Grinding It Out (5 page)

Miami was packed to the rafters with fortune seekers like us, and we began to despair of ever finding a place to rest our weary heads. Finally, in a big old house smack in the middle of town, we found a kitchen and butler's pantry that had been furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a table, and a set of chairs. The rest of the house was filled with cots occupied by an assortment of male roomers, and the solitary bathroom in the place had to be shared with them. It was a place to stay, at least, and Ethel, bless her soul, didn't complain. Not at first. But it became increasingly difficult for her when her sister got an apartment of her own, a job as a secretary, and went her own way. I got a job with W. F. Morang & Son selling real estate for a development in Fort Lauderdale along Las Olas Boulevard. It was amazing. Everything I had been hearing about the real estate boom was true. The company had twenty seven-passenger Hudson automobiles. If you got into the top twenty bracket in sales with them, you were given a Hudson and a driver for business use. That was for me, of course, and I made it quickly. I went to the Miami Chamber of Commerce and looked up the names of tourists who came from the Chicago area. I'd call them and fill them in—as one Chicagoan to another—on an exciting development I'd found in this palmy land of crazed speculation. They were all intrigued. I would take them by car up route AlA to Fort Lauderdale so they could see for themselves what was going on there along the “new river,” the intercoastal waterway. The property was underwater, but there was a solid bed of coral rock beneath, and the dredging for the intercoastal raised all the lots high and dry, with permanent abutments. People who purchased those lots really got a bargain, even though the prices were astronomical for those times, because the area is now one of the most beautiful in all of Florida, and lots there are worth many times what they sold for then.

My job was to line up the prospects and get them to the property. There they would be taken on a tour of the development by a man we called the “spieler.” We would follow along with them, and if we saw a couple begin to get glassy-eyed and ripe for the collar, we would signal another specialist who tagged along—the “closer.” This gentleman would move in, and we would separate the marked couple from the rest of the herd and go to work on them. All it took to purchase one of these pieces of paradise was a $500 deposit. I got a number of deposits each trip. The people I was dealing with were mostly older folks. I felt that my twenty-three-year-old face was too callow to be credible for a real estate wheeler-dealer, so I decided to grow a mustache. It was a disaster. Most men have a margin around their lips, a demarcation where hair doesn't grow. I lack this feature, with the result that my mustache grew right down into my mouth. Moreover, it was a horrible brownish-red color. Ethel despised it, and I didn't like it much either. I didn't have to wear it long. The muckraking stories in northern newspapers soon pulled the plug on our big real estate boom, and there were no longer any prospects to worry about. What a colossal blow! Just when I was getting into the swing of selling these lots, the whole business vanished.

One morning I was sitting in the living room we all shared in our rooming house, noodling around on the decrepit old upright piano, and wondering what in the hell I was going to do next. I was seriously considering going back to Chicago and asking to get back on at the radio station and at the Lily Cup Company. My thoughts were so far away that at first I didn't notice the chap calling to me through the screen door. Finally I let him in, and he wanted to know if I'd like a job playing the piano.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” I replied.

He wanted to know if I had a tuxedo. I didn't, of course, but he allowed that a dark blue suit would do. That I had; and I could pick up a black bow tie on the way home from the union hall if they accepted my Chicago Musician's Union card and gave me a permit to play in Miami. I had to do some sight-reading for the union tester, and then he asked me to play a tune I didn't know and transpose it into another key as I read it. My heart sank. I thought he was aiming to shoot me down and not give me a permit.

“Look, I can transpose a piece that I know,” I said. “But if I have to sight-read and transpose it at the same time I can't keep a tempo.”

“That's all right,” he said. “I just want to see if you know how.”

“O.K., Mac. But this is going to be the groping method.”

After a couple of tortured bars, he told me to stop and waved me back to the rear of the hall. I shot a despairing glance at my erstwhile employer and followed after the union man. To my immense relief, he wrote out a permit and handed it to me.

“That'll be five bucks,” he said. Then he noticed my greenish pallor and said, “Hey, cheer up. You did fine. Your transposition was accurate, and that's all I ask.”

The Florida sky looked bright again when we got outside, and I felt fine.

The job was with the Willard Robinson Orchestra in a plush nightclub on Palm Island called The Silent Night. Willard Robinson was a fine pianist himself, but he had a lot of personal problems at the time and was drinking heavily. After he fell off the piano stool a couple of times, the management told him he could keep leading the group, but he'd have to hire another piano player. His divorce and selling his house on Long Island (which he memorialized in his hit song of the day, “A Cottage for Sale”) and his resultant drinking problem were to my benefit, of course. One man's famine makes another man's feast, and it's an ill wind that blows nobody good and all that. But subconsciously I felt a bit guilty about my good fortune at Willard's expense. I was happy to see him come back strong in New York a few years later. His Deep River Orchestra was featured on the original Maxwell House Showboat on radio, bringing his music the national audience it deserved.

The music we made at The Silent Night wasn't so bad either. Soon I was averaging $110 a week—good money in those days. At last we were able to move out of the rooming house into a three-and-a-half-room furnished apartment in a terrific new building.

My first night of playing at The Silent Night made quite an impression on me. The place itself was fabulous—gorgeous, glamorous, and illegal. The owner was a rum runner who brought the illicit booze he served from the Bahamas. A great hedge surrounded the place, and a doorman was posted at the entrance gate to screen guests as they arrived. Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d' bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale.

The bandstand was in an elaborate, rococo pavilion. The dance floor was of marble, surrounded by Grecian columns. One of the other guys in the orchestra pointed out a huge yacht tied to the dock and told me that it had once belonged to the Emperor of Japan. In inclement weather, the dining and dancing shifted to the yacht. I was astonished by the place and a bit cowed by the suave urbanity of the patrons. The drinks were a dollar each for anything you wished, champagne, brandy, bourbon, scotch, whatever. I didn't drink at all back then but the fixed-price drink menu and the stylish simplicity of the food service made a lasting impression on me. They had no printed menu because there were just three entrees: Maine lobster, steak, and roast duckling. Years later I recalled that spare bill of fare in my first motto for McDonald's—KISS—which meant, “Keep it simple, stupid.”

Another thing that captivated me was the deft service of the Swiss waiters. They would bring out a roast duckling on a big wooden platter and filet it right at the customer's table, slicing it up with the flair of a magician producing rabbits from a hat. I admired their professionalism.

But I didn't have a lot of time to observe what was going on that first night. I played the piano continuously. When it came time to take a break, the rest of the players left the bandstand, but Robinson placed a silk top hat on the piano and told me I had to keep playing requests for people who wanted to sing. The customers tossed tips into the hat, and I felt good about that until I discovered that I was expected to share the tips with all the other players. That was grossly unfair, and I was steaming mad. But it was the custom, apparently, and there wasn't much I could do about it if I wanted to keep the job. I hammered away, my fingers getting painful from such unaccustomed exercise, and I vowed that I would figure out a way to keep this piano player from being the goat for the whole orchestra.

The solution didn't come to me that first night, or even the first week. I was too busy worrying about whether I would last the entire evening. When I'd get home my fingers would be puffed and almost bleeding, and I had to soak them in a bucket of warm water. I tried the direct approach to Willard Robinson once more on a night when he seemed relatively mellow and more sober than usual.

“Mr. Robinson, I think I am getting a dirty deal,” I said. “When you played piano through all the breaks, it was different. You were the star folks had come to see, and they paid handsome tips. You could afford to share them, because you were getting your pay as leader, too. I'm just one of the boys, yet I have to play much more than the others and get nothing extra for it at all!”

He looked at me vacantly and then squinted until he got me in focus. “That's too bad, Joe,” he responded. “Maybe you'll get smart and learn to play the flute or somethin'.”

I got smart, all right, but no thanks to Robinson. I was doing my solo routine for requests one night, and an old geezer who'd won a bundle at the racetrack that day came in with a doll who could have been his granddaughter but obviously was not. They danced over to the piano in a spastic flutter, cheek-to-cheek, and the old boy waved a dollar bill at me and asked if I could play “I Love You Truly.” I just stared at him and shook my head negatively. He was startled and the young girl slapped his hand with the dollar, knocking it into the top hat, and she shouted, “How dare you insult him with a dollar, you cheapskate!” Then she grabbed a twenty-dollar bill out of the bundle that protruded from his breast pocket and dropped it in my lap. “Hey, wait a minute,” I called. “Did you say ‘I Love You Truly'?” and I played the first few bars haltingly, as though striving to recall them. He nodded vigorously, and I went ahead with the tune and played the hell out of it. If my associates in the orchestra noticed the extra tip, they didn't say anything about it. Special requests for a little bit extra to the piano player became a common thing after that.

I got even smarter. I talked the violinist into playing the breaks with me and strolling through the audience, serenading each table individually. That doubled our tips immediately and was a big addition to our pay every week.

One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life.

That incident didn't cheer Ethel up at all either. We were doing well financially, and she even liked the apartment. But she was growing exceedingly homesick. At least when I was working all the time in Chicago, she'd had her family and friends to keep her from being too lonely. Here, she had no one at all. Her sister was dating, leading her own life, and they seldom saw each other. So the warm weather was cold comfort for Ethel. Finally we agreed to go back to Chicago. Our lease on the apartment ran until March 1, but Ethel couldn't wait that long. I put her and the baby on the train about the middle of February and stayed alone to play out my two weeks' notice so the orchestra could get a replacement for me.

That long drive home alone in my Model T was an unforgettable experience. I caught snatches of sleep along the road from time to time, but aside from that, I drove straight through. I had no top coat, and the weather got increasingly colder as I drove north. When I reached Chicago's southern limits, the streets were covered with ice. At Sixty-third and Western, the car went into a skid, and I ended up on the curb on the wrong side of the street. A big policeman came rushing over swearing at me, sitting there shivering in my light suitcoat, “What's the matter,” he yelled. “Are you drunk?” I was afraid I was due for another few hours in jail, but I explained my plight and he let me go. Like most Chicagoans, he figured anyone who'd been taken in the Florida real estate scandal was a damned fool, but more to be pitied than scorned.

My parents' home never looked more welcome than it did that day. Ethel fed me hot soup and got me into a warm bed, and I slept for fifteen hours straight.

I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV's Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again.

 

4

The ten years between 1927 and 1937 were a decade of destiny for the paper cup industry. It was exciting to watch the business grow. But if I had known the disillusionment that was waiting for me, I might have gone into some other line of work.

When I returned to selling paper cups, I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. When I played the piano, it would be for pleasure only. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling, and that's exactly what I did.