Tamiment is the Native American name for a region in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. But for me, and many other young people in the 1930s to the 1950s, it was first and foremost the name of a summer resort—burnished in memory by sunshine and Friday evening cocktail hours that brought men and women together for a first look that might lead to sex, or even better, marriage.
What I remember most vividly from the summer I spent there in 1950 were the weekly shows—forged in the crucible of Tamiment’s Playhouse and created by famed producer-director Max Liebman and his exuberant, hard-working theater team. Without Tamiment and its desire to offer affordable and educational vacations to young, primarily Jewish New Yorkers, Liebman might not have gained the experience or developed the sensibility that led him, in 1951, to revolutionize TV and later to exert enormous influence over musical theater and film. Without Max Liebman, Tamiment might have remained just another summer resort. Instead, it served as a talent incubator for untold numbers of entertainers—along with writers, producers, directors, theater managers, set and costume creators—who would eventually become household names.
Tamiment’s story begins in 1921, when it was founded by New York City’s Rand School of Social Science as a tax-exempt summer school and camp to provide needed income for Rand. Established in 1906 by adherents of the Socialist Party of America to bring socialist ideas, culture and education to New York City’s young workers, the Rand School enrolled just over 5,000 students in 1918-1919, but in part due to the Red Scare of 1917-1920, enrollment fell and its operating capital plunged to an all-time low.
Tamiment was a unique venture—a resort that would be used to educate workers (mostly young, single Jewish men and women) even as it offered them a brief respite from the city heat. The resort was the brainchild of Bertha Mailly, the executive secretary of the Rand School, who conceived of the project as a way to help support the school. She found the 2,100-acre property, in Pike County, PA, and raised the funds to purchase and develop what was initially called Camp Tamiment.
Undated portrait of renowned producer-director Max Liebman, who for some 20 years made the Tamiment Playhouse a destination for aspiring young entertainers. (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Though a creation of the Rand School, it was to be administered under a separate entity called the People’s Educational Camp Society. To justify its tax-exempt status, the camp added lectures, classical and contemporary music, and singers and dancers to the usual resort activities of swimming, tennis and calisthenics. In the early days there was opera and courses in classic Yiddish.
Tamiment was magic. Heavily wooded grounds hid guest sleeping cabins; the edges of its 90-acre lake were free of houses except for a few modest bungalows on the far shore, which provided accommodations for families connected with the school or the Socialist Party. Even larger structures such as the dining room, the Playhouse and administrative buildings were relatively unobtrusive. A clubhouse, designed for relaxation and quiet contemplation, was tucked into the side of a hill overlooking the only large open space on the grounds—a prize-winning golf course designed by prolific golf course architect Robert Trent Jones. Visible from the clubhouse, waterfalls ran down both sides of a wide stone stairway and splashed down to the golf course.
The clubhouse’s interior colors—green, yellow and beige—echoed its sylvan setting. Much of this design and the resort’s many amenities were due to the innovative ideas of its shrewd and prescient general manager Ben Josephson, who was associated with the Rand School and worked at Tamiment from 1941 to 1968.
The singing, dancing Nazis of Mel Brooks’s The Producers actually had their origin in a 1930s Tamiment production.
Despite some initial struggles, Tamiment soon attracted enough visitors to earn sufficient money to support both the resort and the Rand School. Guests, who generally arrived on Friday, paid by the week with all activities included. On Friday nights, everyone assembled for cocktails and a “meet and greet” on the terrace fronting the dining hall. Couples would often form, but singles would have many other opportunities to meet—around the large pool, in the dining hall, or while engaging in tennis, horseback riding or other activities. The staff, many of whom were college students or young people who needed summer jobs, would also mingle with the guests, but unlike the Catskills hotels, which encouraged such behavior, Tamiment remained diffident about such couplings.
Built in 1941, the 1,200-seat, state-of-the-art Tamiment Playhouse was where some of the most prominent names in mid-century entertainment got their start. (Photo credit: Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)
As only one of a dozen hotel resorts in the area (others included the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s Unity House and the old Mount Airy Lodge), Tamiment attracted customers from New York City and environs, visitors from the neighborhood, and young women like me who sneaked into the resort to see their boyfriends. To keep intruders out, guards stationed at the gates at the bottom of the road leading to Tamiment refused entry to anyone without a resort pass. To get past the guards I would wait a few hundred feet away, beyond their view, and watch for cars full of young men headed for the resort. I’d thumb a ride, jump into the car, and onto some guy’s lap. The guards would stop the car, glance at us and snicker.
Had we really tricked them? I never found out, but there were always a few other young women sleeping (or I might say, hiding) in the dancers’ quarters.
Things took an important and exciting turn in 1931 when Ben Josephson stole Max Liebman from another Poconos hotel. Liebman was a talented young man with a solid background in Yiddish theater, vaudeville, burlesque and comedy. He wrote sketches, songs and lyrics and shared Tamiment’s interest in raising the cultural level of the resort’s guests. At some point, he decided to create a new variety show every Saturday night. The shows, primarily skits accompanied by music and dance, were so successful that Tamiment built a new 1,200-seat state-of-the-art theater for him in 1941. Known as the Playhouse, it was equal and often superior to Broadway venues, and soon became a magnet for stage professionals eager for summer work.
Costumed Tamiment Playhouse performers, from the 1920s (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Composer Jerry Bock, seated, and lyricist Sheldon Harnick collaborate on a musical score in 1960. (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Imogen Coca and Sid Caesar, 1952. (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca ham it up in skits from Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Tamiment Playhouse Players in Costume. (Photo credit: Tamiment Library)
Aptly described as “the boot camp for Broadway,” the Tamiment productions under Liebman demanded discipline, hard work and commitment. How else could a relatively small group of people produce a completely original new show each week? The pressure was enormous. Those who couldn’t take it left quickly. Those who stayed learned to work together efficiently under the weekly deadline—invaluable training for the nascent TV industry.
Liebman loved music, and in 1938 he had employed a songwriter named Sylvia Fine to help write music and lyrics for his productions. Fine, in turn, introduced him to her future husband, Danny Kaye. Both Fine and Kaye had worked in the Catskills, but it would be Kaye’s starring role in Liebman’s 1939 Broadway production The Straw Hat Revue (yet another endeavor of the prolific director) that would put Kaye on the map. Other comedians who performed at Tamiment later came to dominate much of TV in the 1950s, including such icons as Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett and Irwin Corey.
Danny Kaye and his future wife, songwriter Sylvia Fine, at Camp Tamiment. (Photo credit: LOC)
Liebman’s impact on dance was equally impressive. He employed the dance team of Marge and Gower Champion, helped train dozens of dancers and persuaded Jerome Robbins—whose dance routines in West Side Story would revolutionize the Broadway stage—to become a choreographer. Herbert Ross followed a similar trajectory. After spending time at Tamiment, he went on to delight Broadway audiences with his choreography in shows such as Finian’s Rainbow and to produce or direct some two dozen films.
Tamiment was startlingly different from Borscht Belt circuit hotels, whose stars, such as Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Phil Silvers, Fanny Brice and Zero Mostel, had already been prominently featured in films and on radio during the first half of the 20th century. Differences even extended to the resorts’ architecture. Catskills hotels asserted themselves on the landscape with large buildings and open spaces that seemed to shout, “Look at me!” They were famous for one-man shows starring comics known as tummlers, who wandered among the guests during the day, telling self-deprecating jokes about marital arguments in mixed English and Yiddish. Their variety shows were derivative, largely made up of material adapted from Broadway productions. Though distinctly Jewish, this humor—once shorn of Yiddish but retaining its rhythms and cadence by some inexplicable alchemy—became enormously successful with a broader American audience.
Postcard views of Tamiment capture the sloping orchestra seating of the Playhouse. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
A late-night performance in the resort’s Constellation room. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
The view from the clubhouse looking out on the resort’s 90-acre lake. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
The clubhouse interior. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
Resort guests compete in pool volleyball. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
Drive-in entrance to Tamiment. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
The clubhouse terrace. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
Interior of the Constellation room, the resort’s venue for late-night performances and dancing. (Photo credit: Larry L. Bird Postcard Collection / CardCow.com / Russ Glasson / Carboard America)
Tamiment’s more sophisticated entertainment depended on teamwork and seemed organically connected both to its natural environment and to the American culture in which it was now embedded. It appealed to a younger, better-educated generation of men and women eager to assimilate to American culture even as they retained their Jewish identity. Comedy was always important, and the Playhouse emphasized parody, original dance routines and music and lyrics. Jewish humor was largely verbal and often antiauthoritarian. Serious politics were generally avoided, but by satirizing contemporary American life, the skits at Tamiment offered insights into popular culture even as they confirmed Jewish connections by making fun of antisemites such as Father Coughlin and taking aim at the rising power of the Nazis. The singing, dancing Nazis of Mel Brooks’s The Producers actually had their origin in a 1930s Tamiment production.
In 1950 I was employed as the au pair to the family of Tamiment’s orchestra leader, Milt Greene. I had never heard of him, or of any of the artists who sang, danced, wrote and produced the weekly shows there, although I got to know them and many more in the following years. The shows were primarily skits—think Saturday Night Live—although short plays were also sometimes put on. My soon-to-be husband, Mike Levitas, operated the lights and helped build the sets for the weekly performances, and I occasionally watched the rehearsals. That year, the staff included writers Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener and Harold Flender, and singers Jack Cassidy and Barbara Cook. Some of their names may be familiar, others less so, but their contributions to show business, both behind and on the stage, were invaluable.
I met some of them at the clubhouse, where they went to relax. Jerry Bock, whose affability and gentle humor masked his ambition and intensity, became a close friend. His then collaborator was Holofcener, with whom he produced several successful Broadway musicals (Catch a Star and Mr. Wonderful are probably the best known), but Holofcener would soon quit the theater to become a highly successful sculptor.
Hard as they worked, members of the troupe were always ready for fun. Flender, the writer whose remarkable list of TV credits include I Spy and Car 54, Where Are You?, approached us one day as we prepared to take a walk around the clubhouse grounds. He asked to join us, then disappeared for half an hour, returning in knickers, knee socks and boots, a pith helmet on his head, and binoculars and a walking stick in his hands.
Another charmer, singer Jack Cassidy, was handsome and funny. Shortly after his Tamiment year, he became an important leading man in films and Broadway shows. I remember him fingering a piano and singing a self-written ditty, “It’s a Disappointment to be Irish.” Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin often came to the clubhouse to read. Both wrote words and music to most of that year’s sketches (with occasional alterations or additions by those bold enough to make them). Tolkin, a Russian-born Canadian, was a bit shy and we never got to know him very well. He and Kallen both wrote for TV’s Admiral Broadway Revue and Your Show of Shows. Tolkin went on to write 34 episodes of All in the Family, and for many other shows.
Barbara Cook had been singing since she was a child, but acting in a musical paralyzed her with fright. Tamiment gave her the confidence to overcome her fears, and she starred in at least one of Jerry Bock’s musicals—She Loves Me—and in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. I never met actors Sylvia Miles or Lee Grant, but the latter, a well-known director as well, remained in my mind because my husband Mike always referred to himself as “Lee Grant’s costar,” since he once played a minor role in Tennessee Williams’s play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1949, when Grant was a featured player at Tamiment. Yes, Liebman also put on short contemporary plays during the week, placing even more pressure on his hard-working staff.
Playhouse stage manager Samuel “Biff” Liff became one of the most important figures in show business. He had major roles as an assistant producer, producer, stage manager and director for 50 Broadway shows and several TV productions. Mike, who briefly replaced him as Tamiment’s stage manager when Biff left in midsummer for a new position, always regretted that we hadn’t followed his career: Even a small investment in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Hello, Dolly!—not to mention any of his dozens of other ventures—would have made us rich. Not incidentally, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly! both starred Carol Channing—another Tamiment alumna.
In 1951, Liebman left Tamiment. He was lured to TV by Pat Weaver, head of NBC, to produce a weekly variety show, originally the Admiral Broadway Revue—which later morphed into Your Show of Shows—starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, who had performed at Tamiment in the 1940s. And for the next half century Liebman’s writers and performers, notably Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (as well as dozens of other theater personnel) dominated much of American TV, film and musical theater. Watch Saturday Night Live—which still retains the format and spirit of Your Show of Shows—for some idea of Liebman’s impact on the industry.
Even after Liebman was gone, the Playhouse continued to attract such talents as Woody Allen and Mary Rodgers, who wrote and tried out Once Upon a Mattress over the course of a couple of Tamiment summers. And if I remember correctly, Neil “Doc” Simon, who authored 30 plays and films (including The Apartment, The Odd Couple and Brighton Beach Memoirs), arrived in 1951. He was vocal in his gratitude to Tamiment. It was, he said, where he learned to write. Larry Gelbart, who wrote M*A*S*H and Tootsie, and Joe Stein, who produced Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba, also worked at the resort before their successful careers.
We stayed connected to Max Liebman even after he left Tamiment. In 1951, Mike and I were included in some of Max’s New York soirees, which is where we first met Mel Brooks. One evening, sitting at the piano, Brooks began to riff spontaneously on shouted suggestions from a rowdy audience. Someone yelled “War and Peace” and he was off—on a hilariously literate monologue. The “2,000-year-old man” was born at one of those sessions.
In 1956, Tamiment, which hadn’t been a “school” since its first few years, lost its tax exemption, and its profits predictably declined. Its connection to the People’s Educational Camp Society was severed in 1965 when it was sold to a Delaware corporation, which razed the Playhouse in 1976 to make room for conference rooms and indoor tennis. At some point the new owners tried to extend their season into winter with the construction of a small ski slope that ran from the golf course to the clubhouse. It got mixed reviews and was destroyed some years later.
In 1983 singer and entertainer Wayne Newton, known as Mr. Las Vegas, purchased the property to take advantage of a bill to legalize gambling slated to come before the state legislature. The bill never passed, and Newton sold the property in 1987 to investment banker Suong Hong, who struggled to keep it open. Tastes by then had changed, and in 2005, Hong sold Tamiment to a developer who leveled the site to make way for houses and condominiums, which are rented and sold today by Eagle Resorts. The golf course remained until sometime after 2012, when it too was demolished to accommodate further housing sites.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Mike and I had returned to Tamiment for a brief visit. We had not followed its fortunes and were shocked and saddened by its appearance. The new owners had transformed the clubhouse, replacing wood with plastic and earth tones with gaudy upholstery, thus destroying its tranquil connection to the environment. Gone now was its calm and relaxed atmosphere. The Playhouse, too, was gone. Where it once stood there was nothing but grass.
Today, Tamiment is only a memory—bittersweet and wonderful—for those who stayed, worked or performed there. At one time “a pillar of the Poconos tourist industry,” it played a large and original role in resort history, but its myriad contributions to American film, television and theater are what made it truly unique.*
*For a more exhaustive and fascinating study of this history, I refer readers to Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco’s Every Week, a Broadway Revue. Published in 1992, this volume is housed at New York University as part of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. I could not have written this article without it.
Hello Gloria,
It’s Martha (Marti) Schmoyer LoMonaco here. Eve Sicular, who has also published a recent article on Tamiment—hers was on the Yiddische Mikado—sent me this. Thanks both for the credit and for an enjoyable read, peppered by your additional info about the post-Tamiment lives of your friends and colleagues, as well as the fact that Wayne Newton had purchased the property at one point. I knew your name immediately—as you know, there were two folks named Levitas at Tamiment and I believe I interviewed your husband for my book. That book is definitely floating around and not just at Tamiment/Wagner Archives—I hear from strangers at least once a year asking questions, wanting to do follow-ups, etc. I still harbor hopes that someone will want to dramatize the Tamiment Playhouse story which would make a wonderful Netflix (or other platform) series. I am a theatre director but not a playwright/scriptwriter—-let’s face it, this is rich material that someone like Amy Sherman Palladino (do you have a contact for her?) could do wonders with. Please feel free to get in touch with me so we can continue this conversation: martilomonaco@optonline.net