This is Maitreya born in The City of Angels to fulfill the Prophecy. Los Angeles forever Monorails glisten as Peace bows to Atomic Subterranean Vaults Silence yet all pervading Bliss.
Craig Vincent Smith was born at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles on April 25th, 1945. He had two older brothers, Charles, born 1940, and Gary, born 1942. A sister, Deborah, came later, in 1950. At the time of Craig’s birth, the family was living in a rented cottage on Vista Del Mar Avenue in Hollywood, two blocks east of the future site of the Capitol Records building and just a few hundred yards down the hill from the Krotona, the rambling Moorish-themed colony that was from 1912–26 the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, the esoteric religious movement founded in 1875 by the Russian-born mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky. Music and mysticism were part of the neighborhood scenery. As a teenager Craig would make his first records within blocks of his childhood home. And his later alter-ego, Maitreya Kali, was in part derived from Theosophist literature, as was the name he chose for his record label, Akashic Records.
Charles Gabriel Smith, Craig’s father, was born in Chicago on November 29th, 1913, the third of four children, the others all girls. Before his second birthday the family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and by 1930 were living in Minneapolis where Charles’ father, Alexander Smith, managed a department of the Juster Brothers men’s clothing store. Charles’ middle name was taken from the maiden name of his mother, Florence Sabrina Gabriel, and the genetic roots of Craig’s musicality can be clearly traced back to his ancestors in the Gabriel family. Craig’s great-great-uncle (the uncle of his paternal grandmother Florence) was the renowned gospel songwriter and composer Charles Hutchinson Gabriel. Born in Wilton, Iowa, in 1856, Charles H. Gabriel is said to have had a hand in composing almost eight thousand gospel songs (often under pseudonyms), many of which appear in hymnals to this day. In addition to the gospel songs he was best known for, Gabriel also composed a number of marches and polkas, and wrote or edited numerous musical instruction books. Gabriel played several musical instruments, including reed organ, piano, violin and cornet. His most popular songs include “Higher Ground,” “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” “More Like the Master,” “Dream of Fairyland,” and “Glory For Me,” some of which sold millions of copies as sheet music and in hymn books. Gabriel also composed the music for the famous hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which has been recorded by countless artists, including the Carter Family in 1935.
Craig Smith’s great-great-uncle, Charles Hutchinson Gabriel, the renowned gospel songwriter;
A late 19th-century songbook of his work;
Charles H. Gabriel, Jr., also a successful songwriter.
Charles H. Gabriel died in Hollywood in 1932 at the home of his son, Charles H. Gabriel Jr., himself a songwriter, as well as a music teacher, journalist, magazine editor and radio station manager. Judy Garland sang one of his compositions, “Brighten the Corner,” in her 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis. Gabriel Junior, Craig’s great-uncle, died in Los Angeles just two years after his father in November 1934. This was around the same time that Craig’s parents moved out to Hollywood from Minnesota.
Craig’s mother was born in Minnesota on July 7th, 1915 as Marguerite Marie Lundquist. Her father, Henry, was Swedish, and her mother, Irene, whose maiden name was Schwartz, was of German descent. Henry worked as a locomotive fireman for the Milwaukee & St. Louis Railway and as a truck driver for a number of different companies. After completing high school in Minneapolis, Marguerite found work as a clerk, most likely at the Munsingwear factory. Munsingwear was an underwear manufacturer—reportedly the largest in the world at the time, cranking out as many as 30,000 undergarments a day—and their workforce of around 3,000 was 85 percent female. Marguerite’s mother, aunt and, later, younger sister Harriet all found employment with Munsingwear, whose slogan was “Don’t say underwear, say Munsingwear.”
But Marguerite evidently had ambitions that extended far beyond the walls of the Munsingwear factory, and their celebrated line of “itchless” woolen undergarments. She dreamed of one day becoming a professional singer. It’s not known whether Marguerite ever sang in public while in Minnesota. Perhaps she tried out her talents during one of the Thursday lunch breaks, when Munsingwear brought in an orchestra to entertain its employees. What we do know is that by 1935 she’d become romantically involved with Charles Smith—Chuck to his friends—who himself had dreams of Hollywood glamour. Around the spring of that year, 21-year-old Chuck and 19-year-old Marguerite left Minneapolis and headed out to the West Coast together.
The couple’s activities for the next few years are not known, but presumably it took them some time to find their feet and start making any headway with Marguerite’s singing career. It’s not clear where Chuck’s ambitions lay, but he also appears to have been musically inclined. It’s been said he was a musician, a band leader, or even a songwriter, no doubt inspired by his uncle or great-uncle. Notably, by 1938—and likely as early as their move in 1935—the couple had each taken ‘professional’ names. Charles Smith and Marguerite Lundquist became Charles and Carole Barclay. Marguerite would go by the name Carole for the rest of her life.
The Los Angeles city directories for 1938 and 1939 show Charles Barclay living at 1817 Ivar Avenue, a couple of blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard, at the Parva-Sed Apta Apartments. Three years earlier, Nathanael West had written The Day of the Locust while living in this same shabby faux-Tudor rooming house, basing his characters on his fellow residents, most of who eked out a living on the lower tiers of the industry or nibbled around its outer fringes—scriptwriters, bit-part actors, vaudeville refugees, set builders, painters, pimps, prostitutes, flimflam men. West’s bleak, cynical novel chipped away the brittle varnish of the Hollywood dream to reveal its seedy and hollow core. For the purposes of fiction, he renamed the apartment building Chateau Mirabella. “Another name for Ivar Street [sic] was ‘Lysol Alley’,” he wrote, “and the Chateau was mainly inhabited by hustlers, their managers, trainers and advance agents. In the morning its halls reeked of antiseptic.”
Inside Larry Potter’s Jade Dragon Lounge on Hollywood Boulevard, where Craig Smith’s father worked in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s.
Chuck and Carole’s neighbors along those antiseptic hallways included C- and D-list actors like Antrim Short, Lulu Mae Bohrman, Charlotte Field, and Dora Clement, who was starring at the time in the serial The Phantom Creeps, and soon afterwards would have a role in Buck Privates, Abbott & Costello’s debut feature. Lysol Alley may not have been particularly glamorous, but it was a convenient entry point into Hollywood’s bloodstream. A ten-minute stroll took Chuck to his place of employment, the Jade Café at 6619 Hollywood Boulevard.
The Jade—also known as the Jade Room, Jade Dragon Lounge and the Jade Palace Café—was an opulently decorated restaurant and nightclub with an Oriental theme, one of several Los Angeles clubs owned by Larry Potter. “Vivid in Gold Leaf and Chinese Red Lacquer,” the club’s advertisements declared. “Dimly lighted . . . cool . . . restful. The finest of foods and liquors served in an atmosphere of Oriental Splendor.” An elaborately carved wooden dragon curved around the bar, and the walls were hung with exotic paintings, the centerpiece being a large oil painting by Henry Clive depicting a seductive nude blonde tickling the nose of a smiling Buddha statue with a long red feather. Titled “Buddha-Pest,” a version of the image also graced the club’s matchbooks.
The Jade also offered “Continuous entertainment nightly” overseen by Chuck, who was the club’s manager, producer and master of ceremonies. The Jade’s entertainers included singers Mary Norman, Lillian Randolph, and the Brown Sisters, comedian Hal March (later the host of The $64,000 Question), dancer Louis DeProng, head-balancing act Bill and Dotty Phelps, and Jabuti, a statuesque redhead who played the slide trombone. It’s likely that Carole, too, performed at the Jade during this period.
Another aspiring singer, Peggy Lee, had yet to turn 18 when she arrived in Hollywood from North Dakota in March 1938. After scraping a living for several weeks as a short order cook and a carnival barker, she showed up at the Jade one afternoon to audition. In her autobiography, Miss Peggy Lee, she describes hitchhiking to the club, her beach shoes falling apart as she walked the last few blocks. “Barefoot, I went in and auditioned for Chuck Barclay, the master of ceremonies,” she wrote.
“Inside the Jade Room,” she continued, “the darkness and the Oriental décor, the smell of the gardenias and Chinese food, the waitresses in their satin coats and satin pants moving silently about the thick carpet, carrying cooling drinks, egg rolls and butterfly shrimp, created an air of mystery… especially for a seventeen-year-old girl from North Dakota.”
“Tall and terribly handsome,” Chuck also made an immediate impression on her. “She sang a couple of songs and I liked her,” Chuck later remembered, “and Mrs. Potter liked her. But Larry said we had plenty of singers. I hired her anyway.” Steve Boardner, later a famous Los Angeles restaurateur himself, was tending bar at the Jade at the time and also claimed to have played a role in the decision to hire Peggy Lee that day, but Lee always credited Craig’s father with giving her her first paid singing job in California. That job reportedly paid her $2.50 a night, 50 cents of which she was required to kick back to Larry Potter.
“She was a nice little kid,” Chuck recalled, “so we put her to work right then and there. She was broke. She’d spent her last money on carfare to come and see us. We fixed her up in a rooming house, and Mrs. Potter bought Peggy her first evening gown and a pair of slippers.”
Lee began singing seven nights a week at the Jade, accompanied by the club’s in-house pianist Phil Moore (later a successful arranger for MGM). She alternated spots with Mary Norman, who mentored the young singer, teaching her how to apply her makeup and helping her choose songs for her repertoire. After a short time, the club let Norman go and Lee was given top billing and an extra dollar a week. “Her red pleated gown was left behind,” remembered Peggy, “and I can only hope Mary went on to something better. She deserved it.”
Matchbook from the Jade, ca. late 1930s.
The Jade’s owner, Larry Potter, was implicated in a high-profile murder case in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake Telegram, January 21, 1931.
For all its gold leaf and “Oriental Splendor,” the Jade Room harbored some seriously dangerous criminal elements, as Peggy Lee would soon learn. It was the kind of place where “you might see a movie star, a G-man or someone looking for a tourist he could ‘roll’,” remembered Lee. “I was to learn that expression meant to relieve someone of their bankroll, or at least I thought that was what it meant. You don’t soon forget seeing a confused, stumbling man weaving out the door into the night, wondering where his money had gone.”
The Jade’s criminal reputation was well known to the FBI. According to their files, Potter was the front man for a small empire of Los Angeles clubs, all of somewhat dubious reputation. Potter had had numerous run-ins with the law going back to as early as 1913, when he was detained by police in Honolulu on “white-slaver” or pimping charges. He was subsequently deported from the island. After a few years in San Francisco he settled next in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he ran a notorious vice operation out of the Fairmount Hotel during the Prohibition era, and was indicted several times on pandering charges relating to underage girls. Then, in 1930, he became entangled in the investigation of one of Utah’s most notorious unsolved homicides.
On February 21st, 1930, 32-year-old Dorothy Moormeister was brutally slain, her skull fractured with a large rock and her corpse run over repeatedly by her own car until every bone in it had been broken. Moormeister, the wife of a prominent local surgeon, had been embroiled in a romantic affair with a mysterious Persian prince, and had plans for a movie career in Hollywood. Potter, described by the newspapers as “a man about town,” was with the victim two days before she was killed, along with an alleged L.A. racketeer by the name of H. Paul Mitchell. “The three of us had a drink together,” Potter testified at the inquest. “Then we took a ride in her car for half an hour. She told me she was desperately in love with another man, that she was going to get a divorce and marry him, and settle down in Los Angeles.” A notebook found among the victim’s possessions indicated that she had an appointment to meet with Mitchell on the evening of her death, but Potter insisted his Los Angeles business associate had left town 12 hours before the murder. “It would not be embarrassing for me to say what is Mitchell’s business,” Potter quipped on the stand, “but it might be embarrassing to him.” The investigation stalled and the murder remained unsolved, but, decades later, in 1964, the case was reopened after an inmate in a Texas jail, Will Sadler, confessed to the killing, and named the man who’d paid him $500 to carry out the hit: Larry Potter. It was later determined that Sadler had made up the story after learning the details of the case in a detective magazine. The case remains unsolved.
Potter’s actual role in the murder, if any, has never been determined, but his racketeering activities continued in Salt Lake and Ogden, where his name was frequently in the newspapers in connection with prostitution, gambling, and the sale and trafficking of illicit liquor. After being arrested in a raid at the Fairmount Hotel in January 1931, Potter glibly described his occupation to police as “capitalist, retired.” “With the aforementioned Mr. Potter were various myrmidons whose multifarious functions keep them engaged until the small hours of the morning,” reported the Salt Lake Telegram, “together with a group of women who habitually affect the particular type of hotel in which he is interested—financially.” Everyone knew Potter’s game, but criminal charges never seemed to stick, prompting letters to the newspapers from outraged Salt Lake citizens asking, “Does he run the entire police department and what sort of power has he that makes him immune?” The vice king’s infamy in Salt Lake was so great that one concerned correspondent wondered how long it would be before the chamber of commerce changed the name of their “fair city” to Potterville: “It would seem so very appropriate.” Mounting pressure from the public eventually prompted a crackdown on Potter’s activities in Salt Lake, spearheaded by Mayor John F. Bowman, and an attempt by Potter to shift his operations to Ogden was met with similar opposition there. Feeling the heat in Utah, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1935—the same year Chuck and Carole arrived from Minnesota.
It is unlikely that Chuck knew anything of his employer’s shady past, but no doubt he was aware of the nefarious elements lurking in and around the Jade. He made it his business to protect the vulnerable Peggy Lee. In her autobiography she describes Chuck as “the greatest big brother anyone could have. Well, second greatest,” she added, next describing an incident that happened one night after she’d finished her set.
According to Lee, Potter was at the bar with a gentleman she’d never seen before and invited Peggy to join them. Soon afterwards Potter suggested the man give Lee a ride back to her rooming house, a mile and a half away on Gower. “I still can’t believe this myself, I was so naïve, but to me it seemed only a kind gesture,” she remembered in her memoir. “Also, the fact that he was sitting with Mr. Potter seemed a sort of guarantee.” Instead of driving the singer home to her rooming house, though, the stranger took her to a “shabby-looking club” downtown. There she found herself sandwiched into a booth full of men, all of them drinking heavily—especially Potter’s friend. One of the other men suddenly whispered in her ear that she was in danger and he was going to get her out of there. As they made to leave, Potter’s friend confronted them. “There was a terrible fight, and fortunately for me, my new friend won. The next minute we were rushing out of the club and running for his car.” The gallant rescuer—her other “greatest big brother”—informed her on the drive home that, “You, young lady, were headed for white slavery, and nobody would have heard from you again. Nobody.”
Did Larry Potter try to sell Peggy Lee into a life of prostitution? Lee’s memories are frequently fanciful and melodramatic, but, as Lee biographer James Gavin notes, “even Lee’s most preposterously delusional stories held glints of emotional truth.” By 1938 “white slavery” was a rather archaic euphemism, but instances of young girls—of all races—being kidnapped and forced into prostitution were still commonplace in Los Angeles. That same year, police broke up a prostitution ring headed by a woman, Ann Forrester. At her trial, Forrester, whom newspapers dubbed “The Black Widow,” testified about the activities of “The Syndicate,” a group of mobsters who controlled the city’s lucrative gambling and prostitution operations. Given Potter’s pimp past and his ties to known mobsters, Lee’s story may have had more than a glimmer of truth. At the very least Potter must have known that his friend had more in mind than a ride home for the unworldly teen he described in a 1950 newspaper piece as “corn-fed, milk-cheeked and with hay practically falling out of her hair.”
Lee herself does not appear to have connected all the dots. Back at the Jade afterwards, “Chuck Barclay was shocked to hear what had happened,” she wrote, “and he and Bob the bartender, Paul the bar boy, Irene my guardian [a waitress], Chuck and Carol, Larry and Sue all doubled security.” Presumably the “Carol” [sic] paired with Chuck was the enigmatic Marguerite Lundquist, Craig Smith’s mother. If so, it is her only mention in Lee’s memoir.
Eventually long hours, late nights and poor nutrition took a toll on Lee’s health. In July she collapsed onstage in the middle of her set and was rushed in a squad car to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. A doctor there diagnosed severe tonsillitis and recommended Lee return home to North Dakota for surgery and to be with her family. She didn’t have enough money for a train ticket, so, as Chuck later remembered, the employees at the Jade rallied around to help her. “By this time we’d all grown to love her so much that all the waiters and waitresses and bartenders—everyone that worked there—chipped in to try to get Peggy home.”
Chuck Barclay would continue to work at the Jade Room for several more years. He was still there in late 1940 or early 1941 when Peggy Lee came back for a short return engagement. Several months later she joined Benny Goodman’s band and her career began its inexorable ascendancy. Little did Chuck and Carole know then that they would one day have a son who would not only share the stage with Peggy Lee, but also record for the label which released most of her biggest hits.
Craig Smith’s father, Chuck, reunited with Peggy Lee in November 1972 on the television show This Is Your Life.
Lee never forgot the favor Chuck Barclay did her by hiring her at the Jade, nor the protection and friendship he gave her during the months she worked there. When she was honored on an episode of This Is Your Life, filmed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas on November 28th, 1972, Chuck was flown in as one of the ‘surprise’ guests, putting him in the company of such luminaries as Duke Ellington, Leonard Feather, and Louis Armstrong’s widow Lucille. As Craig’s father walked out onstage, Lee was clearly delighted to see him: “Chuck!” she beamed as they embraced. While most of Chuck’s dialogue had been scripted in advance, Lee’s banter was genuinely spontaneous. “He took care of me,” she says, as Chuck chortles nervously. “He did everything for me. He chaperoned me… You didn’t know how old I was either!” she adds. “I didn’t know!” admitted Chuck, who also went off script to joke with her about “that little Volu-Tone microphone,” referring to the inexpensive ribbon microphone they used at the club. No mention was made of Larry Potter, who had died ten months earlier at the age of 77, but according to the script notes Chuck told Peggy, “Steve Boardner and a lot of the guys from the old days asked me to say hello.”
For Chuck Barclay—“now working at the Pump Room in Studio City,” according to announcer Ralph Edwards—these brief moments onstage at Caesar’s Palace must have been a poignant reminder of simpler and presumably happier times.