http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...,7476082.story
Joyce Sloane, the beloved maternal powerhouse of The Second City, and the woman who found and nurtured such comedy giants as John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley and Bill Murray, died Thursday, according to Kelly Leonard, the vice-president of The Second City.
According to her daughter, Cheryl, Sloane died peacefully, while in bed. She was 80.
She was associated with Second City for all but one of its fifty years. She held virtually every title in the place: associate producer, executive producer, founder of the e.t.c. Company, founder of the national touring company, co-founder of the Toronto branch of The Second City, producer emeritus. So on and so forth across the years.
But those titles don't fully convey the import of a gifted woman who could spot raw talent with ease and who provided a crucial nurturing presence in what was, especially in the early years, almost exclusively a boys' club.
Sloane's daughter, Cheryl, was born a year or so after the founding of Second City, but the young comedians, especially the young women, who started out at Second City in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, found that the maternal instincts of Cheryl's mother were available for sharing.
"Everybody who comes to Second City has issues," said Tim Kazurinsky, one of Sloane's charges. "She was the mother to the largest dysfunctional family in the world. Second City was like marine boot-camp, but over in this corner there was little Jewish mother. It's hard to imagine the void."
It was Joyce Sloane who held Radner's hand when things got tough. "When Gilda came out on stage," Sloane told the Tribune in 1999, "the whole audience wanted to put its arms around her." She was, of course, speaking mostly of herself. At the time, Sloane still could not speak of Radner, who had died of ovarian cancer a decade before, without her voice breaking.
Yet it was also Sloane who headed out to the College of DuPage and found a raw, edgy young student named John Belushi and hired him without even requiring him to audition.
'Oh, John," Sloane used to say, her round face lighting up with the memory of one of her most notable discoveries.
But Belushi, and his brother Jim, were hardly the only ones. It was Sloane who trekked to London, Ontario, in 1990 to check out a young comic named Nia Vardalos. Sloane brought her to Chicago. Vardalos went on the make "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."
Sloane was den mother to Chicago actors, comedians and improvisers for nearly a half-century; she regarded the likes of Vardalos, Bonnie Hunt, Tina Fey and countless others as her surrogate daughters.
In the early years, Sloane also was crucial to the fledgling business, initially little more than a beatnik cabaret cafe.
"My Aunt Nettie would do the payroll," she told the Tribune in 2009. "My father, who was in the printing business, said to me one day, 'Am I a partner in the business?' I said, 'Why, Dad?' He said, 'Because I don't get paid.'"
Sloane had other passions, including a longtime seat on the board of the Victory Gardens Theater and deep involvement as a supporter of the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She was instrumental in the development of many seminal Off-Loop theaters in the 1970s and 80s.
"One day at Wisdom Bridge,' said BJ Jones, now the artistic director of Nrothlight Theatre, "I watched Joyce and Essie Kupcinet bringing in carpet."
But Second City and its performers were her professional life. Her retirement age and decling health notwithstanding, she remained a fixture at the theater until just a few weeks ago. She was normally to be found off to the side, perched on a stool or bench.
"I'm the only one who still keeps an office downstairs," she said, during Second City's 50th-anniversary celebrations. "To me there are two things that are important here, the stage and the box office, and I'm near both of them."
That was only partly true. What mattered most to Sloane at Second City was the people.
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