The jazzmen stayed till the end, and had a lot of nice things to say when I walked back to the Roost with them for a celebratory drink. Now, at least, they knew what I did. That was enough for me. I couldn’t have imagined they’d think enough of my singing to make a suggestion that would change my life.
The workshop roles kept coming, but by early 1948, the euphoria I’d felt in joining this great collective had ebbed. It was supposed to help launch me as an actor, but I’d gotten nowhere in landing even a small part in any off-Broadway play, or lining up an agent. My classmates were all making headway, getting breaks; they had a lot to talk about when they got together. As a black actor, I was out of the loop, and so I spent less and less time socializing with them. The loneliness I’d felt so keenly in my youth, that bitter sense of not belonging, came back in full force, and nothing Marguerite could say would ease the anger it brought. I’d rant about how few parts there were for black actors in this racist white society. I’d rail at racist white politics: Blacks were getting lynched in the South, and Strom Thurmond, avowed segregationist, was running for president! The smallest thing would set me off. Riding on the subway with her, I’d point to the advertisements overhead for various beauty products. Why were all those models white, when so many of the riders on the subway were black?
The bleaker my acting prospects looked, the more I threw myself into political organizing. At various union halls, I helped put on agitprop plays—taking a union crisis and dramatizing it, so the rank and file would be inspired to rally for better wages and working conditions. With my two roommates, I went during the summer break to a beautiful union retreat in Pennsylvania called Beaver Lodge, and helped the entertainment staff stage plays and sing-alongs. Time has blurred those events in my mind, but I remember sharing stages with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Josh White, and others, all protesting inequality and injustice. The war had been fought for democracy, yet all around us, the system we’d fought for and won kept failing us. The federal government suppressed strikes and censored free speech. It viewed its own citizens as traitors for espousing “undemocratic” political views. Most abominably, it did nothing to stop the scores of beatings and lynchings down South, many of returning black servicemen who’d gotten the “uppity” notion that they, too, had fought a war for democracy. I well remember one of the first victims, Isaac Woodard, a decorated black soldier from South Carolina who, in February 1946, boarded a Greyhound bus and got into an argument with the white driver. At the next stop, the driver reported him to the local police. Although he had a chest full of medals, the police dragged him off the bus and gouged out both his eyes. He would come to speak at rallies, his concave eye sockets a terrible testimony to what prejudice could do. In the postwar South, thousands more were savaged or killed without record or retribution.
Paul Robeson spoke and sang at some of those rallies. He was the star draw, and I was an usher. But I did approach him to tell him I’d been in that play at the ANT, and to say I’d read his last speech, and how much I’d admired it. He came to recognize me, and to flash that great grin when he saw me. “Oh, Harry—you’re here. Good to see you.”
Only in retrospect did I realize how much my politicking began to burden the friendships I had with my fellow workshop actors. I was walking around with too much of a conscience, always busy making people feel responsible and guilty if they didn’t get as caught up in social issues as I was. They liked me, probably more than I knew, but in the end, I was a bit too much for them. In truth, some of my indignation had less to do with the issues or my parents or poverty than it did with the fact that my classmates had begun to get work—parts in real plays, not just school productions. I was getting nothing at all.
One day that winter, my luck took a turn for the better at last. I got a call from Osceola Archer, the director from the ANT who’d cast me in my first roles. She was planning an off-Broadway production of Sojourner Truth, about the Negro abolitionist who became an early icon of civil rights. She wanted me to play Sojourner’s son. For me, this was huge. Erwin Piscator’s productions were, in a sense, off-Broadway, too. But they got staged and were financed by an academic institution; they weren’t competing commercially. Sojourner Truth would open at the 92nd Street Y, hardly the Palace or the Winter Garden. But officially and formally, it would be an off-Broadway production—my first. Best of all, I’d be playing opposite Muriel Smith, one of the New York theater’s rising stars. Smith had won a lot of attention for her fourteen-month run in Carmen Jones, the all-black Broadway, Oscar Hammerstein version of the Bizet opera Carmen. Her reputation as a singer secure, she hoped that playing Sojourner would establish her as a dramatic actor, too, and lead to more Broadway plays. That it didn’t may have been, at least in some small part, my fault.
Opening night—April 20, 1948—went off without a hitch. The problem came at the start of the next day’s matinee. In the show, Muriel Smith’s co-star played a white woman whose son was my character’s friend. The two of us were like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, always getting into mischief. As the play opened, we were being chased across the stage by cops, and were then supposed to jump through a basement window, only to land, to our surprise, in a secret abolitionists’ meeting. My friend jumped first. At this matinee, when he did, his pants ripped right up the backside, revealing that he was wearing no underwear. To see him put a hand back to try to cover his white behind struck me as hilarious—so funny that I started laughing at him, and kept laughing throughout the scene, no matter how many of my fellow actors gave me furious sidelong looks. Muriel Smith was the angriest of them all. This was her play, her vehicle, and I was making a mockery of it. She didn’t talk to me again, not the rest of that day, as we put on our third and last performance at the 92nd Street Y, nor when we staged the production up at the American Negro Theatre the next month.
That uptown performance brought two consolations. One was that Eleanor Roosevelt came to see the play, since it was written by her friend Katherine Garrison Biddle. In her “My Day” column that week, Mrs. Roosevelt praised Muriel Smith’s “beautiful voice” and called her “a really fine actress,” easing my guilty conscience somewhat. “Many of the men impressed me also,” she added, which I took as my first critical praise in print. Even more important, Marguerite came to the Harlem performance.
Something clicked for Marguerite as she watched me onstage that May night. When she came up to me afterward, she gave me a big, soulful hug. After the show, we strolled over to the East River Drive and walked along the promenade, the bridge lights twinkling above and below us. On a whim, I pushed her toward the railing and threatened to throw her into the current if she didn’t agree to marry me. After shrieking a bit, she did. We set a date of June 18.
Over the next few weeks, I worried Marguerite might change her mind. But when I came to pick her up during her lunch break at Bethany Day Nursery on June 18, there she was, still game for getting hitched to an aspiring black actor whose prospects seemed only slightly less meager than before his off-Broadway debut. She’d even found a wedding dress to wear. Mrs. Bears—her boss and my supporter—came down to City Hall with us, along with several of the teachers, to serve as witnesses, and an aunt of Marguerite’s from Jersey City showed up to represent the Byrds. Marguerite had broken the news to her parents the night before, and they’d done little to hide their horror at her rash move. No one from my family attended. Why would they? My mother disapproved of my getting married so young—but then, for that matter, she disapproved of me in every particular. My stepfather, Bill Wright, wouldn’t have come on his own without her, and their children were about four and six years old. My father didn’t disapprove of me, exactly; we just had no communication, now that Millie had remarried and he no longer had to supply child support on a weekly basis. As for my younger brother, Dennis, his main feeling toward me was resentment—for being the brother who wasn’t there, and out on my own. I don’t recall feeling sorry for myself about any of this. It just was what it was.
&
nbsp; For our honeymoon, Marguerite and I went down to Beaver Lodge, the union lodge in Pennsylvania where my roommates and I had entertained workers that winter and spring. The organizers put on the Ritz for us, in part because I’d agreed to stay on for the summer as one of their paid entertainment staff. After ten blissful days, Marguerite went back to Manhattan and her job at Bethany Day Nursery. Often, in the next months, the seventy-five dollars she earned each week at Bethany would be all that stood between us and destitution. I was twenty-one. Professionally, I was a black actor whose G.I. Bill money for classes had just run out. And now a married black out-of-work actor. At summer’s end, I would have to find an apartment for the two of us and a job to pay the rent. And whatever job it was, it would have to be something better than pushing clothes racks in the garment district, because by August, Marguerite was pregnant.
5
I remember a cold rain that night in January 1949, and a brisk wind that I tried to block with the collar of my navy peacoat. As I reached the Royal Roost, Pee Wee Marquette, the midget who stood outside in an admiral’s suit luring passersby in with his steady patter, mangled my name as usual. “Harry Bella Buddha! How are ya, Mister Harry?”
I hesitated. Marguerite was right: Whiling away these winter nights at the Roost just kept me from facing my new responsibilities as a husband and soon-to-be father. But the streets were frigid, inside was warm, and the Roost was the one place in my life that felt like home. As I opened the door, a slow, smooth, perfect tenor sax solo pulled me in. How could I not go in when Lester Young and his band were playing?
I’d had a tough few months. With the end of my G.I. Bill money, I’d had to withdraw from classes at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop. My off-Broadway break in Sojourner Truth hadn’t led to more roles. I was still pushing clothes racks in the garment district—now full-time, for forty dollars a week. And for the moment, at least, I couldn’t see what difference my activism had made. Despite all those rallies and agitprop plays and sing-alongs, Henry Wallace’s presidential bid had gone nowhere, blacks were still being lynched in the segregated South, and the country seemed no closer to a classless society than before.
Through these months, I thought hard about giving up acting. I knew Marguerite wanted me to put my life on a proper track at last: a high school equivalency diploma, college, a real job. Her parents made no bones about telling her she’d made a big mistake marrying me. They’d assumed she’d marry some upstanding black graduate student—or at least that New York Times reporter—and so had she. Instead, she’d gotten snared by a kid who was pretty slick and fast on his feet, a kid who was fun to be around, a curious creature who elicited her sympathy as much as her love. In our courtship, I’d played on that sympathy to reel her in. And now that she was carrying our child, I felt a heavy burden not to fail as a provider. My parents’ voices echoed in my mind, engaged in those same old bitter battles. “Why can’t you earn a decent living, Harry?” “I do what I can.” “It’s not enough!” “You ask too much.” “I only ask you to be a responsible husband and father!” Above all, I wanted not to fail in Marguerite’s eyes, as my father had in Millie’s.
That night at the Roost, the waiters let me sit up front, and when the set ended, Lester and his bandmates came over. “How’re your feelings?” Lester asked. He always put it that way. In the months since he’d come to hear me play the Troubadour in Of Mice and Men, we’d gotten pretty close. One night I’d told him about my two weeks in Portsmouth Naval Prison, and he’d told me his own, far more horrifying story. As a draftee in Alabama, Lester had been arrested for possessing marijuana and barbiturates. When the authorities had learned he had a white girlfriend, they added miscegenation to the rap. In Alabama, miscegenation was defined by law as interracial sex, with or without matrimony. Lester had sat out the rest of the war in a military prison, an experience that traumatized him and would partly account for his nervous breakdown some years later.
“My feelings aren’t doing so well,” I admitted, and told him just how bleak my prospects were.
“Well, why don’t you ask Monte to give you a gig?” one of Lester’s sidemen asked. “Something to tide you over.”
Monte was Monte Kay, the Royal Roost’s new young manager.
“I’m not a singer,” I said. “What you saw me do was acting. It just happened to involve singing.”
“Talk to Monte,” another of the sidemen said.
To my astonishment, Monte didn’t need persuading; he liked what he’d heard at the Forty-eighth Street theater, too. Monte was about my age, an olive-skinned Sephardic Jew who loved jazz and hoped his gig at the Roost would lead to managing his own clientele of singers and players. He’d come pretty far already: Though the mob owned the Roost (as it did nearly every significant nightclub in the country), Monte had the power to book any acts he liked. If he heard some kid in St. Louis could blow a horn, Monte would fly down to check him out. “How about singing in the intermissions?” he suggested to me. “We could try it for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.”
“But I don’t have a repertoire,” I responded.
“Well, you can sing,” Monte said. “And it’s easy enough to work up enough songs for an intermission.”
Monte went to Al Haig, Lester’s pianist, the one white guy in Lester Young’s band, a regular player with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. Al said he’d be happy to oblige.
“Don’t worry,” Monte said to me. “We’ll pay you, too—scale. Seventy bucks per week.”
Seventy dollars! To sing!
That week, Al and I worked up a few standards, starting with “Pennies from Heaven.” My roommate Alan Greene contributed a song he’d written called “Lean on Me.” I threw in an original, too—the only song I’d written—from a Dramatic Workshop musicale at the Houston Street theater. The revue, called Middleman, What Now?, had focused on soldiers returning from the war and trying to fit into postwar society; the students had contributed songs or vignettes, as they liked. My song, “Recognition,” was about the struggles of trying to make it as a black veteran in white America.
I’m known as a roamer
Wandering roun’ from town to town
Tryin’ hard to find a corner
Where I can lay my weary head down.
I ended by singing, “I’m gonna put my shoulder to the wheel of freedom and help it roll along.”
For my big night, I went out and bought a blue suit—secondhand but very sharp. Marguerite was impressed I’d be earning seventy dollars, though not impressed enough to come down and hear me. If acting was a dubious profession, in her eyes, singing was just a lark.
I sat quaking through Lester’s first set that next Tuesday night, my mouth dry, my palms sweaty. When it came to an end, and all the players except Al melted away, I almost bolted. Before I could make a move, Pee Wee Marquette popped up onstage, his admiral’s hat at a rakish slant. Monte had brought him down from the street to do the honors. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Royal Roost is pleased to introduce a new discovery, Harry Bella Buddha!”
Al gave me a little nod and a smile and played a little flourish as I walked across the stage in a stupor. And then something very odd happened, something I remember as vividly today as when it happened more than sixty years ago.
Tommy Potter came out onstage with us, picked up his bass, and started playing along. I looked at him, surprised and confused. He gave me a nod and a smile.
Then Max Roach glided out and slid behind his drum set.
And finally Charlie Parker emerged from backstage and picked up his sax.
Al Haig, Tommy Potter, Max Roach … and Charlie Parker!
I couldn’t believe it. Four of the world’s greatest jazz musicians had just volunteered to be the backup band for a twenty-one-year-old singer no one had ever heard of, making his debut in a nightclub intermission. They hadn’t decided to sit in because they thought I had the greatest scat going, or some new way of phrasing. They came out because they liked
this kid who came to the club a lot, and wanted to give him a send-off.
Al launched into “Pennies from Heaven” in E flat. But if anyone had told Charlie about the sixteen-bar intro, he’d forgotten. As I was about to open my mouth, Charlie raised his sax high and tore into a riff. I stood there nodding along, both thrilled and terrified, my count completely blown. I couldn’t even tell where the intro began. Finally Al gave me a nod, and I just plunged in.
The Roost had a good crowd that night, and I got a nice hand for “Pennies.” With each of the next four songs, the applause grew louder. At the end, I got a solid ovation, and when I dared at last to look over at Monte, he was sitting off to the side with a Cheshire cat grin, as if he’d known exactly what the crowd’s reaction would be all along.
Whatever I said to thank the players that night, it wasn’t enough. I could never repay them, not then or later, for this amazing act of generosity. Just by coming onstage and picking up their instruments, they’d validated me; the crowd knew that that kind of heat wouldn’t get up to play for some flunky. And so the din of conversation had died, the drunks had stopped flagging their waiters for more drinks, and everyone, out of sheer curiosity, just listened. And I’d had my chance. All I could do was be alert, in years to come, for opportunities to help some talented unknown the way those guys had helped me, and to hope, when those opportunities came, as they did, that in some small way I was passing that karma on.
Monte extended my gig by a week, and then another, and another: twenty-two weeks in all. I sang two or three intermissions each night, my repertoire expanding as I went. Al Haig was my only backup now, but he was more than enough; thanks to that all-star sendoff the first night, I’d made my mark. With packed rooms cheering me on, Monte even upped my pay, to $200 a week. It was breathtaking. I went from being a nobody who didn’t think he could sing to walking onstage at Carnegie Hall, one night that spring, to accept a plaque from the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper, as the most promising new singer in the country.
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