THE ALL STARS arrived in Spoleto on June 23 to play at composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds, accompanied by impresario Ed Sullivan, who was intent on filming the festival for his television variety show. Upon briefly returning to New York after his most recent European tour, Armstrong flew to Rome, then proceeded on the two-and-a-quarter-hour drive to Spoleto, with Lucille, Sullivan, and Armstrong’s personal physician, Dr. Alexander Schiff, in tow. Once there, Armstrong retired to his hotel room to rest, but began having difficulty breathing. Lucille called Menotti and Schiff, who found Armstrong on his knees in his room gasping for breath. Menotti phoned the hospital and had a tank of oxygen rushed over. A few hours later, Armstrong was rushed to a hospital. While there, he told Sullivan, “You’ve got to get me out of here, Ed. I’ve never missed a stage date in all my life.” Told by Dr. Schiff he couldn’t play Menotti’s festival, Armstrong was inconsolable.1
On a 1970 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, Lucille Armstrong recalled the incident as the most important moment of her marriage. “We were in Italy, in Spoleto, it was a very small, picturesque town. One hospital. Nobody speaks English. And of course the diagnosis—we have our own doctor with us, Dr. Schiff, but Dr. Schiff is not allowed to practice [in Italy]. But he knows Louie’s case history and he tells these doctors it’s not a heart attack, it’s pneumonia. And they keep saying, ‘No, it’s a heart attack.’ They finally treated Louie for a heart attack for four days and the pneumonia is getting deeper. And Louie almost died.”2
The first wave of newspaper reports called Armstrong’s scare a heart attack, but the Associated Press reported on June 24, “The specialists said Armstrong’s condition was not grave. His wife was at his beside.”3 The next day was filled with more good news, for Dr. Schiff had said Armstrong might be able to leave the hospital within a few days.4 By now Armstrong was sitting up in bed, joking with reporters. Schiff told the Associated Press that Armstrong’s heart was weakened by years of blowing the trumpet, but he had not suffered a heart attack.5 Still, it appeared, Armstrong was being treated in accordance with a misdiagnosis; he soon took a turn for the worse. Alarmed, Countess Alicia Paolozzi, a friend of the Armstrongs, took control of the situation and sent for an English-speaking nurse and two heart specialists from Rome. In the wake of Armstrong’s “heart disturbance,” Lucille was called to his bedside at two a.m. The hospital said Armstrong had survived a “serious crisis” in the middle of the night but was now sleeping peacefully, though he still had a 102-degree fever. Italian heart specialist Corrado Tramontana was also at Armstrong’s bedside, waiting for the other specialist to arrive.6
When details hit the United States, things looked grave. The New York Post’s front page headline was “Satchmo Goes Into a Coma; Rome Heart Doctors Called.” The article inside, credited to the Associated Press, said, “Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong, who trumpeted his way to the top ranks of jazz, lay gravely ill in a coma here tonight. He was given oxygen and heart stimulants.” Armstrong’s condition was reported as “steadily worsening … The worsening in Armstrong’s condition stunned members of his famous band. His rapid improvement earlier had given them hope he would be back with them within a few days. They were so cheered by this that last night, for the first time, they played on the program of the music festival. They said today, however, they would play no more while their leader is in the hospital.”7 Later in the day, Dr. Cataldo Cassano of Rome arrived to join Tramontana and Schiff. Hearing of the Post’s headline, Schiff made it clear that Armstrong “has not been in a coma at any time.”8
The next day, Armstrong’s condition stabilized, and he soon began to show signs of improvement. “Louie pulled out of it, he’s got a very, very strong constitution,” Lucille said in 1970. “He pulled out of it and of course, this [particular] morning I’m taking this bath about six o’clock in the morning after Louie had gone into a sort of crisis when the fever breaks. And I hear Louie at six o’clock in the morning hollering, ‘I want spaghetti! I want spaghetti for breakfast!’ And I’m bathing and I said, ‘This man’s all right!’ I couldn’t get dressed quick enough to go in and look at him and he was just perfect.”9 Lucille propped him up on two pillows and asked him, “How do you feel, honey?” He answered, “I feel just dandy, just dandy.” Armstrong’s temperature was now only slightly above normal. Lucille, who kept an eighteen-hour vigil by his bedside, also made it clear that he was never in a coma.10 Armstrong was then allowed to eat, after he had announced: “Bring it all, I’m hungry!” “He grinned, laughed and told his jokes from his hospital bed in this town in the central Italian hills,” according to the Associated Press.11
Tramontana declared that Armstrong would still be able to play his trumpet, but he would have to take it easy for a while. So Glaser canceled Armstrong’s upcoming gigs, including his appearance at what was to be a Fourth of July fifty-ninth birthday celebration at Lewisohn Stadium.12 Upon leaving the hospital, Armstrong headed to Rome for some sightseeing, visiting St. Peter’s Basilica “to thank the Good Lord for being so good to me.”13 A few days later, he wrote to Dizzy Gillespie, “There’s one thing that you should always remember—you can’t kill a nigger. Ha Ha Ha. Ole Sidney Bechet and Big Sid Catlett were trying to get me to come up there with them and hold that 1st chair down on the trumpet. Probably they would have had a little luck if they weren’t so damn cheap. Huh—they only wanted to pay me union scale—shit.”14 On July 3, Armstrong arrived in New York. Apparently, he found time to jam with Jack Teagarden’s band. “In Spoleto, if I wasn’t in good shape, you know, don’t no cat come out of the week with all the stuff the papers said and go right down there with Jack Teagarden, playing, when I come off the plane at two o’clock in the morning and went down and sit in that last hour with Jack,” Armstrong would later say.15
The Lewisohn Stadium birthday concert was still on for the Fourth. Gene Krupa and Herbie Mann performed, before the All Stars took the stage with Wild Bill Davison filling in for Armstrong. At the conclusion of the concert, all hell broke loose. As the New York Times put it:
Then Satchmo showed up and, if there had been a roof, it would have been blown off … As he came on the stage, there was a moment of surprise, then a roaring, standing ovation from 8,000 persons present. Impromptu choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’ were clearly audible above the din, but Mr. Armstrong quieted them when he began to play. After a moment of suspense while he blew a few random notes, he went into his theme, “Sleepy Time Down South,” adding a rousing vocal chorus for good measure. With the musicians behind him, he continued to delight the crowd with his playing and singing in “Back Home Again in Indiana” and “Gypsy.”16
Armstrong played for about fifteen minutes and said after the show, “I didn’t come here to prove I’m not sick. I came just to play.”17
Armstrong would fully recover from his illness, and he would continue to downplay it for the rest of his life. He called it a mere “chest cold” he got from eating too much spaghetti late at night followed immediately by sleeping directly under an open window. And he wanted to make it clear that he had never been in a coma. “When I picked up our American paper where it said I was in a coma, I know they was wrong then, ’cause I’m from New Orleans, Louisiana, and all my life we was under the impression nothing but rich people went into comas! We went into a trance, maybe. But it all ended up nice.”18 Until the day he died, Armstrong, Lucille, Glaser, and everyone in his inner circle refused publicly to admit that Armstrong had had a heart attack in Spoleto. It wasn’t until 1984 that Schiff, appearing in a British documentary on Armstrong, finally came clean. “All the time I said that Louie did not have a heart attack, Louie had a respiratory condition, pneumonia,” Schiff said. “I brought this man up from Rome to agree with my diagnosis so that Louie’s career would not be ended.”19 When Armstrong visited heart specialist Gary Zucker in 1968, Zucker performed a cardiogram that confirmed the heart attack, something Zucker spoke about after Armstrong’s passing. As Schiff alluded, admitting a heart attack would have been bad for business. Club owners might have been skeptical about booking a frail, ailing artist.
By July 18, Armstrong was back with the All Stars, playing in front of six thousand people in Stony Brook, Long Island. “My main interest in driving out to Stony Brook was to hear just how much the ordeal had affected Louis, and to ask him personally how he had felt, and felt now, about his physical condition,” Leonard Feather wrote. “The first question was soon answered, for Louis’s pipes and chops obviously were completely unshaken. He played as much and as well as ever: his spirits were at their perennial ebullient level.”20 Of the two-hour show, Hugh Thomson said, “He is not only back to normal, which for him is highly exuberant, but seems to have gained gusto.”21 To Feather, Armstrong allowed: “I keep my body up good—I wasn’t never in doubt about getting well. And I knew all along it wasn’t my heart. What happened was, they worked me too hard—cut into the middle of my vacation, making me play a private performance for somebody’s party. I needed a little rest, that’s all.”22 Now that he was back on the road, the last thing Armstrong was about to get was a little rest. John Norris, in reviewing Armstrong’s August set at the Toronto Jazz Festival for Coda magazine, was astounded by the amount of traveling Armstrong had to do in this period. “The ridiculous booking of the Armstrong band will have to be reviewed one day soon, for his agent surely cannot go on drawing blood from them for ever,” Norris wrote. “The band travelled 500 miles from Columbus, Ohio, to make the festival. They left Columbus at 2 a.m. arriving in Toronto just before 6 p.m. the next evening. Their next engagement was in Milwaukee Sunday evening, when they were playing three 30-minute spots. This meant leaving straight after the show for another 600 miles of grueling travel by bus. This kind of thing was typical in the 1930s but is not what one would expect today.” The scheduled bus trip proved to be a little too much; as Norris added, “Rather than face this sort of schedule and desirous of keeping fit, Louis, Velma and others in the band chose instead to fly at their own expense the following morning.”23 Though Armstrong was back to the grind remarkably soon after a heart attack, he wasn’t acting any differently. When asked if he noticed any change, Danny Barcelona answered emphatically, “No! No, it was the same thing like he never left. It was a surprise, you know. I didn’t think he’d come back that fast.”24 To all intents and purposes, Armstrong was still playing in peak form. He would go forward, traveling and performing as if nothing serious had happened.
From August 3 through August 5, Armstrong was in Chicago, back in the recording studio with Frank Assunto’s Dukes of Dixieland, with whom he had shared a bill the previous summer. “They’re home boys,” Armstrong said of the Dukes. “Whenever we’re playing in the same town, I go and sit in.”25 Much of the repertoire for the session was composed of Dixieland warhorses, but Armstrong also included such All Stars set pieces as “Back o’ Town Blues,” “Someday You’ll Be Sorry,” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” As their name suggested, the Dukes were very much an old-fashioned Dixieland band, but they swung, though not in the polished manner of the All Stars. While he acquits himself with power and brilliance on “Dippermouth Blues” and “Bill Bailey,” Armstrong has some trouble executing the quick-fingered stop-time solo on “Cornet Chop Suey,” which he had blazed through at the Autobiography sessions of 1957.
The recording with the Dukes was made for Audio Fidelity, a small label best known for releasing the first commercial stereophonic record in 1957. After his last recordings for Decca, Armstrong was now a free agent, open for business to the highest bidder, who would turn out to be the label’s president, Sid Frey. After recording Armstrong with the Dukes, he lifted an idea for an album that George Avakian originally wanted to produce for Columbia in the mid-fifties: Armstrong and his All Stars performing the music of Armstrong’s mentor Joe “King” Oliver. But unlike Avakian, who would have given much care and consideration to such a project, Frey did not want to pay extravagantly for rights to copyrighted Oliver material, so he ended up recording much public-domain material, including songs that had nothing to do with Oliver whatsoever, such as “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Frankie and Johnny.” What is more, most of the All Stars were unfamiliar with Oliver’s music. “A lot of the numbers, old King Oliver numbers, Billy Kyle and I didn’t know,” Trummy Young remembered. “We had never heard them before, so Pops had to play them over for us a couple of times, and show us where the breaks were. He taught me some of the phrases on one of those tunes, and made it a lot easier for me.”26 As a result, a certain stiffness creeps into the performances of “Snake Rag” and “Drop That Sack,” among others, as the band sounds as if it is struggling to be a two-beat Dixie band.
Still, there are high points on the Oliver tribute: “I Ain’t Got Nobody” features Armstrong’s time-honored, but extremely difficult, playing of the melody an octave higher, nailing every note; his concluding cadenza on “St. James Infirmary” is unlike any other version in his career, ending on a piercing high concert E-flat; and, as in his youth, he figures out ways to transcend inferior material such as “My Old Kentucky Home” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Even John S. Wilson, implacable nemesis of the All Stars, agreed that Satchmo Plays King Oliver had its virtues. In DownBeat he saw fit to give it three stars. “To say that this is the best recording to come from Armstrong’s touring sextet in the last five years is fainter praise than the disc deserves,” the review read. “The material gets the group away from the things it now does by rote, and Armstrong at least plays and sings with some semblance of creative fire.”27 As for the black media, Armstrong was applauded for changing “darkies” to “folks” in the lyrics of “My Old Kentucky Home.” “Forget those old notions about Louis Armstrong being a ‘handkerchief head,’ ” Jet magazine intoned. “He just had an impromptu session for a Dixieland album, which included ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ When he came to the lyrics, ‘It’s summer and (you know who) is gay,’ he sang: ‘It’s summer, and the folks they’re all gay,’ after first making certain he knew how the original words went. Salute!!”28
Armstrong and the All Stars, however, would not be saluted in New Orleans. Toward the end of the year, Jefferson Parish, part of metropolitan New Orleans, was dedicating the Louis Armstrong Playground. The parish wanted Armstrong to play at the dedication, but as he later wrote, “There’s a state law that doesn’t allow mixing of Negro and white musicians. They want me to leave the two white boys in my band home. But I say, ‘That wouldn’t be my band.’ So I don’t go.”29 Armstrong told a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter that he would not return to his hometown until he was “received without racial distinction … I’m accepted all over the world, and when New Orleans accepts me, I will go home … I’m accepted in satellite nations behind the Iron Curtain, even before they see me … I feel bad about it, but will nonetheless stay that way.”30
A New Orleans radio newscaster, retired school principal, and former friend of Armstrong’s, O. C. W. Taylor, took umbrage at Armstrong’s position. Taylor made insinuations regarding Armstrong’s 1949 appearance as King of the Zulus in New Orleans: “So drunk was Louis at the time, and so rickety was the wagon, that both fell to pieces in the middle of the street, stopping the burlesque parade.”31 He added that Armstrong “was always contented to return a grinning, ape-like Sambo and help keep the Negro in his ‘Uncle Tom’ status. Maybe New Orleans does not accept him. New Orleans prefers to read about him, to remember him as a successful trumpet player … maybe New Orleans is rather tired of having him come down and lower the level of the Negro group.” For his part, Armstrong simply dismissed Taylor’s attack. He continued the boycott of his hometown into the next decade.