Blues in the Dark

by Raymond Benson

  The camera moves around the building as the voice-over resumes.

  “Central Avenue was where it was at for the Negro community. Everyone went to the Dunbar Hotel to see and be seen. It was where the black entertainers stayed, since they weren’t allowed to use white hotels. Mind you, they could perform in white hotels, but they couldn’t sleep there! The strip in front of the hotel was for cruising, where the locals showed up to hold up the wall and show off their new threads.

  “Next to the Dunbar was Club Alabam, a hugely popular nightspot for jazz, and just a few doors down from that was the Downbeat Club, a more intimate setting where the audience could see a show by the likes of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie—up close and personal.”

  We are now inside the Dunbar Hotel, moving through its grand art deco lobby with Spanish arcade–like windows and open balconies.

  “I would sometimes accompany Hank to the Dunbar on nights we thought not too many people would be there. After all, our relationship was controversial on both sides of the color line. Musicians and show-business people tended to accept us more than regular folk. The Negro movie stars like Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson and Louise Beavers didn’t seem to have a problem with seeing one of their own with a white woman.”

  The camera moves into a small lounge, a cocktail bar, with room enough for a piano on one side. Hank Marley is sitting at the keyboard, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Ray Webster stands next to the piano with his upright bass, thumping away as the pair play lively acoustic jazz pieces. The place is packed.

  “The Turban Room was a little place downstairs inside the Dunbar where Hank occasionally played with Ray Webster, just as a duo. There wasn’t enough room in there for his full band, although they often played in the larger Club Alabam out back, the Downbeat Club, or a place called the Last Word, across the street.

  “There was one evening that I had to work late at the studio shooting The Dark Lonely Night. Hank was at the Dunbar with Ray, doing what he did best …”

  Ray Webster launched into an opening riff for Earle Hagen’s “Harlem Nocturne,” arranged for piano and bass, which was one of Hank Marley’s signature pieces. When his fingers hit the keys, the patrons applauded and oohed and aahed in appreciation. Hank grinned broadly and nodded at the listeners.

  “Thank you, thank you kindly.”

  The music didn’t stop the chatter, though. The Turban Room was a bar, not a concert hall. The musicians played as drinks were served, cash flowed, and people socialized. Cigarette smoke filled the crowded room, the lighting was low, and the ambiance was cool and smooth. Hank loved to play at the Dunbar, often more so than in the bigger joints that paid better. There was something about the intimacy of the place, the closeness of the customers, and the one-on-one sparring with the young bass player he had hired. Ray still had a lot to learn, but he was good—damned good. They made a swell team.

  The next song in the set was “Woody ’n’ You” by Dizzy Gillespie, which was an unusual piece to be heard on just piano and bass, but they made it work. Hank swayed and bounced his shoulders as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Ray emitted a moan of delight as he felt the spirit of the music. He plucked the strings of the double bass with verve and abandon. When the tune was done, the entire room burst into applause.

  Hank spoke into the microphone on the stand beside the piano. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I must say you’re all looking mighty fine tonight all decked out in your going-out clothes. I see a whole lot of beautiful people. Yes, sir. Ray and I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.”

  There were some affirmative shouts of joy.

  “Good, good. Here’s a little number that is something of a personal piece for us.”

  The duo launched into a dreamy version of “Blues in the Dark,” and Hank sang in a passionate, woeful timbre. For a moment, the conversations in the bar ceased completely as the song cast a spell over the crowd. Women closed their eyes and smiled. Men moved in place with the melody. It was three minutes of pure magic. The applause that erupted when the music stopped indicated how potent the arrangement was.

  “Thank you, thank you. You are all very kind. Well, Ray and I are going to take a short break. We’re the Hank Marley Duo, and we’ll be back in a little bit. Don’t go away now, y’hear?”

  Hank and Ray nodded at each other and left the band area, which was more of a corner than a stage, and slithered through the crowd. Ray stopped at the bar to get a drink and Hank went out of the lounge, upstairs, and into the hotel lobby. He greeted several acquaintances, including the acclaimed architect, Paul Williams. It was a sea of lovely black faces and a handful of whites, but the woman he’d hoped to spot wasn’t there.

  He went outside and greeted Delbert, the doorman, and offered him a smoke.

  “No, thank you, Hank, not while I’m on duty, sir.”

  Hank tapped a cigarette out of the pack for himself. Delbert was ready with a light, and Hank allowed the man to fire it up. “Thank you very much.” Then he walked north along Central to the Club Alabam’s awning. The doorman there, Eugene, also greeted Hank. A poster proclaimed the appearance of Joe Turner, a blues singer who had appeared in Duke Ellington’s musical revue Jump for Joy. Hank knew Curtis Mosby, the club owner, and probably could have ducked in for a few minutes to listen to a couple of numbers before heading back to the Dunbar, but he decided to continue his stroll outside and enjoy the cigarette.

  He passed the Downbeat Club, crossed 42nd Street, and kept walking north at a leisurely pace, nodding at various pedestrians and couples who were strolling in the opposite direction. Music from the various clubs on the block drifted through the night air, creating a muffled, but pleasant, cacophony of clashing melodies and rhythms.

  Blair …

  Hank often wondered if he was doing the right thing with her. The relationship could hurt her career. Although opportunities for black people in Hollywood had improved during the past decade, it was still a segregated, closed world. The precious white stars had to be protected so their public images remained sanctified. All in the name of the box office dollar.

  He had read in the Sentinel that a case could be going to the state courts that challenged miscegenation laws. If that passed, then he and Blair could get married. Even so, that didn’t mean it would be accepted by her studio. Was it selfish of him to keep the relationship going? The problem was—he really loved her. He had been with several women in his thirty years on earth—all black, of course—and he had loved several of them. Blair, though, was different, and it wasn’t because she was white. Joe Hardy, a fellow he played cards with sometimes, said something the other night about that. “You only like her ’cause you’re getting some white meat.” Hank would have punched the man in the face if others at the table hadn’t held him back.

  Later on, Bobop, his trombone player, asked him over drinks, “Could it be true, Hank? That this is all about her being white? Don’t be mad, I’m asking as your friend. Do you know what you’re doing?”

  Sure, there was a taboo element to it. Something … foreign. But all that ceased to matter when he considered Blair herself. Blair could talk to him. She understood his moods and his tastes and his music. He loved her fire. The racial difference simply didn’t enter the equation when they were alone. It only came into play when they were with other people, outside the privacy of the bedroom.

  Lost in his thoughts, Hank didn’t notice the black Cadillac that passed him slowly heading south. It pulled over to the curb behind him. Besides the driver, there were three passengers inside—all white men.

  Buddy Franco got out with two cohorts—big, burly guys who might have been wrestlers. Without warning and with no concern that they could be seen by dozens of pedestrians, the men quickly moved behind Hank. One of the bruisers clasped his hands together to form a battering ram of knuckles and swung hard into the middle of Hank’s back. The musician toppled to the sidewalk.

  Women screamed. Men shouted, but no one
dared to interfere. These were white men. Undercover police? Probably. Don’t get involved. Walk away. Watch from a distance.

  The two thugs started to viciously kick the fallen man. Hank cried out as the hard shoes pummeled his ribs, his belly, his back, his legs, and his face. After a full thirty seconds of punishment, Hank Marley lay helpless, limp and bloody.

  Franco stooped to speak softly into the man’s ear.

  “Stop seeing Blair Kendrick. This was just a warning. The consequences will be far worse if you don’t do what I say. Do you understand, boy?”

  Hank could only groan.

  “Do you understand?”

  Hank nodded.

  Franco stood and gestured for the men to follow him back to the car. They got in and it took off down Central, turned a corner, and disappeared.

  The distant music from the jazz clubs faded away completely. Hank ceased to hear the traffic noise on the street next to him. There were muted cries nearby, and someone calling for help. He felt bodies near him, hands gently moving him, and words asking if he could hear what was being said.

  An eternity passed, and then he was aware of a familiar voice. “Hank! Hank! Delbert called an ambulance. Hold on!”

  It was Ray.

  Hank reached up and grabbed his bass player’s collar. “No …”

  “What? Hank, you’re hurt bad! We got to get you to the hospital—”

  “Just take me … home … take me home … no hospital.”

  “Hank—!”

  “I … mean it …”

  Ray Webster did what Hank asked. He enlisted some friends from the hotel to help him carry Hank to his car, and then he drove his injured friend to their home in Sugar Hill. Ray roused his wife, Loretta, out of bed to help attend to Hank in his room. Ray called the studio and left a message for Blair, who was busy shooting night scenes. Then, together, Ray and Loretta cleaned and bandaged up their friend and sat with him during the night, while their five-year-old son, Gregory, slept in his own room.

  16

  KARISSA

  On Sunday, Karissa decided to pick up where she had left off and continue exploring her house on Harvard Boulevard. Who knew what other treasures that belonged to Blair Kendrick she might find?

  The bedroom where the trunk was also contained several cardboard boxes. She opened them, one by one, and was disappointed to find mostly paperwork pertaining to Blair Kendrick’s activities at the studio, such as scripts and publicity stills. One box held a collection of the latter that were pre-signed, apparently to mail to fans. Karissa figured they might be of value. Autographed photos of a murder victim/actress present at the murdering of a Hollywood studio head? Someone could make a killing on eBay, but it wouldn’t be Karissa. She left the pictures in the box, save one that she would take to the office for inspiration.

  Inside another box were copies of the California Eagle, the oldest African American newspaper published in the western United States. Karissa knew that it had started in the late 1800s under a different name and was changed to the California Eagle not long after the turn of the century, staying in print until the 1960s. The box in the bedroom held various issues from the late 1940s.

  Blair had marked the issues on the fronts with a pen, indicating page numbers within. Karissa examined one and found a piece on Hank Marley and his band, who were appearing at the Last Word nightclub. Another paper had a photo of Hank and the band performing at Club Alabam. Yet another featured a photograph of the audience at the Downbeat Club—and there was Blair Kendrick at a table with Hank. The caption read, “Jazz musician Hank Marley out on the town with actress Blair Kendrick.”

  The last Eagle in the box was dated January 1949. Karissa recalled that Eldon Hirsch had been killed in July 1949. This might be significant, she thought, and so she went downstairs to her laptop computer and began to search various subjects via Google.

  First, she studied Blair Kendrick’s filmography. She had made three pictures for Ultimate that were released in 1947—A Kiss in the Night, The Jazz Club, and A Dame Without Fear. Three more movies came out in 1948—The Dark Lonely Night, The Love of a Killer, and The Outlaw Lovers. The IMDb website indicated that Blair had begun production of a picture called The Boss and the Blonde that was to be a 1949 release, but production was never completed. It had been scrapped by the studio in January of that year.

  Karissa searched online for The Boss and the Blonde but found very little to explain why the studio had canceled the film. Apparently, it was to be yet another film noir with Blair playing a gun moll to a powerful mobster who was none other than James Cagney. The actor had not portrayed a gangster since the 1930s. It was to be something of a return to that type of role for Cagney. When The Boss and the Blonde was stopped, Cagney instead made his mobster comeback for Warner Brothers in the classic White Heat.

  Next, Karissa looked for any information about Blair Kendrick in January 1949 and found a couple of references to the cancellation of the title by Ultimate Pictures, but again with no reason why it had happened. A search for her name in February 1949 produced no results. The same was true for March and April. Then, when Karissa typed “Blair Kendrick May 1949,” She was linked to a scholarly article on a political website that referenced a Los Angeles Times story on the House Un-American Activities Committee and its “Red Scare” witch hunt. Fortuitously, in the same column and in a sidebar unrelated to the main piece, Karissa discovered one of Hedda Hopper’s gossip columns. “Where is Blair Kendrick?” Hopper asked. “The feisty blond actress has not been seen or heard from in Hollywood since her last starring vehicle was canceled by Ultimate Pictures. When I spoke to studio executive Buddy Franco about it, he replied that Blair had become gravely ill and production was halted. Franco wouldn’t elaborate on Blair’s condition or where she was convalescing.”

  Wow. What the hell had happened to her?

  Karissa printed out the page and continued to look for further mentions of Blair in the following months. Nothing in June. Then, in July, the murder of Eldon Hirsch. Lots of hits there with speculation that Blair Kendrick had witnessed it and was killed by the perpetrators. The charred body by burned cars on Mulholland Drive, identification made by the jewelry—her signature pearl necklace—that the corpse was wearing, and the subsequent burial in Westwood cemetery.

  What was the mysterious illness she had contracted? Had she experienced a “nervous breakdown,” as they called it back then? Karissa had to admit that Blair Kendrick exhibited a recklessness by having a love affair with a black man in the late 1940s. It could have been detrimental to her career—and perhaps it was.

  Karissa’s initial instincts to create a film around the actress, portraying her as a femme fatale who, in real life, had been a victim, seemed to make more and more sense. But why was Ultimate Pictures so dead set against her making the picture? Something wasn’t clicking.

  She decided to research the history from another direction. She googled “Hank Marley 1949” and found a few hits about his disappearance: he was reported as a missing person in early February of that year. That meant he had most likely vanished in late January—the same month that Blair Kendrick had become “ill” and her movie was canceled.

  A coincidence? Karissa thought not.

  The California Eagle had been archived online, where it was accessible and free to the public. Karissa searched for mentions of Hank within the paper and found plenty dated throughout the late 1940s. However, there were no links to issues in 1950 or ’51, though there were a handful for 1952. Karissa clicked on each one, and every time she was sent to a page that proclaimed, “Sorry! This issue is missing from the archives!”

  That’s odd, Karissa thought. She then remembered the other newspaper that catered mostly to African Americans—the Los Angeles Sentinel. She looked for archives online and learned that they were accessible at the UCLA Library.

  Hm. Field trip.

  The Charles E. Young Research Library was an impressive building on the north end of the UCLA campus
. As Karissa walked the familiar grounds of her alma mater, she reminisced about the many hours she’d spent here preparing for exams, writing papers, or researching various topics that piqued her interest. While the UCLA library was comprised of several physical locations, the research library was perhaps Karissa’s favorite. It contained documents, books, journals, newspapers, and digital files from all over the world in many languages.

  Inside, Karissa located the microfiche for the Sentinel, which was first published in 1933 and still in circulation. She went through the index to locate dates and issues in which Blair Kendrick and/or Hank Marley were mentioned, but they were mostly duplications of news in the California Eagle. She then wrote down the entries from 1952 and went to collect the film. Once she had the microfiche threaded into a machine, she scrolled to the appropriate issue.

  The microfiche abruptly ended. In fact, it had been cut. The rest of the film was still spooled onto the small reel. She threaded the remainder and saw that the page she’d been looking for was missing. It was as if someone had deliberately deleted it from the archive and hadn’t bothered to splice the fiche back together.

  Karissa spent the next hour checking the other 1952 reels. They, too, were missing the pages she wanted. She picked up the various reels and took them to the help desk.

  “I want to report some vandalism on these microfiches,” she said to the librarian, carefully displaying the damaged microfiche.

  “That’s horrible!” the librarian said. “Thank you for pointing it out.”