Sunday, March 27, 2005
The Human Sound
by Whitney Balliett
Issue of 1970-12-26
Posted 2005-03-22
On March 21st, the cabaret singer Bobby Short died of leukemia at the age of 80. This Profile of Short was written in 1970 by Whitney Balliett, then The New Yorker’s jazz critic.
It is quite possible that when the century is over, live entertainment—real people singing, acting, dancing, playing, reciting, and clowning in front of real people—will have disappeared in this country or become an anachronism. (The very existence of the phrase “live entertainment” is ominous; the term would have struck the Victorians as a puzzling redundancy.) Concert halls and opera houses are no longer full. The theatre appears static beside the fluid drive of film. (At that, even movie houses, which have always seemed like arenas of live entertainment, are rarely sold out.) The circus and rodeo are obsolescent, night clubs are dwindling, and such diversions as band concerts and the straw-hat circuit are almost at an end. When this decline is complete, something essential will have gone out of human experience. In-the-flesh entertainment at its best is one of the most complex, delightful, and inventive forms of communication. It is a mutually beneficial intercourse between the performer, who plays a god, and the audience, which allows this pretension, knowing delightedly all the while that the performer, beneath the skin of his skills, is human, too. Simply by doing what he is doing where he is doing it, the performer demonstrates great courage, and the audience experiences this courage vicariously. The performer is flattered by the attention of the audience, and the audience congratulates itself for having the intelligence and sensitivity to admire the performer. But electronics is closing off this invaluable two-way street. The performer can no longer play his changes on an audience, gauging his abilities in the mirror of its faces, and the audience can no longer manipulate the performer with cheers and tears. Yet decline and flowering often occur simultaneously; the form dies and its final moments are phoenix-brilliant. I have in mind the brave excellence of Bobby Short, the forty-six-year-old singer and pianist, who, one of the last examples (and indubitably the best) of the café singer or the supper-club singer or “troubadour,” as the late Vernon Duke called him, practices what is probably the most intimate and delicate form of live entertainment extant. It is the art of singing (and often accompanying oneself on the piano) witty or ironic or sad but never sentimental songs in a small room to a small group of people, and in such a way that the performer and his audience, generally only a few feet away, become almost one. (Mabel Mercer, the great doyenne of the form, often sits at her listeners’ table and sings to them, and she remembers long ago carrying this attention to its ultimate in the noisy Parisian boîte by singing into her customers ears through a small megaphone.) Every member of the audience comes to believe that a song is being sung to him, and the performer, who can look directly into his listeners’ eyes, feels that he is singing only to the listener he happens to look at. The songs are as important as their delivery. They are, as often as not, out-of-the-way tunes by the likes of Cy Coleman or Ivor Novello or Noël Coward or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. They may have a small but steady currency, they may have long since been forgotten, they may never have been known at all because of having been dropped from a movie or Broadway show before it opened, or they may have been written only for the performer who is singing them. They must be sung immaculately, in an offhand, transparent way, so that the singer, his diction clean glass, lights up his materials with meanings their composers may never have thought of. Café singing, or at any rate Bobby Short’s way of singing, is unencumbered by the theatrics of opera or rock, by the quaintness of folk singing, by the confinements of jazz singing, and by the mealiness of old-style pop singing. It is singing stripped to its essentials—words lifted and carried by the curves of melody.
Short’s achievements as a performer are all the more remarkable when one considers his equipment. He has a baritone that is frequently plagued by laryngitis. He has a rapid, almost querulous vibrato, and he sometimes slides past or stops short of the note he is after. His piano playing is so unfettered it is usually accelerando—a tendency that is beautifully disguised by his accompanists, Beverly Peer (bass) and Dick Sheridan (drums), who invariably keep in perfect rhythmic step. But everything in Short’s style miraculously balances out. His free sense of time gives his numbers a surprised, bounding quality, his vibrato makes his phrase endings ripple like flags, his laryngitis lends his voice a searching, down sound, and his uncertain notes enhance the cheerfulness and abandon he projects. His appearance is deceptive as well. He is slight—five feet nine, with a thirty-inch waist and small, demure feet. He has an oval face, a button nose, and vaguely apprehensive eyes, all of which do battle with an engulfing mustache. But three attributes work in wondrous concert for him. He is a faultless and inventive dresser (he is a regular on the best-dressed lists), he has a warm, princely bearing, and he has a stunning smile. The resulting impression, as one meets him, is of a tall, poised, and irresistibly attractive man.
I first met him early one afternoon at his apartment, on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall—the apartment once occupied by Thomas Scherman, the conductor. Short has lived there twelve years. It is the sort of place old New Yorkers covet—a small, reasonable, soundproof triplex. No sound comes from outside, nor does any sound escape, so Short can sit before the baby grand in his living room at three in the morning and pound and shout with perfect propriety. The small foyer on the first floor contains a desk, a big Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opens off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, is two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end are a small bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. These lead to a spacious balcony, which serves as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faces a small roof, where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, are aired. The furnishings are high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rests on a zebra-skin rug, and on the rug, beneath the table, are two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass. A pair of big daybeds, which are covered with bright African-looking material and leopard-skin pillows, flank the table. Near the foyer stairs are a huge wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages in East Hampton and on Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hangs in the living room, and it is echoed by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every description jam the walls, and the window side of the room is lined with books and bric-a-brac.
When I arrived, Short, who occasionally models, was posing for a Harper’s Bazaar sketch. He was wearing an orange-and-white cashmere turtleneck, tan slacks, and low, buckled boots, and for the drawing he had added a square-cut puma-skin coat with an otter collar, designed by Donald Brooks for Jacques Kaplan. And he had on a cowboy hat. He was leaning against a support of the balcony, his hands in the coat pockets, and he looked melancholy and distant.
The diminutive Chinese girl who was sketching him said something. “It is a fantastic apartment,” Short said. His voice was light, melodic, yet husky. “I was away when they decided to tear down Carnegie Hall, and I guess I didn’t really realize what was going on, so I didn’t panic. A lot of the people who lived here did, and they moved out, and when the building was saved they had a hell of a time getting back in.” He cleared his throat unavailingly. “I’ve had this bout of laryngitis forweeks. Every morning, I get on my bike and pedal over to my doctor, on East Side. He sprays me and makes bad jokes and I pedal back, but itdoesn’t get any better. But then it doesn’t get much of a chance. At the Café Carlyle, where I work, it’s three shows a night, six nights a week. And I can’t just lay off for a week or two. My responsibility is to the Carlyle. I have to be on time and I have to do everything with grace, even when I feel like saying to hell with it, when it’s like pulling teeth to get myself up from my early-evening nap and shower and shave and dress and get downstairs and into a cab. The romance of being a supper-club singer! I still do private parties as well. It’s extra money for Dick Sheridan and Beverly Peer, and I find myself asking a lot of money. Sometimes I’m whisked down to ‘21’ between shows to play for someone’s birthday, and I’ve been flown to Hobe Sound and the Caribbean. And not long ago I was invited to perform at the White House when the Nixons gave a party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It cost me a thousand dollars, what with new clothes and transportation and all, but I was delighted I could afford to go. I would have been a very upset boy had I been invited and not had the money. But the Carlyle is the middle of my life. In fact, I’m hopelessly associated with it. Bobby Short of the Carlyle, despite there still being people in New York who prefer to think of me as their secret, their discovery. I started there in 1968, and in a peculiar way. George Feyer, the pianist, had been in residence for twelve years. He took off two weeks that summer, and Peter Sharp, who owns the Carlyle, asked Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records, who to get as a replacement. They said, ‘Get Bobby Short.’ I did my best to make those two weeks as successful as anything I’d done, and when Feyer’s contract ran out they offered me half a year. Feyer found a better deal elsewhere, and I work there now eight months of the year. It’s physically impossible to work more than that, and anyway it doesn’t make sense for me to be so available that I lose my attraction value.”
He shed the fur coat and, leaning back on one of the daybeds, struck a new pose, his hands clasped behind his head and his feet on the coffee table. A tall, thin, lugubrious-looking man in blue denim work clothes came in.
“How was your weekend, Wendell?” Short asked him.
“I’m not feeling so well. A cold.”
“Are you congested? Well, I’ve got just the pill for you. It’s the same one the astronauts took. Take one now and one tonight.” Wendell went upstairs, put leashes on the cats, and took them out on the roof. Wendell cleans and cooks and does odd jobs for Short three days a week.
“I think the Carlyle is probably one of the last places in the world where you can drink tea with your pinkie comfortably out. It attracts royalty. It’s not unusual to have a baroness or a princess around, and Jacqueline hasbeen in with Aristotle Onassis. So has Mrs. Palm Beach Gardner, Mrs. Winston Frost, and Bunny Mellon. My dressing room, which is on the fourth floor, above the Café Carlyle, is really one of the maids’ rooms that the hotel provides for the servants such people generally travel with. But you can come into the Carlyle wearing practically anything. It is big enough and elegant enough and grand enough not to be affected by unusual attire among its patrons. I’d been to the hotel several times before I worked there, and I was always treated beautifully. I must deal with the people who come solely to see Bobby Short. They make all sorts of complaints, written and verbal. ‘Mr. Short didn’t sing at all during his first show last night,’ or ‘Mr. Short finished his second set ten minutes early.’ My God! And if I sing too many Negro songs, the Negro patrons get self-conscious and the whites think I’m being militant. Imagine Bessie Smith’s ‘Gimme a Pigfoot’ being considered militant! Everyone who sings in a café has to have something about him that says, ‘Come close but not too close.’ But people often get too close, too pully on you. Beverly and Dick and I have been together for ten years, and we have accumulated a lot of friends. But we must think of ourselves as caterers at a party. After all, the waiters and bartenders can’t get drunk, and I can’t sit down with friends between shows and have a quart of champagne or six whiskeys. It takes some stuff to remember your place so long as you’re earning a living, and I’ll always have to earn a living. If I get overly friendly, the audience thinks, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. We know him so well that we don’t have to listen!’
“The people who come to hear me are a mixed bag, and they range in age from eighteen to seventy-five. A lot of them are rich, but I have lived among the wealthy and bizarre so long that their ways don’t bother me. I also get professional football players, and Leontyne Price, who is a great friend. Alice Faye and Bart Howard and Arthur Schwartz come in, and Craig Claiborne was there a while ago with a lady from Texas who’s a billionairess. The clergy come in, and so do neighborhood ladies, who can walk safely home together. The whole clutch from Elaine’s comes in, including Jack Richardson and Norman Mailer. Norman even wrote a poem about me once. Let me see if I can find it.”
Short took a book from the bookcase and handed it to me. The poem, “Boîtes,” is in a Mailer miscellany, “Cannibals and Christians,” and it is a Vachel Lindsay blank-verse eulogy in which Short is called “divine,” a “Prince of the Congo,” “darkest delight,” “blackbird,” and a “King of the Congo.”
I asked Short about the poem. “God!” he said. “It’s too obviously a matter of social climbing, isn’t it—bedarkness, or whatever it is? But musicians come into the Carlyle, too—people like Miles Davis and Cy Coleman and Cannonball Adderley and Joe Williams and Marian McPartland. And a lot of fashion people but they have followed me all my career—the designers and the models, the manufacturers. Senator Javits and his wife are regulars, and there are a lot of French people, and I speak French to them, of course. And there have been a good many young people, including rock groups. They give one hope. People say that graciousness is finished, but it isn’t. My people respect graciousness. They are ready to be gracious and they respond to graciousness.”
The girl finished her sketches. She and Bobby packed the fur coat in a box, and she staggered out with it under one arm and her drawings under the other. Wendell shouted up the stairs that a bottle of champagne had exploded in the freezer. Short slapped his forehead. “Oh dear! That’s terrible. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I put that inthere last night before some friends came, but they drank something else and I forgot about it. Is it bad, Wendell?”
“Yes, it’s in little pieces. After I clean up, do you want me to go out and get a roast or something?”
“All right, and some Boston lettuce and orange juice.”
Short went over to the bar and poured a ginger ale. “I only eat once a day, at lunch,” he said. “I can’t eat before I work. If I do, I can’t breathe when I sing, or else all the wine and cheese come up. Sometimes I go somewhere fancy for lunch—that’s my treat for the day—or I cook something here. When I’m not working, I can put together a decent boeuf bourguignon for six or eight people. After they leave, I strip off all my clothes and go down to the kitchen and wash up. It takes me a couple of hours, but it’s the best therapy in the world.”
A radio, which had been playing when I arrived, began a Duke Ellington tune.
“I got to know the Ellington band-pack in the early forties,” Short said, “when I was living in Los Angeles and was more or less adopted by Harold Brown, a pianist and the brother of Lawrence Brown, Ellington’s trombonist. The band would come to the Coast—and those parties! They went on until eight or nine in the morning. All the liquor you could drink and all the available girls in town and Art Tatum playing the piano in a corner. I’ve been unswerving since then—a lifelong devotee. Some of those things Duke wrote in the late thirties and early forties—they’re mind-bending. I haven’t seen the band since last summer, when they were at the Rainbow Grill, that great glassed-in place up above the city. It was a total New York night. My date was an English girl, a fan of mine, and the Duke had a thing going. Everybody was there. Tony Bennett. Sylvia Syms. They both sang. Then someone saw me. I told them to go away and shut up, but Duke got me up there, and I chose ‘Rose of the Rio Grande,’ simply because I wanted to hear Lawrence Brown’s great solo on it. He played it, and I found out later that Duke and Lawrence had had words earlier that night, and Lawrence had told him, ‘No solos tonight.’ It was a great compliment.”
Short looked at his watch. “I have to go down to the photography department at Macy’s to get an old picture of my mother restored.” He handed me a dark oval photograph, torn and faded—a pretty woman with long hair and deep, faintly smiling eyes. “It’ll be in my book, which I just finished the transcript of the other night, at two-thirty in the morning. It’s about the first seventeen years of my life—my life as a show-biz kid. Imagine me writing a book for an established firm like Dodd, Mead. My mother is remarkable. She’s eighty-three and lives with my oldest sister, Naomi, in Danville, Illinois, where I was born. Mother was tiny, never weighing more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, and, as you can see, very pretty. When I was a kid, she worked all day, and when she wasn’t at her job she was at church or in a P.T.A. meeting or trying to keep her house in order. She was a domestic, as most of her friends were, and she worked from seven-thirty in the morning until early evening. She was ambivalent. Her pride drove her out to work all day, using every avenue of strength she had, but then when I was ten she’d let me go and play the piano and sing in the local roadhouses—provided she knew the mother of someone in the band. She let me do this when she wouldn’t allow a jazz record or a blues record in the houseand when she thought it unthinkable to go into show business, which was considered a one-way road straight to Hell, thanks to the Puritanical nonsense the Negroes borrowed from the whites. But it was the Depression and things were very rough, and I know that the three or four dollars I brought home on Saturday nights were used to pay the gas bill or buy clothes and books for us children. Mother never cracked more than ten dollars a week as a domestic, and here I could make almost half that in one night’s work. I think she respected me for it.
“I was born the ninth of ten children. There were never more than seven of us alive at once. My mother and father came from Kentucky, but they met in Danville. It’s about a hundred and twenty-five miles south of Chicago, and it hovers close to the Indiana line. It was the best of all possible places to be poor in the Depression—in a small town where there were no racial pressures. There was a small colored population and an old colored section, but the town was at least superficially integrated. We lived in a newer section, where there were whites. Very often I was the only Negro in my class. I never knew Father terribly well. He was slender and had a marvellous mustache, which was balanced by a tonsure that I inherited. He went through eight years of school, and then his father sent him to four more at Frankfort College, which was more like a high school then. His father was not wealthy, but he owned farms here and there. He’d been born at the end of slavery, but he was a freedman. My father had a talent for mathematics, and he was brilliant at speedwriting. He had gifts that could have made him a much greater man than he was. He held a number of white-collar jobs, civil-service jobs. He ran for justice of the peace in Danville, and he won. But he liked the coal mines. When the Depression hit, he went back to Kentucky to the mines. He sent us money and came to see us twice a year. But the mines were his Waterloo. I was about nine or ten when he died.”
Miss Brown shot down the stairs from the bedroom, leaped up on the pillows on the daybed, and lay there watching Rufus, who was creeping along the base of the bookcase. “Rufus!” Short shouted. “Stop it!” Rufus slid across the floor on his belly, his eye on Miss Brown. “Go on! Enough! Scat!” Rufus catapulted up the stairs and disappeared under the bed. Short picked up a handful of pistachio nuts from a bowl and began to open them.
“There was a piano in our house, as there was in every house then, and I taught myself to play and sing. I listened to Ivie Anderson and to Bing Crosby, and once in a while I’d get a good hot radio program from Chicago, and bands like Fess Williams’ and Walter Barnes’ came through town. I left Danville for the first time when I was eleven and a half. A couple of booking agents came through and heard me sing and play, and they took me off to Chicago—with my mother’s permission, of course. I lived on the West Side with a Catholic family from New Orleans, which appealed to my mother, and I went to a Catholic school. When I left Danville, I had no idea what image I projected. There I was, a child sitting in tails at the piano and singing ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and ‘In My Solitude’ in a high, squeaky voice in astonishing keys. The lyrics meant nothing to me, and they must have sounded strange to other people coming out of a child’s mouth. So I changed and sang things like ‘Shoe Shine Boy’ and ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.’ But I could not find it within me to believe that I was a child. And I didn’t like being a child, because I couldn’t stand the patronization connected with childhood. Moreover, it was never in me to be the best colored singer or the best colored student. I simply wanted to be the best singer and the best student. But I have a respect for my race that might surprise some of the people who discovered just six months ago that they are black. I was brought up in such a way that doesn’t allow any head-hanging. There is nothing about me that can be called non-white, but I consider myself fortunate because I’m not so well known that people accept me only for my fame. I’m not sophisticated about the comings and goings of the revolutionaries today. I suspect that many of them are out for their own gains—financial, political, whatever. A long time ago, I discovered that the best advertisement for a minority is that member who, without being Uncle Tom, takes the time to mesh with whatever exists socially. He makes it that much easier for the next member who comes along.
“That winter, I worked mostly around Chicago. I did some broadcasting over N.B.C., and a lot of so-called ‘club’ dates at places like the Sheraton Hotel. I’d be part of one-night shows that included an orchestra, tap-dancers, and other singers. I became the colored counterpart of Bobby Breen. I got thirty or thirty-five dollars for each club date, but of course I had to buy clothes and pay tuition and give something to the family I lived with. When I finished school, in June of 1937, I was twelve and a half. But I didn’t go home. I went East. New York wasn’t easy, because I started there from scratch, performing all times of day and night for bookers. But I worked at the Frolic Cafe, over the Winter Garden Theatre, at La Grande Pomme, and at the Apollo, in Harlem. The audiences at the Apollo were used to Pigmeat Markham and Butter Beans and Susie and Moms Mabley, and I was obviously a downtown act. They didn’t care about my white tie and tails. All they wanted was to be turned on. They probably all had kids my age at home who danced and sang anyway.
“The New York thing came to an abrupt end early in 1938. I suddenly realized that there I was—a kid with two years of show biz and all the mannerisms of an adult—and I didn’t like it, so I went back to Danville and stayed there four years, until I finished high school. It was a funny adjustment to make at first. I had come off what was regarded as the big time. My mother said I couldn’t work for tacky people in tacky places after working in grand hotels and grand theatres for grand people. So I didn’t work for the first year, but I began to feel the economic pressures and I went back to work in earnest. I had more pizzazz by then, and I was a professional. I sought out the best hotels and taprooms around Danville, and after a while I became solvent and could dress myself properly and even indulge myself. I finished high school in 1942, and a month later I opened at the Capitol Lounge, in Chicago. The rage was boogie-woogie. I thought it was cheap. I made up my mind there was something better. I had heard Hildegarde on records, and of course she was the queen then. She had the slickest night-club act of all time. It was produced down to the last sigh. Even down to a blue spotlight that brought out the color in the red roses that invariably stood by her piano. She would record whole Broadway scores, and she sang Vernon Duke and Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Noel Coward, and through her I became aware of the Broadway kind of score, of the mystique of the Broadway musical.
“In 1943, I went to the Beachcomber, in Omaha, where I worked for a week opposite Jimmy Noone, the New Orleans clarinettist, and for a week opposite Nat Cole. Nat and I became friends and remained friends until he died. He was a sly, funny man, and he’d sit in the back room and watch me—a smart-aleck nineteen-year-old—performing out front, and he’d laugh and say, when I came off, ‘What are you doing to these people?’ I got a job in Los Angeles with Mike Reilly—‘The Music Goes Around and Around and It Comes Out Here’ Reilly—in the Radio Room. He had a comedy band, and they threw flounders at the audience, and that sort of thing. I first heard there about Mabel Mercer and Cy Walter, and I became deeply immersed in Rodgers and Hart. And Don McCrae, who is really Don Redman and who wrote ‘Practice Makes Perfect,’ came to my house with a huge stack of out-of-the-way songs and told me to learn them. My job at the Radio Room ended a couple of months later. Another comedy band had come in, and the act involved smoke pouring out of the top hat the leader wore. The smoke was flour, and it spewed out all over me and I was in black tie. After the first show, I refused to go back on, and was dismissed. I worked around, mostly at private parties for fifty dollars a night, and at the old Trocadero Ballroom, filling in for Dorothy Donegan. Then I got a gig in Milwaukee, where I appeared opposite the Art Tatum trio with Tiny Grimes on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass. Tatum will always be my idol, and it was marvellous to get to know him. He had the same sort of sly humor that Nat Cole had. He en joyed pretty ladies and he drank: a lot of beer. There was no condescension and in a strange way I think he even admired me, even though he never talked about music. But it always astonished me that for the most part the people who came to hear him didn’t really know what they were hearing.”
Short jumped up. “Macy’s awaits me.” He reappeared ten minutes later. He was wearing a sensationally well-tailored Glen-plaid suit. His shoes were dark, his shirt was a pale blue, and a modestly wide tie was navy with white polka dots. We went over to Seventh Avenue and he flagged a cab. He conducted his business at Macy’s in sparkling way, as if he were waiting on the saleslady. In the cab, he had told me that he had gone from Milwaukee to the Chase Hotel, in St. Louis, where Hildegarde was the main attraction. It was the first time he hadseen her work. Her manager heard him and called Herbert Jacoby, who, along with Max Gordon, owned the Blue Angel, in New York. Jacoby went out to St. Louis and asked Short to come to the Blue Angel the following spring. “Eddie Mayehoff was on the bill,” Short said on the escalator. “And Irene Bordoni and Mildred Bailey, and of course I was just the opener. For a long time, I thought my engagement at the Blue Angel was not successful, but I learned later that Jacoby and Gordon often cancelled new acts after the first night. I stayed for a full four weeks. I shared a dressing room with Mildred Bailey, and I got some interesting insights into her. Despite that enormous poitrine and her barrel shape and those toothpick legs, she was very vain. She had a lovely face and beautiful skin, and she’d sit at her dressing table in front of the mirror the whole time between shows, fixing her face and staring at herself. We talked constantly, but she never once took her eyes off herself and looked at me.”
We came out into Herald Square. Short suggested that we walk up to Brooks Brothers, where he wanted to look at some dress shirts and pumps. “I met Mabel Mercer, too, for the first time, and Bart Howard, who gave me a lot of his songs. I longed to belong to Mabel’s intimate circle, and I knew I had to come back to New York one day on a more permanent basis. Mabel has worked as viciously hard as I have. She has always sung in small places without microphones, and she thinks microphones are abominable. Mabel is much more fragile than I. She is, as we know it in America, the outstanding personage of our kind of art. When I first met her, the thing that struck me was her repertoire. I was involved in the same pursuit, and it was true serendipity. Even when she sang a song I knew, it came to be totally fresh. I can’t think of any singer who is true to himself who has avoided being influenced by Mabel Mercer. People have accused me of stealing from other performers, but that’s nonsense. What one does is absorb the feeling generated by a great singer like Mabel. She is an enormously private person, and I am flattered that we have a friendship.
“After the Blue Angel, I went back to California and worked off and on on Monday nights for three or four months at the Haig, a kind of a shack on Wilshire Boulevard, across from the Ambassador Hotel. It was run by a show-biz nut named Johnny Bernstein, and he kept bringing me obscure show tunes. Between him and Don McCrae, my repertoire became sizable. The periods in between my stints at the Haig were very poor. I lived with Harold Brown and his wife. They fed me and slept me and even gave me pocket money, or I wouldn’t be here today. Then I got a job at the Cafe Gala. It was in a big house on Sunset Boulevard which had been bought by the Baroness d’Erlanger for Johnny Walsh to sing in. He was a tall, fantastically handsome Irishman with white hair and beautifully tailored clothes, and he had the largest repertoire I’d ever heard. The Gala was the most chic club in California, or the West, for that matter. It was always filled with ex-New Yorkers, and you’d see Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton and Monty Woolley and Cole Porter. Walsh sold the Gala to a man named Jim Dolan. He gave me a one-week contract, but I stayed from July of 1948 to the fall of 1951. I became the mainstay, announcing shows and playing interim piano. Felicia Sanders worked there, and Bobby Troup and Dorothy Dandridge and Stella Brooks and Sheila Barrett. Eventually, a neon sign appeared on the roof: ‘Jim Dolan Presents Bobby Short.’ I acquired a new apartment and met all sorts of people high up in the movie business, and international people. I fell into a velvet- lined rut. In fact, Olga San Juan turned to Leonard Spigelgass at the Gala and said, ‘Who is this Bobby Short? Why isn’t he in films, why isn’t he making a lot of records?’ Spigelgass replied, ‘He’s too chic.’ And that was the truth. I had become the young colored boy who was all chic and who dined at the Cafe Jay, which sat just twenty, fifteen of them invariably the biggest Hollywood stars, and that was as far as I could go. People kept telling me, ‘Go to New York, Bobby. Get out of here and go to New York.’ I knew I wasn’t ready for New York, but I did go to Paris, first class, by plane.”
At Brooks, Short tried on some pumps. “Do you see that lady sitting over there with the man?” he said. “She’s Erika Lund, and she worked at the Gala when I was there. I still sing one of her songs.” They greeted each other warmly, and he told her to stop by the Café Carlyle. Old Home Week continued at the shirt counter, where the dapper, middle-aged salesman told Short he had once been with Young & Rubicam and that he used to go to the Beverly Club, at Lexington and Fiftieth, to hear him. Short looked pleased, bought six shirts, and told him to stop by the Carlyle.
Short and I went over to the Algonquin, and he ordered a beer. “I just love this place,” he said. “It’s an oasis in this mad city. Well, the rest of that year in Paris was insane. I worked for Spivy and I worked at the Embassy Club, in London, several times. I had an atelier in the most fashionable arrondissement in Paris. I had a maid, a private French tutor, I ate well, and when I was in London I bought all the clothes I could. Then it was back to L.A. and the Gala, and in the beginning of 1954 I met Phil Moore, the arranger and composer, and he became my manager. He figured out how my act could be enlarged, controlled, polished. The first thing he did was to put me in a room in Los Angeles with Larry Bunker, the drummer, and Rollie Bundock, the bassist. We made a tape and Phil sold it to Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun. Then I was flown to New York by Dorothy Kilgallen, as a birthday present for her husband. Dick Kollmar. The record came out, Dorothy paved the way in her column, and I got the job at the Beverly Club. I went on to the Red Carpet, Le Cupidon, and back to the Blue Angel, where I had top billing and made a thousand dollars a week. I worked the Living Room, the Weylin Hotel, and the Arpeggio. During the summers, I went back to California for short stints, and to Florida, for the first time, and Chicago. Early in the sixties, after I’d been here at the Sheraton-East, the old Ambassador Hotel, Herbert Jacoby and a rich friend and myself took over a room on East Fifty-fourth Street and called it Le Caprice. Herbert had always coveted an haute-cuisine French restaurant, which Caprice was, and my trying to cater to an eating clientele instead of a drinking one didn’t make it. We lasted a year and three months. Then came the heavy time for Mr. Short. I hadn’t taken any salary at all for the last three months at the Caprice, and I had gone through all my savings. I was on my uppers. During the summer of 1965, I didn’t work in New York at all, except for occasional weekends, and I ended up in Provincetown and Cleveland. But that winter I was lucky enough to have a standup part in the ‘New Cole Porter Revue,’ down at Square East, in the Village. A while after that, I got a job in the upstairs room at L’Intrigue, over on West Fifty-sixth Street. I handled my own lights, I seated guests. It fed my cats, paid the rent, and kept me alive. For the next few years, I subsisted in Boston at Paul’s Mall, at the Living Room here, and at places like the Playboy Club in London. The night-club business was not what it had been.”
Short yawned. “Nap time. Why don’t you stop by the Carlyle tonight? The first show is around nine-thirty, but don’t come to that. It’s always awful—cold, stiff, empty. It was a nice walk. Thank you.”
The Cafe Carlyle is a small, oblong room (it seats under two hundred) on one side of the Madison Avenue Entrance of the Hotel Carlyle. A tiny sit-down bar is concealed behind two pillars, and against the opposite wall, on a low dais, is a grand piano. There are banquettes around the other walls, which are covered by murals, and the center of the room is taken up by a dozen tables. It is a dark, dowdy, comfortable place. I arrived at nine-thirty, convinced that Short was incapable of anything cold or stiff, and I was right. He appeared, resplendent in a dinner jacket and pleated white shirt, and sat down in semi-darkness at the piano, flanked on one side by Dick Sheridan and on the other by Beverly Peer. No lights went on; he simply started to play. He looked solemn and detached and private, as if he were playing for himself late at night in his living room. It was a graceful, flowing display. He did a Gershwin melody, “Perdido,” the theme from “Exodus,” a blues, and several other tunes. His style bears a loose, enthusiastic resemblance to Art Tatum’s—it is as florid and arpeggioed and slurred—and by the time he had played ten or so tunes a considerable head of steam had been built up. The lights went on, and he began to sing Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fly Away.” It was immediately clear that it would be a difficult night. His laryngitis was compounded by a faulty microphone, and the crowd was noisy. During his third song, he stopped abruptly when new arrivals began loudly, “Comment-ça-va”ing the people at the next table. Looking over their heads with a slight smile, his hands resting on the raised keyboard cover, he waited until the room subsided, and then began precisely where he had left off.
After the last number, he greeted several people, then sat down at my table. He mopped his face and ordered a glass of ice water and hot tea with honey. The headwaiter apologized for the microphone; the repairman had promised to come but had not. Short smiled and croaked, “I know. I know. Phil Moore told me that it really doesn’t matter what a performer does. It’s a question of how many dishes the busboys drop and of whether or not the microphones work. And it’s up to the audience, too. When you get a bad one, you work harder and harder and sing louder and louder to compensate and they talk louder and louder to compensate for you. But a bad microphone is like playing with a drunken drummer. If I were on a stage, removed, it would be different, but I’m practically within touching distance of everyone here. On top of that, I know most of them. Those are Shaker Heights people over there, and the group that came in and made all the noise includes Liza Minelli’s estranged husband, and back against the wall is Geraldine Stutz, of Bendel, and her husband. Of course, one night you come in and the piano is in tune, the boys feel wonderful, I feel wonderful, and the audience is rotten. Another night, I feel perfectly rotten and the audience sits there as though they were in church. You must never be angry or uptight in the gut; you have to be free and loose. Singing itself is such pure expression. The human sound is the most touching in the world; it’s exemplified by someone like Ray Charles. He has that kind of getting inside a song and finding something that the composer himself didn’t know was there. And a good performer can’t be carrying on emotionally when he sings. You simply can’t sing well with a lump in your throat. Take ‘I Still Believe in You.’ It has one of my favorite lyrics of all time. It’s by Rodgers and Hart, and was dropped from a 1930 show called ‘Simple Simon’ before the show opened. I first heard Charlotte Rae sing it, and I’ve known it for a year, but for a long time I could not bring myself to sing it without breaking up. Finally, I absorbed the song, and now I can do it.”
Geraldine Stutz went by, and Short stood up and spoke to her, then poured more honey in his tea.
“I guess I have several hundred songs in my repertoire, and when I’m requested to sing a song I’ve never sung in my life I find that I suddenly know all the words, and we figure out a key and we’re off. I can sing songs I haven’t sung in ten years, and theonly ones I ever have to brush up on are things I sang as a child. Actually, I wish I could push some of the lyrics I’ve got in my head outand replace them with newer material, but that’s an occupational hazard; you become a kind of singing Smithsonian. I’m interested in all kinds of good songs. Sometimes the lyrics grab me, sometimes the song itself. It’s not often that the marriage is perfect. But the Gershwins can be counted on, and Cole Porter made both ends work. Rodgers and Hart were brilliant. Vernon Duke wasn’t always fortunate enough to find good lyricists. Yip Harburg was good with him, and so was Ira Gershwin. But I don’t think Vernon was easy to work with. I love Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and when they collaborated on the score of ‘St. Louis Woman’ it was almost too much of a good thing. Johnny Mercer displays a homespun façade in his work, but he’s capable of turning out a truly sensational lyric. I worship Fats Waller, but I feel inadequate with his material. But I do all the Ellington and Strayhorn I can pick up. I get into Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, among the English songwriters. My thinking English friends bring them over to me. I prefer Coward to Novello; his songs hold up beautifully. I feel almost intellectual when I sing one. It’s just like reading a Huxley novel. I like some of the things that Charles Trenet and Jean Sablon sang in the thirties and forties in France. English songs tend to be sentimental, but French songs are unique—tough, and the thirty-two-bar form be damned. But it is the Americans who excel at writing popular songs. You can go anywhere in the world and hear American songs.”
For his second show, he sang a dozen songs, among them a fascinating, meditative “I Can’t Get Started,” with lyrics that included such surprising, ingenious turns as:
When J. P. Morgan speaks I just nod,
“Green Pastures” wanted me to play God,
But you’ve got me downhearted, etc.
and
The Himalayan mountains I climb,
I’m written up in Fortune and Time,
The Siamese twins I’ve parted,
Still I can’t get started, etc.
Then came a couple of Burt Bacharach songs, a swinging “Nashville Nightingale,” a slow Stella Brooks blues, the Bessie Smith “Cake Walkin’ Babies,” and a long, intense reading of “Bye Bye Blackbird” that equalled any other version I’ve ever heard. In the fast numbers, his tempos raced in all directions, his face took on a strained, almost diabolical look, he reared back and shouted, and he often ended a song by flinging his right hand out, leaping to his feet, and standing statue-still, his eyes fixed on the back wall of the room. For slow ballads, the lights were lowered and he sang quietly, his voice husky and small, his accompaniment full of soft tremolos and runs. The audience came around quickly, and by the time he had finished “Blackbird” there wasn’t a murmur in the room.
He rejoined me and ordered more tea with honey, and I asked him about the songs he’d just sung, a couple of which I’d never heard before. “ ‘You Better Love Me’ is from ‘High Spirits,’ which was based on ‘Blithe Spirit,’ and ‘Sand in My Shoes’ is from ‘Kiss the Boys Goodbye,’ the 1940 Loesser-Schertzinger thing. It was never a terribly successful song, but it’s the most requested thing I do. That ‘Can’t Get Started’ I love. Ira Gershwin wrote lots of stanzas, and he’s a nifty one for going back and rewriting his lyrics years later. Did I do ‘By Strauss’? That was from a 1936 revue, and it was by the Gershwins. Bert Lahr and Beatrice Lillie were in it, and Vernon Duke wrote his ‘Now’ for it. It was, I believe, first recorded by George Byron, the tenor who married Eva Kern, Jerome’s widow. It was on the General label, and Byron’s pianist on the date was Bobby Tucker. A voice coach who took a shine to me in Hollywood in the early forties introduced it to me. Then I did a couple of Bacharachs. He’s a nice man, and his parents are saints. He’s tall and she’s tiny, and they’re deliciously proud of Burt because he’s made it so big. ‘Nashville Nightingale’ was a Gershwin number, written in the late twenties. Vernon Duke gave me it, too. He never pushed any of his own songs, but he would sit with me for hours and push everybody else’s. He came to New York once with fourteen unknown Gershwin tunes and wanted me to record them immediately, but unfortunately nothing came of it. ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ was from ‘Higher and Higher,’ a 1940 Rodgers and Hart effort, and I think I first heard Shirley Ross sing it on an old Blue Seal Decca. The “Bye Bye Blackbird’ is a little different, because I interpolate part of ‘I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.’ ”
Short looked up. The room was packed, and the lobby outside the glass entrance door was filled with people waiting for tables. He smiled. “I better get up to my maid’s room and change again.”
by Whitney Balliett
Issue of 1970-12-26
Posted 2005-03-22
On March 21st, the cabaret singer Bobby Short died of leukemia at the age of 80. This Profile of Short was written in 1970 by Whitney Balliett, then The New Yorker’s jazz critic.
It is quite possible that when the century is over, live entertainment—real people singing, acting, dancing, playing, reciting, and clowning in front of real people—will have disappeared in this country or become an anachronism. (The very existence of the phrase “live entertainment” is ominous; the term would have struck the Victorians as a puzzling redundancy.) Concert halls and opera houses are no longer full. The theatre appears static beside the fluid drive of film. (At that, even movie houses, which have always seemed like arenas of live entertainment, are rarely sold out.) The circus and rodeo are obsolescent, night clubs are dwindling, and such diversions as band concerts and the straw-hat circuit are almost at an end. When this decline is complete, something essential will have gone out of human experience. In-the-flesh entertainment at its best is one of the most complex, delightful, and inventive forms of communication. It is a mutually beneficial intercourse between the performer, who plays a god, and the audience, which allows this pretension, knowing delightedly all the while that the performer, beneath the skin of his skills, is human, too. Simply by doing what he is doing where he is doing it, the performer demonstrates great courage, and the audience experiences this courage vicariously. The performer is flattered by the attention of the audience, and the audience congratulates itself for having the intelligence and sensitivity to admire the performer. But electronics is closing off this invaluable two-way street. The performer can no longer play his changes on an audience, gauging his abilities in the mirror of its faces, and the audience can no longer manipulate the performer with cheers and tears. Yet decline and flowering often occur simultaneously; the form dies and its final moments are phoenix-brilliant. I have in mind the brave excellence of Bobby Short, the forty-six-year-old singer and pianist, who, one of the last examples (and indubitably the best) of the café singer or the supper-club singer or “troubadour,” as the late Vernon Duke called him, practices what is probably the most intimate and delicate form of live entertainment extant. It is the art of singing (and often accompanying oneself on the piano) witty or ironic or sad but never sentimental songs in a small room to a small group of people, and in such a way that the performer and his audience, generally only a few feet away, become almost one. (Mabel Mercer, the great doyenne of the form, often sits at her listeners’ table and sings to them, and she remembers long ago carrying this attention to its ultimate in the noisy Parisian boîte by singing into her customers ears through a small megaphone.) Every member of the audience comes to believe that a song is being sung to him, and the performer, who can look directly into his listeners’ eyes, feels that he is singing only to the listener he happens to look at. The songs are as important as their delivery. They are, as often as not, out-of-the-way tunes by the likes of Cy Coleman or Ivor Novello or Noël Coward or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. They may have a small but steady currency, they may have long since been forgotten, they may never have been known at all because of having been dropped from a movie or Broadway show before it opened, or they may have been written only for the performer who is singing them. They must be sung immaculately, in an offhand, transparent way, so that the singer, his diction clean glass, lights up his materials with meanings their composers may never have thought of. Café singing, or at any rate Bobby Short’s way of singing, is unencumbered by the theatrics of opera or rock, by the quaintness of folk singing, by the confinements of jazz singing, and by the mealiness of old-style pop singing. It is singing stripped to its essentials—words lifted and carried by the curves of melody.
Short’s achievements as a performer are all the more remarkable when one considers his equipment. He has a baritone that is frequently plagued by laryngitis. He has a rapid, almost querulous vibrato, and he sometimes slides past or stops short of the note he is after. His piano playing is so unfettered it is usually accelerando—a tendency that is beautifully disguised by his accompanists, Beverly Peer (bass) and Dick Sheridan (drums), who invariably keep in perfect rhythmic step. But everything in Short’s style miraculously balances out. His free sense of time gives his numbers a surprised, bounding quality, his vibrato makes his phrase endings ripple like flags, his laryngitis lends his voice a searching, down sound, and his uncertain notes enhance the cheerfulness and abandon he projects. His appearance is deceptive as well. He is slight—five feet nine, with a thirty-inch waist and small, demure feet. He has an oval face, a button nose, and vaguely apprehensive eyes, all of which do battle with an engulfing mustache. But three attributes work in wondrous concert for him. He is a faultless and inventive dresser (he is a regular on the best-dressed lists), he has a warm, princely bearing, and he has a stunning smile. The resulting impression, as one meets him, is of a tall, poised, and irresistibly attractive man.
I first met him early one afternoon at his apartment, on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall—the apartment once occupied by Thomas Scherman, the conductor. Short has lived there twelve years. It is the sort of place old New Yorkers covet—a small, reasonable, soundproof triplex. No sound comes from outside, nor does any sound escape, so Short can sit before the baby grand in his living room at three in the morning and pound and shout with perfect propriety. The small foyer on the first floor contains a desk, a big Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opens off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, is two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end are a small bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. These lead to a spacious balcony, which serves as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faces a small roof, where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, are aired. The furnishings are high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rests on a zebra-skin rug, and on the rug, beneath the table, are two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass. A pair of big daybeds, which are covered with bright African-looking material and leopard-skin pillows, flank the table. Near the foyer stairs are a huge wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages in East Hampton and on Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hangs in the living room, and it is echoed by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every description jam the walls, and the window side of the room is lined with books and bric-a-brac.
When I arrived, Short, who occasionally models, was posing for a Harper’s Bazaar sketch. He was wearing an orange-and-white cashmere turtleneck, tan slacks, and low, buckled boots, and for the drawing he had added a square-cut puma-skin coat with an otter collar, designed by Donald Brooks for Jacques Kaplan. And he had on a cowboy hat. He was leaning against a support of the balcony, his hands in the coat pockets, and he looked melancholy and distant.
The diminutive Chinese girl who was sketching him said something. “It is a fantastic apartment,” Short said. His voice was light, melodic, yet husky. “I was away when they decided to tear down Carnegie Hall, and I guess I didn’t really realize what was going on, so I didn’t panic. A lot of the people who lived here did, and they moved out, and when the building was saved they had a hell of a time getting back in.” He cleared his throat unavailingly. “I’ve had this bout of laryngitis forweeks. Every morning, I get on my bike and pedal over to my doctor, on East Side. He sprays me and makes bad jokes and I pedal back, but itdoesn’t get any better. But then it doesn’t get much of a chance. At the Café Carlyle, where I work, it’s three shows a night, six nights a week. And I can’t just lay off for a week or two. My responsibility is to the Carlyle. I have to be on time and I have to do everything with grace, even when I feel like saying to hell with it, when it’s like pulling teeth to get myself up from my early-evening nap and shower and shave and dress and get downstairs and into a cab. The romance of being a supper-club singer! I still do private parties as well. It’s extra money for Dick Sheridan and Beverly Peer, and I find myself asking a lot of money. Sometimes I’m whisked down to ‘21’ between shows to play for someone’s birthday, and I’ve been flown to Hobe Sound and the Caribbean. And not long ago I was invited to perform at the White House when the Nixons gave a party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It cost me a thousand dollars, what with new clothes and transportation and all, but I was delighted I could afford to go. I would have been a very upset boy had I been invited and not had the money. But the Carlyle is the middle of my life. In fact, I’m hopelessly associated with it. Bobby Short of the Carlyle, despite there still being people in New York who prefer to think of me as their secret, their discovery. I started there in 1968, and in a peculiar way. George Feyer, the pianist, had been in residence for twelve years. He took off two weeks that summer, and Peter Sharp, who owns the Carlyle, asked Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records, who to get as a replacement. They said, ‘Get Bobby Short.’ I did my best to make those two weeks as successful as anything I’d done, and when Feyer’s contract ran out they offered me half a year. Feyer found a better deal elsewhere, and I work there now eight months of the year. It’s physically impossible to work more than that, and anyway it doesn’t make sense for me to be so available that I lose my attraction value.”
He shed the fur coat and, leaning back on one of the daybeds, struck a new pose, his hands clasped behind his head and his feet on the coffee table. A tall, thin, lugubrious-looking man in blue denim work clothes came in.
“How was your weekend, Wendell?” Short asked him.
“I’m not feeling so well. A cold.”
“Are you congested? Well, I’ve got just the pill for you. It’s the same one the astronauts took. Take one now and one tonight.” Wendell went upstairs, put leashes on the cats, and took them out on the roof. Wendell cleans and cooks and does odd jobs for Short three days a week.
“I think the Carlyle is probably one of the last places in the world where you can drink tea with your pinkie comfortably out. It attracts royalty. It’s not unusual to have a baroness or a princess around, and Jacqueline hasbeen in with Aristotle Onassis. So has Mrs. Palm Beach Gardner, Mrs. Winston Frost, and Bunny Mellon. My dressing room, which is on the fourth floor, above the Café Carlyle, is really one of the maids’ rooms that the hotel provides for the servants such people generally travel with. But you can come into the Carlyle wearing practically anything. It is big enough and elegant enough and grand enough not to be affected by unusual attire among its patrons. I’d been to the hotel several times before I worked there, and I was always treated beautifully. I must deal with the people who come solely to see Bobby Short. They make all sorts of complaints, written and verbal. ‘Mr. Short didn’t sing at all during his first show last night,’ or ‘Mr. Short finished his second set ten minutes early.’ My God! And if I sing too many Negro songs, the Negro patrons get self-conscious and the whites think I’m being militant. Imagine Bessie Smith’s ‘Gimme a Pigfoot’ being considered militant! Everyone who sings in a café has to have something about him that says, ‘Come close but not too close.’ But people often get too close, too pully on you. Beverly and Dick and I have been together for ten years, and we have accumulated a lot of friends. But we must think of ourselves as caterers at a party. After all, the waiters and bartenders can’t get drunk, and I can’t sit down with friends between shows and have a quart of champagne or six whiskeys. It takes some stuff to remember your place so long as you’re earning a living, and I’ll always have to earn a living. If I get overly friendly, the audience thinks, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. We know him so well that we don’t have to listen!’
“The people who come to hear me are a mixed bag, and they range in age from eighteen to seventy-five. A lot of them are rich, but I have lived among the wealthy and bizarre so long that their ways don’t bother me. I also get professional football players, and Leontyne Price, who is a great friend. Alice Faye and Bart Howard and Arthur Schwartz come in, and Craig Claiborne was there a while ago with a lady from Texas who’s a billionairess. The clergy come in, and so do neighborhood ladies, who can walk safely home together. The whole clutch from Elaine’s comes in, including Jack Richardson and Norman Mailer. Norman even wrote a poem about me once. Let me see if I can find it.”
Short took a book from the bookcase and handed it to me. The poem, “Boîtes,” is in a Mailer miscellany, “Cannibals and Christians,” and it is a Vachel Lindsay blank-verse eulogy in which Short is called “divine,” a “Prince of the Congo,” “darkest delight,” “blackbird,” and a “King of the Congo.”
I asked Short about the poem. “God!” he said. “It’s too obviously a matter of social climbing, isn’t it—bedarkness, or whatever it is? But musicians come into the Carlyle, too—people like Miles Davis and Cy Coleman and Cannonball Adderley and Joe Williams and Marian McPartland. And a lot of fashion people but they have followed me all my career—the designers and the models, the manufacturers. Senator Javits and his wife are regulars, and there are a lot of French people, and I speak French to them, of course. And there have been a good many young people, including rock groups. They give one hope. People say that graciousness is finished, but it isn’t. My people respect graciousness. They are ready to be gracious and they respond to graciousness.”
The girl finished her sketches. She and Bobby packed the fur coat in a box, and she staggered out with it under one arm and her drawings under the other. Wendell shouted up the stairs that a bottle of champagne had exploded in the freezer. Short slapped his forehead. “Oh dear! That’s terrible. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I put that inthere last night before some friends came, but they drank something else and I forgot about it. Is it bad, Wendell?”
“Yes, it’s in little pieces. After I clean up, do you want me to go out and get a roast or something?”
“All right, and some Boston lettuce and orange juice.”
Short went over to the bar and poured a ginger ale. “I only eat once a day, at lunch,” he said. “I can’t eat before I work. If I do, I can’t breathe when I sing, or else all the wine and cheese come up. Sometimes I go somewhere fancy for lunch—that’s my treat for the day—or I cook something here. When I’m not working, I can put together a decent boeuf bourguignon for six or eight people. After they leave, I strip off all my clothes and go down to the kitchen and wash up. It takes me a couple of hours, but it’s the best therapy in the world.”
A radio, which had been playing when I arrived, began a Duke Ellington tune.
“I got to know the Ellington band-pack in the early forties,” Short said, “when I was living in Los Angeles and was more or less adopted by Harold Brown, a pianist and the brother of Lawrence Brown, Ellington’s trombonist. The band would come to the Coast—and those parties! They went on until eight or nine in the morning. All the liquor you could drink and all the available girls in town and Art Tatum playing the piano in a corner. I’ve been unswerving since then—a lifelong devotee. Some of those things Duke wrote in the late thirties and early forties—they’re mind-bending. I haven’t seen the band since last summer, when they were at the Rainbow Grill, that great glassed-in place up above the city. It was a total New York night. My date was an English girl, a fan of mine, and the Duke had a thing going. Everybody was there. Tony Bennett. Sylvia Syms. They both sang. Then someone saw me. I told them to go away and shut up, but Duke got me up there, and I chose ‘Rose of the Rio Grande,’ simply because I wanted to hear Lawrence Brown’s great solo on it. He played it, and I found out later that Duke and Lawrence had had words earlier that night, and Lawrence had told him, ‘No solos tonight.’ It was a great compliment.”
Short looked at his watch. “I have to go down to the photography department at Macy’s to get an old picture of my mother restored.” He handed me a dark oval photograph, torn and faded—a pretty woman with long hair and deep, faintly smiling eyes. “It’ll be in my book, which I just finished the transcript of the other night, at two-thirty in the morning. It’s about the first seventeen years of my life—my life as a show-biz kid. Imagine me writing a book for an established firm like Dodd, Mead. My mother is remarkable. She’s eighty-three and lives with my oldest sister, Naomi, in Danville, Illinois, where I was born. Mother was tiny, never weighing more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, and, as you can see, very pretty. When I was a kid, she worked all day, and when she wasn’t at her job she was at church or in a P.T.A. meeting or trying to keep her house in order. She was a domestic, as most of her friends were, and she worked from seven-thirty in the morning until early evening. She was ambivalent. Her pride drove her out to work all day, using every avenue of strength she had, but then when I was ten she’d let me go and play the piano and sing in the local roadhouses—provided she knew the mother of someone in the band. She let me do this when she wouldn’t allow a jazz record or a blues record in the houseand when she thought it unthinkable to go into show business, which was considered a one-way road straight to Hell, thanks to the Puritanical nonsense the Negroes borrowed from the whites. But it was the Depression and things were very rough, and I know that the three or four dollars I brought home on Saturday nights were used to pay the gas bill or buy clothes and books for us children. Mother never cracked more than ten dollars a week as a domestic, and here I could make almost half that in one night’s work. I think she respected me for it.
“I was born the ninth of ten children. There were never more than seven of us alive at once. My mother and father came from Kentucky, but they met in Danville. It’s about a hundred and twenty-five miles south of Chicago, and it hovers close to the Indiana line. It was the best of all possible places to be poor in the Depression—in a small town where there were no racial pressures. There was a small colored population and an old colored section, but the town was at least superficially integrated. We lived in a newer section, where there were whites. Very often I was the only Negro in my class. I never knew Father terribly well. He was slender and had a marvellous mustache, which was balanced by a tonsure that I inherited. He went through eight years of school, and then his father sent him to four more at Frankfort College, which was more like a high school then. His father was not wealthy, but he owned farms here and there. He’d been born at the end of slavery, but he was a freedman. My father had a talent for mathematics, and he was brilliant at speedwriting. He had gifts that could have made him a much greater man than he was. He held a number of white-collar jobs, civil-service jobs. He ran for justice of the peace in Danville, and he won. But he liked the coal mines. When the Depression hit, he went back to Kentucky to the mines. He sent us money and came to see us twice a year. But the mines were his Waterloo. I was about nine or ten when he died.”
Miss Brown shot down the stairs from the bedroom, leaped up on the pillows on the daybed, and lay there watching Rufus, who was creeping along the base of the bookcase. “Rufus!” Short shouted. “Stop it!” Rufus slid across the floor on his belly, his eye on Miss Brown. “Go on! Enough! Scat!” Rufus catapulted up the stairs and disappeared under the bed. Short picked up a handful of pistachio nuts from a bowl and began to open them.
“There was a piano in our house, as there was in every house then, and I taught myself to play and sing. I listened to Ivie Anderson and to Bing Crosby, and once in a while I’d get a good hot radio program from Chicago, and bands like Fess Williams’ and Walter Barnes’ came through town. I left Danville for the first time when I was eleven and a half. A couple of booking agents came through and heard me sing and play, and they took me off to Chicago—with my mother’s permission, of course. I lived on the West Side with a Catholic family from New Orleans, which appealed to my mother, and I went to a Catholic school. When I left Danville, I had no idea what image I projected. There I was, a child sitting in tails at the piano and singing ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and ‘In My Solitude’ in a high, squeaky voice in astonishing keys. The lyrics meant nothing to me, and they must have sounded strange to other people coming out of a child’s mouth. So I changed and sang things like ‘Shoe Shine Boy’ and ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.’ But I could not find it within me to believe that I was a child. And I didn’t like being a child, because I couldn’t stand the patronization connected with childhood. Moreover, it was never in me to be the best colored singer or the best colored student. I simply wanted to be the best singer and the best student. But I have a respect for my race that might surprise some of the people who discovered just six months ago that they are black. I was brought up in such a way that doesn’t allow any head-hanging. There is nothing about me that can be called non-white, but I consider myself fortunate because I’m not so well known that people accept me only for my fame. I’m not sophisticated about the comings and goings of the revolutionaries today. I suspect that many of them are out for their own gains—financial, political, whatever. A long time ago, I discovered that the best advertisement for a minority is that member who, without being Uncle Tom, takes the time to mesh with whatever exists socially. He makes it that much easier for the next member who comes along.
“That winter, I worked mostly around Chicago. I did some broadcasting over N.B.C., and a lot of so-called ‘club’ dates at places like the Sheraton Hotel. I’d be part of one-night shows that included an orchestra, tap-dancers, and other singers. I became the colored counterpart of Bobby Breen. I got thirty or thirty-five dollars for each club date, but of course I had to buy clothes and pay tuition and give something to the family I lived with. When I finished school, in June of 1937, I was twelve and a half. But I didn’t go home. I went East. New York wasn’t easy, because I started there from scratch, performing all times of day and night for bookers. But I worked at the Frolic Cafe, over the Winter Garden Theatre, at La Grande Pomme, and at the Apollo, in Harlem. The audiences at the Apollo were used to Pigmeat Markham and Butter Beans and Susie and Moms Mabley, and I was obviously a downtown act. They didn’t care about my white tie and tails. All they wanted was to be turned on. They probably all had kids my age at home who danced and sang anyway.
“The New York thing came to an abrupt end early in 1938. I suddenly realized that there I was—a kid with two years of show biz and all the mannerisms of an adult—and I didn’t like it, so I went back to Danville and stayed there four years, until I finished high school. It was a funny adjustment to make at first. I had come off what was regarded as the big time. My mother said I couldn’t work for tacky people in tacky places after working in grand hotels and grand theatres for grand people. So I didn’t work for the first year, but I began to feel the economic pressures and I went back to work in earnest. I had more pizzazz by then, and I was a professional. I sought out the best hotels and taprooms around Danville, and after a while I became solvent and could dress myself properly and even indulge myself. I finished high school in 1942, and a month later I opened at the Capitol Lounge, in Chicago. The rage was boogie-woogie. I thought it was cheap. I made up my mind there was something better. I had heard Hildegarde on records, and of course she was the queen then. She had the slickest night-club act of all time. It was produced down to the last sigh. Even down to a blue spotlight that brought out the color in the red roses that invariably stood by her piano. She would record whole Broadway scores, and she sang Vernon Duke and Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Noel Coward, and through her I became aware of the Broadway kind of score, of the mystique of the Broadway musical.
“In 1943, I went to the Beachcomber, in Omaha, where I worked for a week opposite Jimmy Noone, the New Orleans clarinettist, and for a week opposite Nat Cole. Nat and I became friends and remained friends until he died. He was a sly, funny man, and he’d sit in the back room and watch me—a smart-aleck nineteen-year-old—performing out front, and he’d laugh and say, when I came off, ‘What are you doing to these people?’ I got a job in Los Angeles with Mike Reilly—‘The Music Goes Around and Around and It Comes Out Here’ Reilly—in the Radio Room. He had a comedy band, and they threw flounders at the audience, and that sort of thing. I first heard there about Mabel Mercer and Cy Walter, and I became deeply immersed in Rodgers and Hart. And Don McCrae, who is really Don Redman and who wrote ‘Practice Makes Perfect,’ came to my house with a huge stack of out-of-the-way songs and told me to learn them. My job at the Radio Room ended a couple of months later. Another comedy band had come in, and the act involved smoke pouring out of the top hat the leader wore. The smoke was flour, and it spewed out all over me and I was in black tie. After the first show, I refused to go back on, and was dismissed. I worked around, mostly at private parties for fifty dollars a night, and at the old Trocadero Ballroom, filling in for Dorothy Donegan. Then I got a gig in Milwaukee, where I appeared opposite the Art Tatum trio with Tiny Grimes on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass. Tatum will always be my idol, and it was marvellous to get to know him. He had the same sort of sly humor that Nat Cole had. He en joyed pretty ladies and he drank: a lot of beer. There was no condescension and in a strange way I think he even admired me, even though he never talked about music. But it always astonished me that for the most part the people who came to hear him didn’t really know what they were hearing.”
Short jumped up. “Macy’s awaits me.” He reappeared ten minutes later. He was wearing a sensationally well-tailored Glen-plaid suit. His shoes were dark, his shirt was a pale blue, and a modestly wide tie was navy with white polka dots. We went over to Seventh Avenue and he flagged a cab. He conducted his business at Macy’s in sparkling way, as if he were waiting on the saleslady. In the cab, he had told me that he had gone from Milwaukee to the Chase Hotel, in St. Louis, where Hildegarde was the main attraction. It was the first time he hadseen her work. Her manager heard him and called Herbert Jacoby, who, along with Max Gordon, owned the Blue Angel, in New York. Jacoby went out to St. Louis and asked Short to come to the Blue Angel the following spring. “Eddie Mayehoff was on the bill,” Short said on the escalator. “And Irene Bordoni and Mildred Bailey, and of course I was just the opener. For a long time, I thought my engagement at the Blue Angel was not successful, but I learned later that Jacoby and Gordon often cancelled new acts after the first night. I stayed for a full four weeks. I shared a dressing room with Mildred Bailey, and I got some interesting insights into her. Despite that enormous poitrine and her barrel shape and those toothpick legs, she was very vain. She had a lovely face and beautiful skin, and she’d sit at her dressing table in front of the mirror the whole time between shows, fixing her face and staring at herself. We talked constantly, but she never once took her eyes off herself and looked at me.”
We came out into Herald Square. Short suggested that we walk up to Brooks Brothers, where he wanted to look at some dress shirts and pumps. “I met Mabel Mercer, too, for the first time, and Bart Howard, who gave me a lot of his songs. I longed to belong to Mabel’s intimate circle, and I knew I had to come back to New York one day on a more permanent basis. Mabel has worked as viciously hard as I have. She has always sung in small places without microphones, and she thinks microphones are abominable. Mabel is much more fragile than I. She is, as we know it in America, the outstanding personage of our kind of art. When I first met her, the thing that struck me was her repertoire. I was involved in the same pursuit, and it was true serendipity. Even when she sang a song I knew, it came to be totally fresh. I can’t think of any singer who is true to himself who has avoided being influenced by Mabel Mercer. People have accused me of stealing from other performers, but that’s nonsense. What one does is absorb the feeling generated by a great singer like Mabel. She is an enormously private person, and I am flattered that we have a friendship.
“After the Blue Angel, I went back to California and worked off and on on Monday nights for three or four months at the Haig, a kind of a shack on Wilshire Boulevard, across from the Ambassador Hotel. It was run by a show-biz nut named Johnny Bernstein, and he kept bringing me obscure show tunes. Between him and Don McCrae, my repertoire became sizable. The periods in between my stints at the Haig were very poor. I lived with Harold Brown and his wife. They fed me and slept me and even gave me pocket money, or I wouldn’t be here today. Then I got a job at the Cafe Gala. It was in a big house on Sunset Boulevard which had been bought by the Baroness d’Erlanger for Johnny Walsh to sing in. He was a tall, fantastically handsome Irishman with white hair and beautifully tailored clothes, and he had the largest repertoire I’d ever heard. The Gala was the most chic club in California, or the West, for that matter. It was always filled with ex-New Yorkers, and you’d see Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton and Monty Woolley and Cole Porter. Walsh sold the Gala to a man named Jim Dolan. He gave me a one-week contract, but I stayed from July of 1948 to the fall of 1951. I became the mainstay, announcing shows and playing interim piano. Felicia Sanders worked there, and Bobby Troup and Dorothy Dandridge and Stella Brooks and Sheila Barrett. Eventually, a neon sign appeared on the roof: ‘Jim Dolan Presents Bobby Short.’ I acquired a new apartment and met all sorts of people high up in the movie business, and international people. I fell into a velvet- lined rut. In fact, Olga San Juan turned to Leonard Spigelgass at the Gala and said, ‘Who is this Bobby Short? Why isn’t he in films, why isn’t he making a lot of records?’ Spigelgass replied, ‘He’s too chic.’ And that was the truth. I had become the young colored boy who was all chic and who dined at the Cafe Jay, which sat just twenty, fifteen of them invariably the biggest Hollywood stars, and that was as far as I could go. People kept telling me, ‘Go to New York, Bobby. Get out of here and go to New York.’ I knew I wasn’t ready for New York, but I did go to Paris, first class, by plane.”
At Brooks, Short tried on some pumps. “Do you see that lady sitting over there with the man?” he said. “She’s Erika Lund, and she worked at the Gala when I was there. I still sing one of her songs.” They greeted each other warmly, and he told her to stop by the Café Carlyle. Old Home Week continued at the shirt counter, where the dapper, middle-aged salesman told Short he had once been with Young & Rubicam and that he used to go to the Beverly Club, at Lexington and Fiftieth, to hear him. Short looked pleased, bought six shirts, and told him to stop by the Carlyle.
Short and I went over to the Algonquin, and he ordered a beer. “I just love this place,” he said. “It’s an oasis in this mad city. Well, the rest of that year in Paris was insane. I worked for Spivy and I worked at the Embassy Club, in London, several times. I had an atelier in the most fashionable arrondissement in Paris. I had a maid, a private French tutor, I ate well, and when I was in London I bought all the clothes I could. Then it was back to L.A. and the Gala, and in the beginning of 1954 I met Phil Moore, the arranger and composer, and he became my manager. He figured out how my act could be enlarged, controlled, polished. The first thing he did was to put me in a room in Los Angeles with Larry Bunker, the drummer, and Rollie Bundock, the bassist. We made a tape and Phil sold it to Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun. Then I was flown to New York by Dorothy Kilgallen, as a birthday present for her husband. Dick Kollmar. The record came out, Dorothy paved the way in her column, and I got the job at the Beverly Club. I went on to the Red Carpet, Le Cupidon, and back to the Blue Angel, where I had top billing and made a thousand dollars a week. I worked the Living Room, the Weylin Hotel, and the Arpeggio. During the summers, I went back to California for short stints, and to Florida, for the first time, and Chicago. Early in the sixties, after I’d been here at the Sheraton-East, the old Ambassador Hotel, Herbert Jacoby and a rich friend and myself took over a room on East Fifty-fourth Street and called it Le Caprice. Herbert had always coveted an haute-cuisine French restaurant, which Caprice was, and my trying to cater to an eating clientele instead of a drinking one didn’t make it. We lasted a year and three months. Then came the heavy time for Mr. Short. I hadn’t taken any salary at all for the last three months at the Caprice, and I had gone through all my savings. I was on my uppers. During the summer of 1965, I didn’t work in New York at all, except for occasional weekends, and I ended up in Provincetown and Cleveland. But that winter I was lucky enough to have a standup part in the ‘New Cole Porter Revue,’ down at Square East, in the Village. A while after that, I got a job in the upstairs room at L’Intrigue, over on West Fifty-sixth Street. I handled my own lights, I seated guests. It fed my cats, paid the rent, and kept me alive. For the next few years, I subsisted in Boston at Paul’s Mall, at the Living Room here, and at places like the Playboy Club in London. The night-club business was not what it had been.”
Short yawned. “Nap time. Why don’t you stop by the Carlyle tonight? The first show is around nine-thirty, but don’t come to that. It’s always awful—cold, stiff, empty. It was a nice walk. Thank you.”
The Cafe Carlyle is a small, oblong room (it seats under two hundred) on one side of the Madison Avenue Entrance of the Hotel Carlyle. A tiny sit-down bar is concealed behind two pillars, and against the opposite wall, on a low dais, is a grand piano. There are banquettes around the other walls, which are covered by murals, and the center of the room is taken up by a dozen tables. It is a dark, dowdy, comfortable place. I arrived at nine-thirty, convinced that Short was incapable of anything cold or stiff, and I was right. He appeared, resplendent in a dinner jacket and pleated white shirt, and sat down in semi-darkness at the piano, flanked on one side by Dick Sheridan and on the other by Beverly Peer. No lights went on; he simply started to play. He looked solemn and detached and private, as if he were playing for himself late at night in his living room. It was a graceful, flowing display. He did a Gershwin melody, “Perdido,” the theme from “Exodus,” a blues, and several other tunes. His style bears a loose, enthusiastic resemblance to Art Tatum’s—it is as florid and arpeggioed and slurred—and by the time he had played ten or so tunes a considerable head of steam had been built up. The lights went on, and he began to sing Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fly Away.” It was immediately clear that it would be a difficult night. His laryngitis was compounded by a faulty microphone, and the crowd was noisy. During his third song, he stopped abruptly when new arrivals began loudly, “Comment-ça-va”ing the people at the next table. Looking over their heads with a slight smile, his hands resting on the raised keyboard cover, he waited until the room subsided, and then began precisely where he had left off.
After the last number, he greeted several people, then sat down at my table. He mopped his face and ordered a glass of ice water and hot tea with honey. The headwaiter apologized for the microphone; the repairman had promised to come but had not. Short smiled and croaked, “I know. I know. Phil Moore told me that it really doesn’t matter what a performer does. It’s a question of how many dishes the busboys drop and of whether or not the microphones work. And it’s up to the audience, too. When you get a bad one, you work harder and harder and sing louder and louder to compensate and they talk louder and louder to compensate for you. But a bad microphone is like playing with a drunken drummer. If I were on a stage, removed, it would be different, but I’m practically within touching distance of everyone here. On top of that, I know most of them. Those are Shaker Heights people over there, and the group that came in and made all the noise includes Liza Minelli’s estranged husband, and back against the wall is Geraldine Stutz, of Bendel, and her husband. Of course, one night you come in and the piano is in tune, the boys feel wonderful, I feel wonderful, and the audience is rotten. Another night, I feel perfectly rotten and the audience sits there as though they were in church. You must never be angry or uptight in the gut; you have to be free and loose. Singing itself is such pure expression. The human sound is the most touching in the world; it’s exemplified by someone like Ray Charles. He has that kind of getting inside a song and finding something that the composer himself didn’t know was there. And a good performer can’t be carrying on emotionally when he sings. You simply can’t sing well with a lump in your throat. Take ‘I Still Believe in You.’ It has one of my favorite lyrics of all time. It’s by Rodgers and Hart, and was dropped from a 1930 show called ‘Simple Simon’ before the show opened. I first heard Charlotte Rae sing it, and I’ve known it for a year, but for a long time I could not bring myself to sing it without breaking up. Finally, I absorbed the song, and now I can do it.”
Geraldine Stutz went by, and Short stood up and spoke to her, then poured more honey in his tea.
“I guess I have several hundred songs in my repertoire, and when I’m requested to sing a song I’ve never sung in my life I find that I suddenly know all the words, and we figure out a key and we’re off. I can sing songs I haven’t sung in ten years, and theonly ones I ever have to brush up on are things I sang as a child. Actually, I wish I could push some of the lyrics I’ve got in my head outand replace them with newer material, but that’s an occupational hazard; you become a kind of singing Smithsonian. I’m interested in all kinds of good songs. Sometimes the lyrics grab me, sometimes the song itself. It’s not often that the marriage is perfect. But the Gershwins can be counted on, and Cole Porter made both ends work. Rodgers and Hart were brilliant. Vernon Duke wasn’t always fortunate enough to find good lyricists. Yip Harburg was good with him, and so was Ira Gershwin. But I don’t think Vernon was easy to work with. I love Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and when they collaborated on the score of ‘St. Louis Woman’ it was almost too much of a good thing. Johnny Mercer displays a homespun façade in his work, but he’s capable of turning out a truly sensational lyric. I worship Fats Waller, but I feel inadequate with his material. But I do all the Ellington and Strayhorn I can pick up. I get into Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, among the English songwriters. My thinking English friends bring them over to me. I prefer Coward to Novello; his songs hold up beautifully. I feel almost intellectual when I sing one. It’s just like reading a Huxley novel. I like some of the things that Charles Trenet and Jean Sablon sang in the thirties and forties in France. English songs tend to be sentimental, but French songs are unique—tough, and the thirty-two-bar form be damned. But it is the Americans who excel at writing popular songs. You can go anywhere in the world and hear American songs.”
For his second show, he sang a dozen songs, among them a fascinating, meditative “I Can’t Get Started,” with lyrics that included such surprising, ingenious turns as:
When J. P. Morgan speaks I just nod,
“Green Pastures” wanted me to play God,
But you’ve got me downhearted, etc.
and
The Himalayan mountains I climb,
I’m written up in Fortune and Time,
The Siamese twins I’ve parted,
Still I can’t get started, etc.
Then came a couple of Burt Bacharach songs, a swinging “Nashville Nightingale,” a slow Stella Brooks blues, the Bessie Smith “Cake Walkin’ Babies,” and a long, intense reading of “Bye Bye Blackbird” that equalled any other version I’ve ever heard. In the fast numbers, his tempos raced in all directions, his face took on a strained, almost diabolical look, he reared back and shouted, and he often ended a song by flinging his right hand out, leaping to his feet, and standing statue-still, his eyes fixed on the back wall of the room. For slow ballads, the lights were lowered and he sang quietly, his voice husky and small, his accompaniment full of soft tremolos and runs. The audience came around quickly, and by the time he had finished “Blackbird” there wasn’t a murmur in the room.
He rejoined me and ordered more tea with honey, and I asked him about the songs he’d just sung, a couple of which I’d never heard before. “ ‘You Better Love Me’ is from ‘High Spirits,’ which was based on ‘Blithe Spirit,’ and ‘Sand in My Shoes’ is from ‘Kiss the Boys Goodbye,’ the 1940 Loesser-Schertzinger thing. It was never a terribly successful song, but it’s the most requested thing I do. That ‘Can’t Get Started’ I love. Ira Gershwin wrote lots of stanzas, and he’s a nifty one for going back and rewriting his lyrics years later. Did I do ‘By Strauss’? That was from a 1936 revue, and it was by the Gershwins. Bert Lahr and Beatrice Lillie were in it, and Vernon Duke wrote his ‘Now’ for it. It was, I believe, first recorded by George Byron, the tenor who married Eva Kern, Jerome’s widow. It was on the General label, and Byron’s pianist on the date was Bobby Tucker. A voice coach who took a shine to me in Hollywood in the early forties introduced it to me. Then I did a couple of Bacharachs. He’s a nice man, and his parents are saints. He’s tall and she’s tiny, and they’re deliciously proud of Burt because he’s made it so big. ‘Nashville Nightingale’ was a Gershwin number, written in the late twenties. Vernon Duke gave me it, too. He never pushed any of his own songs, but he would sit with me for hours and push everybody else’s. He came to New York once with fourteen unknown Gershwin tunes and wanted me to record them immediately, but unfortunately nothing came of it. ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ was from ‘Higher and Higher,’ a 1940 Rodgers and Hart effort, and I think I first heard Shirley Ross sing it on an old Blue Seal Decca. The “Bye Bye Blackbird’ is a little different, because I interpolate part of ‘I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.’ ”
Short looked up. The room was packed, and the lobby outside the glass entrance door was filled with people waiting for tables. He smiled. “I better get up to my maid’s room and change again.”
