Sweet Thunder Page 13
The Jazz Book essays were learned and informative; pieces of erudition still impressive decades later.
Paul Eduard Miller’s essay—“Hot Jazz: Prophet without Honor”—sought to explain the struggles of jazz “for a justifiable place of recognition in a hostile world.” Miller’s writing swept across the decades of jazz, remembering how hard a journey it had always been to keep the music alive, how difficult the late twenties and early thirties had been: “By 1932 Joe Marsala had done a stint as a truck driver; Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole, Red Nichols, and a host of others succumbed to the lure of radio money; Rappolo was in the madhouse, Beiderbecke, Teschemacher and Lang were dead.” Miller knew that deep within the music lay all kinds of secrets and mysteries; that those accustomed to the status quo, the expected, the routine, would have to alter their senses and open their minds to the appreciation for a new art form. Jazz—from the alley, the stoop, the drug needle, the smoky throat, the St. Louis eyes of Billie Holiday, and the cockiness of the young lad, Miles Davis, on a bus just now arriving in Manhattan (he would tell friends later in life how much Esquire’s Jazz Book had inspired him)—was climbing up and up.
Paul Eduard Miller’s reference to the jazz soloist’s search for recognition could equally have applied to a young pugilist, home from war. All kinds of mysteries unto himself, trying to direct his own life now and to give his brand of boxing to the world, the young Sugar Ray was not unlike the young solo jazz musician. Robinson identified so easily with jazzmen because they made valiant efforts to control their own destinies; figures like Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton had lifted themselves from the confining world of so many in Negro America. The musicians seemed as independent as a Negro could be in 1940s America. And they respected codes of dress and refinement. (“Sugar Ray wasn’t the type of guy to wear a fucking leather jacket,” remembers the writer Jimmy Breslin.) Robinson also liked the way jazz musicians canvassed the world around them—street corners, sidewalks, nightclubs—when they were not playing. Their eyes seemed to always be roving, calculating—much like Robinson’s eyes inside the ring. In Esquire Miller would opine: “Over and above the beat surges the soloist. Pitting himself against the limitations—the throb of the rhythm section—he seeks release from the confinements of society. With ecstatic abandon he pursues his unattainable objective. But the percussionists do not allow him forever to wander the heights. They recall him; he subsides, merging once more into the restrictions of the orchestra where, resolving with dignity his fanciful flight, he again affirms life.”
Esquire’s Jazz Book came with biographical sketches of numerous jazzmen—the known and unknown, the gifted and the extraordinarily gifted—and discographies.
Of course there was Louis Armstrong and William “Count” Basie, Sidney Bechet and Harry “Bing” Crosby; Cabell “Cab” Calloway and others of that rising tribe whose names had appeared on marquees coast to coast. But who knew of Walter Brown? Esquire did: “Featured as vocalist with the Jay McShann orchestra, a Negro group from Kansas City which has come into some prominence during the past year.” What of Arthur Bernstein, who played string bass, who had chucked his law books because the music got inside him, claimed his heart? “A one-time lawyer, now in the service, he has concentrated most of his activities with free-lance work in the New York area,” Esquire informed its readers. Arthur had recorded with the likes of Eddie Condon, Benny Goodman, Sharkey Bonano, and Billie Holiday. For all involved it seemed such a privilege, such a coup, to have made the Esquire cut. To slip into a barber’s chair and open the red-covered publication and spot yourself. Of course Art Tatum made it; so, too, Jack Teagarden and Teddy Wilson. They were men and women who lived, for the most part, like vagabonds, traveling the country, spreading the jazz, toting their instruments, pleasing the crowds.
And there appeared on nearly every page of the periodical a touch of E. Simms Campbell, his drawings in the margins, almost pencillike etchings with dark shadowings: Someone with a bass guitar, someone holding a trombone, someone leaning back and blowing into their trumpet. A womanly figure with something flowery in her hair, her shoulders thrown back and standing at a microphone: Campbell wanted you to imagine seeing “Lady Day,” Billie Holiday, herself. He wanted you to imagine seeing Benny Goodman—the man in silhouette with a clarinet. And Duke Ellington—the figure hunched over the piano keys.
But it was the array of photographs—black and white, soulful and expressive—that genuinely captured the imaginative scope of Esquire’s offering. They had been culled principally from three sources—Jazz magazine, DownBeat, and Metronome—and they had the effect of forming a kind of documentary through still photography. Here is the great Sidney Bechet (Sugar Ray talked incessantly about his genius) and two others, Earl Hines and Rex Stewart. The three men, their hair pomaded, are captured in a Chicago studio, recording a tribute to a friend, the late Johnny Dodd. Hines sits at the far right, a jazzman’s smile on his face. His paisley tie is tied, tight. Rex Stewart, horn player, stands in the middle; he’s staged a quick getaway from Duke’s band. Bechet and Stewart have wide waists—too much chicken and gravy on the road, too many spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. Long leather belts are holding up their beautifully pleated slacks. Here is Benny Goodman, a page all alone, the background black, as if Benny is his own lightbulb. He’s leaning to the left just a bit, holding his clarinet, dressed in a tux. He has the courtly look of a corner druggist. He’s been playing since childhood and he’s been famous since 1936, hopping around the country, heading his own band, playing music both sweet and lovely (“Cabin in the Sky,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Sing Me a Swing Song”). Negro musicians are wild about him: he has assailed convention and integrated his bands, gallivanting about the South with a poetic grin on his face.
It is unmistakably Billie, shot from the waist up, the gardenia a giveaway, like the hairstyle and the slitted eyes and the smooth skin. She’s standing at a microphone (the E. Simms Campbell etching come to life) and showing a wide smile. For four years, leading up to 1944, she has been singing solo, having broken away from Count Basie’s band and Artie Shaw’s band. Somehow—maybe it’s the magic of the Speed Graphic—it is never the ravages of drugs that comes through in photographs of her, but the musicianship. One wishes that she were photo op and voice only (“That’s Life I Guess,” she sang).
It’s a dandy of a photograph: Duke Ellington on the left, filmmaker and boy wonder Orson Welles in the middle, and Cab Calloway on the right. They appear to be seated along the back wall of some nightspot. The caption talks about Welles’s onetime plan to film the story of jazz, centering it around Louis Armstrong’s life. (The film idea fell apart while the jazz kept humming.)
They are men and women—mostly men—pushing the doors of jazz open wider. They are in suits and ties; they travel at times on the Twentieth Century Limited express train; they travel in the backseats of old Model T Fords and new Cadillacs; they can slip a town if need be and leave everything behind if they must—everything save for the instrument.
Sportsmen adore them, lean into them and their music, buy them drinks. Theirs is a world of melody and newness. It is a world that Sugar Ray Robinson easily gravitates to. These are men who recognize style, who dress as he does—with an attention to detail, a surprising flourish against a backdrop of sedateness. “He was the unofficial ambassador of entertainment in Harlem,” Robert Royal says of the young fighter.
Robinson, an inveterate reader of boxing publications, had astutely studied the careers of both Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. Johnson had given up much because of his constant cavorting with white women (whom Robinson avoided) and because he showed no inclination to ingratiate himself into any black community. Louis tried, bouncing between Chicago, Manhattan (Harlem), and Detroit, but failed to become a permanent and visible fixture in any one locale. Robinson would stake his claim to Harlem because of its ready-made backdrop of entertainment venues—where sportsmen gathered—and because he so easily fit into that scene. Then, too, Johnson sho
wed no inclination toward musical entertainment during his boxing career; Louis did, but looked awkward trying to catch a beat. Robinson, because he had made efforts at studying music, fit in gracefully. His appearance at nightclubs in Harlem always raised the profile of those clubs, and the owners began to consider him wonderful publicity. And, finally, there was Edna Mae Holly, the gorgeous woman on his arm.
Edna Mae liked to go swimming. It was at an outdoor pool in 1941 in upper Manhattan that she first met an up-and-coming prizefighter. Sugar Ray would go there after sparring sessions, quite proud of himself and his physique as he lolled around the pool staring at the young ladies. Edna Mae, there with her girlfriends, had emerged from the swimming pool one afternoon looking as lovely as a bronzed mermaid might look. Robinson felt he was gawking at “the prettiest pair of long legs I’d ever seen.” They were, in fact, a dancer’s legs. “She walked with a little wiggle,” Mel Dick, a lifelong friend of Robinson’s, would recall of the young Edna Mae.
Born in Florida but raised in New York City, Holly hailed from a family of middle-class achievers. She studied for a time at Hunter College but then confounded the family’s conventional expectations by becoming a dancer rather than a teacher or social worker. She was one of the beautiful young women who had danced with Lena Horne on the stage of the Cotton Club. At the time Sugar Ray met her she was employed at the Mimo Club. (Even though Robinson had only been fighting professionally for a year when they first met, his reputation had already spread.) She recognized Sugar Ray when she saw him and some of his friends sitting one evening at a table at the club where she danced. When he approached her, she played coy and uninterested. He wooed her by sending roses. He made a nuisance of himself at the Mimo by dropping by to watch her rehearse. She told him she had other suitors; he twirled his fedora and smiled at her. One of those suitors—the one she paid more attention to than the others—was Willie Bryant. Bryant, often referred to in the press as a Manhattan playboy, was a radio deejay and part-time actor. He was Hollywood-handsome with slicked-back hair, thin mustache, and cool features. Women swooned over him. But Sugar Ray dismissed Bryant and continued to pursue Edna Mae with flowers and gifts—among those gifts, a mink coat. The mink caught her attention. “Ray took Edna Mae from Willie Bryant,” says Robert Royal.
And then there she was, ringside at his fights. They married quietly and almost secretly in 1943 on one of his Army furloughs. Now this rising, silky fighting machine in the well-cut and tapered suits, who bloodied men as an occupation, was hers. The season of the Esquire men marked their coming-out party. Musicians took them to dinner; there were soirees in their honor. Edna introduced young Robinson to Lena Horne, to Duke Ellington, to all the entertainers she knew. (Celebrities had long already introduced themselves to him, but he played along.)
They talked about clothes and fashion crazes. She proved a complement to the insights he had gleaned about style from his jazzmen friends. They moved into an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue. “He really admired her,” says Billie Allen, a dancer who sometimes socialized with the couple. “He always strove to meet her standards.”
“She knew how to handle him,” says Evelyn Cunningham, who knew the Robinsons when she was a young writer in Harlem.
Owing to her beauty and those dramatic entrances she had perfected at social gatherings—the stop-on-a-dime halt, then a slow stroll forward—Edna Mae began to appear in the society columns quite frequently. (From a Chicago newspaper columnist: “You cannot steal a party that is given for Lena Horne or Edna Mae Holly … Edna Mae, who is the wife of Sugar Ray Robinson, proved that when charming Ann Helm feted her [the] other night. Edna Mae with her grand looks was the whole show just as Lena would have been.”)
“Edna Mae and Sugar Ray reminded me of the love story in Carmen Jones,” says Billie Allen. “I think Sugar Ray exemplified the extraordinary black male—virile and handsome.”
When bigger fight purses began to come in, Sugar Ray and Edna Mae moved into a larger home in Riverdale. He introduced her to glittering nights after his victorious fights. The photographers caught them both, arm in arm, dazzling in their stride. They had bewitched Manhattan and its environs. “Edna Mae was quite glamorous,” says Billie Allen, “but after a while I think she became concerned about his whereabouts. I got the feeling he was a bit more rough-hewn than her.”
Sugar Ray Robinson used to sing songs in the company of his wife, warbling out jazz standards. He particularly liked “The Very Thought of You.” It made her smile. But she began to catch him in white lies, then bigger lies, and she realized he had a penchant for being unfaithful. There were heated arguments, separations, then Edna Mae’s unannounced visits to training camp. Then long nights of lovemaking after the reconciliation. Their only child, Ray Jr., was born in 1949. He was a handsome and gregarious boy, but his daddy was on the road a lot. “My business was boxing, not babysitting” is how Robinson put it.
The fighter window-shopped on Fifth Avenue. He filed away the names and locations of tailors recommended to him by Duke Ellington and seconded by Edna Mae. He listened intently to music, parsing the different rhythms practiced by jazz combos. Conversations about boxing were fine, but when he sensed they were going on and on, and the information supplied to him was useless, things he already knew, he changed the subject—even if he was talking to George Gainford—with a grin and turn of the head.
He dreamed of himself in the jazzman’s world more than in the grubby and wicked and unforgiving world of pugilism. He admired the jazzman’s demand for respect, took it to heart. In the autumn of 1942 Robinson was wooed by Boston officials for a fight in that city. He decamped with aides to Boston to look things over. He scoffed at the proposed venue—the grubby and pedestrian Mechanics Hall—and requested the more charming and famed Boston Garden. When showed possible hotels for his accommodation and that of his traveling mates, his face grew pinched: He considered everything the officials showed him below grade. He suggested the Copley Plaza Hotel with its chandeliers and soft carpeting and classy address. (It was sometimes referred to as “the Costly Pleasure,” a sobriquet its operators hardly minded.) Movie stars and high rollers stayed at the Copley Plaza, strolling through its lobby as sweet piano music drifted through the air. Boston boxing officials listened to Robinson’s requests and eventually told him they could not meet either of them. Whatever clout they had, they didn’t wish to use it up getting a twenty-one-year-old Negro boxer and his entourage into the Copley Plaza Hotel. Robinson left town and abruptly backed out of the fight. But the matter did not end there. It ignited a verbal brouhaha in the New York press, principally between Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror and Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News. Parker was livid that Robinson had refused Boston officials: “Ray Robinson has class as a fighter but in no other respect,” Parker opined, citing the Boston incident. “He’s the direct antithesis of Joe Louis.” That charge met with fury from Burley: “The ungracious grumpy Mr. Parker’s blasting of Ray’s refusal to Uncle Tom in Boston and accept accommodations in a regular dump of a flophouse smells of [U.S. Sen. Herman] Talmadge and Georgia …” He goes on: “Ray Robinson is only reflecting the spirit of the new Negro who today refuses to bow and scrape before erstwhile royalty, and who is demanding his full pound of flesh in the distribution of all the [sic] Rights citizenship in these United States affords.”
It was, of course, the blood and guts that made the dreams of Sugar Ray Robinson come true.
Not long after Esquire’s jazz edition was published, Sugar Ray got in contact with Vertner Tandy Sr., a celebrated Manhattan architect. For more than a year Robinson had been contemplating a foray into the business world. He discussed his idea with Edna Mae, her dancer friends, and his own musician friends. Robinson and Tandy took a stroll down Seventh Avenue, idling on the block of 124th. Sugar Ray looked around, up and down the block, into the traffic. And then he began to imagine seeing his name in lights, just as he had as a kid when he looked up at the names of the big Broadway stars.
He found himself with time on his hands. Home from the war, it did not take him long to become disenchanted with the quest for a shot at a title fight. Prizefighters were avoiding him and his deadly left hook, denying him the opportunity to be named champion. Champions rightfully demanded larger purses. Even his handlers were dubious about whether the time was right. “Robinson is impossible now,” Mike Jacobs, the promoter, had confided to a publicity hack in the world of boxing shortly after Robinson’s return from the military. “Imagine dealing with him as a champion.”
Jacobs—playing both ends—tried to assuage Robinson’s frustration by mentioning that he’d make plenty of money by fighting non-title fights. “I didn’t need money,” as Robinson would put it, “I needed glory.”
And Sugar Ray, for once in his life, really didn’t need money. He had savings now. While awaiting his title shot, he leaned into music dreams. He wanted a place where jazzmen and jazz lovers could come, where someone writing protest poems might wish to come and think. A place where he could pour champagne himself, and slip the mink wraps off the shoulders of lovely women.
He had started out as little more than an urchin, a hustling little child in Detroit, then New York City. But now Sugar Ray Robinson had propelled his own dreams into reality. Ideas of his future continued to excite him. He convinced himself he could travel further into mainstream America than either Jack Johnson or Joe Louis had done. The shortsighted among his fans and critics might wish to link all Negro prizefighters together, but it was his intention to carve a new model.
There was something intoxicating about the Manhattan of 1945. It wasn’t just that the civilized world was still standing upright, that the forces of evil had been beaten back. It was all of that tripled by celebration and opportunity—and music. War had famished everyone; now it was over, everyone seemed ravenous. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were kicking up a hurricane on Fifty-second Street. Billie Holiday was wailing; Louis Armstrong was in and out of town with his band. Musicians were back home from Paris. You couldn’t fling a scarlet-covered jazz publication ten feet without it flapping by the doors of some jazz nightclub. They were large and small; they stretched from Broadway to Harlem. Headline makers like Joe Louis and Henry Armstrong now had nightclubs. The competition hardly seemed to faze Robinson.