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The Cotton Club, New York
March 4, 1933
The first time I heard of the Cotton Club was in 1927, when the Duke Ellington Orchestra broadcast on a nationwide hookup on WABC. We couldn’t wait to hear the strains of the Ellington theme song of that time, “The East St. Louis Toodle-o,” gradually swelling as the voice-over of Ted Husing in an impeccable mellifluous baritone said, “and now from the Cotton Club—the aristocrat of Harlem—where Park Avenue, Broadway and Hollywood rub elbows … the Jungle Band of Duke Ellington!”
We didn’t know at the time that the splendid sound of the Ellington organization was not jungle music but a creative form of irony that masked the commercial pandering to an upper-class white audience thrilled at the opportunity to witness and hear what it thought was genuine Black exotica. So, in our innocence, my friends Irving Overby and Robby Benjamin and I with four hastily recruited sidemen formed our replica of the Ellington orchestra, playing kazoos for brass, tissue paper folded over combs for reeds, and washboards and pots and pans with thimbles for rhythm and percussion. We played in the Overbys’ cellar, where our “jungle” music would not bring the neighborhood down on us.
My next connection with the Cotton Club came through my sister Winnie, who danced at local affairs sponsored by social clubs that wanted a floor show, a “something more” than just the usual dance. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson had heard about Winnie’s talent and offered her a week at the Alhambra Theater with him if she could do his routine. Winnie learned the routine in no time—she had what might be called a photographic memory in her muscles and could reproduce steps within two or three tries if they were complicated; once was enough for the simpler combinations—and she got the week’s work. Elida Webb, choreographer and talent scout for the Cotton Club, heard about Winnie from Bill Robinson and hired her for the chorus of the revue “Flying Colors” from which she would go to the Cotton Club for more stable employment, Broadway shows being somewhat ephemeral.
However, “Flying Colors” went over big, what with Clifton Webb, Tamara Geva, Charles Butterworth, and Patsy Kelly as principals and a young team, Vilma and Buddy Ebsen (the latter of later Beverly Hillbillies fame), doing a captivating eccentric dance. Agnes de Mille did the choreography in her first shot at Broadway. One of her innovations was the production of a major number, “Smoking Reefers,” the first time Black and white girls were to perform on stage as equals. I should say the first admissible time, because Black girls light enough to pass for white had made the Ziegfeld Follies and white girls bold enough to say they were Black had worked at the Cotton Club.
After “Flying Colors” closed, Winnie joined the Cotton Club chorus, and because this offered relatively steady employment, our parents had to make a big decision: Should the family pull up stakes and move to New York, or should my mother and Winnie continue to make the regular commute from Orange to Harlem? During the year 1932, the opening of the Independent Subway, especially the “A” train, had made commuting to Harlem easier; the fare was only five cents (!) and we wouldn’t be as exposed to the dangers of New York night life. But, the Cotton Club was open seven nights a week, and there were two shows, 11:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., meaning very late traveling. At the same time, my father had lost his job as porter at the Embassy Theater and was surviving only as a “super” at a cluster of apartment buildings on Berwyn Street in exchange for free rent and a pittance of a salary. But we all finally said, “Let’s go!” when Elida Webb informed us there was an apartment available next door to the Cotton Club at 646 Lenox Avenue—the club was at 642 on what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard at 142nd Street. We joked about the location, saying, “They want to make sure Winnie gets to work on time!” In fact, after we moved in, we were thrilled and tickled to hear the band playing the dance music before the show was to go on—and the band was Cab Calloway’s. It was the “Minnie the Moocher” show.
During this period I was to get a postgraduate course in the complexities of class relationships in American society with the Cotton Club as the laboratory. The owners of the Cotton Club were white mobsters who had grown wealthy during Prohibition. They represented a band of the most vicious thugs and racketeers that has ever been produced in New York.
Up until he was killed in 1928, Arnold Rothstein, a big-time gambler whose greatest achievement was the rigging of the 1919 World Series, was a major figure in the Cotton Club management. The movie Eight Men Out with Charlie Sheen tells the story well. Rothstein’s partners or successors were Owney Madden—overlord of the Hell’s Kitchen section of the lower West Side, arrested fifty-seven times, convicted only twice, once for complicity in a gang killing involving the Gophers gang and the other for a minor traffic violation—and “Dutch” Schultz, a.k.a. Arthur Flegenheimer, boss of the numbers racket in Harlem. A “silent” partner was the Tammany politician Jimmy Hines, who was later sent to prison for his connection with the gang world. The cabal that operated the “club” also included a strong-arm man, Jerry Sullivan, and “Big Frenchy” De Mange, of the old New York gang the Hudson Dusters. This unscrupulous bunch exploited the Black entertainers and staff as if we were sharecroppers in the Deep South. The titular manager, Herman Stark, a front for the mob, had ties with the power structure—top police officials, politicians, judges, and corporation heads were frequently seen at ringside in the friendliest relations with the mobsters.
The bane of our existence was the constant benefits we had to play at Police Benevolent Association affairs on Sunday nights when there was only one show at the club. For this there was a wink of the eye by the police department for infractions of the law by the mob, but no pay for us. Our only pay was a free meal, thereby eliminating the usual exorbitant backstage prices. Conditions were such that many of us referred to the club as “Herman Stark’s Plantation.” The mob had no thought of any rights for us. Even among themselves, questions were often settled with brass knuckles or at gunpoint, rather than through more peaceful arbitration procedures. When negotiations over the “divvy” of the loot from the illegal beer industry broke down between Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll and Dutch, the latter offered $50,000 to any man who would kill Coll. Every freelance gunner in New York went after Coll. He was finally brought down with fifty submachine-gun bullets in a telephone booth on West 23rd Street near Ninth Avenue. That night, Dutch and the rest of the mob celebrated into the wee hours of the morning at the Cotton Club. The monopolistic control of the beer trade had been maintained, and the awesome power of the mob to police its own jurisdiction had been reaffirmed. This was history when we arrived at the Cotton Club.
The arrogance of the mob toward society in general was exponentially multiplied when it was mixed with white racist attitudes toward the performers. They had no respect for women in the show, except in the few instances where family members escorted chorines to work and back (there was a kind of underworld respect for the family as an institution). Usually, the mobsters or their visiting friends from out of town would point out a chorine to join them, as if at a slave market, for after-the-show drinks or raunchier entertainment. The bosses at the club had installed red velvet curtains that could be drawn over their private booths, and when that happened, we knew that the party was going to be no-holds-barred.
Lena Horne’s stepfather, a Cuban refugee and radical ousted by the Batista regime for his political activities in Havana, once took issue when the mobsters refused to raise Lena’s pay. He was beaten unmercifully, further contributing to the ubiquitous atmosphere of iron fist in velvet glove dictatorship that represented our working conditions. It is even ironic, in reference to the episode with Lena’s stepfather, that the same mob which controlled the Cotton Club had a tacit alliance with Fulgencio Batista that controlled and made Havana “the whorehouse of the Western Hemisphere.” I admired Lena’s stepfather. He later told me that he was a communist. That had some influence on my thinking.
It is hard to understand how Ellington could produce a single creative musical sound in this setting. But it was similar sordid subject matter that provided the source material for Van Gogh’s Absinthe Drinkers, Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, Picasso’s Guernica, and Gorky’s Lower Depths. In a like manner, African American artists extracted vitality, emotional strength, and universal truths from the material conditions of life in the ghetto and the myriad ways in which they dealt with their own oppression. This relationship was often expressed in Ellington’s music at the club. The sensitivity, lyricism, and beauty of Ellington’s sound even when the band was “growling” made it clear that the jungle did not necessarily have to be African. Harlem was one of the feeding grounds for the mob—and the mob was only an illegitimate shadow of the larger predators from Wall Street who exploited the community.
Later, as my political education matured, I saw that the savages were not the stereotypical Blacks in loincloths in Hollywood’s Tarzan-type thrillers. For me, they were the upper-class elites who sought vicarious “kicks” out of hob-nobbing with their underworld counterparts while fantasizing about their own libidinous urges for the Black performers. The mob controlled most of the entertainment in Harlem and the rest of New York, except for a few Black-owned night spots. The Black owners did not have the kind of capital to invest in the kind of spectacular shows mounted at the Cotton Club, but after the performers finished their chores for the white audiences, they would put on impromptu shows at the Black-owned spots for Black audiences that were unrivaled.
Most of these clubs commenced their activities at two or three in the morning when the white-owned clubs were through with the Black entertainers. Among these clubs were Jeff Blount’s Lenox Club, Happy Rhone’s Radium Club, the 101 Ranch (named after the famous New Orleans Club) on 138th Street with its bizarre transvestite and homosexual chorus line, and Pod’s and Jerry’s, where Billie Holiday improvised her first singing appearance after her dance act flopped. Some of the late spots that Blacks patronized after hours also catered to whites. Nowadays one of these, named Dickey Wells’ Shim-Sham Club, might be called a crossover club in today’s recording industry parlance for mixed audiences. The Shim Sham (Shimmy) was a dance invented by homosexuals from the chorus line at the 101 Ranch. The Shim was a condensation of the term she-him, and the Sham was a word serving the dual purpose of denoting the female role played by males and the shambling nature of the steps, particularly the first eight bars. The Shimmy was the combined hip and shoulder wiggle that was a part of the third combination, called the “tack Annie” step.
Dickey Wells was a former Cotton Club dancer–turned–pimp and entrepreneur. He ran his club on as economical a basis as possible, employing a “jug” band of musicians on kazoos, washboards, and jugs: The Shim-Shammers or Kenny Watts and His Kilowatts. Watts played the piano; Eddie Dougherty played drums; and Fletch Jahon, Eddie “Hawk” Johnson, Heywood Jackson, and Milton Lane played kazoos, making a sound somewhere between those of Red McKenzie’s Mound City Blue Blowers and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Carol Walrond, the brother of Renaissance poet Eric Walrond, was on bass. Fletch and Sammy Page did vocals and whistling, and the group was fronted by an extraordinary “hoofer” whose percussion rhythms afforded an unusually inspirational jazz dance. He was “Baby” Lawrence, a master of technique, rhythmic flow, and continuous innovation.
“Virgie” was also a stellar attraction, doing a fast, “dirty” song like “I Want to Be a Yale Man,” followed by an extra-sensuous “shake” dance during which she’d simulate copulation with folded dollar bills stuck out by customers on the edge of their tables. Her act would climax with a vigorous snatching of the bills with her genitals. Breakfast dances were held all over Harlem in the ’30s. The topper was Small’s Paradise (later bought by Wilt Chamberlain and whimsically retitled “Big Wilt’s” Small’s). At Small’s, the breakfast dance started at 4:00 A.M. Monday and continued until 12:00 noon or 1:00 P.M. Hardly an entertainer, musician, sportsman, gambler, prostitute, or pimp functioning in Harlem missed the breakfast dance—it was a crossroads of the night life. Yet it was connected with the everyday life of the community because the entertainment, gambling, and tourism industries in Harlem in the ’30s employed more people in the various services connected with them than any other trade.
The other main employments were outside Harlem: domestic work obtained in the “slave markets” of the Bronx and Brooklyn for the women and hard, mostly unskilled labor for the men. The connection between the night and day life in Harlem is best illustrated in “kitchen mechanics’ night” at the Savoy Ballroom. “Kitchen mechanic” was the name for domestic workers, mostly women, more likely to be employed than the men. Thursday night was free night for women, and a lonely male could be sure of getting a dance, a dinner, a date, or even a domicile for the most aggressive. But more than this heavy forerunner to what is called the singles action today was the sheer entertainment evoked through the music of the Savoy Sultans, and Chick Webb and his band with its most appropriate theme song, “Let’s Get Together.” Band battles that saw the best from downtown, like Benny Goodman, came up and fell by the wayside under the inspired attack of the Black musicians on their own turf, catering to the uninhibited dancing of the Black audience. Later, they were joined by Lindy-Hopping white youth from the Bronx and Brooklyn who were hip enough to find the real jazz goodies, free from the demands of the commercially oriented tastes of the upper-class tourists who would go up to Ellington and request Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite” or Guy Lombardo’s “My Blue Heaven.” Cy Oliver was later to finish off that request with a satirical version of “Heaven” that winds up in a heavy blues riff.
But back to the Cotton Club: It was the most prestigious, the classic Black night club, the ideal for racist America—Black entertainers, white underworld bosses, and white upper-class audiences. The mob, though the club was in deep Harlem, did not admit Blacks unless they were world-renowned celebrities like Stepin Fetchit, Bill Robinson, or Jack Johnson.
The show following “The Minnie the Moocher Show” was designed to be the very best. Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler were hired for music and lyrics; Ethel Waters was the star, Avon Long the juvenile; and Swan and Lee, the comics (Johnnie Lee was to later play Brother Crawford on the TV Amos ’n’ Andy show). The show broke records. “Stormy Weather” became an international hit along with the Ellington band, which had just returned from a road tour that had included a stopover to make the film Check and Double-Check with Amos and Andy, one of its many peaks as an organization. The Ellington sound had achieved worldwide renown felt by many to express feelings that could not be verbalized. The Aesopian language of titles gave the insiders in the orchestra amusement, like “Skrontch,” which meant “intercourse”; “TT on Toast” stood for Tough Titty; and the sidemen’s name for “Warm Valley” was “Call of the Clitoris.”
I was in seventh heaven because I had passed the audition for chorus boys, who were going to be added to the famous chorus girls to augment the impact of the line. Winnie had said to me, “Stretch, you’ve got good rhythm and coordination from your basketball playing. If you’ll rehearse with me for the next week, you ought to be able to pass the audition!” She added, “You’re tall and good looking—light, bright and out of sight—be sure to move big, wave your arms while you’re dancing, keep lookin’ up and, above all smile!”
With that recipe, I passed the audition and started rehearsing. I was not the world’s greatest dancer by any means, and of the Ten Dancing Demons, as we came to be known, I would rank myself about seventh from the top among the ten. Walter Shepherd, whose sister Ethel had some pull, was the tenth in talent and Jimmy Wright, a Harlem man-about-town, was ninth, in my estimation. Billy Smith was almost my equal. Walter had such a hard time keeping up with the routines that he began to drink more and more as the show went on. Finally, one night he came in staggering and was in such bad shape that he could not get fully dressed for each number until we were coming off from that number. It was both tragic and comic that he got fully dressed for each number, but only by the time it was finished. He was dismissed shortly after that. But I was never completely happy with my dancing. I was never able to get the small muscle dexterity that close tapping required, so I compensated with exaggerated movement, inspired by the loose and big movements that I had seen Buddy Ebsen use so effectively in “Flying Colors,” and of course Ray Bolger’s style suited me to a T. My eccentric moves and the enthusiasm and energy I put into my performance added a dimension that kept me in the show. But I always had a sneaking suspicion that being Winnie’s brother had a lot more to do with it. The best of the Ten Dancing Demons was Maxie Armstrong. Maxie went on to develop a single that he wound up with, a smash finale doing a show-stopping “circus one” tempo array of “mule-kicks” to the tune “Chinatown, My Chinatown!” Fifty years later, Henry LeTang told me of his sad experience trying out for the Dancing Demons on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Cotton Club. He was a better dancer than any of us, becoming the greatest choreographer Harlem ever produced, in my estimation. He was rejected because he was too short. He said, “I went home crying, because I knew I was as good as any of you who were hired, Stretch!”
But the pièce de résistance of the Cotton Club shows was the female chorus! The women were handpicked from the best dancers and beauties in show business. For the 24th Edition of the Cotton Club Revue, the array of beauty and talent would knock your eyes out—Anice Boyer, Dolly MacCormick, Hycie Curtis, Edna Mae Holly, Lena Horne, Joyce Beasley, Lucille Wilson, Arlene Marshall, Catherine Nash, Peggy Griffith, Amy Spencer, Marie Robinson, and Una Mae Carlisle of “I Walk Alone by the River” fame were just part of the cream of the crop of tall, tan, and terrific chorines who graced the highly polished pine boards. My sister Winnie was one of the most beautiful of the beautiful array of feminine pulchritude. As a group, they had their choice of the most eligible Black males on the planet. Anice was one of Bill Robinson’s mistresses; Edna Mae married Sugar Ray Robinson; Joyce married Bobby Brown, one of Harlem’s leading numbers bankers; and Lucille married Louis Armstrong. Flo Ziegfeld had nothing on the Cotton Club for female beauty. The legend over the backstage entrance to the Ziegfeld Follies that boasted “through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world” could well have been put over the entrance to the Cotton Club!
Some of the women had multiple lovers. My sister Winnie numbered among her lovers, and sometimes husbands, Bill Robinson, Joe Louis, “Chuck” Green, Adam Clayton Powell, Canada Lee, Duke Ellington, and the penultimate husband before her last marriage to Dr. Middleton Lambright, the disastrous Stepin Fetchit. As Winnie’s older brother, I was often the somewhat embarrassed but not completely reluctant recipient of favors that came my way from Winnie’s suitors. They hoped that getting on my “good side” would open the doors for a date with Winnie. Joe Louis gave me a $100.00 ticket to see the Buddy Baer fight. I could never have afforded such a seat after I left show business. It was one of the greatest experiences I ever had in the fight game. For me, when Joe started chopping into Baer’s ribs with his hammer blows, it was like watching a lumberjack chop down a tall tree.
Most important about the Cotton Club was that its location was not accidental. The mob chose to purchase the club from Jack Johnson because the Harlem Renaissance was just beginning. The year 1927, when Opportunity magazine gave Langston Hughes its literary award, is named by Alain Locke, Rhodes Scholar and dean of Black literary critics, as the beginning of the Renaissance.1 The club had been acquired by the mob five years earlier. They knew that Harlem was becoming the most magnetic of locations with its reputation for sophistication, creativity, and excitement. The Renaissance in Harlem was a continual display of the extraordinary talent of poets, writers, playwrights, singers, dancers, and musicians who congregated there much as political exiles and creative people from all over Europe assembled in Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Hotcha, Small’s Paradise, Dickey Wells, Clinton Moore’s, the Jitterbug, LaMarcheri (dig the Parisian accent!), and the Red Rooster were some of the hot nightspots in Harlem of the Harlem Renaissance. While the gangsters who were located in Harlem may not have known all that went into the makeup of Harlem’s attraction, they knew there was some money to be made in the ghetto. The Savoy, “The Home of Happy Feet,” anticipated the discotheque. Pot was the preferred mind-alterer among the “hip.” Kaiser’s tea-pad on 133rd Street (212 West) had tables where off-the-street customers could sit down to the strains of Duke, Billie Holiday, or Fletcher Henderson on the jukebox, and order their dozen-for-dollar joints bathed in surrealistic red and blue lights.
These were Harlem’s equivalents for Paris’s Le Dôme Café, La Coupole, Les Deux Magots, and Le Flore. Harlem was a Montmartre in Mocha, the Latin Quarter in Rotogravure, the Seine in Sepia!
A cross-fertilizing process accelerated the fermentation of the arts and received steady impetus from the massive gathering of Blacks from every state in the Union, augmented by a continual stream of immigrants from the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa, the mother continent. Harlem became an international center, and one could walk down Seventh Avenue (the Black Champs-Élysées, to prolong the metaphor) on a Saturday night and hear Haitians speaking French, Jamaicans conversing in the broad A’s of the British, mingled with the Spanish accents of the Afro-Cubans and Afro-Ricans, seasoned with the drawls and slurs of Delta folk from Mississippi, melodic tongues from Alabama and Georgia, not to mention the talk of the Geechies—direct transmission of the Gullah tongue to Harlem from west Africa via South Carolina.
The cultural hybridization produced by the continual multiethnic melanistic melange provided sounds that existed nowhere else in the world. The streets of Harlem anticipated the United Nations. For the musician more than any other group of artists, Harlem with its multitudinous tongues represented a linguistic paradise of sound that could be captured for instant translation into the universal language of music. It was this objective setting that created the basis for the Black musicians’ becoming the best in the world. Hugues Panassié recognizes this in his second jazz book, The Real Jazz:
I had the bad luck, in a sense, to become acquainted with jazz first through white musicians.… I did not realize until many years after the publication of my first book that, from the point of view of jazz, most white musicians were inferior to Black musicians.2
Of like significance is Marshall Steams’s story, of Isham Jones’s enthusiastically buying Don Redman’s arrangement of “Chant of the Weeds” played at Connie’s Inn at 132nd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and his white musicians’ not being able to play it.
This recognition of the superiority of the Black musician was later to be pejoratively labeled “Crow-Jimism,” but, as they say in the streets, “Jack, the Jims really could crow!”
New Orleans may have played that role during the fin-de-siècle period, but by 1930 all roads led to Harlem. Besides this global mix of Blacks and browns, Harlem was host to a never-ending stream of tourists from all over the world who came to experience the lifestyle of an avant-garde community that was reputed never to sleep. If New Orleans was the cradle of jazz, Harlem was where it grew up. Harlem in the ’30s was a preview of much that was to be characteristic of the counterculture which grew out of the radical upsurge of the ’60s. The language of the street was a creative reservoir, the raw material for the musician like that of no other community in the world. This multicultural mix was augmented by the arrival of the best musicians from all over the country, seeking to find work in a community where the tourist industry created employment in the nightclubs, bars, and theaters for more than 2,000 musicians, waiters, bartenders, chorines, singers, dancers, and hustlers. The saying was, “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!”