3
Look at the Lights
Dressed in freshly shined shoes and a brass-buttoned suit, he dropped a suitcase in front of the swank Manor Plaza Hotel in San Francisco. His hair was conked—straightened with caustic lye—in the fashion of the day, carefully combed and shiny with pomade. Bowing, he extended a gloved hand to the Sunday-dressed woman. “Right this way, beautiful lady.”
She put a quarter in his hand.
“Thank you very very,” said the hotel’s new bellhop. It wasn’t the kind of work he’d dreamed of when he finished his Air Force hitch, but Clerow’s forty-dollar-a-week paycheck was more than a lot of guys had in a job market overflowing with returning servicemen.
Honorably discharged in January 1954, he’d ridden a troop ship from Guam back to the West Coast, under the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco, where he stayed. “There was nothing for me in Jersey City,” he recalled decades later. He stuck his discharge papers in a duffel along with his clothes, books, and a letter from Captain Spiker. The letter praised Airman Wilson as a popular entertainer, expert typist, and credit to his people. After dragging his belongings uphill through a winter fog, twenty-year-old Clerow found that typist was his most useful credit so far. Nobody was hiring comics to lecture about crabs, coconut or otherwise. But the Manor Plaza needed office help. “So I bellhopped from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, then worked in the office from six to ten at night.” His room in a Fillmore boardinghouse cost twenty dollars a week, leaving him enough in pay and tips to sample the nightlife.
This wasn’t the flowers-in-your-hair San Francisco of the sixties. The integrated, syncopated Fillmore District of the 1950s, often called the Harlem of the West, featured Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie headlining at the Fillmore Auditorium; Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane raising the roof at Bop City; and Billie Holiday singing the blues at the New Orleans Swing Club. In 1954 the Manor Plaza’s downstairs showroom featured another top headliner, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. Jordan, a sax player and singer with a pencil mustache over his Pepsodent smile, was a veteran star of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a string of nightclubs and music halls catering to black Americans that stretched from Chicago, Detroit, and New York through the dangerous Deep South to Texas. Along with Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Jordan ranked among the top black bandleaders of his time, and with 78-rpm hits like “G.I. Jive,” “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” he outranked them by one measure. Fans and critics hailed Jordan as the monarch of a popular new machine: he was “King of the Jukebox.”
Jordan was an innovator. His tight Tympany Five, cheaper to pay and take on tour than Ellington’s and Basie’s sixteen-piece orchestras, helped bridge the mid-century gap between the big-band era and the rise of rock and roll. His promotional film clips, called “soundies,” filled segregated movie theaters with Jordan’s silky singing voice, which one critic compared to peach brandy. Jordan’s soundies predated music videos by thirty years. His patter about cute “chicks” introduced the term as a synonym for “girl,” and his “Saturday Night Fish Fry” used “rockin’” in a new sense, to mean danceable music rather than sex—another reason Jordan is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the “Grandfather of Rock.”
Back in 1940 one of Jordan’s young rivals, bandleader Walter Barnes, had led his Royal Creolians through a one-nighter at one of the Chitlin’ Circuit’s homeliest dives, a converted hardware store at the edge of a swamp in Natchez, Mississippi. Workers boarded up the windows to keep gawkers from seeing the show for free, then decorated the rafters with dry Spanish moss and spritzed the moss with flammable Flit bug spray to keep mosquitoes away. Hours later, when a stray match set the room ablaze, more than two hundred dancers crowded the only exit. “Keep calm! Be cool,” Barnes told them. Lifting his alto sax to his lips, Barnes led his band into the song “Marie” while flames climbed the walls. According to Chitlin’ Circuit chronicler Preston Lauterbach, “With the final breath of his life, trumpeter Paul Stott blasted a note just as the inferno gulped the remaining oxygen, collapsing the tin roof and walls. . . . The flaming ceiling slumped onto the stage like a fiery curtain descending on Walter Barnes.” The Natchez fire, memorialized in songs by Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, and others, led Chitlin’ Circuit performers to shy away from small-town firetraps in favor of safer, more lucrative urban venues. During a gig at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater in 1948, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five grossed an unheard-of $70,000 in two weeks. (President Eisenhower worked all year to make $100,000.) Six years later the Jukebox King was forty-five, wearing a hernia truss under his lavender suit but still light on his feet as he stepped from his chauffeur-driven car to the curb at 930 Fillmore Street, where a young bellhop hustled Jordan’s bags to the door.
“Welcome to the Manor Plaza, Mister Jordan.”
“Thank you kindly, son.” Jordan gave Clerow a silver dollar. Their hands touched and Clerow felt a spark, a click. Jordan was already past him, scanning the lobby for photographers and swooning young chicks, or better yet women who were, say, twenty-five to thirty-five, like the majority of his wives—he’d had five so far—grown women who knew more than chicks knew of the arts of companionship. Jordan glided through the lobby with Clerow a step behind, forgotten, until the kid bellhop hurried ahead and told the puzzled bandleader his name.
“They call me Flip. Flip Wilson. I’m a comedian,” he said.
* * *
Most people didn’t call him much of anything during the days he split twelve-hour workdays between the bell stand and a manual typewriter in the hotel office. Women of all ages ignored him, but he didn’t mind. He figured chicks would come after him if he could get famous like Jordan, and at that point he’d deserve them. After work he slipped downstairs to the Manor Plaza’s showroom to hear Jordan’s brandy-smooth quintet. The crowd, well-dressed black couples with a salting of bohemian whites, danced to the jump blues of “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” and “Let the Good Times Roll,” the music floating up to neon Fillmore Street and beyond, sounding sweeter the longer Clerow nursed a glass of wine. The only lull came a little after one A.M., when the band took a breather and the lights came up. The spell was broken, stains on the carpet and ceiling revealed, the crowd milling around the bandstand, waiting. Each night a few bored couples wandered upstairs to see what was doing at street level and didn’t return.
Clerow cornered the manager, Willie McCoy, an expensively dressed, conk-headed skinflint who kept tabs on every free drink and salted peanut in the place. “Let me go on during the break,” he said.
McCoy said, “Go on and do what?”
“Talk.”
“Talk?” That struck McCoy as funny. “Talk’s not an act. I can talk.”
Baby-faced Clerow grinned. “You’ll sell more drinks. Give me five minutes.”
“Five minutes.” They shook on it, and the next morning Clerow risked fifteen dollars on a big, floppy stovepipe hat and a Salvation Army tuxedo. Everybody loves a drunk, he thought, remembering the Mosque Theater comic bawling “Open the door, Richard!” While Jordan and his band finished their first set, Clerow sipped white port wine with a dash of lemon juice, the Fillmore District drink of the moment. When Jordan bowed and led his Tympany Five off the bandstand, Clerow counted to ten. No hurry, he thought. Let it happen. With no introduction he stepped into the spotlight. Shielding his eyes, he said, “Bad day. I had a bad day today.” Pause. “Almost as bad as you all look.”
That got the patrons’ attention. As bad as they looked? They weren’t sure if this rumpled fellow was part of the show or just a lush on his way to the bathroom. He bumped into a drum set; customers smiled and pointed. Despite the wine buzz his mind raced, turning over which lines he might say next. At the same time he felt his gorge rise like he might throw up. Eyes on him, people snickering—it turned his stomach. Would they love him? Hate him? He avoided their eyes by looking at the stage lights. There was safety there, a clean white like the spotlight on Clara Barton at P.S. 14, and for the first time he could remember, he felt at home.
“Had cornflakes for breakfast,” he said suddenly, “but I ran out of milk. What’s worse than that? Do you eat a little half bowl with a normal milk level, or one big soggy bowl with dry flakes up the sides?”
Scattered laughs.
“This chick I’m going out with, we’re rockin’ and rollin’, you know what I mean, and she yells out, ‘Oh, Ray, I loves you!’” He looked miserable. “Ray’s my brother. Bad day.”
More laughter. Laughs from paying customers, not joke-starved servicemen. Now flying on more than the wine, he dropped the stage-drunk act and spoke as himself, riffing on what he’d seen riding the bus around town—the fog, the cable cars, the drunken sailors, the junkies and bums. “I was so turned on,” he remembered years later. “I couldn’t wait for them to shut up laughing so I could say the next thing.” When the Tympany Five lined up to return to the stage, he ignored them. He did ten minutes more, snapping his fingers and adding a shuffle step when a line worked. Manager McCoy waved his arms, pointing at the royally irked Jukebox King. Still Flip talked. The crowd laughed and applauded. At last McCoy strode onstage, clamped his hand around the bellhop’s wrist, and marched him out of the spotlight.
“Watch who you’re grabbin’!”
“Watch who you’re upstagin’,” McCoy said, nodding toward Jordan. “That’s ten thousand dollars a week.” The band kicked into an up-tempo number while customers patted Clerow’s shoulder or pulled his sleeve, saying, Good job! and Bad day! and asking, What’s your name? McCoy yanked him toward the stairs, warning, “They like you. But pull more shit like that and you’re done here.”
Flip shook him off. “You can’t ‘done here’ me. I quit.”
His exile lasted twenty-four hours. He was pacing the sidewalk the next day, talking to himself, when McCoy pulled up in a long black car, rolling the window down. “People are asking after you,” he said. “You can do the break every night. Ten minutes, all yours.”
“Fifteen,” Flip said, and kept walking.
* * *
In 1954 “Flip” Wilson—his first name rendered in quotation marks—began appearing for fifteen minutes six nights a week at the Manor Plaza. Each night he got a little looped on white port before he went on. He recycled his bad-day and dry-cornflakes bits, adding new riffs as he learned which lines needed a slide step or finger snap, which ones should be shouted, which whispered. “Pretty soon I’m observing the crowd, looking out the corner of my eye at different people,” he recalled, “wondering why one guy’s laughing and the person next to him isn’t. And it broke my concentration. That’s when I figured something out. It wasn’t about them, it was about me.” He realized that the customers weren’t there to evaluate the performers. They just wanted to have a good time. All he had to do to win them over was give them the confident, infectiously likable performer the airmen on Guam flipped for. “From that night on I just looked at the lights. It was like talking to a mirror. Totally relaxed, giving off that I’m good vibe. I’m good and I know it. Because that relaxed, confident guy, Flip, he’s someone the audience would like to be their friend. Be their friend, and they’ll love you forever.”
After two weeks, Jordan and his Tympany Five moved on, ceding the Manor Plaza’s stage to a colorful dance act. Joe DeCosta’s troupe wore bright feathered outfits that called for several costume changes in the course of the show. During their breaks, DeCosta’s five-piece band played rhythm and blues. Manor Plaza manager McCoy lengthened the breaks to make time for the fledgling comedian, who was starting to draw a few fans of his own. Flip described Joe DeCosta as “a gay cat, an elaborate dresser” who invited him to join the act on the road. Flip couldn’t resist. I don’t owe this place anything, he thought, and off he went, squished into the backseat of a rusty green convertible with DeCosta’s band. They followed the troupe’s other vehicle, a matching green convertible, across the Bay Bridge, through Oakland and hilly green Contra Costa County to Pittsburg, California, a coal-mining town, population fifteen thousand, mostly poor and black. Settling in for a three-night engagement at the dingy Black Jack Club, they checked into a hotel that charged three dollars a night for a bed, a lamp, a nightstand, a Gideon Bible, and a toilet down the hall. It sounded cheap enough until Flip lined up behind the dancers and the band after Friday night’s show.
“Five, six,” DeCosta said, counting dollar bills into the piano player’s hand. “Six dollars and sixty-seven cents.” Next he paid the sax player. “Six dollars, sixty-seven cents.”
Finally it was Flip’s turn. “Ninety, ninety-five,” DeCosta said. “One dollar.”
“That’s it?”
“The dancers are guaranteed, dear. The band, too. I pay them first. You get a cut of what’s left of the door.” DeCosta shrugged. “But don’t fret. Don’t sweat. Tomorrow’s Saturday.” Saturday was better. Flip’s cut came to $1.05. He got ninety-five cents after Sunday’s show, leaving him with an even three dollars for three nights to go with a nine-dollar hotel bill. The dancers and musicians had made up to twenty dollars apiece but had blown it on food, drink, and drugs. They gathered in Flip’s second-floor room, griping about the hotel and the Black Jack Club, and decided to skip town. One by one they climbed out the window to the fire escape, dropped their bags into the green convertible, and jumped. DeCosta and piano player Charles Calloway caught their luggage in the alley below and stowed it in the convertibles’ trunks. Flip, as usual, went last. He dropped his Air Force duffel bag to DeCosta, sat on the edge of the fire escape, and scooted into empty space. He came down in the backseat of one of the convertibles—a perfect landing—and they peeled out of Pittsburg, laughing all the way.
* * *
Stockton, California, was a farm town with a Navy base. Its black farmhands, cowboys, and off-duty sailors spent their paychecks in Goat Valley, a dirt-road neck of town where a woman named Lucille ran an after-hours club beside a tomato field. A three-hundred-pound six-footer in a calico dress, Lucille sported a proud, curly, natural hairdo that barely fit through doorways. She paid her entertainers nothing. She put them up in rattletrap rooms, fed them in the club’s steamy kitchen—heaps of fried chicken, oxtails, greens, fried tomatoes, and corn on the cob with pitchers of sweet iced tea—and let them pass the hat after their shows. DeCosta’s dancers paraded their plumage around Lucille’s faded-linoleum stage, and Flip did his thing during intermissions. He got laughs, but now there were silences, too, dead air in spots where the Manor Plaza crowd had laughed. After a Saturday show, he smoked Pall Malls and sipped white port with DeCosta’s piano player, Charles Calloway, while a wrinkly, shirtless old man mopped the floor. Calloway was in his forties, elderly in Flip’s eyes, with long, graceful fingers and elegant creases on his face. He had a family back east but was no more faithful to his wife than most road musicians, as Flip learned while trying to sleep on nights when Calloway entertained women in the next room.
“Young Flipper,” Calloway said, blowing a smoke ring. “You never been out on the road, have you?”
“No, Charles. It’s my first time,” Flip replied, expecting romantic advice.
“Professionally speaking, you’re an amateur. You do a joke, these people sit there like dumb animals. Same joke killed ’em in Frisco. Why? Because these is yokels. You’re in the sticks. You go a little louder in the sticks.”
“Louder?”
“Not louder louder. Bigger. Moderate and modulate. Look at me. I might prefer to tap the keys à la Prelude in C Sharp Minor, but I don’t. In Frisco it’s more like ‘’Round Midnight,’ and in a place like this”—he looked around at the peeling walls and warped floorboards—“it’s ‘Camptown Races.’” Flip knew what he meant. He’d noticed that Calloway played Lucille’s honky-tonk upright louder than the piano at the Manor Plaza, or at least bigger, hitting the same notes a hair harder, holding them an instant longer, and singing a weepier blues for the Goat Valley crowd. “It’s the tones, not the tunes,” Calloway said. “You give ’em what they already like.”
“Well, that’s just it. I don’t want to do that. I’m just gonna be me.”
Calloway chuckled. “Simon Pure, that’s you. Working for corn on the cob.”
“Keyboard Cal,” Flip said. “Selling out for corn on the cob.”
“Touché, young Flipper, and I’ll drink to that.”
Flip and Calloway got on so well that they worked up a two-man bit. Between dance numbers, while DeCosta’s dancing girls changed costumes, Calloway played and sang a brokenhearted blues tune. When he got to the chick who done him wrong, Flip flounced onstage in a blond wig and tight skirt. Nervous laughter from the crowd as Calloway played on, wailing about his girl leaving him for a man with a bigger bankroll. Now Flip gave the piano a bump with his hip.
“Wasn’t just his bankroll was bigger, honey!”
The crowd roared. Before long DeCosta gave them two spots a night. Word of the funny duo spread around Stockton, and Lucille’s club was soon packed every weekend. Before long the manager of Club Four, an upscale nightspot on Main Street, came to see the new arrivals. He offered Flip and Calloway a gig of their own, three shows a week, seven dollars apiece every show. Twenty-one dollars a week was a shade under Clerow’s Air Force pay, but it beat room and board at Lucille’s. Still he wondered: How could they just ditch DeCosta?
“Easy,” Calloway said. “When he’s got a mouthful of Tom, Dick, or Dick, we decamp.”
Flip said no. “What did he do to hurt us?” Instead he went to the dance impresario and told him everything.
“You know what?” DeCosta said, nodding as if he’d expected this visit. “It’s cool. I took you from Willie McCoy. Next guy takes you from me. That’s business. You take what you can, when you can, long as you can. You’ll drop Calloway, too.”
“I will?”
“And you’ll be right to. You won’t need him. You’re the real thing, Wilson. So go on and do good.” DeCosta reached into his pocket. He stuck out a manicured hand.
Flip looked at the coins in DeCosta’s palm. “What’s this?”
“Back pay.”
Ninety-five cents.
* * *
Black men in jackets and ties, gold watches glistening under their sleeves, danced with chopstick-thin women in shimmery dresses. Club Four smelled of sweat, cologne, cigarette smoke, sex, and celebration. Calloway crooned, “Baby, give me back that wig I bought you.”
Flip flounced onstage, brushing blond-wig bangs off his forehead. “You mean my golden tresses?”
“Don’t roll yo’ bloodshot eyes at me, girl.”
Flip shook his fist. “I’ll give your blood a shot!”
He and Calloway spent almost a year at Club Four in Stockton, selling out the room three nights a week. Flip’s pay rose from seven dollars a night to fifteen and finally twenty-five a night—seventy-five dollars a week, more than triple his Air Force salary. More than he could spend. He sent ten- and twenty-dollar money orders home to Jersey City, addressed to his sister Eleanor, the family member with a permanent address, always adding a note saying, For Pops.
Flip’s hip-shaking blond chick, unnamed so far, proved so popular that he worried about getting pegged as a drag queen. “We need another character,” he told Calloway. Toward the end of their year in Stockton he introduced a rabble-rousing preacher modeled on one of his foster fathers. “The Rev,” Flip called him. The Rev waved shivery hands toward heaven and swore that God helps them that help themselves. Accordingly he helped himself to the lion’s share of the weekly collection, reminding his flock that today, just as in gladiatorial times, the lion’s share sure beat the Christians’ share.
“Rev,” Calloway called out, “we got a big blue Cadillac blocking the church door!”
“Don’t I know it? The Lord smiled down on me in last week’s raffle!”
The Rev kept his shoulders low and knees bent as if he might abscond any second. Bouncing on the balls of his sneaky cat feet, he mimed the first step of a sprint. “The dash,” he called that pose. And it caught on. Soon half of black Stockton was mimicking the kid comic’s sneaky preacher. Men posed like sprinters, doing the dash. Women and kids, too. “For the first time,” Flip said, “I saw something I did catch on.”
Another surprise: One night he rolled into his cramped hotel room, kicked the door shut, and jumped halfway out of his skin. A girl was waiting for him. Not just any girl—a stripper from another club on Main Street. She was slim-hipped, in a tight skirt and a scoop-neck top that showed plenty of cleavage. Her fake eyelashes were almost as long as her crimson fake nails, and she was sitting on his bed. If this was his groupie, Flip thought, he could do worse.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “About your dick.”
His eyes must have bulged because she smiled. She stood up, looked him level in the eye.
“It’s your worst enemy.” She nodded. “You see, I don’t like men, but I see a great talent in you, a great future. Unless you let some girl fuck it up. So take some good advice while you can, Flip Wilson. Don’t fall in love, not until you make it big. And then you can do anything you want.” With that she turned and left him alone with his worst enemy.