by Lillian Ross
We said we hadn’t, and the next afternoon we dropped by Mr. Ellis’s brownstone, in Chelsea. There he fed us coffee and doughnuts and talked about diaries.
Besides writing his column for Diarist’s Journal (February’s was about Henri Frederic Amiel, a nineteenth-century Swiss diarist), Mr. Ellis serves as a consultant for Letts of London (and, more recently, of Hauppauge, New York), a hundred-and-seventy-seven-year-old publisher of diaries, which will soon publish a line of diaries designed by Ellis, and as a consultant for the in-progress New-York Historical Society and Yale University Press Encyclopedia of New York City. He also has a work in progress on the history of mysticism, and, of course, his own diary.
Mr. Ellis’s diary, squeezed into sixty-one volumes, is eighteen million words long and counting. Except for a fortnight in 1965, at the time his wife died, he told us, he has kept a daily log since December 27, 1927, when he was sixteen years old. He is a tireless crusader for an American diary repository. “In 1980, my diary was shipped to the University of Wyoming,” he said. “I have dupes of everything I’ve written since then, but the entire original, except 1988—I haven’t shipped it yet—is in Laramie. I didn’t want to give the diary up, but Gene Gressley, who is the archivist at the American Heritage Center, in Laramie, asked me a simple question: ‘What about fire, Eddie?’ I looked around. I had fifteen thousand books in this place. I used to smoke. I said, ‘Come and get it.’ ”
Mr. Ellis is a big, round man, with a big, round face, a full head of swept-back brown hair, and a full white beard. Around the house, he wears cowboy boots, slacks, a hooded sweatshirt, a shawl that hangs like a gym towel around his neck, and a red beret. He looks a little like Santa Claus moonlighting as a boxing trainer.
“I’m about ninety-nine per cent honest in my diary,” he went on. “I’ve stipulated that when I die it can be opened and published, as long as the contents don’t hurt any living persons or their relatives. I don’t keep an eye to posterity, but I’m aware that my work may be reproduced and studied. I decided long ago that it—posterity—can’t influence me, or the diary will be artificial. Once, a long time ago, an actress friend asked me to read out loud what I had said about her in my diary. I found the right page and realized I hadn’t been kind at all. I had to ad-lib new words, just like that.”
His longest entry—fourteen pages, double-spaced, no paragraphs—came after the birth of his daughter, he said. The shortest entry is “Hung Over.” “That’s in there a lot, but not in the last ten years,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic, a bookaholic, and a workaholic. The first one is the only one I’m recovering from.”
Eddie asked if we kept a diary, and we said, “Yes. Well, no. Sort of—when we’re out of town. Not really.”
We should, he said.
We knew that, we said. Did he have any tips?
He gave us the following:
1. Write every day in the same place, at the same time—morning or afternoon or evening or night. The exact hour isn’t important.
2. Keep your diary locked. Don’t let anyone read it—not even your spouse.
3. Don’t use slang unless you note the meaning. “If you write down ‘I hear you, I hear you,’ as I did the other day, recording a cabbie’s conversation, and don’t explain it, no one will be able to understand it in a hundred years.”
4. Number all your pages, and keep a wide left margin for binding.
5. If you write in longhand, use a pen. If you type, use a good ribbon. Use only the best paper—anything less won’t last.
6. Pick a title. “Mine used to be ‘Briefly I Tarry.’ Now it’s ‘The Ellis Diary.’ ”
7. Observe details. “I have notes about platform shoes. Do you remember them? That information might come in very handy one day for a historian.”
8. Note the price of everything. “I have records of dinners in New Orleans during the Depression that cost me thirty-five cents. Hard to believe, but there it is.”
9. Include the name and address of any restaurant you go to. Chances are very good it will be gone in a year, not to mention a decade.
10. Use a person’s full name. If the name appears regularly, you can shorten it after the first notation.
11. Record all current jokes. “I have about thirty Joe McCarthy jokes in my diary, like the time he and his wife hear the National Anthem and he says to her, ‘Stand up, dear, they’re playing our song.’ ”
12. Note the day of the week as well as the month and the year.
13. Keep the entries strictly chronological. Forget putting the most important event of the day at the top. Forget writing an essay.
Mr. Ellis stopped us at the door to say, “Remember, a diarist is a writer who watches himself watching himself. And one last thing: I said a diary entry had best be strictly chronological, but that isn’t quite true. If on a given day I come up with any philosophical thoughts—if I’ve learned anything during the day that I can put down in the abstract—I wait until the very end to do it. That way, the day’s entry can taper off toward the heavens.”
1989
1990s
MISS SUBWAYS — David Owen
BROWN cake with gray icing isn’t our favorite, but no one seemed to be complaining, so we were a good sport and ate three pieces. The cake was in the shape of a subway car, and the icing represented paint. The cake commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the naming of the first Miss Subways, and the fifteenth anniversary of the naming of the last. It had been provided by Ellen Hart Sturm, who was Miss Subways in March and April of 1959, and who had invited all the former Miss Subways she could find to a reunion at her restaurant, Ellen’s Stardust Diner, on Sixth Avenue. About fifty (out of a total of two hundred or so) showed up, some of them coming from as far away as Florida and California.
The most famous Miss Subways ever was the dancer Sono Osato, who wasn’t a real Miss Subways but played one (as Miss Turnstiles) in the musical comedy “On the Town.” The second most famous Miss Subways was Vera-Ellen, who took over in the 1949 movie version of the show. The third most famous Miss Subways was the first real one, Mona Freeman: she went on to star, with Alan Ladd, in “Branded,” which was released in 1950, and she also appeared in “Dear Ruth,” “Dear Wife,” and “Dear Brat”—a series of comedies from the same era. For subway riders, the zenith of her celebrity occurred somewhat earlier—in May, 1941, when posters featuring her picture appeared in trains all over the city. She was fourteen years old and had a cute smile. Her poster explained that she had been selected by the “Famous Beauty Authority” John Robert Powers (who ran a modelling agency) and that her ambition was to become “a top-notch magazine illustrator.” When subway riders saw her picture, they became confident that the subway was a glamorous yet wholesome form of transportation, and only rarely did they draw a mustache on her face. Mona Freeman did not attend the reunion, but she was present in the form of videotapes of “Branded,” which were playing on four old-fashioned television sets way up near the ceiling.
Quite a few Miss Subways went on to achieve renown of one sort or another. Marie Therese Thomas Ferrari, who was Miss Subways in March of 1946, appeared regularly on “The Jackie Gleason Show,” and in 1948 she had a part in the first live television commercial, which was for the U.S. Rubber Company, and in which she wore a bathing suit made partly and a bathing cap made entirely of rubber. Mary Gardiner Timoney (May, 1957) eventually gave birth to both a future columnist for Soap Opera Weekly and a future stand-in for the actor Bruce Willis. Marie Crittenden Kettler (January and February, 1957) became the First Lady of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. (Her husband is the mayor.) Peggy Byrne (March and April, 1958) turned out to be the aunt of Peggy Noonan, who has written speeches for Presidents Reagan and Bush, and who would have been named Joan if at birth she hadn’t looked so much like her mother’s sister.
Of course, all former Miss Subways are famous to some extent, by virtue of having been Miss Subways. Most were very eager to speak to reporters and pose for photographers and ca
mera crews. At one point, we felt a hand on our shoulder and turned around to see a man in a dark suit, ready to introduce us to Rita Rogers Gross (March and April, 1955). She told us that the man was “a very good friend, a P.R. man for me,” and then caught us up on her life. “Later that year, I married the West Pointer I was engaged to, but it was fun being Miss Subways, because you would see people nudge each other on the trains,” she said. “I am now executive secretary with a pulp-and-paper consulting firm in Tarrytown. It’s a Finnish firm, so I won’t even bother spelling the name for you.” As she talked to us, her eyes combed the room. Suddenly, she saw a cameraman from a local television station. “Oh, he’s taking pictures!” she said, and she rushed away, the P.R. man hurrying to catch up.
Most of the Miss Subways had brought copies of their posters, and they held them up when photographers told them to. Several had brought other memorabilia as well. Winifred McAleer Noyes (June, 1944) showed us a copy of the April 23, 1945, issue of Life, which contained (along with an article about the death of President Roosevelt) a two-page spread on the Miss Subways so far. It was illustrated with pictures of posters, among them hers. “The mail that came in after that was incredible,” she told us. “There were love letters, marriage proposals—everything imaginable. There was one very flowery letter from the Ivory Coast, in Africa, and there were letters from all over the world, the South Pacific particularly. It was great fun. The letters came in for months afterward. The post office in Jackson Heights was inundated.”
The easiest Miss Subways to find at the reunion was Stella Deere (November and December, 1961), because she was wearing a large white hat that said “BRONSON PINCHOT FAN” on it in big black letters. Stella Deere’s real name is Stella Malecki. When she was chosen to be Miss Subways, she picked Deere out of the phone book, she said, because she didn’t want to shock her father, who had a heart condition. Since then, she has used Deere as her middle name or, occasionally, her last. “Everyone has to have a happy experience in their life that makes them feel special,” she said. “I belong to no organizations of any kind. Being Miss Subways—being one of two hundred—is really my only thing that I belong to in my life. It’s a very nice feeling to belong to something. It’s nice to be happy for a while.”
All the Miss Subways we talked to seemed to be extremely happy. We spent some time sitting in a booth with several who were looking at newspaper and magazine clippings from the forties. One of the clippings, a two-page spread from Collier’s, showed a number of Miss Subways frolicking together on Jones Beach in bathing suits. In one of the photographs, all the Miss Subways were kneeling in the sand, and in another they were having a tug-of-war. Dorothea Mate (June, 1942) walked past the booth, glanced down at the pictures, and said, “That’s me! That’s me! Oh, my God! I had forgotten that! For heaven’s sake!” Looking more closely at the clipping, she found herself in a second picture. She smiled broadly. “It was our moment in glory,” she said. “Even after forty-nine years, you can live it again. You think back, and you know you once had it. If you have a bad day, you think, Oh, try again—you were Miss Subways.”
1991
POPSIANA Nancy Franklin
WHEN it comes to stuff, we wrote the book. You probably have a copy of it sitting around somewhere—maybe in the closet with the maracas and the snowshoes and the slides of Mt. Hood. So we understand each other, right? Because if we thought you were the kind of person who would waltz into someone’s apartment and make sweeping, dismissive gestures and say things like “Those souvenir pens from the Museum of Science and Industry, and that picture of you and your tentmates at Scout camp, and that rock you found on a beach in Scotland, and this shot glass from Luray Caverns, and what about that math workbook you’ve been saving since fourth grade—what are you going to do with all this stuff?” then we would just stop right here. We certainly wouldn’t tell you about a trip we took to Flushing the other day to see some of Louis Armstrong’s stuff, which was on display in the main library of Queens College.
In 1943, Louis Armstrong bought a house in the Corona section of Queens, and that was where he lived until his death, in 1971. As we reported a few years ago, Queens College came into possession of the house and its contents after Lucille Armstrong, his widow, died, in 1983. Among the items in the house were eight thousand photographs; hundreds of books, records, homemade tapes, and pieces of sheet music; dozens of souvenirs, trophies, letters, and scrapbooks; and hundreds of pages of Armstrong’s writings. Once everything is catalogued—a job that is expected to take from two to three years—the Louis Armstrong Archive will open its doors. (The house itself is being renovated, and will someday open as a museum.) The work has finally begun, thanks to an infusion of grant money, and, as a way of celebrating the Armstrong legacy, the college invited a handful of trumpet players and several other musicians to the campus to let them have a look at the goodies and to give them an opportunity to blow Armstrong’s five gold-plated horns, which are part of the archive.
We shared the ride over to Queens with Doc Cheatham, one of the designated trumpeters. Mr. Cheatham, a dapper man of eighty-six, has a pencil mustache and a wisp of beard just under his lower lip, and he wore a dark suit set off with splashes of color: a flowered tie, an enamel lapel pin of the Eiffel Tower, a red handkerchief, and purple socks. He told us he first got to know Armstrong in Chicago, in 1926, when Armstrong threw some work his way. “Louis was very good to me,” he said. “A lot of musicians from New Orleans, his home town, were very jealous of him. That’s why he chose me to fill in for him.” Mr. Cheatham said that he was looking forward to playing one of Armstrong’s instruments. “Yeah, we’ll see what we can do with his trumpets. You know, you shouldn’t let a horn sit and sit without being used. If you don’t play those instruments, they’ll freeze. Someone I know once made a lamp out of a trumpet.” He shook his head. “It’s just a shame to see a good instrument go to pot.”
Musicians who knew Armstrong have been asked to make donations to the archive, and now Mr. Cheatham took his contribution out of a pocket and held it up. It was a tubular piece of dull, discolored brass about three inches long and flaring slightly at one end. “This was the standard mouthpiece back then for cornet and trumpet,” he said. “This is about sixty-five years old. It’s what Louis would have used—it’s what we all used. You don’t see these anymore— all the players are dead that had these things.”
The Armstrong memorabilia were in a small room off the rotunda of the library, and there we spoke to Michael Cogswell, the curator of the archive. “We’ve brought seventy-two boxes here from the Armstrong house,” he said. “The house wasn’t suitable for the archive. Here everything will be kept at sixty-eight degrees and fifty per cent humidity year-round.”
Next to a TV monitor showing a documentary on Armstrong stood Dizzy Gillespie, eating a plum and saying hello to various musicians who were threading through the room: the bassist Arvell Shaw and the pianist Marty Napoleon, who played with Armstrong’s All Stars; the trumpeters Jon Faddis, Jimmy Owens, and Donald Byrd; the saxophonist Jimmy Heath. (Mr. Heath and Mr. Byrd also teach at the college.) While they were posing for photographs, we took a closer look at the display cases set up around the room. One held several trumpets, nestled in a beat-up leather case; one held manuscripts of “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue”; one held two sheets of legal-pad paper filled with Armstrong’s handwriting. Toward the end of his life, when he was in the hospital in New York for long stays, Armstrong wrote pages and pages of reminiscences. These particular pages, concerning his early boyhood, held clues to the origin of the Armstrong spark:
When I would be on the junk wagon with Alex Karnofsky I had a little tin horn, the kind the people celebrate with. I would . . . blow it, as a call for old rags, bones, bottles or anything that the people had to sell. The kids would bring bottles and receive pennies from Alex. The kids loved the sounds of my tin horn. . . . After blowing the tin horn so long I wondered how I would do bl
owing a real horn, a cornet was what I had in mind. Sure enough, I saw a little cornet in a pawn shop window—five dollars. My luck was just right. With the Karnofsky loan on my salary, I saved 50¢ a week and bought the horn. All dirty—but was soon pretty to me. After blowing into it awhile, I realized that I could play Home Sweet Home, then here come the blues. From then on, I was a mess and tootin’ away.
Nearby, a large scrapbook filled with clippings from Armstrong’s first European tour, in 1932, was open to a page of newspaper reviews. In one of them a sourpuss calling himself Bass Clef had written, “I heard Armstrong in Glasgow. . . . It is quite true that he produces notes beyond the legitimate range of the trumpet, but by no stretch of the imagination can these notes be classed as music. They are screeching noises.” Other Europeans were more enthusiastic and more enterprising: mounted on one wall, next to Armstrong’s passport, was a round blue tin of Louis Armstrong Lip Salve, manufactured by Franz Schüritz, of Mannheim.
Out in the rotunda, the musicians and college officials were assembling. Shirley Strum Kenny, the president of the college, stood on a makeshift stage and spoke with pride of the archive’s importance for jazz historians. Mr. Byrd, who is in his late fifties, told of growing up in Detroit and sneaking out of school to see Armstrong and his band when they came to town. When he added, “I had to skip school to see Dizzy, too,” you-know-who cried out from the sidelines, “I’m not that old!” Mr. Cheatham spoke about his early days in Chicago, before he met Armstrong. “I got a job washing dishes in a restaurant, making thirty-five dollars a week,” he said. “I was thinking about taking my father’s advice and going back to school to study dentistry.” But then he heard Armstrong at the Vendome Theatre. “People were astounded. It was as if a war had broken out in Chicago, he was so great. When Louis came on, the people would—You never saw anything like it in your life. I decided then that I wasn’t going back to school—the heck with school.”