Fifteen Seconds with Duke Ellington

Andy Warhol used to prate about everybody's being entitled to 15 minutes of fame. I am satisfied with the 15 seconds I spent alone in an elevator with Duke Ellington in the fall of 1970. I had just delivered my daughter Catherine to Amtrak in Trenton on her way back to the Rhode Island College of Design. I was there too early to blitz the State Museum of Art, one of my favorite pastimes, a still much undervalued institution. So I killed some time by checking out the new Holiday Inn kitty corner from the museum.

Was Trenton as terminally ugly from the top of that building as it so depressingly was at street level? A cursory sweep confirmed that it was just as ugly. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. On the way down, who popped into the elevator at the seventh floor but Duke Ellington. Momentarily speechless (there went two of my 15 seconds!), I asked him what he was doing in Trenton on noon of a Sunday. Another honorary doctorate, he replied with that lovable hauteur that always emanated from his sleepy looking eyelids. Princeton, this time! Which I took to mean, you can stuff the ones from Fisk and Atlanta Us, I've really hit the Bigtime. Since he had long since been an international celebrity, I took him to mean, Honky Bigtime! The Fifth floor dinged.

I still relish the memory of drinking with Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney at the American Embassy in Dakar at the First World Festival of the Negro Arts. Just a slither of approval from those languorous eyes. Third floor bell. I'm not a sentimental man, Mr. Ellington (a little Whitey's lie), but when you broke into Take the A-Train on Sunday morning at Liberty Stadium in Dakar, I could hardly hold my camera steady. The blessing of a full frontal smile, as the doors popped open at ground floor. And I've got the only color footage shot that morning! What is your name? he quickly asked, guiding me over to the registration desk, where I gave my first and only anti-autograph. PATRICK D. HAZARD, BEAVER COLLEGE, GLENSIDE, PA. Alas, he never got around to asking me to send it before he died. But those 15 seconds were serendipitous in the extreme.

I have a thing about Celebrity Culture. I despise it. I concur in Andy Rooney's refusal to sign any old piece of paper shoved at him when he shows up for a book signing. I remember once in Los Angeles, in November 1975, at the premiere of SELMA! at the Huntington Hartford Theatre, Groucho Marx showed up, a virtual ghost, literally in his last days, as a gesture of fealty to his revered friend Martin Luther King, Jr.. An adolescent signature collector was hounding the dear old man and wouldn't even listen to his girl friend/nurses plea for mercy, I snuck up to him and whispered as meanly as I could, GET FUCKING LOST! GROUCHO IS SICK: He snuck away like the weasel he was.

That musical, by the way, a labor of love by the Las Vegas entertainer, Tommy Taylor, was a great evening's entertainment. But it was just too serious to thrive at the Hartford, which by a strange fluke was on Vine and Selma Streets! I was covering the opening for my KALW-FM arts program, Muse Room West, whose motto was Ezra Pound's zinger, Literature Is News That Stays News. I had opened the series with Dizzy Gillespie at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. He was there to motivate Bay Area kids to study math more through jazz! I think the real motivation was the eventual appearance that evening of the lady bureaucrat who arranged the Lowell High seminar (where if anything the kids are over-motivated) in her debut as a blues singer. Her voice was better than her bureaucratizing in my judgment.

The only other show that came near Diz's was with Jackie and Roy. All evening my date and I sat with Gillespie at his table near the stand with a very quiet guy in Maoist gear. Diz introduced him as the first man to give him a gig on 52nd Street in the early 1950, Morton Scott. Some time around midnight, he appeared on stage and delivered some very credible tenor solos. He had been working as a longshoreman on the Oakland waterfront, instead of playing jazz in New York.

After the premiere, there was a press party at the Brown Derby. Yolanda King was there at a table with Redd Foxx and some other friends of King. I asked Foxx why he had invested in the musical. His answer was direct, and somewhat bitter in tone: So the kids coming up won't have to put up with the shit I did back then. Yolanda spoke with great intensity about keeping up the work of her father. It was before the Kings got hung up on who owned the royalties etc.

I was to see her again in 1982, when as one of my first moves as an independent journalist I went down to Atlanta for the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Change. I put up at the posh Peachtree Plaza because I wanted to be sure to see the Maya Angelou program on Bill Moyers' series that evening. Imagine my dismay when I found the TV had no public TV channel. I went down to the lobby to buy TV Guide so I could check out the number. Sold out, four p.m. Sunday! No Atlanta Constitution either! I demanded that they send me up an engineer to twiddle my TV. Alas, he had bet a wad on the football game on CBS, and would hardly listen to my complaining. Finally I got him to remove a cover so I could fiddle for the missing channel. Before long, I came upon the supercilious visage of the head shooter on Firing Line. If Bill Buckley was there, Maya could not be far behind.

The next morning I went up to the Sun Dial, with its very good views of downtown Atlanta. An early riser, I was puzzled to find a young black man with binoculars prowling those precincts so early. Turned out he had just graduated from the Medill School of Journalism, and this was his first job, traffic reporter for a local TV station. I had been puzzled by the identifying marks on rim of the Sun Dial. It seemed that any Atlanta structure over three feet high was ID'd except black Atlanta University as well as the new King Center, with Daddy Kings adjacent Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Later at the press conference at the King Center, I identified myself as an out of town journalist from Philadelphia, puzzled by the black-less Sun Dial. Jesse Jackson gave me a look that could kill, if disgust was high caliber. There was an awkward pause. Finally, Mrs. King said, I'm glad you brought that up. I asked the same question six months ago and got a brushoff from management. When I got back home, I fired off a letter to the local manager with a copy to Westin HQ in Seattle. In due course, I got an Uriah Heepish apology for their not being a public TV channel on my TV set, and a promise that they would look into Sun Dial policies.

I'm happy to report that the following February when I was passing through Atlanta again there was a very substantial lobby exhibition on Black History Month and a marker on the Sun Dial for Daddy King's Ebenezer Baptist Church! (No expense account aristocrat would get tight over so bland a religious allusion. MLK Center remained unseen from the skewed view of the Peachtree Plaza.) That same afternoon I Greyhounded on to Mobile for the dedication of the Maya Lin's fountain for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Where I found that two of my Southern activist heroes, the Law Center and Habitat for Humanity founders, were the organizers in Tuscaloosa of a service by which parents could send their children useful gifts. That grub stake has had a lot of useful mileage. I'll never forget the 60ish black lady who shared my Greyhound seat that day. A kind of cross between Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer. Pure gold character, tempered in the fires of the Civil Rights Era.

I don't know where I got my thing about the outrageousness of segregation. There wasn't any talk about it that I can remember at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. (I can't recall a single black seminarian, come to think of it, 1940-43.) I do remember that on my first job as a shoe salesman at Gateley's, a blue collar department store on Michigan Avenue, that my boss Van used to embarrass me with racial innuendos, after he had had to serve a colored lady. (He would cynically try to interest them in ill fitting dogs because there was an extra commission for getting rid of them, no matter what a chiropodist might think.) The manager of the store was a stiff-necked cool character whom I regarded as a snob, too good to mix with the rest of us. But in the race riot of 1943, this man earned my lifelong respect by helping an old black man fleeing a mob escape into our store. He stood fearlessly in the front door and refused the rioters entrance.

I know that when I entered the Navy in September, 1944, there were no coloreds in my Company 1818. We were a radar tech company. (We entered as seaman first class, instead of able-bodied seaman; we weren't all that able-bodied, come to think of it, most of us matching our high math scores with much less than 20/20 vision.) This was the occasion of much merriment on the part of the regular recruits. They could instantly identify us as a tech company on the drill ground because of the reflection of sunlight off of our glasses. So as they passed, they would sing, Take down your service flag, Mother/ Your son is a Navy RT/He'll never get killed by a slide rule/ or hurt by the square root of three/ RT, TS, Your son is a Navy RT. TS! (Tough Shit, that is.)

And there were no blacks at Wilbur Wright Junior College, where we went after boot camp, to weed out the intellectually lame and halt. By the time we got to Gulfport, MS, we were really ready to become RTs. Two of my clearest memories are of watching B-17s take off from a nearby airbase in the early morning, blue flames shooting off their engines and of locals getting edgy when I'd gravitate to the back of the bus when on Liberty. Hell, I was used to sitting with blacks on the DSR in my home town. It miffed me that it bothered the locals.

At the University of Detroit, the most interesting Jesuit instructor I had was Father John Coogan, a sociology professor who could have passed at Wayne or U of M except for his intransigence on birth control. But on race, he was far ahead of even the median Jebbie, a very liberal lot to begin with. The first term paper I did was on the contradiction in Ebony magazine between the editorial content of racial pride and the advertising for things like hair straightening remedies! He liked that paper so much he asked me why I didn't become a sociology major. I later discovered in a biography of Charles Coughlin, the radio priest, that Coogan had tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of his rightist ideology. The only other racial memories I have from those years was talking to high school students in a transitional Eastside neighborhood for the Catholic Interracial Council. And it seemed like a big deal at the time, double dating with a Negro couple at the Eastwood Gardens University prom.

Eastwood was one of two musical venues of my youth. That is where the great white name bands played every summer. I still recall the interview I had in the 1980s with Tex Beneke, then performing with the Glenn Miller Orchestra at Pine Bluff in Oakland. Tex told of how he was playing with Ben Pollacks midwestern regional band when Gene Krupa came through Detroit in 1938 looking for sidemen for the band he was forming. He had a full complement of saxes already, but he told Glenn Miller at Hotel Pennsylvania about the talented 19 year old Texan he had just heard. Miller called him and offered him the standard $50 a week stipend.

Beneke had the chutzpah to hold out for $55. Miller was so amused, he went along with him. Tex recalled driving nonstop from Detroit through Buffalo and Albany (this was before the Pennsylvania Turnpike) in his dinky Plymouth coupe in a snow storm. When he got to the hotel , he was so bushed he asked Miller to let him take a break. Miller was merciless (remember that extra $5!). He snapped, remembering the drawl, Get your horn, Tex, and get on the stand. Johnny Desmond dropped into the interview, remembering how much the band members loved Eastwood because eight miles from downtown, they had to put up at local homes. Including, especially, his Italian mothers, who was such a good cook, band members drew straws for the blessing of eating by his Mammas. They also loved thunderstormy Sunday afternoons, because the girls in T-shirts would put on impromptu wet T-shirt contests, dancing in the rain. Ogling tootlers would lose their places in the tune when the wind blew their charts hither and yon. But Eastwood was strictly white. Benny Goodman finally got away with insisting on Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson in his quarter with Gene Krupa.

But the black Eastwood was called the Paradise Theater on Woodward Avenue, the main drag of Detroit. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Fatha Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Erskine Hawkins. It was there in high school and college, and at the black and tan night clubs nearby (destroyed when the freeways came), that I learned to love jazz and black pop culture there were lively vaudeville acts and boring Westerns you had to put up with for the privilege of relishing that music.In the black and tans there were great pianists like Tommy Flannagan and Hank Jones.

I call it still the beginning of my humanistic education. In 1980 when I went back to Detroit to bury my brother Mike, I was in a sentimental mood so I stopped off at the Paradise, now shuttered because of rock music. What a story on the Bicentennial sign. In 1919, the nouveaux riches Detroit auto moguls began to feel the need for culture to go with their cash (the idealistic Detroit News publisher George W. Booth was in a similar mood founding Cranbrook out in Bloomfield Hills). They talked a Polish pianist/composer to head the newly formed Detroit Symphony, but then forced him to perform in the acoustical equivalent of junior high cafeterias. He revolted. He said give him a decent hall or he was going back to Warsaw. In nine months they delivered him Orchestra Hall, which no less an ear than Pablo Casals called the best performance space in North America.

Alas, as whites moved to the suburbs, Orchestra Hall morphed in 1939 to the Paradise. After two decades the collapse of Big Bands darkened the theater. Some thought for good. But a benignly obsessed oboeist in the Detroit Symphony raised twenty three million dollars and had the old shell brought back to life as Orchestra Hall again. In November 1989, Steinway commissioned the sculptor Wendell Castle to craft the 500,000th piano in their name. In 1995, I managed to attend a rehearsal of the DSO and I cornered that oboist and chided him for wrecking my high school fantasies. Whaddya mean, he countered. We have jazz every Saturday night. A wonderful renewal. It may be the only hopeful sign I've seen in my beleaguered hometown since I left it for graduate school in 1949. There has been a jazz uptick downtown with the Montreux-Detroit jazz festival. And a retired police officer has given new spritz to the Baker Show Bar near the University of Detroit.

But it still the kind of segregation of the races that got Detroit into trouble in 1943 and 1967. During the last debacle I was returning from my mothers cottage on Lake Huron, ten miles South of Tawas City on U.S.23. We avoided the mess by taking the Thruways around Detroit, listening nervously to the radio as we whizzed by safely. A recent visit to Sacred Heart Seminary revealed an almost fortress defense; it was at the heart of the rioting.

Sad to say, the last conversation I had with my mother, a kindly soul who taught Poles and coloreds peacefully for thirty years in Hamtramck, was about the appearance of blacks at Rileys, the cluster of rental cottages two minutes away on foot. Do you want Cathy (then 13) mixing on the beach with the coloreds? I didn't have the heart to tease her by saying, Heh, if they're as sexy as Harry Belafonte, why not? It was World War II that undid Detroit. All those poor whites from Kentucky and Tennessee and poor blacks from Mississippi and Alabama, competing for scarce housing and abundant jobs. The dark side of the defense industry.