The album and the single immediately began getting huge airplay on radio across the country, and soon both were climbing the music charts. Peter Davidson had recently graduated from Manhattan College in Queens and was getting ready to return to South Africa. Stewart and I sent Peter an airplane ticket so he could come to Los Angeles and join in celebrating our success. Little did I know that my world was beginning to take off in directions I never imagined and couldn’t control. With “Grazing” approaching number one on the charts, the gigs were flying in. The phones never stopped ringing and the telegrams kept coming in to ABC, which led to bookings all over the United States. We needed a road manager, and I asked Peter Davidson to postpone his plans. He agreed, and stayed with us for two years. We crisscrossed the country headlining festivals and concerts, playing the top clubs and selling out everywhere.
In Philadelphia we played the Quaker Jazz Festival at the Spectrum arena. I was leaving the venue when a beautiful woman stepped out of a limousine parked next to mine. It was Tammi Terrell. She said, “Release your driver. You’re coming with me.” She whisked me off to a suite she had reserved for us at the Marriott Hotel, where we spent the rest of the weekend together. Tammi spoke about how saddened she had been by not being able to join Marvin and me at the Apollo Theater. She had had an operation earlier that month, and the doctors were hopeful that they’d successfully removed the tumor. She would be going for X-rays later in the month to see what kind of progress was taking place. This was the beginning of a very tender relationship with the beautiful Tammi. I went to Philadelphia to visit her at her parents’ home whenever I could. I would take her out for dinner or lunch, but as time went on she grew progressively weaker. The chemotherapy and several more operations did not help. I continued visiting her right up to a few weeks before she died. After she passed away, Marvin was so distraught he did not tour for three years.
On my twenty-ninth birthday, April 4, 1968, I was in New York City, having played a concert the night before in New Jersey. I had just left the Village Gate, where I had stopped for a few cognacs before heading uptown to my hotel. While I was driving a rented Cadillac up Sixth Avenue, an announcement came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. I was shocked. A few seconds later, while I was stopped at a red light, a car plowed into my rear. I got out of the car to talk to the driver, a gray-haired old white man. An elderly woman, who I assumed was his wife, was seated next to him. They were both shaking like tree leaves in a storm, and suddenly they began to cry and begged me not to hurt them. I told them to go home and get some rest, and they drove off in disbelief. When I got to my room at the Mayflower Hotel, I turned on the television and saw there were riots going on in almost every black ghetto in America. No wonder the white couple had been crying and begging for mercy. I had not wanted to involve the police in my fender-bender because I had been drinking and snorting cocaine all day. I had two grams of cocaine in my jacket pocket, had been smoking a joint in the car, and was carrying a pocket full of rolled joints. This had become my lifestyle. I wasn’t alone in this; all over the world, not every participant in the struggle for liberation was sober. In fact, the stress of it all drove many radicals into their graves either through booze or drugs, and even through sex.
Miriam was far more active than I in civil rights causes. She even attended Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta. I stayed so high that I missed many historical events that were taking place right under my powdered nose. We played Symphony Hall in Chicago during the summer of 1968, on the day that the riots were at their full fury, yet we didn’t learn about the events that had taken place until we landed in Cleveland the next day and read the morning papers. Stewart and I had been prohibited from entering Mister Kelley’s, where Cannonball Adderley was playing, because we were not wearing ties. We cussed the manager, jumped back into our limousine, and returned to our hotel to get higher, while the riots were taking place all around us. Many delegates to the Democratic Convention stayed in our hotel. The hotel manager tried to impress us by telling us he had rejected the Mississippi delegation and booked us in their place. We didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about.
The spring and summer of 1968 turned out to be one of the most insane periods in my life. I went totally nuts. We hired the accounting firm of Pilger and Dubey to manage our finances. Except for my Jaguar, Philemon Hou’s MG roadster, and Peter Davidson’s car, our clothes, the hi-fi set, bedroom linens, housewares, a few pieces of furniture, and my trumpet, everything was leased. Lou Pilger assured us that this was the wisest way to manage our money. All of my earnings were paid into Chisa Record Corporation, whose sole directors were Stewart and myself. We were making money hand over fist, but we hardly owned anything. Many people tried to coax me into buying property and invest in other businesses, but I wasn’t listening. Some people warned me that Stewart, Lou Pilger, and Paul Dubey were exploiting me, but I was convinced that my funds were being managed properly. The only thing I put my foot down about was that once every month, my accountants send my folks money back in South Africa. Other than that, I followed their advice. I was too preoccupied with getting high and getting laid and having a good time. Like so many artists before and after me, I didn’t think the windfall would ever end.
Around this time I took Mabusha, my nephew, from Miriam, who was now married to the activist Stokely Carmichael. Miriam had taken Mabusha from Barbara in Lusaka because she was having a difficult time minding him, working in the ANC office, and going to school. Peter, Philemon, Mabusha, and I lived in a big mansion on Queens Road. Out on the road I was having too much fun to mind the handling of my finances.
Shortly after the release of Promise of a Future, I was in New York playing the last night of a sold-out, two-week engagement at the Village Gate, when Jimi Hendrix came backstage. At this time Jimi’s career was flying high. He was the god of the guitar and jammed every night at The Scene, at 49th Street and Eighth Avenue, where he always invited me, but I wasn’t into rock jam sessions. The most beautiful women always surrounded Jimi. It was wonderful to hang out with him because he had a calming effect on me, and all the beautiful women around him made for some wonderful pickings. But unlike me, he had a cool and calm demeanor, spoke very little, and was very laid back. We had met at the Monterey Pop Festival and always talked about going on the road together. Jimi felt that most of his audience was white, and because I had such a large black following, the combination of Jimi, Sly Stone, and me would be a great way of integrating audiences.
After my last set at the Village Gate, Jimi and I ended up at a place called the Salvation. It was a beautiful basement club and disco with a stage, booths, a glass dance floor, great snacks, and waiters who were waiting to be discovered as singers, actors, dancers, songwriters, authors, and poets. In one night, just about everyone who had a top-ten record, or was in a hit show on Broadway or in a movie, would pass through the joint to network, cruise, meet a top drug dealer, or just plain hang out. Just about everyone who came to the Salvation was good looking and a sharp dresser. We loved the Salvation because it was a “members only” establishment. We were not members, but our celebrity was our entrée. Most of all, the food was gourmet quality, the drinks were top-shelf, and the women were some of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitian to the bone.
Thelma Oliver, a stunning black woman who played opposite Gwen Verdon in the Broadway hit show Sweet Charity, came to see us perform at the Village Gate one Sunday, her night off, and I invited her for a drink at the Salvation. I had seen posters of Thelma, and like many others, I was an admirer of her coffee-brown beauty and dancer’s body. That night we had drinks, and in the days that followed I became absolutely besotted. She was alarmed at how little time it had taken me to fall completely in love with her, but after a week she opened up and seemed to develop similar feelings for me. Then, hardly two weeks after we met, she told me she was leaving with the show for Paris. I was devastated. This was the first time I had really fallen boots and
all for a woman since my divorce from Miriam, two years earlier. Saying good-bye to Thelma was painful, especially because she was still smiling that beautiful smile of hers as she waved to me from the taxi on her way to the airport. For the next two days I didn’t feel like leaving my hotel room. For a while there, I lost my appetite for the smoke, the blow, and the drink. The guys in the band couldn’t figure out what was the matter with me, and I wasn’t saying anything. I felt lost and alone again. It was only when we played that I revived.
11
ONE OF THE WAITERS at Salvation, Mario, a young gay lyricist who claimed to be working on songs with Ashford and Simpson, had been telling me for weeks that a girlfriend of his by the name of Chris was dying to meet me. I never paid much attention to him. I was hanging out with Jimi again, hitting the night spots, dance clubs, and restaurants around New York with his entourage of beautiful women. He would say, “Hey, forget about Thelma, she’s gone, and she ain’t coming back no mo’, but dig it, there’s a whole lot of them where she came from. Let’s hang and have a good time. You gotta bring your horn and blow with me at The Scene.” But I just couldn’t bring myself to go and jam with Jimi.
One night Jimi and I were at the Salvation, enjoying the funky music of the house band, the Chambers Brothers. I had been slipping out to the bathroom for a hit of coke between cognacs. Mario knew that I didn’t like my glass to be empty, so he kept coming around to top me up. Around midnight, he sidled over to our table and whispered, “Hughie, can you come over with me for one second? I want to introduce you to someone who wants to meet you desperately.” I followed Mario to a booth where Toma Gero, a famous designer who used to make clothes for Miriam, was sitting with this light-skinned, freckle-faced, bubbly beauty, dressed in an elegant black pantsuit.
“Hughie,” Mario said, “this is Chris Calloway.” Chris took my hand in both of hers, smiled her bewitching dimpled smile, and asked me to sit down. Mario brought a bottle of Dom Perignon to the table and uncorked it with a loud bang. After a while, I looked over where I had been sitting and Jimi was gone.
We ended up at Toma’s spacious eight-room apartment in Chelsea, where Chris lived with Toma and her two little daughters. After more than three hours of nonstop conversation about Chris’s Broadway show, Hello Dolly, and all of my questions about her father, Cab Calloway, whom I was dying to meet because I had seen him in so many of those half-hour sepia shorts in the movies back home, I left their flat when the sun was already up. Chris and I had not taken our eyes off each other the whole night. I thought I had found the cure for my Thelma Oliver blues.
The next night, Chris and I had an early dinner before her performance in Hello Dolly, which starred Pearl Bailey and her father, Cab. Chris was playing the comedic role of Miss Marmelstein in the show, which had the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter. After the show, we went back to the Salvation and enjoyed another long evening of endless conversation. The following morning I had to catch a flight back to Los Angeles. We phoned each other several times a day. Whenever I had a few days off, I flew to New York to be with Chris. It must have been a month or so after we met that we fell madly in love. I would rent a limousine that would take us to White Plains, where we hung out with Chris’s dad and mom, their neighbors Moms Mabley, the Gordon Parks family, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and many other Mount Vernon luminaries. Moms Mabley was a pure joy and affectionate, but Chris’s mother, Nuffie, was very guarded, just like Pearl Bailey when Chris introduced me to her backstage. They both extended their arm from far away to greet me, their brows furrowed. Chris told me not to mind them. Chris took me to the Parkses’ home—she had grown up with Gordon Jr. and his brother, David, who were extremely funny. Gordon and his wife treated Chris as if she were their own child. Ossie and Ruby were just as cordial. By the looks of the gigantic homes they lived in, I assumed that these were all very wealthy people—I was being introduced to yet another hidden stratum of American life, a black elite that I hadn’t ever really seen before.
Cab and I hit it off hard. He loved when I told him about the movie shorts I had seen him in, especially when I imitated how he sang, did some of his steps, and described his zoot suits to a T. He would laugh and set me straight on his contributions to this game: “I was the first hip cat and I introduced the hip language, like ‘slap me five’ and ‘yeah, daddy-o.’ You know what? Them young bebop cats stole a lot of my words, like ‘hep,’ which they changed to ‘hip.’ They’ll never admit it, but if it wasn’t for me, we’d all still be square.”
Nuffie would just look at her husband and shake her head, while Cab and I were roaring with laughter and throwing back that Dom Perignon. None of these folks seemed to care about my number-one hit or my newfound celebrity because they had been celebrities for decades. They were more interested in South Africa, my parents, whether I wrote my mother, the languages I spoke, when I would be going home, and all the rest of the stuff that Marcus Belgrave’s people had asked me back in Chester—only in more refined English.
Toma Gero was preparing to leave for Europe with her children to visit their father for the summer. Chris was going to have the apartment to herself. I moved in with her right away. By the beginning of May, Chris was visiting me regularly in Los Angeles, where we would spend most of our time at Stewart and Susie’s Malibu Beach home getting high, laughing, and loving. A few weeks later I asked Chris to marry me, because I wanted to be intimate with one person and have a real home. It was too easy playing around with a lot of women and hanging out with Jimi from club to restaurant to after-hours joint. I was keen to have some children and raise a family. Chris came from what looked like a stable, secure family background, and that appealed to me. I pictured us driving the kids to visit their grandparents in White Plains, my in-laws fussing over them, Cab and me shooting the breeze, sipping champagne on the porch, and going fishing. I ached for a stable environment, something I knew I couldn’t find in South Africa, because I wasn’t going back there anytime soon. With Chris, I felt the potential of that kind of warmth in our lives. Besides love, it was with this larger vision of a life in my mind that I proposed marriage to Chris Calloway. She accepted.
Word spread quickly of our whirlwind romance and upcoming wedding, but rather than a chorus of congratulations, I was surprised when I got warnings and catcalls. Friends started telling me, “Hughie, this is one move you are going to regret for the rest of your life.” “Hughie, Chris is crazy, man. Everybody knows that. Where you been?”
Billy Dee Williams, who used to date Chris, warned me, “Hughie, I lived with her, man. She is insane. She’s gonna drive you up the wall, brother.” I had met Billy Dee through Chris’s manager, a young black accountant named Dennis Armstead, who also managed the affairs of several other actors. Dennis accompanied us to many dinners, shows, parties, and clubs. Before long he and I became good friends—we shared a healthy appetite for XO cognac, vintage champagne, prime weed, and pure blow. Most of all, he loved fine women. A few other friends tried to warn me, but I was totally deaf to them on the subject.
On the other hand, Stewart, Susie, and the guys in my band liked Chris. With all my blow, smoke, uppers, downers, cognac, champagne, and wine, I never noticed any unusual behavior. To me, she was always cool, soft-spoken, sweet, and funny. And believe me, if she could keep up with the amount of substances that Susie, Stewart, and I were consuming, the girl was okay by me. We were convinced everybody was slandering her out of jealousy and envy.
The Calloways were excited about our wedding, which would be at their White Plains estate. Nuffie had grown to love me, and Stewart was going to be my best man, my band members the ushers. Bernard Johnson, Broadway’s top designer of clothing at the time, would be doing the men’s outfits. We planned to fly in Toma from Europe to do the maid of honor’s and bridesmaids’ clothes. Nuffie marched us through the motions in the gigantic gardens of her estate, briefing us on how the ceremony would go down, from the back porch through the trellises to the gazebo, where the minist
er would marry us. The guests were going to be the who’s-who of the entertainment business, Mount Vernon’s upper-crust black families, and my hanging partners. My blood relatives were all back home, and Barbara was in Zambia. I had lost touch with the South African community in New York since beginning my new life in Los Angeles. My family back home was so preoccupied with their own problems and trying to survive the apartheid nightmares that all they could wish me was happiness. They were very appreciative of the monthly check I was sending, and never tried to tell me how to live my life. My mother prayed for me every day.
Although Chris was happy, she seemed detached from the wedding plans. Her younger sister, Cabella, spent a lot of time with me in her upstairs bedroom, where we could view the entire estate gardens while we smoked spliffs and philosophized about life. Her older sister, Lael, was very quiet and spent most of her time with her mother. I spent hours drinking with Cab and talking about his band and all the people he’d trained, especially Dizzy Gillespie, whom he said he’d fired for his practical jokes. Dizzy always told me about how crazy Cab used to be, and vice versa. Cab assured me that Dizzy had learned everything he knew from him—scatting, humor, bebop, you name it. Cab could really run his mouth until Nuffie entered the room, at which point he’d straighten up and behave.
Still Grazing Page 27
