Authors: Cynthia Weil
I'm Glad I Did (15 page)
My mind spun with thoughts of Dulcie. All the
what if
s. What if I had decided to tell her the name of the lyricist?
That the words she loved, the song she had sung had been written by Luke Silver, her son? What would she have done? Would she have admitted the truth to Luke, or would she have continued to hide the fact of who he was and who she was to him? Could she have found out somehow? Could it have been a factor in her taking her own life? But no, only he and I knew.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost eight thirty. Eleven o'clock suddenly seemed very close.
Finally Luke pulled away from me. “I have to keep reading,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You don't have to stay.”
“I want to stay,” I told him. “We can't stop now.”
Our baby boy, Luke, was born on December 10, 1944, at Lenox Hill Hospital. I knew there was no way we could raise him together. In the south, there were still separate waiting rooms and ticket windows in bus stations for Negroes and whites, and it was even illegal for them to just live together. In New York City, segregation wasn't that out in the open, but the races were not supposed to mix. It wasn't even until two years later that Jackie Robinson would be hired to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team
.
George and I had created a person together out of our love, but we had made a child who had no real place in the world. So we came up with a plan. It tore my heart out, but it was the only thing we could do. Although my name was on the birth certificate as the mother, George promised me he'd get one with another name on it. We agreed that I would be able to visit Luke but would never tell him who I was. I would just be a friend of his father
.
If his skin remained light enough, he would never know that his mother was a Negro. If his skin turned dark, George would tell him he was adopted. I prayed he would look like George and never know the pain of being a colored person
.
We were lucky that George had enough money and connections to take care of everything that needed to be taken care of. He found a false “mother” and got the birth certificate altered. The woman was a white backup singer he had known for years who was dying from a brain tumor. It was tragic and wrong of us, but she never even knew. She passed away four weeks to the day after Luke was born
.
Maybe I was wrong, too, in keeping my son's heritage a secret. I was not ashamed of who he was, and neither was George, but the world was not ready for him. It still may not be, even as I write this in the year 1962, but I pray every night that soon that day will come. I hope I live long enough to see it so I can take Luke in my arms and tell him how much his mother loves him and has always loved him
.
Luke sat there without making a sound. I held out my hand and he took it. There was no one in the world but the two of us. Even if eleven o'clock came and went, I knew I wouldn't abandon him if he weren't ready to be left alone, no matter what the price I paid at home.
“I don't remember her ever coming to see me,” he murmured. “I wonder if she did.”
“I don't think we remember much of anything before we're three. Actually, my mother told me that when she was
arguing some case where it was brought into evidence.” I sighed. “Dulcie might have come before then.”
“Maybe she'll tell us.” He picked up the remaining stack of pages.
I ached for my children, the one I'd left behind and the one I could never hold, and I hated my life. I hated having to hide my relationship with the man I loved. I couldn't come up with anything that sounded like a hit song, so I felt I was letting George down. The record company was driving him and Bernie nuts, pressuring them for another hit. Bernie knew about Luke, of course, so he understood why I couldn't concentrate. But he wasn't exactly sympathetic. Bernie was all business and told me I had to write a follow-up to “Good Love Gone Bad” and record it, or the record buying public would forget me
.
“Get off your beautiful ass and get the job done,” he used to say
.
I wanted to do what he said. I wanted it more than I'd even wanted that first hit. When I finally wrote another song that everyone liked, I didn't know whether we'd waited too long to release it. Or maybe it just wasn't as good as we thought it was. It barely crawled onto the charts and hung there by its fingertips. Each record after that did a little worse, and I began feeling a lot worse about myself
.
One night after a session, one of the musicians saw how low I was and offered me some of that dust that Marcus used to use. This cat called it nose candy. “Take a snort,” he said. “You'll feel better, and you won't get hooked.” So I
thought
, Why not?
I needed relief from this feeling inside, this ache that wouldn't fade
.
I did feel better for a little while, he was right about that. But that's all he was right about
.
I glanced at Luke, unsure of how he would feel about reading about the intimate details of his mother's slide into drug addiction. He picked up the pace, skimming a little, but he never stopped handing the pages to me.
Dulcie went on about how she began to depend on cocaine to pick her up when she was down and how she would crash after the cocaine wore off, so the cycle would begin again. She always needed more to pick her up. She hit up George for cash. She threw fits when he refused to feed her habit by not giving her money. She knew she was behaving badly, not showing up for shows or record sessions on time or in such bad shape that her voice sounded “like sandpaper,” but she couldn't help herself. She couldn't stop.
When the record company dropped her, Bernie flipped out. He said George could handle her alone. Bernie was done with Dulcie Brown, and even George forbade her to see Luke while she was using. He thought that might get her to quit. But not being able to see her son just made her feel so terrible that she used even more. Finally, George was unable to get her a deal, unable to book her, and ultimately unable to deal with the junkie she had become. In the end, he gave up like Bernie and refused to manage herâalthough he continued to give her money to keep her from starving or becoming homeless.
It was now 1951. Sweet Dulcie Brown thought she'd lost everything she had to lose.
I don't remember much of the next few years, but in 1952 or early '53, I was singing at a dive up in Harlem. To tell you the truth, I was not doing that much singing. What I was doing a lot of was sitting with customers, pushing cheap champagne and occasionally going home with one of them. I was a mess. When I had cocaine, I was on a manic high, and when I didn't have it, I was so far down the gutter looked like up to me
.
That was the year my sixteen-year-old baby girl, Rosetta, decided to run away from home and come to visit me. Her timing couldn't have been worse. She came to find the mother she dreamed about all her life, someone who would open loving arms and hold her close. She deserved a mother like that. But I couldn't take care of myself, much less take care of her
.
For as long as I live, I'll have to live with the look in her eyes when I gave her a bus ticket back to North Carolina and dropped her off at the Greyhound Station. I don't know if she took that bus, but I know that I lost her back then. I wish I could go back and talk to that girl. To tell her that today, after four years of being clean, I am ready to be the mother she wanted. Maybe I still can make things right. I only hope I'm not too late
.
Luke rubbed his eyes. He looked drained.
“Those are the words of someone with a plan for the future,” I said. Then I bit my lip, wondering if I'd said
the wrong thing. Luke had every reason to be enraged at both his father and his mother. He had every reason to toss her manuscript and her memory into the garbage, along with his father's paper trail of fraud and deception.
“You're right.” Luke said, his voice weary. “I don't believe Dulcie killed herself, and if she didn't, I want to find out what really happened to her.”
I stared at him a moment. “You're really brave,” I whispered.
“You think?” he asked with a sad half-smile. “Because right now I feel scared to death.”
“Listen, Luke,” I told him, “I'm with you on this. I need to know what happened to her, too. I hadn't known her that long, but there was something â¦Â I loved her. That's as plain as I can put it. I loved the Dulcie I knew.”
Luke looked into my eyes. It seemed as if he had aged a few years in just a few hours. He took my hand. “We haven't known each other very long either,” he said softly. “But I don't know what I would have done without you tonight.”
All I could do was nod in agreement. The truth was, I was scared to death, too. Not only of what I'd find out about Dulcie, but of what I felt for Luke Silver.
“Then we're in this together?” Luke whispered in the silence.
“You don't know how together,” I breathed as I squeezed his hand back. Afraid of what I'd do if I lingered an instant longer, I let go and stood. “Now, I gotta get home by eleven, or I turn into a bagel.”
In spite of everything, he smiled. Damn, that smile felt good.
I smiled back and raced out the door.
As clueless and unfeeling as my family might be, I don't think I ever appreciated them as much as I did that night. The smell of the apartment, cigarettes, the brandy, the sound of legal chatter was more comforting than I ever dreamed it could be. I poked my head into the living room to let them know I was home and wished everyone good night.
“Sleep well, sweetheart,” my dad called after me.
If I only could have. I lay there staring at the dark ceiling, picturing Luke alone in his father's empty apartment. He had left there this morning a white boy and returned at night half Negro. How would that affect the rest of his life? Had he graduated from high school like me? Maybe â¦Â he was eighteen and a half. Which one? Was he going to college? Was it anywhere near Barnard?
The thought of not seeing him made my stomach tighten. What if the college found out about his background? Would he still be welcome?
He was still Luke to me. Still a boy I was drawn to no matter what his heritage. He was just Luke Silver. That's all he had to be for me to feel the way I felt about him. But would it change his feelings toward me? I knew that he felt something for me. But I didn't know what that something was. If it was just friendship that would be okay â¦Â not good but okay.
I shuddered, twisting, and throwing off the covers. I didn't care that his mother was colored. But others certainly would. Some would assume he'd always known and tried to “pass” for white. The difference was that I knew the truth, and so did he. What would that truth mean to him? Could he even figure that out yet?
No doubt he was tossing in his bed, unable to sleep, just as I was.
THE NEXT DAY AT
Good Music, when I heard the different writing teams cheering, I knew Bobby had posted the chart positions. At least some of the songs had moved up with a “bullet.” The bullet was a red dot next to the title, indicating it had one of the biggest gains in sales that week. The teams whose songs had fallen or stalled on the charts pretended they were happy for their palsâbut none of them were going to win any Oscars for their “happy face” performances.
Tacked to the Good Music bulletin board, next to the charts from
Cashbox
and
Billboard
, was the updated list of singer-producer teams who needed new songs. When the crowd had cleared, I checked to see if there was anybody who could possibly sing what Luke and I had written.
Leslie Gore was looking for a follow-up to “It's My Party” with Quincy Jones producing. Ruby & the Romantics were looking for another “Our Day Will Come” with Al Stanton producing. Neither was right for “I'm Glad I Did.” The rest of the singers needing material were male singers or groups. So this week was a big no.
Nobody fit our song, and our song didn't fit anybody.
But I wouldn't give up, especially not now. Part of me felt I owed it to Dulcie to see this song throughâat least the Dulcie Brown who'd brought magic to our demo. Besides, this song was still my only chance at keeping my dream alive. I knew I had to be patient. And I'd learned from Bernie that part of getting lucky was timing. I could wait.
If I played our song for Bobby too soon, it would be old to him by the time the right singer came around. Bernie's lessons in song placement strategy had not been lost on me. Namely, if Bobby liked the song, it was important for him to believe that the casting of “I'm Glad I Did” was his idea. No matter who put the song and singer together, he would eventually remember it as being his idea if it was a hit. But if he thought it was his idea
before
it was a hit, he'd make every effort to be sure it became one.
