I don’t know what I expected, but the last way I expected to meet Jack Johnson was jamming with a combo around an upright piano. Sax, cornet, drums, if I remember right. And bass of course. I’d forgotten that he was a bull fiddle player—cellist too—and let me tell you that bull fiddle looked more like a viola in his big hands. I think he coulda picked it up and played it like one, if he’da wanted to.
I didn’t want to disturb them, and so Hiram and I stood in the back, in the shadows, listening. The tune was “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and I never heard it played better. When it came time for the bass solo, Johnson plucked that bull dry, made it sing and cry and whisper. The other players just stepped back and listened, the drummer laying down a trap beat, just enough to support Jack wherever he wanted to go.
Believe it or nor, it was at that moment, watching that big African toss that fiddle around, with the other players smiling and snapping their fingers, and the piano player tossing back a fresh cold one while he had the chance, and one of the waitresses, mid-twenties, lithe, startin’ in to shimmy, that I got the idea that, if I do say so myself, changed the course of popular music.
The music stopped and I started to applaud, two lone white paws clapping on 142nd Street. Black faces turned toward me as I stepped out of the shadows, and for a moment there I thought there might be trouble, or at least some hard feelings, but Hiram was right beside me and the minute Jack spotted him he broke into a big grin and gave everybody the high sign and the next thing I know I’m shaking hands with the champ.
“Mr. Jack, this Mr. Owney. I tole you about him years ago. Now he a big man.”
The fighter they called the Galveston Giant looked at me and I knew that he knew that I knew that he could squash me like a roach if he wanted to, which luckily he did not.
“I am pleased and delighted to have the honor of making your acquaintance, sir,” said Johnson in a soft East Texas accent. That’s the way he talked, real fancy, all class, and I liked him straightaway.
At the time I met him, Jack Johnson was forty-eight, a good fourteen years older than my own good self. That may sound middle-aged to you, but believe me back then it was old going on elderly, especially for a boxer. Pushing fifty, even a regular workingman was already yearning for retirement. A fighter had one foot in the grave, if he was lucky.
Jack snapped his fingers and the shimmying colored gal brought us some beers. One sip was all it took to tell me he was serving the Dutchman’s dreck, which was going to have to change.
As she set the beers down, I couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was, how light her skin, and for a minute there I thought she might be white, since I knew that Jack liked white girls plenty, but she was what dark folks call high yaller. Up to this point I had never thought one way or the other about colored girls, having met damn few of ’em, but as I say my mind was workin’ overtime now.
“Now, what can I do for you, mister?” asked Johnson.
Instead of gawking at the dame, I should have been thinking about what I was going to say. If I had, I probably would’ve thought to say something about Johnson’s fight career, how he made hamburger out of Jim Jeffries and the other Great White Hopes, right up to Jess Willard; or his problems with the Mann Act, or his travels around Europe, but no, the first words out of my mouth were:
“How much you want for it?”
Normally I would never blurt business right off the bat, like a Levantine, but I was shook up in the presence of greatness.
Johnson counterpunched right away. “What is it about my establishment that indicates to you that I am in either want or need of partnership or sale?”
I felt like a real jerk, especially with Hiram’s left shoe bouncing off my shin. “Nothing whatsoever, Mr. Johnson,” I said. “I just thought maybe we could do some business together.”
The giant smiled. Jack was running to fat, like all old fighters do, his belly spreading, his tits drooping, but the muscles in his arms still bulged through his T-shirt. “Mr. Watkins tells me you’re in the liquor trade.” He reached for his beer and downed it. “This concoction is decidedly inferior.”
I could second that motion. “Maybe that’s why you’re having trouble drawing people. You ought to try mine, Madden’s No. 1. Best brew in town. Ain’t that right, Hiram?”
Hiram didn’t have to say nothing. “I am inclined to agree, upon information and belief.” Johnson stroked his clean-shaven chin, the one that had taken so many punches over the years. “I could mayhaps take on a fiduciary partner or two, in order to improve and refine the surroundings, the libations and the comestibles.”
Now he was talking.
“Got it all figured out already. We’ll form a corporation. My associate, Mr. George DeMange, will be the secretary. In exchange for a cash payment of—I watched his face carefully—“two hundred thousand dollars, you’ll be employed in an executive capacity, to lend your name and prestige to the joint. Welcome anytime, everything on the house, you get the picture…”
Jack nodded. “And in return?”
“We get one hundred percent. Straight buyout, with you as the front man for as long as you wish.”
Johnson trained his big brown eyes on Hiram. I couldn’t tell if he was blaming him for bringing me up here or thanking him. “You’re asking me to throw my last fight, Mr. Madden,” he said.
There was an awkward moment. The musicians were still at their perch, silent. The waitress had stopped pretending to serve and was standing stock-still. Hiram, well, Hiram had pretty much stopped breathing. Show time.
“How hard did Willard hit you? With the last punch.” That was either the right thing or the wrong thing to say, and I would soon find out, either the easy way or the hard way.
Reflexively Johnson made a fist and then opened it again. His eyes were elsewhere. “Combination,” he said softly. “It was a combination. He came out for the twenty-sixth, and he knew he had me and I knew he had me. I just plumb had nothing left. He struck me with a left jab in the face, then a right to the stomach. Then another left to the heart.”
“What did you feel?”
He looked at me like I’d never been in a fight, and I never had, not in that kind. “Pain,” he said. “Nothing but pain. Everything else is silence.”
I sat there in the Harlem club, picturing that awful scene in Cuba.
“I dropped my guard, the way one does when one has taken two shots in the midsection, and that’s when he caught me flush on the jaw, and the next thing I knew I was on my back in the broiling Havana heat, trying to shield my eyes from the sun and finally hearing something I hadn’t heard before up to that point. Something my beating heart had drowned out heretofore.”
“What was that?” I had to lean forward to hear his reply.
“White people.”
He drank the last dregs of his beer. “In that moment it occurred to me that I had finally given them, after all my years in the ring, what they came to see. A white heavyweight champion.”
He threw the bottle against the wall. It didn’t stand a chance. “You’re right. This beverage is completely unacceptable. When might I expect the down payment on our transaction?”
“Mr. DeMange will be here tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp with payment in full.”
“Do I need or want to know where this money came from, Mr. Madden?”
“Not at all, Mr. Johnson,” said I.
He let out a big sigh, and then he stuck out a bigger hand. We shook, and no matter what happens to me in the rest of my life, I can always tell people I shook the hand of Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world.
First thing I did was change the name to the Cotton Club. You might have heard of it.
Chapter Forty-Two
The Cotton Club was what brought me and Dutch together, and kept us working together right up until nearly our last night together. It’s funny that we should both have departed the great city of the Manhattoes on the same day, but I don’t suppose that’s any less believabl
e than the fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day. They didn’t like each other any better than Dutch and I did, but they admired each other, and sometimes it takes two great, if flawed, men working together to bring Americans the kind of country they want and deserve.
We fixed up the joint spectacular, and they’re still talking about it today. Feature a jungle with a stage, a dance floor and places for four or five hundred customers and you’ll have the idea. They didn’t call the Cotton Club the Aristocrat of Harlem for nothin’.
At first, most of our musicians came from Chicago. The reason was simple. Unlike our girls, colored players was mostly a bad lot, and a fight that started downtown at the Club Abbey could easily continue ninety blocks north. I didn’t want no trouble—couldn’t afford any, being on parole and all—and so I called up the Big Fella, Al Capone, in Chi-town and had his boys send me musicians that mostly didn’t know each other. For it’s sad but true that your average colored likes to fight as much as your average Irishman, which is why I guess when the paddies first come here, the white folks had a hard time distinguishin’ us from the darkies. Take a look at any of the political cartoons of the period, if you don’t believe me: there they are, the mick and the coon, two apes sittin’ side by side and scaring the bejesus out of the proper folk.
I didn’t know Capone then, not personally. I knew he’d come out of Brooklyn and had run with the last of the Five Pointers, so in a sense he was one of Paul Kelly’s boys, but New York had changed, and already Monk and Paul were lifetimes ago. There was no point in holding imaginary grudges when there was business to be done.
We welcomed everybody as long as they had the price of admission, which was steep, with a couple of exceptions. The doormen, who were colored, were under strict orders not to admit Negroes, whether on their own or in mixed groups. Once in a while I bent rule number one to let in some coloreds known to me personally, such as Hiram, whom I’d hired as my valet and man Friday for thirty-five dollars a week, and of course I kept my bargain and Jack Johnson was always welcome—hell, you can’t ask for a better front man than a former heavyweight champ—and so I guess you can say we invented the whole idea of the pug-turned-Vegas-greeter right there on Lenox Avenue.
Another rule concerned women: no unescorted dames after six P.M. in any of my clubs. It wasn’t just that I wanted to keep the easy-virtue element out; it was to spare my married clientele the embarrassment of being sought out by the wife and being caught with the girlfriend. Or vice versa.
I had one other special rule, which was more or less the reverse of the previous: my sister, May, was only to be admitted by herself, as long as I was in the house. No dates, no groups, only solo. Of course my mother was never to be admitted, under any circumstances. Marty could do as he pleased.
Inside and out, a no-fighting policy was strictly enforced, the result of which the Cotton Club was the safest place in darktown, bar none. We wanted only the classiest people in our joint, and any overt razorwork, slicing or gunplay scared the high-class element away.
We sold Madden’s No. I—showcased it, in fact. For those wishing to indulge in the finer bubbly, we offered champagne at thirty bucks the bottle and a fifth of whiskey for eighteen. The chow was good and pricey, and as for the girls…
The girls were young as legally allowed and maybe not even, and so fair that half of them could have passed for white and probably did. One or two later married high-society boys, whose blue-nosed families were none the wiser. I’d asked Granlund to help me out, and while colored gals was a little out of his line, he came up with some real winners. We put ’em in the skimpiest outfits we could get away with—good legs was a must—and choreographed them to a fare-thee-well. No show ever went up on that stage without I gave it the high sign.
Only trouble was my keen ear soon realized that we needed a better band to accompany our revues. The Cotton Club Syncopators was just okay, and when its leader, Andy Preer, passed away of natural causes, I thought it was a tough break for Andy but a good break for me, because now I had an excuse to find something really terrific, especially with a new season coming up.
Fella named Jimmy McHugh was one of our music johnnies, and he said he’d heard a swell group, eleven pieces, called Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians. Problem was Ellington was gigging at Gibson’s Standard down Philly, and so I’d called a mug I knew, Boo Boo Hoff, and asked him to have a collegial word with Clarence Robinson, the-proprietor, about my chances of employing Mr. Ellington and his band. On the night I’m recounting I was waiting for Boo Boo to bring back Robinson’s response.
At the Cotton Club everybody who was anybody, and everybody who wanted to be somebody, showed his face. Jimmy Walker was a regular, toodling in most nights after midnight; no wonder the press called him “the Night Mayor of New York.” I always kept his table stocked with champagne. Tammany lads came often, including my old pals Chick and Billy, now men of property and position; we used to joke with Billy that his last name had to be worth a job someday, and now here he was, a district leader named Tammany. Police captains came with their wives, police lieutenants came with their mistresses, detectives came with their girlfriends and patrolmen came with their whores. It was swell.
Writers and journalists ate it up and why not? That moocher Winchell came by to collect scoops, hobbin’ with the nobs and pretendin’ like hell he hadn’t been born just a few blocks away. Damon Runyon was just the opposite. He told everybody he’d been born in Manhattan, which was true, except he forgot to mention it was Kansas.
We got so big that we was killin’ the Harlem competition—Small’s, the Exclusive, a bunch of others. And that’s why Dutch Schultz paid me a visit that night.
Although we hadn’t met facewise up to this point, Dutch and I had an agreement that Manhattan north of 110th Street and all of the Bronx was his liquor territory, while I took the rest of the island plus Brooklyn. Nobody lived in Queens in them days and Staten Island wasn’t worth fighting over. The deal had been negotiated by Frenchy for me and for Dutch by the punk named Legs Diamond, but Legs had struck out on his own and I was wondering how long that deal could hold.
You may be wondering why I hadn’t revenged myself on Jack Diamond for taking that shot at me back at the Arbor, but that was bygones as far as I was concerned. He was just doin’ his job. You can’t go through this life tryin’ to settle each and every score, just the ones that counted, and I figured as long as Legs hadn’t done nothing more to me, a live-and-let-live policy would obtain.
This, by the way, is another thing folks today get wrong about the gangs back then. Jews employed Irish, Irish employed Jews, everybody employed Italians, even the Italians, who also employed Irish and Jews. That was the way it was back in the days of Monk and Paul Kelly, and that was the way it was during Prohibition. That’s how we all learned to work together, and who’s to say the country isn’t better off for it? It wasn’t going to happen on Wall Street, that’s for sure.
May and I were sitting at my usual table in the back with Frenchy, who was playing solitaire. I was enjoyin’ the show and looking out over the sea of furs and jewels and she was just being beautiful. Once in a while at first, some mug would mistake her for my girlfriend, but he got straightened out real quick if he knew what was good for him.
Frenchy dealt a tableau, turned over a card or two, then folded.
“Why don’t you play the hand out?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was stupid. “No point to it,” he said. “I can tell how it’s going to go.”
“Then why bother, if you can figure it out after a couple of cards?”
“It’s fun is why,” he replied, dealing himself a fresh layout. “Look who’s here.”
“Mr. Madden,” said a natty fellow in specs. “How are you this evening, fine sir?”
Runyon sat down with us, schnorring as usual, and talking up his latest project, which was stories he was writing about gangland and all the “colorful characters” therein.
“Like you, Duke,” he said.
I told him if he ever so much as thought about putting me in one of his stories, I would cut his heart out and mail it to his mother back in Kansas.
“All life is nine to five against,” he said.
“Not if you’re already alive,” said Frenchy, calculating his cards. “Then it’s even money.”
“You got me all wrong,” Runyon stuttered. He’d had a few, so he wasn’t as wary as he otherwise might have been. I’d already had to explain the facts of life to Winchell, that he could plug my bands, my booze, my babes in his newspaper columns but on no account was he ever to mention me by name nohow nowhere. Walter thought of himself as a tough guy, but that was a figment of his imagination, like most of the stuff in his columns, and he did exactly as he was told. I couldn’t have asked for a better press agent than Winchell, which is why, unlike some mugs, I never had to hire one.
Runyon, on the other hand, was a more formidable chap. He was bright and brave, he’d walk into any kind of situation—brawls, shoot-outs, what have you—and stay just as dapper as when he left his house in the morning. Too bad he was such a drunk.
“I’m not using real names, I’m using aliases.”
Now, that was thinking like a hood. “Such as?”
“Such as the one I’m thinking about for you, for example.”
Frenchy looked up from his cards and shot Runyon a look, just so I didn’t have to. I knew that his shotgun, fully loaded, lay under the table by his feet, just in case. George DeMange believed in insurance.
And All the Saints Page 26