Flashback 2001: Essee — The fire, light and love of Kup's life

Essee Kupcinet, right, with her famous husband
and noted singer Frank Sinatra

     Monday I ran the obituary of Sun-Times celebrity columnist Irv Kupcinet. So it seems fitting that today. I run his wife's.

     Reading this now, after 24 years, a few things come to mind.

     First, it might not be written quite this way today. We like to give people agency, and women tend not to be defined quite so much by who they married, even if that is the reason they're being written about. 

     Second, she was buried with a pack of cigarettes in her coffin.

    Third, it is Sun-Times policy to read obituaries to the next of kin — it's the one time in professional journalism where a person outside of the paper is given ... well, not pre-approval, but a chance to react to a story that's going in the paper before it's printed. I'm not exactly sure why that is. A kindness to the newly bereaved, I imagine. Errors are bad enough without fucking up the details of the life of a beloved relative who died a few days ago. So we fix those before the story is published. 

     I remember reading this over the telephone to Kup, a difficult moment for us both.

     She was a firecracker. She was a lady. She was his best friend.
     Esther "Essee" Kupcinet, 84, who died Saturday morning at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was the wife of revered Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet.
     For more than 60 years, she shared his extraordinary life of fame and celebrity, supporting him in his phenomenal career and working energetically to improve the city they both loved.
     "You can't understand Irv Kupcinet unless you understand his wife," wrote critic Neil Tesser in a 1988 profile. "Where Kup remains even-keeled, Essee flies this way and that, blurting out his unspoken thoughts and giving vent to the emotions they share. In the division of responsibilities that characterizes every marriage, she expresses all that is impulsive about them, while Kup, unruffled, focuses on his demanding job."
     They were a team. She would pass items to him from sources she read that he might have missed. Mrs. Kupcinet boosted her husband relentlessly. In the 1940s, when she was out on the town with him tracking down gossip, she sometimes wore a blouse stenciled with his column's logo.
     "She was certainly one of the most colorful and interesting women in the history of Chicago, a passionate lover of communications and the arts," said Joe Morris, a friend and attorney of the Kupcinets.
     Though ailing in recent years, Mrs. Kupcinet loved cigarettes and wisecracks. She was famous for her sharp, often acid wit. After she volunteered to coordinate the Chicago visit of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, she was stunned to find herself rewarded with the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Rank of Knight, which allowed her to be called "Dame."
     "How should we address you now?" asked an impressed friend.
     "Call me Sir Essee," Mrs. Kupcinet said. "I've been a dame for years."
     She kept her husband — famous for his daytime drowsiness induced by late-night club hopping — awake and on his toes. When he regaled his television audience with the time he had an "audition" with the pope, Essee could be heard hissing from the wings, "It's audience, not `audition,' you idiot!"
     Mrs. Kupcinet, a fan of the theater, was a great supporter of the arts. She was a founding trustee of the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She called it "my school," and the theater department there is named in her honor.
     She was born Esther Janice Solomon in Chicago, one of three children of Joseph and Doris Solomon. Her father was a successful druggist. As a girl "mad for Joan Crawford," she changed her middle name to Joan.
     Her father insisted his children go to college. She met Kupcinet in 1935 when she was a Northwestern University psychology major. He was a football player at the University of North Dakota, visiting Evanston to drop in on a friend who also happened to be her boyfriend.
     Four years later, she and Kup married.
     "I proposed," remembered Mrs. Kupcinet. "I said, `When are we going to get married?' "
     "Never," Kup answered.
     They wed Feb. 12, 1939. They spent their honeymoon in Florida, at baseball spring training.
     After college, she became assistant director of the Psychology Laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital, where she worked for three years. A former dancer, she also worked as a dance instructor.
     When her husband began his celebrity column in 1943, she vowed to accompany him into the whirl of Chicago nightlife.
     "When I first got the column, she was dubious," Kup wrote in his self-titled autobiography. "She thought — as did her mother — that I'd be surrounded by glamor girls at all times.
     "It was true that a lot of other columnists through the years, beginning with Walter Winchell, had at the very least strange marriages or, soon, no marriages at all. Walter never took his wife anywhere, and he was hardly ever at home, so you can draw your own conclusions.
      "Earl Wilson of the New York Post had started his column about the same time as mine, and Essee and Rosemary Wilson decided they weren't going to end up like Walter's wife, that they'd accompany their husbands as often as possible. It was fine with me, (and) we had the perfect menage a trois: the column, Essee and me."
      When Kup lunched with Humphrey Bogart and his new bride, Lauren Bacall, the morning after their wedding, Mrs. Kupcinet was at his side. She danced with Frank Sinatra, dined with Clark Gable and went to a drag ball in New York City with Tennessee Williams.
     They had two children, Jerry and Roberta Lynn, whom they called Cookie and who began her career as an actress under the name Karyn. When their daughter was murdered in Los Angeles in 1963, a week after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Mrs. Kupcinet was devastated. She went to psychics, trying to contact Cookie, and visited the cemetery five times a week.
      For a year she was, by her description, "a zombie," lifted from her sorrow only by support from notables such as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy, who wrote to her at the suggestion of television giant Ed Sullivan.
      "Pray when your heart is heavy and you can find no solace, I shall pray for you, too," the president's mother wrote.
     "That letter showed strength such as Essee had never known," Kup wrote. "It inspired her to go on living, as Cookie would have wanted, even though Essee wanted to die with her."
     After her daughter's murder, Mrs. Kupcinet threw herself into support of the arts.
     "We should recognize local talent so they don't have to go out of town to work," she said. "If my daughter had more theater, she wouldn't have had to go to California."
     She and Kup established the Karyn Kupcinet Gallery at her high school, the Karyn Kupcinet Playhouse at Shimer College, a Karyn Kupcinet Center at Little City in Palatine and the Karyn Kupcinet International School for Science at the Weitzmann Institute in Israel.
     In 1982, Mrs. Kupcinet helped establish the Chicago Academy for the Arts, where she was named life honorary chairwoman.
     "If it wasn't for her, this school wouldn't be here," said Alice Gold, the registrar. "She was a wonderful, wonderful lady to this school."
     The Chicago Academy of the Arts will "stand as one of the permanent monuments to her," Morris said. 

      "The great tragedy in her life was the murder of her daughter, Karyn. Confronting this horrible tragedy of a daughter in her 20s murdered while trying to carve out a career for herself in Hollywood, Essee's response was to spend her lifetime creating opportunities for young people by the thousands to create careers in the arts."
     Mrs. Kupcinet also served in a variety of eclectic civil roles. She was a co-chairwoman of the Joseph Jefferson Awards and produced the theatrical awards' television program for eight years, winning a local Emmy for her work in 1977 and 1979. She headed the committee set up in 1983 when Mayor Jane Byrne ordered a songwriting contest to find an official Chicago anthem.
     She also began to work as talent coordinator on "Kup's Show," a role she filled for 20 years. She handled the many stars on the show with the same dagger wit she used on Kup, though sometimes they got the better of her. When she offered George Burns "a doughnut and a kiss," he replied, "How about two doughnuts?"
      She received many awards and honors. In 1974, she received the Prime Minister's Medal from Israel; in 1978, the Easter Seal Society's Humanitarian Award. She also shared many honors with Kup. In 1985, the Better Boys Foundation established a scholarship in their name. In 1987, Mayor Harold Washington presented an award to the couple for their support of the Illinois Film Festival, calling them "the first family of Chicago film."
      In 1988, they shared the Mass Media Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and she was the 1988 Variety Club Woman of the Year.
     In his autobiography, Kup wrote:
     "She's given me happiness, love, a lot of laughs and sometimes a lot of trouble. She's given me some of my best scoops, too. Once, when I was out of town getting a story, she wrote my column. I put a stop to that. She was too good.
     ". . . Neither one of us would tell you we haven't had our problems. Many days, marriage makes one-on-one tackle football on a cement sidewalk seem like a picnic. Yet, like very few couples, through my work and Essee's multi-talents, we've had the opportunity to `see it all,' as she puts it. And we've seen it together."
     One of Mrs. Kupcinet's brothers, Dr. Jerome Solomon, was killed in action in New Guinea in 1944.
     Survivors include her husband; her son, Jerry; two grandchildren, Kari and David; a great-grandson, Sam, and a brother, Leonard Solomon.
     Services will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Temple Shalom, 3480 N. Lake Shore Dr., followed by burial at Memorial Park in Skokie.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2001