Miles & Me

by Quincy Troupe

  It was an honor and a privilege for me to have been selected by him to write his book, and I still feel that way today. Miles and I became even closer friends after the book was published. He was always inviting me down to his place to eat and talk. Once the burden of doing interviews for the book was lifted, we could do other things, like watch sports, listen to music, and talk art and politics together. I used to bring him food cooked by a friend of mine, Verta Mae Grosvenor, a commentator for National Public Radio and a great cook. Verta was staying with Margaret and me at our Harlem apartment, where she was cooking all the time, and from time to time I would take some of it to Miles. He loved Verta’s cooking so much he used to scheme to try and get some of it every day, especially her great seafood dishes, okra, greens, and cornbread. Of course, I couldn’t be going to see him every day, and neither could Verta be cooking for him on a regular basis. But that didn’t keep him from trying.

  saying good bye to sammy

  Sammy Davis Jr. and Miles were very good friends and had been for a long, long time. In 1990, Sammy Davis was dying of cancer; everybody knew it. There had been several tearful tributes to the great entertainer on television, and everybody who knew him was making a pilgrimage to his Beverly Hills home. But Miles was agonizing whether he should go to see his friend when he was in such bad condition. Miles kept talking about how many of his close friends had died, how much he missed them, and how he wanted to remember Sammy as he was when he was healthy. I stayed out of it, just listened. One day he asked me what I thought. Should he should go to see Sammy or not? He looked me right in the eye, like he always did when he wanted an answer to a question, so I told him I thought he should go see his friend. And he did.

  When Miles returned to Manhattan, we talked on the phone, and I went downtown to have lunch with him. Over chili, he began laughing when he started telling me about his visit to Sammy. He described how morose everyone was in Sammy’s house, how it felt like a death watch, and how it made him feel so sad. Then, when he went in to see Sammy, he thought on how thin Sammy was, who was always a skinny man, and how big his head looked atop that tiny body. Miles said he could think of nothing else to say, so he just spoke the truth; told him what he was thinking right then and there, saying, “Goddamn, your head look so big, Sammy, sitting on top of that tiny little body. Man, you betta eat something, ’cause you look real weird right now.”

  He told me that everyone in the house was appalled at what he had just said, but that Sammy had instantly broken into hysterical laughter when he heard Miles’ words; that Sammy laughed so hard, for so long, tears running down his face, that Miles got worried.

  “I felt like he was gonna die on the spot, because his tiny body just shook so hard, his big old head was just rolling around on top of his tiny, tiny body like it was gonna fall right off! Man it was something else to see.”

  Miles added that Sammy called him the next day to thank him for being so truthful and for bringing some much needed laughter into his final days. Shortly after, Sammy passed away, and Miles told me he was glad he had been able to lighten his friend’s last hours.

  margaret the voodoo woman

  As mentioned earlier, Miles had been suffering from recurring bouts of a flu-like virus ever since 1985. If my memory serves me right, ever since I’d done the Spin story, he had been periodically struck down by the disease and by the side effects of his serious case of diabetes. Now, at the end of 1989, he was under the weather again with the virus, and it put him flat on his back for a longer time than was usual. This time he told me he was suffering from pneumonia. After he recovered from the illness, he went down to play four nights in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. It was the first time he had played on a West Indian island and he loved it, loved his reception there. I felt good about him doing these concerts because I had helped to arrange them through contacts with longtime friends of mine on the island. Those four nights he really killed them down there, and they really loved him.

  Miles paid for Margaret and me to come down and be with him on the last night of the engagement. The morning after his last concert we looked down from our hotel terrace overlooking the beach and saw him in his bathing suit peering around from behind a bath house, seemingly trying to figure out whether he should go in for a swim, though he didn’t.

  When I saw him later, I asked him why he hadn’t gone in because I knew how much he loved to swim. He just laughed and said, “Oh, you saw me, huh? Well, I was just tryin’ to figure out if all them people out there on that beach knew who I was, and if they did, would they come up askin’ me for autographs like the Japanese people always do. I didn’t want none of that shit, so I just sat there and watched. Man, that was a beautiful beach with some gorgeous ladies on it. Did you and Margaret go in?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How could you stand it?” he said, looking at me quizzically.”

  “Stand what?” I said, not understanding what he meant.

  “Them ‘bad,’ beautiful women, man. They was finer than a motherfucka. How could you stand it? Not looking at them and shit. I bet it was Margaret, right?”

  “Right,” I said, smiling.

  “Yeah, you got that right. Margaret’s a voodoo woman. She would have beat your ass if she caught you looking at all them foxes. Man, I know I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.”

  “You got that right,” I said. “And I don’t.” Then we both cracked up and gave each other high fives.

  Miles had given Margaret the nickname “voodoo woman” one afternoon when we were at his New York apartment in the former Essex House Hotel on 59th Street. We were over visiting and eating, and he was about to begin painting. Knowing of our interest in art, he rolled out a couple of paintings and said to Margaret, “Now, see here, what I’m doing here is trying to put some figures up here with a little color.”

  He went on, pointing to the upper right-hand corner of the painting, “See, the colors kind of merge with the figures. Can you see that, Margaret?”

  A little smile of condescension was playing around the corners of his lips like Margaret didn’t know what he was talking about. Margaret, a quiet but forceful and, when necessary, outspoken woman with a deep knowledge of art—she has an art gallery today in San Diego—said, “Aw, Miles, you don’t have to show me how to look at a painting. I can see. I have a lot of paintings at home. I know a lot about art, probably more than you do.”

  This shocked Miles. Hardly anyone ever expressed disagreement with Miles. He looked up, his eyes bugging out of his head and said, “Well, excuse me.” Then he asked, this time with a little hesitation in his voice, “Well, what do you think about it?”

  “Well,” Margaret said, looking straight at him, “it’s alright, but it could use a little work.”

  “What?” Miles said, a little taken aback, a little angry, but with some humor and surprise in his voice, that smile still playing around his lips. “Well, why don’t you let me see some of your fucking paintings?”

  Everybody laughed then, and Miles looked at me and asked, “How do you live with her?” grinning and looking at her as if he was seeing her in a new light, really seeing her for the first time. Then he said, “She’s a voodoo woman. That’s what she is: a voodoo woman.”

  After this incident Miles had nothing but respect for Margaret and treated her accordingly every time he saw her. Most people told Miles what they thought he wanted to hear, but Miles respected only those who honestly spoke their mind.

  There was another revealing incident that occurred when Miles invited Margaret and me to the old Essex House apartment to eat his beloved barbecue with him. While the three of us were eating the ribs, Miles brought out a bottle of French red wine that he said had cost six hundred dollars and asked if we wanted some. Remember, by that time, he didn’t drink at all. He said he had been given a case by some rich fan. We said, “Sure,” so he opened the bottle, and being red wine lovers, Margaret and I began drinking like our lives depended on finishing every las
t drop. When Miles discovered we had finished the whole bottle, he said, a little perturbed but laughing his way through it, “Goddamn, you motherfuckas must not have ever had no wine like that. Shit, that fuckin’ wine cost six hundred dollars and y’all done drunk it up like that?”

  “Yeah,” Margaret said, “it was real good. You ought to have some.”

  “You know I can’t drink because of my diabetes problem,” he said, looking a little sad. “I like to watch other people drink and enjoy it, though.”

  “That’s why we drank it,” I said, “so you could watch us. You don’t drink, so somebody had to drink it, and it might as well have been us.”

  “Fuck y’all,” he said, half smiling. “You motherfuckas just greedy, that’s all.” Then he popped a cough drop in his mouth to relieve a coughing fit that came down on him all of a sudden.

  “Do those cough drops have sugar in them?” Margaret asked him, mindful of his diabetes.

  “No,” Miles said. “They’re natural and sugarless.”

  “Let me see the package they came in,” she said.

  “Take my word for it,” he said, looking a little annoyed.

  “Well, are they sweet?” she asked, laughing.

  “Yeah, they sweet, baby, but I guess they’re naturally sweetened.”

  “Miles, if those cough drops got any sugar in them, one of these days your fingers and toes are going to fall off and you’re not going to have nothing but nubs in their place, because diabetes don’t play.”

  Miles looked at Margaret in amazement, then he spat the cough drops into a bowl on his glass coffee table. “Damn,” he said, “you don’t ever give a motherfucka a break, do you?” Then he smiled, a big half-moon grin splitting his midnight face.

  Moments like these endeared Miles to my family and transformed the celebrated legend into a human being and friend. We loved it, and him—and he loved it, and us. There were many such instances of warmth and closeness during the time I knew Miles, like the fashion shows he would put on late at night to delay me—or Margaret and me—from leaving his place. He would pull out those great outfits he had in his closet and model them for us, strutting around in all his splendor. One night he gave Margaret a marvelous suit and said that he was sorry that he didn’t have anything that would fit me because I was too big, which was true.

  Sometimes he wanted us to stay because he was lonely. He didn’t have that many friends he could just relax with. I remember one night after his video for Tutu was previewed at a private club down on Prince Street in New York’s Soho district. It was directed by Spike Lee, and all kinds of celebrities turned out for this occasion, including Richard Gere, Walter Yetnikoff (the CEO of Sony and Columbia Records), the singers Ashford and Simpson, Wesley Snipes, and, of course, Spike Lee. Stretch limos lined the narrow street. Champagne was flowing and great food was everywhere. Beautiful women and handsome men trying to look “cooler” than Miles swarmed all over the place. But no matter how hip they thought they were, if they didn’t know Miles they were too much in awe, or too afraid, to introduce themselves and speak to him. They watched him from a distance like beautiful mannequins in a Bloomingdale’s display window, smiling all the while, and drinking and “stuffing their faces” with all that expensive, catered food.

  After a while, Margaret and I got bored with all the stylin’ and profilin’. We told Miles we were leaving; it was too plastic for us. He was bored, too, so he left with us, leaving his limousine there. Everyone was shocked. When we got outside, a waiter who worked across the street at Raoul’s, a great French restaurant that Margaret and I frequented, was outside. This waiter was also a photographer and he asked me if Miles would mind him taking a photo. I asked Miles and he said he wouldn’t mind, so a couple of pictures were taken, one of which still hangs over the entrance into the kitchen and garden in Raoul’s restaurant. When we drove uptown, Miles asked us to come up and have some food or something, but we declined. When he got out of the car, he looked hurt that we hadn’t taken him up on the invitation. “Later,” he said as he walked away from the car and through the doors of his apartment building. I think that was the night I first realized how lonely he often was. On the drive uptown, I remember, Margaret and I talked about how bad we felt because we hadn’t hung out with Miles. But it was late, and we both had a lot of stuff to do the next day and we needed to get some sleep. We would have been there until the early hours of the morning, eating, listening to music, watching films, and checking out the “terrible rags” he would have modeled for us.

  sending our regrets

  The Tutu video party reminds me of the annual birthday parties that Miles would throw for himself and a few friends at some great restaurant in Los Angeles or New York, depending on where he was on May 26. A lot of stars came to these parties, like Bill Cosby and his wife, Quincy Jones, Prince, Jasmine Guy, and Lionel Ritchie. Everybody would sit around the birthday table trying to appear cooler than the next person, too hip to even talk to each other. These stars seemed so empty and superficial to Margaret and me. Their lives seemed devoid of passion. So rich and famous and talented, they appeared to be enchanted by themselves, their notoriety, their privilege. So isolated. So detached. So unreal. Partying with the stars was definitely weird.

  So in 1990, when we were living in New York, we decided not to attend the next-to-last birthday party that was held out in Los Angeles. Instead, we sent a friend, Teresa Sanchez-Gordon (now Judge Sanchez-Gordon), and her daughter, Maya-Luz, with a huge bouquet of flowers. After the maitre d’ told him who the flowers were from, our friends were able to carry them in to give to Miles personally. Now, both these women are extremely beautiful, as fine as they come. So when they brought the flowers in to Miles with big grins on their faces, he kept looking at them so hard they got a little nervous. They told me Miles’ eyeballs almost fell on the table, he was so amazed. He liked them so much that he invited them to his party, and when they declined, he got up and walked them to the door.

  The next day he called me and asked where I was, and how come I hadn’t come. I told him I didn’t like those kind of affairs because I found them boring. After agreeing, he asked me, laughing all the while, about my beautiful friend and her gorgeous daughter, saying with a deep chuckle of appreciation, “Man, they were finer than a motherfucka.” With that I agreed. The following year, in New York (the last year of his life), when he chartered a boat for his birthday party, he didn’t even bother asking us to come because he knew we would turn him down, but we did send birthday greetings.

  Around this time Miles got real tight with the pop star Prince and started going out to Minneapolis to play and hang out with him. He loved Prince’s music and his attitude, and the young star idolized Miles. They had been talking about doing a record together ever since I began writing Miles’ book. Somehow it never happened, even though Prince submitted some songs for one of Miles’ albums that didn’t work out.

  Something else that never worked out was that I was never able to arrange for Miles to meet our homeboy Chuck Berry. I wanted to see that happen real bad. They were born in the same year and had never met. I thought it would have been very interesting to get these two innovative musicians and creative spirits together in the same room, turn on a tape recorder, and see what would happen. I knew that a conversation between these two iconoclastic musical titans couldn’t have been anything but fascinating. Although Miles said he was willing, it never came about.

  strange times

  Miles was very loyal to his friends. There are countless stories about him trying to help people he knew from behind the scenes. When James Brown had his run-in with the law and was jailed down in Georgia, I remember Miles trying to find a way to get him out of jail. Since it was not a question of money, Miles tried to figure out if he had any political connections who might help Brown. Finally, he had to realize that he could do nothing.

  Then, there was the awful mess my oldest son, Quincy Brandon, found himself in. In his senior year at the State
University of New York at Stonybrook, he was falsely accused of raping a white woman and was jailed. Miles’ lawyer (and the executor of his estate), Peter Schukat, read about Brandon’s situation in the local Long Island paper. Concerned and unable to reach us in the pandemonium—our phone was busy constantly after the news broke—he called Miles, who was touring in Japan and China. One night around four in the morning, the phone rang and woke us out of a dead sleep. It was Miles. After asking how Margaret, I, and Porter were, he got straight to the point, telling me he had heard what had happened to Quincy Brandon and that if I needed anything, to get in touch with Peter, who would do what he could to help. Luckily, we didn’t have to—after a long ordeal, everything worked out for Brandon. Still, we never forgot Miles’ concern for our family.

  Sometime in 1990 I became aware that Quincy Jones wanted to arrange and conduct some of the music Miles had recorded with Gil Evans in the late 1950s. He wanted Miles to play that music live with a big band, perhaps at the Montreux Jazz Festival. At first, Miles hated the idea. He absolutely rejected it and kept complaining about it to me. He loved Quincy as a person and wanted to work with him in some way BUT on some other project—one in which they would create some new music. But Quincy persisted and after a while won Miles over. It was all set. They agreed to do it at Montreux, the summer of 1991, and it would be filmed and recorded.

  When Miles told me he was going to do it, I tried to tease him in a good-natured way about the fact that he had said he would “never play that old music again,” that he would rather die than do so. I told him that he “must be dying,” since he was playing his old music. First I saw his eyes flash anger, and then they bore into my eyes like electric screwdrivers. He had never been this angry with me before. I remember wondering, Is he going to hit me?