My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  2. GENE KRUPA WANTS TO “SWING AFRICAN”

  Night and day in a hot soundproof room in the Brunswick Building, Gene Krupa is whacking a new band of swing musicians in shape for a tour. Gene Krupa is a skinny, shambling young man with long fingers and the grin of a happy maniac, who began messing with a trap drum while jerking soda in a “dime-grind” resort on a river outside Madison, Wisconsin, and is now, fourteen summers later, considered the best drummer in the world. He left Benny Goodman a few weeks ago and organized a band of his own, selecting his men from bands all over.

  “I got certain ideas about music I couldn’t carry out with Goodman,” said Mr. Krupa. “I wanted to go further. There was an expedition to Africa that made some recordings of drummers in the Congo jungle, and I got hold of them, twelve sides of them, and I’ve been studying them. Those boys know how to drum. They tell me I know something about beating a drum, and I guess I do, but those boys can sure handle a drum. I want to get some of that stuff, that genuine African drumming, into my band. Right out of the jungle, you might say.”

  Most jazz drummers fit out their drums with so many noise-making accessories they look more like a college boy’s automobile than a drum, a habit Mr. Krupa despises. “Just give me a drum,” he said. “I knock all that stuff off. Had my way I’d just take a barrel and stretch two heads over it and let it dry in the sun, and I’d have me a drum. I got a lot of drums. I could take my drums and move into a vacant store, and I would be open for business. I got eight snares and six bass drums, and fifteen tomtoms. I got five or six trunks of traps. I’m always busting a drum. Other men may think different; I think a drum is the foundation of a band.”

  While Mr. Krupa talked his men kept on playing. He has three trumpets, four saxophones, a guitar, a piano player, a bass, and himself. When he left Mr. Goodman he went around the country and picked up men whose playing he had heard and admired. He has worked with at least eight bands—“everything from little old hole-in-the-wall bands to the big name bands”—and every time on tour he heard playing he liked, he wrote the player’s name down in a notebook he carries.

  “When I got ready to start my band,” he said, “I knew just who I wanted in it. I had all the names in my black book. All I did, I just went around the country and signed them up. Two I got from the Coast, and two from Detroit, and some came from Texas. The rest from just around. We have forty-eight arrangements now but I want sixty before we start. We open in Atlantic City and then they have us booked ahead two months, all one-night stands. Once a week we come into New York to make records. The tour is training, kind of. I want us to be good before we open up in New York.”

  Except for jerking soda, beating a drum is the only work Mr. Krupa has ever done. He was born in Chicago. He is twenty-nine. His father, Bartley Krupa, was a South Side alderman, who died when Gene was around eight. His name is Austrian—“I’d say it was Austrian,” he said, “but my mother was a Swede.” He started to study for the priesthood at a school in Indiana, working in the summer as a soda jerker.

  “I would stand next to the icebox and open up these cold drinks, these nickel drinks,” he said. “It wasn’t really soda jerking. Mostly bottle stuff. They had a band, and the drummer used to let me fool around with his drum. I got so I could play a little, and he’d let me sit in. He was glad to get a rest. Well, you know the way those things happen—he got sick, and they took me on. When we closed up at the Wisconsin Beach Gardens, I moved up to Chicago and joined the union and got in a band. Since then I’ve been drumming.”

  He is married to Ethel Fawcett. She used to be a telephone operator at the Dixie Hotel. For amusement he goes to ball games and reads sports news. He said, however, that about the only thing he is interested in is drumming. When he was with Goodman, swing fans used to gather around him and exhibit signs of insanity as the sticks he threw into the air came to rest unerringly in his fingers, and as his sticks flew from rattling cymbal to snare to cowbell to tomtom. He is happy when swing fans gather around him and jump up and down.

  “I like to see them go crazy,” he said. “I sure do.”

  2. GEORGE M. COHAN

  “Yeah, I used to like to hang around Broadway and drink beer with the boys,” said George M. Cohan, looking from the window of his apartment on Fifth Avenue to the fat, noisy pigeons roosting in the eaves of the Metropolitan Museum across the street.

  “Now I hardly ever see the street. I mean, sometimes I pass it on the way to my lawyer’s office, or going downtown to play a part, or sometimes I drop into Dinty Moore’s for some liver and bacon and a couple of rye highballs, but I don’t exactly feel it’s the same town I used to live in any more.

  “Whenever I feel like drinking, I go down to the Plaza, the old Plaza, where they have this rack of horse cabs in front, but I don’t even do that much any more. All I do is go for rides in Central Park, usually around the Reservoir, and I don’t miss many ball games, although I don’t root for any particular club.

  “Walking around town isn’t as much fun as it used to be; my old pal Steve Reardon, the retired policeman, is dead now, and I used to get a kick out of walking with him. Funny guy. Used to like to walk a lot. Used to ship his grip up to Albany when the seasons changed and start walking toward his grip. When spring came he would put some money in his sock and start walking toward his grip.”

  Mr. Cohan’s career as a song-and-dance man, as a playwright-actor-producer, as songwriter and as an ill-fated movie star has been distinguished by the range and quality of his indignation, but he said the brassy state of Broadway does not make him indignant; it merely makes him want to stay home. His quarrelsomeness has been monumental ever since the days when the Four Cohans used to be chosen instead of a stable of acrobats to open a vaudeville ball, occasions when his mother, father and sister had to restrain him from leaving the theater. At the close of almost every vaudeville engagement he used to rush up to the manager of the theater and shout, “Sometime I’m going to come back here and buy this theater just so I can throw you into the street.”

  He will oblige any reporter with a blast against Hollywood—“If I had my choice between Hollywood and Atlanta, I’d take Leavenworth,” or something like that—but concerning Broadway he is sorrowful, not outraged. He is a little like the man who saves up enough money for a trip to his hometown and finds that all the people he used to know are not there any more.

  “They have to make a living too,” he says when he walks down Broadway and stares at the auctioneers and strongman professors in every second store, and the barkers with megaphones yelling their heads off in front of dime-a-head movie palaces. He does not forget that there was a lot of trash on the old Broadway when he walks through the territories in the theatrical district so flashy and noisy they make Coney Island resemble an elegant watering place on the Riviera.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, speaking out of the right corner of his twisted mouth, “things have got to move on, and change and grow old. There’s a lot of good stuff in the American theater, even in Hollywood. W. C. Fields, for example, an artist if there ever was one, and Groucho Marx, and this young man Clifford Odets is all right. He reeks of the theater. He pounds on the table a lot, but he’s good. When I was seeing ‘Awake and Sing’ there were times when I couldn’t sit still.”

  He is going to open up in “a little comedy” around Thanksgiving, when the elections are over, and he’s going to take it on the road. He hasn’t written any campaign songs this year, and does not plan to. He has not forgotten that a lot of people laughed when they heard his 1934 song for Roosevelt, “What a man, what a man, what a ma-a-an,” sung to the tune of his most famous song, “Over There.” (For the Jubilee of Light he wrote a similar song concerning Thomas Alva Edison, “What a man, what a plan,” sung to the same tune.) He also said that he does not think that he will wave the American flag during this election. He has been a Democrat all his life, but this election he appears to be a little puzzled.

  “I’ve got friends in both places
,” he said.

  In two years Mr. Cohan will be sixty, but he says that the muscles in his legs would still stand a three-a-day vaudeville tour. His hair is white, but his pink face is amazingly youthful.

  “I may not look it, but sometimes I feel my age,” he said. “However, I keep myself in good condition walking. I weigh 136. I didn’t weigh 100 until I was twenty-seven.

  “In the season of 1927–28 I danced for thirty-seven weeks. For thirteen years I hadn’t danced a lick, and this old actor, Arthur Deagon, dropped dead on me, and I jumped in and took his part with no trouble. That was in ‘The Merry Malones.’ It is good to know that your muscles aren’t asleep. I can’t play golf or tennis, or any of the things most regular guys can do. I can’t even swim, and I’ve never learned how to drive an automobile. I’m probably the only person left in the world who doesn’t know how to drive.

  “I take it out walking. There is a cult of people who take daily walks around the Reservoir. Why, I see more people I know by face, walking in Central Park—people you can speak to and say, ‘Hello there, how are you?’—than I see on Broadway.

  “I don’t drink much any more. I haven’t had a dozen drinks in the last six months. I was in Europe twelve weeks this summer and I didn’t take a single drink, no stout in Ireland, no wine in France. I’m not on the wagon or anything. I don’t stand on ceremony with myself—when I feel like a few drinks I go downtown and get them.”

  His trip to Ireland last summer was something he had promised himself for many years. He made a sedate tour through Leinster and Munster, not venturing into the North. His grandparents were from Cork, and he had a good time there. He went to see the Lakes of Killarney in County Kerry, and watched the Liffey flowing into the Irish Sea at Dublin, a quiet trip with his wife, looking at places he had heard about all his life. His son, George Michael Harris Cohan, is now working for a lithographer, although Mr. Cohan used to say he wanted him to be a ballplayer. Mr. Cohan shows up at a ball park every day there is a game in the city.

  “According to the gossip around town,” he said, “I have tried to buy every ball club in both leagues. One time I did buy the New York Giants with Sam Harris, my partner. We shook hands on the deal and I thought the matter was settled, but another offer came up next morning and the owners forgot they shook hands with Sam Harris and George Cohan and sold it to the new fellow.”

  Mr. Cohan does not have an office any more. His hat is his office, although he keeps an account in the office of Sam Harris, his old partner.

  “I also have a storehouse on some street in the Fifties,” he said. “Which street it is I’ve forgotten. There are two lofts full of my old sets and lighting equipment and costumes. I haven’t been in that storehouse in years. I bet it would cost me $5,000 to move all that stuff over to Long Island City, and burn it.”

  Mr. Cohan said that the story that he intended to leave Broadway for good and troupe with an Ohio and Mississippi River showboat was a good story, but that Charles Washburn, the press agent, was responsible for it.

  “You give a press agent a pencil and no telling what he will do,” said Mr. Cohan. “This old showboat producer in Cincinnati, Billy Bryant, happened to be a friend of Mr. Washburn’s and he got me to let him write Bryant saying I wanted a job. Bryant had just written a book and Charlie wanted to get him some publicity.”

  The letter to the river producer, ostensibly from Mr. Cohan, contained this tear-jerking paragraph: “Can you use another good song-and-dance man this summer? I want to be a child again and play hookey from the skeptic applause of the dry-land theater. I’ve missed something in life, and I want to get away from the hardships of writing, acting and producing plays for the Broadway of today.”

  “It was a good letter,” said Mr. Cohan, shedding a couple of tears, “and I wish I could compose like that. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind acting in a few old-time melodramas again. I remember trouping with a thriller called ‘Daniel Boone on the Trail.’ It was so melodramatic at times that they often had to pump blood out of the cellar before they could finish the third act.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joseph Mitchell came to New York City in 1929 from a small farming town called Fairmont, in the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina. He was twenty-one years old. He worked as a reporter and feature writer—for The World, The Herald Tribune, and The World-Telegram—for eight years, and then went to The New Yorker, where he worked off and on until his death in 1996.

  Portrait of the author

  The author’s opinion of the Sunday newspaper

  Copyright © 1938, 2001, copyright renewed 1966 by

  The Estate of Joseph Mitchell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in different form by Sheridan House, New York, in 1938.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  The photographs are by

  Therese Mitchell. Copyright © The Estate of Joseph Mitchell.

  The pieces in this collection were originally published, sometimes in somewhat different form, in the New York World-Telegram, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mitchell, Joseph, 1908–1996

  My ears are bent / Joseph Mitchell.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75811-8

  1. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th century.

  2. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 3. Interviews—New York

  (State)—New York. I. Title.

  F128.5.M718 2001 974.7’1091—dc21 00-053742

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