Live at the Fillmore East and West
Page 3
Back in Germany, Billy’s sister Ester, now age eighteen, had been liberated by the Americans from the Spandau Concentration Camp. She was now married with a young son and had started trying to reunite the family. First she tracked down Evelyn, who was living in Budapest, and then she found Sonja in Austria. But their beloved mother had perished in a concentration camp.
Ester worked at the Hanover branch of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and she asked her boss to try to locate her little brother Wolodia when he traveled to New York for a conference.
After making a few calls, he found the boy living with the Ehrenreichs. Ester then wrote to Wolodia after her boss brought back one of the family photographs the boy had taken to America.
It was a turning point for Billy. He was overjoyed that his three sisters had survived but heartbroken to learn his mother had perished in a concentration camp. Although there were no plans for an immediate reunion, Billy started corresponding with all of his sisters.
Reuniting with his real family gave Billy a new, positive outlook on life. He was now attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and his first reports were excellent. He was elected class vice president and joined the school swimming team, enthusiastically competing in all school athletic events.
He found his first job delivering the Bronx Home News for $5 a week, which he spent on the movies. He also did errands for the local grocers and butchers and was soon giving his foster family $10.50 a week toward his board and keep.
At seventeen, Billy Grajonca found a well-paying summer job, working as an office boy and messenger. Now a seventh-term honor roll student at DeWitt Clinton, he planned to work and attend college at night after his graduation.
During his senior year, he discovered what would be a lifelong passion for Latin music, becoming a regular at the Palladium at 53rd Street and Broadway. There he saw such top Latin music stars as Xavier Cugat, Tito Puente, and Esy Morales. On Wednesday nights he would dance to the mambo music until three or four in the morning. Years later, he would faithfully re-create the feel and excitement of the Palladium with the Fillmore East. Another of his favorite places was the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem, where he saw Cab Calloway and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
But the late nights never interfered with Billy’s schoolwork, and when he graduated he received a glowing progress report from his social worker.13
“Billy has grown from a distrustful, sly, underhanded, frightened little boy to a tall, good looking, outgoing, secure, warm and friendly young man with a fine sense of humor,” read the report. “He has many friends and varied interests, including school, all sports, reading and socializes with other boys and girls. [He’s a] well-rounded, likable young person.”
On April 13, 1949, Billy Grajonca applied for US citizenship, officially Americanizing his name to William Graham. It was the surname directly preceding Grajonca in the Bronx telephone book.
The 1949 DeWitt Clinton High School yearbook contains a photograph of a smiling William “Bill” Graham, a member of the swimming team, a color guard, and a contributor to the school’s Magpie magazine. His stated ambition was to become a physical education instructor/coach, and his graduating message was the simple toast, “To Graham.”
At the dawn of the 1950s, six-foot-tall William Graham sought the American dream. He worked part-time for $10 a week in a neighborhood tailor shop and had been accepted by Brooklyn College on a $300 scholarship to study engineering. But the self-confessed Mambonic spent the money on fashionable suits and ties for his dancing nights out.
“The Palladium is where I went to recharge my batteries,” he later explained. “Just take it and stick it in the wall. I’d come out hours later, feeling great. Get into the subway and get home maybe at four or four-thirty in the morning.”
After a few months, he decided to take a semester off from Brooklyn College and get a summer job so he could afford to go night clubbing in the stylish Harlem clothes he loved. There was big money to be made at the popular Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains, two hours north of New York City. And the enterprising young man found a job as a busboy at Grossingers Resort Hotel. He soon learned how to charm the restaurant guests he served, ensuring good tips. At the end of the summer season, when the work ran out, he returned to New York.
Now nineteen, he quit Brooklyn College and went to work at Davidson & Sons Jewelry Co. on West 47th Street for $45 a week. He was soon promoted to assistant foreman and for a time seriously considered becoming a jeweler.14
In late 1950, the US Army drafted William Graham for the Korean War, with orders to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey. It was a major blow, as his American citizenship was imminent, and he was planning to bring his sisters to America. His Davidson workmates threw him a going-away party, presenting him with a gold ring bearing his initials, “BG”—which he would proudly wear for the rest of his life.
After passing a physical, he was assigned to Camp Chaffee in Arkansas for basic training. One day he had a pinched nerve and was unable to put on his backpack for the daily ten-mile hike. When his corporal ordered him to do so, Graham replied, “Fuck you, Jack!” and was promptly court-martialed for insubordination.
After basic training, Graham shipped out to Japan on a huge troop carrier. During the long voyage he joined in the nightly craps games, soon discovering that the players got hungry. The entrepreneurial young soldier organized a restaurant delivery service, charging the craps players $1.50 for sandwiches and 25 cents for fruit, which he stole from the kitchen, where he worked during the day. He was soon selling more than a hundred sandwiches a night, even hiring another soldier to help him prepare the food. After the two-week voyage, he had made a profit of $3,700 ($36,000 in 2010 dollars) in cash, which he soon gambled away.
En route to Korea, Private Graham’s company was assigned to a Japanese base to prepare for action. But the aggressively outspoken young soldier soon ran into trouble.
“It was a corporal,” he later remembered.“Didn’t like big city guys and didn’t like Jews. He and I got into it one day, and he nailed me for insubordination.”15
Graham was then sent to the Korean town of Taegu as an artillery forward observer. And as part of a two-man team, he went into no-man’s land to sight out the enemy and report their positions on a radio telephone.
Early one morning, Private Graham’s reconnaissance team was attacked by four North Koreans, who shot one of his friends and beat up another. Out of ammunition, Graham fought gallantly, beating one of the enemy soldiers unconscious. Then, under full enemy fire he carried his injured friend on his shoulders three hundred yards to safety. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery.
Yet three days later, he found himself facing a full court-martial for refusing a direct order under fire.
“The captain sent us on a suicide mission to lay some communication lines,” he later recalled. “It was obvious to us that if we carried it out we had a 90 percent chance of ending up dead, as the enemy had all the high positions. I refused a direct order because I knew it would be suicide.”16
When Graham threatened to fight the court-martial and prove his case, the captain backed down and withdrew the charges.
“He was one of those gung-ho schmucks,” said Graham, “and about a month later he was going up the side of a hill gleaming, and the enemy just popped him.”17
A few days after Graham received his Bronze Star and a citation for holding the lines under enemy fire, Pearl Ehrenreich fell dangerously ill and Alfred requested immediate compassionate leave for his foster son. Initially the army denied the request, but when a second telegram arrived with the news she was on her deathbed, Private Graham was allowed to fly home.
He walked into the Montgomery Avenue apartment to find that his beloved foster mother had died two days earlier.
“Whatever positive things I have in me I owe to my foster mother,” he would lat
er say. “I was not an easy child to bring up. I was very angry at the world. She helped take away some of the bitterness.”
Three days after his twenty-third birthday, Billy Graham officially became an American citizen. He celebrated by formally applying for his sisters to come and live in the United States. A few months later, his oldest sister, Rita, arrived with her husband, Eric. She stayed in New York only a short time before settling in San Francisco.
A year later, he met his sister Ester Chichinsky at Idlewild Airport when she arrived with her seven-year-old-son, Avi. Billy’s two other sisters, Evelyn and Sonja, decided to remain in Europe.
After his army discharge, Graham enrolled in the City College of New York to study business administration. But he soon quit,18 heading back to the Catskills to make real money. He found a job waiting tables at the Concord Hotel near Monticello, where he served breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week. There he befriended another young waiter named Jack Levin, who was a couple of years older and married.
“Billy was a skinny little kid,” remembered Levin. “He was funny and full of life.”19
All the Jewish Catskill resorts had nightclubs, which were strictly off-limits to hotel staff, who were forbidden to mix with the guests. As Latin music was now all the rage in the Jewish resorts, the two waiters loved going to the clubs to hear the Afro-Cuban mambo music and dance with the female guests.
“Billy was a real ladies man, and we wound up doing a lot of things off-color,” remembered Levin. “He loved Tito Puente and Machito and was a great samba dancer.”
One night at the President Hotel, Billy Graham introduced himself to Latin music star Tito Puente, who was performing.
“And we hit off a great friendship,” said the salsa percussionist, “since he was in love with Latin music. He was a very good dancer.”20
On their rare days off, the two waiters would go to the Saratoga Racetrack. But whatever Graham won was usually lost a few hours later in a craps game. Soon he started running his own craps games at the Concord for the staff and guests.
“I organized the greatest craps games,” said Graham, “but I made more money from shill games. I was twenty-three years old, and I loved action, from the flea races in Canada to the dog races in Miami.”
He also rented a hotel room on the ground floor of the Concord, which he transformed into a gambling club, as well as operating a check-cashing service for resort employees, averaging around $300 ($2,650) a week in profits.
“Billy used to do very well,” said Levin. “We’d start the game at ten in the evening and finish up about six in the morning, and then go right back to work. He supplied all the cards, and he had hot food, beer and coffee.”
On a good night Graham could make up to $500 ($4,385), but usually he joined in the game and lost everything.
Many of the Catskill resorts’ stars, such as Harry Bellafonte, gambled at Billy’s Cabana after their show. And he became friends with Eddie Fisher, with a photograph of them together even appearing in a TV fan magazine.
One day Billy announced that he was going to become an actor and was saving his money for stage school.
“He talked about it constantly,” said Levin. “That was his first love.”
At the Concord, Billy dated a waitress named Patricia Kern, who was working her way through university. She became his steady girlfriend for a couple of years, serving food and drinks at his craps games.
Whenever he had a free weekend, Graham caught the Friday-night bus to New York, hitting the Palladium for the mambo dance competitions, which he would often win. Then early Monday morning he’d be back at the Concord to serve breakfast, having been up for forty-eight hours straight.
The Concord maitre d’, Irving Cohen, whom Graham often compared to Captain Bligh, did not approve of his lifestyle. During his three years at the Concord, Graham was constantly feuding with his boss, who eventually fired him for trying to unionize the staff.
“He was a hippie,” said Cohen, who worked more than fifty years at the resort. “He had long hair and he wanted to wear an earring. He once told me he goes to Harlem to buy clothes. He said black people are two years ahead of us.”21
Back in New York, Graham found a job as a waiter at Ben Maksik’s Town and Country Nightclub on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, moving into a Greenwich Village apartment. He became a regular at the pickup basketball games on West Fourth Street, near his Waverly Place apartment.
He concentrated on launching his acting career and started going to casting calls and auditions. But the next few years were frustrating for Graham, with rejection after rejection.
“My heroes were Lee J. Cobb, Eli Wallach, Edward G. Robinson,” he said, “the character actors who made it not because they looked good but because they were good.”22
In early 1955, he drove cross country to visit his sister Rita and her husband, Eric Rosen, in San Francisco for a change of scene. He decided to stay, finding a job as a statistician and payroll clerk for the Pacific Motor Trucking Company. Then he flew back to New York to collect his things, arranging to drive an old New York yellow cab to Modesto, California, for a driveaway agency.
“That was an amazing, amazing trip across America,” he recalled. “A mattress that I was schlepping for my sister tied on top, a teddy bear bigger than I was—for her son—in the seat beside me.”
For the next two years he worked as a statistician, studying acting at night at the Mara Alexander School of Drama. Then he moved 260 miles north, working as chief paymaster for the Weaverville Dam Project. That job lasted just five months, and he returned to New York for another shot at acting.
He leased a tiny studio on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, working as a waiter in a Brooklyn nightclub and driving a taxi cab at night. He also took diction lessons and enrolled in Lee Strasberg‘s Actor’s Studio, studying in the same class as Marilyn Monroe. But his inability to remember lines proved a problem.
He joined Equity, using the stage name Anthony Graham because there was another actor called William Graham. And he had tiny roles in the movies Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Hatful of Rain, as well as a string of long-forgotten “B” movies.
As he turned thirty, William Graham lacked direction, with no steady job or real acting success. So he went to Los Angeles to go all-in on becoming a movie star. But the nearest he got to fame was waiting tables at a Rodeo Drive restaurant, serving such stars as Charles Laughton, David Niven, and Lee Marvin.
In 1960, Graham was visiting his sister Rita in San Francisco when he went on a casting call to play Big Julie in the musical Guys and Dolls. Also auditioning for a dancing part was eighteen-year-old Martyn Buchwald—who five years later would change his name to Marty Balin and start the legendary rock band Jefferson Airplane, which Graham would briefly manage.
“And he caused this furor,” recalled Balin, “just stopped the whole place because he kept telling the director how to direct his part. He had one line, and he just stopped the whole production—he was telling everybody how to work around him. The director finally kicked him out [and] we were all just sitting there watching this. He always had to be in charge.” 23
After nearly six months in Hollywood, Graham finally got a break when he was called back three times for a major role in a new TV series called The Law and Mr. Jones. He was even told he had the part, but at the last minute the star, James Whitmore, insisted on another actor, believing William Graham’s rugged looks could upstage him.
“He quit acting there and then,” said Hollywood acting coach Harold Guskin, who had become his friend. “It was a crushing blow to him. He could not take not being in control.”
In early 1962, deeply depressed and feeling a failure, Graham returned to Europe and spent a year bumming around. He lived in Paris, Madrid, and Valencia but was unable to settle down. He felt insecure and began to wonder if he had any real acting talent.
CHAPTER TWO
Carlos
As Bill Graham pondered his future in Europe, a rail-thin fourteen-year-old Mexican boy arrived in San Francisco with his parents and six siblings. Carlos Santana was born on July 20, 1947, in Autlán de Navarro, a tiny peasant town in the state of Jalisco. He had music in his blood, coming from a long line of performers.
Jalisco was the nineteenth-century birthplace of modern mariachi. A hybrid of Spanish, Mexican, and African folk music, it celebrated the triumphs and struggles of the Mexican people and was played at weddings, birthdays, and holidays.
It also has a key role in the elaborate Mexican courting ritual. In the strict Catholic countryside, where the sexes were kept apart, a young man courted a prospective bride through the serenata—a musical message of love delivered by a mariachi orchestra.
Carlos’s grandfather Antonino Santana played French horn in the municipal band in Cuautla, four hundred miles east of Autlán de Novarro. And soon after his son José was born in January 1913, he started teaching him violin.
When the Santana family moved to Autlán de Novarro, little José showed exceptional musical talent. As a teenager he joined the local symphony orchestra and played waltzes, polkas, and tangos, eventually becoming bandleader.
By 1940, José was a famous musician in Jalisco, when he married a local girl named Josefina Barragan. Over the next few years they would have seven children: Antonio, Laura, Irma, Carlos, Leticia, Jorge, and Maria. 1
“Everybody just loved my dad,” Carlos Santana would later tell Billboard magazine. “He was the darling of the town. Everybody wanted my dad to play at their weddings, baptisms, whatever.”2