Here Comes the Night (4 page)
Berns found a girl singer fresh out of Taft High School in the West Bronx named Edith Gormezano who called herself Eydie Gorme. She was working as a Spanish interpreter for a theatrical supply export company during the day and taking classes in the evening at City College in foreign trade and economics. In high school, she had been the featured vocalist of the school band and star of many school musicals, but she was not planning on a career in show business. She started working on weekends in a band led by former City College classmate Ken Greenglass, a trumpeter who also acted as her manager. Berns took Bernstein to a ballroom near his home in Fordham to hear the pretty young girl singer. Bernstein agreed she had talent and looks.
They each put up $700 and set up a session. Berns knew a drummer named Herb Wasserman who wrote songs, and he supplied a pair of novelty numbers. “M & X” made “Mairzy Doats” sound like Cole Porter. The chorus was a garbled, nonsense run at “If you have any ham”—“F-U-N-E-M”—to which the answer went “O-S-I-F-S-M”—“Oh, yes, I have some ham” . . . “F-U-N-E-X O-S-I-F-S-X.” Ham and eggs. M & X. They paired their girl singer, Eydie Gorme, with a big band singer born Manny Levin who went by the gentile-sounding name Bob Manning. They hired a band led by Les Elgart, a trumpeter who had knocked around the big band scene before forming his own dance band only a few years earlier. Bernstein also brought in Esy Morales on the same session to record “African Voodoo,” a vague remake of his hit from the previous year.
They took an office downtown in 1650 Broadway, a Theater District office building filled with fly-by-night music publishers and record labels, pressed up a few hundred copies of both records, and waited for the money to come rolling in. Berns wrote and copyrighted a batch of songs for their music publishing division, Magic Music, with titles like cheap paperback novels: “Kiss of Love,” “Roulette Wheel,” “Then It’s Goodbye to You,” and “High Heels Clicking on a Lonely Street.” The songs he wrote were never recorded. The records
they released disappeared without a trace. Berns and Bernstein quietly folded their tent and slipped back into the Bronx. Within months, both were out of show business. Bernstein had left the club business to manage Esy Morales full-time, only to have Morales, a diabetic who didn’t take care of himself, keel over dead from a drug-related heart attack at age thirty-four a few months later in 1950. Berns also needed to find a new scheme, but it would be many years before anything turned up.
THE WINTER OF
1957 in Cuba had a fairy-tale quality. Meyer Lansky opened his Hotel Riviera in December 1957, a glittering twenty-one-story, 440-room edifice rising up by the sea from the Malecón, decorated in turquoise mosaic. Rooms at the Riviera were booked solid into the next year. The money rolled in. Big shots who thought nothing of writing a check for $30,000 or $40,000 at the end of an evening gambled in the formal elegance of Lansky’s casino. Tourists flooded Havana. The town was crawling with sharpies looking for a piece of the action.
The sandy beaches looked like snow, and the ocean and the sky were both so much the same deep blue, you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. It was a city of promise, allure, cheap come-ons, and fast grifts. It was a city with its skirts raised. The trade winds blew riffraff and high rollers alike into town. The casinos brought the wiseguys and showfolks, the musicians and the dancers, the boozers and the dreamers, the chiselers and the schemers. It may have been Cuba, but Broadway types packed the cafes and strolled the sidewalks of the Prado in the long hours of the afternoon. People who knew each other from Manhattan would run into each other on the streets of Havana and think nothing of it. To a select crowd, Havana was like an extension of New York. They crowded around over mojitos at El Floridita, where Hemingway drank. The place was lousy with the same cheap hustlers and con artists you could find anytime on Fifty-Second Street. Havana was their kind of town.
Everywhere in Havana there was music. Under the balmy skies of this Paris of the Caribbean, life was good. And everywhere there was the mambo, sophisticated languor that just hung in the air, a vital pulse to this sinful city. Since Meyer Lansky opened his new hotel, with Ginger Rogers christening the Copa Room, there had been plenty of work in town with a cast of thousands playing lounges and shows all over the place. The casino flew in Hollywood sorts by planeloads for the opening. Alfred Hitchcock and Bill Holden could be seen playing roulette in the egg-shaped Gold Leaf Casino. Lansky didn’t care much for Ginger Rogers’s act. “She can wiggle her ass,” he said, “but she can’t sing a goddamned note.”
The casinos operated on the shady side. The boys in Havana knew they were dealing with suckers, not real gamblers. They maintained a speedy check-cashing routine worked out where they would fly checks overnight to Inter-American Check Service Inc. in Miami, who worked to secure the transfer of funds before recalcitrant gamblers could act on any nagging second thoughts. Smart money steered a wide berth around Havana’s crooked casinos.
From the rarified enclosures of the Havana Yacht Club or the lush estates of Vedado, the panoramic heights immediately outside downtown Havana, the ruling classes could avert their eyes from the utter degeneracy that was their city’s stock-in-trade. Some of the more adventuresome might even travel down to see the famed nightclub performer named Superman, who measured his manhood with twelve silver dollars and would demonstrate the exact source of his stage name several times nightly in one of the more well-known prurient attractions of Havana nightlife.
The town oozed sex—the sultry nights, the flimsy clothes, the abundant prostitution. A languid sensuality blew into town with the sea wind. The whole place was a teeming cauldron of sex, sin, and idolatry—set to a rumba beat.
The rhythms came directly from pagan rites. Unlike the American slaves, whose wary slave owners forbade them drums because they
feared they could carry a language used to foment revolt, Cuban slaves kept their drums, and more. They kept their language and they kept their religion, simply disguising it to suit the Catholic colonialists. Nearly two dozen deities survived the voyage from western Africa in this religion that came to be called Santeria in Cuba and Voodoo in Haiti. The Santeria priests simply gave their Yoruban gods the names of Catholic saints. Chango, the Yoruban god of thunder, became Santa Barbara. Babalu Aye,
orisha
of infectious diseases, turned into San Lazaro. And so on.
This typifies the singular approach to assimilation that built the Cuban culture. They easily blended the practices of Santeria and Catholicism. It was this very mixture of Spain and Africa that made Cuba. In this accommodating spirit, the slaves were able to keep Africa alive in Cuba. In the early eighteenth century, the Spanish Catholic Church allowed the creation of
cabildos
, societies where Africans of shared heritage could get together, speak their language, conduct their rites. And play their drums.
The drums were holy. They spoke in the language of the gods. Whenever the Cubans wanted to evoke a link to the spirit, there was drumming and there was chanting. Specific rhythms were associated with specific deities, specific drums to specific rituals. In Nigeria, the
bata
were said to belong to Chango, the most graceful dancer of the
orishas
. While the rumba was said to have been invented on the docks of Havana by men beating on codfish boxes, the
bata
was always the spiritual heart of the music. Rumba comes from
guaguanco
, music that goes back hundreds of years to when the Spanish brought flamenco to Cuba. These two musics, the rhythms of Africa and this Spanish style, mixed together and led to early versions of the rumba.
The histories of Cuban music and American music are like parallel universes. The busy trade route between Havana and New Orleans may have provided some piquant cross-pollination long ago. Early New Orleans jazzmen sometimes played in a habanera style from Cuba, and
Jelly Roll Morton always spoke of what he called “the Spanish tinge” as an essential ingredient to his early jazz. In fact, some of the earliest recordings of anything remotely resembling jazz does not come from the white Americans imitating the black New Orleanians, as commonly presumed, but a racially mixed orchestra recorded in Havana almost ten years earlier. But New Orleans is more Caribbean than American in many ways, and once jazz moved up the river, this Cuban element was lost from its story for decades.
No doubt it was the music that drew Bert Berns to Cuba during the winter season of 1957–58, no matter what vague ideas he had or stories he told people before he left. The snaking
guajiro
rhythms drew him like a beacon to Havana. He and his pal Mickey Raygor, another ne’er-do-well from the Bronx, may have talked about putting together a comedy act for Havana nightclubs. Berns goofed around on such an act with Howard Storm a couple of years earlier. Storm was a young up-and-coming comic struggling to make it when he met Berns at Hansen’s, the Broadway drugstore where show business types without offices of their own congregated. Berns sweet-talked Storm into coming out to the Bronx to rehearse a two-man act with Berns as the piano-playing straight man. Storm took a couple of subway rides out to some Bronx catering hall where Berns had managed to commandeer a stage with a piano during the afternoons. But nothing ever came of it.
Nothing ever came of any of Berns’s schemes to get into show business. He held down a few nothing jobs, but none that ever lasted. He wrote a few songs with some other writers, especially Al Rubin, who managed to place their calypso-flavored song, “Way Down by the Cherry Tree,” with vocalist Micki Marlo on Capitol Records. He tried touting singers. He knew all the Broadway characters. His brother-in-law and sister, when they went on their honeymoon cruise, were surprised to discover when he saw them off that Berns knew the ship’s entertainer, former child star Bobby Breen. He knew the players. He knew some of the moves. He knew how to look and he knew the phone booths at
Hansen’s. But, at age twenty-nine, Bert Berns had nothing going on and nothing coming up. He lived in a dump in the West Village he couldn’t afford and sneaked out to the Bronx every so often, where his soft touch mother would slip him money behind his disapproving father’s back.
In Havana, Berns drank too much rum, smoked reefer, and slept on the beach. He and Raygor got involved in some half-baked plans to buy a nightclub, only to back out when they discovered they were actually negotiating the purchase of a whorehouse. He soaked up the atmosphere, hanging out in clubs by night, making the scene, and taking it all in. The rhythm of the
orishas
began to surround Berns.
Berns and Raygor ran out of money after a couple of months and headed home long before the good times in Havana crashed to a close. Over the years, Berns would tell many different stories about his stay in Cuba. He told people he ran guns and drugs. His brief stay in Cuba became a touchstone in his life—a physical connection to his spiritual roots in the rhythm of the
orishas
, a pilgrimage to the home of the mambo, a moment where he was a part of all the madness, romance, and glamour swirling in the Havana night air. It may even have served as a galvanizing, cathartic event that provoked him out of his indolence and gave him his greatest artistic vision, his blending of the mambo and rock and roll. And it was always the source of stories, even though nobody at home knew the names of fabled musicians like Beny Moré or Arsenio Rodriguez, who had drawn him to Havana in the first place. But when he got home, he did tell his sister he met Fidel Castro.
Ahmet Ertegun, Nesuhi Ertegun, 1947
A
HMET ERTEGUN WENT
into the recording studio the first time without any idea of what he was going to do. Smitten with American jazz, the young son of a distinguished Turkish diplomat took a raunchy blues singer who called herself Little Miss Cornshucks into a rented Washington, DC, studio in 1942 with a piano and a tenor and recorded her singing a few songs just for the hell of it.
Already balding, not yet twenty years old, the bespectacled young man wore crisp blazers and alligator shoes with a gleaming polish. He grew up ritzy in the luxury and privilege of embassy life. His father was the most trusted advisor to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the inspirational father of modern Turkey, who posted Munir Ertegun in the great capitals of Europe—Paris and London—before dispatching him to Washington, DC, where the brilliant, cultured diplomat became a personal favorite of President Roosevelt.
His older brother Nesuhi had taken nine-year-old Ahmet to see Cab Calloway and his Orchestra in London and, shortly after that, the Duke Ellington band. By the time the two young men landed in Washington with their family in 1934, they were thoroughly indoctrinated, with visions dancing in their heads of black men in tuxedos and their bright, shiny, brassy music. They combed black neighborhoods door-to-door looking for old 78 rpm records. They hosted Sunday
brunch jam sessions at the Turkish embassy, and a procession of jazz greats such as Lester Young and Sidney Bechet, highly amused at the invitation, waltzed through the elegant quarters when the Ertegun boys lived there. They presented jazz concerts outside the embassy—their first featured bluesman Leadbelly at the Washington Press Club.
