ARTIE SHAW
Artie Shaw Talking
2
ARTIE SHAW TALKING
A Solo Performance Play
The Spider and the Fly
Lana Turner
Eloping
The Morning After
The American Dream
Johnny Hyde
The Studio System
The Sweater Girl
Roy Eldridge
Marijuana
Ava’s Contract
McCarthyism
The Musical Gene
Production Notes
The order of the monologues above may be modified or otherwise
changed as the performer and/or director see fit.
The music of Artie Shaw might be featured between the monologues or
otherwise utilized. There might also be visual documentation of various
people mentioned in the monologues, gleaned from recorded conversations
Shaw made with the playwright.
3
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
When I started my psychoanalysis with Dr. May Romm in Los
Angeles I was a man of thirty-five who had been raised to the pinnacle of
American success. At the peak of my career I used to think, God, I wish I
could be number ten instead of number one. You make almost the same
amount of money but you don't have all that awful pressure on you. When
you're number one, everybody looks at you, scrutinizes everything; you're
like a movie star whose screen image is forty feet high. You could have a
little polyp on your nose and it looks like a goddamn watermelon.
I had been raised to this level, and then a war came along and knocked
all of my values galley-west, and I came back from the war and didn't know
what I was going to do with my life. One of my biggest problems was that I
loathed crowds. I was basically a reclusive guy who would have liked to
have lived quietly and done reasonable things. A reasonable thing for me
would have been to try to write a good page of prose. It wasn't playing the
same piece forty-eight times, or forty-eight thousand times, for ninety
thousand people who had no idea what the hell you were doing and were
screaming, "Why don't you smile?" God must have loved idiots because he
made so many of them, to paraphrase Mr. Lincoln. I couldn't stand the
mindlessness of these crowds.
I wanted success and I found it--and it was a pain in the ass. It had
nothing to recommend it except money, broads, cars, big houses, all the socalled goodies--but nothing that fed me. It's as simple as that. I chased after
it, and I got it, like a dog who chases after a locomotive. It's a lot of
4
brouhaha and drama every day that big thing goes by. "I'll show that big
iron beast!" The dog barks and screams and jumps up and down and chases
it. Then one day it stops. What's the dog going to do? Jesus Christ, what's
this big fucking thing? He sniffs it. What do you do--pee on it? The game
is over. That's what it was like.
I had been a reader all my life, and I'd absorbed other values, call
them humanist or what you will. The values were: Who are we? Where do
we come from? Where are we going? Those are the basic questions. And
none of these things I was doing had anything to do with that.
I hated crowds--nevertheless if I didn't draw crowds, I was out of
work. That was the dilemma. I made the analogy to Dr. Romm that it was
as if I were an archaeologist digging around in ruins, but I had this neurotic
fear of spiders.
That opened up quite a can of worms.
"What do you mean neurotic?" she asked.
"Let me get on with my problem," I said.
"No," she said, "stay with me. What's a neurotic fear?"
"Alright," I said, "let me put it this way: a fear out of proportion to
the damage something can do."
In fact, I did have that neurotic fear. I would shudder when I saw a
spider. If it's a black widow, you're perfectly justified in being afraid of it.
Or a tarantula: it can do you some injury. But to be afraid of a daddy-longlegs? What can it do to you? It's a harmless little creature. You can go
squash and it's gone.
The doctor said let's regress and find out where that began. I was
trying to get on to my crowds, which seemed to me to be the problem, and
she was leading me toward something else. I figured she was trying to get
5
me into a correlation between a spider and a devouring female or something,
which I had no interest in.
"Tell me about your fear," she insisted. "When did it begin?"
I remembered when I'd lived in Bucks County and was chopping
wood for a living. I'd go with these guys--we'd strip down to the waist in
summer on a hot day, and we'd go through the woods. One early morning
with the dew on everything I walked right into a spider web--and I went
through quite a shudder. But I couldn't let the guys know. I'd have felt like a
sissy, scared of a little spider web. We were supposed to be big guys who
were going to knock down trees.
"No," she said, "that's not a good example. You already had the fear."
Then I remembered when I used to go to the Museum of Natural
History in New York and they had some tarantulas in a glass case. I couldn't
face them, so I'd stand in profile to the case and gradually turn my head until
I caught sight of one and had to turn away again. And gradually I could
lengthen the amount of time I looked at it.
"Well, again," she said, "you already have the fear."
We went back and back--as many memories as I could dredge up
about fear of spiders. Now I was kind of interested in the game--this was in
a single session--and all of a sudden I thought I'd got it.
I was standing on the back porch of the house we lived in on York
Street in New Haven and my father was inside fighting with my mother over
a cutting table, working with her making dresses. He was a disgruntled man
who didn't like what he was doing. He had no drive to succeed at her
business. She was the one making dresses, and she had taught him how to
cut. So he was cutting for her; he'd become a sort of tailor.
6
He came out to the porch for a smoke, and I was standing there, seven
or eight years old, and it was Father. Father's a big creature when you're a
little kid, and I couldn't relate to him. I was more afraid of him than
anything else. For want of anything to say, I said, "What's that?"
In the corner of the veranda where the railings came together, there
was one of those conical spider webs.
He caught a fly in his hand--he was obviously a very deft man --and
threw it into the web. I stood there watching what happened at about my
eye-level. I saw this creature come out of the tunnel-like web and grab this
other creature that was struggling, this little fly, and wrap it up and do
whatever it did and drag it back.
It was terror for me, sheer terror.
"Now you've got it," she said. "That's it."
"I know," I said, "because I can feel the hair on the back of my neck
standing up."
"Alright," she said, "what do you want to make of that?"
"Well, what do you want to make out of it?"
"Well," she said, "let me talk a moment. You witnessed a drama.
And you know that in all dramas--this is classic--there's a protagonist and an
antagonist, and when a human being looks he empathizes with one or the
other, identifies. Now if you had been of another nature, you might have
empathized with the spider and said, 'Ah, a nice juicy meal'--and you'd have
felt fine. You'd have had no terror. But you empathized with the struggling
fly. Why?"
And click in my mind: My father caught the fly, threw it into the
web. If he knew that I wanted him to leave, and leave me with my mother,
then...
7
Oedipus. It was the classic Oedipus.
That day was a landmark in my analysis because for the first time I
really got into something that had nothing to do with all the shit that was
ostensibly bothering me.
8
LANA TURNER
Eloping
Remember the Steinberg drawing of the handsome, jutting-jawed,
John Wayne-type American businessman, with the little rabbit peering out
of the eyes? That was what I was like. I was this little insecure kid.
Nothing I did could have been much, because I did it.
I was the outlander who was suddenly let into the magic kingdom. It
was an education. I had to learn what the world was. I was a naive little
Lower East Side Jewish kid whose name became Artie Shaw. But I was
Arthur Arshawsky living in there, and I didn't know what I was doing.
"God, if this beautiful girl wants to marry me," I thought, "how am I
going to argue with that?"
I'm out with this glamorous creature, she was in my car, we'd had
dinner. I looked at her. The world was in love with Lana Turner. And there
she was, saying she'd like to have a home and kiddies, too. That was why
the game of chicken began. It was the first time I took her out.
"You don't mean it," I said. "You're just saying that, about how you
don't want the glamorous film career, you want a home and kiddies."
And I didn't want my career, unless I could make it worthwhile and
have somebody to come home to, a family. Somebody to do it for and make
it worthwhile.
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"Well, why don't we do it?" I was saying it for kicks, not thinking she
was serious. "Why don't we do it? What would you say if I said, 'Let's do
it?'"
"I'd say 'yes,'" she said.
"Oh, come on."
"No, I mean it."
"You don't mean it. You're kidding me."
"No, I'm not. Try me."
"Alright, I'll try you," I said. "Let's go."
"You mean it?"
"Yeah."
Now I'm looking, thinking to myself she's going to say no, so what
the hell, why not keep going?
We went up to my house on Summit Ridge Drive. I called Paul
Mance, the air service guy, and I'm still looking at her.
"Look, I want a plane. Where can we go to get married? Tonight."
He told me and I said, "Okay." Las Vegas. Yuma. Wherever the hell
it was. I looked at her.
"Yeah," she says, "go ahead."
We went all the way out to the airport and I figured she was going to
say, "Stop it."
We got on the plane. We're in the plane. This is Lana Turner--I don't
even know her. We'd just had our first date. She was a total stranger, a girl
I'd just met.
10
We got married. It was a dream. A trance. I don't even remember
where it was--Las Vegas, Yuma, wherever.
The chartered plane was waiting for us.
Came back. Came to my house.
We had sex then, which was strange because I didn't know her. I
didn't know anything about her. All I knew was she was beautiful. I knew I
wasn't what she thought I was, whatever that was.
We made love. She felt strange to me. I did what you do. And she
apparently liked it. So there we were, stroking each other, two strangers.
The Morning After
I remember Lana once showed me a photograph of herself at the age
of eleven or twelve. There she was, standing on a little pedestal, and she
was dressed in an evening gown. She had no tits, she was flat-chested. A
cupid's bow lip-stick. Pencilled-in eye-brows. All done up as a grotesque
parody of a sexual object.
Mildred, her mother, was one of those people Joan Didion writes
about in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Her mother was training her for
what she would become. Mildred was a beautician from San Francisco.
Lana's father got killed in a crap game, stabbed to death. It was that same
awful Marilyn Monroe kind of background.
*
*
*
The next morning we woke up when my manservant, Herbie--a tall,
thin, homosexual black man who'd been with me for quite a while--knocked
at the bedroom door.
11
I called him in. Lana was in bed beside me.
"Mr. Shaw," he whispered, "there's a lot of people out there on the
street in front of the house."
We were up on Summit Ridge Drive. The house was on a
promontory overlooking all of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Los Angeles, on a
clear day all the way to Catalina. There were steps going down to the curb,
a garage to the right. Herbie's room was down by the garage. The rest was
over that, a one-floor sort of spread-out California ranch-house with a little
tower where I used to go up and try to write.
"What are you talking about?" I said to Herbie. "What kind of
people?"
It hadn't dawned on me that I was marrying a girl who was a
Hollywood goddess, and that I was a flamboyant figure in my own way. I'd
recently quit my first band and gone down to Mexico for a while. I'd just
got back when we went out.
I'd first met Lana a couple of years before on the set of "Dancing CoEd," in which I played myself. I was standing on the bandstand and we
were introduced--she was about to do a dance number and I was about to
play. As a joke, I said, "You better be nice to me or I'll screw up your
tempos."
And Lana looked up, dead serious, and said: "You better not!"
She didn't get it. She was peeved. I thought, this girl's a little dumb.
We made the movie and I forgot about her. I didn't see her again until Phil
Silvers came over to my house one day and took me onto the set of the
movie she was making.
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There she was, coming down a staircase in this little green silk dress
that fit her like she'd been born in it. When the scene was over, she came out
to us, and Phil "introduced" us again. I wonder now if he didn't have some
mischief in mind, knowing I'd already met her. She looked absolutely
incredible in that dress. And this time she was very sweet to me, laughing
and kidding around. She didn't seem to remember we hadn't hit it off. And
I asked her out.
I hadn't yet re-grouped, or figured out what I was going to do next,
that night we ended up getting married.
"There are people out there with cameras," Herbie told us. "They've
got trucks out there."
We were two jeunes d'or. I looked out the window, peeked out
through the blind. It was scary. I'd say a couple of hundred people milling
around out there, all over the street. Radio news people and newspaper
reporters. Fans too, but not that many because it hadn't got out yet.
"What the hell is going on?" I said.
"Well," Herbie said, "some of these guys told me that there was
something in the paper about you and Miss..." I'd come in late at night and
he hadn't seen us, but now he knew who it was. "...that you and Miss Turner
got married last night. Congratulations."
It was like a bit in a movie.
*
*
*
I found out that the newspapers that day--the Herald Express, the
Hearst paper, the L.A. Times, the Citizen News--had these big banner
headlines:
LANA TURNER ELOPES WITH ARTIE SHAW!
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"Well, what the hell are we going to do?" I said. "I can't leave. We
can't walk out."
"No," he said. "I don't know what to do."
"Let's call Edgar Selwyn," I said.
Edgar was the producer of Dancing Co-Ed, one of the big machers at
MGM. He and Goldwyn had switched the second syllables of their names.
Goldwyn's name was Goldfish, and they called their company Goldwyn.
The joke was they switched the wrong syllables. The other way it would
have come out "Selfish."
"Just stay where you are. Don't do a thing. I'll fix it," Edgar said
when I got him on the phone. "I'm coming up in a limo. There'll be a big
blanket in it. The limo's going to go into your garage. You can get into the
garage from inside the house. You and Lana get into the back seat and I'll
cover you with the blankets and we'll drive away with me sitting in the back
and the chauffeur driving."
That was how we got out of there. We went down to his place in
Beverly Hills, where he had a guest house, and we stayed there for three
days. After that things subsided a little. We gave a few interviews with
studio people there. We were coached about what to say. They told me not
to say I just married her. It sounded a little outre. I was to say I had met her
when we made Dancing Co-Ed and felt an affinity. Then we saw each other
again and liked each other. We went to dinner, we talked.
The American Dream
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We were married six months. It lasted about a year and a half in all
from marriage through interlocutory to final decree. The first inkling I had
that it wasn't going to work came early on. One night she did something I
couldn't believe.
We were getting ready to go to bed and she was being very loving.
She made me go into the bathroom and clean myself, take a shower. Then,
when I got in bed, she turned me over on my belly and licked me all over.
It was such a strange experience. I let her do it. What could I do, say
no?
By now I'd heard of Greg Bautzer, this big high-powered film lawyer
she'd been going with and had a fight with the night we got married. He
must have trained her to do that. He fucked his way through the town--from
Joan Crawford on, up and down. He represented all these lady movie stars,
got their contracts validated and whatnot.
He was a son-of-a-bitch, a bastard. He never forgave me, to the end
of his life, for taking his girl away from him, which I didn't even know I was
doing.
She wanted to show me how much she loved me, and she had been
trained to believe that was a desirable thing from a man's point of view. It
wasn't from mine. I thought, that can't be very pleasant.
That was part of where it started to go wrong, because I began to read
things into that. I've spoken to many women about that and it's not a turn-on
for them. But it's something you do as a courtesan to please your patron or
your sultan or whatever.
15
When a producer would call she'd go into movie-star mode: "Hello,
bubby, baby. Hello, Arthur"--Arthur Freed. "Hi, darling, what's
happening?" Then she'd hang up and say, "Aw shit, those horrible people."
Ava played exactly the same game, word for word. "Hi, darling!
Yes!"--then hang up, and, "Oh, Jesus Christ..."
Two different people. I thought the one that was dealing with me was
the real one. It turned out the other one was the real one.
Some woman came to visit us who had a baby, and Lana said, "Let
me hold it." And she came into the bedroom--I was in bed with a cold--and
holding the baby on her arm she said, "How do I look with a baby?"
Johnny Hyde
Johnny Hyde was the head of the West Coast office of William
Morris, and Lana's agent. He was about five feet tall. The gag was if you
wanted to work at William Morris you couldn't be over five feet tall because
you'd tower over the head man.
Abe Lastvogel, the head of their New York office, was about the same
size. His feet didn't touch the ground when he sat down.
Johnny had a grown son, Donald Hyde, who was at William Morris
too. Johnny had been married to a woman who was an alcoholic and she'd
been committed to an institution. Donald hated him--I think because he
thought his dad was one of the big reasons his mother was in an institution.
One night I got a call about two-thirty in the morning. Johnny Hyde.
"Artie." His voice was distraught.
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"What's the matter, Johnny?" I said. I was half asleep.
"Jesus, Artie, please. I need help."
"What can I do for you?"
"Can you come over?"
"Of course. Is it urgent?"
"Artie, it's life and death."
I got dressed and got in my car and drove over to the Sunset Towers.
He had a penthouse up there where from the terrace you could look out over
Hollywood like a carpet.
He was pacing up and down his living room with a little royal blue
robe on, a little blond guy with almost marcelled-looking hair. "Come in,"
he said. "Sit down. You want a drink?"
"No, Johnny. What's up?"
"Artie," he said, "I had a vision of myself tonight and came close to
jumping off the goddam terrace."
"What happened?"
"I saw myself, suddenly, and couldn't stand what I saw. I know you're
a person who thinks about things." He liked me, and apparently I must have
been one of the few people he could blurt this out to. "I had to talk to
somebody."
"Well, that's very flattering, Johnny, but what is it?"
"Look, I was doing what I do almost every night. I had another one of
those little blond starlets up here tonight: lovely little thing, seventeen,
eighteen years old...They come to see me."
He later discovered Marilyn Monroe and on his deathbed wanted to
marry her. She turned him down because she was a straight chick and
didn't want that. That was one of the nice things about her. He was dying
17
and wanted to leave her everything, and she wouldn't do it. Marilyn had a
certain honor.
"I was here and I had this little blond chick," he said. "I do this
almost every night. The town is filled with these little creatures. They come
here, and I'm the big agent, and they talk to me. I take an interest in them,
and they think, 'Oh, here's foxy Grandpa. He likes me.' These little kids are
educated from the cradle. They know exactly what they have, little
American girls who've always had men swooning over them.
"So it isn't too surprising that I finally get them into bed. This little
one was lying there and I was about to get into bed with her, and suddenly I
got this picture of myself as a dirty old man taking advantage of this--child.
I said, 'Honey, put your clothes on and get out of here. Leave right now.
Don't worry, everything's fine.'
"And I let her go and sat here for a while, thinking to myself, What
has happened to you? Your wife is in an institution. Your son hates you.
What are you doing? I goddam near jumped off that terrace."
I comforted him, and finally he said thank you, and I got up and left,
and that was the end of it. We never mentioned it again. He later became
Ava's agent.
The Studio System
Johnny called one day and asked if I wanted to go to a preview of a
movie Lana had made. I hated those things--all that "Who's that? Are you
somebody?" kind of craziness--and said I didn't really want to go.
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"Do you mind if I pick Lana up and I'll take her?" he said. "She
should see this. We're going to get an audience reaction." It was going to
be playing out in Bellflower or someplace.
"Sure, take her out there," I said, "I'll stay home and take it easy." I
had a night off.
He came and picked her up and they went, and I picked up a book.
The preview would end at 10:30 or 11:00, and by the time they got home it
would be midnight.
At about eleven o'clock, late for Hollywood, I was reading, and my
doorbell rang. Herbie went to the door and he came tip-toeing in to me.
"Mr. Shaw," he said, "there's a man out there wants to talk to you."
"Who?"
"I don't know who he is but he's got a big limousine with a chauffeur.
He said his name is Mayer."
"Mayer? L.B.?"
"I don't know."
"Well, tell him to come in."
He came in through the living room with Herbie escorting him. It
was L.B. Mayer. A portly man in a blue suit with white hair, built like a
little bull, dignified, with shiny glasses.
"Mr. Mayer," I said. "What are you doing here?" I stood up.
"Well," he said, "I thought I'd come up and see you about--just a piece
of business."
"I don't understand--"
19
"Well, it has to do with our little girl." They always called them little
girls--our little girl. He used to call Judy Garland "my little hunchback"
because she had long legs and a little torso.
"Well," I said, "sit down. Would you like a drink or something?"
He accepted a glass of water and sat down.
"I wanted to ask you a sort of delicate question. I hope you don't
mind, it's personal..."
"Go ahead."
"Well," he said, "are you and Lana planning on having children?"
"Gee, I don't know. We're not making any plans but we're doing all
the right things. They could come. I'm not taking any precautions. Why?"
"Well," he said, "you know we have a considerable amount of money
invested in her. And this girl is going to make us millions. She's going to
be one of the biggest stars we've ever had." She hadn't quite made it over
the top yet. "It would be disastrous if she had a child."
"Disastrous?" I didn't know much about the film business at the time.
"Yes, it would be disastrous. She's a love goddess. And love
goddesses don't have children."
"Well, L.B.," I said, "I don't know whether I can promise you
anything on that."
I thought it was high-handed, and he must have thought so too or he
wouldn't have apologized about it being personal. He was not the most
tactful man. He was the Rajah, the head man, the guy who started the
Academy Awards when Hollywood needed to clean up its image after the
Fatty Arbuckle mess.
"Well, L.B.," I said, "I see what you're saying, and I understand it, but
I have to think about this."
20
What he was saying was, don't fuck her without a condom. They
didn't have pills in those days. I guess they had diaphragms. I didn't pay a
lot of attention to that.
I never told Lana about any of this, and only later found out that, at
the instigation of Johnny Hyde and L.B., she had an abortion without my
knowing it. That was about six months after we were married, which was
maybe two months after the Mayer visit.
I began to think maybe Mayer knew that she was pregnant, and it
became an emergency matter at the studio. Maybe if I'd said, "Okay, I see
your point," he might have told me, "We're going to arrange an abortion."
But I didn't make any promises and made it clear to him I didn't think it was
the studio's business.
Lana never discussed it with me. Somebody must have told her,
"Look, if you're going to have the abortion, don't tell him, because he won't
like it. We've already found out that he doesn't want to take precautions."
When I found out, the marriage was really over. It isn't that I
necessarily wanted the child. But when I learned she'd had an abortion
without any consultation with me, I felt betrayed. I felt that the studio and
the agent had somehow gotten into my life and that getting Lana to have an
abortion without telling me was betrayal.
As far as I'm concerned, betrayal is the worst thing that can happen
between a man and a woman. It's the only thing I feel bad about with
cheating. There's nothing wrong with cheating except that it's betrayal.
You're giving a woman a secret that your wife doesn't have. She knows
something about you that your wife doesn't.
21
The Sweater Girl
The publicity marshalled around Lana by MGM when we were
divorced was devastating about me, lines like "Artie Shaw was the kind of
guy to whom eight bars of Bobby Hackett meant more than the fall of
Paris." A nice little item to have written about you just before we got into
World War II. She was the little shat-upon angel and I was the twirlingmustached evil blackguard.
In reality, after our divorce she kept coming up to see me.
"This guy called me," she'd say. "What do you know about him?
What do you think--should I?"
"Well, you know, John Garfield's a nice guy," I'd say. "I've known
him a long time. He's a pretty sharp guy, a good actor."
And she would do sweet little things. She moved into a house down
below Summit Ridge Drive where we'd lived. She would get into problems,
and after we broke up and all the dust settled, she'd come back and see me. I
was twenty-nine and she was about nineteen.
I'd go down from my little ivory tower on the hilltop, and play the
Palomar, a big ballroom at Third and Vermont where my band was booked,
and then come back home. One Christmas Eve I drove home and I was
miserable. I was living alone, I didn't know what I was doing.
I got to the house and it was bedecked with tinsel and holly and all the
Christmas decorations--tree, all of that--packages all over the couch and on
the floor...
What's going on here? I thought. Christmas is a terrible time when
you're alone and you don't have a family.
22
And suddenly, up behind the couch pops Lana! She had come up
there and spent the day doing all that with Herbie. They'd got me out of
there on some pretext. I went to work, came home, and there she was.
At that point I seriously considered marrying her again. She doesn't
even mention things like that in her autobiography. She went along with her
PR men who defended her during the divorce. She's the little ingenue, and I
was the wicked man from the big city who took advantage of her.
Ouite a stretch, to put it mildly.
One day we were rehearsing a radio show I was doing with George
Burns and Gracie Allen. My band had half the show, and Burns and Allen
had the other half, and I used to have lines I'd do with George. In one of the
exchanges, George says, "Where were you, Artie? You were late." "Well,"
I said, "I was out shopping for sweaters." And everybody laughed.
"Why are people laughing at that?" I asked George. "What's the
joke?"
He looked at me in astonishment. "You're getting divorced from Lana
Turner," he said.
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"You mean you don't know Lana is the Sweater Girl?"
She'd been in a movie called They Shall Not Die where she was raped.
The first time you saw her, she came down the street wearing a very tight
sweater, and her boobs--which were absolutely spectacular--were jiggling.
With each step, they jiggled. She was sixteen and they dubbed her the
Sweater Girl.
That's how naive I was. I was probably the only guy within a
thousand miles that didn't know that.
23
During rehearsal we had a five-minute break and I went to the can. I
was standing at one of the urinals.
"Hi, Artie," a guy said at the next one.
I looked up and it was Tony Martin. I'd known Tony since 1931
when he was singing in New Orleans.
"Gee," he said, "what's this about you and Lana?"
"Well, you know, that's the way it is." I didn't want to talk about it;
we were both taking a leak.
"Would you mind if I asked her out?" he said.
"Tony, I have nothing to do with it," I said. "We're getting divorced.
What are you asking me that for? I don't run you and I don't run her."
About three days later, Lana came up to see me.
"Do you know Tony Martin?" she asked.
"Of course I know Tony."
"Well," she said, "he called and wanted a date. Is he a nice man?"
"Well, I don't know. Use your own judgment."
About two weeks later, she said, "You know, he really is a sweet
man."
"That's nice. I'm glad to hear that."
"You know" she said, "we were in bed after we did it." (She always
talked that way: We did it.) "We were in bed and the moonlight was shining
in the window. We were lying there, and...it was so sweet...he said, 'I bet
there are ten million guys out there who'd cut off an arm to be where I am
right now.' Wasn't that sweet?"
"Really, that was sweet."
Poor little girl...
24
ROY ELDRIDGE
25
Roy Eldridge, the trumpet player, was the bridge from Louie
Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie. Louie was the precursor, the seminal figure.
Roy came along and took Louie into modern days, and Dizzy took it from
there. Dizzy will tell you he comes right out of Louie Armstrong through
Roy Eldridge. Roy was the great trumpet player of his period.
I hired him for the band I started when I quit my analysis with May
Romm and went east. He was one of the spark plugs of that band. In any
good band, like in a football team, you have two or three stars and the rest
are supporting players. If you have a running back like Hirschel Walker, his
great value isn't just that he carries the ball. It's that they never know when
he's going to carry it. So you can give it to Joe Shmo on the left here, and
they're watching for Hirschel so Joe gets a run out of it. Hirschel makes the
team. Two or three of those guys and you've got a great team.
It's the same thing with a band. I had Roy Eldridge, I had Barney
Kessel on guitar, Dodo Marmarosa on piano, and myself on clarinet, plus a
rhythm section--which made a small group within the band. And every now
and then some explosive thing would happen from one of these four guys.
That's a good part of what a band is about.
Roy was a quick-tempered little black guy. He didn't like what went
on, and I don't blame him. When Billie Holiday worked with my band, she
hadn't liked it either. I hired Roy and gave him the top salary. Nobody else
in the band got that much. I told him, "You're getting this not because of
your color. You're getting it because you're a great trumpet player. And I'm
giving it to you because I'm going to lean very heavily on you."
26
Let's say two hundred dollars a week was the top salary. He was
getting five. He was that good. And I built the band around him and these
other guys.
I knew he carried a gun and felt that was stupid, but if he wanted to
and felt he needed to, that was his business. He had trouble every time we
went on the road. He couldn't stay in the same hotels we did. Anywhere you
went, a black guy had trouble. The North was as bad as the South.
If we went to a little town like Paducah, the band stayed at some hotel,
but he had to go to Niggertown, as they called it back then. The band bus
would drop us off, and he'd get a cab. And then he'd have to get back to the
gig that night. I had told him that on stage I'd see that nobody gave him a
hard time. But off-stage he was on his own. I couldn't run the world.
That was the preamble. Then we went on the road, and I knew there
was going to be trouble, and there was. But he stayed in the band and we
went along for almost a year, eight months or so, including making some
pretty good records. We ended up playing the big civic auditorium in San
Francisco.
Roy missed the bus to the gig, which had happened before. The bus
showed up and all the guys piled out--one man short. They got up on the
bandstand. The band-boy had set everything up, and they started playing. I
got on the stand for the second set--the band usually played the first set
without me--and saw there was still no Roy there. An empty chair. The
book was built around him, and this was about the eighth time it had
happened. I was pretty pissed.
27
Then there was a commotion out front, and suddenly an usher came in
with Roy in his band uniform with his horn. And Roy was salty, he was
mad. He came up to the stand and the usher said, "Is this guy in your band?"
"Of course he is," I said.
Roy got up on the stand and was looking at me, angry.
After the set I asked him what the hell had happened.
"I couldn't get in, man," he said. "They wouldn't let me in. I came in
the front door and I couldn't get in."
"Why the hell didn't you come with the band, Roy? The bus got in.
We had no trouble. We all got in. Why would you come in the front door, a
black man in a white place, and say, 'I'm a member of the band'--? No
wonder they didn't believe you. They thought you were a gate-crasher."
But he was pissed.
"Don't look at me, Roy," I said. "I told you a long time ago I've got
nothing to do with that crap. On the bandstand, you're better than equal. Off
the bandstand, I don't run the world. I know you have problems, and I'm
highly sympathetic, but I can't let that screw around with my life. And
you're getting in my way now. Instead of helping me five hundred dollars
worth, you're giving me five hundred dollars worth of headaches tonight.
You should have shown up when you were supposed to. It was your job to
be there."
I told him that, but we'd gone through it too often. I didn't want to get
into fights with Roy and have him angry with me, and be angry with him.
The hell with that. I liked Roy. It didn't work. We tried it--it worked for a
while--but this was stupid. I told my band manager to give Roy his two
weeks' notice.
28
I was sitting in my dressing room at intermission, and I heard a knock
on the door and said, Come in. The door opened and it was Roy and he had
a knife.
"Any reason I shouldn't cut you, motherfucker?"
"Jesus Christ," I said, "I don't believe this. If I'm your enemy, Roy,
who the hell are your friends?"
That got through.
"Come in here, you crazy son-of-a-bitch." I put my arm around him.
"You know what's going on here. You're running into the shit we talked
about. You're letting all that applause go to your head. That's only for your
trumpet, you know that. You can't even get a sandwich when we're on the
road. I don't run this shit. You're looking at a Jew. I've grown up with the
same shit--maybe not to the same extent, but I know what you're going
through."
He was crying.
"What you ought to do," I said, "is get the hell out of here and go to
Paris. You'll have a ball. They'll welcome you as a great man..."
I saw him twenty years later. He was with Jazz at the Philharmonic,
which they used to call "the Plantation." He came up to me and said, "Man,
you know, you were right. You were dead right. But you were wrong too."
"Why?"
"I went to Paris," he said. "Man, I couldn't stand it. I'm a fuckin'
American. I came back here to this shit because I can't live there."
29
MARIJUANA
A guy named Chuck Peterson was my first trumpet player in the first
band, the '38 band. He was a viper, always high, always smoking. And my
thesis with the band was, do your job and I don't care what you do off the
stand. On that stand, you're a horn. I don't want to see your face; all I want
is to hear what's coming out. So you're not going to get praise or credit; I
expect you to do what you do. They knew that. They knew I respected the
music and I respected them, and I didn't want any bullshit. But Chuck was
smoking a lot of marijuana and it finally got to the place where he was
beginning to slow down.
A first trumpet player in a jazz band is like a concert master. He sets
the tone, he plays the lead. And if he slows down the whole band tends to
lag--first the trumpet section, then the trombones get infected, and pretty
soon the virus has spread to the saxes and everything slows down. It's no
good. A while ago, of course, the music got a little cooler. In my day, it
was different: you didn't stay on the beat, you were a little bit on top of it,
pushing it all the time. A beat has thickness--there's a back to it and there's a
front to it, and we were on the front--just as a note has thickness. You're a
little bit on the sharp side or on the flat side, and you vary that. I can hear
quarter-tones very easily. Most people can't hear half-tones; I can hear
quarter-tones; I can hear eighth-tones...sometimes sixteenths. That's a
complex thing. Nobody knows what an ear really is.
So Chuck Peterson is slowing down the band, and one night on the
way to the Cornell prom, as it happens, we're in the bus and I'm in my seat
and I call Chuck over. Chuck and I were friends--I knew all the guys in the
30
band. We knew each other well. He's twenty two or three and I'm twenty
eight. Very good lead trumpet player--I trained him. He wasn't much before
he joined my band. Nobody knew him. I trained Johnny Best, Bernie Pruin,
these guys speak very highly of me on the liner notes on the "Complete Artie
Shaw" record.
I called Chuck over and he sat down with me.
"Chuck," I said, "we've got to have a serious talk."
"What's up, man?" he said.
"Well," I said, "you're lagging. You're doing something wrong."
"No, man, what're you talking about?" he said.
"Come on, Chuck. You're smoking too much of that shit. You gotta
cut down."
"No, I'm not," he said. "It makes me play better."
"No, you think you're playing better," I said. "You're not. I'm out
here listening, and it's slowing down. You're lagging. It's not working. I've
gone to you many times and given you the beat to show you, bring it up, and
you can't do it. You're not hearing right. Your head is befuddled."
"Oh, come on, man," he said.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," I said. "I'll make you a deal. How many
joints do you smoke a night?"
"Well, I have a bomb before I start, and then at intermission I get
another one--not a full bomb, but a little one."
"Okay," I said. "I'll do it tonight. Give me what you smoke..."
Because I used to smoke when I was a kid--eighteen, seventeen, nineteen-running around the country playing like he was playing in my band. So I
said, "Lemme have it. I'll smoke it right in front of you before we go on,
31
and during intermission I'll do it again. And if I play better, we'll both turn
on from now on--every night."
"Hey, you gotta deal," he said. He liked that, that was fun: the boss is
gonna get loaded and swing, right?
That night he gave me this bomb and I smoked it, and I got up on that
stand and I was feeling no pain at all. When intermission came, I said,
"Gimme the other one." He gave it to me, I smoked it, and I was playing
over my head. I was hearing shit I'd never heard before in those same old
arrangements.
I finished and turned to him. "You win," I said.
"No, man," he said. "I lose."
He was giving me incredulous looks during the evening and I thought
he was thinking, man, this guy is blowing his head off. I was hearing great
things. But the technical ability to do it--it's like driving drunk. You feel
great, but you don't know what you're doing.
"You win," I said.
"No," he said, "I lose."
He was honest about it.
32
AVA'S CONTRACT
Johnny Hyde was Ava's agent, and I told him I didn't think she was
being treated properly at Metro. They'd given her a contract when she
divorced Mickey Rooney, who was their biggest star, but she and her sister
Bappie, who took care of her business, were very naive and they accepted
one of those seven-year contracts with all the options on the studio's side.
She was making about a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week.
Bappie was a baby name for Beatrice, I think. She was much older
than Ava, a sort of surrogate mother. She maneuvered her into the marriage
with Mickey, and she tried to get her married to Howard Hughes. I found out
later Ava had been living in a house Hughes was paying for when I met her.
At five-thirty one morning after we were married she got her usual
wake-up call. She had to be at the studio at six for make-up. We'd been up
till about midnight.
"Oh my God," she said. "I'll have bags under my eyes all day."
"Don't go in," I said. "You're not doing anything over there."
"What do you mean?"
"They put you in a bathing suit and give you a beach ball and take you
down to the beach and take a picture and put a caption on it: 'Ava Gardner,
starlet, featured in a forthcoming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film.' You're not
doing anything. You're a stooge."
"Well, what am I supposed to do?"
33
"Stay in bed," I said.
"I can't," she said. This is the girl who said she didn't want to be in
movies, who'd hang up the phone after talking to some producer and say,
'Oh, for Christ's sake!'"
"What're they going to do?" I said. "I'll give you the hundred and
twenty-five a week. I give you more than that now--what is this bullshit?"
"Really?" she said.
"Yeah, stay in bed."
I picked up the phone and said, "OK, we got the call. Bye." It was a
studio call.
Then I lay there waiting. Sure enough, in a little while the phone
rang, a casting call.
"Where's our little girl?"
"She's very sleepy," I said. "She's beat and she's not coming in
today."
"What? What's the matter? Is she sick?"
"No," I said. "That's all you know."
I knew it was going to go up the ladder from there. The next call's
from Billy Grady in casting. "Artie, what happened?"
"Nothing," I said. "She's tired, man. You're going to take her out to
the beach and take pictures of her against a rock? Who cares."
"Artie, what's going on?"
"Nothing, Billy. That's all."
I knew it was going to go up from there: Next call probably from Joe
Cohen, and on up to Eddie Mannix, then Benny Thaw, and finally the head
man himself, L.B. [Mayer]. It didn't get to him. I stopped at Benny Thaw,
who was one of the upper crust.
34
"What's going on, Artie? You know this is very serious."
"What's serious? A hundred a week? That's not serious. That's pin
money."
"What am I going to say?"
"Nothing, Benny."
Now Johnny Hyde calls up. It's rebellion in the ranks, right?
"Artie, what's happening?"
"I think this is stupid. Ava is very tired--she hasn't slept--and she's not
doing a goddamn thing at Metro."
"Artie, you know how this works. They'll either pick up her option or
they won't."
"I don't give a goddam."
"They're going to put her on suspension."
"Fine, we'll do without the hundred and twenty-five. I'll give her a
check every week and she'll go shopping. She's going to spend more than
that anyway, so what are we talking about?"
He laughed. "You're right, but what do you want me to tell them?"
"Tell 'em that."
In a little while he called again. "L.B. would like to meet with you."
"Why me? Why doesn't he meet with you?"
"You're the one that's running this rebellion. Come in and we'll have a
meeting." This was before people "took" meetings.
We went to a meeting. Johnny and I; and L.B., the rajah, and his
henchmen. He never had a meeting alone. He had to have witnesses to say
"He never said that" in case anybody tried to sue him. He would have these
guys there, Eddie Mannix, Benny Thaw, Arthur Freed.
35
He had this big white desk that he played like an organ. Buttons. If
he pressed all the buttons, the whole studio would come dashing in. The
whole joint would blow up. This is where he used to cry ball-bearing tears,
as Judy Garland put it, when he pleaded with some star to behave right.
"Don't go out with that guy, sweetheart. Honey, please, I love you like a
father." And he'd cry. "He'll do you harm; he'll fuck you. You don't want
that."
He ran a harem.
"How are you, Artie," he said.
"Fine, L.B.," I said, "nice to see you."
I was the MGM nemesis. As Natalie Wood said once at the Academy
Awards, "Those days when everybody was marrying Artie Shaw..."
"What's going on?" he said.
"Nothing, L.B.," I said. "It's kind of silly. It isn't really worthy of
your attention. Ava's getting a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, and
I don't want her doing these stupid things she does. You're treating her as
bait to get you some press. She's my wife. I'd rather give her the money to
stay home and do what she wants."
"What are you suggesting?" he said.
"Nothing. It's your studio."
"Are you asking us to redo her contract?"
"No, I'm not. But if you expect her to come to work you'll have to
make it serious."
"What do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. What would you have to pay her as a salary so you'd
respect her?"
"A thousand?" he said.
36
"Would you really respect her at a thousand dollars, L.B.?" Gable
was then getting around five.
"Well, fifteen. At fifteen hundred I'd have to have some respect. At
the end of forty weeks that's sixty thousand dollars. We don't throw that
kind of money around. The kind of money she's getting now, you're right,
it's an errand boy."
"At fifteen hundred a week you would take her seriously enough to
put her into something that makes sense? A movie?"
"Yes. I think so," he said.
"Johnny?" I turned to him.
"I think that would be a fair figure, Artie," he said.
So I said okay and they redrew the contract. That was that.
I came home and told Ava she had a deal as a fifteen-hundred-a-week
actress.
They put her into a movie called Whistle Stop with George Raft, who
was a big star at that time. She was the co-star. Metro lent her to an
independent producer for that movie. They got sixty thousand dollars for
her, so that took care of her salary for the year.
Then she was in The Killers. They lent her to Warner's. John
Huston wrote the script under the name Tony Villiers. Bob Siodmak was
the director. He did a hell of a job and that made her.
37
McCARTHYISM
Around 1960 a man named Henry White called me and said, "Let's do
a program. I've got a hell of an idea for a program--it's going to be the seven
lively arts, and there's nobody better suited to be the MC on this than you.
We've got a hell of a writer, Robert Paul Smith." He wrote Where Did You
Go? / Out./ What Did You Do? / Nothing. He was the only guy I couldn't
beat at annagrams--consistently. He would beat me and I would beat him.
Nice guy, tremendous word man. So he was going to do the script, and we
were going to have, each week, three or four people from different arts-dance, theater, scupture, painting, music, whatever. The seven lively arts. It
was a nice idea. Each of them was going to do something, and would talk
about it. I would interview each guest.
"Henry," I said, "I'd love to do it. It sounds like a good idea. But I'm
not kosher for television."
"What do you mean?" he said.
"That Un-American Activities Committee finished me," I said. "I
can't do television."
"Don't be silly," he said. "That's only with reactionary people. The
people I deal with don't operate on that level."
"I'm warning you," I said. "If you want to try it, fine, I'm willing to
give it a shot, cause I like the writer and I like you, and we'll have a good
show. But I don't think it's ever going to hit the air."
38
So Bob Smith and Henry White and I agreed that we would try to do
this show. They wrote up a presentation, and Henry took it out and hustled
it. Henry was a good hustler. He was on the phone with me every day:
"Hey, it's going...This is gonna happen...Look who we got...We got this guy
for that..." Oh, big excitement. My phone was ringing off the hook all day
long.
"Henry," I said, "lemme alone. I'm trying to do something else.
When you're ready, we'll go."
"Artie," he said, "you know all those worries you had--for nothing."
"All right, great," I said. "We'll see. I hope you're right."
All of sudden one day, a whole day went by without a call from Henry
White, which at that time was a defeaning silence.
Where is he? What's happening? Uh-oh, something's happening.
I wait another day--no call.
This is ridiculous, I thought. I've known this guy for ten years. So I
got sick of it and I called his secretary, left a message for him to call me.
He didn't call back.
Now when that happens, you know that the blight has hit you. I knew
about the blight, I had warned him, so why was he being so cozy? Finally I
got angry and I called again and I said to the secretary, "I want to talk to
him, and if he's there, I'm gonna come over there and I'm gonna push past
you and I'm going to his office. I won't listen to this crap anymore. I want
to talk to him. Tell him I want to talk to him."
So he came on the phone. Very subdued.
"Henry," I said, "what's happening? For Christ sake, you stopped
calling. What's goin' on?"
39
"Well, Artie," he said, "Jesus, I don't know. I don't know what to tell
you."
"You can tell me whatever happened," I said. "I'm not a child. I
warned you about this."
"Yeah," he said. "I couldn't believe it."
"Well, let's talk about it."
"Let's have lunch," he said. "I don't want to talk over the phone."
Already, fear and trembling. We met for lunch at The Ritz. His
office was very near there. We sat down.
"Well" he said, very shame-facedly, very embarrassed, "here's the
story."
"Henry," I said, "don't be silly. I've lived through this. I've just come
back from Europe. I was told it was changed. I know it hasn't."
"Here's what it is," he said. "All of a sudden, people don't return your
call."
"Like you with me."
"Well, yeah," he said.
"How does it happen?" I said. "Give me the mechanics."
"I don't know them," he said. "I wish I knew them. I can't trace it
down anywhere. The best I can come up with is there's a guy sitting in an
office somewhere in New York, surrounded by alphabetized files. And he
looks at names--he looks under S for Shaw, and he finds this stuff in Red
Channels."
"Oh, for God's sake," I said.
"Nobody knows who he is. He obviously sells his services to all of
the networks--he finds this stuff, and the show will not go on. I still don't
believe it, but it's true."
40
"Well, this is where we began," I said. "Why're you so embarrassed?"
"I just can't believe it's true," he said, "but it is."
A decade before a man named Stanley Warren got in touch with me.
He worked with BBD&O, one of the big advertising agencies. And I'm
sitting in my apartment in New York City, struggling to figure out what to
do, how am I going to live my life, where do I go next. I was living on
record royalties. Fortunately, those were not affected. People who buy
records don't read books, so I sneaked in under that. I was getting along. I
wasn't making a fortune, but I was paying the rent.
"Artie," he said, "you can make a few bucks, you know."
"Doing what?" I said.
"I know this will curl your stomach," he said, "but you might want to
do it. It'll make you a couple of thousand a week." This was back in 1949,
and I hadn't worked for a long long time. "Look," he said, "we do the Lucky
Strike Hit Parade. It's a big show. It gets a big audience. It's crap. You go
give downbeats, period. We're getting people nobody knows. Artie Shaw's
a big name. I could sell you on that thing in two minutes. The sponsors
would be delighted. You'll make a couple of thousand bucks a week. You
show up once a week and give five downbeats and go home. You don't even
have to think about it."
"That's true," I said.
"Would you do it?"
"Well," I said, "it goes against my grain, but why don't you check it
out. Let's see."
He calls me back a day later.
"Artie," he says, "I gotta see you."
41
"What's up, Stanley?"
He came over to my apartment.
"Listen," he said, "you gotta clear yourself."
"Clear myself of what?" I said.
"I don't know," he said.
"Neither do I," I said.
This is right out of Kafka, right out of The Trial: "One day two men
came and arrested Joseph K."
"Clear myself of what, Stanley?" I say.
"Well," he says, "I mentioned your name at a television meeting. I
said, 'I can get Artie Shaw to do the Lucky Strike show'--and they looked at
me as though I were a leper. 'What's the matter,' I said. 'Don't you know
about him?' 'No, what do you mean?' I said, 'He's a good friend of mine.'
And they looked at me again as though I were some kind of tainted creature.
You've gotta clear yourself."
"What are you talking about, Stanley?" I said. "Of what?"
"Well, the word is you're not able to work on television," he said.
"You're tainted."
"I know about the Un-American Activities Committee," I said. "I
know about McCarthy. I know all about that stuff. But, for God's sake, will
you tell me who's accusing me? I'll face him."
Well, end of that.
*
*
*
I went to my lawyer one day. I had a very intelligent letter from a
man who used to be a PR man for a big vaudeville star named Eva Tangay
who had been accused back in the late 1920s of living with her accompanist.
That was deadly then. It was a sin. But finally this PR man came up with a
42
solution. The week before she was to appear in any city, he published an ad
which said $10,000--or $1,000, or whatever it was then--reward to anyone
who can bring in any information proving that Miss Tangay was guilty of
any improprieties. In his letter to me, the PR man suggested that I do the
same thing about being accused of being a communist.
"I suggest this to you," he wrote, "because you've been accused by
innuendo, and nobody's ever proved anything about you. Why don't you talk
to your lawyer about it?" He was a well wisher.
So I called my lawyer and went up to see him.
"Listen," I said, "here's an interesting letter."
I handed it to him and he read it through.
"What are you talking about?" he said.
"Why don't we do that?" I said. "We'll take out the back page of
Variety, and put out a $10,000 reward to anybody who can prove Artie Shaw
has ever been a member of the communist party."
My lawyer turned pale.
"What are you talking about?" he said. "They'll prove it overnight.
They'll kill you."
"Who? What?" I said. "It's not true."
"Whata you mean it's not true? In this climate?" he said. "Two guys
will come in. One'll say, 'I picked him up at the Fairmont Hotel' and the
other guy will say, 'I was present at the meeting of Harry Bridges' committee
when he got up and made an inflamatory speech.'
Now who are they gonna believe--you or them? They were eye-witnesses.
You're dead. You can't do that. They'll split the $10,000, $5,000 each, and
they're ahead of the game."
"It's that bad?" I said.
43
"Yeah, it's that bad."
At the end of 1954, I was down in Melbourne, Australia--I was going
to play a concert--and I got a message at the hotel saying please call Justice
So-and-So. Ben Reyes, who was later Stanley Kubrick's publicist and was
mine at the time, told me: "My God, over here this guy is like Justice
Douglas in our Supreme Court."
"What does he want?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.
"Why don't you find out," I said.
So he called him. It turned out the man wanted to see me in
chambers. He sent a limo for me. We were going to do a concert that night.
So I get in the limo, go there, and there's this nice man sitting behind a big
desk in his chambers, and he's got a copy of my book The Trouble with
Cinderella sitting on his desk.
"What's this?" I said.
"I wanted to meet you," he said. "When I went to Cornell law school,
one of my classmates and I became very friendly and before we went our
respective ways after graduation, we made a pact that any time either of us
read a book that was of real interest, we'd send it to the other. He sent me
your book and I read it with enormous interest. And in it you talk about the
Un-American Activities Committee. I'm a life long liberal and I want to
know if it's true that in America, the bastion of freedom and liberalism, that
to all intents and purposes a man is guilty upon accusation."
"Yes," I said. "It is true. I've never been able to work in television
since that accusation."
"Really?" he said.
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That's how far afield the ripples of that miserable thing went.
THE MUSICAL GENE
45
Over the years people have asked me, "What's your musical
genealogy?" How was I supposed to answer that? I spent ten years trying to
teach my mother how to play "My Country 'Tis of Thee." She was like a
seal with those pipes at the aquarium--no relation to music. My father could
at least pick out a melody single-fingered. I thought maybe it was from his
side.
When I was fifty-something my mother died. She had a Jewish
funeral on Amsterdam Avenue in New York. All my mother's family was
there.
"Hey, Artie!" "Gee, Artie! Artie!" They even asked for autographs.
"For Christ's sake, my mother's dead!" I said. "Leave me alone, you
shmucks."
We went into the funeral parlor and sat down. There was a plain pine
casket up there on this little rostrum. Orthodox Jewish funerals don't have
flowers. I was looking at a box with this woman inside it who'd been hung
around my neck almost like an albatross, with whom I'd had a love-hate
relationship ever since I could remember. There she was, up there in this
box.
I sat there and in spite of myself I was moved. Her life was over,
finished. It was like a big hole in my life for a minute. I was sitting there
with my then wife, Evelyn Keyes, and this young rabbi got up--not an
orthodox rabbi, but a young man who spoke perfect English--and he
addressed us.
"Here we have a coffin," he said, "--with all that remains of Sarah
Shaw. We're here to pay reverence and respect to her for her life. Let us
talk for a moment about these people like Sarah who came to this country..."
He did an Irving Howe-style commentary out of World of Our Fathers:
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"They came here by the thousands, expecting sidewalks of gold, and found
toil and travail and exploitation. They lived in the teeming Lower East Side
and worked in sweatshops and struggled to make a living. They married and
brought forth children, some of whom achieved fame and fortune..."
He was going good, I thought.
Then an old guy got up from the congregation. A typical Lower East
Side Jew, he wore navy blue pants and a brown double-breasted jacket,
open, with cigarette ashes on his vest, and a big broad-brimmed hat. He
went over to the rabbi and plucked at his pants.
The rabbi did a W.C. Fields take: Get away, kid, you're bothering me-trying to get on with his speech. Then another guy got up and tried to
dissuade the first guy.
The first man was Moishe, my uncle Morris, my mother's older
brother, and he didn't speak much English. He was speaking in his guttural
Yiddish to the rabbi, and the rabbi didn't seem to understand. The other guy
was trying to pull Moishe away. The rabbi leaned over.
Finally the rabbi turned back to us.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this man is the older brother of the
deceased, Sarah, and he's just been telling me he wants to sing a lament for
the dead, the Kaddish. So with your permission, I'll step down and let him
do that."
Moishe got up on the rostrum--this little old man in that typical
uniform of the Lower East Side Jew--and he stood there and started to sing.
My jaw dropped.
He had no more voice, there was no instrument, it was all gone. But
he had musicality. The Kaddish is a beautiful Yiddish lament. And he sang
47
with such pathos and musical intonation--a real relationship of note to note,
which is what music is about--that within his own pitch, he was singing
perfectly.
A shiver went through me, and I whispered to Evelyn, "That's where it
came from: my mother's side." This dead, tone-deaf lady had been the one
with the musical gene in her all along.
He finished singing. The other man took him away and sat him down
again. It was a very touching moment, his singing a lament for his dead
sister.
It was one of the epiphanies of my life.
Two weeks went by and I got a call from my lawyer. He was the
executor of my mother's estate, which was still in probate, and he asked if I
could come up and help him sort through some bills.
I showed up at his office, and he had a pack of bills in front of him on
his desk: gas bills for the apartment, rent due. She had paid for a plot to be
buried in. Old-country people believe in doing these things.
"I don't understand this one," he said. "It's a bill from somebody
named Morris for a hundred and fifty dollars. It's for singing at your
mother's funeral."
"What?" I said.
"Did someone sing at your mother's funeral? Did you hire
somebody?"
You'd think a brother would sing for free. He wrung my heart out and
then wanted to be paid. He saw a chance to make a buck. I never talked to
that son-of-a-bitch again. That's me and my family.
It was like a nightingale sending you a bill.