DOROTHY WHEELOCK: As the features editor at Harper’s Bazaar, I sometimes had six or ten pages to fill when there weren’t enough new fashions. Once I did a nightclub piece, “Your Night to Howl,” and my husband and I went to about three nightclubs a night for almost three weeks.
When James Mason’s mother-in-law, who was from that big English movie family, came over, the only thing she wanted to see was Harlem. So we took her together with James and Pam to the Harlem Ballroom. Immediately the black guys asked the mother and Pam and me to dance. They had been sitting around at tables, having a drink, waiting for tourists to come in. But when James and my husband asked the black girls to dance, they wouldn’t dance with them. They were so mad because we were having such a good time. Those guys were very fancy dancers.
ALVIN REED: I was an excellent dancer, excellent. We did the mambo, we did the slop, we did what we called walk-the-floor—it was like a two-step. All the dance halls had live music; the dj’s didn’t come in until later on.
Live music was better. You had a partner, you looked in her eyes, you asked her name, you made conversation. Then when the dance was over, you’d take the young lady back to the table where you got her from. A lot of times her parents were there to kind of watch the young lady, to make sure she met the right kind of man.
“Hi, young man,” the father would say. “Have a seat. What’s your name? Do you work?”
MONTE IRVIN: There was a group called the Savoy Sultans that played at the Savoy Ballroom over on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streeets. That was the place to see great dancing, particularly the group that did the jitterbug, the lindy hop. Cootie Williams and Erskine Hawkins would always appear there and play great, great music.
We knew a lot about the Renaissance Casino because we used to play an annual college basketball game there. The Rens, a legendary basketball team, played at the Renaissance regularly: Tarzan Cooper, Eyre Saitch, Bill Yancey, who was a shortstop and a great basketball player. First there was a game, then there’d be a dance. Count Basie or Duke Ellington might be playing. We were very partial to Basie, Ellington, and Billy Eckstine. They were big baseball fans and stayed at the same hotels down South that we did when we were barnstorming.
I used to come to Harlem with Joe Williams, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella—guys from the Negro Leagues I hung out with. We’d go to Smokey Joe Williams, a bar on Lexington and 126th. Smokey Joe was the bartender there. Campy and I used to stop by and talk to him. He’d name some of the old Negro players. When we really wanted to relax, we’d take our wives to Sugar Ray Robinson’s bar on Seventh Avenue and 124th Street. Sugar Ray prided himself on the fact that he could sing a little; he was a pretty good dancer, too. There were jazz clubs all over the place, and that’s where we would hang out.
ALVIN REED: Harlem had a club on every corner, two, three of them, and they were all packed. You couldn’t wait to hit eighteen to get into the clubs. I actually joined the National Guard when I was seventeen—you were supposed to be eighteen—to get a photo ID so I could get into the clubs.
We went to Club Baron on Lenox and 132nd, Small’s Paradise, Count Basie’s, Well’s, Jock’s Place. A lot of those places, we’d go in, have a drink, and move on. The price was a little high for us. Sometimes we went to the Red Rooster at 138th and Seventh Avenue, which was mostly for professional people, politicians. Adam Clayton Powell—that was his hangout. Heavy conversations, political conversations—we didn’t stay for that.
MONTE IRVIN: The fellow who owned the Red Rooster was one of greatest Giant fans who ever lived. After I became a Giant, I’d leave him tickets and he’d come particularly to the afternoon games.
ALVIN REED: I started following jazz to be cool. You take a young lady out, show her a sophisticated atmosphere. She thinks, “Oh, this guy’s really heavy here.” But then I began to like it, not so much over the radio, as live. Live jazz was totally different. You see the expression on the guy’s face, you see the sweat.
MONTE IRVIN: The bars would usually close at four o’clock, but there were these after-hours clubs that would open up a minute after four. Nobody was ready to go home yet. We came along in a great era musically, a wonderful, wonderful era. Sinatra was just coming into his own; there was Harry James, and Ella Fitzgerald and all these wonderful, wonderful people would hang out in Harlem. There was Nat Cole—at that time he was playing the piano—he wasn’t doing much singing, but he’d be there. Joe Louis was around; he was a big jazz fan.
LACONIA SMEDLEY: If you came to Small’s Paradise late enough, and that’s what people did, you would have chicken with waffles and hear some very good jazz.
White jazz musicians would come in the hopes of sitting in with some of the jazz greats. I went to see the saxophonist Sonny Stitt play at Baron’s. A couple of white folks in the audience wanted to play, so Sonny’s piano player invited them up. They played pretty good, but what Sonny would do—he was very devilish—was run the keys. These folks were obviously more than just beginners, they were pretty proficient, but to be able to play in all the keys and improvise in all the keys was something else.
I was kind of conservative and focused on my teaching. I wasn’t the person to drink and smoke and go to bars. But a friend of mine, very relaxed where I was kind of uptight, would say, “Come on, let’s go out.” So we’d visit the clubs. I found it all very exciting because the energy of the people was so high and the musicians were so fabulous.
ALVIN REED: The Rhythm Club on 133rd between Lenox and Seventh was a club for musicians. All of them were in there: Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Cab Calloway, Bojangles—it was like a kind of private club. I guess it started off because a lot of blacks couldn’t always play downtown so they stayed there. They had really cheap meals. Down in the basement you could gamble. They had a little chalkboard for the musicians. You put your name on that board and what instrument you played, and when downtown needed a saxophone player they’d call up, and the guy on top of the list would go down. They’d cross his name off the top of the list, and everybody would move up. Meantime, they’re playing a little cards, they’re eating. That was how they got their gigs.
Every now and then the police used to come with the paddywagon and shoosh, all the people would come out in handcuffs into a lineup because of the gambling that was going on. Every now and then I saw my father come out in handcuffs. The next evening, they were all back there again.
LACONIA SMEDLEY: In the clubs of Harlem, people really let their spirits soar. If you are sensitive enough spiritually, you could actually feel the vibrations of those places when you walked in because the people who played there had left their essence behind.
9
All around the Town
LEONARD KOPPETT: The way of life that made New York City what it was in the fifties and sixties was peculiar to that time. New York had become the most affluent and influential spot on the face of the planet. And the people making decisions were forming their concepts of what was going on from what they read in the New York newspapers. Television was still new. Radio was rudimentary, essentially bulletin news. The newspaper was the major source of current affairs and features. “I read it in the paper” meant it happened.
In 1948, the morning papers were the Times, Herald Tribune, Daily News, and Mirror. The Times and Trib were a nickel, the News and Mirror were two cents. The afternoon papers were the Sun, Journal American, World Telegram, and Post. There were others: the Compass, PM; the Yiddish papers were also very strong.
BILL GALLO: Each newspaper had its own character. I envisioned the Times as an aristocrat smoking a cigarette with a cigarette holder. The Trib was a professor, not too concerned with money although well dressed, not pompous like the Times. The Mirror was a kid on the block running after things, while the Post was hard driving, intellectual, and liberal but with the tone of a loser. The World Telegram was a respectable sort of a guy who minded his own business. He was steady, wanting to improve all the time, and had a little more class than
the Journal American, which was the only one of the newspapers who didn’t know who it was. It had a sort of schizophrenic personality, gossipy one day, trying to start a war the next. But the Daily News was a person with a great sense of humor who was very sure of himself.
LEONARD KOPPETT: There was a strong rivalry between the Times and the Trib. The Trib was clearly the better paper in terms of the quality of writing and how it handled its coverage. Walter Lippman was still there. It was frankly Republican while the Times was Democrat but not quite open about it. However, the Tribune was badly managed, and after the war it started to get into financial difficulties, while the Times was brilliantly managed all along.
BILL GALLO: There was this great rivalry between the News and the Mirror. The Mirror was a Hearst paper but they couldn’t get the ads.
LEONARD KOPPETT: The World Telegram, which absorbed the Sun around 1950, was essentially wishy-washy, on the mainstream side, attracting straight, nontabloid readers of an afternoon paper. The people who read the Times and the Trib in the morning would read the World Telegram and Sun in the afternoon. Most people read at least two papers a day.
JACK LANG: I liked the Journal American. It was a Hearst newspaper with columnists like Dorothy Kilgallen and Westbrook Pegler and loaded with information about what was going on in entertainment and sports.
JOHN CAMPI: The Daily News was size and power. When I started working there, it was still on 42nd Street and, like most newspapers of that time, written and printed in the same building. When those presses ran, you could actually feel the building shake.
JACK LANG: Where they drop the ball on New Year’s Eve, there used to be a newsstand that sold all of the out-of-town newspapers. Every once in a while I would get a call to cover something for the daily Oklahoma City newspaper. Two days later I would go over to that newsstand, pick up that paper, and see my story.
BILL GALLO: At the News, the reporters would go out and get the story. Then they would phone it into the office, where a staff of rewrite men turned it into great copy. It was always a double byline.
There were real stars in the newspaper business. Jimmy Powers was the sports editor of the News. Ed Sullivan, John Chapman, and Mark Hellinger had columns. The Mirror had Dan Parker, Walter Winchell.
MICKEY ALPERT: When my parents were out, my sister would turn on the radio to Walter Winchell. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press . . . ,” he would say with the noise of the teletype in the background. It would scare the hell out of me.
From what I heard, Winchell was a very vindictive guy. The movie Sweet Smell of Success was based on him. The late and legendary press agent Mike Hall tells the story of how Winchell forbade the press agents in New York to go see the screening of the movie at the Loews State. They sneaked in, pulling up the collars of their coats to hide their faces. When they came out, there was Winchell across the street, making notes.
BILL GALLO: Winchell was a great newspaperman but a nasty son of a gun. When he started becoming a big deal at the Mirror, Patterson, the owner of the News, started looking for someone to counter his popularity. He found Ed Sullivan, who was originally a sportswriter and then a Broadway columnist on the Graphic, a newspaper that had a fake page one with fake photographs of dead bodies. Everybody knew it was a fake but they bought the paper anyway.
Ed Sullivan in 1954.
Winchell may have been a better columnist than Sullivan, but Sullivan knew everybody in New York, and he knew a good story—that was his talent. What you saw on television: the deadpan expression, the bent posture—that’s the way he was. He never improved, and he never got worse. But he was a very decent man.
Sullivan began his television show Toast of the Town on Channel 11, WPIX, which was owned by the Daily News. Later he moved to CBS. The Ed Sullivan Show ran for twenty-five years. At the start, all the acts came on for free in return for a line or two in his column. He made no bones about it. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their first television appearance on that show. Nobody knew who they were then.
ROBERT MERRILL: Most of the people on the Toast of the Town sang songs from Broadway, movies, popular things. But when I appeared early on in the show, Ed felt I should do an aria. It worked out very well; I went on to do about ten or twelve more shows with him.
MICKEY ALPERT: I was working for Joe Levine, the movie producer, when he bought the movie of the ballet of Romeo and Juliet with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. I called Sullivan’s office and said, “How would you like the balcony scene with Fonteyn and Nureyev dancing for your program?”
He came to look at the picture at 1301 Sixth Avenue, a fabulous screening room in what was then the J.C. Penney Building. He said, “Thank you. I’ll take it; I’ll use it Sunday.” It was great for us, great for him.
Sunday I’m watching the Giants football game in the afternoon. They announce, “Tonight on The Ed Sullivan Show . . .” and mention all the acts, but not Fonteyn and Nureyev. I watch the whole program; it’s not on. I’m ready to have a heart attack. The next morning, I call him. “Something happened,” he says. “I’m going to use it this Sunday.”
The next Sunday, again I’m watching the Giants football game, and again they announce, “Tonight on The Ed Sullivan Show . . .” Only this time, they say Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Thank God.
I watch the whole program; he doesn’t run it. I call him the next morning. “Myron Cohen looked so great in the dress rehearsal that I used him instead,” he tells me. The comic Myron Cohen bumped Nureyev and Fonteyn.
Who am I to argue? He’d have five singers, put them all on in a row. Then he’d have four comedians with a juggler in between. Whatever he did, it worked.
Once Federico Fellini was here for a picture called Juliet of the Spirits, and I made an arrangement with Sullivan for him to take a bow from the orchestra. Fellini was furious. He didn’t want to go. He was invited someplace else. I said, “No, no, you have to come with me to The Ed Sullivan Show.”
I take him to the show. He’s sitting in the orchestra for the whole thing. Finally Sullivan says, “And out in the orchestra tonight we have the director Federico Fellini, who’s here for his new picture, 8 1/2.” It’s live, it’s over, that’s it. Fellini hardly spoke English. The only words he understood were “Fellini” and “8 1/2.” He wanted to kill me.
BILL GALLO: Ed Sullivan was this Irish guy who married a Jewish girl, Sylvia. They had a great marriage. Sylvia was crazy about Ezio Pinza, who played the lead in South Pacific. One Sunday morning the bell rang in their apartment at the Delmonico Hotel. Ed said, “Sylvia, you answer that.” She opened the door, and there was Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”
MARGARET WHITING: I was in Ed’s apartment at the Delmonico many times. His daughter Betty and I were good friends. But it was always such a hurried environment. Secretaries would be booking people. Producers would come in. Phones would be ringing.
BILL GALLO: Ed Sullivan and Walter Winchell had a big rivalry, and our editors hated Winchell because of it. After the Mirror folded, Winchell came to our managing editor and offered to work for no salary. He was turned down. You would think that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t. Every Saturday he would come up to the Daily News city room, sit on the bench and tell tales of his newspaper experience. The editors just ignored him.
MICKEY ALPERT: For a while he worked for the Journal American. Then they cut his column to one day a week. Then he worked for Women’s Wear Daily. He was just trying to hang around.
BILL GALLO: Winchell was once one of the most powerful men in America, and now he was done.
MICKEY ALPERT: He was scraping until he died. And only a couple of people came to his funeral.
After the terrible newspaper strike around 1962, ’63, the Mirror was the first to go. The Journal, World Telegram, and Sun, and Herald Tribune closed around the same time. As the Trib folded, they put together a Sunday supplement called “New York,” edited b
y Clay Felker. That was the start of New York magazine.
BILL GALLO: Dick Young was one of the most famous and widely read sportswriters of his day. A lot of people didn’t like him because he was so outspoken. But he was a real New York sportswriter, a good man, and my best friend. To give you an idea, when Larsen pitched the perfect game in the World Series of 1956, Joe Trimble was covering the Yankees. He had a deadline to get the story in, but after the game, he suddenly started to sweat, got up and walked away from his typewriter. “Get Dick Young over here, please,” he said to me.
In a second, Dick knocked out the line “Don Larsen, the imperfect man, pitched the perfect game.” Period. As soon as Joe Trimble saw that, he no longer had writer’s block. He was able to write a beautiful story that won awards. But it wouldn’t have happened if Dick Young hadn’t given him that impetus.
At Dick’s retirement party upstairs at Gallagher’s, about 150 newspapermen were present. A lot of people offered tributes and stories. Finally, Joe Trimble got up and told the Don Larsen story. “I never told this story,” he said, “and what’s more, and what makes me feel so good about it, Dick Young never told this story either.”
At the News, we competed with all the other newspapers to get the story first, to get the scoop. That all changed with television. Once one of my heroes, Tony Marino, got a tip that something was going to happen in a hotel barbershop. Tony went up there with a photographer and saw the mafioso Albert Anastasia shot. The News got the exclusive on that one.
But overall there wasn’t that much crime in New York City in the postwar years. The News invented Willy Sutton. In reality, he was a dull kind of character with a pencil-thin mustache, a loser who spent most of his life in jail. He read a lot because he had a lot of time to read. He never killed or hurt anybody and only had a fake gun, which is what he used to escape from jail. But he had that one good line. When they asked him why he robbed banks, he said, “That’s where the money is.”
Manhattan at Mid-Century Page 20
