NEAR NORTH SIDE — Have you ever wished you could have seen Ella Fitzgerald live on stage, singing Gershwin tunes? Laughed at Bob Newhart’s Abraham Lincoln public relations man bit in person when he was an up-and-coming comic? Visited a dark, smoky and swinging nightclub in mid-20th century Chicago with a two-drink minimum, surrounded by hip luminaries?
If you visit “A Night at Mr. Kelly’s,” the new exhibition at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton Ave., you’ll get as close as you can in 2024 (short of a VR machine).
The exhibition, which opens Thursday, offers a multitude of artifacts and oral histories to help craft what life was like in one of the city’s coolest nightclubs in the 1950s and ’60s.
The real Mr. Kelly’s is where Gibsons steakhouse is now at 1028 N. Rush St., just blocks away from the Newberry Library.
Film producer David Marienthal has fond memories of the place: It was run by his dad, George, and his uncle Oscar, and he and his brother practically grew up there.
“When I was very young, my father used to take me into the office on Saturdays. I used to play with the adding machines and go scrape off the gum from under the tables,” Marienthal told Block Club.
“My dad and my uncle started right after the war in 1946. It was a small coffee shop and built it up to this entertainment empire.”
The list of legendary performers at Mr. Kelly’s is almost hard to fathom. There was 21-year-old Barbra Streisand making her Chicago debut. A beardless, buttoned-down George Carlin. Iconic chanteuses Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Bette Midler performing her cabaret show, backed by her piano player, Barry Manilow.
One of Mr. Kelly’s most impressive artifacts is Lenny Bruce’s bar bill.
Marienthal made a documentary about the club that came out in 2021, “Live at Mr. Kelly’s.” When it came time for him to donate his father’s papers, photographs, posters and other memorabilia related to the club, he shopped around to various local museums and universities. The Newberry “just was really a great fit,” he said.
Marienthal remembers Newberry curator Alison Hinderliter even visited his then-Chicago home to view the collection.
Hinderliter, officially the Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Archives at the Newberry, curated “A Night at Mr. Kelly’s,” which was a few years in the making.
“I’m not a native Chicagoan, and I had not heard of Mr. Kelly’s,” Hinderliter said. “But I’d certainly heard of George Carlin and Ella Fitzgerald, and Richard Pryor and Steve Martin. So I was like, ‘Wow, so all of these people performed just three blocks from where I work.’ And I was really intrigued. And I thought, well, this is a perfect fit for the Newberry … it’s quintessential Chicago.”
One of the things Mr. Kelly’s was known for was inclusiveness. In those decades, some clubs still wouldn’t feature Black performers on their main stage, or if they did, those performers still weren’t allowed to walk in through the front door, or stay in certain hotels. But Mr. Kelly’s often featured Black talent like Vaughan, Fitzgerald, Pryor and Dick Gregory, as well as interracial comedy acts.
Hinderliter recalls seeing a poster for “Tim and Tom” in Marienthal’s collection.
“And I immediately looked at Tim [Reid] and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Venus Flytrap [from ’70s sitcom ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’]. I didn’t know he was a comic. And David explained that he had this comedy duo with Tom Dreesen, and they were the first and maybe so far the only Black and white stand-up comedy duo. And that was the first thing that piqued my interest.”
Marienthal remembers that Mr. Kelly’s had a diverse crowd both onstage and off.
“There was a lot of out-of-town conventioneers. There were also the kind of hip fans of music and jazz and comedy, and they were all able to enjoy it together. And there were definitely some people that took offense at a Dick Gregory or Lenny Bruce. You know, some people that objected to the interracial aspect of the clientele and the staff,” he said.
But part of the owners’ ultimate goal was that the club “was really in the forefront” of breaking barriers and pushing boundaries, as many comics and performers of the time did in the ’50s and ’60s, Marienthal said.
“Not only of racial progress, but also the women’s movement, with comics like Joan Rivers and Totie Fields and Phyllis Diller, and having women in key positions. The Free Speech Movement with the Smothers Brothers and Gregory and many others. I think that’s what’s interesting: They had this really great way of expanding the boundaries, but also creating a lot of goodwill and good business.”
“A Night at Mr. Kelly’s” opens Thursday and runs through July 20 at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.
The library has also planned a rich lineup of programs alongside the exhibition, including an exploration of Rush Street nightlife on May 11, followed by a reception at Gibsons, the former site of Mr. Kelly’s. Reid and Dreesen will reunite for an appearance at the library on May 16. And even a few of the Newberry’s adult education seminars are themed around the exhibition, with classes diving into rhythm and blues culture and a philosophical exploration of comedy.
The Newberry Library is open Tuesday-Saturday, and admission is free. For more information, visit the Newberry website.
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