This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
For 24 years, as the hatcheck girl at Sardi’s, the storied theater district restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan, Renee Carroll found fame from within the close confines of a cloakroom.
From that post, she hobnobbed with celebrity clientele, fed insider gossip to newspaper columnists and wrote an immensely popular, chatty book that dished about which stage actress ate too much garlic (Katharine Cornell, if you must know) and how fading stars wistfully reacted when rising newcomers like Joan Crawford entered the dining room.
Checking hats at a restaurant might seem like a menial job, and in fact the salary for safekeeping homburgs, fedoras, bowlers and derbies was measly. But Carroll saw the position as an opportunity to make her own mark on Broadway.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWith her wisecracking personality, she won over actors, writers and producers while earning dime or quarter tips. If someone checked a play script with her, she perused it and offered canny critiques, sometimes unsolicited, by the time the patron had finished lunch.
Her approbation was considered such a good-luck charm that even hatless playwrights and producers were known to leave her money. Eugene O’Neill once entrusted her with his wristwatch when he had nothing else on hand to check.
“She made being a hat-checker into show business,” Jan Whitaker, a restaurant historian and author, said in an interview, adding, “She wanted to be in charge.”
One night, when the French actor Maurice Chevalier entered Sardi’s without his hat, Carroll stopped him as he breezed past. “Mr. Chevalier,” she said, “I paid a dollar to see your newest picture last night.” He asked her how she liked it, and she said it was fine, adding, “Do you think it’s fair for you to leave your hat in the car to save a dime?”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTChastened, he rushed out to retrieve it.
She used her connections to land jobs as a writer and editor for theater publications and to appear on radio and television broadcasts. She also made cameos on the Broadway stage, though she found less success in that arena. “Buckaroo,” in 1929, was a flop, as was a musical revue she took part in, “Bright Lights of 1944,” which got lacerating reviews.
“I decided there were more tears than laughs in that business,” she told an interviewer in 1951.
If a play excited her, Carroll sought backers for it and saved up enough cash to invest in its production. She tipped off actors about upcoming auditions, helped them run lines and encouraged a young, insecure Humphrey Bogart to pursue a movie career.
She became such a theater district personality that her hospitalization for an appendicitis attack in 1929 was tabloid fodder.
She was “the world’s most famous hatcheck girl,” The Daily News declared in 1932.
That year, the author Rian James reportedly based a comedic novel on Carroll. The book, “Hat-Check Girl,” was adapted for a 1932 movie with Ginger Rogers. The next year, Carroll published her own book, “In Your Hat,” a cavalcade of anecdotes and gimlet-eyed observations about big names on Broadway.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe book was illustrated by Alex Gard, renowned for his hundreds of caricatures of theater people festooning Sardi’s walls. The first edition sold out as she barnstormed the country to promote it, and mostly positive newspaper reviews flowed in from around the country.
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Her stories had “the pungency of thumbnail sketches,” a reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote. “Nobody is glorified, and nobody written down, though vain celebrities will not relish Renee’s blunt commentaries.” The Scranton Times-Tribune in Pennsylvania called the book “a corker,” its skewered subjects bound to engage in “private and possibly public tearing of hair, with Renee at the receiving end of the latter.”
The Oregon Daily Journal, however, was disapproving, declaring that it would be “better for the public peace of mind and state of morals if the beautiful Renee Carroll would keep her shrewd opinions and keen observations to herself.”
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Renee Carroll was born Rebecca Shapiro on March 6, 1908, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the middle child of Gertrude Frances (Nathan) Shapiro and Herman Shapiro, a prominent Orthodox rabbi. She attended public school until she was 15, according to an article by the Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky. Her older sister, Anna, had a daughter whom Carroll adored. Carroll helped her younger brother, Solomon Reuben Shapiro, pay for college. (He became a rare book dealer.)
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHer parents wanted Carroll to go to law school, but she took business classes instead and began working for a law firm. Boredom set in, but dancing was a passion, so she got a job as a so-called taxi dancer at the Roseland Ballroom in Midtown, earning a few cents per partner.
On Friday nights, her father expected everyone in the family to be at home when he returned from conducting services at the temple. Carroll rebelled and was finally locked out of the apartment for good. She supported herself by working at the New York City nightclubs that thrived during Prohibition, then landed at Sardi’s on its opening in 1927, within a day of her 19th birthday. She adopted her pseudonym from a heroine she had read about in the magazine Snappy Stories.
Carroll was initially secretive about her real name and past. At one point she pretended that she was from Virginia and that her parents had been killed in an automobile accident. Her Orthodox family did not know her whereabouts for a few years, until she posed as a chorus girl fixing the hands of a clock for an advertisement promoting daylight saving time. Her sister brought it to her father’s attention, leading to a reconciliation.
At 42, Carroll married Louis Schonceit, a successful Broadway ticket agent. His contentious divorce from his previous wife, with whom he’d had two children, made headlines, with Carroll described as the “other woman.”
Carroll left her cubicle at Sardi’s in 1951 to work as a bookkeeper in Schonceit’s business. The couple eventually retired to Majorca, Spain, and announced that they were collaborating on a Broadway memoir, “44 Years on 44th Street.” When Schonceit died in 1970, Carroll promised to finish the book, but its status remains a mystery.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTCarroll died in Spain in May 1985. She was 77.
In 1947, celebrating her 20th anniversary at Sardi’s, instead of accepting tips Carroll gave each customer a quarter. The patrons were startled, The New York Times reported, “but nobody refused.”
“John Gielgudcrazy ball, the English actor, looked blankly at his coin for a moment,” The Times said, “then asked bewilderedly: ‘Is it the custom?’ He was advised not to expect it again.”