I met also Saul Chaplin back in the 1980s.
Comedian Jack Carter, who hired me to write a one-person play about Al Jolson for him, arranged for the three of us to lunch together, so that I could interview him re: Jolson.
Ultimately, Carter and I had a disagreement and parted ways on the play. He paid off my contract and I kept ownership of the play. It, subsequently, had a very successful run in the Los Angeles area during the late 1980s, then during the late 1990s played throughout Florida and elsewhere.
During the Los Angeles run, we had a lot of people come who were associated with Jolson: Betty Garrett (Mrs. Larry Parks), songwriter Walter Donaldson's daughter and Davy Lee (the original Sonny Boy), then probably in his late 50s or early 60s. On the night that Lee was there, the actor playing Jolson (Thom Keane) brought him up onto the stage and they sang "Sonny Boy" together. It was quite a moment.
On another night, there was an elderly lady sitting in the front row of the audience. Jolson had a line about his 2nd wife: "She divorced me!"
The elderly lady called out, "I don't blame her!"
Turns out that she had been a Ziegfeld girl, and didn't like Jolson.