The Good Life (12 page)

The first time I sang in a nightclub was at the Shangri-La. It was right under the El train in Astoria and was a very fancy, hip place in 1946. The great trombonist Tyree Glenn—who earlier in his career had played with Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Benny Carter, and Cab Calloway—was leading the band. I sang informally at the bar, and when Tyree saw how much I loved his band, he said to me, “Come on up and sing with us.” What a thrill! After he heard me and saw the audience’s reaction, he gave me a job. It didn’t last long, though, because a few months later Tyree joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and after that became one of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars. But those were very successful moments for me, and they encouraged me to keep going. I knew if I just had the chance to get up in front of an audience, I’d win them over.

I “worked” all kinds of clubs in Queens and Manhattan. I sang once or twice at the old Venice Gardens in Astoria, although mainly I used to go there to dance and look for girls. For a while I was once again a singing waiter, this time at the Pheasant Tavern and the Red Door in Astoria. Occasionally I sat in at the Yukon Bar on Fiftieth Street in New York, and for a while I performed at the Bal Tabarin on Broadway around Forty-fifth Street. That was the biggest job I’d had yet, and when I got it I said to myself “I’ve hit the big time, I’m right on Broadway!”

The Nestle Inn in Astoria was fairly typical of the kinds of gigs I was getting. It was a tiny club “nestled,” as it were, under the Hell Gate Bridge. Stan Weiss had a nice little jazz thing going there as the leader of a quartet. He’d just come off the road with Tony Pastor’s Orchestra, where he got to play with Rosemary Clooney, so he was doing great. When I heard he was playing the Nestle Inn, I went over and asked him if I could sit in.

Stan apparently liked what I did, because he told me I could sing with his band whenever I wanted. As usual there was never any talk of paying me anything, but like I said, it was all about the experience of working with Stan and his pianist, a wonderful guy named Bobby Pratt. Bobby knew millions of songs, and he turned me on to a lot of them. He gave me a song called “While the Music Plays On,” a great tune which I later recorded on my first jazz album for Columbia.

Stan’s friends, like Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, two of the most swinging tenor saxophonists in the entire history of jazz, would often drop in to jam. That was the first time I heard them, and from that moment on I became a fan for life. When I met them I didn’t realize how famous they were—they had both been featured in Woody Herman’s Second Herd, probably the greatest big band of those years. Like the great sax player Stan Getz, who was also in Woody’s band, they were heavily influenced by the legendary Lester “Prez” Young of Count Basie fame, who created the light and swinging style of tenor saxophone that was a jazz revelation. Zoot and Al became like brothers to me, and when I started recording regularly many years later, I was thrilled to have them play with me. Back in 1947, all three of us were sitting in with Stan Weiss’s group at the Nestle Inn for the fun of it.

I was showing up at the Nestle Inn whenever Stan was playing there, and we got to be great pals. Between sets I’d show him all the cool places to eat in Astoria—it was my neighborhood, after all—and once we double-dated with a couple of nice local girls. A few months later Stan got an offer to go back on the road with Elliot Lawrence’s band. I was sorry to see him go, but happy for him, because Elliot had a fine band.

I met quite a few lifelong friends in those years after the war. There were a lot of showbiz bars around midtown and Greenwich Village where I’d hang out and socialize with the
guys. Right near the Winter Garden Theater, on Seventh Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth, there was a place called B-G Bottomless Coffee, where I spent many happy hours. Right next door was Hanson’s, where all the comics hung out, and across the street were Hector’s and Charlie’s Tavern, It was an all-star line-up of hangout joints all along Seventh Avenue between Fifty-first and the legendary Fifty-second Street, I met John Cholakis at one of these clubs. He was a struggling bass player and I was a struggling singer, so we hit it off right away, John had inherited a resort hotel in Far Rockaway Beach, all the way at the end of Queens, practically in Long Island, and in the summer we opened up the place and got it ready for the guests. We fixed up any broken-down furniture, aired out mattresses, did any odd job that needed doing, and in exchange I got to stay at the hotel all summer. It could have been a Neil Simon play, two kids spending the summer on the beach, dreaming of stardom.

John and I used to go to Fifty-second Street to hear great jazz: swing, bop, and Dixieland, in one little funky club after another. It was incredible. John had a friend named Billy Verlin who played trumpet and ran a rehearsal studio. All the musicians hung out and jammed there, but Billy was in no better shape than the rest of us, so he asked each of the guys to cough up a dollar to help with the rent. It worked out great for everybody. Marlon Brando, who was then on Broadway in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, often came down and hung around with the musicians at Verlin’s studio on his matinee days. This was long before the general public knew who he was. Billy didn’t recognize him and was about to tell him to split until one of the guys said that he was an actor. That was okay with Billy. Brando always had a pretty girl on his arm and strolled into the studio wearing his trademark T-shirt.

John later made it himself, not as a bassist but as a television director, and his wife, Betty Frasier, a wonderful woman, is one of the country’s leading illustrators of children’s books.

I was living on a dime a day, literally. I’d get up and go into the city every morning and start my door-to-door rounds. My mom always left me a dollar’s worth of change on the table before she went to work, but I never took more than ten cents. She was still working as a seamstress and I couldn’t bear to take her money. I still dreamed about being a successful singer so that she wouldn’t have to work anymore, and in the meantime I wasn’t going to take more than I had to.

What really struck me as strange was the fact that, after all the positive stories about show business my uncle Dick had told me, he now gave me a hard time about pursuing my dream of getting into the business instead of getting a “steady job” to help support my family. I guess he felt it was his duty to read me the riot act. He’d say things like, “You’re just a bum! You’re not going to make it, so you might as well just get a regular job. Help your mother out! Don’t be a gigolo!” He was really rough on me, and he made me feel like I was talentless. But at the time Uncle Dick’s ridicule only made me more determined to succeed. I know now that he was just telling me what he thought I should hear, what the upstanding Italian uncle should say to the son of a widow, because years later I found out from Gary Stevens, a famous press agent, that Uncle Dick used to talk me up all over town. He was still working at the Broadway Theatre then, and he’d tell anyone who would listen: “I’ve got this nephew who can really sing! He’s going to be a big star. He’s really gonna make it. You gotta go out and see him!”

The best thing that happened to me after the war was the opportunity to study at the American Theater Wing on Forty-fourth
Street. The government set up a program called the Gl Bill that provided benefits for returning soldiers. It paid the tuition for college or trade schools, and provided other important services—anything to help the vets get back on their feet. It gave a lot of guys like myself the opportunity to continue the education that was interrupted by the war or to go to a school that we otherwise would never have been able to afford. In fact, in 1954 I was presented with a special citation that singled me out as “the ex-soldier who’d accomplished the most with his GI Bill of Rights training” by President Eisenhower. I am particularly proud of this award.

The American Theater Wing (which later became The Actors’ Studio) was one of the greatest schools in New York City. I had amazing teachers, most notably a Russian professor named Zhilinski who had performed with the world-renowned Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky was the founder of what became known as Method acting, a discipline that has been made famous by actors like Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman. To this day I’ve never seen performances on Broadway or anywhere else that were better than the ones Zhilinski gave us. In one class, he demonstrated fifteen different ways to play a drunk and fifteen different ways to cry.

I’ve since applied the techniques I learned there to my singing. When I sing a song, I think autobiographically, as though the lyrics are about something I’ve experienced. I look for songs that lend themselves to that type of expression, songs that are full of powerful emotions, so that the public can “dream along with me,” as Perry Como used to say. That’s what I look for in a singer too. Nat “King” Cole, for example, just hypnotized me when he sang a song like “I Realize Now,” because he revealed himself so honestly. That’s the idea: to let the audience know how you feel.

At the same time that I was learning how to tell a story at the American Theater Wing, I was also studying vocal technique. Pietro D’Andrea taught me
bel canto
singing, the same method my brother had studied when he was a kid. These techniques and exercises have really saved my voice. There’s nothing like knowing the basics. I also studied with Helen Hobbs Jordan for a while. She taught me sight reading, which was quite a challenge, and gave me a whole new appreciation for what I was trying to do.

Another tremendous coach of mine was Mimi Speer. She had a studio right on Fifty-second Street, across from all my favorite haunts. We’d look out her window down at the marquees across the street: Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, George Shearing, Lester Young, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday, all lined up in a row. It was enough to make your head spin. She’d tell me, “Do not imitate another singer, because you’ll end up sounding just like they do, and you won’t develop an original sound. Instead, find a musician you really like and study their phrasing. That way you’ll create a sound all your own.” It was a great tip. I paid particular attention to sax players Stan Getz and Lester Young. Art Tatum, was the greatest piano player of all time and was particularly instructive to listen to because he did unexpected stuff, all those jumps in and out of the melody.

I was particularly taken with Charlie Parker and the early beboppers. I knew a lot of soldiers who came back after the war and felt alienated by what had happened to jazz, but I was crazy about it. I remember the first time I heard Parker. It was at the legendary Birdland, and I didn’t even know who he was at the time. I was so intensely overcome with emotion at what I heard that I actually went into the alley behind the club and threw up.

By studying the great artists over the years, I’ve learned ways to keep the public’s interest, I spent a lot of time with Count Basie, and his music was all about dynamics and
nuances, first soft and then BOOM! There would be unexpected little body blows and then knockout punches, BOOM, BOOM, BAM! I try to do the unexpected so that the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

I was fortunate to catch the tail end of an era when performers helped each other out. There was camaraderie then. Established stars helped young performers coming up. If you got a hit song, the veterans took you along with them on the road and helped you break in. And the public was so encouraging. They rooted for you if they saw that you were nervous and you were trying, and they kept plugging for you. Showbiz today seems much more cutthroat. I think young performers should be encouraged and nurtured much more carefully, and be given a chance to grow.

I never did actually get a paying gig on Fifty-second Street, although I basically lived there for a few years. I did perform once at Leon and Eddie’s, thanks to Milton Berle and Jan Murray, who had heard me sing and arranged for me to perform at the club on a Sunday night so agents could come in and see me.

The wonderful entertainer Barbara Carroll invited me to sing with her at a club called La Cava on Fifty-second Street, and that was a terrific break. She said, “Come in and just sing, and maybe someone will hear you.” I did that for a while, still making no money, but I did get free drinks and experience. One night someone came up to me and said, “There’s a big songwriter in the audience, Rube Bloom. Sing for him.” He had written “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” and many other standards. I started singing for Mr. Bloom, looking right at him, but instead of being flattered by the attention, he was annoyed that I was trying to catch his ear. When he discovered I wasn’t going to let him enjoy his drink in anonymity, he got angry and abruptly turned his back on me. I was singing “Blue Moon,” and when I got to the second chorus, I sang, “Rube Bloom, you
saw me standing alone.” He got up, threw his money down on the table, and stormed out of the place. Timing is everything.

My closest friend in these early years was Jack Wilson. Wed been friends since 1939; his family lived next door to us in the Metropolitan Apartments. When we were kids, he, my brother, and I hung out together all the time. He was a few years older than me, but that didn’t make any difference because we liked to do the same things. Jack and I discovered that we both wanted to make it in the music business. Most kids would get together and talk about girls or sports, but not us. All we thought about was music. I had my heart set on singing, but Jack was an aspiring songwriter. We listened to the latest big band records and got to know them so well that we could stand on the corner and scat-sing all the solos. We sang for dimes on the streets of Astoria. It was a great friendship.