“That’s right, Dutch,” said Bo, brushing an imaginary speck from his lapel.
Dutch was so agitated he finally took a sip of my beer. “Not bad,” he said, wiping his lip with his sleeve. “How many times do you have to shoot a guy before he falls over and stays down?”
“Only once if you’re doing it right.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Damn right it is. People have been saying the same thing about me since 1912, and I’m still here.”
“Something tells me Legs ain’t going to be so lucky.”
I was getting the picture loud and clear. “Are you askin’ me or are you tellin’ me?”
“Think of this as a courtesy call,” said Otto Berman diplomatically. “Mr. Schultz has come here to inform you of some of his business plans, because—”
“Because of, you know,” blurted Dutch.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Mr. Madden doesn’t know, Mr. Schultz,” said George.
“Arthur, I think it best if we—” said Otto.
This was starting to get me sore. “What is it that I don’t know?”
Even with all the music and the noise and the clinking of glasses and the dancing colored girls, the Cotton Club seemed a very quiet place to me all of a sudden.
Then Mary Frances spoke up. It was the first time she’d opened her beak all evening. “You don’t know what Legs has been saying about you. And your sister.”
Well, now I was plenty sore. “What kinds of things?”
Mary Frances tossed back her curls. “Rumors. Boasting. The usual mug stuff about guys and dolls.”
If Legs was there, I would have shot him on the spot. “Did he say anything about my sister?”
Otto wiped some sweat off his brow. Frenchy put a hand on my shoulder. “You know how mooks are, Owen. All talk, no action.”
“So you’re gonna have Bo pop Legs,” I said, trying to calm down. “I’m sorry for this, May.”
She looked kinda pale. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Eventually,” said Dutch. “He’s hidin’ out upstate somewhere, but we’ll find him, and when we do, Bo and Abe and Lulu’ll be there and that will be the end of Legs Diamond. Tough break about whatever broad he’s banging. I hear the new one is quite the dish. Kiki something. If she was a blonde…”
“What about the other half of your problem? Coll? I thought he worked for you.”
Dutch, as usual, was ready with an answer. “He did, but he just popped one of my boys, Barelli, over nothin’. Killed his sister too, just ’cause she was there. Guy’s a fuckin’ madman.” Dutch got an idea; I could see it in his eyes. “Say, why don’t you put him down? He’s one of yours.”
“A Kildare lad, through and through. Folks live in the Kitchen.” I shook my head. “He’s just a boy, Dutch—can’t be more than seventeen, eighteen.”
“That’s a man in my book.”
“I’ll think about it.”
My eye caught a signal from the doorman, whose name was Bert. As you know from riding trains and dealing with Pullman porters, all colored boys are named George, but we already had so many Georges around that I decided that all the black boys who worked for me would be called Bert, after Bert Williams, the great entertainer, and none of them seemed to mind.
Bert and me had a whole series of hand signs that woulda done Urban Shocker and his catcher, Pat Collins, proud. This particular one—a tug of his doorman’s cap, followed by a brush on both lapels—meant there was an urgent message for me, that the messenger was going to deliver it in person and that the messenger was jake.
To my surprise the messenger was none other than Boo Boo Hoff, who’d come straight up from Penn Station. I’d always told my boys I like good news over the phone and bad news delivered in person, and here came Boo Boo, so I could guess what Clarence Robinson’s answer was, and now it was up to me to formulate a reply.
“What’s the word, Boo Boo?” I asked as he approached our table. He featured the gang and stopped, taking off his hat like a good boy.
“Could I have a word with you in private, Mr. Madden?” he asked.
“Sit down and have a beer instead, you’ve come a long way,” I invited.
“Gee, thanks.” He couldn’ta been more nervous if he was face-to-face with his Maker.
A waiter rushed over. “A beer for Mr. Hoff, and would you mind going up on the roof and getting me a piece of cardboard what’s lining one of my pigeon cages at the moment?”
The Cotton Club waiters knew better than to ask questions, and so in two shakes of a lamb’s tail Boo Boo had his beer and I had my cardboard, which was fairly dripping with pigeon shite.
“Gimme a pen, George. One that writes.”
Frenchy took out a splendid Cross in the shape of a baseball bat I’d given him as a present in honor of Ruth’s hitting sixty home runs that summer. I turned away from the group, rubbed away some of the ordure and started in to writing.
“What the hell you doin’?” asked Dutch, but I wasn’t finished.
“Makin’ a medical suggestion. There.”
I turned back to the group and showed them what I’d scrawled on the liner:
“BE BIG OR BE DEAD.”
I handed it to Boo Boo. “Take this back to Robinson and tell him I expect Ellington’s band to be at Pennsylvania Station by two tomorrow afternoon, checked in to a colored hotel by three o’clock and up here playing at the club by seven.”
Boo Boo jumped to his feet and made ready to grab the sign.
“Finish your beer first,” I said.
Chapter Forty-Four
I’ve mentioned that our business interests were flourishing, and so they were. Everybody was makin’ money, honest or otherwise, and more important, everybody was spending it. Stock pickers couldn’t rake it in fast enough, coppers couldn’t put their hands out quick enough and bartenders couldn’t set ’em up smart enough. It was like a giant wheel of money that just kept spinning and while the smart eggs knew it had to stop someday, the suckers just kept plunkin’ down their dimes, hoping to take one last ride.
Looking back, I guess you could say that 1929 was more or less my high-water mark, just like the rest of the country. The clubs Larry and I ran were going gangbusters. Thanks to Winchell and Runyon, Texas Guinan’s name was in all the papers and mine wasn’t.
The brewery was operating at full capacity. Me and a dapper little Hebrew named Joe Gould were investing in various fighters, including the heavyweights, so I got to go to plenty of fights at the Garden and profit from them too. I lived at the top of 440 West 34th Street and raised generation after generation of Columbidae. My sister and my mother lived in a big flat on the floor below, and I was paying for a place for my brother, Marty, at 452 West 96th, telephone Riverside 9–4313, where he was nightly entertaining a nice young lady named Kitty.
Mary Frances and I saw each other on the nights she wasn’t with Dutch. I could tell the state of their affair from the color of her hair, and on this evening it was darker rather than lighter.
“You ever gonna get married?” she asked. We were lying on my bed, with the view east into the city. Even flat on my back, I could see down 34th all the way to the Waldorf on Fifth, north a little to 405 Lexington Avenue, where the new Chrysler Building was going up, and let me tell you it was some sight, even without its topper.
Ignorant of school learning as I was, I nevertheless had a great appreciation for fine architecture, and Mary Frances was one of those rare dames who was more beautiful without her clothes on than she was with them on, not needing the purple mantle most women rely upon to make their way in the world. She was still slender, small-breasted and narrow-waisted, her diadem set off against the changing color of her topside.
“I am married,” I reminded her.
MFB rolled over to reach for the cigarette case I’d given her. It was pure silver, embossed with her initials. The covers fell away from her and I got a good long look at her shape, smoo
th and round the way God intended such things to be, and at that moment, if I was going to love a woman, I guess I’d have to say I loved her.
“Match me,” she said. I did. “Love me?”
“What kind of a question’s that?” I replied, shaking out the match before it burned my fingers.
She took a deep drag and handed the fag over. “The kind girls like me ask.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only one left.”
I blew the smoke out of my lungs. It hurt. “Divorce is against my religion.”
She kissed me, hard. “So’s this.”
“Gotta pick your poison.”
I hate when girls cry.
“Would you, could you…ever?”
Mary Frances pushed the covers back and exposed my body from chin to toenails. I hated the way I looked, shot up and scar-tracked, but she knew each and every wound, had practically been present at their creation, and she kissed and caressed each one like it was an old friend. “You almost died that night.”
“Didn’t want to.”
“Me you neither.”
She rolled over, opened her arms and made her legs receptive. “I want to.”
“Me you too.”
We did it again, with the abandon of lovers without consequences. At times like this, what the Dusters done to me seemed like a small price to pay for my pleasure, until my pleasure was over, and then I remembered that it was just about the highest price a man could pay and still call himself a man.
I guess there must have been something stimulating about our conversation, because I gave a particularly good account of myself, and finally we both fell back exhausted, our duty done, to suffer the little death that comes to all lovers.
“I see the way you look at her,” she said. I was half-asleep. I took a wild guess.
“Who? Mae?”
She seemed surprised I’d got it in one. “And that’s okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? We’re both free, white and twenty-one.”
“Yeah, but—”
I threw my arms around her, ready for round three. “But nothing.”
“I never woulda thought—”
“Don’t think, then,” I said, smothering her tender mouth and drawing her breath into mine.
Chapter Forty-Five
Back to business. By now, even the feds had pretty much given up enforcing Prohibition, and Hoover trumped up a typical goo-goo commission, this one named after some clown called Wickersham, to prove that what they thought had been such a swell notion just ten years earlier that they went and amended the Constitution was now a rotten idea and what they needed to do was of course amend the Constitution again. This, I thought, was the true genius of goo-goos and reformers everywhere: that they never had to admit Reform was a mistake, and if it was, then all it took was more Reform to set it right.
I had the cops eating out of my hand, all except my old pal Branagan, who was starting to bite that hand what fed him, mostly in the form of small shakedowns from time to time. The problem with me and Branagan was that we each had too much on the other. He, my priors; me, his desires. Branagan had lost none of his taste for lasses, and here was the amazing part: that while he’d aged, the girls he went for hadn’t, which meant that it took some of the town’s more exotic establishments to keep both his big head and his little head happy.
So one fine day he demanded more than his usual, and I refused, and the result of which was that the cops padlocked the Cotton Club for a few months and fined me, but that was okay because it meant two things. One, that as far as I was concerned Branagan and I were quitclaim and two, I could fire the manager and hire two fellas who knew guns and broads and how to keep ’em apart: Harry Block, to run the place, and Herman Stark, to produce the shows. Herman was the smart guy who came up with the idea for the “Cotton Club Parades,” as well as the fella who told Harry to hire a little sheeny songwriter from Buffalo, which I did and here’s how.
One morning I had Hiram drive me up to the club to take care of some business. Hiram was my man now, and a better wheelman I never found. People looked at me strange when I called him my friend, because no proper white man was friends with the colored back then, but being Irish I was no proper white man in the first place and anyway Hiram and I went way back, and we had a lot more in common than we did with most others, plus we actually liked each other.
Funny how small a dump is with no one in it, at night, when it was packed to the rafters with swells, you could swear the whole City of New York was cheek-to-cheek, but at eleven A.M. it seemed forlorn and a little tacky. Power of illusion, and never underestimate it, whether in business or dolls.
Anyway, there was a swarthy kid sitting at one of the rehearsal pianos, fiddling around, and I figured he was one of the boys in the band, although I didn’t recognize him.
“Who’s that?” I said to Harry Block.
“Says he’s a songwriter.” Harry always had a seegar in his mouth, couldn’t live without one, and so he didn’t like to say much.
“Colored boy?”
“Jewish.”
“Name of?”
“Arluck.”
I ambled over, but Arluck was so lost in his tinklin’ of the ivories that he didn’t hear me coming. I listened as I approached; the tune was melancholy. I myself am partial to up-tempo numbers, but like most Irish I liked a sad song every now and then, especially when sung by a dish. He jumped as I clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t oughta let mugs sneak up on you like that, kid,” I said. “Ain’t healthy.” I looked at his notepaper. “Whaddya call it?”
He stayed cool. “ ‘III Wind,’ ” he said. “I call it ‘III Wind.’ ”
“Let’s hope none of it blows our way.” I leaned on the piano as we conversed. “You always write such sad songs?”
“Sometimes I do, if that’s the way I feel. Colored folks call it the blues.”
“Sing a little of it.” He did. “Nice voice.”
“My father is a cantor in Buffalo, New York. He taught me to sing.”
“So why ain’t ya singin’ there?”
“I’d rather be here.”
I liked this gonoph, full of moxie. “You know who I am?”
“I can guess.”
“Make you nervous?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Good answer. “You don’t mind working with colored?”
That got him a little riled, the way I hoped it would. “Mind? Mind! That’s why I came here—to New York City. To Harlem. To work with the best. The fellows in the band say I’m the blackest white man they ever met.”
“I bet they mean that as a compliment too,” I said.
“You bet they do, Mr. Madden.”
“Call me Owney.”
“No, I won’t. I’ll call you Mr. Madden until the day comes when I’m more famous than you are, and you call me Mr. Arluck.”
I shook my head. “That day ain’t never comin’.”
“Why not?”
I changed the subject. “What’s with the blues?”
Hyman settled down. “Not everybody’s lucky. Some folks have it tough. They can’t make the rent, their girlfriend’s left them—”
“Ellington’s got a number, ‘Mood Indigo.’ Something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’t like it as well as I like ‘The Mooche.’ ”
“Tough to choose, with Ellington.”
“Between the devil and the deep blue sea, huh?”
“Something like that. The blues are how they, black folks, express themselves. They’re how I express myself.”
I looked him over. He was wearing an okay suit and trying to grow a little mustache. “You don’t look like you’re so bad off. After all, you’re working for me.” I thought he would faint. “Fifty bucks a week. So start earnin’ it.”
“Okay!”
He launched into another number he’d written, a snappy
bit that had me tapping my toes. “It’s called ‘Get Happy,’ ” he said, pounding away. He was one of those guys who could play and talk at the same time. I never understood how they did that.
A girl, barely sixteen, was standing off in a corner, shy as all get out, listenin’ raptly. I motioned her over.
I had a rule about underage kids, having been one myself once. The whole notion of underage workers was just another screwy reform idea in the first place, but even gangsters had to observe it, at least in the breach, so the deal was we could hire as many of them as we could get away with, but any mug who so much as gave them a dirty look was out the door in a flash.
“What’s your name, honey?” I asked.
“Lena,” she said.
“Workin’?”
“Chorus line.”
I took a good look at her. The chorus girls wore nothing but a string of bananas, a couple of strategically placed leaves and a smile. On stage, she looked like a small bronzed goddess. To me, now, she looked like a star.
“Can you sing solo?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Madden,” she said.
I pointed at Arluck. “Can you sing his swill?”
She nodded. “We’ve been practicing.”
“Then hit it.”
I listened a few bars, that’s all it took. I reached in my pocket, took out a roll and peeled off a set of bills for each of ’em. “Here,” I said, handing Arluck and Lena a couple hundred simoleons apiece. “Buy yourselves a yacht.”
“But I get seasick,” said Hyman.
“Then buy yourself an egg cream,” I said. Egg creams were new back then and you didn’t even have to be Jewish to like them.
“What’s it really for?” asked Lena, smart girl.
“The future,” I said. “And, kid”—I’m looking at Arluck now—“lose the name. All the best people do.” A couple of weeks later he was callin’ himself Harold Arlen, a big improvement if you ask me.
But she was Lena Horne and that’s the way she stayed.
Chapter Forty-Six
And All the Saints Page 28
