Word: maksik
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...spots for too much coin. The latest of the show bizites to feel the pinch are Manhattan's Lou Walters, whose "six-stage, super-Broadway showcase," Café de Paris, is deep in the red after only a month's operation, and Brooklyn's Ben Maksik, who last week shut down his cavernous Town & Country Club (TIME, April 7) for the summer, at the same time filed a petition in bankruptcy...
...Boniface Maksik operated on the theory of low minimum and high capacity (2,000 a show) to get him off the nut. He shelled out as high as $40,000 a week for boffo biz getters like Jerry Lewis, Johnnie Ray, Harry Belafonte, but not all of his headliners paid their way. This season only Lewis and Belafonte were black...
...voice cracking, Songstress Judy Garland husked out two songs for her audience at Ben Maksik's huge (2,000 capacity) Town & Country Club in Brooklyn, then said: "I'm sorry, I have terrible laryngitis. But it doesn't matter anyhow because I have just been fired." With that, Judy vanished to her dressing room. Fired or not, both Judy and irate Ben Maksik had had enough. Claiming that he had advanced her $40,000 (not so, said Judy) for her scheduled 3½ week act at $25,000 a week, Maksik argued that his star had reneged...
Success on the Tundra. The man who built up the world's biggest nightclub is a 47-year-old Brooklynite named Ben Maksik, and he built it from a hot dog stand. When he was cleaned out of the real-estate business by the Depression, Maksik borrowed $200, slapped together a wooden frankfurters-and-Coke stand, gradually expanded it into a nightclub by acquiring a jukebox, liquor and cabaret licenses and a dance floor. Two and a half years ago he borrowed $1,000,000, built his present colossus. The logistics of its operation, he soon found, were staggering...
Despite his success on the Brooklyn tundra, Maksik is a chronic worrier who believes that sooner or later his storied "Child's with music and a minimum" is bound to go the way of all the big clubs. "I'm in this business 21 years, and everyone always calls me a success, but how come I'm always borrowing money?" To that, a former associate replies: "Ben ain't in this to look at pretty girls in tights; he don't do nothin' that don't make money." Whatever else...