Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  The true thing about this phenomenon is that you do not have to have Frank on video, or in a movie or TV show, or even invent conversation in person with this fellow who is a stranger. You really don’t need those presences. All you need is the music the man has made and that has been with you all your life, and which is even better now because you have all the songs of his maturity (which is why these four disks are so valuable, for they collect tunes he did early on and here does so much better). He was new in the forties and still growing in the fifties into such masterpieces as “Drinking Again” (1967), by Johnny Mercer, the greatest of all torch songs Frank ever sang, and also such breakouts as we have here—“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1966) and “The Lady Is a Tramp” (1974) that put earlier white-bread versions out in the back yard. Of course, these views are open to argument but, even so, I will brook none of it here. This is my memoir.

  There is another superb thing Sinatra does, which is Irving Berlin’s schmaltziest work—“All Alone” and “What’ll I Do?” among others—shameless, cornball, wonderful throwbacks to the Tin Pan Alley time when schmaltz was A–Number One, King-of the Hill.

  It was the schmaltz and also too many trumpets that turned off my son, Brendan, when I played Frank in the car. (He once listened to a Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys tape from 1929, and decided the music was prehistoric.) We would fight over tape time in the car, he opting for the Police, me for guess who? This was 1983 and Bren was thirteen. Now he’s in college and last month he told me, “We were at a party and this horrible music was on and this girl and I put on a tape of Frank and danced until somebody shut him off.”

  Two weeks ago he asked my advice on dance tunes and I recommended Swing Easy and the albums with Ellington and Jobim, and so now Brendan also travels with Frank tapes, in case of emergency dancing.

  The finale of all this is that Frank turned up in our hometown, Albany, as the opening act for the brand-new Knickerbocker Arena, with seventeen thousand seats. Would Albany turn out for him in any numbers? Word had gone out, as it always does with these mythmaking events, that Frank wasn’t well, might not show up, that Liza Minnelli was standing by to go on if he crumpled. What’s more, Ava had just died and so maybe this was not one of those very good years.

  And yet here he came on January 30, six years older than when I’d last seen him, looking smaller and—how not?—older, his seventy-fifth year just barely under way. He’s wearing his single-breasted tux with an orange pocket handkerchief, his hair totally silver, adding to his years. Then he opens his mouth. “Come fly with me,” he sings and a cheer goes up from the yes, seventeen thousand who have packed the place to hear and see this legendary character who only seems to grow old.

  A lifetime of staying young at center stage: how can anybody be so good for so long? You listen and know that this is not Frank in his best voice ever but it doesn’t matter. It’s his sound, his cadence, his tunes, him, and it’s as good as it can be and that’s still very, very good. He moseys to the improvised bar on stage with the Jack Daniel’s and the ice bucket and he sits on the bar stool and says: “I think it’s about time to have a drink. I don’t drink a lot, but I don’t drink a little either.” And then he opens his mouth again: “It’s quarter to three …” and the crowd roars and he calms them with his old torch.

  And then, finally, he segues into “New York, New York” and the spotlights circle the crowd, which is stomping, and Frank is making love to all here. He opens his arms, points to everybody.… “It’s up to you, New York, New York.…”

  Then it’s over and the spots cross on him, and the aging bobby-soxers, having come full circle from forty-eight years gone, reach up to shake his hand, and he fades down the stairs and out, and you follow him with your eyes because he is carrying the sound of your youth, the songs of your middle age. And then you think, the song is you, pal, the song is you.

  1990

  Pablo Casals:

  Master Class at Marlboro

  It was the last day at Marlboro for Pablo Casals. He would conduct the final master class of his two-week visit, then leave with his wife, Martita, for Prades, France, a small town in the Pyrenees. Casals spent many years there in exile after the Spanish Civil War, where now an annual Casals Festival of chamber music is held to honor the town’s most famous ex-resident.

  The eighty-six-year-old master musician, composer, conductor sat on the stage of the converted barn, a pine-walled cube with rough-hewn beams overhead, red and yellow crepe-paper strips two feet wide hanging on the walls to improve the acoustics, and the several windows offering a cool view of the gnarled trees growing out of the green Vermont hillside.

  Casals sat facing his pupil, David Soyer, forty, of New York City, a man who has studied the cello for thirty years. The maestro has been at it longer; almost eighty years. Between the two men stood a music stand, and on it the music for Bach’s D Major Suite.

  The music faced the pupil, not the teacher. At no time in the next three hours, for any of the students who sat across from him, would Casals refer to the music. The Bach suite, Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words: they were all as much a part of Casals’s mind as the vision of his mother’s face.

  When his master class in Berkeley, California, was televised, the world heard Casals advise a student on the tempo of a given phrase. “It goes like this,” the maestro said. “I remember discussing it with Brahms himself.”

  Casals has lived a long time. He was born December 29, 1876. Yet he stays young. He is unusually active for a man of such advanced years. He is without the liver-spotted skin of most octogenarians. On the stage at Marlboro last week he moved his arm vigorously with each stroke of the bow. He leaped up frequently to instruct the pupils on the use of their fingers. (“Make your left hand give a little percussion on the strings—like playing the piano. It’s neat.”) He instructed them in the aesthetic use of the arm in pulling away from the instrument after plucking a note.

  And he talked and hummed:

  Yes, leave the bow … yi, yum, pi … yi, yum, pi … it’s difficult but I think the easiest way is this … ahn, ahn, ahn … dee, dee, ah, ah … very good, very good … dot’s it … yesssss … noooooo … wait, wait … don’t do it … better, better … not so pianissimo … that’s very interesting … everything has to be heard and I didn’t hear this part … No! What a thing! This way! … Don’t do that with that song, this is a very rare occasion, the very end of a pianissimo … I don’t hear it … a little more crescendo … I don’t like that … more, more! … You are the principal part … yes, yes … very beautiful.

  The audience was mostly musicians, members of the Marlboro Music School’s “republic of equals.” This is the catchphrase which Marlboro’s artistic director, the famed pianist Rudolf Serkin, took from Schuman to characterize the way of life at Marlboro’s summer festival. It is a July-to-September season of music, some contemporary, mostly classical.

  A brochure describes the Marlboro experience as something “more than a school or a festival—a place where professional musicians, the young as well as the more experienced, can exchange ideas, experiment, and cultivate the highest arts of chamber music.”

  The school is supported by donations from well-to-do patrons. Also, many musicians pay a “tuition” which runs about $625 for the nine-week season, and which covers room and board. In the winter the school reverts to a liberal arts college with no connection with the music festival other than mutual use of the school’s facilities.

  The audience of 140 persons who came to see Casals was casual, dressed mostly in knockaround clothing. One man came late, asked for a ticket (“Make whatever donation you feel you can afford,” the ticketman said), paid thirty dollars. “I’d like to make a more substantial donation later,” he said. “That can be arranged,” said the ticketman.

  In the audience was a white-haired woman, an ancient, with cotton in her ears. Also listening to Casals like an eager pupil was pianist Serkin, a maste
r himself.

  Then came the music, the deep, scratching sweetness of the cellos as the Bach suite was played. The heat of the late morning’s high-rising sun drilled in through the roof of the auditorium.

  Casals bounced up out of his chair, tapped his feet, stared with downturned mouth at the pupils: “No, no, no … ah yes, dot’s right. Very good technique.”

  Said cellist David Soyer, Casals’s first pupil of the morning: “We are constantly amazed at the fantastic beauty of Casals’s playing. And unbelievable as it might seem, he plays better now than he ever did. And this is a great inspiration to all of us.”

  At the end of each session the audience applauded. Then at the end of the final session when Casals played the Mendelssohn Song Without Words with Madeline Foley of the Brandeis University faculty, the swan song for Casals at Marlboro this year, the audience broke into rhythmic applause—1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. Casals bowed to them, put down his cello, then returned to center stage.

  “I don’t like speeches, I like facts,” he said. “I want to say I’m very sad to leave you.”

  Then he backed away to greater applause.

  This was his third year at Marlboro, the end of a two-week visit, a peaceful interim in a half-year of hectic concertizing. Casals, in June, completed two weeks of conducting Casals Festival Concerts in San Juan; went then to New York where he conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, received the key to the city of New York, and received an honorary doctorate at Temple University in Philadelphia.

  He then flew to Ravina, Illinois, where before ten thousand persons in a rainstorm he conducted “El Pesebre” (“The Manger”), his oratorio celebrating the birth of Christ, and symbolizing his personal crusade for peace in the world.

  Then he came to Marlboro, next to Prades until early August, then once again will go on the road for his peace crusade with “El Pesebre” concerts in Berlin, London, the United Nations (on UN Day, October 24), and finally New Orleans. And then home to Puerto Rico.

  Casals said once that a man should “do things with intelligence and conscience.” He has lived his own life that way and because of it, and because of his great talent and his care for his talent, he has heaped greatness upon himself. Yet after all, one might ask, isn’t it a bit foolish for one mortal man to think that he can bring about peace in today’s world?

  Casals is enough of a realist to know that it is neither vainglory nor foolishness to try.

  As he exited from the auditorium, walking into the bright summer sunlight toward the waiting automobile, his wife trailing him, Serkin embracing him, dozens of admirers having shaken his hand and whispered words of awe and praise to him, he was asked about his crusade. How does it go? Is it achieving what he wants it to achieve?

  He grasped the arm of the inquirer and with a knowing smile he retorted:

  “I play my oratorio, you know. We can only do what we can.”

  He smiled with wise eyes.

  “But everybody,” he added, “has to do what he can.”

  Then Casals was gone and life at Marlboro swiftly resumed. It was time for lunch and the auditorium where the maestro just gave his hallowed lessons was suddenly a mess hall. Instead of sweet strings there was the click of silverware on dishes. Rudolf Serkin jumped off the stage and was buttonholed.

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot talk for long,” he said. “I must rehearse for a benefit concert I’m giving tomorrow night with Mr. Benny Goodman.”

  “Mr. Benny Goodman the jazz clarinetist?”

  “No. Mr. Benny Goodman the classical clarinetist.”

  Mr. Goodman showed up in due time, dressed in off-green gabardine threads, wearing horn-rims, and looking cool and ready to attack Schubert and Brahms. He said he was “an old friend of Rudy’s,” and that this was his first visit to Marlboro. The concert would be in Stanford, Connecticut.

  “All classical?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “No jazz.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Then Rudy and Benny went off to rehearse, as did the rest of the equals at the Marlboro Republic. From one old house came the sound of brass. From another the finger exercise of a violinist. The auditorium–mess hall was now a rehearsal stage where a cantata was in progress. Outside a workman hammered at a piece of lumber for a new building and a persistent bee buzzed around a man who walked up a pathway on the campus. The Goodman-Serkin duo sent Schubert strains out over the maple-tree tops, which rustled with their own soft percussion. Down the road in the new concert hall a Hindemith quartet was in progress.

  It was a typical afternoon in Marlboro, and for once, without exaggeration, you could say that music filled the air.

  1963

  Satchmo:

  “All My Days Are the Same”

  I’ve been trying for thirty-six years to write the story of my interview with Louis Armstrong. I did write a small piece for the Albany Times-Union the day I talked with him, and when the news editor read it he threw it in the wastebasket with the comment, “Just another bandleader.” I retrieved the story and complained to the managing editor, who personally put it in the Sunday edition. It was a reasonably bright, comic story that revealed Satchmo to a small degree and amused a fair number of readers. This whole episode tipped the balance of my discontent and a month later I quit the paper and took a job in San Juan.

  I held on to my notes from the interview, for I’d only used a fragment of what Louis and I had talked about, some of which was unprintable in a family newspaper. My awe and reverence for Louis continued to grow through the ensuing years, and somewhere in the late 1970s I conducted an after-dinner poll of who was the most valuable person who ever lived, and Satchmo won with five votes. William Faulkner got four, Michaelangelo three, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali, and Tolstoy two each, and Dostoyevsky and Busby Berkeley one each.

  This whole episode tipped the balance of my long silence on Louis, and I began writing the story of our conversation. But I lacked what editors call a “peg” on which to hang the story. My 1956 notes—made on folded, irregularly cut newsprint, which was what reporters took notes on in Albany in those days—had turned yellow and brittle, the sea air of Puerto Rico had rusted the paper clip that held the notes together; also, books by the dozens were being published about Satchmo, and so my interest dwindled, and the unfinished story moldered in my file.

  Even so, I did not despair. I kept the Satch notes in the current-projects file, peering in at them now and again, certain that one day a peg would emerge from the lumberyard of my imagination. Alas, one did not. And this whole episode tipped the balance of my inertia and led me, at last, to write the story anyway.

  I’ve been leafing through assorted Satchmo books, by Gary Giddins, by Gunther Schuller, by Martin Williams, by Louis himself, and it is quite wonderful to see all the things that people have said of him, and how much more they know about him and his work than I do; and it is also wonderful to read what he said to other people; for he had great verbal talent in addition to being a musical genius.

  But whatever my shortcomings in relation to Louis, and because I do not think my postprandial companions were alone in rating his value in the cosmos, I have decided that writing my footnotes to the life of this Parnassian figure is in order.

  It was the second week in March, 1956, and Louis, just four months shy of his fifty-sixth unofficial public birthday—he said he was born on the Fourth of July, 1900, but he was really born on the fourth of August, 1901—was in town with his band, the All-Stars (Trummy Young, trombone; Billy Kyle, piano; Barrett Deems, drums; Arvell Shaw, bass; Edmond Hall, clarinet) to play the Palace. Louis was staying at the Kenmore Hotel, which was odd, for the old hotel, once the place where Albany’s gentry and the state’s loftiest politicians sipped, supped, and rested their bones in nineteenth-century luxury, was on the slide into fleabagation.

  But Satch had played the Kenmore’s Rain-Bo Room periodically since it began broadcasting music all over the country via the General Electric Company’s radio station WGY,
Schenectady. These broadcasts drove romantic couples, even husbands and wives, into spasms of fox-trotting, waltzing, and bunny-hugging in living rooms all across America, and so the Kenmore was, in these years, a mecca for musicians and performers seeking coast-to-coast exposure—Rudy Vallee and Hal Kemp, Duke Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke, Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey, the Dorsey brothers and Bunny Berigan, all this splendid music originating in beautiful downtown Albany.

  These dynamic radio days were long gone in 1956, television having entered the national life with its usurping ways, and the postwar entertainment tax still driving people to social pursuits other than expensive nightclubbing. But for all the aforementioned music-oriented reasons, Louis would still feel good about the Kenmore, and would be loyal to the place also because, as the story went, he once tried to stay at the Ten Eyck, the premier hotel of Albany’s modern era, and was denied a room because of his color; and the Kenmore, which had been established and run for some years by the son of a slave, a man named Adam Blake, did not bar blacks in the modern age.

  When I told Bob Murphy, the proprietor of the Kenmore, that I had an appointment to see Louis, he told me his Bunny Berigan story. He came to own Berigan’s trumpet, he said, and he gave it to Dan Prior, the criminal lawyer who had so successfully defended Jack (Legs) Diamond, perhaps the most noted and certainly the most infamous denizen of the Kenmore, against assault and kidnapping charges in 1931. Murphy said he acquired the trumpet after Berigan died, but there were those who said it belonged to a musician in Doc Peyton’s orchestra—one of the Kenmore’s several house bands—who didn’t pay his bar bill. Some said Murphy had a great imagination on matters like this. Others said the truth wasn’t in him.