Brooks & Babsie

 BROOKS KERR, AUGUST 1982, DETROIT, HOTEL PONCHARTRAIN

Almost immediately following my Southern California sojourn came the second-- or third, depending on where one starts-- annual convention of the Duke Ellington Study Group, organized, in part, by the Duke Ellington Music Society (DEMS) through their international Bulletin.

Upon arriving with the Chicago delegation, the first people I met were Jerry Valburn, whose mission it was to rescue discarded Ellington recordings and put them out on his own labels, and pianist Brooks Kerr.  He was engaged to a woman named Violet at the time.  Brooks, whose reputation as a walking encyclopedia of Ellingtonia, obliged my request to play "New World A-Coming" on the grand piano in the hotel lobby.

The following day, Brooks made a presentation to all of us, with his portable Casio keyboard.  Somewhere in there Brooks informed us about the original lyrics to "Squeeze Me," by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, now cleaned up from its original title, "The Boy in the Boat."  We were further informed that the title was a metaphorical reference to a woman's clitoris. 

The following represents the portion of his talk devoted to Ellington

"[Ellington had just finished the] 'Such Sweet Thunder' album for Columbia, and Duke used to come to town [Hartford, Connecticut] once a year.  So. for us living in the city, his once-a-year visit was very important.  We always flocked to hear his latest compositions.  I'm going to approach this a little proactively.  I'd like to open with what I believe was his second composition, which he wrote in high school.  The first was "Soda Fountain Rag," which I had the pleasure of recording in 1974, with Sonny Greer, on the Chiaroscuro label.

"The second composition-- I last heard Ellington play it at a restaurant called Leonard Stroud, where he was celebrating his seventy-third birthday -- that was in 1972.  To commemorate his birthday, he sat down at the piano-- he had an electric piano that he loved to carry around-- when he sang this following lyric, which he used to play in Washington at the high-school dances of that period.  He became quite a popular guy in high school for songs like this and topical lyrics, such as this.  Duke's second piece was called "What You Going to Do When the Bed Breaks Down."  It's very short, only sixteen bars long, but you can hear the first theme.  [Plays three choruses on his Cassio electric piano]:

Tried it on the table, tried it on the chair

Tried it on the sofa, but I didn't get nowhere.

What you gonna do when the bed breaks down?

You got to work out on the floor.

"You know how Duke would talk and sing it like this: [demonstrates].  That was his seventy-third birthday present to us.

"There exists another fragment, which he claimed was in Black, Brown and Beige, that was composed in this period, around 1914.  It was a little piano sequence.  It appears also in certain versions of "Cotton Tail."  It was a little thing called "Bitches Ball," which is a stride thing similar to James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout."  [demonstrates]at 

"That is the fragment, also heard in "Cotton Tail."  It was also in one of [French] Columbia's sets, and the middle section was with Sam Woodyard.  It's called "Piano Improvisation in Three Parts."

ALICE BABS, WASHINGTON, D.C. 1983

The following year the convention expanded exponentially, in general attendance and in the number of speakers and presenters, including Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Billy Taylor, Sr; June Norton, Jimmy McPhail, Jerry Valburn (who presented an evening of Ellington films), Patricia Willard (on Jump for Joy and the recording to be issued on the Smithsonian label), Willis Conover, and an open discussion among Eddie Lambert (UK), Klaus Stratemann (Denmark), and Sjef Hoefsmit (Sweden).

Some of the Chicago delegation traveled to Chevy Chase, Maryland, to the home of sound engineer supreme, Jack Towers.  Not only did we meet him personally; we also were treated to a tour of his basement sanctuary, where we viewed and heard the original sixteen-inch master of Ellington's Fargo recording from 1940.

Finally, I met a member of the Washington Ellington Society, Dr. Maurice Banks, who was a childhood friend of Mercer Ellington's and met Duke often.  He was soft-spoken, polite, and took to me immediately.  We visited each other over the coming years as good friends.

I got a chance to meet Alice Babs and her husband, Nils Lindberg.  They invited me to sit with them, and for the few minutes we talked together they treated me like someone important, something I could never forget.  I remember her telling me that Duke allowed her to choose the tunes for the 1963 Paris recording of the album Serenade to Sweden.  I was pleased she chose "Take Love Easy" from Beggar's Holiday, as I was exploring that subject at the time. Later on she went before the attendees to introduce a video production of Ellington's Second Sacred Concert from 1967 in which she herself, of course, was a participant.

The video to be presented was recorded in a cathedral in Sweden.  After remarking how little time she had to speak-- "Too much to tell; you could fill a book"-- Babs began her introduction by recalling her first glimpse of Ellington in Stockholm, during the band's European tour in 1939.  She described that encounter as "the kick of my life."

In those years she was child a movie star, rather like a Swedish version of Hollywood's Judy Garland.  From the age of thirteen, she had listened to every Ellington record she could find, but by the time her idol returned to Sweden in 1963, Babs, then in her forties, had retired from show business and started a family.  Along the Scandinavian arc of his European tour, Ellington invited her to sing with the Orchestra on an upcoming Swedish television appearance.  (The song they performed happened to be "Take Love Easy.")

the complete album

"I can't tell you how happy I am to be here; it's like a dream.  And a dream it was also for me to sing with Duke Ellington.  My wildest dream came true.  You know, when your heart is full, your mouth wants to talk about it, and we all have parts of our hearts in Duke Ellington.  There is so much to tell you about how I happened to work with him, I could fill a book and talk throughout my stay here.  Of course, you must be wondering how a Swedish singer came to sing with Duke Ellington

"It started when I was a young girl.  I collected his recordings, but the first two years, I was only thirteen, I didn't have money to buy them.  So, I went to a shop; I heard them selling the records there, and I had permission to listen to many of the recordings.  But two years later I started my career as a singer; I was fifteen then.  The first concert I went to, at the concert hall in Stockholm, was Duke Ellington, and it gave me the kick of my lifetime.  I had the nerve to say in interviews that it was my life's ambition get to sing with Duke Ellington.  Can you imagine?  

"Twenty years later, I was ready for it.  It happened that a friend of mine who knew I was very fond of Duke Ellington's music was the producer of a program with the orchestra. She was going to do the choreography, and there were dancers from the Royal Opera, and I was chosen to sing with Duke Ellington.

"But I was not in the business.  I had three children and didn't want to tour.  Then one day I got a phone call, and my friend, who had done an album with me, asked me, 'Would you like to do a program for tv with Duke Ellington?'  He didn't hear a sound from me!  I sat down, and after a while I was able to stand. 'Of course I would like to.' I was in the kitchen when he called, you know.  "During one-and-a half year's time, I had been going to a professor to study, although I didn't really intend to go back to my career, because I was so fond of my family life.  I didn't want to go away from my children, yet here I was again on the stage with Duke Ellington, '63.

"One month later he called me from Paris and asked me, 'On Monday, would you like to come to Lauren and make a recording with me?'  It was Sunday in Sweden, and I said, 'I cannot come tomorrow, but three days later I was there, and a few days later we had the album ready.  As you hear, it's small pieces written by Ellington that he gave me.  He said, 'I will give you a background of four French horns, and we'll see what everything's like.'  There was a lot of improvisation in it, and when he wanted me to sing up, he pointed this way, and when he wanted me to sing down, he pointed that way!

"Every time he came to Sweden I joined in, and it happened to be on his birthday in 1967.  He said that Ella had to sing in Berlin, and he asked me, 'Would you like to come with me and do two concerts with me?'  We had no rehearsals at all, and I made two concerts with him.  I sang, which I also did in the theater program, 'Come Sunday,' and that was a song I also recorded with him.  I think that it had grown in his mind that perhaps he could use me and my voice in Sacred Concerts, songs like 'Come Sunday' and Negro spirituals.  I had already done that in churches in Sweden.

"In the same year he asked me, 'Would you like, in one year's time, to come to New York and sing in my Sacred Concert, which I'm working on."  I really was ready for it at the time.  It was the first Sacred Concert for me, but it was the second for Duke Ellington.  And then there was another opportunity two years later, with many concerts in between.  I don't want to talk too much, because I want to show the program, but that was the Sacred Concert number three.  That was a long concert.  It was only performed once, at Westminster Abbey.

"What can I say about the second Sacred Concert?  When I first came to New York, it was eleven days before we had the premiere, but Duke Ellington was not in New York, so I began to be nervous.  Two days later he came, and I had no songs, nothing.  In Sweden, they had big papers about it, big columns and writeups.  I was really very worried.

"Then, nine days before the concert, he invited me to his home.  He played a little melody, and I immediately sang it.  I'm going with my musical intuition, so I just sang it with memories of moments, my whole life.  That was 'ching-ching-ching ching.'  All the melody was not on paper:  there were parts that he really wanted me to fill in, so I did what I felt like.  And that was the case for many of the other songs; there were a few bars left where I could do whatever I wanted.

 

"That was so great!  I really relished the thrill to be invited to do that, with my Maestro.  You can't imagine.  I'm still that little girl listening to his recordings, and then suddenly being invited to be his companion!  I could never get over that, you know.  I've been crying and I've been laughing today, and I've been enjoying it tremendously.

"But it's funny with us people.  We always go back to where it started, and then I'm bringing all the things I have experienced.  But why talk about it?  Why don't we just listen to the sacred part of Duke Ellington?  I'm sorry to say that there are many jazz fans who don't give this part of Ellington time enough.  They close their doors to beautiful ballads.  They are too afraid.  The choir singing here in this concert of Duke Ellington sing in a more classical way than he was used to hear them.  It's so pure, the music, crystal clear, and many of his thoughts in the lyrics are for eternity.   He said to me, "Alice, sometimes I feel that I am God's messenger boy."

"So, let's listen now to this Sacred Concert from Stockholm, 1969."

Ellington Meets Chicago

I gave the following presentation to the Duke Ellington Music Society's fourth international convention, in Chicago, Illinois.  The event took place over four days in May,1984, and was put together by Richard Wang, head of the music department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, assisted by members of the Ray Nance Chapter of the Duke Ellington.  Luminaries present included Gunther Schuller, Willis Conover, and Robert E. Johnson, the former chief editor at Jet Magazine.  Mark Tucker, fresh out of graduate school at the University of Michigan, was also present.  From the U.K. came the author George Edward "Eddie" Lambert with his companion, Elaine Norsworthy.

The first few minutes of my talk was not related to the topic, so I omit it here. 

To Ellington, Chicago in the 1950s meant the Blue Note.  The archives of that legendary establishment, permanently archived at the Chicago Historical Society, reveal a partnership between Duke and the club's owner, Frank Holzfeind, that lasted over ten years.  It culminated with the band's appearance there in 1955 was for six weeks.   In 1956 and 1957, seven weeks.  And before the Blue Note closed for the last time, the Ellington band played for a full eight weeks in 1959:  that is, roughly one night out of every six the band resided at the Blue Note.

What else comes to mind concerning Chicago?  Well, there was the Civic Opera House during the years of Ellington's "social significance" thrusts, as Duke put it.  There was Ray Nance, and there still is the exquisite Kay Davis, both Chicagoans.  There was the little-remembered bassist, Hayes Alvis, who was born and raised in Chicago.  Freddie Guy died in Chicago tragically, in 1971.  There was the Congress Hotel series from 1936, when we had the Mills organization and a young Toronto debutante named Hellen Oakley, and a bunch of traditional jazz nuts called the Chicago Rhythm Club, all working overtime to put the wind in Duke's sails in the mid-30s.  The very first Ellington recording to originate outside a recording studio, as far as we know, was taken from the WMAQ and WENR broadcasts of the band playing in the Urban Room of the Congress Hotel.  There was My People at McCormick Place in 1963, and sadly there was Duke's last public performance in DeKalb, just a few hours north of Chicago, on March 20, 1974.

We might also recall the magnificent records Duke waxed in Chicago.  Imagine, if you will, Duke here in the Windy City getting in the mood to bring to perfections gems like "Rude Interlude," "Daybreak Express," "Solitude" in its very first recording, the furious "Ko-Ko," "Jack the Bear," Betty Roche singing scat on "Take the 'A' Train," and that's just to name a mere handful of the Ellington masterpieces that were recorded here in Chicago.

With all of that said, although Washington will always be Duke's birthplace, and New York became his home base and springboard, Chicago, quite simply, hosted his most glorious achievements.  Period.

Perhaps the most glorious was Duke's first appearance here in 1931.  It was part of his first theater tour away from the east coast.  The 1931 edition of the Ellington band was already famous as the Cotton Club Orchestra, yet it was clearly on its way toward another incarnation altogether.  This was, as recordings document admirably, a time of tremendous creativity for the band, still evolving toward what would be known as the Famous Orchestra of the '30s.  Otto Hardwicke was temporarily out of the band, pursuing his own career.  He would rejoin in 1932, and then Lawrence Brown would complete the trombone section, and there we would have the classic Famous Orchestra.  Under the astute management of Irving Mills, the band took its first step in the hinterland of the Midwest, but this step was anything but tentative.  Duke came strutting into Chicago with pomp and ceremony:  look out Pops Armstrong, look out Fatha Hines.

The centerpiece of the Ellington band's Chicago debut included the beginning of the first three weeks of an eighteen-week contract to play movie theaters on the Midwest Publix circuit.  This was, in fact, the second leg of the very first tour of picture-houses by any big band, Black or white, a fact that Duke credits to Irving Mills.  At that date, the fact that the tour took place at all was a small miracle, for 1931 was a very bitter year for jazz in general and for Black jazz orchestras in particular.  Variety wrote that year that "colored showbiz can shout at only a few spots.  In all the other spots, it hasn't the strength to shout; it can't even whisper."

Oriental Theater, Downtown Chicago

All this was no small challenge, even to the formidable resources of Duke Ellington, Incorporated.  The stark social realities of the Depression, which dictated the demise or decline of many superior bands, only to add still more luster to the fame of Ellington, and many more doors were to be opened for him during the run of the Chicago tour.  The major engagements here included a week's booking at the Balaban and Katz Oriental Theater in the Loop with a matinee performance on February 13.  According to the original Publix contract, the Ellington band was to spend the following two weeks playing at the Regal Theater, on the South Side.

In January, about two weeks before the tour hit Chicago, the contract was amended to include the B & K Uptown Theater on the opposite end of town for its final week in Chicago, and the Regal stay was shortened to a single week.

Apparently, there was one other important change in the Publix contract, for originally the shows in Chicago were supposed to import a portion of the Cotton Club's floor show, along with Ellington, to perform during the band's intermissions.  Although Ellington's program at all three theaters included supporting acts similar to the Harlem fare, accounts from the Chicago papers of that time indicate that local talent filled out the remainder of the billing. Perhaps this was the basis for some of the premature speculation that Ellington was about to leave the Cotton Club permanently for the greener pastures of theater tours.  The Publix contract reportedly carried a stipulation bearing more than four figures, so financially it was a very wise move for Ellington to have made at that time; at the same time, it seems the Cotton Club management was threatening cuts in the band's salary.

For its part, the Balaban & Katz chain had already earned a reputation for giving breaks to Black performers, and here, no doubt, Irving Mills sensed a golden opportunity.  At the beginning of February, they cast the comedy team of Chilton and Thomas to head a stage production called Whirl of Luck at the Oriental, and from there until Ellington's premier, the show went to the Uptown Theater, and then out of town on a Publix tour.  From their point of view, Ellington could generate the kind of interest that could yank B & K and Chicago out of the doldrums of the Depression.

The public in Chicago was well-acquainted with Ellington, from musicians to ordinary radio-listeners, a market that included just about everybody.  The Mills office publicity, coupled with broadcasts from the Cotton Club, was largely responsible for the ever-increasing ballyhoo over Ellington.  Moreover, many Chicagoans had already seen the band in its early film appearances, including the new Pathe studio revue then showing in town.  Word of mouth, the most reliable of all publicity, had it that, at a theater in Boston the week before the Chicago opening, the audience gave the band a standing ovation lasting twenty-two minutes after the curtain went down on the show.  The Bostonian audience, never known as the most demonstrative kind, continued to applaud until the picture was stopped and Duke came out for another bow.

With this kind of momentum, Duke Ellington, couldn't miss in Chicago.  Many of the important components of what would become the standard Ellington p.r. sheet was already filling the local show-business columns.  One such piece in the Chicago Defender, whimsical in tone and bearing a strange byline, "Anonymous Weineshenk.," may have been the first of a long line of capsule biographies of Duke.  It dubbed Ellington the "the leading exponent of what is known as dirty and hot music," and chronicled.his rise from Washington salons to the pinnacle of celebrity at the Cotton Club, "one of the places Mayor Jimmy Walker takes visiting swimmers to see."

Duke's first recording of "Creole Rhapsody" appeared in January that same year, and this article may have been the first to reveal Ellington's intention to complete, in an extended form, his musical history of his race, an idea that was to occupy Ellington for many more years.  Even at this date, there appeared in Ellington's career a dichotomy between serious art and popular success.  He had been a popular success at least since "Mood Indigo" became the first of his hit songs.

The band's opening on Friday, February 13, kicked off an engagement that broke all the attendance at the Oriental Theater.  For the matinee performance, as the theater opened its doors at 1:33, Chicagoans "pushed, shoved and thronged the entrance to get a peek at Harlem's king of jazz," some of them having stood in line for three hours in the February weather.

That phrase, "the Harlem king of jazz" was surely the brainchild of Ned Williams then doing B & K publicity and soon to become the heart of the Mills office's promotion of Duke Ellington.  Ned's most obvious talent was his rapid-fire compression of images, phrases and slogans to gain an effect. His ad copy in the Chicago Tribune and the other big daily papers was filled with such things as, "Today!  The Hottest Music, the Most Sizzling Stage Show in the World!"  "Come on! Get Hot!  Get Happy!"  "Harlem's Jazz King Blaring, Crooning, Burning Up the Stage with His Red-Hot Rhythms, Moaning Saxophones, Wailing Cornets, Laughing Trombones, Screaming Clarinets!"  "Sensational Stars of Radio and Records in an All-Colored Jamboree, High Low-Down,Wild, Mad Dancing Girls!"  "Low-down Hilarious Comedy!  Blazing Blues Singers!"  "Furious and Fast Stage Show, Hotter than Blazes!"  All this and a movie, The Truth About Youth, starring Loretta Young, for thirty-five cents.  

According to the review of the Friday opening show in the Defender, "The patient crowd was amply repaid by Duke, once they took their seats.  Some of the little femmes, after grinding at their typewriters all day, relaxed under that beaming personality and smile that the Duke emulates.  But more soo, thing than his smile was the music that he and his band dispensed.  What rhythm, what harmony, what unison!"

Regal Theater, South Side

The Regal Theater Chorus opened the show with a strike-up-the-band dance routine.  They then sang a special number, introducing the great Ellington.  A second curtain ascended to reveal Duke under an amber spot, cuing the band into "Ring Dem Bells" and "Three Little Words," which they had performed in the feature film Check and Double Check the year previously.  Then came a bit of magic:  Ivie Anderson, aged twenty-five, was already a show-business veteran, having been a professional singer for ten years, both at home and abroad.

She had most recently worked as a featured attraction in Earl Hines's Grand Terrace Revue on Thirty-fifth Street, and she expected her current tryout with Ellington to last no longer than his Chicago booking.  For eleven more years, Ivie was to spark the band's appearances with her verve, wit and dignity and would become a star in her own right, but nowhere would she move an audience more effectively than at the Oriental Theater on opening night.  Recalling Florence Mills, Ivie gave her rendition of "I'm a Little Blackbird," and the cheering mob wouldn't let her go.  It took four bows and a speech to get her off the stage in the opening show.

Third on the bill, Duke returned as an emcee with "If I Could Be With You."  The reviewer wrote, "and the femmes sigh and close their eyes."  Then, against lurid jungle scenery, the Regalettes come back to dance to Duke's arrangement of "Tiger Rag."  They were followed in the fourth spot by the old vaudevillian dance team of Ford, Marshall and Jones.  The Ellington band closed out the show with a set of Duke's own compositions:  the mournful "Black and Tan Fantasy," with a blue klieg light full upon the entire band, and then the astounding "Old Man Blues" as a rousing finale.

Duke's opening on the South Side did not go without fanfare, either.  For Friday, February 20, the Defender carried notice of a "monster parade to be held in Duke's honor," inviting "everyone with an automobile and a heart full of welcome for Duke Ellington."  The throng stretched all the way downtown from the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh Street by noon.  The matinee opening at the Regal was billed as the biggest in the history of that theater.  Advance publicity, proclaiming Ellington's as "the only band in the world that plays jazz, with a primitive rhythm that thrills to the fingertips, with harmony blending soft, warm jungle melodies in perfect syncopation," was undoubtedly again the doing of Ned Williams.

I might add that some of Ellington's publicity in the Negro press directly reflected Black America's hunger for race heroes and champions it could call its own.  One item in the Defender went so far as to depict Duke as a sort of Black Jack Armstrong.  The article was slugged, "Duke Ellington Proves Mettle in Cotton Club Blaze."  The story informed South Side readers how Ellington, "rushing in, loaded with pails of water, saved the chorus girls from a dressing room fire at the Cotton Club" showing "he could cool things down as fast as he could warm them up."

The band closed at the Regal Thursday night, February 26 and opened at the Uptown Theater the following day.  The show there was essentially the same as the ones presented at the Oriental and Regal, except that the Ford, Marshall and Jones dance team was replaced by the Four Blazes.  The week at the Uptown brought Duke's first Chicago stay to a fitting conclusion.  The band would go on with its Publix tour to the Paradise, Tivoli, and Fisher Theaters in Detroit, before returning East for an engagement at the Brooklyn Paramount, but it was a different band than the one it had been three weeks before.  Chicago was the origin of many new motifs in the Ellington story.

Uptown Theater, North Side

Henry Blankfort, part two

 

L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993

Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest.  A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People."  He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure."  During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps.  His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.  

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.

The Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour.   After Meet the People and before Jump for Joy?

At around the same time as Meet the People.  A professor who is fired because of the hierarchy.  [director] Sidney Salkow was out here.  So was Albert Maltz.

Of the Hollywood Ten.

Yeah.  And they wrote Zero Hour.

It didn’t have a successful run.

No.  As a matter of fact, at the end of the second act I posted a closing sign.

On opening night?

Yeah, I smelled it.

I have something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called They Can’t Get You Down, but by that time you were gone.

Departed.  And They Can’t Get You Down did not go up.  Really, its main success was Meet the People, number one.   And I see, Eddie Eliscu, one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north.  It’s playing near San Francisco.  My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read the reviews.  Brilliant, great reviews.  Eddie Eliscu is still writing plays; how do these guys hang around?  I thought they were dead!

Getting back to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his suave, sophisticated onstage persona?

No.  He was a suave and sophisticated guy, very much onstage all the time.  A wide-ranging imagination.  The one reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong for his people.  I think there were a number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity.  Everything that happened was God’s will.

Do you mean to say he was fatalistic about things like Jim Crow?

It wasn’t fatalism.  I’m an atheist.  The God-fetish that too many people accept isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this.  My own philosophy is I'm against anything that divides people.  I think they're all manufactured, anyhow.  Basically, to be very crass about it, most of it's bullshit.  Those people are programmed to walk with bended knees, heads down.   I've seen so much hypocrisy in the religious world, the misuse of people for personal benefit.  What are there: fourteen hundred different religions?

But Duke didn't want any part of it.   

No, Duke would never get involved.  I think because of his talent and his personality, he was readily lionized in his successful days by the chic whites who would ask him to dinner to prove they had no prejudice.    

In a sense, that was the basis of his whole career, at least one way of looking at it.  In show business, he was the number one Black, the Negro who showed that the Negro could "make it" in show business.

  

Because of my involvement with Jump for Joy, I became one of the writers on Tales of Manhattan.

I don't know anything about that.

Tales of Manhattan was a major film.  It had an interesting concept:  it was the story of a tailcoat.  It had Ginger Rogers and Eddie Robinson in it.  [Charles] Laughton was in it, and Ethel Waters.  Paul Robeson was in it, and my assignment was to do the section with Paul Robeson.   Later on, they also put me on the Edward G. Robinson section.  It was one of the big pictures of its day.

And history has a funny way of twisting about itself.  When he [Robeson] and I were doing that part, there was bad segregation.  His daughter is still alive.  He sang at a show where his son and daughter were assigned the same seat one night.  Can you imagine that?  But his daughter did a book that lies:  it says he didn't like his episode in Tales of Manhattan.  Tales of Manhattan was made in the 1940s.  Fortunately, there has been some change in Black attitudes.  Paul had complete artistic control over his section.  He even sent me a handwritten note, which said he was overjoyed.  When he read my draft, he wrote in some comments.

Anyway, in the story the tailcoat with money in its pockets. lands on a little sharecropper's place.  Ethel Waters, who plays his wife, believes it's from God.  Robeson thinks that's bullshit; he wants to spend the money on tractors, and plows, and everything for this little community.  She wants it for a church.  He wins.  

Another thing about Ellington:  he was a great womanizer.  When we were casting the show, he called me over and said, "I want to tell you something. There's a woman coming to your office," and he told me her name.  We walked out of the office, and he had E.S.P.  This is true!

There's a lady, Lena Horne.  I was the first white man whose hand she shook, because she had intense dislike for whites and still carries it around.  I read somewhere that she married Lenny Hayton because he was white, not because she loved him.  But she learned to like him.  

Duke tells in his book, about Jump for Joy, that there were backstage discussions every night.  Every time the curtain came down, there would be changes made.

Oh, all the time.

Tell me about that.  Were there sharp disagreements?  Were they political in nature?

Some of them were, like no dialect was political in nature.

How did these discussions usually play out?  Were there conservatives or radicals among the cast?

 Yes, like society.  This was not quite true of Meet the People.  There you didn't have anybody who was conservative, none.  I was politicized through Meet the People, in an organizational way.

What about the backstage discussions in Jump for Joy?

Well, there were many of them.

Were certain sketches taken out by consensus?

These people became afraid when they got threats to blow up the theater, that kind of stuff.  One thing I saw in the general cast, among the girls and fellows:  some of them did become radicalized.   They saw something happening, even to themselves.  They began to understand, when you want to get your master's foot off your neck, you've got to take that goddamned foot and twist it.  And it gave them a sense of pride.

There was a gal called Lomax who wrote for the Black paper called The Sentinel, a very brilliant writer with a very mordant pen, razor-edged.  We opened against Cabin in the Sky, the stage version, the same night.  She compared Cabin in the Sky to Booker T. Washington and Jump for Joy to Frederick Douglass.  When I saw that review, that's all I wanted.  

I can see how she would think that way.

I'd never met her, up to that time.  The first time I saw her we fell in love.  Fantastic.  We kept in contact for a number of years, then she went abroad for a and became a columnist.  There were too many of complaints from white people.  She was ahead of her time.  The thing in the past that bothers me most about Jump for Joy is the in the attitudes of reviewers that this was never recognized as a milestone in the theater.

Now, in a sense, too-- this was also true of Meet the People-- was Dorothy Dandridge.  This would play down South, and there were attitudes among white actors, not in the cast, but within the Actors Guild.  In the matter of my driving her home, her mother was black and honest with me, and she understood it.  I could only suppose it; they lived it.   She was afraid.  Some might say it's being paranoid on the part of Blacks.  It's actual.  Dorothy went out when some white boys and girls threw tomatoes at her, and there were some episodes going into restaurants.  For a while, my wife and I lived a very stormy life!  We'd make reservations in restaurants, and we'd come in with Dorothy.  "Sorry, sorry."  I remember one night at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, I told the maitre-d' I'd piss on the floor.  They called the cops, but we got a table.

We introduced her to one of the Nicholas Brothers-- Harold?--  She was married to him.         

Later on in the Forties, you became quite a political activist.  You have a cousin named Michael Blankfort?  

He just died.

I'm sorry to hear that.    

I'm not.  He was an informer, on his own volition, too.

  

You're referring to the HUAC hearings that took place here thirty years ago?

He named two people, whom he had no knowledge about:  me and his former wife.    

As a result, did that bring you in front of the Committee?

Oh, no, no, no.  I was at the bottom of the barrel, but I was there.

I've read your testimony, by the way.

It's one of the high points of my life.

Your message rings out, bold and clear.

Oh, I had a wonderful time.  

Was Michael blacklisted?

For about ten minutes.

So he went on working, while you were blacklisted.  You were out of the film business from that point on.

I did a couple of things under pseudonyms.

As in Woody Allen's movie, The Front?

Yes.  I didn't mind keeping a double set of books.  Of course, I'm involved with an aerospace education, on levels of all sorts, and they know all about me.

How did you get involved in that career, and when?

I live by serendipity.   When I was blacklisted, I'd been doing quite well in the motion picture business.  You lived up to everything you made in those days.  I had to work!  Oh, I sold door to door, all that kind of stuff, but I took it in stride.  I wasn't bothered at all about being blacklisted, psychologically.

I don't know how to worry, you see.  I simply don't:  I'm retarded!  It's funny; by a series of coincidences, I got a job with a company called Revell.

Model airplanes?

On my first day, I met the president.  I didn't know who he was, and I got into a big argument with him.  And he offered me a job!  I didn't know who the hell he was.  And six months later, I was a vice-president of the company.  So many letters from kids came to me about those airplanes.  

I talked to Patricia Willard a couple of weeks ago.  She worked for you, is that right?

Yeah, I remember her taking up a lot of my time.

She's on a grant.  She's working on an Ellington book, too.

From the Smithsonian, right?

From the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities, I'm not sure which.  That's what I should have done!

What are you going to do?  A book?

I've sent a manuscript to a couple of publishers, who don't seem to be interested in my first draft, so I'm working on my second draft.  One of them I interested was the Louisiana State University Press.  The commercial publishers aren't interested in anything about Ellington, as far as I can tell.

 You know, his book didn't sell too well.  It wasn't a good book.

They gave him a huge advance.  That's why he did it.  It's very entertaining, if that's what you're looking for, but as far as telling what it's like to be a Black person in show business, it's worthless.

I see him as an example of all things are possible.  I think a writer should bear more responsibility.  What is your approach on the Ellington book?

There have been a lot of books about Ellington, but all of them are focused on his music.  I want to see him in a larger context.

The exceptionalist idea comes into play:  he's "exceptional."  Not an example of what a human being can be.

I'm very involved with education in the ghettoes and barrios.  I'm a volunteer teacher for the L.A. school district.   They just gave a Golden Apple Award to Mayor Brown.  I'm involved in aerospace education.  I've always been interested in the learning process; I'm a dropout.  I have no academic credentials, but I come from an academic family.   My mother taught at Hunter College.  My father was the in the first graduating class from the City Colleges of New York.  My sister in New Jersey graduated from Cornell, and I had an older brother who went to N.Y.U. and another who attended Princeton, until the First World War broke out.  There are many contradictions in me.  When I was a kid, I wanted to go to military school; now I'm so violently against violence!

So, we began getting letters from these kids who were building these models, hundreds of letters, and I began thinking these little kits could be turned into learning tools.  I read in the p.aper that there was to be a conference on aerospace education in one week, someone.  This was in the 1950s; I was at Revell at that time.  So, I strolled over to see what it was like.  I sat through three days of this thing, and I met Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley.  I got into an argument.

A technical argument?

Technical?  I didn't even know how a plane stays up in the sky!  And they were so unsure of themselves, they thought I was a maven, someone with wisdom who could point out their lack of knowledge.    

Now, an interesting thing about Meet the People:  As time has gone on, first of all Nanette Fabray, some of that cast's participation is never mentioned.  It's the same as saying you're a Communist.  It's funny, these hidden fears we have in this so-called democracy.

Some of Duke Ellington's past has been hidden.  I wrote the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act.  Were you with the Hollywood Democratic Committee?

Sure.

The F.B.I. says Duke Ellington was on the executive board.  Does that mean anything?

It was just to support candidates.  Roosevelt!  But in those days, this was anathema.

There's a list of benefits:  American Committee to Save Refugees; an Exiled Writers' Committee; the American Spanish Aid Committee.  The F.B.I. marks these as involvement with the left.  Plenty of people were blacklisted for much less than this.

I know that the F.B.I. was interested in Jump for Joy.  Why, I don't know.  That was in a period when mail was opened.

Did the show go off to other places when it left the Mayan Theater?  I've seen mention of some "tabloid versions."

Oh, Sid was involved with that.  They thought they could perform some acts in a nightclub.  I remember a time when I got a phone call from Duke at four in the morning.  He wanted to do a revival of Jump for Joy.  Duke used to call at odd hours.  Sometimes he wanted me to come to New York to revive Jump for Joy.  

Well, they finally did revive it in Miami, unsuccessfully.  And Kuller wants to revive it again.

I know it.  I have this penchant for not thinking about the past.  A day came when someone wanted to revive Meet the People.  Well, the world's changed.  Attitudes are different.  They wanted to use some of the same songs that had been hits.  The big hit from Meet the People was "A Boy and a Girl."  Christ, that would be ridiculous today!

It's a period piece.

You see, what incites success for some of the old musicals inspires them, but we're on a different channel.

I sense that to reprise Jump for Joy, you'd really need the original cast and the Ellington band itself.  It's a period piece, a success that can never be repeated.  You'd need Ivie Anderson.

It still plays occasionally.  There's a lyric in there about a glass of gin, somewhere.

"My man and me just gin some, and sin some,,."

 Yes, gin some, sin some.  That'd be crap today.

Still, something about it makes me cry.

It's a good song, musically.  But it doesn't have the feeling of some of this rock music that's more contemporary.

I can't agree with that.  Most pop music is crass commercialism and crap.

Have you heard "Take This Job and Shove It"?  The kids who write today are like meteors.  They go to the sky and come back again.  I used to have a house on Beverly Boulevard, and there was a music agency in the place.  Those kids, some of them in their twenties, driving around in their Rolls Royces,  They had a hit song!

  

    

 

  

Henry Blankfort, Studio City, 8/13/82, part one

Henry Blankfort and I conversed outdoors, poolside on a patio in his backyard.  I found him extremely engaging, articulate, and eager to tell his story to someone of my generation.  During the course of our talk, I was introduced to his wife Sylvia, and from time to time his young grandson came out, whereupon Henry would ask him to find a cigarette for him.  I was a smoker at that time, and he didn't hesitate to take one of mine, insisting he was doing me a favor by taking it away from me.

Our conversation was leisurely, but organized, and we spent a good two hours together.

HB:  I suppose the way to begin is to start with Jump for Joy, which is how I first met Ellington.

DC:  I'd like to go back to before Jump for Joy.  You were a member of the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  Tell me about that first.

Yes, I was the director for the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  This was back during the Depression, 1939, and a group of writers and I were unhappy about the nation and the world, which is something inborn in writers, I guess.  We felt this town had an enormous amount of talent that had no opportunity.

I was in New York at the time, at a cabaret called TAC, the Theater Arts Cabaret.  We were open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  It was really a showcase for people involved with theater.

Who were the members of TAC?

Oh, I don't know their precise names, but probably from the Theater Guild.   Most of these writers tried our space as a hangout, where they could come as sort of a club and, at the same time, give opportunity.

The people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance, and then in New York with the Theater Guild and also the Civic Theater downtown.   And we thought we might do the same thing here:  not only a non-profit thing, but a less-profit thing.  We put in some bucks and rented a little place, just Saturdays and Sundays.  The people who performed would get the profits, if there were any.  We'd feed them and write them material for a week.  Each one of us put in money to get the set launched, and we rented a little place on Sunset Boulevard.

Most of the people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance were left of liberal, and naturally their thinking took on a color taint.  Some of the people in the administration of this city did not like this, so we usually had a [police] Red Squad out here.

Am I correct in thinking this was not an organized [Communist] Party political thing, with a Party fraction behind it?

I assume there was great Party influence, but not in a direct way.

Anyway, we rented this place on Sunset Boulevard and began holding auditions, and several of the city's mothers and fathers didn't like what we were doing.  They would say that we needed a new fire-door here, all sorts of restrictions.  It sort of got our hackles up, and we decided to really go all-out.

We rented a little theater.  It was no longer a cabaret, because we couldn't get a license to serve food.  They put all sorts of obstacles in our way.  So, we simply decided we would do a variety show, and the threads and pieces of it would be the People of our society and our culture.  Because I had a business background, they made me executive director.  I took charge, and it became a fantastic hit.

Tell me about the show itself.

The material in it?

Who was involved on the creative end?

Everybody.  Most of the music was done by Jay Gorney and Henry Meier.  Jay Gorney was the author of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"  Now, at the age of eighty-five, he's teaching at Columbia [University].

In 1982 I was able to do a round of interviews in California, where I had a marvelous time with Stanley and Helen Dance.  Before we said goodbye, Stanley suggested that Chicago was a nearly untapped resource for research about Ellington.

Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941

And we all contributed skits to this thing.  We put this on in a relatively small theater.  In the first two days, we took in about twenty-four dollars, but suddenly it flashed.  The narrative was about Hedda Hopper, the columnist.  She was, like Louella Parsons, very powerful in this town.  There were fireworks.  It attacked all her principles:  it was anti-racist.  One of the numbers had the cast singing the Bill of Rights, word for word.  It got a standing ovation.

We had certain sketches that were so provocative that we had bomb threats.  But it was terrifically successful; we were able to move to larger and larger theaters, and then on to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

Who were the stars of the show?

The stars were new and unknown at the time.  Jack Albertson.

His debut, more or less.

Oh, yeah.  This was the first show in the United States that had a mixed cast.  One of them was Dorothy Dandridge.

In Meet the People?  She was also in Jump for Joy.

I discovered her.  A gal named Virginia O'Brien would take auditions for us.  She was frightened stiff.  She had rehearsed at home, but she was so frightened that she stood there as if she were a robot, and the words came out like one of these games they have today.

At the end of the thing, she was so frightened she ran off crying.  I ran after her and grabbed her.  I said, "Baby, you were great!  Do just what you did."  We had a concept different from hers, but hers had a peculiar quality, as if we're all programmed.

Someone at MGM saw Virginia O'Brien and liked her, and she got an offer to sign a contract.  When she came to me, I said, "Take the contract," even though by this time she was a hit in our show.  But if we followed our principles with these kids...

You'd have to let them go.

And now we had to replace her with a Negro gal.  So, I had some auditions, and up comes a beautiful girl.  I saw her mother, Virginia Dandridge, standing by.  And I decided:  Dorothy Dandridge.  I didn't let the cast know about this.  In sounding out some of the people there in the Hollywood Theater Alliance, some were a little disturbed.  (I didn't give a fuck about those things.  I'd walked off contracts with the studios.  If my bosses did things I didn't like, I walked out on them.)  They thought it was fine, but they wondered how the audience would react, and they didn't want to put the whole play in jeopardy.

So, I rehearsed Dorothy away from the cast.  She was just sixteen or seventeen.  I took her to a gown shop on Hollywood Boulevard.  Part of the deal was I'd drive her home every night.  Her mother was very aware of the racism in the studios.

Well, she exploded.  It was one of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had.  She came in two days before the performance, and I said I didn't want any discussion with the cast.  She came out, and one of the spotlights hit her, and after she did her number, the audience stood up and cheered!  She was sensational.

We kept on changing sketches, to keep it alive, contemporary.  In one of them, the Democratic Party is looking for a candidate for President.

In 1939 Roosevelt was in office.

But they didn't know if he'd run for a third term.  Here's what the skit was:  we come to the Oval Office, and the fellow they're going to nominate has his back toward the audience.  He's asked, "How are we going to sell this to the people?"  Turns out he's an actor, and he has a rubber mask on.  It's a mask of Roosevelt!  When he turns around, he's Roosevelt, and he talks like him.  And we had stuff like "It's the Same Old South."

We got threats of bombing, the same thing as with Jump for Joy later on.  But the show was a phenomenal success.  It discovered a log of actors; I would say that out of the cast, at least eighty or ninety per cent of them got contracts with studios.  And we began making some money, so we set up shows that would travel around into little towns in Southern California, to give people a feeling of the theater.  When there were strikes and labor problems, we would send a show in there.

As far as your question before, concerning political guidance for the show, I'm pretty sure not one word was sent from Moscow.

I would imagine not!  I think Uncle Joe had problems of his own.

During the time of the pact between the Soviet Union and the Nazis, we had a number with Hitler and Stalin dancing, each with a knife at the other one's back.  To anyone who was politically aware, this was a treaty of convenience.  The Western nations wanted Hitler to rule the Soviet Union.

Well, it was a great success.  It was the longest-running play in Hollywood for a number of years.  When it ran here, it was in one of the largest theaters in Hollywood.  It got enormous community support, I would say.  The individuals involved weren't making any money.  We put it into these extras and paid these road companies.  We set up classes; we had a place called the Actors' Lab out here.

At this time, you were still making a living as a screenwriter?

Yes.  I think out of the generosity of their hearts, because I was spending so much money myself, I think they gave me an extra $125 a week.  I'd given up some jobs for studios in order to do this.  I'm a strange contradiction:  I've never been interested in money and material things, whatever the reasons.  Because I never felt the pinch of poverty, perhaps, I had no interest in money.

So, we had a couple of road companies going to the major cities.  We were very successful in San Francisco and Chicago.  It didn't have a long run in New York, because I did an unfortunate thing.  Pal Joey was opening the same night as we were, and they had big stars and big names like Gene Kelly, but I said we were going to beat them.  Well, we didn't!

We kept it running about three months.  This was a show imported by New York from California.  We were the outlanders invading the Big Apple.  The press did not look with favor on us.  Politically, the things we were saying were not comfortable garments for the people of New York to wear with ease.

Then they decided to do a Meet the People number two, but I personally was uncomfortable with it.  When we did the original thing, it was done with the kind of flair that I enjoyed; there was no attempt to be serious about a subject.  And just about this time, the Hollywood Theater Alliance wanted to do an all-Negro revue, but I wasn't comfortable with this material.  They worked on it for a year and a half, but nothing came off.  It frittered away.  You see, when writers don't get paid, you can only get their energy for a certain amount of time.

But there was talk in the community about this Negro show.  I was approached by a guy named Sid Kuller.

I talked to him yesterday.

You're serious?  Is he in town?  I've got to call him.

So, I was approached by the American Revue Theater.

But you must have been associated with Sid Kuller on Meet the People.  At least, his name is listed among the show's personnel as a writer.

I think Sid did something, but we never used it.

Maybe he was on the business end?

No, not the business end.  He was a comedy writer.   With Jump for Joy, I supervised the entire production.  This was a time when big bands had kind of folded.  We had an opportunity to get Duke Ellington.

He was playing at the Orpheum Theater.  Sid Kuller had a chance to catch Ellington, possibly at the Orpheum or the Casa Manana.

We signed up Duke at a very reasonable price.  I raised the curtain on that thing for $18,000:  talk about blood, sweat and tears.  Talk about Churchill and the Battle of Britain; this was the battle of Hollywood!

Tell me how you got involved.

Well, I knew some of the guys, and I think I got more credit for Meet the People than I deserved.  I got offers from major studios to be a producer, but I was never interested in the big stuff.  As a matter of fact, when I was writing and producing motion pictures, I selected the area of B pictures for a number of reasons.  For one thing, from my business background I was interested in budgets and producing quality within the budget.  And I had no supervision; all they ever said was, "Henry, you've got two bucks and three days."  I would go out on the sets they'd built for major motion pictures and have a story done for that set.  I remember one instance when Walter Wang had produced a major motion picture, and over a weekend, I did a story to fit these sets. They used to have double bills, and my little picture would open on the same show as a second picture.  And they both had the same sets!  Wang got frantic. He wanted to kill me.  He was a very passionate man.  I used to use some of the same costumes, whatever was there.  I would use contract players.

So, the American revue Theater started.  This was nowhere as politically oriented as Meet the People, in a conscious way.  I saw an enormous opportunity to bring to American audiences what was going on.

It was a kind of fulfillment of that all-Negro revue you had in mind earlier.

Yes, but it wasn't played as if it were an all-Negro revue.  We lampooned things.  For instance, we had a running thing where a Black guy is haunted by a ghost, and the audience expected him to react in terror, but the opposite would happen.

You had a skit with Garbo and Hepburn and Noel Coward.

We had a Noel Coward sketch in there, but the sketch was not written by Noel Coward, but in that idiom.  A number of very interesting things happened; I would talk to the girls who were going to be in the chorus and tell them why I was interested in this play, and say that they were making a contribution to the Black experience.  I said there would be no Negro dialect.   Nick Castle was the director; when I signed him up I thought the director should have full sway.

He did the choreography also.

He was a choreographer.  He came up at Twentieth Century.

He just died, didn't he?

He must have died, because they buried him.  I hope he died before they buried him!

Members of the chorus would come by, one at a time, to my office, and I knew what was on the mind of every one of them.  Here's this pontiff:  I'll get the job if I lay for him.  But I opened up conversations with them and asked them what was on their mind.  I told them that if any of these white guys puts a hand on you, I don't care who they are, I'd kick them right out on their ass.

I remember one time I got a complaint about a sketch that had dancing and dialogue, a sketch with dialect.  I went to a rehearsal unannounced, and I told them, "Don't do it.  I don't care what the director says."  I asked Nick Castle to come by my office.  I told him not to use dialect.  He answered, "But I'm the director."  I told him to tell the actors, and by God he changed!

This was a very exciting thing, staging Jump for Joy, to see the effect on the audience and also on the cast.  Incidentally, it was my first experience with a thing called "tea"; now they call it marijuana.  I met Herb Jeffries in the green room once and asked him, "What's that strange smell?"  There was all this smoke around, and he said, "That's tea, baby."  I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  I didn't see any cups!

I think he's playing out in the Valley now.  He was a very interesting guy, with many facets.  he was so light skinned he could pass.  He had a brother who did.

He worked out here before he joined Ellington, acting in westerns.  He was known as the "Bronze Buckaroo."

Anyway, when I saw him in his dressing room, he said he was going into the Navy.  I said, "Don't worry about white people.  There's nothing white about any of us, except our skeletons.  I said, "Take pride in the fact you're a Negro.  I'm proud I'm a Jew, but I just happen to be one.  So what?"  For some reason, he never went into the Navy, something physical, I guess.

How well did you know Duke?

Oh, I knew him fine.

Did you meet him at Sid Kuller's place?  He had parties every Saturday night.

Parties?  I practically lived on Central Avenue.  Central Avenue is in the heart of Watts.  Now, Duke could have gotten into any hotel in LA, but not his band.  So, the hotel they occupied was the Dunbar. They took a bunch of rooms, one after the other down the hallway.  

He had this interesting thing:  he knew he was black, but he was not an agitator.  I used to argue with him, and he'd say, "Henry, you're an agitator."   I told him I felt Black people in this country were not being treated fairly.  I used to argue that whether or not Black people receive their rights is up to them, as well as white people fighting along with them.  At around this time, he and his band had been commissioned to play at something, a coming-out party, by Nelson Rockefeller in Tarrytown, New York. but all the hotels were taken.  Rockefeller found them places to stay-- in the stables!  I said, "You took this shit?  It might not make any difference to you, but it does to me.  If it were a white person, that's where they'd belong:  in a stable."

 He was a very religious man and an enormously generous guy in many, many ways.  I remember one time at a stage door; he always drew crowds at a stage door.  A brother came up and whispered something in Ellington's ear.  Duke had a guy named Smitty, who kept business records for him.  He called him over and said, "Give this boy some togs."

I thought it was Jonesy.

No, Jonesy was his valet.  Jonesy later had a story about Duke's home on Sugar Hill, in Harlem, where Duke would give away clothes.  They were old clothes, but they were new.  He had like fifty of the same kind of suits.

Very generous.  I once saw him buying three Cadillacs at the same time; that was on Wilshire Boulevard.  One of them for his wife in Washington, one for his girlfriend in Philadelphia, and one for Bea-- is that her name?

Yes.  Bea Ellis.  Did you get to know her?

Sure.

Did she come out to L.A.?

She was at every rehearsal, with all those girls.  She was ready to take out that razor [laughs].  She watched over him like a hawk.

She died not long after he.  I have the idea that Duke was not involved with the content of the show at all.

He enjoyed it, but he didn't know what it was.  If he did, he certainly kept it to himself.  I could never get him into a discussion, really.  You see, with Duke, a kind of legend grew up around him.  Orson Welles was close to him.  I think they worked on some stuff together.

Anyway, the show was very successful out here, and Duke became very successful out here.  After the curtain went down at eleven o'clock, we had jam sessions afterward.  They all got onstage, and the audience was really nutty.  It was fantastic.

He also had this feeling about money, as though there was some kind of gold mine opening up.  I remember once, when I stayed at his apartment in New York, he needed a piece of paper to write on.

He said, "Go over to the desk and find something."  I found an envelope from Columbia or RCA  or something.  It wasn't open, but it had a transparent address window, and there was a check in there.  I said, "Duke, there's a check in here."  He said, "Let me see it."  Forty-two hundred dollars in royalties.  He hadn't even opened the money!

He also was very glib.  It obviously came from his innate ability:  he never had to work hard on his music.  It came out of the vibes in his soul.  But the sweat that it put me through!  I kept asking, "Duke, where's the score?"

"Don't worry about it."  This was three or four days before the opening.  "Duke, we've got to have this thing."

Jonesy took me to Duke's room at the Dunbar, which had a tub.  And Duke gets into the tub with a board across it and big sheets of wrapping paper, like you'd see at a butcher's store, and a gallon of chocolate ice cream.  I think he drank scotch, or whatever the hell it was, with milk.  Now, if only this scene could be photographed:  here's what would happen.  He'd scrawl some stuff down, and "Swee-Pea" -- Strayhorn-- would come and take the papers from him, go into a room with a beat-up old upright piano and do some arranging.  Then he would take his arrangement down the hall to all the men, one at a time.  They were very small rooms.

Then he'd begin doodling.  Duke would be writing, he would be arranging, and Duke would be listening and yell out.  It was the wildest thing!  I would say by ten or eleven the next morning, he'd worked the night through with the score.  I'm trying to think of the lyricist on his songs.  Was it Webster?

Paul Webster.

A very meticulous guy, very precise.

Had he been around long before this?

Most of the writers I hired had had some recognition.  But Duke's rocket began to flare then.  Zoom!  He began getting all kinds of offers.  But he held on to the contract.

Everywhere I've looked there's a different version of this story.  Someone wanted him in NewYork?

A guy named Friedman was his agent from the William Morris office.

Another thing Kuller suggested for the closing of the show was the military draft.  This was November, just before World War Two.

December 7.  The draft took some of the guys, but it wasn't a major factor.

Mercer Ellington says there were financial problems.

Oh, we always operated on a shoelace.

With a successful show, that's difficult to understand.  You played to full houses.

There were people in that show who were uneasy about it.  It's like the "moral majority" supporting Reagan now.

Who are we talking about, supporting the show?  John Garfield put up some money.

Not a hell of a lot.  Nobody put in a hell of a lot.

Joe Pasternak?

Oh, a thousand bucks.

This article says otherwise.  Joe Pasternak gave you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, according to Kuller.

Oh, I'll tell you what Joe Pasternak did.  We had to put up a bond for musicians and stagehands, and Pasternak put up half of it.  But there's no check for twenty-five thousand dollars that I ever saw.

Even though the show was doing well, you weren't rolling in money.

I don't think the show made any money.  Did Kuller say anything?

He said there were packed houses, standing-room only.

We didn't charge much for tickets.  We were going to do another show after that, called Zero Hour.  I have a note from Theodore Dreiser.  I have it framed.  He enclosed a check for a hundred bucks.  To get a check from Theodore Dreiser-- for a writer to contribute money:  it's usually the other way around.

Was Zero Hour a straight drama?

Yes.  It took place on a college campus.

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.