Dream Lucky

Roxane Orgill

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061866067
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The time: 1936-1938. The mood: Hopeful. It wasn't wartime, not yet. The music: The incomparable Count Basie and Benny Goodman, among others. The setting: Living rooms across America and, most of all, New York City.

Dream Lucky covers politics, race, religion, arts, and sports, but the central focus is the period's soundtrack—specifically big band jazz—and the big-hearted piano player William "Count" Basie. His ascent is the narrative thread of the book—how he made it and what made his music different from the rest. But many other stories weave in and out: Amelia Earhart pursues her dream of flying "around the world at its waistline." Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., stages a boycott on 125th Street. And Mae West shocks radio listeners as a naked Eve tempting the snake.

Critic Nat Hentoff praises the "precise originality" with which Roxane Orgill writes about music. In Dream Lucky, she magically lets readers hear the past.

JOE: ROUND ONE

June 19, 1936

Start with 39,878 paying customers in Yankee Stadium. Add the papered seats, including those for Joe Louis’s mother, Lillie Barrow Brooks; his stunning wife, Marva, in a fiery red suede chapeau and gloves and shoes to match; seven hundred newspapermen; and the nonpaying hundreds who peered down from the upper stories and roofs and fire escapes of the surrounding Bronx apartment houses. Add the riders of Interboro Rapid Transit who caught a glimpse of the stadium from their train near the 161st Street stop.

Add the German movie star Anny Ondra, who never attended her husband’s fights but listened via shortwave radio in a country house near Potsdam, Germany.

Back in New York, add the people listening to the radios in the Harlem gin mills with signs posted “Joe Louis Headquarters,” and the people downtown listening via loudspeakers set up on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington and outside Rockefeller Center. Heading west, north, and south, add all the radios in taverns, lunchrooms, general stores, railroad stations, pool halls, automobiles, and living rooms across the country—one in two Americans owned a radio.

In sum, probably sixty million people experienced the tilt between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling on a cloudy, damp evening in June 1936.

On the radio Clem McCarthy, who always sounded like he had rocks in his cheeks, ground out the words faster than a telegraph operator. The only way to hear was to shush everybody in the room and lean in close to the Silvertone. “A right hand high on Louis’s jaw that made Louis rock his head….”

It was a strange beginning, considering that the odds were in Joe’s favor eight to one.

In the most general way, whites favored thorough, methodical Schmeling simply because he was white. They were willing to overlook the offense of his being so buddy-buddy with Hitler and his associates. He was white—that’s what counted when you were going against a black man in the boxing ring. A Negro had no place in the ring.

Remember Jack Johnson? Who could forget the first black man to hold the heavyweight boxing title? Cocky, spoke whatever was on his mind, had no respect for white authority. Johnson had lost his title back in 1915, but memories were long when it came to rich niggers running with white women. Johnson not only ran with them; he married three of them. His biggest mistake, though, was a seemingly small thing: He paid a white lady’s bus fare across state lines. That was against the Mann Act, passed to halt transport of females for “immoral purposes.” Johnson fled the country rather than face the charges.

Louis was a different kind of man, but white folks didn’t pay any mind. A Negro had no place in the ring.

Naturally, Negroes backed Louis, but not just because his skin was brown—“coffee with double cream” in the eyes of one female admirer. And not just because he was quick and had a murderous right cross. Negroes stopped him on the corner, at the gas station, in a restaurant to tell him, “Way to go, Brown Bomber. Show the white man who we are!” Joe was serious and sober, respectful. Unlike Johnson, he had taken a woman from his race for a wife. He fought fair, and he gave a ton of money away. Goodness and ability made Joe the Last Great Hope, the one who was going to deliver Negroes from slavery once and forever. He was the New Day.

The Bomber had won twenty-seven fights in a row, all but four of them knockouts. He was twenty-two to Schmeling’s thirty, and six pounds heavier than Schmeling’s one hundred and ninety-two. No way could Joe lose. He himself was so casual about the match that he brought his new wife and his golf clubs to training camp in Lakewood, New Jersey. More than once he sneaked off to play eighteen holes. Meanwhile, Schmeling, at camp in the Catskills, ran uphill and down for hundreds of miles to build endurance, and drank exclusively German mineral water.

On the train ride up to New York, Joe played “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” on his harmonica for fifteen minutes and then slept soundly in his gray pinstripe suit for the rest of the two-hour trip. Max had a long, harrowing drive downstate in the pouring rain.

On the radio, McCarthy was spitting words like watermelon seeds. “A right hand high on Louis’s jaw that made Louis rock his head. Schmeling has sent Louis down. Joe Louis is down!” It was the fourth round, and the Bomber was on the canvas for the first time in his professional career. He was so unaccustomed to working the count to his advantage that he quickly stood up again. “He did not wait for the count! He got up on the count of two! Schmeling came back at him and gave him another right! Schmeling is pouring in now…” It wasn’t possible; Joe was taking a beating. The crowd was screaming so loud the fighters didn’t hear the bell to end round four, and they went on hammering.

Lillie, seated ringside, screamed, “Don’t kill my boy, dear Lord!” A family friend carted her out of the stadium before she got too hysterical. Marva, in the fifth row, would have left, too, but some magazine woman was peppering her with questions, pinning Marva in her seat. “Joe, honey, get up! Get up!” she shouted.

In general stores, mothers perched on upturned wooden boxes let squirmy children slip from their laps. In taverns, nearly full beer bottles stood still as soldiers along the bar. At intersections, automobiles idled, their drivers unseeing as stoplights shone green, red, and green again.

In Kansas City, in the stuffy parlor at Aunt Lucy’s boardinghouse, where everybody was glued to the radio turned up all the way, Bill Basie couldn’t take it anymore. He was thirty-two, a short, stocky man, very dark, with surprisingly long fingers: a piano player. He had a small, neat mustache and a full lower lip that was often turned up in a sunny smile. But not right now. Basie went outside and lay in the floppy hammock strung between two trees, to wait.

More bedlam in rounds five and six as Schmeling staggered Louis with his specialty right-hand punch to the head, and the gasping, screaming crowd was again too loud for the bell to be heard. The referee got wise and stepped between the sweat-drenched fighters each time the bell sounded, or there would be no end to the pummeling.

Round twelve came: “After hard rights and lefts to the jaw, Schmeling has puffed up Louis’s left cheek. And Louis is down! Louis is down, hanging from the ropes!”

Thirteen million Negroes standing in doorways, sitting on kitchen chairs, hanging from fire escapes stopped breathing.

“He is a very tired fighter. He is blinking his eyes, shaking his head. The count is ten. The fight is over! The fight is over!”

Thirteen million Negroes gave a shout, a groan, or a moan. Over? It was not possible.

Joe, barely conscious, staggered to his dressing room with the help of a flock of blue-clad policemen. His forehead was swollen to his eyelids, and he had an enormous lump on his left cheek. His lips were puffed out like balloons. He was crying.

In Kansas City, Bill Basie stopped rocking when he heard shouts followed by deep quiet as radios clicked off and people sat unmoving. The screen door creaked. Aunt Lucy poked her head out to tell him what he already knew.

It was not possible. The strongest man in the world did not lose. Could not. If he lost, it was not just Joe Louis, the hard-training fighter, fair-minded man of dignity, idol of his people, who lost. The Race lost whatever few yards’ ground it had gained since slavery days. If Joe Louis lost, Negroes were what the crackers said they were: reptiles; low-down niggers; stupid, ugly, lazy, dirty; only slightly higher than the apes.

In Potsdam, Anny Schmeling accepted congratulations from her host, Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Goebbels sent off a cable to Max, which read: “We know you fought for Germany; it’s a German victory. We are proud of you. Heil Hitler. Regards.”

In Harlem, people fled their crowded apartments and spilled onto the cracked sidewalks just as they had for Joe’s many victories. Only this time, instead of shouting and yelling and banging pots and driving around and more shouting, people were quiet, more or less. Some wandered with no aim but to relieve their misery. The Harlem poet Langston Hughes walked and walked down Seventh Avenue and saw men weeping openly and women sitting on curbs, cradling their heads in their hands.

Other Harlemites took action, of a sort. Thirty black men jumped a single hapless white WPA worker crossing 119th Street at Fifth Avenue. The man was treated at Harlem Hospital for a cut over his right eye and bruises. Boys stationed themselves along Amsterdam Avenue to throw stones at the windows of automobiles returning from the fight. Just to do something.

So Joe Louis was no Great Hope after all. He was just another Negro beaten by a white man. How in God’s name were they supposed to go on from here?

BASIE: BYE-BYE KAYCEE

November 1, 1936

The bottle came around again, and Bill Basie had his little taste and passed the whiskey to the row behind him. His eyelids looked droopy, but they were always like that; he wasn’t sleepy. None of the fellows were. It was dark inside the bus, but he could hear their voices all pumped up, and laughter. Lester Young, the tenor saxophone player, was going up and down the aisle in his long black coat, singing “Sweet music, sweet music” and rattling a pair of dice.

Basie wasn’t in the mood to play craps. He wanted to savor crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois and heading toward Springfield. He wanted to savor every mile of this first trip outside Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, known to musicians as the “territory,” with his own band. From Springfield it was only a hop, 199 miles, to Chicago. He would check into the Ritz hotel at Thirty-ninth and South Parkway in the heart of the South Side, called Bronzeville because colored folks lived there. He would drop his suitcase in the room and head straight for the Grand Terrace Ballroom in the same building. He would have to see how the bandleader Fletcher Henderson was running down the show. In less than a week he’d be taking Henderson’s place.

The best thing about the Terrace was the nightly radio broadcast, which could be heard from coast to coast. Radio was important. You could be a sensation in Chicago, but when you got to Youngstown, they’d never heard of you—unless you were on the radio. Those broadcasts from the Grand Terrace had put Henderson’s band on the map, Earl Hines’s, too, which meant a lot, since radio was mostly white bands. Yes, the Grand Terrace could do a lot for a guy just starting out.

The bottle came again, and Basie had another taste. Funny, but he wasn’t nervous. He had had nine terrific years in Kansas City, first as a pianist with Bennie Moten’s band and then, for the past year, with his own group named Three, Three, and Three for the number of trumpets, reeds, and rhythms (piano, bass or tuba, and drums). He had worked all the angles to get into the Moten band, which, since Moten played piano, would naturally seem to have no need for a second piano player.

It happened like this: Basie couldn’t read music, much less write it, but he had ideas for tunes. Moten’s trombone player, Eddie Durham, wrote music, so Basie asked him whether, if he played something on the piano, Eddie could write it down. Sure, Eddie said, and finished two of Basie’s tunes and wrote out the parts. Moten liked the new numbers so much that he asked Basie to join the band as staff arranger—and Basie had never written a note! Then, just as Basie had hoped, Bennie asked him to sit in for him for a set while he took care of some band business. From then on, Bennie and Basie took turns at the piano bench, and Basie had himself a ball.

A heavenly place for music, Kaycee. The city had more joints than a guy could shake a stick at: the Cherry Blossom, the Subway, the Sunset, and the handsome Pla-Mor Ballroom. At the Eblon Theater on Eighteenth Street, Basie played the organ during the picture shows and gave himself a title even though he was only twenty-four. There was a King Oliver and a Duke Ellington and an Earl Hines. Why not a Count? He had business cards printed: “COUNT BASIE. Beware the Count is Here.”

Up on Twelfth Street and Cherry, the Reno Club, where Basie’s group got its start, was a little joint you entered off the street, with a bandstand so small it barely fit nine men and a piano. Walter Page had to go outside to play the tuba; he leaned in through a window to reach the mouthpiece.

The Reno wasn’t much of a place. It paid all of fourteen dollars a week per man, but it did do a broadcast. Twice a week or so, a local station set up a wire, and the sound carried about as far as Chicago. Which was just far enough, as it turned out.

One frosty morning the past January at about one o’clock, the record producer John Hammond, a white man with a crew cut, was sitting in his Hudson in a Chicago parking lot, taking a break from hearing Benny Goodman tear things up at the Congress Hotel. Hammond, a Hotchkiss grad and Yale dropout, son of the president of a private club for millionaires, who’d caught the jazz bug in his teens, had produced some of Goodman’s records and was partially responsible for the “King-of-Swing” hoopla. Hammond had a powerful radio, and he managed to tune in to tiny station W9XBY from Kaycee.

He started saying nice things about the band after that in the music rag he wrote for, Down Beat. Things like “Basie has by far and away the finest dance orchestra in the country” and “the only one who can compare with the original Fletcher Henderson orchestra.” Hammond even took Benny out to the cold car one night to listen, but the King only shivered and said, “So what’s the big deal?”

In the spring, Hammond drove all the way out from New York to see if the band sounded as raucous, relaxed, and free in person as it had on his car radio.

That night the band was solidly in the groove. Nobody knew who the slim, very young ofay in a crew cut was, sitting next to Basie on the piano bench. Hell, Basie didn’t even know until the stranger said, “Hi, I’m John Hammond.”

The two hit it off from the moment John ordered a little taste of gin for his benchmate.

There was no program, never was, at the Reno. The band, now called Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm, had no written arrangements to speak of; everybody kept the music in their heads or made it up on the spot. That was the Basie style, and it knocked Hammond off his feet—and into the office of Willard Alexander, the agent at Music Corporation of America who did Benny Goodman’s booking. Willard, with big, almost round, glasses and a kindly face, had the magic touch: Goodman was able to lay $125 a week base pay on his men, plus extra for record dates and radio broadcasts.

Willard took Basie on; Hammond’s influence was that strong. Willard set up this road trip and was supposed to be working on even bigger things in N.Y.C.

New York! Where seven and a half million people hung their hats; where Rockefell...