WITH TWO WEEKS of performances booked at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in September, Armstrong felt rejuvenated toward the end of the summer of 1970. He was even able to admit that perhaps the two-year layoff from steady work had done him some good. “For 54 years I went through that one-nighter routine, and I didn’t know what my home looked like,” he said at the start of the International Hotel engagement. “I don’t want to get too active and overdo it. I’m not ready for that big funeral yet. Frankly, I’ve never had a rest like these two years in my life. I’m getting regular meals, sleeping regular hours and taking it easy—just like the doctors suggested. There were times I went back to work after I’d been sick when I had no business going back to work. It’s ruined a lot of cats. Suddenly I realized what a fool I was when I could have been home in bed.”1
This was an important event for Armstrong. Besides having a steady gig again and getting the green light to play the trumpet, Armstrong would finally be reunited with the All Stars, who hadn’t been asked to appear at the Los Angeles or Newport tributes, much to the chagrin of Joe Muranyi. “That would bother me very much,” Muranyi said. “ ’Cause Pops felt more comfortable with his band. That Newport one there, too, that, I was furious about that. He was rehearsing ‘Hello, Dolly!’—you know, come on, have his band already! … The guy’s old and it’s the end of his career and he’s made a hundred million dollars, God knows what he’s made to the office, fly his band out there. Come on. That bothered me very much. I felt left out. And I just felt that my interests [were] Pops’s interests. He could hire somebody better than me, but at least I know Pops’s shit.”2
Aside from the birthday tributes, Armstrong hadn’t performed a full show in public in two years, leading to a bit of rare tension in the dressing room. “Lucille, with a warm embrace, kissed her man on the cheek and left to take a seat in the overcrowded dining room [of the International],” Eddie Adams wrote. “Ira [Mangel] left the room to take a position outside the dressing-room door. Only Pops and I were left. He sat on a chair facing a mirror tinged with lights, wearing his tuxedo trousers, a white shirt, and a bib around his neck. He picked up his horn, played a couple of notes, gently laid the shiny instrument on his lap, and stared at it as though he was either spellbound or reminiscing. He looked frightened.” At that point, a voice yelled, “Five minutes!” That was all Armstrong needed to hear to loosen up. “Wearing a bright smile, holding his horn in one hand, Pops came bursting out of the dressing room door, stopped abruptly, stretched out both arms, chuckled devilishly: ‘My debut.’ ”3 At the end of the evening, the ecstatic crowd gave him a long standing ovation.
After opening night, Armstrong told the National Enquirer, “I just took it nice and easy out there. I proved to those doctors and I proved to myself that I can still blow that horn in public. Let me tell you something. I lived two years just waiting for that opening night. I knew the doctors had to be wrong. Twice them hospital cats had me under intensive care. And when you get in that ward, you can kiss the world good-bye. But Ol’ Satch ain’t ready to go upstairs yet. I’m gonna live for another 100 years.”4 Leonard Feather attended Armstrong and Bailey’s show at the International Hotel and raved. “It was not just Louis himself we applauded as he ambled onstage to the opening stanza of ‘Sleepy Time Down South’; it was the fact that he was once again able to play his horn, for the first time after two years of illness,” he wrote. “Satchmo and his combo (most of his 1968 men were back with him) cruised through their traditional show, with the usual ‘Indiana’ for openers, followed by ‘Someday,’ ‘Tiger Rag,’ and ‘The Saints,’ among others. His horn had lost none of its incandescence. His sound might have been stronger, but we told ourselves that time would take care of that. Each note was perfectly on target and Armstrong-pure.”5 Bailey, who would later call the engagement “two of the most beautiful weeks of my life,” said after one of the shows, “There was an awful lot of love in the house tonight.”
Though the Vegas shows were a giant love fest, one incident demonstrated that Armstrong’s almost fatherlike defense of his All Stars was still very much intact. Bailey would open backed by an orchestra led by her husband, Louie Bellson, a tremendous jazz drummer, who had backed Louis on his 1957 Verve sessions with Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. Armstrong was determined to protect Danny Barcelona, a fine drummer in his own right but out of Bellson’s league when it came to dynamic showpieces. “I mean, Louie Bellson, one of the world’s great drummers, he’s got his two bass drums and everything, and he does his feature,” Dan Morgenstern related. “Louie’s immediate reaction is that … Danny Barcelona is going to have to follow that, not immediately, but he’s following it. So he knows Pearl—he takes her aside and says, ‘Look, Pearl, you know, I would really be happy if you didn’t do this. Louie’s great and everything’s wonderful but you’re showing up my guy, you know, and your show is not a jazz show, I mean, you got your thing, and …’ Well, she wouldn’t do it.”6 According to Muranyi, Armstrong “went ballistic. He got very pissed off.” At the end of the show, which closed with Armstrong and Bailey singing some duets, Muranyi recalled, “Louie took his mike and threw it up in the air. It must have gone fifteen feet and down into the piano, boom boom boom!—you know, like ‘fuck it!’ ”7 Morgenstern continued, “On the next night, when Bellson starts his solo, Louie walks out from the wings with his horn and starts to play over him, you know—and of course completely, you know, steals the show, which is what he intends to do. So after that, Bellson’s act was cut from Pearl Bailey’s show.”8
With a two-week engagement behind him, a confident Armstrong appeared on an episode of ABC’s Johnny Cash Show in October. There to promote his new Country and Western album, he looked resplendent in a blue suit with a comically oversized cowboy hat and sang a medley of “Crystal Chandeliers” and “Ramblin’ Rose.” After the performance, Cash surprisingly invited Armstrong to re-create his famous 1930 duet with Jimmie Rodgers on “Blue Yodel Number 9.” Armstrong pulled out his trumpet and instantly transformed into the young Louis Armstrong of 1924, the master of the obbligato whose horn work was a hallmark on so many seminal blues recordings of the 1920s. Armstrong hadn’t really played obbligatos since Velma Middleton’s days in the band; but on Cash’s set he showed that he hadn’t lost any of his inventiveness or his sound, which was just as warm as ever. Armstrong didn’t go for many high notes, but he didn’t have to. He unleashed an incredible stream of ideas throughout the nearly four-minute performance. Anyone who was unaware of Armstrong’s health troubles wouldn’t have known he was ailing. Sure, he looked skinnier than usual, but he played and even scatted with the command of a man who wasn’t ready to give in just yet.
Though Armstrong’s trumpet playing sounds wonderful on the Cash program, it soon became clear that he no longer had the endurance to play for extended periods of time. At the end of October, he flew to London to perform a charity concert for the National Playing Fields Association. It would be a one-night-only performance, documented by a camera crew shadowing Armstrong for the day. Armstrong’s friend trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton was on hand and remembered that “Louis Armstrong’s final appearance in Britain, witnessed in all its detail by his friends here, assumed the elements of Greek tragedy.” Lyttelton was taken aback by Armstrong’s appearance. He may have been skinny during the 1968 trip, but now he clearly had trouble walking. “To me, he seemed for the first time an old man. The always jaunty, stiff-limbered walk had a frail jerkiness about it and in repose his face wore a crumpled, defeated look,” Lyttelton continued. “When he arrived in London, this frailty was marked—it seemed as if the head of a fifty-year-old was perched on the body of a man of ninety.” Armstrong had a packed, nonstop day, including television appearances, receptions, and even rehearsals. The finished documentary, Boy from New Orleans, features small snippets of Armstrong playing trumpet during rehearsal, and though he sounds fairly strong, it was clearly quite taxing. “Now the trumpet notes really were laboured and the effort needed to produce them obviously painful,” Lyttelton wrote. “It is hard to imagine any other artist of international repute in his old age being subjected—or perhaps in Armstrong’s case we should still say subjecting himself—to the routine of that day.”9
At the concert, the camera caught his time-honored warmup routine in the dressing room—a beautiful segment—but by the time he got onstage, Armstrong was out of gas. As he tripped down a step and almost fell before his opening vocal, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” his fragility was on display for all to see. “His show-business reflexes came to the rescue and he covered up with a crack to the effect of ‘You want to watch that step!’ But he was clearly shaken,” said Lyttelton. Footage of Armstrong playing “Hello, Dolly!” is truly a tragic moment. “When he started to play the trumpet, it must have been apparent to him before anyone else that the renowned chops had no strength left in them,” Lyttelton wrote. “And the man … whose majesty on the instrument had never been challenged by any other trumpet player, surrendered to a ruthless and irresistible opponent and played the trumpet with his back to the audience.”10 The image of Armstrong fumbling to produce a note, turning around, and surrendering the lead to Tyree Glenn is perhaps the saddest of Armstrong’s career. Fortunately, it lasted less than a minute. The rest of the concert was a smash, thanks to Armstrong’s singing and stage presence as he traded jokes with host David Frost and delivered heartfelt vocals on pieces like “What a Wonderful World.” Back in the United States, Armstrong proudly discussed the performance on various talk shows, especially delighting in a story about receiving a gift from Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. Naturally, Armstrong immediately responded by giving the duke a packet of Swiss Kriss and enthusiastically explaining its purpose!
Following a slow November, Armstrong brought the All Stars back to Las Vegas for another two-week engagement. There was little fanfare this time around as things seemed to go smoothly onstage. But offstage, something was wrong: Armstrong began experiencing shortness of breath. Dr. Schiff was already with Armstrong, but he knew he had to write Dr. Zucker. Probably fearful that Zucker would make him stop playing, Armstrong broke the ice in his letter of December 30 by opening with a dirty joke and assuring him “Everything’s going real well here. Everybody loves us.” He then continued, “I thought it best to wait an write you after Dr. Schiff consult you concerning the shortening of my Breath. And Since he talked to you—and with your Instructions I feel much better already. Thanks Daddy.”11 Zucker couldn’t have been pleased at Armstrong’s shortness of breath but with his assurance that he was okay, Zucker allowed him to play a few engagements spread out over January and February. On January 23, 1971, he and Tyree Glenn appeared with some local Washington, D.C., musicians for a concert at the National Press Club. Armstrong opened with “Sleepy Time Down South” and played a wonderful, fresh solo on “Hello, Dolly!,” even managing to insert a quote from the old New Orleans standard “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.” Feeling confident again, he appeared on The David Frost Show later that month, singing “Blueberry Hill” with Bing Crosby and playing “Sleepy Time” and “That’s My Desire” on the trumpet again. Although he complained his “chops are dry,” the broadcast sounded very good. On February 21, Armstrong wrote to clarinetist Slim Evans, “Your boy Satchmo is getting pretty sassy these days. Blowing his black ass off. I knew I could, all the time. My fans and friends, quite naturally they’d be a little uneasy about things, but as for me, they’re my chops. I wear them 24 hours a day, and I keep them in good trim.”12 On The Dick Cavett Show the very next night, as if to prove a point, Armstrong daringly called “Ole Miss,” a demanding instrumental that was a highlight of Armstrong’s shows in the fifties and sixties. The choice did not come without its consequences, as Armstrong had trouble maintaining the fast tempo during his solo. However, he sounded very strong throughout the ensemble and ended the tune on a perfectly paced high-note climb. Cavett’s announcer, Jack Barry, then backstage with Lucille, reported that she had said, “You know, Louie’s been quite sick. I’m so happy to see him back there. All he was worried about, would he ever blow that horn again.”13
By the time of the Cavett appearance, Armstrong’s next engagement was already booked and advertised in the New Yorker. Beginning on March 2, Armstrong and the All Stars, augmented in some numbers by a big band, would perform for two weeks at the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. After Vegas in December and his performance on television, he felt confident about the gig. The night before he opened, a vivacious Armstrong appeared on The Tonight Show. He told stories, sang “Blueberry Hill,” and even played one of his best trumpet solos of this period on “Pretty Little Missy.” Excited at the Waldorf appearance, Armstrong told Johnny Carson, “We was over there rehearsing today, me and the boys, my band and the band that’s over [there], we had a nice time. I have some big stuff they play behind me, too, you know, when we all get grandioso, you know!”14 He was ready to entertain, singing and playing well. However, the Waldorf-Astoria gig is generally known to be one of the saddest stories of Louis Armstrong’s life. When talking about it on Ken Burns’s documentary Jazz, Arvell Shaw broke down crying and couldn’t continue. According to Joe Muranyi, “Well, Louis was wobbly, but it wasn’t [that sad].” The truth seems to lie in the middle. A short amount of footage survives from the Empire Room and, though skinny, Armstrong looks perfectly fine, singing beautifully and holding his horn proudly. Armstrong’s old critical nemesis John S. Wilson reviewed a show for the New York Times and didn’t notice anything wrong. “His appearance at the Waldorf is his first engagement in New York since his illness,” Wilson wrote. “Yet, despite the physical impact that this must have had on a man in his late 60’s, he seems little changed from the Louis Armstrong who was constantly touring the world during the decade before.” Wilson mentioned that Armstrong played “Indiana,” “Some Day You’ll Be Sorry,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “What a Wonderful World,” “That’s My Desire,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Mack the Knife,” and “Boy from New Orleans,” in addition to giving the All Stars their regular features. “Looking slim and trim in a light-blue suit, Mr. Armstrong sings with the deliberate, toothy emphasis that is his trademark and blows his trumpet sparingly but with enough emphasis to let it be known that he is back at the old stand.”15
However, it is clear that a two-week engagement was more than he could handle, and some time in the middle Armstrong began to decline rapidly. Knowing about Armstrong’s shortness of breath in Las Vegas in December, Dr. Zucker had predicted this and told Armstrong so before the Waldorf performances even began. During a visit to Zucker’s office, Armstrong was barely able to breathe. Zucker told him, “Louie, you could drop dead while you’re performing,” to which Armstrong responded, “Doc, that’s all right, I don’t care.” According to Zucker, “He did a very interesting thing. He got into this transported state. Sitting there on the examining table he said, ‘Doc, you don’t understand.… My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blooow that hooorn.’ And he sat there for a moment sort of removed and went through the motions of blowing that horn. ‘I’ve got bookings arranged and the people are waiting for me. I got to do it, Doc, I got to do it.’ ”16
Armstrong’s longtime physician Alexander Schiff agreed that the engagement should have been canceled. “Even at the end, when his last date was at the Waldorf-Astoria here in New York City, we wanted to cancel that contract,” Schiff said. “But he said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that to me. This is the first big engagement I have in New York City at the best hotel, and I’m gonna finish that contract.’ He was very, very sick at that time, and he had lost so much weight that people didn’t even recognize him.”17 Writing about the performances a few months later, Richard Meryman inferred Armstrong probably saw it as too important a gig to cancel. “He had to be helped on and off the stage,” Meryman recounted. “To Louis, no doubt, that date—his first at the Waldorf—was a kind of pinnacle, a very specific measurement of the distance from squalid James Alley. For that—and for him—I am much more happy than sad.”18
As the Waldorf run continued, Armstrong’s trumpet playing suffered. “His playing the trumpet was—I wouldn’t say ‘shameful,’ but it wasn’t Louie,” Schiff said. “It was a different person playing that trumpet.”19 Muranyi, too, remembered Armstrong’s chops deserting him on a recorded version of “Indiana.” “He plays ‘Indiana’ and he’s got no chops at all, he’s physically in terrible shape,” he says about the tape. “And the old man, I cried when I heard it a couple of times and I couldn’t play it anymore. He plays ‘Indiana’ with all the mistakes and he tries to make something happen with the mistakes. And it’s, you know, he wouldn’t give up.”20
Armstrong was so determined to keep playing that he focused all of his offstage time on resting. On March 8, six days into the run, gossip columnist Earl Wilson reported, “Louis Armstrong, 71 on July 4, blew his famous horn when he opened at the Waldorf Empire Room though it took so much strength that he went to bed in between shows. His wife said he had been in bed much of the month resting so he could blow the trumpet while performing with his All-Stars.”21 Phoebe Jacobs, a friend of Armstrong’s and today vice president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, remembered that during those rest periods, Armstrong had to use oxygen to ease his breathing.22 From the beginning Dr. Zucker had insisted Armstrong stay at the Waldorf for the entire two weeks and only leave his room to take the elevator to the Empire Room. Though Armstrong never left the hotel, the performances began to take a toll. “Once, coming downstairs to do our show with Ira [Mangel], the road manager, Pops threw up in the elevator,” Muranyi recalled. “I saw Ira wiping off Louis’s patent-leather shoes and Ira making a comment on the happening.” Nothing would stop Armstrong, as he lived to perform. If he couldn’t entertain, he couldn’t be happy. His health already had kept him from doing what he loved for almost two years, and it had depressed him tremendously. Now back onstage, he was determined to stay there, even if it killed him.
Armstrong had been suffering from varicose veins (which he called “very-close veins”) since at least 1964. It turned into phlebitis, which Armstrong had to endure for the rest of the decade.23 Throughout his 1970 television appearances, Armstrong showcased a stiff, troubling gait but still seemed to get around without much difficulty. However, at the Waldorf, Armstrong’s leg problems were so severe he had to be helped on and off stage. Arvell Shaw, who had played intermittently with Armstrong since the mid-forties, knew the trumpeter’s larger-than-life stage presence and was struck by the now fragile Armstrong. Shaw recalled the impact Armstrong’s performance had on the band augmenting the All Stars. “They had a big, sixteen-piece show band there, you know. And they had all these hardened New York musicians. We used to call them ‘the thugs,’ that’s how hard—all jazz musicians and good musicians. The guys that you’d think nothing could faze them. And I’d look back, especially every night [when] we would end the show with … ‘What a Wonderful World,’ and he did it with such emotion, these guys would be like this, tears running down. So that was one of the worst two weeks.”24 Armstrong did play “What a Wonderful World” each evening, but he closed every night with “Boy from New Orleans,” the autobiographical take on “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” that he first recorded for Louis Armstrong and His Friends in May 1970. At a strutting medium tempo, Armstrong told his life’s story, from growing up a youth in New Orleans to being named a “jazz ambassador” and appearing in films with “Bing and Princess Grace.” It was an upbeat song, but as the band slowed the tempo to dirgelike status Armstrong always recited:
Now all through the years
Folks, I’ve had a ball.
Oh, thank you, Lord
And I want to thank you all.
You were very kind,
To old Satchmo
Just a boy from New Orleans.
Those were the final words spoken by Louis Armstrong onstage, thanking the fans for making his life a “ball,” a very fitting epitaph. Armstrong was practically killing himself onstage at the Waldorf, but he knew that without them, he’d probably still be struggling in New Orleans. Photographer Eddie Adams attended Armstrong’s final performance and recalled, “That night, Pops ended his performance with a song about his life, ‘The Little Boy from New Orleans.’ I think he was trying to tell us something.”25 Road manager Ira Mangel was tremendously affected by Armstrong’s final performance. “He had tears in his eyes as he walked off the stage during his last night at the Waldorf,” he said. “In all my years with him, I have never seen him cry before. He played his horn like he never played before and even told his audience stories about his trips to Africa.”26 Adams had attended Armstrong’s triumphant comeback performance in Las Vegas the previous September and was horrified by his condition at the Waldorf. “I waited offstage for Pops. He wasn’t the same Satchmo I had seen in September. Now he was frail, seemed to be wasting away. He moved slowly, haltingly. Six months had made a very old man of Pops.”
Armstrong knew he was a sick man at the end of the Waldorf-Astoria run, but he didn’t think it would be his last gig. “In fact, just before he left, right after the gig, Pops said, you know, ‘Hey, kid, see you in Miami, Florida, in June,’ or something like that,” Danny Barcelona recalled. “That’s what I can remember. I guess they had something booked, you know, during the summer.”27 Joe Muranyi told a similar story. “That night, it’s the last set of the last night, I’m seated with Louis Armstrong and Tyree’s taking the solo, or somebody … and he says, ‘Josephus,’ he says, ‘I want you to know,’ he said. ‘When we’re through here, I’m checking into a hospital, Beth Israel. I’ve got some things that have to be done for me but I don’t want you to worry. I’m all right. I’m going in on my own. There’s not going to be an emergency. Don’t worry. We’re going to go around the world one more time.’ ”28
Adams later wrote about the offstage moments after Armstrong’s final performance at the Waldorf. “After a standing ovation, Pops, Ira, and I started for his suite, but through the lobby of the hotel a crowd of well-wishers and autograph seekers surrounded Pops. He obliged. A New York columnist latched onto Ira. The crowd disappeared. Pops disappeared. At the far end of the lobby the light was reflected from his horn. It made me look up. I saw Pops walking away alone. He seemed in a daze, swaying as he walked. I thought he was going to collapse before he got to his room. His doctor answered the door.”29 Back in Dr. Zucker’s care, Armstrong knew he was sick, he just didn’t know the extent. The Waldorf engagement ended on March 13 and two days later, on the 15th, Armstrong suffered a heart attack and was rushed to Beth Israel. The attack was induced by kidney trouble that resulted in uremic poisoning, affecting the heart in the process. Armstrong’s liver and gall-bladder were also barely functioning. Now more than ever, Louis Armstrong was staring death in the face. Though he was in critical condition, the moment Armstrong’s pain eased, he would sing and entertain the hospital staff. On March 29, Armstrong took a turn for the worse, suffering another heart attack. This time, his heart stopped beating completely. “For thirty seconds he was clinically dead,” Lucille said.30 Zucker had to insert a tracheotomic tube to save Armstrong’s life. He was later placed on a respirator but once again fought for his life, and in mid-April he moved from intensive care to a private room. “His breathing is comfortable and his heartbeat is regular,” Zucker told the press. “He is eating very well and is out of bed in a chair several times a day. His spirits are much brighter now.”31 Armstrong even joked about the tracheotomy, confessing, “I was afraid that would take away my dulcet tones, but it didn’t affect me at all.”
Truthfully, Armstrong was miserable. He was especially upset about the tracheotomy. “At first I was furious at Lucille for giving permission for this operation,” he said when he got out. “I thought, now it’s finished with talking and blowing the horn. But, thank heavens, I was wrong.” Lucille sat at his bedside for sixteen hours a day for over eight weeks; on some days, he didn’t recognize her. But she believed in his will to survive. “Not for one second did I really believe Louis could possibly die,” she said. “This was it,” Louis said. “That helped me. I couldn’t disappoint her.” On May 8, feeling slightly better, Armstrong called his wife at 2:30 in the morning and shouted, “Get me out of this damned hospital! I can’t look any longer at the nurses in their uniforms. Get me out of here—or I’ll quit on my own.” Lucille responded that there was nothing she could do at that time of night. Finally, after repeated phone calls from Louis, Lucille called Dr. Zucker, who agreed that sending Louis back home could be “good therapy for Louis.”32
Back in Corona, Lucille had her hands full. Armstrong still couldn’t get around, falling down on his second day at home and bruising his knee. Because Louis couldn’t walk, Lucille had to carry him out of the bed every four hours to change the sheets, in addition to washing, shaving, and feeding him. The ever-stubborn Louis was even reluctant to take his medicine, so she had to stay on him for that, as well. It took Louis ten days before he could get out of bed alone. Lucille had an electric lift installed to help Louis get up and down the stairs. This, too, did not please him. “Louis was mad at me when I first told him [about the stair lift],” Lucille said. “ ‘I am not a cripple yet,’ he yelled. ‘I am not an old man and not paralyzed. Beside this, I am convinced, you have demolished half the house to get this stupid chair installed.’ He wanted me to remove the chair immediately, but of course I didn’t.” Finally, on May 23, two weeks after his return home, Louis came downstairs for dinner on his own. “He was feeling amazingly well and we enjoyed a lovely, entertaining evening with some close friends,” Lucille said.33
Foreseeing another long stay at home, Louis and Lucille turned their efforts to improving their residence. “When we bought this house twenty-nine years ago, we figured it would be a temporary home while looking for something better,” Lucille said. “But we stopped looking for something else. We really got to love this area.”34 The first thing they did was purchase the empty lot next door. The Armstrongs wasted no time in installing a lavish Japanese-inspired garden area. “I’m going to landscape this lot with trees, bushes, and flowers and maybe even a small croquet court,” Armstrong told the press in late May. “Then, I’m just going to sit out there and enjoy my garden and maybe even blow my horn a little. I’ll let my wife Lucille do the gardening. She has a green thumb.” The same New York Daily News article about this expansion of the Armstrong property ended with these words: “He said he hopes to be recovered enough by Fall to resume concerts but added that he would never play one-nighters again.”35 Next, the Armstrongs covered their house with a brick façade. “Not wishing to be perceived as ‘putting on airs,’ ” director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum Michael Cogswell explains, “Louis offered to cover the house of his next-door neighbors, Adele and Selma Heraldo, with brick as well. The Heraldos declined, but did allow the brick masons to extend the brick face along the retaining wall in front of their house.”36 The gesture typified how Armstrong felt about his Corona neighborhood. Armstrong’s generous spirit continued, and in June 1971 he donated a thousand dollars to the Milne Boys’ Home in New Orleans “for the purchase and maintenance of musical instruments.” Milne was the new name for the Colored Waif’s Home, where Armstrong first learned to blow his horn in 1913. He knew, even at the end of his life, that he wanted to help struggling kids from his hometown become musicians.37
Armstrong’s next task was to alert friends that he was doing okay. On May 30, he wrote to Slim Evans, “This was a tough one this time (in the Hospital). Hmmm. The Cats (people) Everywhere out East were Betting money that I wouldn’t make it this time. 4 weeks I was in Intensive Care, Sick as a Bitch. But Doctor Zucker—Lucille and the Lord and Mee (Tee-Hee) we had something going. Ol Swiss Kriss was in there with us. Yas Lord—Ol Satch is back on the mound again.” Armstrong told Evans that he had even begun playing the trumpet again. “My Doctor a (‘Hip Rascal’) gave me permission to Blow a little lightly every day before My Dinner. Sorta slip on it and getting a strong lip and building up an Embusure or Amberschure. [Embouchure] Hmm. You know? I am trying to say good strong crumb crushers (Lips).”38
By late June, Armstrong began to feel better. He was now walking with a cane—when he chose to. “He is supposed to walk with the help of a walking stick,” Lucille told a German reporter, “but now that he feels strong again he often forgets it. After walking a while, he naturally gets a little weak. Then he calls and I know. Now he is standing up clutching at the furniture, because he can’t go on. And only because he was too stubborn to use his walking stick.” Armstrong knew that the reports about his illness were dire and he didn’t care for such speculation. “I never was interested in the life of Caruso or the death of Mario Lanza,” he said. “But today it is different. Everybody wants to know how I am going to die. And I am going to be at least ninety years old. And they think I want to prove something by playing the trumpet as soon as possible and give at least four concerts a year. I don’t want to prove anything. I just like to blow my horn. And I enjoy hearing myself play.”39
In order to prove he was on the road to recovery, Armstrong invited the press to visit him in Corona. Rolling Stone magazine sent photographer Annie Leibowitz on her first travel assignment for the magazine. “Leibowitz hoped to do unposed photo reportage on Armstrong and was disappointed to find that the show business veteran had his own ideas about picture taking,” Marc H. Miller wrote. “Without any encouragement from Leibowitz, he went through his complete repertoire of poses: taking out his handkerchief, pretending to blow his trumpet, and giving her his famous smile. After a few hours, Leibowitz left, feeling that the session was largely a failure. It was only later that she saw the true poignancy of the photos, which were among the last taken of Armstrong.” Leibowitz recalled, “You know something is not 100 percent right. You admire the professionalism. You admire that the show must go on. You admire that even in this sort of tired and exhausted state, he’s going to give you his best. Those are all very fascinating and admirable moments.”40
On June 23, Armstrong sat down in his den and composed an open letter to the most important people in his life, his fans:
This is Louis Satchmo Armstrong speaking from his home in Corona. I’ve Just gotten out of the Beth Israel N.Y. Hospital. I’ve had a million things that happened to me, including the operation for TRECHEOTOMY. And I’m coming along just fine and I’m getting my strength back even in my legs. I thought that it is real thrilling to send a message to my fans and friends from all over the world. Which I’d like to thank all of them from every nook and corner of the world for their lovely get well cards and prayers. Which did wonders for me. I also want to thank my personal Doctor Gary Zucker—His staff of Doctors, Mrs. Lucille Armstrong, Dr. Alexander Schiff, our company Doctor, Ira Mangel, our road manager for many years for many years [sic], and still is. That is, if I ever get back to work again. I am looking forward to it. I feel that I owe them, my public and fans, my service again. Which they are eagerly waiting for.41
Later that day, Armstrong held court in his home for various reporters and photographers. “I’m one old cat that you just can’t kill … and I’m definitely going back to work as soon as my legs get a little stronger,” he assured them. “Work, that’s my life—oh yeah! But I wouldn’t want to go out on the stage with a walking cane. Soon as my pins get back in shape, ole Satch will be back.”42 Lucille was on hand to speak of Armstrong’s yearning to get back on stage. “Just the other day he asked me ‘what’s my next job?’ He’s doing so well and he looks so great,” she said. “And he plays his horn every day … sounds great, just great.” To prove it, Louis pulled out his trumpet and began playing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” backed by his friend Tyree Glenn, who had dropped by for a visit. As a United Press International reporter summed it up, “Taking a chorus, eyes closed, ever-present white handkerchief clutched in his left hand, Satchmo ran off a series of clear, clean notes, whose mellowness and phrasing proclaimed that he has lost none of his touch. Then he laid down his horn, wiped his chops with the handkerchief, pointed to a photograph of himself and mused: ‘See that cat? You can’t kill him, man. That cat ain’t ever gonna die. We just gonna keep on going, just going. Yeeeaaah man!’ ”43
According to one report, Armstrong played three more short songs with Glenn and ended the mini-set with one of his own compositions, “If We Never Meet Again.”44 Armstrong found time to read his “open letter” to his fans, and according to the New York Times, he ended his visit with the press by asking them to deliver a message to the fans: “Tell ’em I love ’em, that’s all.”45
In his alone time, Armstrong pursued his hobbies, including writing, listening to his tapes, and designing collages for the boxes. He had begun to recatalog his massive reel-to-reel collection while recuperating at home in 1970. For more than a year, Armstrong spent much of his free time transferring recent and older recordings to numbered tapes. He frequently dubbed his own music, revisiting his 1920s work on occasion, but spending most of his time on later albums such as Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, Ambassador Satch, Louis and the Good Book, Louis and the Angels, The Real Ambassadors, and Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography, sometimes making multiple copies of the same albums. He transferred joke-telling sessions with now-deceased friends such as Velma Middleton and Doc Pugh. He continued copying other people’s records, not only expected musicians such as King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton but also more modern jazzmen such as Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, proof that his old stance against bop had, for the most part, dissipated. Classical music and opera remained a favorite, but he also made room for new music by Neil Diamond and the Plastic Ono Band. Once done making a reel, he would write down the tape’s contents and stick the paper inside the tape box. In his final year, he had begun transferring the contents of his tapes into a catalog. He prenumbered the first 233 pages, leaving room for 155 reels, but would only manage to fill it up to reel 123.
The exteriors of the tape boxes were saved for his special collages, which often had nothing to do with the contents of the tapes. He would take photos from throughout his career, cut them up and arrange them in the most creative fashions. Now each photo turned into a memory. Before he got sick, he viewed them with Associated Press reporter Mary Campbell. “Here’s Velma Middleton,” he said, looking at one. “She killed them when she sang. I’ll never find another one like her.” He picked up another one and remarked, “Edmond Hall, probably playing ‘Dardanella.’ ”46 Armstrong’s entire life was contained in these boxes, on the inside and the out. As June turned into July, Louis was still busy decorating boxes with at least five different newspaper headlines and magazine articles from May or June of that year. Two of his final collages consisted of headlines from the June 24 issue of the Orange County Register (“Satchmo Talking … ‘Tell all the cats the Choirmaster up there in Heaven will have to wait for old Louis.’ ”) and the June 25 Miami Herald (“Satchmo Bouncing Back, Eager to Work Again”).
On July 4, Armstrong celebrated his seventy-first birthday in his backyard garden area, welcoming friends and listening to a radio marathon of his music. The next day, he was ready for yet another comeback. He called Dr. Schiff and told him that he wanted to get the All Stars together for a rehearsal. “We’ll get the boys together, rehearse and go back to work,” Armstrong told Schiff.47 Preparations were underway for Armstrong to perform again, starting in California. Louis Armstrong, happy with the knowledge that he could one day perform with his All Stars again, went to bed. He would never wake up.
Louis Armstrong died in his sleep at 5:30 a.m. on July 6, 1971. Lucille Armstrong noticed her husband stopped breathing and immediately summoned Drs. Schiff and Zucker, who pronounced Armstrong dead of “kidney failure, attributable to heart failure.”48 Though he had just celebrated his seventy-first birthday, Armstrong was in fact sixty-nine years old at the time of his death, four weeks shy of actually turning seventy. It doesn’t seem like a particularly old age until one considers how much Armstrong packed into it. The one-nighters, the powerful trumpet playing, the cigarettes, the marijuana, the endless laxatives … in some ways, it is a miracle Armstrong lasted that long. Perhaps he would have lasted longer if he hadn’t worked himself so hard but it was the only life he knew.
Armstrong’s death was front-page news around the world. The papers were filled with tributes from the likes of Bing Crosby, Eddie Condon, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, and Duke Ellington. Gillespie penned a column for the New York Times and wrote, “Never before in the history of black music had one individual so completely dominated an art form as the Master, Daniel Louis Armstrong.” Proof the bop-war days were over, Gillespie, who once called Armstrong a “plantation character,” wrote, “Louis is not dead, for his music is and will remain in the hearts and minds of countless millions of the world’s people, and in the playing of hundreds of thousands of musicians who have come under his influence.”49 Ellington, who once bitterly made insinuations about Armstrong being an Uncle Tom, was quoted as saying, “If anyone was Mr. Jazz, it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be … He is what I call an American standard, an American original.”50 Miles Davis, an unabashed fan who also vehemently criticized what he perceived as Armstrong’s Uncle Tom ways, said, “You can’t play anything on that horn that Louis hasn’t played.”51 Lucille Armstrong filled multiple scrapbooks with personal condolences from celebrities and friends. Crosby wrote to her, “The too infrequent times I spent in his company were joyous experiences and I know of no man for whom I had more admiration and respect. He was a true genius, but more.”52
The NAACP obituary, written by Executive Director Roy Wilkins, praised Armstrong: “Unlike many of the Negro youngsters of today, Armstrong was not always feeling sorry for himself, bemoaning the fact that he was black, while looking around for someone whom he could flim-flam for assistance,” echoing sentiments Armstrong had expressed in his private 1969 manuscript on race. Wilkins concluded:
Louis Armstrong is one answer to those who maintain that excellence is not necessary, that all a black person has to be is black. In his time this man was simply the best trumpeter alive. Through his own sheer talent he won the place that jazz occupies today in American music. No faking. With today’s crime news, it may not seem that devotion to excellence pays off. The slick operators seem to have it, all the way from lunch money muscled from schoolboys to dubious deals in the board rooms of great corporations. But Louis Armstrong, growling out his gravelling singing, fluttering one of his snow white handkerchiefs and blowing ecstasy into the air with his trumpet, pipes piercingly, “Taint so, Honey, taint so.”53
Armstrong’s body was laid out for three days at the New York National Guard Armory for the more than twenty-five thousand fans who went to say good-bye. When Lucille organized Armstrong’s funeral as a sober New York affair, she was criticized for not planning the joyous New Orleans–styled celebration Armstrong himself explained as his ideal send-off. Jet magazine ran the headline “Satchmo’s Funeral ‘White and Dead’ in New York, but ‘Black, Alive and Swinging’ in New Orleans.” The article read, “For a man who contributed so much to the world of music, Armstrong’s last laying-out moments on this earth were bereft of any of the strains that brought comfort and joy to millions around the world, although his widow, Mrs. Lucille Armstrong, insisted that this was the way ‘Pops’ wanted it … The so-called attempt at ‘dignity’ was stifling to any sense of real feeling or emotion.”54 Ella Fitzgerald, in attendance, did not sing despite her storied collaborations with Armstrong. Instead, Peggy Lee sang a quiet “Lord’s Prayer” while Al Hibbler sang mournful versions of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Thousands of people lined up outside Corona’s Congregational Church, but only five hundred were admitted, including Gillespie, Earl Hines, David Frost, and Ornette Coleman. Joe Muranyi recalled, “You had to have tickets to get into the church. And they were stamped ‘Associated Booking Corp.’ And I had to laugh and I said, ‘Jesus, even his funeral was booked by Joe Glaser!’ ”55
Muranyi was dismayed by the lack of music at the funeral: “I took my horn and I didn’t know, I figured maybe we should play, but we didn’t.” “If Joe Glaser had been alive Louis would have had a grand send-off,” Dan Morgenstern declared. “But Lucille wanted to be respectable and had ties to the community—she was under some pressure to have it there.”56 According to Jet, “Not a trumpet sounded, nor a funeral note, for the man who started his career playing at funerals and who said on his 70th birthday last year, ‘They going to enjoy blowing over me, ain’t they? Cats will be coming from California and everywhere else just to play.’ Cats came from everywhere, but apparently they were not allowed to play at the funeral … Many New Orleans musicians traveled to New York on their own to be at the funeral and to play, if they were allowed. But no permission came.”57 Those musicians would have been better off staying in New Orleans, where fifteen thousand people crowded City Hall for the official tribute to the city’s most famous son. Multiple brass bands performed, but the music did not last long. However, trumpeter Teddy Riley closed the ceremony by performing “Taps” on the battered cornet Armstrong first learned to play on while at the Colored Waif’s Home in 1913: a beautiful touch the New York affair sadly lacked.
Louis Armstrong was officially gone. Soon after his heart stopped beating, the now standard story of Armstrong’s later years began to develop. In his eulogy, John S. Wilson stated: “Because he made these essential contributions to the development of jazz in the 1920’s when jazz … was largely an underground music, most of Mr. Armstrong’s career was, in a sense, an anticlimax.”58 Barely a month after Armstrong’s death, Craig McGregor began sowing the seeds for the theory that Louis’s life was a “tragedy” and a “despairing story.” “What we may not know or don’t always remember is that in many ways Armstrong is a tragic figure, and his tragedy is part of a larger one in which we all share,” he wrote in the New York Times. Regarding Armstrong’s ability “to adapt his art to the demands of the time,” McGregor argued: “Armstrong survived by compromise, and it was a compromise which destroyed his art. It should never have been necessary, and unless we learn from his fate how commercialism can corrode even a creative genius like Armstrong, jazz will continue to be created by a unique minority who are willing to sacrifice their lives for their art.”59
This line of thinking continued throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. For example, James Lincoln Collier said, “I cannot think of another American artist who so failed his own talent,” and Gunther Schuller referred to Armstrong’s “need to scratch out a living as a good-natured buffoon.” Gerald Early, a young black essayist and critic, protested: “Armstrong, at the time of his death in July 1971 was not only quite wealthy but was probably the most famous American entertainer in the history of the American performing arts. But it is not Armstrong the entertainer, Armstrong the performer, Armstrong the darkie minstrel, who needs to be remembered.” In the late 1980s Early described why Armstrong’s later career turned off so much of his black audience:
The pain that one feels when Armstrong’s television performances of the middle and late sixties are recalled is so overwhelming as to constitute an enormously bitter grief, a grief made all the keener because it balances so perfectly one’s sense of shame, rage, and despair … One shudders to think that perhaps two generations of black Americans remember Louis Armstrong, perhaps one of the most remarkable geniuses America ever produced, not only as a silly Uncle Tom but as a pathetically vulnerable, weak old man. During the sixties, a time when black people most vehemently did not wish to appear weak, Armstrong seemed positively dwarfed by the patronizing white talk-show hosts on whose programs he performed, and he seemed to revel in that chilling, embarrassing spotlight. To this current generation of young black adults, Armstrong’s greatness, if he ever had any, occurred in such a remote, antediluvian time as to bear almost no relation to modern American music or modern American culture.60
The tide began to turn in the 1980s with Dan Morgenstern’s liner notes to various Armstrong releases, including Columbia’s Chicago Concert set. Gary Giddins, the first to gain access to Armstrong’s manuscripts and tape recordings, published Satchmo in 1988. The book, a loving appreciation of Armstrong, defended the trumpeter’s entertaining ways and provided new insight into his writings. Armstrong’s personal archive did not become available to the public until 1994, when the Louis Armstrong Archives opened at Queens College. It is a haven for researchers and fans alike.
Probably of little coincidence, perceptions about Armstrong began to change when Armstrong’s private views about life and music became public. In the 1990s, younger black jazz musicians such as Jon Faddis, Wynton Marsalis, and Nicholas Payton began to preach about the wonders of Armstrong’s entire career, including his later years. And 1994 also marked the year of the traveling Smithsonian exhibit about his life and the release of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But the critically lauded boxed set redirected the focus to Louis’s 1920s recordings as a jazz maverick, thereby allowing critics to praise his early work at the expense of the later. “Hello, Dali, goodbye ‘Hello, Dolly!” wrote David Hadju in Entertainment Weekly.
The Armstrong juggernaut continued over the ensuing years. Armstrong was featured on a postage stamp in 1995; numerous biographies and books about the trumpeter were published; an annual “Satchmo SummerFest” was founded in 2001, drawing thousands of people to New Orleans to celebrate the city’s most famous son. Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary made Armstrong its “star,” even devoting time to the All Stars, the Little Rock comments, and other episodes from Armstrong’s final decades. Armstrong’s historic Corona home opened as the Louis Armstrong House Museum in 2003. As I write this, Forest Whitaker is planning a big-screen biopic on Armstrong’s life. And yet, and yet. As chronicled in the first chapter, Armstrong’s later years continue to be shrouded in myths. People still hurl the “Uncle Tom” epithet. Hardened jazz fans focus on the Hot Fives and Sevens and ignore the All Stars. There are nonjazz fans who only know Armstrong though “What a Wonderful World” and other coffeehouse pop songs that showcase yet another side of his genius, a more “neutered” one. My hope is that in reading this book people from all musical backgrounds will finally begin to understand that the later years of Louis Armstrong’s life were epic. His music was masterful and he consistently challenged himself in studio recordings and live performances. It was then that Armstrong experienced his greatest popularity, touring the world and touching the lives of fans everywhere. Offstage, though he delighted in laxatives, marijuana, and women, he also showcased an indomitable spirit of generosity, treating friends and fans, royalty and strangers, all like gold. With regard to race relations, Armstrong’s private conversations and public actions proved he was nobody’s Uncle Tom.
Although Armstrong was overwhelmingly popular throughout his career and died a national icon, his detractors have always had the loudest voices, which is why the negative view of his later years remains the standard after all these years. Armstrong’s composition “Someday You’ll Be Sorry,” which he sang from the earliest All Stars gigs in 1947 until his last performance at the Waldorf-Astoria, perfectly epitomizes Louis’s misunderstood final period: “Someday you’ll be sorry / The way you treated me was wrong.”
Miles Davis may have criticized Armstrong’s entertaining style, but he couldn’t deny how Armstrong transcended his stage persona, saying in 1970: “To me, the great style and interpretation that Louis gave to us musically came from the heart, but his personality was developed by white people wanting black people to entertain by smiling and jumping around. After they do it they call you a Tom, but Louis fooled all of them and became an ambassador of good will.”61 Few names better capture Armstrong’s mission in life. He addressed the title “Ambassador of Goodwill” in 1957:
I say my public, they ain’t thinkin’ about politics when they call me Ambassador. They thinkin’ about that horn and them notes and that music and them riffs. Oh, yes, that what they thinkin’. They prob’ly want to rest up on Satchmo, you know, when they call me Ambassador Satch. Which is nice, you know. ‘Specially when the chicks, they say, “Hellew there, Ambassador Satch.” And the cats, “How you doin’ there, ol’ Ambassador Satchie-matchie!” Long as I’m playin’, I don’t want ’em to feel nothin’ else. I’m not lookin’ to be on no high pedestal. They get their soul lifted because they got the same soul I have the minute I hit a note. There’s three generations Satchmo has witnessed—the ol’ cats, their children and their children’s children, and they still all walk up and say, “Ol’ Satch, how do you do!” I love my audience and they love me and we just have one good time whenever I get up on the stage—it’s such a lovely pleasure.62