3
Broadway, New York
June 1, 1936
One of the Harlem after-hours spots where some of the Cotton Club dancers hung out was Clinton Moore’s Chez Clinton. It was a rendezvous for the cosmopolitan and upwardly mobile creative and literary set. Its fame, or notoriety, increased nightly. By this time I knew the ropes, so to speak, and each of us had dreams of hitting it big in some way, because of the fame, money, and power that was represented in the downtown clientele of Chez Clinton. I knew that if I was going to go anywhere in show business, it would have to be through people like some of the whites who patronized Chez Clinton. I made it my business to be there as often as I could. One night when I walked in, Clinton Moore caught my eye as soon as I got through the door. He said, in his most Oxonian accent, with a hint of a lisp, “Stretch, there’s a very important man here who is looking for talent for a show that’s going to be on Broadway. You should get up and dance when the next piece is played.… I’ll tell the trio to play something really hot.” The trio, a stellar group, consisted of Carroll Boyd, Roland Smith, and Clarence Tisdale. They played at two different clubs on the same night, going from the swank Le Ruban Bleu down on the East Side to the Chez Clinton.
I said, “Who is he?”
Clinton replied, “It’s the short, good-looking man sitting at the center table on the banquette, and I’ll tell him to take a good look at you.”
Clinton, by the way, was an unusually light homosexual from a wealthy Black family in Texas. Physically, he was an amazing prototype for Alfred Hitchcock. I was later to be startled by the sight of Hitchcock, particularly with his shrewd, measuring eyes and pouting lower lip, so much like Clinton Moore’s. Clinton might have possibly been called a Black Elsa Maxwell; his extravagant parties and his red velour wall liners, brass lamps, and black velvet–covered divans in the large upstairs living room provided one of the “in” attractions for any moneyed people who really wanted to see the night life of Harlem. The room’s notoriety was its Saturday night soiree where homosexuals from every part of the East Coast, more whites than Blacks, jammed in to do “touch dancing.” It was quite a sight to walk into the room and watch forty to fifty men, its capacity, dancing cheek to cheek. Chez Clinton was down on the street level. It catered to anyone who could pay the stiff prices, but the upstairs room was limited to the cognoscenti or close friends of Clinton’s from Harlem and the social register. Jimmy Wright and I had a permanent pass to the Saturday night soiree.
This night, however, when our Broadway impresario was buying drinks for the house, it was obvious that the crucial action was to be downstairs. The trio, on a signal from Clinton, broke into a nice, easy, danceable tempo and I moved out to the center of the floor to do my flash steps, high kicks and rubber-leg steps winding up with a faster trench, double-wing, and split. There was much applause. Many of the customers knew that something of an audition was going on, and I seemed to have struck the impresario’s fancy as he joined in enthusiastically, shouting, “Attaboy, Stretch!” After the applause died down, I joined him and his party, during which time he asked me if I would be interested in becoming one of the principals in his forthcoming show; it was entitled New Faces of 1936. His two previous shows, both great successes, were Garrick Gaieties and New Faces of 1934, which had introduced Henry Fonda and Imogene Coca to Broadway. I said, “Certainly, but you’d be missing something if you didn’t see my younger sister and brother.” He agreed and we made a date for the three of us to come downtown for an audition. Winnie and Bobby got together with me and we rehearsed for hours getting something together for presentation.
We were hired as the Three Johnsons, so it was only through the fortuitous circumstance of being at Chez Clinton on a special night when a man of influence was there that the Three Johnsons could make it to Broadway overnight. What few knew, including my family, was that after he had seen me dance I had ensured the family success by spending the first night with him at his hotel appeasing his “gay” appetite. The casting couch was not for women only. However, we were a great success in New Faces of 1936, to such an extent that Van Johnson, who was a chorus boy in the show, called himself the Fourth Johnson. The show “rolled them in the aisles” and we had a nine-month run with the stellar cast that included Jack Smart, who was later to play “The Fat Man” on television; Tommie Rutherford, later of the movies; Imogene Coca; and Marian Pierce, a woman of great wealth who wanted to be on the stage as a kind of hobby to talk about with her social register friends. My mother became her maid and worked for her, both at the theater and the Hotel Pierre, Marian’s permanent residence. Later, Rags Ragland and Gypsy Rose Lee were to give the show some spicy burlesque flavor. Regular show-stoppers were Billy Heywood and Cliff Allen, who became good friends of ours. In fact, we became such good friends that Billy and I started smoking reefers together on the fire escape in the back of the Vanderbilt Theater, and not long after, I was spending nights with Billy in her room at the Hotel Woodside. The Woodside was to become famous later through Count Basie’s tune “Jumping at the Woodside.” That tune was aptly named, because even before the hotel became a resting place for the Basie band, it jumped, and Billy and I jumped at the Woodside many a night after we finished our stint in New Faces.1
Backstage at New Faces was a gas. We lived a segregated life, and because we were Black, the white performers talked among themselves in front of us as if we were part of the furniture, so we often heard the rampant anti-Semitism expressed by non-Jewish performers who didn’t care for the director’s style. To tell the truth, he was extremely intense and it got worse as opening night approached. Of course, it had nothing to do with Judaism at all; it was show business.
One of the other favorite gay hangouts was Jimmy Daniels’ place, where concerts were held over Tillie’s Chicken Shack on Lenox Avenue. Among the downtown whites often seen at Jimmy’s, the Donahues, Jimmy and Jack, heirs along with Babs Hutton to the Woolworth fortune, spent their money like water while movie stars like Cesar Romero, Hugh Sinclair, and Humphrey Bogart dropped in from time to time. Bogart had a favorite whorehouse over Fat Man’s on Sugar Hill at the corner of 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue that he patronized frequently. His tastes were more “macho.” The Stettheimers, patrons in a lavish way of many of the young talents who were introduced to them, often attended the Friday nights. Florine Stettheimer was most widely known, because of her sponsorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her crippled brother, Eddie, who came escorted in a wheelchair, rarely missed the galas on Lenox Avenue.
I, usually in Jimmy Wright’s company, looked on all this as excitement and glamour while repelled by the cynicism and corruption that seemed to be an integral part of the whole scene. My repulsion was not strong enough to overcome my need for some cash, and under Jimmy’s tutelage, I learned to be accommodating for a ten-spot. This was not bad for a fifteen-minute blow job being performed on me. Yet I knew from the beginning that this was not the proper use of my talents.
My indoctrination and participation in this fast-paced life (it was a “jet age” in tempo) lasted from my disemployment as a Cotton Club dancer until I began to collect a regular paycheck in New Faces of 1936. In fact, after it was discovered that I was not going to continue satisfying the sexual appetites of the producer, he agreed with Martin Jones, his partner at the Vanderbilt Theater, to let me go, thus breaking up the Three Johnsons. Because we were vulnerable and the Two Johnsons still brought in a good paycheck to the Johnson household, the family went along with the brutally imposed (in my self-centered mind) decision. Winnie and Bobby continued with New Faces through the summer. We didn’t perform as the Three Johnsons again until we joined the Duke Ellington revue at the 125th Street Apollo in June 1937, though Bobby and I had done a double in burlesque through the good graces of Rags Ragland at the Eltinge Theater on 42nd Street. We did a hot song and dance to the tune of “Nagasaki” delivered in a corny beat that practically ruined our act with the poor rhythm and musicianship of the burlesque band. They seemed to play OK for the strippers, however, and I later wondered whether there was some racism in the musicians’ uninspiring performance. We also had the trio booked into Victor’s Lombardy Room at the Hotel Navarre on Central Park South, next door to the famous Essex House. We dressed in evening clothes, presenting a stunning trio in Black and white and café au lait to a “posh” audience using tunes from Fred Astaire’s latest hits. I thought we had it made. It was to be eight months before we would get the Ellington assignment. When that news broke we were on cloud nine. Ellington asked us if we wanted to present something new, and we showed him some variations on the Susie-Q that we had developed from the dance introduced by Taps Miller, one of the most inventive and witty dancers in Harlem. Taps was later to become the permanent consort of Count Basie until his (Taps’s) death. We hummed a riff to our steps that went Boom-da da-Boom-da! We called it “the Skrontch.” In no time at all Duke had an arrangement on that riff that had the whole orchestra blasting out with “The Skrontch.” The term itself, as I had told Duke, was a term we had used in the JBS to represent for us an “in word” for rollin’ butt or the more vernacular expression “dry fuckin’ ”—skrontch or its other version scraunch a portmanteau of screw and raunch. Duke loved the etymology and the idea of making a “funky” folk term a hit so that the white folks would come up and ask at the dances, “Duke, how about some ‘Skrontch’?” in complete ignorance of the hidden meaning of the term or the title. Anyway, it was the closest I ever came to a musical collaboration with the Duke.
But the most important part of the Duke Ellington engagement for me was the sheer joy of working in front of the Ellington organization; it was the closest thing to heaven for us. I had heard the Duke play at the Cotton Club for the shows in 1932 and 1933 before he left for Hollywood. And I had danced at ballroom dances to the Ellington sound. But for sheer ecstasy, there is nothing for a dancer like the lift that the Ellington band gives when he is molding the rhythm, pulsation, and beat of the orchestra to the dancers’ movements.
The music itself seemed to lift us up off the floor of the stage in a cushion that supplied us with an additional energy that we did not have without the band. Our act used all Ellington tunes. We opened with the three of us singing “Drop Me Off in Harlem.” Then Winnie went into her challenge, followed by Bobby, who was developing as a great tapper, with the haunting strains of “The Mystery Song,” and I pranced to the bouncing rhythms of “Merry-Go-Round,” with the three of us closing with “Showboat Shuffle.” The act before us was Whitey’s Lindy-Hoppers and they stopped the show cold with their high-flying acrobatic syncopation to the swinging Ellington jump tune “Stompy Jones.” It is a difficult thing in show business to go on after an act that has stopped the show. It’s like getting the audience to have a second orgasm, if you stop the show again. We did it despite the tough spot we were in, so I would say we had a class act to go on day after day behind Whitey’s Lindy-Hoppers and get that second orgasm consistently.
That year was a most productive one of smash hits for the Ellington organization. The Apollo show was the spot where many of the great Ellington tunes were played for the public for the first time, at least for a Black audience. “Echoes of Harlem” with Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart doing his cornet masterpiece “Boy Meets Horn,” “Caravan,” crafted by Juan Tizol and there was always the medley of Ellington favorites “Mood Indigo, “Solitude,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Harmony in Harlem.” The traditional trio of Barney Bigard on clarinet, Tricky Sam on trombone, and Cootie Williams on trumpet did the first, Ivy Anderson did “Solitude” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and Johnnie Hodges did “Harmony in Harlem.” The great Harry Carney was the soloist with his baritone sax. It was while hearing such sessions that I grew to appreciate Duke in all his mastery of African American music. He defined it when he expressed his feelings about Blackness as a composer:
If only I can write it down as I feel it. I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm. We used to have, in Africa, a “something” we have lost. One day we shall get it again. I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea and the despair of the landing. And then the days of slavery. I trace the growth of a new spiritual quality and then the days in Harlem and the cities of the States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years. I seek to express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world.2
This came through in the inspirational impact of the Ellington music on us as performing artists. I shall never get over, and never would want to, the Ellington experience. One of the events that gave me an idea of the extravagant life style of the bourgeoisie was a party that Elsa Maxwell gave for Cole Porter’s legs. He had broken them in a riding accident and was just being released from the hospital. Stars from all the Broadway shows and nightclubs were invited to participate. The show was to be held in the Persian Room on the roof garden of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Helen Lawrenson and Bernard Baruch were guests there that night. Helen came to my attention because we had seen her in the company of “Bumpy” Johnson, a leading Harlem gangster, at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. She certainly covered the waterfront in her relationships! Lena Horne was one of the singers with the Noble Sissle Orchestra, which provided the music for the occasion. Lena had left the Cotton Club after her stepfather had been beaten. The family was shocked when Winnie showed up pregnant just before the engagement. She had been valiantly performing every night in New Faces, not knowing what to do about her ever-increasing girth as well as her heaviness in dancing, which both Bobby and I had gently complained about. Winnie made some irrelevant excuse about not eating right and kept making the New Faces performances with increasing difficulty. But by the time of the Elsa Maxwell party, she had become just too big. By this time the family knew what the problem was and Winnie had to have an abortion the night of the Waldorf affair. So we drafted our younger sister, Shirley, to learn Winnie’s routine and she did quite well with it. She was a little thinner than Winnie but she was able to wear her costume. With Shirley looking something like Winnie, we looked pretty much like the Three Johnsons as they appeared in New Faces. As we looked through the curtains at the gala audience, we saw Cole Porter arrive in his wheelchair to the accompaniment of stormy applause and we knew that we were at a history-making party. Billy Heywood and Cliff Allen led off the New Faces contingent who were in the middle of the show, and they really broke it up with Billy’s scorching rendition of “My Last Affair,” one of the hit tunes from New Faces.
Well, the house lights had come down and it was our turn to go on. Shirley was quite nervous and as Bobby and I moved out onto the stage to our assigned positions, we saw a blank space where Shirley was supposed to be! Shirley had gotten such an attack of stage fright that she could not move. She was essentially paralyzed for a moment. Bobby and I improvised some movement to cover up her not being in formation, and after one brief moment of suspense Shirley unfroze and moved into her position so that the act came off as if nothing had happened.
What I did not explain was that we were earning a good piece of money for the engagement that we could not afford to turn down, otherwise Winnie could have just taken a night off. Rose Poindexter could have filled in for Winnie at the New Faces performance, but we could not substitute her for one of the Three Johnsons at the Elsa Maxwell party. It would not have been the same thing. We later heard that everybody in the Big Apple of any consequence had been at the Waldorf that night. No one ever wanted to miss one of Elsa Maxwell’s parties.
Helen Lawrenson’s book Stranger at the Party lists a large group of celebrities of the period as being at the Elsa Maxwell affair in addition to Bernard Baruch and herself.3 Besides them, the Grand Duchesse Marie of Romania, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Clare Boothe and Henry Luce, Joseph Kennedy, and Ralph and Eddie Crowninshield had ringside tables. It was one of those “amazing coincidences” type of experiences for me to meet Helen’s daughter, Joanna, at the Hudson River festival organized by Pete Seeger and the Clearwater group in 1982. Joanna was there with the late Abbie Hoffman, who was one of the invited speakers along with me. The collective topic at our panel was mass organizing. At our particular session, Abbie spoke after me and later told me he’d had to change most of his speech because I’d covered so well many of the points he wanted to make. I thought that was most gracious of him. Joanna was very interested in my remembrances of seeing her mother in the company of Bumpy in Harlem during the period of the Maxwell parties.
Another important experience in the shaping of my outlook was the organization of the Negro Peoples’ Theater under the leadership of one of the greatest actresses of the American theater, Rose McClendon.4 We used to call her “the Black Ethel Barrymore.” My friend and neighbor Billy Owens, who was an active member of a very exclusive group of self-proclaimed men-about-town, Harry Henley’s Osbiny Club, presenters of many outstanding affairs in Harlem, approached me with the proposition of joining the Negro People’s Theater. Its sponsors were going to put on an all-Negro production of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty. I was unemployed at the time and while having had little experience as an actor, I felt my stint as a chorus boy at the Cotton Club was sufficient preparation to join what I thought was essentially an amateur group of actors and actresses. That thought, I soon learned, was rather condescending because Chick Morris, Rose McClendon, Edna Thomas, Lionel Monagas, Percy Verwayne, and Viola Dean were all accomplished pros. They all had much experience with groups of longstanding professional accomplishment such as the Lafayette Players. I was selected to play the part of Sid, the taxi driver, and as I studied for the part, Clifford Odets’s lines describing the Depression, class exploitation and the class struggle, and the need of the taxi drivers to organize penetrated my very soul, confirming, reinforcing, and augmenting ideas I had long carried in almost inarticulate, nonverbal form. I did not need any acting lesson as I repeated the lines in my scenes with Viola Dean. I felt every word as the truth. I took another leap forward, when, to my delight, the Daily Worker published in the theater section a large photo of Viola Dean and me as the young lovers. This was June 1935, shortly after the great riot of March 19, 1935. I didn’t know that the play was being done as part of a huge rally at the Rockland Palace in support of Ethiopia and the Scottsboro Boys and for unemployment insurance.
As part of our preparation, we were taken downtown to meet the cast of Waiting for Lefty, which was playing on Broadway, and other members of the Group Theater, including Harold Clurman, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, and J. Edward Bromberg, who were not in Waiting for Lefty. We got to see the performance of Waiting for Lefty and went backstage, where we met the performers and chatted with them about the roles.
Little did I realize that our performance was going to be on the stage at the Rockland Palace facing more than 3,000 people, two-thirds of whom were white. I almost fell through the floor when I first caught a glimpse of the multitude waiting to hear me recite my lines. My knees turned to jelly for a moment. It was only after summoning all my strength that I was able to get the lines out. What impressed me most besides the play itself was the quality of the audience. It was 66 percent white, which to my naïve political sensibility was bizarre given the fact that the meeting was on the north edge of Central Harlem. At one time, the hall had been a rallying pIace for the Garvey movement. I did not realize that the left could produce this kind of mobilization through concentrated effort. This power was one of the most impressive aspects of the left’s activity in Harlem. The other thing about the audience was a kind of love and reinforcement that reached up out of the audience onto the stage and embraced all the performers and speakers. It was something I had experienced only in peak stage performances and I was no doubt immediately addicted to that embrace. In hindsight, I realize that I spent a great deal of time watching and studying top-quality speakers extract that warmth from the audience, unconsciously hoping to duplicate the experience for myself over and beyond whatever the cause I addressed.