartment building Hamilton manages.

“Here’s the secret of it,” she confides. “He can talk love so that physical love is overshadowed. He doesn’t just say ‘I love you.’ He speaks eloquently of love. It’s like Cyrano de Bergerac and Roxanne. It’s hard not to fall in love with someone like that.”

Klein’s Third Marriage

This will be Klein’s third marriage. The first time, in 1903, he and Molly Paulowitz paid a preacher 50 cents to be wedded. He was 14, she 13. They kept the marriage a secret from their parents for three years. They stayed together for 57 years, until Molly died of cancer.

The next one ended in 1983 after 22 years, when Eleanor Waber died. Klein met Patty a year ago at a local rest home. He sang, she played piano. They did a few numbers from the old days and have been together ever since.

“If I do business with a store and I’m treated fairly and honestly, I’ll keep going there even if it costs me a couple of pennies more,” he explains. “If I’m satisfied with something, I stay with it.”

That’s about as philosophical as Klein will get. He speaks of sadness as if it were a stage routine. In 1923, while “The Four Aces” were on tour in Europe, three of his children were killed in a fire. This tale is followed closely by one about the time in 1944 when the “Aces” were in a car accident outside Salt Lake City. One was killed, the other two died shortly thereafter. And there were the deaths of his first two wives.

Klein says you must make yourself forget such tragedies.

Prefers Show Business Talk

Besides, he’d rather talk show business. He recalls how “The Four Aces” traveled overseas to entertain troops in France during World War I. Eager to see the action, Klein journeyed to the front lines and was wounded by a bomb blast.

Before that, in his earliest days on stage, Klein worked under false names and identification papers--New York state laws prohibited anyone under the age of 16 from performing on stage. Many times stage managers would question Klein’s age.

“The manager would say, ‘That’s no kid. He’s a midget,’ ” Klein recalls.

An acrobat as a boy, Klein claims to have revolutionized vaudeville by cartwheeling up to the microphone.

“Anywhere we went, we were the headliners. There would be stories in the newspaper the week before,” he recalls. “No other group opened their show with somersaults, hand flips, anything at all in the line of acrobatics.”

Klein doesn’t do cartwheels anymore, but he still dances and, as Hamilton says, he’ll sing at the drop of a hat. His eldest daughter is 81, his baby boy is 55. And Irving is itching to get back on stage.

“I’m not quitting. I’m what they call a happy-go-lucky individual,” he says. “I live for today and I don’t worry about tomorrow because I don’t know if I’m going to live until tomorrow.”