There was lots of joking about the new show, The Cocoanuts, music by Irving and book by George S. Kaufman and starring the Marx Brothers. It was due to open after successful tryouts in Boston and Philly.
Irving pretended to crack the whip, and George relinquished his seat at the piano when Edna begged a number from the show. Groucho leapt up and sang his big number from The Cocoanuts, entitled, “Why Am I a Hit With the Ladies?,” with the boys taking on the roles of the chorus girls backing him up.
Edna hugged our mutual friend, handed him a scotch, and asked if he had another song for us.
“Sure I do, but Fran Williams ain’t here to do it justice,” he said, looking at Groucho, who feigned a hurt expression. (Frances Williams is in the show, too.) He sat down on the sofa next to me and asked, “Did I hear you say something about heading up to Harlem?”
“I haven’t seen the new show at the Cotton Club, and George was just playing a new tune that reminded me of Negro spirituals, so I thought . . . .”
An hour later, George, Ira, Aleck, FPA, Heywood, and I were sitting pretty at a table amid the lush jungle décor at the Cotton Club, watching the floorshow. Woodrow Wilson slept alongside me on the banquette. Jane and Ross begged off as the magazine’s deadline loomed over their heads and the night must be spent working. Edna wanted a quiet night at home, probably to recover from the task of playing nursemaid all day to a schoolroom of overgrown children. The Brothers left to join their mother, Minnie, for a second Thanksgiving feast, and Irving’s latest Music Box Revue had an 8:40 P.M. curtain.
Aleck was a bit down-in-the-mouth, and it was no wonder, as the full import of the events of the morning began to weigh on his spirits. A man had died in his arms, he’d been questioned for several hours at the police station, and he’d eaten enough potatoes at Edna’s to have saved a small Irish village from famine. He’d been getting quarrelsome, too, from the time we’d left Edna’s, during the cab ride uptown, and the wait to be seated at the club.
His irritability waned when the orchestra ended its jazzy rendition of “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” and a brisk musical intro brought a dozen long-limbed mulatto beauties scantily dressed in silver halters and tap pants onto the stage.
Andrew Peer conducted his ten-man Cotton Club Orchestra; the Chicagoan musicians squeezed the blue notes from a variety of brass. The fever of expectation thrilled through from the banquettes, across the dance floor, over the gleaming horseshoe bar and up onto the multileveled stage, egged-on by the cool, insistent heartbeat of percussion.
The all-white audience purred with joy as the bevy of beauties parted ranks, and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker slid out onto the stage. His astonishing dance contortions sent waves of applause over the footlights.
Dan Healy, the new director of the Cotton Club show, had outdone every production before him. The orchestra was finely pitched to meet its match in the precision choreography, as the tall, handsome Snakehips, dressed in snug-fitting trousers, cummerbund, and open-collared silk shirt, lithely gyrated with sophisticated grace before turning to welcome the beautiful, long-limbed Evelyn Welch onto the stage to partner the routine, her brief costume’s red fringe flirting along her glorious thighs, moving at counterpoint to the beat.
You couldn’t help but feel the excitement course through you; that uplifting kick that comes with awe and mirth and admiration for the brilliant talents gathered onstage. Such fun! Such perfectly synchronized performance!
Here was artistic expression pitched at us white folks, screaming with more honesty and energy and humanity than any contrived Ziegfeld Follies extravaganza I’d ever seen. One’s admiration is unsullied by the prejudices of race; art mixed with joy and as unpretentious as this transcends envy, suspicion, fear, and hatred. How can one feel anything but profound happiness when swept over by such pure exhilaration? Brass blared, percussion vibrated through the room, applause reverberated.
The world outside these doors should understand how simple it is for souls to connect, but we often need devices to make the connections. The graciousness and generosity of the performers inspires the connection, and through some irresistibly flowing force the audience returns the favor.
George was ecstatic; reveling in his musical element, he entered a different consciousness. His face wore an otherworldly glow as he absorbed the sights and sounds. It was as if he could smell the music, swim in the rhythms, so wholly absorbed was he. While the rest of us were emotionally driven, his connection was visceral.
White audiences flock to the black clubs not merely to be entertained or to be seen at a currently trendy nightclub. Say it’s a call from God, a force, whatever, but here they find a kind of love springing forth through music and dance and voice and the riptide of blatant sexual allure that makes one grasp for some unspoken truth. Here the Negro is a superior race; even though he appears to serve the white clientele, he is really instructing them. The illusion of the jungle décor, the muted lights and the revealing costumes touch a deeper, primal yearning: life lived to the fullest with love, with raw, lusty, undiluted, unchecked emotion.
The rich white swells, the young white New York socialites, and the tourists from small towns let their hair down along with their defenses, abandoning propriety to experience the innate primeval dance long hidden in the dark places of the soul. They flock to the club on 143rd Street likes wolves to the call of the wild. It isn’t slumming, for in fact the bar is raised. Perhaps they feel the urge, like children wanting to run away from their staid, secure homes to join the circus, to seek out carnie adventures alongside the flame thrower, the aerialist, the lion tamer. And here, too, they are witness to the dignity of a culture unbeknownst to them: a world so attractive and rich and unique that they can’t help but desire to leave their poor and parsimonious existences for a time to go on a trip into fantasy.
In Harlem clubs the Negro is royalty. For the first time since leaving the African continent, the Negro is not looked upon as chattel, but revered as treasure. Here, for a few hours, the banker from Buffalo donning top hat and tails can contemplate the possibilities of his nature. For a few hours, the Park Avenue hostess might imagine a dreamed existence of abandoned responsibilities, even if she has never before been conscious of those deep desires.
Etiquette is maintained, of course, but the example is set by the Negro. The colored waiter is dressed to the hilt, his blindingly white linens crisply starched; the crease of his trouser leg, sharp; his tie, level. He smiles without the grimace of subservience, and speaks without deference, although always polite in approach. The white clientele is expected to refrain from loud, obnoxious behavior, especially during the floorshow, or the party is asked to leave the premises. It may be the only place in the world that a Negro can order a white man to quit his place of business!
The condition of the Negro beyond these few precious blocks of Harlem is not enviable. Stripped of talent, muted-hued stage lights, glamour and exotic illusion, a harsh light glares upon him. The colored man becomes, once again, suspect. As the banker boards the train home to Buffalo, the colored redcaps, who can’t sing and dance or torment his soul with the soaring refrains of jazz, revert to nonentities in his eyes. He views with indifference the indignities suffered by the Negro race and acknowledges no part or responsibility in society’s injustices. The hostess from Park Avenue accepts no blame for the past and offers no help for the future of her dark-skinned sister scrubbing her marble floors or nursing her baby. Walk outside these doors, these few square blocks of real estate, and the struggle is ongoing.
I loved the entertainment at the Cotton Club, and at Connie’s Inn, but I don’t like the idea that coloreds aren’t allowed in their audiences. I heard tell that W.C. Handy, the Father of the Blues, was turned away by Frenchy, the doorman at the Cotton Club, even while the band was playing his own “St. Louis Blues”!
Many clubs that adopt a white-only policy don’t last long.
A new club opened last month with a dance floor the size of
a football field painted blue and orange. It has a great band, and top-notch entertainment, and it’s called Small’s Paradise. At Small’s the swells in cutaways and Poiret gowns dance alongside the shoeshine boys and kitchen maids from the neighborhood.
I prefer the less audacious, integrated places, the less salubrious joints where the patronage is mostly colored, the dance floors smaller, the jazz wilder, and the fried chicken crispier. But whites aren’t really welcomed in those clubs; it’s seen as blatantly disrespectful—slumming. A white face is conspicuous, intrusive. A sort of reverse lunch-counter discrimination, or how you might be made to feel showing up at a dinner party uninvited. Outright resentment is veiled but can’t help but bleed through. I understand it, but I don’t like it. Only people like George Gershwin and Heywood Broun can walk into those places and really feel welcomed.
We ordered a fifth of scotch for eighteen bucks under the table, and George bought me a bottle of champagne. By midnight we piled into a cab and headed downtown, dropping George and Ira at their apartments and FPA home to his wife, but Heywood wandered off to Small’s Paradise with a young Negro poet we met on the street by the name of Langston Hughes. Aleck, subdued, if not a little depressed, didn’t want to return to his apartment in the house he'd bought with Jane and Ross a couple of years ago on West 47th Street, so I invited him to my rooms at the Algonquin Hotel for a nightcap.
We got out of the taxi on Broadway and 44th, and walked Woodrow Wilson the two avenues east toward home. Whether it was the effect of the liquor, or the windless night, the air felt pleasant, less frigid than when we stood watching the parade that morning.
Then, abruptly, Aleck said, “Why does one murder a priest, Dottie?”
“Wish I knew,” I said. “Maybe some disgruntled Catholic, for all we know.”
“I got the strangest impression that the fellow knew me. The priest, that is, not the murderer.”
“Who in hell doesn’t know Alexander Woollcott? And, I should add, who on earth doesn’t for that matter?”
He ignored my little joke. “The way he looked at me. He was trying to tell me something more.”
“Like whom to stop and whom to save?”
“That’s it, Dottie!” said Aleck, stopping in his tracks. He said, ‘Stop him. Save him.’ He wasn’t telling me to stop his murderer so that I could save him from something. He was telling me to stop the murderer so I might save someone else.”
“Oh, I see what you mean.”
Aleck looked distressed again. His eyes narrowed and his brows lifted behind his spectacles. For the first time since we met back in ’19 he appeared to be at a loss for words. And for a man known for his verbal prowess, I found this disturbing.
“How am I supposed to do anything about that?” he finally said, and then the solution dawned. “Let’s call Bob and—oh, I forgot. He’s not in town.”
Bob is Robert Benchley, famous writer, wit extraordinaire, critic for Life magazine, star of last year’s Music Box Revue, and best of all, my closest friend and confidant. We met half a dozen years ago, when I was hired by Vanity Fair as theatre critic, where he was editor. A couple years later, when I was fired because I was, let’s say, uncharitable to a Broadway star (Billie Burke) in my scathing review of her performance, disregarding the fact that her husband was not only one of Broadway’s biggest producers (Florenz Ziegfeld) but a major advertiser in Vanity, Robert Benchley resigned his post in protest of my dismissal! No one had ever stood up for me before. He was not just a fair-weather friend with whom I shared good times. He became my champion.
With no job, but with a wife, children, and mortgage in the suburbs, Mr. Benchley decided to try freelance writing, so together we set up an office in a broom closet. Might as well have been a broom closet—a partitioned-off four-by-eight-foot end of a hallway in the Metropolitan Opera House studios close to Times Square for thirty dollars a month. With room for one desk, two chairs, one on either side, our typewriters butt-to-butt (“an inch smaller and it would have been adultery”), we set up shop. There was always some work to be had, for we were writers of note, but during the months we rented the broom closet we spent most of our time unproductively, lunching half the afternoon away with our Algonquin Round Table friends as had become our custom, then returning to our cubbyhole to play cards, watching and commenting on the traffic of pedestrians from the window, and generally joking around until five o’clock. Eventually we abandoned our pathetic enterprise.
Since shutting the door of that closet we spend much of our time together, lunching, going to the theatre, shooting the breeze, and gallivanting all over town. Mr. Benchley (who calls me “Mrs. Parker,” as we were first introduced to each other at Vanity) keeps rooms at the Hotel Royalton, a bachelor residence across the street from the Algonquin, since appearing on Broadway last year; the commute to Scarsdale after the show each night didn’t get him home until two in the morning. He’s kept those rooms, however, since the show closed last summer, and returns home to the suburbs on the weekends. There’s been lots of talk, lots of speculation about our relationship. Some people have insinuated we are lovers. We are not, and never have been. Mr. Benchley and I were married to other people when we met, and although I have been separated from my husband, Eddie, for over a year and feel free to seek out new relationships, Mr. Benchley is happily married. Happily enough to stay married, anyway, although of late he has been visiting Polly Adler’s brothel with some regularity: “Mistresses break the monogamy, Mrs. Parker.” He is my best friend in the whole world. We share a mutual admiration, and our “love” for each other transcends the romantic, and therefore holds great value for me. I sometimes think that if I had been born a man, I’d be Mr. Benchley.
“Mr. Benchley was having Thanksgiving with Gertrude and the boys.”
“Let’s call him from your room.”
“Don’t think Gertrude would appreciate a one-A.M. call, Aleck.”
“Oh, bother.”
We were passing a corner newsstand when Aleck stopped, turned, and walked over to pick up an evening paper. He grabbed a New York Post and a Tribune, too, and flipped a nickel to the newsy.
“Let’s see if there is any mention of this morning’s murder.”
We stood for a moment as he perused the headlines on the first few pages of each paper. Woodrow Wilson tugged at his leash, so I followed his lead that he might investigate an unidentifiable dropping off the curb. I didn’t like the looks of it, so I pulled my pup away and turned to look for Aleck, twenty paces back.
As I waited for the big man to catch up to us, my attention was called by a group of rowdy young men in evening clothes, decidedly “tight,” staggering out of the Harvard Club. Several bent fellows stumbled off the curb, arms flailing, spitting out anemic whistles in ineffectual attempts at commandeering a cab to take them on to a brothel adventure, no doubt. A couple doors down at the New York Yacht Club, there emerged from its French Rococo façade and brightly lit bowed windows a doorman looking to see what the ruckus was about. Noting that the fuss was simply the breast-beating of healthy youth, the guard retreated back into the sanctuary of the club.
Fifty feet further along and across the street, the Hippodrome’s marquee was dark at this late hour, the crowds having long since dispersed from the extravaganza that was currently playing there. The stately white limestone building directly across from my hotel, the New York Bar Association, dozed in dark shadows like sleeping royalty.
Aleck called out and was catching up to me, re-folding the newspapers, when something caught my eye and I turned back to look across at the Bar Association Building.
A man lurked in a doorway, his hat slouched over his eyes and casting a shadow across his face. Our eyes met, and he stepped back into the doorwell’s dark recess. Even with all the millions of men in New York City dressed in nondescript overcoats and banded fedoras, I knew that underneath that hat would be revealed a shock of wild blond hair.
I ran back toward Aleck, Woodrow Wilson sprinting
after me.
“Aleck!” I yelled, grabbing his arm and causing one of the newspapers to fall to the sidewalk. “The murderer! He’s there!”
Aleck stopped, bent down to retrieve the paper, and turned to look in the direction at which I pointed. “I don’t see anyone.”
“The man across the street,” I said, as a truck passed, blocking our view. When it was gone, so was the man.
“There he is, walking toward Fifth Avenue,” I said, watching him turn the corner. “He was waiting for us.”
“Dottie, dearest, your nerves are shot. Your imagination is running away with you.”
“No, Aleck, it was the man, the murderer!”
“But how can you know for sure? It’s dark, the streetlights cast shadows, and he was just a fellow walking down the street.”
“He was waiting for us, lurking in the doorway across from the Gonk.”
“No, dear; if you are right about the fellow’s identity, it was not us he was waiting for, but you. I don’t live here, remember? He would have been watching your hotel, if I’m not mistaken. But, how likely is that, now? The fellow might have just stopped to light a cigarette out of the wind.”
“There is no wind tonight.”
“But, how can you be so sure he is the man? Did you see his face?”
“No, but it was he,” I insisted. “Why else would he bolt when I looked his way?”
“All right, if you feel so certain, perhaps we should call in the police.”
“And what would I tell them? I saw the murderer; he looks like every man on the street?”
Aleck took my arm. “Let’s get inside and get that drink you promised me.”
Peter, the Algonquin’s night doorman, whom we referred to as “St. Peter” because he guarded our heavenly gates, greeted us as we entered, and once in the lobby I thought to ask if he’d seen the man, whom I described, lurking in the doorway of the Bar Association.
[Dorothy Parker 02] - Chasing the Devil Page 4