Lost Places, page 7
Ellington and his band went to hear Armstrong whenever they were able. Despite the proliferation of African American bands, most downtown venues were otherwise all white. The Roseland made a small exception: Black musicians were welcome to watch their peers play, if they stood in a specific area, out of the white patrons’ view. Ellington wrote of hearing Armstrong play, “The guys had never heard anything just like it . . . there weren’t the words coined for describing that kick.” Howard Scott said that during that year, if you ran into a trumpet player with a bandage on his lip, it was likely because he’d split it trying to squeeze out Armstrong’s high notes.
Run up and down the timeline, up and down that handful of blocks, and you’ll overlay George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny (who was dating Gracie’s roommate), Lenny Bruce and Toscanini, Jimmy Durante, Carmen Miranda, Maya Angelou, Charlie Chaplin, Spencer Tracy, Bert Lahr, Eugene O’ Neill, the Astaires, the Marx Brothers (“Room Service? Send up a larger room.”), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Audrey Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Tallulah Bankhead, Bess Morris and Judy Selig, James Dean, Ella Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and H.L. Mencken and the whole Algonquin crowd, Thurber and Guthrie and Gershwin. You’ll overlay all the actors treading the boards of the Broadway theaters and the jazz musicians on their ballroom bandstands. Lucky Luciano will set up operations at the Claridge. Mobsters will shoot down gambler Herman Rosenthal on the sidewalk in front of the Metropole and escape in a gray Packard, the first known use of a getaway car, leading to a sensational trial and the execution of five men, as Fitzgerald described in Gatsby.
Expand outward in time and space. An infinite number of hotel rooms, holding an infinite number of hungry musicians and actors and writers. If we establish an infinite number of hotel rooms, perhaps we can also posit an infinite number of theaters and ballrooms, with an infinite number of guests, all aching for something about to begin. Enough to wake a city.
If a city wanted, it could dream a hotel into existence, and that hotel could dream a ballroom, and with that ballroom, a composer at a piano, as if she had always been, and with that composer a song, and with that song a band to play her work, and with that band, an audience. If a city wanted.
André Breton (Not a Hotel)
In 1924, the poet André Breton wrote in the first Surrealist manifesto that he believed “in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
The Hotel Ekphrastic
Among the many early twentieth century Manhattan hotels, the Ekphrastic stands out partly for its design, yes, Beaux-Arts grandeur mixed with classical elements, but also for the magnificent ballroom on the second floor. Partly, too, for the guests who called it home during the times when calling a hotel home was fashionable. Scott and Zelda stayed a single night there during their marriage’s first year. They were kicked out for riding a bellman’s cart through the plate glass front door.
The concert pianist Myra Hess stayed there in preparation for her American debut in 1922. She asked for a piano to be put in her rooms. The hotel purchased a Steinway Model L for her, the manufacturer’s brand-new concert grand on a small scale. When Hess left, the piano was moved to the ballroom, since it was better than the one that had been in there.
Stage actress Judy Selig moved into the same suite two years later, along with her “companion,” Bess Morris, by then working on Broadway as a rehearsal pianist; the two had met living in the new Webster Apartments the year before, and then found themselves working on the same show. Selig’s star had risen quickly, but Morris had yet to sell any of her songs.
Morris discovered that the ballroom was left unlocked during the day, and began stealing hours there to compose. She loved that particular instrument so much she wrote to a college friend, “I will never be able to move out of this hotel, or if I do, I shall have to hide this piano among my bags. I’m writing a piece here that feels like everything I’ve ever wanted to do.”
Morris may have believed she was sneaking into the ballroom, but most contemporary accounts suggest she was a known presence. H. L. Mencken wrote, “One of the secret highlights of the Ekphrastic’s luncheon can only be discovered if one manages to get the table at the southeast corner of the dining room. There, an airshaft carries the exuberant melodies of a piano player in the shuttered ballroom above. Play on, mystery man. Make me forget the briny lobster.”
The Old Hotel Knickerbocker, Hanover House, The Hotel Knickerbocker
Enrico Caruso lived in the original Hotel Knickerbocker on West 42nd Street, in a fourteen-room apartment on the ninth floor. On the day of the false armistice in 1918, as the incorrect story spread, as church bells and sirens clamored, as an anti-aircraft gun on the Equitable Building’s roof fired blanks into the air, as stores and courts jammed with celebrants, Caruso stepped out on his corner balcony with an American flag and sang “The Star Spangled Banner” to the Times Square throngs.
Bess Morris was in the crowd that day, and wrote to a friend, “Picture that voice, from that balcony, cutting through the cheers. When we heard a little while later that the newspapers had been wrong, people started burning the papers. I got out of there quick, but I couldn’t shake that beautiful tenor and the way it settled over us like a benediction, and a melody came to me that was entirely separate from the one he sang.” Though it wasn’t published until after her death, the melody she referred to was her song “Joy Rains Down.”
Exactly one block north of the Knickerbocker, twenty-two years later, Woody Guthrie took a room in a fleabag residential hotel called Hanover House. Sick of hearing Kate Smith’s popular version of “God Bless America,” Guthrie lifted a Carter Family tune called “When the World’s on Fire” and turned it into his response, “This Land Is Your Land.”
Rewind the Knickerbocker again: after his first novel was published, Fitzgerald briefly took up residence there. On the day he left the hotel, he left the bathtub faucets running and flooded the room.
The Fitzgeralds moved into the Biltmore Hotel the same month, and were booted not long after. They relocated from there to the Commodore, where they reportedly once spent half an hour spinning the revolving door. Amidst all that they got married, and perhaps also splashed through the Pulitzer Fountain. The order doesn’t really matter. The when of it doesn’t matter to a waking city.
Tin Pan Alley, Seventh Street, Whitehall Hotel: I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.
Picture a New York summer day in 1916, windows open on West 28th to catch whatever breeze could be caught. Picture the song pluggers in the top-floor rooms, young George Gershwin among them, demonstrating other people’s songs on out-of-tune uprights to potential purchasers; as sweat rolled down their backs and their tunes joined others’ tunes in disharmony, a dozen pianos like clanging pans to passersby.
Bess Morris, walking under those Tin Pan Alley windows on her first day at work in the office of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. music publishing company, took inspiration from those clashing, crashing chords to compose her first known piece, “Overhead, the City Sings.” She wrote it for four pianos, which immediately limited its utility as a performance piece. The song is all the more remarkable for the fact she was still living in a rooming house with no piano at the time. She wrote it in her head and picked it out in stolen moments at work when the players had gone home, but she can’t possibly have ever heard all the parts together.
Gershwin was only fifteen when he got that job, high school dropout, youngest piano pounder in the street’s employ, making fifteen dollars a week. It had been less than four years since his mother had bought a piano, hoisted through the window to their second story apartment on Second Avenue. He’d been the 7th Street rollerskating champion, a bit of a brawler, and on that first day he beat his older brother Ira to the keys.
In the twenties, the whole family moved to a five-story house on the Upper West Side: parents Rose and Morris, daughter Judy, sons Arthur, George, and Ira. When Ira married, he and his bride took over the fourth floor. The fifth floor was George’s, but he also rented space at the Whitehall Hotel, three blocks away, when the family home got too hectic even for him. I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.
After that, he took a penthouse overlooking the Hudson from Riverside Drive; Ira lived in the apartment next door. Friends and business partners came and went constantly. There were parties until the early morning, George at the piano, a Don Sebastian clamped between his teeth, highball on the sidebar.
Later still, George moved to the East Side, his last New York home, a fourteen-room apartment with the largest private bar in New York. Ira moved into the building across the street. The brothers had a direct telephone line installed between their apartments so they could write songs even across the enormous gulf of 72nd Street.
The Hotel Ekphrastic, the Hollywood Club, the Roseland Ballroom
Paul Whiteman dined at the Ekphrastic, as did Sam Lanin. Lanin’s orchestra, one of the best white dance bands in the city, played the opposite bandstand from the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at the Roseland, alternating sets. Lanin’s band played waltzes and foxtrots, as Henderson’s was supposed to, though the latter couldn’t resist slipping in jazz, to the taxi dancers’ confusion and the consternation of management.
Jazz scholars are generally confused on how the Bess Morris song “For One Night Only” slipped into their repertoires. It’s unclear where any meeting might have taken place. Morris had shopped the song up and down Tin Pan Alley, with no interest from any of the publishing companies, even the one where she had worked a few years before. Did Lanin or Whiteman hear it through the Ekphrastic’s airshaft? Whiteman frequented the Hollywood Club to hear Ellington’s new band. Ellington admired Henderson’s skills as a bandleader, so he might have been at the Roseland to hear Henderson and Lanin.
However it was transmitted, every band in town seemed to pick the song up within a single night in 1924. Lanin’s version was sentimental, Whiteman’s precise, Ellington’s expansive, Henderson’s grand. The version recorded by the Wolverines was short and staid; by all accounts it lacked energy, and Bix Beiderbecke had not yet managed to make his cornet sing on wax the way it did in person.
His live solos didn’t have that problem. Fletcher Henderson wrote of Bix’s “For One Night Only” solo, “He sat behind the beat at the start, lulling you into calm. Then he threw in a phrase right on the beat, tipped into the high register, and you were on your knees without knowing how you’d gotten there.”
Edward Hopper painted his New York Pavements that year, his perspective tilted downward, in opposition to O’Keeffe’s, which always craned for sky. Though he didn’t paint New York Ballroom for another thirteen years, the seated dancer’s expression of sated exhaustion captures precisely what Morris was going for when she wrote the lines, “My feet are done / but my heart is still dancing.”
Further Studies in Overlap: The House of Genius
Number 61 Washington Square South at the turn of the century was a rooming house for artists, writers, and musicians. The third and fourth floor walls were decorated with murals and poetry by the residents, the landlady’s second floor apartment full of art by past residents, some who became famous and some who didn’t. At various times it hosted Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Alan Seeger, Frank Norris, Adelina Patti (who once rehearsed her entire opera company in the parlor), O. Henry, and Eugene O’ Neill, among others.
Further Studies in Overlap: The Barbizon Hotel
A women’s residence from 1928 to 1981, the Barbizon at various times housed Grace Kelly, Candice Bergen, Liza Minnelli, Phylicia Rashad, Eudora Welty, and Sylvia Plath, who wrote The Bell Jar there.
Further Studies in Overlap: The Hotel Elysee
The Elysee was built in the twenties and became “a swank version of a theatrical boardinghouse,” per Life magazine, housing Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams (who died there), Sidney Poitier, Vladimir Horowitz, Harold Robbins, Helen Hayes, Joe DiMaggio, Vaclav Havel, Maria Callas, the Gish sisters, and Ava Gardner. Tallulah Bankhead lived at the Elysee for eighteen years, with a menagerie that included a mynah bird, a monkey, and a lion cub named Winston Churchill. After Truman defeated Dewey, she hosted a party there that lasted five days and five nights.
Further Studies in Overlap: The Hotel Chelsea
Let’s not even get started.
Assorted Quotes to Exemplify a Phenomenon
“I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all interrelate completely.”—David Bowie.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”—Martha Graham.
“The signature of the city changes shape and is fleshed out as more and more people commit to the street. A magical transfer of power from the architectural to the human.”—David Bowie.
Bowie and Iman purchased their first Manhattan home, an apartment at the Essex House Hotel, in 1992. He lived the rest of his life in the city, telling the Times he was a New Yorker and “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
“Would you mind calling up a little later after the light goes?”
—Georgia O’Keeffe.
“At night it looks as though [the Shelton] reached to the stars, and searchlights that cut across the sky back of it do appear to carry messages to other worlds.”—Henry McBride, visiting O’Keeffe’s apartment.
“What does it mean to be a person in this city, if not that you’re a part of the creation of something larger than yourself? That’s what I keep trying to put into song, but it keeps eluding me.”—Bess Morris, 1923.
“. . . You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loud-speaker. You see your neighbor’s laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee . . . One guy is cooking dried fish with rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey . . . You hear people praying, fighting, snoring . . . I tried to put all that in ‘Harlem Air Shaft.’”—Duke Ellington’s Notes on Harlem Air Shaft (1940), from the New Yorker, July 1, 1944.
“New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”—Dorothy
Parker
The Hotel Ekphrastic
On this date in 1924, a crowd lined up beneath the Ekphrastic’s arched entrance, eager to get into the ballroom. The New Amsterdam’s stage was still known as the best ever built for dancing—the Astaires had said so—but the Ekphrastic had the better dance floor.
If you want, you can pick a different place where this happened. The New Amsterdam’s roof garden nightclub, say, where the Follies’ more risqué Midnight Frolic show took place, and where the ghost of Olive Thomas danced every night. Or the Belasco, with its state-of-the-art lighting and special effects and elevator stage, and a ghost of its own. The Roseland Ballroom, the sordid Hollywood Club. Take us uptown to the still-new Cotton Club, all rules relaxed, or Connie’s Inn or Minton’s Playhouse or the Lafayette. Hell, if you want to throw this party at Studio 54 or CBGB, that works too. Pick someplace glamorous or dangerous or both.
The band, that fucking band. Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, Beiderbecke on cornet, Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins on sax, Jelly Roll Morton and Eubie Blake fighting Gershwin for the piano, Duke Ellington leading the band. Moe Tucker glancing over her drums at Lou Reed every once in a while like she wasn’t entirely sure how they got there, but she’d ride it out. Billie Holliday and Ma Rainey and Paul Robeson and Debbie Harry trading off at the mic.
The band played all their own stuff, the songs they’d written and the ones they had yet to write. A dozen styles and sub-styles flamed into existence, stoked by the energy of possibility.
It doesn’t matter who arrived when. The fact was, the moment Bess Morris first played “For One Night Only” to her empty ballroom, the only night she ever really played it, the entire world shifted sideways and gave you a seat in the room, or—if you had the chops—a spot in the band. The numbers don’t approach infinity; shove over and there’s room for another person on the stage, and time enough for them to play.
Everybody was there that night. The Fitzgeralds arrived with Zelda sitting on the taxi’s roof and Scott ornamenting the hood. They invented a new dance, and convinced everyone to try it; the Astaires improved on it. Martha Graham did her own thing entirely. Ira sat on a barstool, watching. Eddie and Jo Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth and William Carlos Williams, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Bankhead and Brando, Williams and Capote.
Dorothy Parker and her vicious circle commandeered a prominent booth. Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly smuggled in their own stash of rye whiskey, even though nobody was paying at the bar. Countee Cullen, still an undergrad, swapped notes with Zora Neale Hurston, the sole black student at Barnard. All the Ramones leaned against the back wall, waiting for their set. Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman and Ralph Ellison hunched over drinks at a table in the back, each celebrating the release of their first books, none of which they’d write for a few years yet. David Bowie, the oldest person in the room, leaned on his elbows in the darkest corner, absorbed in the music and happy to be ignored. Leonard Cohen, simultaneously on the bandstand and whispering poetry into the ear of a woman in the corner, because he was just that smooth. Bess Morris bent closer to her piano, never looking up.
