Sweet Thunder Page 12
They were already gone, away from the things that might have confined them. Their admirers were left to wonder everything about them—not least the mystery of where they had each acquired their individual taste and style.
Robinson had gone into the military believing it a lark and thinking that his rising celebrity would shield him from the orderliness of military life and responsibility. But for the first time in his life he’d been confronted with social humiliation, something that could carry a deeper hurt than poverty itself. And that humiliation had been heaped on not only him but on his hero Joe Louis as well. It was a bewildering thing to see up close. Sgt. Walker Smith Jr.—honorably discharged—was less a con man and more a nonconformist.
Now out of uniform, he began swaying toward the Esquire style sweeping certain parts of Manhattan and the country.
Gentlemen of great means and prestige strolled about the Manhattan metropolis. They were men who had an allegiance to art and style. Many—the Vanderbilts and Astors among them—were known to take their high tea at the Waldorf Astoria. Their magazine of choice, Esquire, had come into being in 1933. That had been a year fraught with economic pain. But style, the artistry of it, managed to keep at bay so much that seemed uncertain and unwelcome. The pages of Esquire offered a kind of balm. A writerly and visual presentation to prove that the proceedings of life would go on.
Above 125th Street, the periodical was being flipped open by jazz-playing hands, by young writers and dancers, by young pugilists. It advertised features on “Fiction, Sports, Humor, Clothes, Art, Cartoons.” By the time that milieu had been mixed and soaked into the brew of uptown, a whole crop of men had emerged, joining the well-heeled and their progeny to let them know that they too believed in the magic of art and style. Only these individuals felt compelled to add their own music. And so it was jazz that colored their Esquire-loving signature and came to flood the senses of the young Sugar Ray.
1945–1946
Esquire men
SUGAR RAY ROBINSON was a man of music—you could see it in the way he fought. And it was jazz in particular that moved him, curled his mind into delicate introspection and observation. Those stuttering jazz stanzas were like big canyon-wide flashes of light, with musical sensations flying out and above patrons. All as if the world were being born with melody right before the eyes. Jazz seemed to carry a language all its own, and it was a language that comforted Robinson. The men he admired—Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine, Miles Davis, Cootie Williams among them—had seemed to bring the same discipline to their craft that he brought to his: It was the discipline of science, coupled with the fleetness and derring-do of improvisation. “He was, like them, an entertainer,” says Budd Schulberg, the Hollywood fixture and screenwriter. “And I think that appealed to them. He was hard to resist.” Sugar Ray told reporters that he himself fancied playing the drums. He paid attention to how Buddy Rich handled his drumsticks, to how Max Roach held his rhythm.
His youth had been peopled by older men—the men in the gymnasiums nodding to him; the shadowy men in the corners betting on his skills; the promoters who wanted to be around him and bought him dinners of liver and onions at Harlem eateries. The men with skin that had a sheen to it, who held his hand a little too long when they shook, making promises and predictions; the men who caught him eyeing the cut of their suits and the softness of their fedoras, commenting on what they just knew to be a bond of mutual admiration. The trainers and promoters—like George Gainford and Mike Jacobs—were all older men, as were the jazzmen whose freedom he relished. His skills had hastened his maturity. The ladder that he had already climbed so high simply put him out of the reach of childhood friends, and so they vanished away from him. Left in his world were older men.
Born too late for the 1920s Jazz Age, Robinson found himself at the doorway of modern jazz in early 1940s New York, the time period that paralleled his own rise in boxing circles. He only had to walk into the Palm Café, uptown on 125th, to hear the kind of music he loved. “I would say it was one of the most popular clubs in New York, and they catered to a sophisticated bourgeois,” remembers Robert Royal, who had first met Robinson while working at another club near the Palm.
The Palm Café was especially noted for its jazz, which was broadcast throughout the city from a radio station based inside. They had a quartet of deejays; each would become a notable figure in his or her own right. One of them, Evelyn Robinson, was gorgeous: She had a café au lait complexion and bright eyes. (Evelyn unabashedly saw currency and instant recognition in utilizing her brother’s last name.) Weather permitting, she liked fur draped around her shoulders. Her hair was often pouffed up, in the manner of a Hollywood actress expecting cameras to flash. She was Sugar Ray’s sister, and she beamed when he showed up, grinning in her direction, the music crowd nodding at him as he moved slowly toward a table.
The men of Sugar Ray’s world—jazzmen—seemed to jump right out into the haunting, ecstatic, worrisome, and finally victorious world of the 1940s. When World War II was over, plenty of musical instruments got unpacked. A lot of hepcats were snapping their fingers, making plans, hunting down nightclub owners in hopes of lining up engagements. And before long, there they were, on the stages of East Coast clubs, beneath glowing bulbs. Club denizens would rush out the next morning to get their vinyl records. But there was something else that brought their music—and style—out into the open.
In that seminal year of 1944—Sugar Ray back home, the war ending, citizens coast to coast full of joy and hatching new plans—a pipe-smoking man by the name of Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire magazine, began nosing around New York jazz spots. Those uptown journeys set him right in the heart of Harlem. Gingrich, a bon vivant, a man who possessed high literary tastes, a man who knew F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos and many of their lesser contemporaries, was in search of something to complement his literary tastes. And when he found it—jazz, jazzmen—he knew he had found something special. It was a world he wanted to know more about, because in that world there was the kind of music that made him smile. Arnold Gingrich soon realized that what was in front of him, before his own eyes, was a distinct convergence of men, music, and style. This cultural convergence was far from universally appreciated at the time. Mostly, in fact, it was only known in places like Kansas City, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City. Gingrich became so enthralled by this world of rhythm and nightlife that he began making plans to devote a whole issue of his Esquire magazine to the music, the craze—the hot jazz. A certain style—the dress code, the supper club air—would inform everything presented in the magazine. The celebrated issue, called Esquire’s Jazz Book, hit the stands in 1944. It featured many of Sugar Ray’s acquaintances, and for him it merely confirmed the reach he was undertaking with his own personal style and presentation and sensibility. “In Harlem Sugar Ray hung around all the musicians,” says jazz critic Albert Murray, who’d been a devoted Esquire reader since the magazine’s origination. “These were men who liked excellent fabrics and nice shoes. Everybody of my generation went for the things in Esquire magazine. You were dressing out of Esquire—but you gave it a Harlem touch.”
Arnold Gingrich was born in 1903 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A serious-minded youth, he became an inveterate reader. He combed through the stories in literary magazines—Collier’s, Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, Holiday—looking for tales of young love, the gunfire and unpredictability of war, the requisite bravery and gallantry of it. His leisure passions, too, veered toward the adult: He loved fly-fishing even when he was young, and became highly skilled in that demanding sport, which requires reasoning, imagination, and focus. (He would later write extensively about it.) Soon after graduating from the University of Michigan (Phi Beta Kappa), Gingrich began work in Chicago as an advertising copywriter. He liked the city, the pace of it, all those tall buildings that seemed to suggest business at hand, a place for earnest ambition. Chicago was a place where a m
an might welcome new ideas and ventures and seize upon them with zeal. Gingrich met Dave Smart, who ran a direct-mail advertising company known as the Men’s Wear Service Corporation. Smart—who rode horses for a hobby and was known as a clothes fiend, seeming to change attire as often as Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—hired Gingrich in 1929 to sell fashion booklets to haberdasheries. “He had a great flair for style and a canny instinct for what would come off as ‘class,’” Gingrich would recall of Smart. Smart’s snazzy, handsome publication, Apparel Arts, showcased high-class clothes for gentlemen. It was like a store catalogue with some magazine content. Gingrich took the job of filling the editorial pages. (When Gingrich went on the road, Smart simply reached into his pocket and sliced money from his roll—$50 bills as Gingrich would remember—and hand it over to him. Then Gingrich was gone, out the door, introducing fashion and high style up and down the East Coast.) The publication—in hardcover no less—became a hit. Among its eccentricities were French captions, left untranslated.
Smart and Gingrich, along with William H. Weintraub—another Smart business partner—had formed a close enough bond that they began hatching plans for a new magazine. They imagined it as a kind of men’s Vogue. It was brave to float such a plan during hard economic times, and their mission seemed to carry a kind of stylishness of its own. They alerted writers, cartoonists, artists. Such new ventures caused serious writers to raise their eyebrows, wondering about the pay scale and the possibility of making some dough. (Gingrich tossed out figures ranging from a hundred to two hundred bucks for an article.) The trio named the magazine Esquire, and one issue made it onto the stands at the end of 1933 before the magazine went monthly in 1934. That first issue was a potent and stylish salvo that heralded things to come: It featured work by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Dashiell Hammett; Harry Hersh-field contributed humor; there was writing by Ring Lardner Jr. and Erskine Caldwell; and cartoons came from, among others, William Steig and E. Simms Campbell. The advertising was colorful and handsome. One page was destined to become a constant: “That was the Cadillac page,” Gingrich would recall. “We had that sold before we even had a magazine to run it in. And, except for the back cover, it became and remained the one advertising page in full color in the first issue of the magazine.” (In time New Yorkers would learn to spot Sugar Ray’s Cadillac—the color of a pink rose—cruising Broadway to Harlem, or idling in front of the jazz haunts on Fifty-second Street, or parked on the gravel at his Cabin-in-the-Sky training camp. His specially designed Cadillac, its chrome as shiny as a barracuda, would become a vehicle as commented-upon and ogled as the Vanderbilt and Astor autos had once been.)
In those first three years the magazine sold upwards of ten million copies. It was an astounding figure. Esquire had arrived. Gingrich knew talent, and one of his earliest hires—at least in person—was so obscure as to be almost invisible.
With plenty of pages to fill in those early days, Gingrich wanted to hire a talented cartoonist. Russell Patterson, an artist Gingrich knew, heard of his plight and recommended a kid in Harlem. Patterson promised the kid was gifted, although unknown, and definitely in need of work. But Patterson also told Gingrich there’d be a problem if he crossed “the color line,” because the kid, E. Simms Campbell, was a Negro.
A graduate of the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago, Campbell lived on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem with relatives. Young, impecunious, eager, he’d often trudge through Manhattan, from one magazine office to the next—dressed neatly, perfect manners—trying to sell his drawings. But he could never get past the receptionist, never even get an interview scheduled. Sometimes he’d be sent away in the politest of tones; other times the matter was handled rather curtly and there he’d be, hustling onto the A train, heading back home, uptown to Harlem: No jobs for Negro cartoonists in those fancy offices. Patterson—as Gingrich would recall—had also said something else about Campbell: “He knew that this kid was from hunger.”
Walking up on Edgecombe Avenue, himself quite hungry for good cartoons to fill the pages of the magazine he was putting together, Gingrich made his way to the apartment where Campbell lived. He would remember that there seemed to be children everywhere, on the walks, on the stoops, up and down the hallways. Elmer Simms Campbell was quite delighted to see this urbane figure standing before him. It was a rare and welcome relief for him: The young artist was saved from the embarrassment of going downtown yet again. An editor had come to him. Campbell led the way through the apartment and showed Gingrich his work. He had drawings that were finished and drawings that were still in progress. He seemed a young man who had been working away for years, hoarding his work, quiet about his inability to showcase it. Gingrich couldn’t take his eyes off the drawings. The young man standing next to him possessed a gift, and Gingrich instantly knew it: “I wanted to yell Eureka, because I saw at a glance that my troubles were over.” Gingrich carried his checkbook around when planning to charm artists and writers for his publication. He pulled it out and offered Campbell a $100 check on the spot, with promises of more payment to come. Back at the office, when Gingrich showed Campbell’s work around, other editors expressed equal delight. (Campbell’s cartoons would appear in Esquire until his death nearly four decades later.)
Before that first issue, Gingrich had ruminated on what the new magazine would mean: “To analyze its name more closely, Esquire means … that class just below knighthood—the cream of that middle class between the nobility and the peasantry.”
When Esquire took off—discussed in salons and men’s clubs, in barbershops and uptown in Harlem, praised on college campuses for its fashion content and literary contributors—Arnold Gingrich was quite a happy man. To start a magazine during a depression, and to have that magazine find a foothold, was a near miracle, and he realized it: “Conceived during the Bank Holiday, when the national anthem was Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? And born a few weeks before Repeal, when nobody booed as the bands played Happy Days Are Here Again, Esquire was Depression’s child, married to a sweet young thing called Recovery.”
The jazz critic Albert Murray could feel the influence of Esquire on Harlemites, on the jazz players, and on Sugar Ray Robinson: “All these guys were influenced by Esquire magazine.”
Gingrich and Campbell became friends, and the Harlem that Arnold Gingrich began seeing through the eyes of his cartoonist fascinated him. Musicians seemed to be everywhere. And in time, Gingrich befriended potent talents. He began hobnobbing with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Lionel Hampton. Some he’d met at war bond affairs during wartime, others at gigs downtown or uptown. He met Charlie Parker and Roy Eldridge; Duke Ellington of course—and Johnny Hodges too. The jazz swirled around him; the jazzmen smoked their cigarettes and he smoked his pipe and the music hummed and floated, dipped and rose. The transformation surprised even him, because these musicians and their music, as he would put it, had overnight “become my cup of tea.”
And around these figures floated sportsmen, men who loved both jazz and sporting events. These were the men who leaned in to murmur words of advice into Sugar Ray Robinson’s ear when he was fresh out of the Army. One of those men was Oscar Barnes, a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands who had a stake in the New York Black Yankees, a Negro League franchise. Barnes would take his son Arthur to see Sugar Ray’s fights in the 1940s and 1950s. A nod from Oscar Barnes gave you special cachet, and Oscar Barnes—who knew enough about those early sporting years in Harlem that Francis Ford Coppola would later ask him to serve as an adviser on his film The Cotton Club—often nodded in Sugar Ray’s direction. It all introduced young Arthur to a certain kind of style. “The most important influences were music then,” Barnes recalls. “On the jukeboxes we had Lester Young, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, Count Basie’s band. Jimmy Rushing was singing ‘Sent for You Yesterday.’”
So the men snapped their fingers around Sugar Ray Robinson. “They were proud and attracted to Sugar Ray because of the nerve
he had,” says Arthur Barnes. (In the mid-1940s, before Miles Davis befriended Sugar Ray, Sugar had struck up an acquaintance with Dizzy Gillespie, and the two were seen strolling the streets of Manhattan together, Sugar bending Dizzy’s ear about the music and the road. Passersby rushed toward Dizzy, not always aware who the string-bean figure next to him was.)
It took time to get fight cards organized. For the first nine months of 1944, Sugar Ray Robinson had no scheduled fights. So he was a man in training, reintroducing himself to Harlem, bopping in and out of the jazz clubs.
If Collier’s magazine could highlight Walter Camp’s All-American football team annually—as they had been doing—then Arnold Gingrich and his team at Esquire now saw no reason why they could not take their readers down a different path. They named an All-American Jazz Band in a special edition, the 1944 Jazz Book.
And when it arrived—as Joe’s and Sugar Ray’s and Clark Gable’s and Ike’s and Jimmy Stewart’s war was coming to a close—the publication could hardly be missed on the newsstands. It measured fourteen inches in length and ten in width; it was ninety pages of thick-stock paper; it had gorgeous photographs and illuminating essays; it had artful drawings by a onetime poor kid in Harlem who had proven to be a discovery; and it was all wrapped in an eyecatching scarlet-red cover!
And while the photographic production was handsome and wholesomely representative of Negro and white musicians alike, never before, it seemed, had such a large contingent of Negroes been gathered to showcase their artistic muscle in one publication.