Today, Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is crowded with fifty-story media high-rises. At twilight on a wintry evening with all the lights on in the offices at Newsweek and Rolling Stone, as steam billows from beneath the streets, in the honking traffic and the rumble of the D train, the air is humming “Lester Leaps In” as I walk past a sign that reads “Swing Street,” on the side of a loading dock.
Before World War II, when Fifth Avenue in the Fifties was still known as Millionaire’s Row, this block of Fifty-second Street was lined with brownstones. The upper stories, which earlier in the century had housed upwardly mobile, middle-class families, now provided shelter for fringe denizens of Broadway—sign-painters and private detectives and the freelance “shooters,” who, their pockets stuffed with flashbulbs, prowled the neighborhood nightclubs looking for a picture that they could sell.
Encouraged by the thousands of servicemen flooding through the neighborhood on their way to war, the ground floors and damp basements had been converted into tiny night spots—the Downbeat, the Spotlite, Kelly’s Stables, the Yacht Club, the Famous Door, and half a dozen more—some no bigger than apartment living rooms, charging stiff prices for watered-down cocktails. On any night, you could hear virtually the entire history of jazz from New Orleans and Dixieland to swing and bebop as you walked up and down the street—“The Street.” “Unquestionably, the most exciting half a block in the world,” tenor player Dexter Gordon called it in Ira Gitler’s Jazz Masters of the ’40s. “Everything was going on—music, chicks, connections—so many musicians working down there side-by-side.”
In the late fall of 1944, Gillespie and Parker cut the first bebop “sides” for Savoy Records in Newark: “Groovin’ High,” “Dizzy Atmosphere,” “Salt Peanuts,” “Hot House.” The following May, they took a quintet into the 3 Deuces. Many of the clubs along Fifty-second Street were controlled by shady operators, but the Deuces was different. It was run by Sammy Kaye, a tough Jewish kid from Brooklyn who’d been to Minton’s and dug the music and didn’t try to tell the musicians how to play it. “The height of the perfection of our music,” Gillespie wrote, “occurred in The 3 Deuces with Charlie Parker.” The music was jerky and dissonant. Its jaggedy rhythms and breakneck tempos reflected wartime’s fractures and dislocations, but it was cocky and struttin’, the first indication of what life might be like after the war.
Using a no. 5 reed, the thickest available, Bird could make his alto sound like it was coming from the center of the earth. Dizzy raised his eyes to heaven as he blew, the goatish tuft beneath his lower lip bobbing as he unfurled cascades of eighth-and sixteenth-note trumpet blasts that rose high above the traffic outside. The run at the Deuces was the first time that white critics and the culture at large got to hear the new music, and Dizzy’s reputation began to soar. It was Diz who won the Esquire jazz poll, Diz who got the profile in The New Yorker, not Bird. Blowing musicians all considered Charlie Parker to be the fountainhead of the new music, bebop’s soul. In his book To Be or Not to Bop, Gillespie defines “hip” as “in the know,” “wise,” or “one with the ‘knowledge’ of life.” To the outside world, Dizzy Gillespie was cool’s first ambassador; but the insiders knew better. Dizzy was hip. Charlie Parker was cool.
Dizzy exploited his newfound celebrity with his own line of bebop clothes, manufactured and marketed by the Fox Brothers out of their shop on Roosevelt Road in Chicago. “Order YOUR leopard skin jacket as worn by Dizzy Gillespie—Now!” demanded a Fox Brothers ad, “Just $39.50!” The heavy, horn-rimmed glasses that Dizzy wore became known as “bop glasses” or simply “bops.” Likewise, his floppy polka-dot bow ties became “bop ties”; berets became “bop caps.” “Bop in here,” trumpeted the ads, “and let Fox build you a crazy box!”
Fox Brothers had been founded by Harold Fox, a former big-band leader whose father operated a piece-goods woolens business in Chicago. In the late 1930s, the younger Fox started noticing zoot suits being worn by what Meyer Berger of the New York Times, possibly the first life-style reporter, called “the hep-cats and swing-mad kids.” Though he was quick to credit the zoot suit’s inspiration to the ghetto, Fox took credit for giving it and its components—the “reet-pleat,” the “reave-sleeve,” the “ripe-stripe,” the “stuff-cuff,” and the “drape-shape”—their names, through which he paid tribute to the rhyming slang employed by many of his black customers. Fox came up with the word “zoot,” he claimed, because it started with the last letter of the alphabet, the coolest, most laid-back letter of them all.
The end of the war was bad news for Fifty-second Street. The soldiers were going home. After a few servicemen got mugged, the military made The Street off-limits. The few joints that weren’t padlocked had to turn to strippers to survive; the brownstones themselves began falling to the wrecking ball. By the end of 1945, even Diz and Bird were looking at Swing Street in the rear-view mirror. The Parker-Gillespie band took a six-week booking at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood.
L.A. wasn’t ready for bebop. The local papers nixed the music, the audiences were openly hostile, and Billy Berg sided with his customers. He told Gillespie and Parker to start playing more-familiar music. They reacted in very different ways. Diz wasn’t about to compromise what he was doing, but he knew how to make people laugh. “If you want to make a living at music,” he wrote in To Be or Not to Bop, “you’ve got to sell it.”
Diz tried hard to woo Billy Berg’s crowd, announcing that he was going to introduce the band, then introducing them to each other, wiggling his butt in time to the music, directing the band with his trumpet as he duck-waddled across the stage. To Bird, what Diz was doing was “Tommin’.” To Diz, Bird was falling apart—shooting dope, gobbling handfuls of Benzedrine, staying up for four or five days at a time, missing shows. When he did show up at Billy Berg’s, Parker nodded out on the bandstand. He named a tune after his heroin connection, a crippled shoeshine-stand operator named Moose the Mooch, then signed over the ownership of the tune to its namesake for fifty bucks’ worth of H. Ross Russell, who would later become one of Parker’s biographers (Bird Lives), owned a Hollywood Boulevard record shop and Dial Records, which released some of Charlie Parker’s greatest music, including “Cool Blues.” Russell says that Bird loved the word “cool.” To him, “it denoted all good qualities and situations under control.” Bird told people he’d shot heroin since he was twelve years old. Now, at twenty-five, heroin had become his world. When he had enough to shoot, he was cool.
With everything that was going on, the rest of the band couldn’t wait to get back to New York. When Gillespie handed out the airplane tickets, Bird cashed his in and disappeared. On the morning that the band was scheduled to leave, drummer Stan Levey spent twenty dollars racing around L.A. in a cab in a futile effort to find Bird.
Once the band left, Parker moved into a cheap hotel on the edge of Little Tokyo and started playing at a club called the Finale. One night, he set his bed on fire. Another night, he came down to the lobby to make a phone call, naked except for his socks. He ended up handcuffed to a bed in the psychiatric ward of the Los Angeles County jail, and was ultimately remanded to the state hospital in Camarillo, where he was hit with multiple shock treatments. Once, according to Miles Davis, he almost bit off his tongue.
Joseph Bayer called his elixir heroisch, German for heroic, because that’s how it made him feel: calm, powerful, detached, cool. Introduced in 1898 and aggressively marketed by the Bayer drug company, heroin was soon widely prescribed by doctors for the suppression of coughs. By the time the American medical establishment realized that heroin was addictive and sought to criminalize it, thousands of ordinary, law-abiding citizens were strung out. According to Jill Jonnes’s history of drug use in America, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, after the Harrison Act went into effect in 1915, as many as fifty American cities opened clinics to supply heroin to those who’d been inadvertently addicted—with the aim of gradually weaning them from their habits.
When more than a thousand people a day began queuing outside the Worth Street clinic in Manhattan, it attracted the attention of Arnold Rothstein—“A.R.,” the man suspected but never convicted of fixing the 1919 World Series—a gambler, rumrunner, financier, and real-life inspiration for Jay Gatsby’s shadowy friend Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. The idea that junkies would kick heroin voluntarily turned out to be wishful thinking. Less than a third of Worth Street’s nearly eight thousand clients went on the program, and the last of the clinics was shut down within a year. Rothstein, who had been one of the first gangsters to exploit the economic opportunities presented by Prohibition, recognized a market. He started buying heroin in Europe, where it was still legal, smuggling it into the United States in hollowed-out bowling balls, and distributing it through his network of bootleggers.
Rothstein was murdered in 1928. By the mid-1930s, one of his foot soldiers, a Sicilian-American thug named Charles Lucania—better known as Lucky (so named in honor, people said, of his having beaten nineteen consecutive criminal indictments) Luciano—had clawed his way to the top of the American heroin trade. Luciano lived a life of lurid celebrity, with his own private plane and a suite in the Waldorf Towers, until he was toppled by New York State Attorney General Thomas Dewey, who succeeded in having Luciano and some three hundred other Sicilian-American gangsters deported to their home island in the late ’30s.
The Sicilian Mafia was no friend of Mussolini’s Fascisti, whom they regarded as interlopers on their turf. Thus, in the months preceding the 1943 Allied invasion of Italy, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence approached the Mob for help. The undercover role actually played by the exiled gangsters has never properly been documented, but after the war, Thomas Dewey, by now governor of New York, pardoned Luciano, and Lucky returned to the States. Heroin began flooding into America’s black ghettos while American police authorities looked the other way. In the mid-1950s, the FBI’s New York office had four hundred agents battling communism, and just four investigating organized crime. Yet between 1947 and 1950, heroin-related admissions of African Americans to the federal prison hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, quintupled.
Jazz historian Lincoln Collier estimates that as many as 75 percent of bebop musicians in the 1940s and ’50s experimented with heroin. Billie Holiday spent the war years on Fifty-second Street, she said, wearing white gowns with white shoes, “and every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.” Miles Davis got hooked when he came back from Paris in 1949 after he and Juliette Greco fell out of love. Junk destroyed the great trumpet player Fats Navarro. Denzil Best, the drummer on Birth of the Cool, overdosed and died. The list goes on and on. “In the end,” says Gerry Mulligan, who got hooked while he was playing saxophone on Birth of the Cool, “the carnage was immense.”
Poet Amiri Baraka calls heroin addiction “one-upsmanship of the highest order.” He argues that heroin’s popularity among African-Americans derives from the drug’s ability to “transform the negroes’ normal separation from the mainstream into an advantage” by creating a clique in which only the most alienated are welcome. Junkies have to be cool, because junkies can’t afford to attract attention. Everything has to be understated, circuitous, metaphorical, communicated in code. Loud voices are uncool. Hurried, overstated behavior is “too frantic, Jim,” as the junkies used to say.