The exterior of Tamara Walters’ former family home near Edgemont Village was a facade.
From the outside it looked like a humble log cabin. Inside it was anything but ordinary.
One night Tamara’s parents would be entertaining Richard Pryor. Another evening it was The Everly Brothers.
It was the 1960s and Tamara’s dad, Richard Walters, and grandfather, Isy Walters, owned two of the hottest supper clubs in Vancouver – The Cave and Isy’s. After a show the acts would appear in the Edgemont Village living room.
“Not all of them wanted to party with the club owners afterwards, but a lot of them did,” says Tamara, who was a child at the time.
The laundry list of famous performers who held court at The Cave and Isy’s jumps off the page and makes you blink.
Dusty Springfield, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, Little Richard, Duke Ellington and Lenny Bruce, to name a few entertainment heavyweights of the day who were lured to Vancouver by the father-and-son duo.
Isy and Richard became fast friends with the performers, who would stick around for the week and spend time with their family.
“Richard Pryor took my sister and I to the zoo,” says Tamara, as a matter of fact.
On Sundays, the entertainers would gather for a kosher spread of meats and salads hosted at the apartment Isy and Richard owned downtown. Sammy Davis Jr. was a friend of Isy’s and a regular at his supper table.
Tamara pauses and lets that sentence settle.
“He loved my grandmother’s cooking,” she says.
On the line just before Christmas from Portland, where she now lives, Tamara says she was too young to understand the magnitude of having a private audience with some of the acts.
“They were just people my parents brought home,” she says.
All these years later, Tamara still enjoys hearing the wild stories from her dad’s glory days.
“You know you kind of get that retrospective when you look back at it and say, ‘Wow, Lulu performed when she was at the height of her career and The Everly Brothers when they were just starting to break out and Dave Clark Five . . . they were as big as The Beatles in the ’60s,’” says Tamara.
Entertainment was Isy’s first love, according to his granddaughter. He toiled in the scrap metal business, buying war machinery to refabricate. Isy used the revenue to invest in entertainment venues.
Richard was 20 years old when his father brought him onboard to run the back of the house in his clubs.
Isy would do all the bookings and make calls to Hollywood to secure the next big act.
Father and son would bicker over the entertainment choice.
“Richard, my father, is a huge jazz fan,” says Tamara. “And they used to fight all the time about what acts to bring in because my dad always wanted to bring in the jazz-type acts and Isy wanted to bring in more of the vaudeville type entertainers.”
Father and son found common ground. There was space for jazz and vaudeville, albeit on separate nights.
“They had a dancer, well basically she was a stripper, and she was covered in balloons and she’d pop the balloons – very burlesque-vaudeville,” says Tamara with a laugh.
Esthetically, The Cave was more primitive than Isy’s. The club was decorated with stalactites made from burlap and plaster and looked like a place Fred Flintstone might frequent. Isy’s, meanwhile, located on West Georgia Street, was more elegant and featured a huge showroom that sat about 1,000 people.
At that time establishments were not licensed. Club guests were sold a setup – soda or coke in a glass – and covertly added their own liquor.
The Cave and Isy’s earned the first and third liquor licences in B.C. That was a game changer and afforded the owners opportunities to bring in better acts.
When Dusty Springfield came to town there was no shortage of drama inflicted by the “Son of a Preacher Man” singer.
“She kind of had a reputation as being a little bit difficult to work with so my dad set out to become friends with her,” says Tamara. “One night the piano player was totally messing up her set. So she was so upset when she came off the stage – she slapped my dad.”
Her dad later found out the piano player, handpicked by Springfield, had cut the cord to the sound system because he knew he couldn’t keep up with her.
Richard left the nightclub scene in 1967 to pursue new dreams in Southern California with his young family. Isy passed away unexpectedly at the age of 66 in his eponymous club in the mid-1970s.
It was the end of an entertainment glamour era.
Now 86, Richard recently moved in with his daughter in Portland. He insisted on finding space for his collection of more than 4,000 jazz CDs.
In early December, father and daughter came back to North Vancouver for a special ceremony in Richard’s honour. He was inducted into the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame, along with his late father.
A plaque will be installed at the Orpheum Theatre, naming Isy and Richard together as pioneers of the B.C. entertainment industry.
During the ceremony at John Braithwaite Community Centre, where family, friends and former co-workers of his gathered, Richard recalled the memories and clutched treasured autographed photos.
“And I just want to add one thing . . . Dad, I Iove you,” said Richard, ending his speech.
He walked back into the crowd. There were many more stories to share.
