At 79, life takes a comic turn

Adele Samuelson isn’t one to wallow. Adversity isn’t her thing. If you catch her running around town, taking meetings, you’d never know that she’s a financial victim of Sept. 11 -- a woman who’s out of money and, some say, out of time. You’d never know that she’s 79 (she doesn’t look a day past 60). What you’d see is a small, plump, perpetually smiling person who walks and talks as if her batteries have just been recharged. And in a way, they have.

Samuelson’s life has been a brand new ballgame since Sept. 11, 2001.

Until that day of terrorist attacks, she’d earned up to $10,000 a month as an independent travel agent, with a client list of actors, agents, production companies and assorted foreign royals.

After Sept. 11, she says, her business “just dropped dead.” The five phone lines in her home office stopped ringing and never started up again. “People didn’t want to travel,” she says. And when they started to fly again, they didn’t need her services. “Now they rent private jets because they feel it’s safer. All the years I put into this business were washed away.”

But Samuelson believes that life begins at 60. By her reckoning, she’s just entering middle age. At a time of life when many people shrink their horizons and expectations, she is fearlessly expanding hers. She’s determined to start a new career -- as a stand-up comic. And maybe as host of a talk show about senior citizens and sex.

And she says she’ll do all that without help from those friends and family members who’ve told her she ought to face facts: She’s broke, she’s pushing 80, she belongs in a home for old people.

Ridiculous, she said on a recent day, as she bounced around the Westwood apartment overlooking Wilshire Boulevard where she’s lived for 25 years. (Her Social Security pays the rent each month, she says. After that, it’s touch-and-go whether she can feed herself or her little white dog. She no longer has health insurance, but her phone was recently turned back on, courtesy of a friend.)

Samuelson’s living room is still set up as an agency: two huge desks, two computers, all the paraphernalia that she and her one full-time employee needed to run the once-bustling firm, which she says sometimes kept her busy 18 hours a day.

An enterprising spirit

She might not be the woman you’d choose as a shoo-in stand-up comedy success. But she’s determined to try. “People always said I was funny, so I’ve decided to capitalize on it,” she says. Which leads us to a Saturday night earlier this summer at a small club in Beverly Hills, the Backstage Cafe. It’s where Samuelson gave the fourth performance of her new stand-up career.

How did she get hired? She didn’t, exactly. She contacts small clubs and persuades management to let her perform for no pay so she can hone her act.

Backstage Cafe’s general manager, Joules Morlini, says Samuelson phoned him a few times and her enterprising spirit intrigued him. “I was curious about her, and the very different angle she was coming from. It wasn’t just her age -- it’s that she’s such a sweet talker,” he says.

The club is a late-night spot that rocks from about 10 until 2 a.m. Morlini scheduled Samuelson early, before the place filled with its regular clientele. She clutches a mike, forces a smile and launches into what might have been a modern routine in the Borscht Belt in the ‘50s. It’s what she calls a “blue routine,” which means sex-oriented jokes in which she misuses words like “mastication.” Or comments on Monica Lewinsky’s Oval Office talents. Or tosses condoms to male guests.

When the audience responds with tepid smiles instead of guffaws, she finishes fast and says goodnight.

“That was the worst performance of my life,” she says after the show. Her first three club performances were boffo, she reports, because she could use a cordless microphone, which she calls “essential for my act. This place didn’t have one, so I was chained to one spot. I usually never stand still. I pick up the mike, look at it and ask, ‘Does this vibrate?’ Then I go into the crowd, talk to the men, ask questions and give funny answers. The crowd breaks up.”

She says she’s determined to perform again as soon as possible, but then a summer of minor health problems, car problems and financial hardship foil her plans. She realizes also, she says, that these comedy forays aren’t making money, “yet.” She’s dependent on tips from the crowd dropped into a discreetly placed jar on the bar. The take from the Backstage Cafe won’t even pay for the gas she used to get there.

Will this deter her? “Never,” she says with a cheery smile and a toss of her short pale curls. She’ll revamp the act, focus on something more contemporary -- maybe the Internet chat lines she’s become so enamored of and where she has recently met so many interesting “gentleman friends.”

And she’s hedging her bets with a Plan B.

She has this new idea about a sex-talk radio show for senior citizens. “I’d do it with a friend of mine, who’d give the male opinion,” she says. “I’m no Dr. Ruth. I won’t give advice, though, of course, I could -- but we’ll let listeners ask and other listeners answer.”

She’s spending her days at the library, learning to write a grant proposal so she can get money to do the talk show. “We could soon get sponsors, I’m sure. Viagra, Depends ... it’s a huge market.”

Born in New York, Samuelson married at 16, had two children and divorced a few years later. She then worked for a garment firm, learned how to be a stylist and married the boss, who owned a few dress manufacturing businesses. They were together for 41 years, until he died in 1989. “We covered a million miles for business and pleasure,” she recalls. When they retired to California, he was content to do nothing. But she wasn’t.

She went to school to become a travel agent because “that’s what I figured I knew best.” She trolled for clients by cold-calling “almost everyone in the phone book.” Her first big bite was from Leonard Rabinowitz, who owned the Saint-Tropez West clothing firm with his wife, designer Carole Little. “They wanted a trip to Paris, row 2, in first class. I told them row 2 was impossible; I could get them row 4. He said, ‘Nothing is impossible.’ That’s been my motto ever since,” she says.

She phoned TWA, “told the guy these are my first clients and I’m losing them. I need row 2. He called the Kansas City hub, who called the people in row 2 and asked them to switch seats. They did.” Rabinowitz and Little remained her clients for years, she says, until they bought a private jet. Soon after them, Samuelson was booking travel for David Hasselhoff, Stella Stevens, Ice T and other Hollywood types.

But her mainstays, she says, were big-ticket groups like film production companies in France, England and Italy; and the entourage of the royal family of Saudi Arabia, whom she met during the Los Angeles Olympics.

She recalls that someone from the Saudi royal family once asked to book a huge chunk of the L’Hermitage hotel in Beverly Hills. The hotel had just closed for renovation and refused to take guests. “I wheedled and begged. Finally, I told the guy straight out: ‘Don’t be dumb. You want to pay for your entire renovation without blinking? Let them come and spend their money. Open it just for them. Your renovation won’t cost you a cent.” Arrangements were made, she says.Yes, but at 79 isn’t she weary of working so hard?

Samuelson hates it when you mention her age. She’s a small dumpling of a woman, with blue eyes, an infectious smile and an open, pleasing face. She’s also a woman who “dates quite a bit. Most of my guys are younger than me, but they are not aware of that. I don’t want them to know it.”

When Samuelson’s husband, Charlie, died of Alzheimer’s disease, she believed “we were very rich,” and their savings would meet her financial needs for the rest of her life. She had no idea how short a time the money would last. And like everyone else, she had no way of knowing that things could go so completely wrong so suddenly -- and leave her so bereft.

Can’t afford family visits

Until this summer, she hadn’t visited her family, who live in the South, for two years. “I used to go three times a year. Now I can’t afford it. I can’t give them gifts like I always have.” (This summer, her children sent her a ticket and she did visit.)

A phone chat with her grandson, Marc Singer, professor of history at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina, reveals that Samuelson’s family doesn’t know what to make of her. “We all love her,” he says. “But some in the family think it’s too expensive for her to live in California. She should move here, near us.”

And do what?

Singer has no idea. Does a woman of 79 really have to do something, he seems to wonder.

Maybe he needs to know his grandmother just a bit better. She plans to be a star. OK, maybe a manager. She’s begun putting together not just a new act, but a team of comics who’ll perform with her. They’re young enough to be her grandchildren. But in terms of energy and enthusiasm, she seems younger than they are.

Morlini, the club manager, says he still finds her intriguing, even after seeing her act. “She’s got something,” he says, though her first night’s performance was admittedly not ideal. “When it comes to stand-up, you never know who’s going to make it and who’s not. She could turn out to be a star.” In any event, he says he’ll invite her back. “We’re going to offer her another weekend slot.”