HALL OVERTON AND CALVIN ALBERT
The fourth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue was divided into two lofts by a temporary plaster wall. Gene Smith had the front, his windows facing Sixth Avenue, from 1957 until he was evicted in 1971. The musician and educator Hall Overton had the back, from 1954 to 1972. Over the fourteen years of shared time, Overton would sometimes cover rent when Smith was broke, and Smith would type long, single-spaced letters to Overton rationalizing his delinquency. Here’s the opening of one letter dated June 19, 1958, which was near the end of Smith’s Pittsburgh odyssey.
Dear Hall,
This is the morning of being nearly conscious enough to survey as wreckage—myself, and the fragmented, lifeless shiftings and settlings of my revolution. Revolution which I believed was not for destroying, but which would bring myself and a few others to a new and fertile ground.
Then six paragraphs later:
My promises broken to you, were not an evasion—and with deep sorrow I am appreciative of the pain which I left hanging as a situation upon you … But grimly, my first concerns in these days are going to be those most in need of considering, rather than those most in power with a way of enforcing pressure. I am deeply chagrined that I have left you in this spot—and I have not intended being evasive with you. It was two-fold and many creased—my one way, as long as I was locked in this last relentless climax to the Pittsburgh project, to raise the money for you alone and not for all the others pressing down on me, not even for food, was a one way choice of a pawning of equipment.
The musician Bob DeCelle copied musical charts for Overton before getting a full-time job as copyist and archivist for the New York Philharmonic. During an interview with him at his home in Brant Lake, New York, on October 2, 2004, he offered this memory:
Hall got pissed off because Gene Smith owed him a couple of months’ rent. And Hall said, “I’m going to fix him,” and he knocked at the door and he banged at the door. And Gene didn’t answer, so he figured he was out. Then Hall got out a hammer and he hammered and nailed the door shut. But Gene was in there. And you could hear Gene wailing, “Let me out of here!” Oh, man, there were some wild things happening in that place.
* * *
On May 23, 2005, I interviewed a psychiatrist named Dr. Baron Shopsin by telephone from my home in North Carolina. I found my way to him after a tip from the photographer Will Faller, a former assistant to Smith. Faller told me that in the early 1970s, Dr. Shopsin had practiced with Dr. Nathan S. Kline, the famous psychiatrist who treated Smith for decades. Faller knew this because he had sought treatment for his addiction problems from this practice after encouragement from Smith. Baron Shopsin saved my life, Faller told me. He might be able to tell you something about Gene. I think he’s still alive and living in Florida.
I found Dr. Shopsin living in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and wrote him a letter. A week later we set up a telephone call. When we talked, his words sounded prepared:
Nate [Dr. Kline] was one of the only doctors who would treat people who drank like Smith. Medication can add to problems for people who drink that much alcohol. Nate regarded Smith as a genius who was very troubled. He just wanted to help him make it along. By the time I knew Smith he looked like a shell of a person. He was only around fifty years old but a very fragile human being, emotionally and physically. There were pathological reasons for Smith’s behavior. It’s an obsessional thing that’s hard to explain in anyone that has it. His obsessions were very costly, very time consuming and draining for him and others around him. He never found a way to turn them off. He and Nate tried everything. The tapes he made in his loft were the product of a troubled mind. There’s no way to explain that degree of activity otherwise. He was driven mad by his thoughts, which were obsessive beyond reason and treatment.
This sounded like a summary to me and I had a hard time going deeper. The rest of my conversation with him focused on how to gain access to Kline’s medical records for Smith. He pointed me in several directions, all of which, he admitted, would probably be futile. He was right. I later learned that Kline sold his private practice and the files were shredded.
Then, casually, as we were winding down the conversation, Shopsin asked, Did you know Smith was bisexual?
No, I didn’t know, and Dr. Shopsin wouldn’t elaborate on his comment for me. In subsequent interviews with various Smith associates, I would find ways to bring it up, and nobody could or would confirm it. A few people said things like, Hmmm, that’s interesting, that had never occurred to me, but I guess I can see it. But nobody could offer anything more than speculation. If it were true, it could add nuance to Smith’s relationship with Hall Overton.
* * *
Overton was a dashing, six-foot-four suit-and-tie man who, on first glance, seemed out of place in the squalor of 821 Sixth Avenue. After carrying stretchers in combat in France and Belgium during World War II, he taught theory and classical composition at Juilliard and, later, at Yale and the New School for Social Research. His wife, Nancy Swain Overton, was a successful singer, first in a group called the Heathertones and later in the iconic Chordettes, of “Mister Sandman” fame, and they shared a nice house in Forest Hills with their two young sons, including one, Rick, who became a successful comedian.
Overton was revered and beloved as a teacher and arranger. In several dozen interviews I conducted with musicians who worked with him—among them the composer Steve Reich, the saxophonist Lee Konitz, the vocalist Janet Lawson, the French-horn player Robert Northern, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, the pianist Marian McPartland, and the composer Carman Moore—the reports were consistent: Overton had a unique ability to find and nurture qualities inside other musicians rather than impose his preferences on them. His signature was not having one.
From Thelonious Monk to Steve Reich, the range of Overton’s behind-the-scenes influence may be unsurpassed in the American music annals. But he’s not really part of those annals today, in part because he seemed to care very little about acknowledgment. He was happy behind the scenes. He preferred the obscurity of his studio loft to the hallowed halls of Juilliard. Musicians hiked the stairwell at 821 Sixth Avenue at all hours for private lessons and experimental jam sessions with Overton. His charm and lack of self-promotion helped earn their trust.
But there was a toll. His blend of skills made it hard to find a home. I think Hall stood alone in being somebody who was a [classical] composer and a professional jazz musician and someone who really had a place in the jazz community, said Steve Reich, who studied with Overton in the loft once a week for two years beginning in June 1957. I think he was totally unique … which means it was kind of a lonely position to be in. There was no place in the academy for a man like him and the bureaucracy wore him down. The weight of Juilliard killed him.
Overton died of cirrhosis at age fifty-two in 1972.
* * *
On March 3, 1961, Smith rolled his tapes and caught himself in this conversation with the photographer Bill Pierce and an unidentified man.
Smith: We’ll import him for a jazz session downstairs.
Pierce: You should be here when he’s here, it’s quite something …
Man: They don’t play it over there like they do it here.
Pierce: Well, they don’t play it here like they play it here. You know, very relaxed.
Smith: Relaxed, but some of the best jam sessions, and they’re not happening very often. Next door at Hall’s, when he has sessions: One, he has very top musicians. Two, he’s one of the most learned of all connected with jazz and music. He teaches at Juilliard. He’s a magnificent jazz pianist. And among other things, he hooks the other characters into the line of completing something, which for most of ’em … they kind of fade away, and you know, he has a beautiful … he has a way of controlling musicians to make them work right. If the drummer is lagging, he has a way of forcing him around with his playing, somewhat decently, and few people play as well as when Hall is driving them on. Which is very impressive.
Man: Who is Hall?
Smith: He guided the orchestration for [Thelonious] Monk, for instance. He also does operas and symphony work and in other words, he’s extremely talented, mainly as a teacher, now. But I’ve never heard one of these jazz musicians that wouldn’t pass his door at all without stopping. And that’s very true, whether it’s been Zoot or Mulligan or anyone else, it’s always “Gee, I’ve gotta study with that guy someday.” It’s always so amazing because his piano playing is almost too polite and quiet in a way. But he has a tremendous way of urging other musicians on.
* * *
Gene Smith and Hall Overton shared more than a wall on the fourth floor of a shithole in the wholesale flower district. They were both from modest parts of the Midwest, Smith lower (Kansas) and Overton upper (apple farm country in Michigan). They had meek fathers and powerful mothers. They witnessed carnage up close in the war while not being armed, Smith as a photographer and Overton as a stretcher carrier. They were riddled by insidious disdain for their employers, Smith for Life and Overton for Juilliard, and they retreated to the Sixth Avenue loft building, leaving wives and families in much nicer homes outside Manhattan. Both men had deep and natural creative passions and charms that drew men and women to them. And both men drank themselves to death in their fifties.
There are a number of photographs of Overton by Smith, including one that Overton used on an album cover, and there are many tape recordings by Smith on which Overton is present. What’s captured is the sound of Overton playing piano or his voice in rehearsal and instructional settings with other musicians. Amid Smith’s 4,500 hours of tapes, there are scant recordings of the two men conversing despite them sharing that fourth floor the whole time.
I met Overton’s widow, Nancy, twice at her home in New Jersey, and his two surviving younger brothers, Harvey and Richard, at their homes in Chicago and rural Oregon, respectively. Each of them rarely visited the loft. I needed another source to understand Overton’s life there. I had learned that a humpbacked sculptor named Calvin Albert had been his closest friend from his days as a young student until his death.
I tracked down Albert in 2003. He was eighty-five years old and living alone in a community for seniors in Margate, Florida, a town just northwest of Fort Lauderdale.
I wrote Albert a letter, followed up with a telephone call, and learned some of the basics. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1918, Albert endured a rather brutal childhood and youth. His parents divorced when he was eight and his mother put him in an orphanage while she took a job in a different town, visiting him only every other weekend. Each of her visits ended with a sobbing separation. Calvin was then moved out of the orphanage and into a home with strangers in a different town. A few years later, his mother returned to live in Grand Rapids and they moved in with her mother, his grandmother, and his aunt.
Then at age twenty, Albert was diagnosed with an untreatable, degenerative spinal disease that left him with a significant and painful hump. His whole life was marked with pain. Through it all, he taught sculpture at Pratt Institute in New York for several decades. After retirement, he and his wife of sixty years, Martha, moved to Florida from New York to be nearer their daughter. Martha had passed away a few years before I reached him.
I knew I’d only get so much from Albert on the phone. His volunteer social worker, Winnie Connor, answered most calls because Albert was confined to very slow movements in a wheelchair. She encouraged me to visit and said that giving Albert an ear might be good therapy for him.
I flew into Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood and drove to Margate on August 20, 2003. Albert was happy to talk about Overton. Immediately, I learned something new. I had figured that the two friends had met in Grand Rapids, because Overton had grown up there, too, after being born nearby in Bangor in 1920. That wasn’t the case. They met in Chicago, where they were attending art and music schools, respectively. Albert spoke slowly with purpose and care, surprised and grateful to have an opportunity to talk about his old friend in a deep manner three decades after he had passed away. Albert had been thinking about our meeting for a couple of weeks and when I arrived he was eager to carry the conversation.
After Martha and I got married, one of the first people I met was her girlfriend, her closest girlfriend, who was a classical pianist. She showed up one night with this tall guy, Hall Overton, who was one of her classmates in music school. We became just fast friends. All through the war he sent me letters with little drawings on them. I asked him what was the worst part of the war. He said it was that he was six foot four and he could never dig a trench fast enough to get himself, all of himself, in. So it was [laughs] harrowing.
In 1945, I had my first gallery show in New York and we decided to move there. Hall had returned from the war and had already moved there. I remember we went over to his place and he cooked us a big meal. He liked to cook. In a short time, he became a teacher and I became a teacher, so that friendship just went along all the way. There were a lot of parts about the relationship that sort of weren’t healthy. Most weekends I’d spend with him down at the loft. His wife would be home and my wife would be home and, thus, we had dates or something.
In the loft, you know, that building, the most amazing thing was Eugene’s studio. When you come in, there was an immense pile of junk, you couldn’t believe how much junk, and there was a path going from the door to the back, with junk piled up on both sides of the path: cameras, film, and everything. You’d think, my god, how does he live in there? He had a girlfriend that lived in there and you’d think, how can she stand it? I just never got used to seeing what a complete and total mess Eugene’s studio was.
I was a terrible student and I was a wonderful teacher. I had the greatest ability as a teacher. No matter how bad the rest of my life was and how painful, or whatever, I got in the class and it was just wonderful. The kids all felt that way, you could tell, because no one skipped. Hall and I would go to Chinatown, usually on Friday nights, and we’d walk down the main drag, a street in the village. We seldom could walk two or three blocks before one of us would have a student come up and talk to us.
You know, when you spend so many years talking with someone—it was thirty years for me and Hall—you can’t remember any one particular conversation. We had these long, long dinners, long conversations, and Hall’s pint of scotch on the table, eating lots of Chinese food, and very elaborate and heated discussions about the art world and where we were and so on.
Hall got very interested in going to see my therapist, which would have been a great idea except that Hall lived way uptown and this guy was over in Brooklyn, even from my house in Brooklyn it was a long ways to this doctor’s house. So Hall didn’t keep it going, and that was too bad because he just didn’t bump into the right doctors. It didn’t work out for him. He always found a way of continuing drinking, but he knew his liver was bad for a long time. He drank himself to death, and he knew it was happening.
Hall wasn’t a happy man. Being in the army may have been just overwhelming—for some people seem to go through it and other people I think were just beat up by it. But he would have to be very depressed to drink that much. But, uh, he went on drinking and things he did, uh, if he had gone to a real analyst, you know, he might have lived a little longer.
I asked Albert about Overton’s teaching, about his preference for teaching at the loft rather than Juilliard: As years went on, Hall began to do a lot of private teaching. What he would do is, the girl he thought was the most possible—that he liked the most, he’d make her his last student over the day, so they could have a drink and sit around. That became a big part—a big part—of his life. People, girls in particular, would do a lot of things that they really didn’t want to do, sexually, because it would please a man. Hall had a vast appetite for that. Hall was a very smooth operator with people and in many ways that worked out perfectly for girls and so on.
The real thing it took me many years of knowing Hall to begin to understand—I think he was really, uh, ambidextrous—not gay, but I think it was always there. It was just an observation. When I, when I came to New York he was living with an older guy and I’m sure he was gay, but, uh … that was never brought up.
One time his father came to visit and here’s this little meek man and Hall’s mother was big and dominating. That was an eye-opener. It gave me a real kind of clue to see him and his whole ambivalence, I think, about sex. I think it was probably from this rough, tough mother. It was such a big part of his life, the girlfriends and everything, and it was elaborate. I really didn’t know anybody else that cared as much about that [sex] as Hall did.
Whatever it was, uh, I think it led to his sexual confusion of a certain amount. That’s just my opinion, based on nothing, except I’ve heard a lot about that—that people that very often tended to be gay will be very macho and have a lot of conquests and how long they can do it and how high they can do it and all, all sorts of things like that. This one time he had this wild night and the next day he had these two big sores on his knees, from banging around for hours.
Albert paused as if he wasn’t sure he should be saying what he had just said. Then he changed the subject abruptly: The end of Hall’s career was so wonderful, in a way. He had written this wonderful opera and Juilliard put it on with all the trimmings—big elaborate sets. It was very beautiful. The main part of the opera was Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer floating downriver in the barge. The opera has beautiful love songs. I thought it was a very ingenious way to portray the relationship of love between two men. It was just very beautiful opera. Afterward the Sunday paper had a big sketch of him. It was at least half of the whole music page, with this great sketch that somebody had done in honor of Hall. It was a wonderful tribute.
Only a few days later, he came over to Pratt to lecture. People knew he was my friend so they had him come over and lecture and we went out to dinner. The next day he just dropped on the steps of Juilliard, spitting up blood. He was in the hospital for quite a long time but, painfully, you know, you could hardly talk to him. His passing made a big fuss, because he had been getting more and more well-known. That was a drastic ending, but he had that great opera.
Albert was growing weary and we decided to break for the day. I returned the next morning and asked him to tell me about his own life and work. I was curious to learn more about the background of someone who would become Overton’s closest friend.
My dad moved us to Chicago when I was about five. He opened a real elaborate nightclub, with an orchestra and a grand piano and pretty girls. I think it just failed completely. He lost everything. Then, in 1926, he just left me and my mother and that was it. I was eight years old. My mother came from a family of five girls and their parents were born in Europe, so I don’t think she had any practical skills, except she was a milliner of some sort. So after my father left, we went back to Grand Rapids and she put me in an orphanage, a Catholic orphanage, and she got a job in another town. I think she was running a hat department in a department store.
I was the only Jewish kid in the orphanage so on Sundays all these people, nuns in black and all the kids, they all marched to church and I sat in the window of the orphanage by myself. That was one vivid memory. The worst memory of that is when my mother left me there. I was eight years old so I was old enough to know what was going on. I just screamed and yelled bloody murder. She gave me an ice cream cone or a lollipop or something. Then she got on the streetcar and I just chased after it and I actually caught up to the streetcar and got on it when it stopped. So we went through all that again. See, the sad part of my life comes up pretty quick.
As a very small boy I started working with clay. It was the only thing I could figure out to do ever since I was very young. I had this ability and it was very strong and it became the sort of thing that people always thought about, whoever was taking care of me. What about Calvin? Just give him some clay and he’ll just stay there and be fine.
When I was about twenty years old I got sick with pains in my back. I went to a free clinic in Chicago and they ended up sending me to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Well, when I got through with all the tests, they called me and told me it was spondylosis, which means your back is going to degenerate and fuse one vertebra at a time, and it is going to take twenty years. I was in a complete nightmare. I could get up and work and run around. But three hours of sleep and I would just wake up screaming.
My wife, Martha, she knew I was sick, but she decided to marry me anyway. She made most of the decisions back then. So she would get up every night and I had a big thing with hot bulbs that she put over me, but you know, that doesn’t make you feel any better—it’s just hot, and you still have this terrible pain.
The doctors treated me with everything that is more dangerous than the disease and nothing, nothing makes any difference to that disease. Absolutely nothing. I even went in the hospital and they stretched me on a rack, and they put some weights or something on me to try to straighten me out. I was there ten days on that thing. Doesn’t make any difference. Just makes it more miserable. Nothing made a difference. By the end of twenty years you’re completely fused, you can’t move anything. I thought, “That’s it.” But the pain goes away and you begin to get a different pain because you’re so bent out of shape that the muscles are always wrong and pulling wrong so you kind of gradually make a transition into that. So I’ve been in a lot of pain all the time and it impacts everything I do. I’ve been physically vulnerable.
Albert and I decided to take an hour break while Winnie helped him with his physical therapy. I drove my rental car to a convenience store and picked up a twenty-four-ounce Budweiser. I found a vacant parking lot and sat in the rental car and listened to one of Overton’s string quartets.
Back at Albert’s house, we renewed our conversation and I asked him about the impact of living in so much pain for so many years. He immediately returned the conversation to Overton. He’d been thinking about this story during our break. It was something he wanted to tell me.
We had one wild evening in that Chinese restaurant. Hall and I were sitting and there were two gentlemen in back of us talking. Well-dressed businessmen. I couldn’t see them, my back was to them. But they were extreme, super-right-wing, I guess. They were talking about the Jews and Communists, and the homosexuals, all the time. Hall and I were talking, and at one point I couldn’t see Hall, I just saw red. That was the only time in my life that I did this—I took the sugar container, unscrewed the top, and very deliberately poured the whole thing over on this guy’s head. I mean, all this sugar. When I did that the other man, who was very small, jumped up to hit me, and Hall stood up, you know, six foot four. Nobody got hit because they were scared of Hall. It was very dangerous for me because with this back condition, if I were put in jail or something, I’d be horribly uncomfortable, in pain.
It was the only time in my life I lost my temper like that. But there’s a lot of anger with, you know, all of those things that I went through. I may have learned how to cover them up but underneath I … I’m dangerous [laughs] to some extent. Also, [if] I’m honest I’d say that Martha and I actually didn’t love each other at all, even though we were married for sixty years. Getting married to her was one way of me dealing with all the problems.
The shrinks, they all said if it wasn’t for my art I’d be a dead-end kid. It’s the reason that when I was a kid they could always put me up in my room with clay and I’d stay there and not bother anybody. It worked out great for everybody and I was, as far as I know, happy.
I think it’s very strange to live, now that my wife died about ten years ago and twenty or more years since Hall died. It’s very strange. You keep going. Everything has changed so much in these last ten years that it really gets to be very strange. I feel very, very old. But it’s not all sad. I outlived my wife and everybody else. It’s really very … ironic.