Alma Cogan (16 page)

‘Death deserves dignity,’ Norman Long says as I stand to go (an apothegm that would probably be hanging on his wall somewhere if I cared to look).

He produces a flat tin from the darkest corner of the gloom and opens it to show what is inside. ‘Heroin, morphine, amphetamine. Add gin or whisky and what does that make? The Brompton cocktail! Set sail for happiness! I’m all prepared.’

The search for bodies on the Moors has been suspended until the weather lifts. It’s snowing in the North.

Yet here there is no sign of snow. The night sky isn’t its usual depthless city black, but lit up with tea-scum, coffee-scurf clouds of the same pastel spectrum as the inmates’ hair.

The boats have been lifted out of the water; they are lined up on the quay with tailored hoods and sleeves fitted over the cabins and masts and leaves slicked to their pedigree hulls.

Odd, as old Bob Brotherhood has occasionally remarked, watching members of the happy-go-crazy set and cases from Berry Bros going onboard during the season, that there was once a time when they built boats here from the wood up.

‘Two hundred years ago,’ so it goes, ‘a woman making bread had to start with grain, and a man making a boat had to start with a tree. Simple components, d’you see what I’m saying, simply joined.’

The long nights signal a flurry of social activity in the village – the Friendly Wives’ Club’s ‘Twenties evening’, the cricket club’s ‘Derby night’, tombola socials, jumble sales, domino suppers, talks, demonstrations – cake decorating, ‘Christmas decorations from garden and hedgerow’ – inspirational-religioso choir workouts, and panto rehearsals (Englishmen in frocks – the annual drag-fest, but all for a good cause: Horticultural Therapy, unless I’m mistaken, will be the beneficiary this year).

Most afternoons a Viva or Nova with a couple of oldsters on board will putter to a halt across from the cottage and a performance as stylised as the ghost dance or Kabuki will begin.

It starts with the unwrapping of sandwiches, the unshelling of eggs (a tissue over the knee to catch any fly-away pieces), the tremulous pouring of hot drinks.

He will fill a pipe while, with the concentration of somebody performing triple bypass surgery, she cores and peels an apple, the skin spiralling agonisingly down into a neat pile in her lap. Her offer of a clean scraped section will be refused with an impatient shake of the head.

After the shipping forecast he will check on the movement of his shares (part of a standard retirement package) before turning to the TV page, where, with a series of ticks and circles, he will plan their viewing for the evening.

By this time she will be sleeping with her mouth ajar and an irregular whistly-wheezy noise coming from deep down in her sternum.

The countryside is littered with these tin semi-tombs at this time of the year – whiskery mouths and jellied turkey wattles and slow-flowing drools and dribbles pointed towards glorious ‘Views’ of wooded peninsulas and boiling sun-flecked seas.

When snooze-time is over and spectacles, hearing aids and upper-palates have been pressed back into service, it is time for more tea and biscuits out of tins bearing ancient images of the corps de ballet from Sleeping Beauty or the old king or the Castle Gardens in Edinburgh viewed from Princes Street.

If you ever needed convincing that All life is sorrowful (the first Buddhist saying) here is your proof.

It is scenes such as this which explain why we all eventually devise ways of putting ourselves in places or states of feeling that bring us back to the inner rhapsody of being alive and reconnect us with the
now
feeling of life.

In my years alone here the formula has been unvarying: a small room, sepulchral lighting, a drink with a kick like a dromedary (a Negroni with Carpano substituted for the Campari, plus a splash of sweet Cinzano, is always guaranteed to hit the button), plus music, including the cheap, thin, popular songs I spent years trying to deny had ever floated on my breath.

I always loved singing. Long before I was alerted to the ambitions my father and mother were hatching for me in that direction, I sang all the time.

There was a man, a neighbour of ours, who used to have me over to help him do things in his garage, and he’d give me a threepenny piece to sing. I sat there and watched him do things, and I sang. I was four or five.

At the peak of my powers I had a voice that could peel lemons.
But time takes a toll on voices, particularly those of women. The vocal cords calcify and, in extreme age, the result is a high cracked sound.

These days the only exercise my voice gets is during the cocktail hour here in the cottage, when I am shut into the small spare-room packed with lumber, which, in my single incursion into what I still regard as borrowed space, I have turned into a makeshift mood module.

One of my regrets is that I haven’t spent as many hours in bars in the course of my life as I would if I had been a man. It’s a passion that can be dated back to my first visit to New York in 1956, when I was booked for two appearances on Ed Sullivan, plus three weeks of cabaret in the Persian Room at the Plaza.

It’s something I had been pushing for for long enough (from the beginning). Fog delayed our departure from London for three days. The flight took thirteen hours, and I arrived tired, under-rehearsed, and nervous.

On opening night I was, to quote one of the early notices, ‘tense as nine newly-tuned pianos’. The
downbeat
critic described me as ‘another femme singer’. (And, in a city that had femme singers coming out of the paintwork, he had a point. I was 100 per cent ersatz Americana; a warmed-over version of the real thing.)

New York didn’t exactly beat a path to my suite at the Plaza, which had what was called a cathedral-ceiling living-room and a terrace overlooking Central Park from where it was possible to watch a polar bear endlessly prowling backwards and forwards in his rocky compound in the Zoo. (It is an image which remains peculiarly vivid, and yet I can’t say for certain it isn’t something I read about later and projected my own predicament on to after the fact.) I remember it now as a gleam among the green, like the light off a naked body.

I was mentally preparing to go out and face them on my second night when the phone rang and a voice from downstairs announced that ‘I have Mr Davis wishing to visit with you.’

Naturally I knew Sammy Davis by reputation – hip-dressing, wise-cracking, finger-snapping, ring-a-ding-ding-ing member of
the showbiz inner-élite. ‘More
tchotchkies
than Sophie Tucker,’ as somebody had it, ‘and twice as sentimental.’

I loved the image. And he was no disappointment in the flesh. He came in through a door to the suite I hadn’t realised existed until then, a tiny black man in a retinue of Italianate white bruisers, and stood ten feet away for maximum effect – the skinny-fitting shiny suit, bluest black, with a blue-black shadow stripe; the eggshell shirt with the generous soft high rolled collar; the boots (with lifts) made from the hide of unborn calf; the saucer-sized St Christopher and other medals bucking on his tie; the black moiré pirate patch covering the eye lost in a road accident eighteen months earlier; the processed electro-violet Congolene pomaded hair.

To say he looked exotic is to seriously undersell the effect – he looked imagineered, cuboid, like a Picasso painting or an Easter Island sculpture. It was plain that here was somebody who didn’t know what it was to take life in small steps.

I, on the other hand (still unversed of course in substance abuse; in chemical coping skills), had never before felt so entirely grounded or earthbound – never so aware of my physical musculoskeletal self.

I felt the dead weight of my plumbing and blubber and heavy organs; saw myself as heaving viscera in a bag of hot skin – and at the same time for what felt like the first time saw my ideal self: a frictionless black man talking jive-talk and living a life whose basic premise was that the normal, the dull and the average – square, white-bread, cutems (I was prepared to put my hand up to all three) – had simply ceased to exist.

He moved to where I was standing and brought both my hands to his lips. ‘I hear last night was a real bitch kitty of a performance, doctor. Tonight you’ll be even better. We’re going to be in forya tonight, and tonight you’re going to knock them square on their
tuchis
. If you don’t turn ’em on, then they’ve got no switches.’

(They
were
in; the performance I gave wasn’t a noticeable improvement on the night before’s. In all my performing career I
never learned Sammy’s trick of burning off fear and releasing the clean, unimpeded impact of personality which jolts an audience to life.)

But it was what happened next that set the seal on the future pattern of our friendship. I’d been feeling so shredded and put through the wringer since I arrived that the only time I’d been out of the room was to go to work.

So the private lift lined in buttoned white leather that we got into was new, and so was the labyrinthine yet intimate bar buried deep in the Plaza that turned out to be our destination.

We slipped behind a velvet rope into an alcove, Sammy ordered – ‘A little taste for the face, a little toddy for the body,
Eduardo
’ – and snaky hipped black boys and solid middle-aged men with Cork-American accents danced attendance on us as if we were deities.

I felt a nice exhilaration, sitting in the electric-plotted twilight, drinking from the Steuben glasses. (I was going to have to be sick before going on, but that came later.)

It was the authentication of an experience I had been living through films and pulp novels and music for probably twenty of my twenty-four years: the chink of ice, the clink of glasses, the syncopation of American conversation (it was a language that climbed on the table and danced its energy), the marimba motion of drinks being made, the tinkling of a cocktail piano.

Heroically-scaled paintings in shades of green-black glowed dimly at the backs of the bigger seating recesses – pictures of fir groves or charging horses or medieval armies or moonlight ripply bowers: their surfaces seemed to form and reform by the minute, and refused to settle down to a single subject or interpretation.

‘Energy without depth.’ ‘Sensation without commitment.’ Those were the standard European criticism of the American experience – of ‘Yank style’ – in the fifties.

But together they represented the American formula for success and were preferable every time (so it seemed to me) to depth without energy, and commitment combined with censoriousness and fire-iron solemnity (the British Way).

I visited many falling-about stations with Sammy in the next weeks (and, in fact, over the next twenty-five years).

Jilly Rizzo’s bar near Madison Square Garden, Tony’s bar on 52nd Street, Jan Walman’s Duplex in the Village, Joe’s Elbow Room in New Jersey; the Crystal Caverns in Washington; the Chez Paree and the Club De-liza in Chicago; the Society in Jermyn Street, and Pal Joey’s at the Angel were some of them.

‘I think I need three inches of money,’ Sammy would tell whoever was holding for him, and we were off for ‘a little see and be seen’.

A place we went to on my first visit that became an established favourite was the bar in the back of the old sleazeball America Hotel on West 47th Street, where Will Mastin, Sammy’s uncle, Lenny Bruce and others kept small efficiency apartments.

The America Hotel was a notorious couch-camp for prostitutes, and more often than not it was being raided. To gain admission you would have to duck under the ‘These premises raided’ sign hanging on a chain that stretched across the doorway.

There was a recording studio on the ground floor, in the back of what had once been an old dining-room. The control room was probably the old kitchen. The bar, which had no name, only a slogan – ‘Open every day 7.00 to unconscious time’ – was fitted into the other half of the dining-room, next to the studio.

It was nothing special – pressed-tin ceiling, granita floor, Formica tables, semi-circular booths, high stools along the long bar where the darkness thinned. There were prawn crackers and peanuts and ketchup squirt tomatoes on the tables, and advertising clocks around the place all giving different times. Overhead in the gloom was a single twenty-two watt circlet bulb of the sort known in the New York of the day as the Landlord’s Halo. El Morocco it wasn’t. On the contrary, it was its low-rent, semi-secret nature and the interplay between the people who washed up there – stellar talent, as it used to be known in those days – Sinatras, Ava Gardners, Garlands, Bogarts, Lena Homes, tossed into the usual stir-fry of mob people, rag-traders, fight promoters, and Fifth Avenue hookers working their Chanel – that made
the bar at the America Hotel hum. A certain electricity permeated the air, a magnetism that went in higher revolutions than anywhere else I could name, then or now.

‘Doctor, let me say this,’ Sammy cautioned me on our first visit. ‘I got one eye, and that eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.’

Over the years I made the acquaintance of a stream of men called Julie and Cleo and Lulu and Connie and Ruby and Tammi – tough guys with big girls’ names. They wore conservatively-cut suits with
tuono
e
lampi
linings and convincing black hair pieces and made each other presents of –
gifted
each
other
with
– Cartier lighters, medals, name bracelets, tie-clips, watches, cufflinks, sweaters, suits, girls, luggage, movie projectors, cases of Chivas, wallets full of money, Charvet ties, tips on the stockmarket, new hangover cures, and bulbous circumferentially-inscribed friendship rings.

The warning I was given once about one of them – ‘He’s the most fascinating person, but don’t stick your hand in the cage’ – held good for them all.

Sammy and the performer clientele stole licks from the street characters, while the street characters picked up shtick from Sammy and his circle and wrote it into their act. It was a two-way traffic of mannerisms, postures, gestures and jokes. New fashions in clothes and ways of talking started there and, by way of records, films, television, etcetera, gradually filtered out into the bigger world.

The one occasion I briefly met the President and Mrs Kennedy was at the America Hotel – not in the bar, but in the studio next door. The ‘These premises raided’ sign was up across the entrance, Sammy was recording inside, a buffet supper of wine, cheese, cold meat-ball and corned-beef sandwiches was set out in the control room, and every exit had an armed guard.

The Kennedys were there perhaps four or five minutes. They met everyone, smiled, chatted, and everybody shook the President’s hand.