Daddy had two lessons on the bass. As she had done through the years while we were being taught, Mommy sat in the room crocheting and listening. After the second lesson, the teacher said, “Donald, you’re going to have to practice more.” Daddy was working two jobs, hiring halls, cooking sausages. When was he going to find time to practice? Mommy didn’t say anything. The next week the teacher came. Mommy had the book; she had practiced. She played for the teacher, and Daddy was out, Mommy was in.
Mommy came in on bass. Rita came in on the piano. When we practiced in our tiny living room, Linda on drums was in front of the picture window, Jeanette on guitar and Donna and I on tenor and alto sax were in front of the fireplace, Rita on piano was against the wall, and Mommy on bass was at the top of the stairs going down to the kitchen so she could smell if dinner was burning. We would practice and practice and practice. We loved it. All of us. We were family and it was fun.
5
Show Biz
WHATEVER MONEY THE THORNETTES were bringing in, that much and more was going out on lessons, music arrangements for the band, maintaining the instruments, and material for the dresses Mommy made for us to wear when we played, which meant that Daddy kept right on working his two jobs: as a janitor at Fort Monmouth on the night shift from midnight until eight in the morning and during the day making deliveries of home heating oil. He lived in dread of missing a mortgage payment, for fear the bank would immediately foreclose on the house he had labored so hard to build, and his worst nightmare threatened to come true the day his supervisor at Fort Monmouth, a civilian, called him in, saying he had heard a rumor that Daddy was moonlighting on a second job.
“This is your main job,” the supervisor said.
“I know that, sir,” Daddy told him respectfully. “I’m just tryin’ to make a little extra money. My kids are fixin’ to go to college someday.…”
The supervisor cut him off. “I’m putting you on days.”
Daddy pleaded with him. “But the more I begged,” Daddy reported later, “the more he just kept sayin’, ‘This is the job. Be here Monday morning.’ He got me so upset, I went to see the army officer in charge and explained it to him why I had to stay on nights, and the major went back to the supervisor and told him, ‘You leave Thornton alone. He don’t take no sick leave. He don’t take no annual leave. You let him stay where he’s at.’”
So, all was well … until a Friday night six months later when the major sought Daddy out to shake his hand and tell him he was retiring. “Oh, my God, the super’s got me this time,” Daddy moaned to himself, and, sure enough, he was called in on Monday and told to report at eight Wednesday morning.
“I begged him again,” Daddy said. “It’s the only time I ever got down on my knees to a guy. I told him, ‘I’ve been drivin’ the oil truck all winter through the cold and the ice and the snow. Just let me work two more months. If the oil company has to get a new man now; he don’t know the stops, the tanks is covered with snow and he can’t find where they’s at, and I’ll miss out on my end-of-season bonus which I really need for my kids.’
“He just looks at me and says, ‘Report on Wednesday morning.’ The guy wanted to screw me, really wanted basically to make life hard for me. He could’ve said, Yes, Donald, I understand you’re strugglin’. That’s what I say: There’s some white people that are very good, and there’s some white people that when you’re tryin’ to do something, they’ll knock you down.
“So now I had to tell the oil man I had to quit. He says, ‘Don, this is a bad time to be leavin’ me,’ and I says, ‘I know it is, but I got no choice.’ I really felt bad. I began to go down in my mind because everything I had planned seemed to be goin’ out from under me. I knew I had to have more money. The bank isn’t gonna understand that guy givin’ me a hard time, and they’re gonna take my house if I can’t meet my mortgage.”
There was a diner across the street from Fort Monmouth, and Daddy walked in there and asked if he could wash dishes at night. “I asked in such a way that the man said, ‘All right, you come on in.’ So when I was through during the day at Fort Monmouth, I started washin’ dishes at this diner at night.”
Daddy also began to cast around for a way for the band to make more than just break-even money. We had been watching Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour on TV for years, and when one of the contestants who had won became famous overnight, he said, “Hm-m-m. That’s it. That’s us.” He told Jeanette to write the program a letter about the Thornettes, except to refer to us as the Thornton Sisters because it sounded more professional, like the King Sisters and the Andrews Sisters.
The “Amateur Hour” answered, telling us to come to New York for a tryout. We piled into our old car—Mommy, Daddy, five kids ranging in age from seven to fourteen, all the instruments; we looked like gypsies—and drove to Radio City in New York. It was 1959, the era of teeny boppers, and the place was jammed with mothers and kids, the kids jumping around with nerves and excitement. We were just as excited but did as we were told and sat with Mommy and Daddy until it was our turn. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Next!” shouted the man doing the auditioning.
“That’s all right,” said Daddy, driving home. “We’ll go back and we’ll make it the next time.”
We had already been practicing one and two hours a day as a band, in addition to each of us practicing individually for our lessons. Now we upped the practice sessions to two and three hours a day, and back and back we went to audition.
One day the magic words came. We were in! We were accepted! The Ted Mack Amateur Hour! TV! The whole school prepared to tune in. All of Long Branch. Daddy went to his Fort Monmouth supervisor and said, his tongue in his cheek and wanting to get even with him, “I got to thank you for putting me on days ‘cause that’s given me the chance to get my kids on television.”
Daddy studied the Ted Mack show as though he were the coach of a team on its way to the Super Bowl, searching for an edge, an advantage we could exploit to win. “Whatever it takes, kids, That’s what we got to do.” After a time he announced, “I got it. That Ted Mack is Irish, and what wins on his show is people doin’ the Irish jig. You’re gonna have to learn to do an Irish jig.” “We’re gonna dance and play at the same time?”
He pointed out that Linda had a drum solo in “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid,” the song that was our specialty, and while she was doing her turn, Donna and I could put down our saxophones and dance a jig. It didn’t occur to us to say that doing an Irish jig to a jazz tune was incongruous, only slightly, less incongruous than little black girls doing an Irish jig at all. We were so used to taking Daddy’s word that it never crossed our minds to say, “Hey, that’s stupid.”
We did object to our costumes, however, complaining that we would die of the heat under the lights, but Daddy insisted that every inch of us had to be covered, everything but our faces and hands. “Nobody’s starin’ at my girls,” he growled, stipulating that the skirts of our jumpers must cover our knees and that we must wear tights under the jumpers, along with high-collared blouses, blazers, and loafers.
The big day arrived. Waiting backstage to go on, we were keyed up but not nervous because we weren’t one person going out there but a unit, all of us sisters and Mommy supporting and strengthening each other. Daddy had often illustrated the strength there is in numbers by grabbing a stick from the pile of kindling by the fireplace and snapping it in two. “See how easy it is to break one of something?” he told us. Then he would pick up five sticks and try to snap them and they wouldn’t break. “See, kids, if you stick together, you can’t get broken. So long as you help each other, cover for each other, support each other, you’ll be okay.”
So, going out onstage, we felt good about ourselves, and because of Daddy’s insistence on solid training, we had great confidence in our music. We stepped into the spotlight expecting to win.
“And now, from Long Branch, New Jersey, an instrumental group—the Thornton Sisters!”
Te
d Mack singled out Mommy. “Are you all really sisters?”
“They certainly are, Mr. Mack. I’m their mother and I should know.”
“Does Mr. Thornton play a musical instrument?”
“No, he just buys them for us.”
“Ah, he buys them. Well, he ought to be entitled to listen then.
All right, let’s hear you.”
The scripted lines were not great, but the audience chuckled appreciatively. And then we were playing. And jigging.
We came in second. The real Irish jig dancers came in first.
Even so, driving back to Long Branch, we were ecstatic. This was show biz! We were in it!
“No, you’re not,” cautioned Daddy. “Come Monday morning, you’re back in school. You still got to do your studyin’.”
With that native astuteness of his, Daddy sensed that the way to get to an ultimate goal is to set intermediate goals along the way. The next goal he targeted for us was Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. If an act won four Amateur Nights in a row, the prize was a week’s engagement at the Apollo on the bill with stars.
Practice and study. Study and practice. That’s all we did. Friends, dates, social life, none of these existed for us. If a girl invited one of us over, we said no, we had to practice. If a boy invited one of us to a movie, we said no, we had to practice. Rather than feeling deprived, though, we were actually a bit smug. I used to wear the neckstrap of my saxophone to school so the kids would whisper, “She plays saxophone. She’s one of the Thornton Sisters.”
We let it drop that we were going to New York to record, carefully not mentioning, of course, that we were recording for ourselves in order to detect where we needed to practice more. We begged Daddy to buy us an electric metronome, one that had a light, because with Linda on the drums, we couldn’t hear the ticking of the old metronome. When he priced the new kind of metronome and found it cost a whole week’s pay, he moaned and groaned, but he and Mommy decided that if that was what the band needed, he had to get it for us.
One day we found the metronome in pieces on the floor. “Who broke the metronome?” Mommy demanded. “Who broke the metronome?” No one answered. Four of us didn’t know, and the guilty one wasn’t saying. “Everyone of you is getting a beating if you don’t tell me who broke that metronome,” Mommy warned. Nobody confessed. “All right, I’m going down to the kitchen to do the ironing, and I’m coming back up in an hour. You’d better tell me then who broke it. If it was an accident, I can understand that, but I cannot accept not being told the truth.”
Mommy stalked down the stairs. We looked at each other. We sort of assumed that Rita had done it because she was the youngest and most likely to have been horsing around, but she denied it. We decided to stage a mock trial.
“Okay, Donna, where were you?”
“Down in the basement.”
“Jeanette, where were you?”
“I was studying.”
At the end of the hour we heard Mommy’s heavy tread on the stairs. She looked from one to another of us. No one spoke. “Get in the back room,” she ordered. She locked the door, pulled down the shades, and waded into us with Brown Betty, the broken sewing machine belt, roaring as she lay about her.
“Your father works so hard.…” Crack! “You kids don’t appreciate.…” Crack! “I’ll teach you to be truthful.…” Crack! “No- body’s talkin’—who can I trust?” Crack! And crack! And crack! We were crying and screaming. Mommy was hissing through clenched teeth. Then suddenly the whipping was over. Mommy unlocked the door and went back to her ironing without another word, and when next we saw her, she simply called us to dinner as if nothing had happened. When Daddy got home and heard about the metronome, he didn’t ask if we had been punished; the welts and the silence were eloquent enough. He took the metronome to be fixed, and from then on we surrounded it with pillows and no one could go near it without the rest of us chorusing, “Watch out for the light!”
The only other time I remember such a whipping was when Mommy had apparently called me for lunch and I was too busy preening in front of the mirror in the room I shared with Linda and Rita to hear her. The next thing I knew she was at me with Brown Betty, hitting me anywhere she could strike while I screamed, “What did I do? Mommy, what did I do?”
“I called you twice. You didn’t answer. You didn’t say, ‘Mommy, I’m coming.’ When I call you, you’d better say you’re coming or you’re in the bathroom or whatever because I’m not screaming my lungs out. You got to have feelings for other people. It’s rude and inconsiderate not to answer when someone’s calling.”
I’m a swift learner. From then on, when she yelled, “Cookie!” I answered instantly, “Yes, Mom, what do you want? I’ll be right there.”
A strict family rule prohibited us from taking a shortcut across the railroad tracks to get to school because over the years several children had been struck by trains. But one day Donna and Jeanette were late and reasoned that Mommy was at work and wouldn’t see them crossing the tracks. Nowadays you have to worry about neighbors molesting your kids, but not so long ago they looked out for them, and what the neighbors saw quickly reached Mommy’s ears. Donna and Jeanette knew better than to deny their wrongdoing, which saved them from a whipping but earned all of us one of Mommy and Daddy’s lectures.
Always when we did something wrong, they sat us around the front-room table elaborating on what could happen to us if we didn’t listen to them. “We’ve told you time and again not to cross those railroad tracks, but you’re late and somebody says to cut across, and a train could have come and killed you.” And, with a sudden shift of subject, “That’s why teenagers get pregnant—because somebody says, ‘Oh, this one time’s not gonna hurt.’ Or somebody says, ‘Oh, one drink isn’t gonna hurt you.’ If you listen to that, you’re weak minded, and weak-minded people end up in trouble. You have a mind. You got to use it. If somebody comes along and says, ‘I’m gonna lead you to the Promised Land,’ you got to say to yourself, ‘Now wait a minute. Where is this guy comin’ from?’ You have to think things over because you could get hurt.”
Their lectures were far more effective than whippings. When a whipping was over, it was over and the pain eventually subsided, but their words stuck in our minds. It could be years later when something would happen and you’d say to yourself, “Hey, I’m not going to do this because Mommy and Daddy said …” Their precepts never left us because there was nothing abstract about them; they were vivid and memorable.
In the summer of 1959, a few months after “Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour” show, Daddy decided we were ready to try for the Apollo Theatre. The Apollo was like Mecca to black people. Everyone knew about Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Sammy Davis, Jr., and all the other greats who had gone on to stardom from the Apollo. Everyone knew that theatrical agents and record companies were on the lookout for new talent at the Amateur Nights. Everyone knew that the audience was discriminating and that if you could win four Wednesday nights in a row and earn a week’s paid engagement with the stars, you had solid talent and were on your way to fame and fortune.
We knew it, too, and every Wednesday morning for two months that summer, we piled ourselves and our instruments and our hopes into the old car, trundled over the Pulaski Skyway, past the American Can Company, through the Holland Tunnel, up to 125th Street in Harlem, and waited in the basement of the Apollo Theatre to be allowed to audition. Daddy asked the guy in charge, “What does it take?”
The guy shrugged. “Keep coming back,” he said.
We did. Every Wednesday morning we were there, people—all blacks—breathing on us from every side, everybody tense, restless, praying to be called to audition and become one of the five or six acts that would go on that night. There were singers, tap dancers, comedians, couples, quartets, but no other bands, particularly no other groups as young as we were. We looked like the schoolgirls we were; perhaps
it was hard to take us seriously. Until we finally got a chance to audition. We were taken seriously then, and we went on that night, playing “Funny Face,” an upbeat jazz tune in which each of us had a solo, but this time no Irish jig. Tradition at the Apollo had it that amateurs going out onstage touched a wooden stump for luck, the remains of a chestnut tree under which unemployed entertainers had once gathered on a street corner hoping to pick up jobs from booking agents. That first night we went on, we touched the stump, and when the master of ceremonies called all the acts out onstage at the end of the show and held the envelope containing the winning prize of twenty-five dollars over the heads of each of the acts in turn, the Thornton Sisters got the most applause. We had won! We could come back the following week.
When we left the Apollo that night, a man came up to Daddy and said he had just heard us perform. He then leaned down and kissed nine-year-old Linda on the cheek and said that, despite her age, she was one of the best drummers he had ever heard. That man was Illinois Jacquet, the great jazz saxophonist.
We told Daddy that touching the stump had worked, it had brought us luck. He snorted. “You make your own luck. That piece of wood’s got nothin’ to do with it.” After that, we just pretended to touch it when we went on stage. Instead, we had a ritual of our own: We would stand in a circle backstage, like a team in a huddle, and each of us in turn put out one hand, stacking them one above another but not touching—touching would break the spell. We would concentrate. Break away. And make our entrance.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 8
