10 The Memory Lingers On
Everything changes; nothing stays the same. It has been over a half a century since the Cotton Club opened in Harlem, and nearly that long since Harlem had its heyday. It is hard to identify the sites of the hot Harlem nightspots of the twenties today. Barron Wilkins’ Exclusive Club, after going through various metamorphoses as the Theatrical Grill and the Red Pirate, is now Roy Campanella, Inc., a liquor store. The site of Connor’s Cafe enjoyed brief success as Murray’s Roseland, a Harlem version of the Broadway dance hall, in the late twenties. By the mid-sixties, the entire block had been demolished. The Nest Club became a warehouse. Of the Harlem “Big Three” of Prohibition times, only Small’s Paradise remains. Now it is Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise, a small bar with minor entertainment, owned by Wilt Chamberlain. The former Connie’s Inn site, occupied after the lmmermans moved downtown by the Ubangi Club and Birdland, is now Hilda’s Admiral Cafe.
The Harlem Cotton Club site remained vacant for a number of years after the club’s downtown move. Around 1939 the downstairs section of the original Douglas Casino was converted into the Golden Gate Ballroom, where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., held his first meeting to mobilize the people of Harlem to boycott neighborhood stores that refused to hire Blacks; where, in September 1941, he announced his intention to be the first Black candidate ever to run for New York’s City Council; and where, on December 17, 1944, a huge gathering of Harlemites sent off to Washington, D.C., the nation’s first Black congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In 1945 a new Club Sudan opened in the upstairs section of the Douglas Casino, where the Cotton Club was located. It featured Andy Kirk’s orchestra. Delano Village, a middle income private housing development, now occupies the site.
As for the Broadway Cotton Club site, two years after the Cotton Club closed, on April Fool’s night, 1942, Lou Walters opened the Latin Quarter there.
The Cotton Club people, after the club closed went their separate ways. Some remained in show business; others did not. Some were successful; others were not. Some are dead; some still live and work today. Despite their long association with organized crime, the owners and managers, Owney Madden, George “Big Frenchy” DeMange, Herman Stark, never met the fate of many mobsters. All died of natural causes and enjoyed lives of comparative respectability.
All of the Cotton Club bands were well established by the time the club closed, and Ellington and Calloway are names as familiar today as they were back in the thirties. Ellington was still accepting bookings and had just completed his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, when he died in 1974, leaving a legacy of some 6,000 original compositions. Cab Calloway remains active, and while his age and changing times have led to the dissolution of his “hide-ho” reputation, he is still one of the most energetic band leaders around. Louis Armstrong lived on to be one of the most loved entertainers in the world, universally mourned when he died in 1973. Jimmie Lunceford died tragically on July 13, 1947, much too young. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have achieved a fame comparable to that of Ellington or Calloway or Armstrong. But although Lunceford is dead, he is by no means forgotten. His trumpeter, Sy Oliver, formed his own seven-piece group and kept the Lunceford-Oliver style alive. In July of 1975, on the occasion of the anniversary of Lunceford’s death, New York’s Rainbow Room featured the Oliver group in a month-long tribute to Lunceford and his celebrated band.
Ivy Anderson, who joined Ellington’s band as female vocalist in 1929, remained with the band for thirteen years, until the summer of 1 942. Actually, she had wanted to leave for some time. Ivy’s Chicken Shack, a restaurant she had started in Los Angeles, was doing well, and she wanted to supervise the operation. After a few years, however, lonely for the stage, she returned with a solo act. She, too, died young, at the age of forty-five, in a Los Angeles apartment building managed by her husband, Robert Collins.
Harold Arlen is dead as well, but his life and career were long and successful. His list of compositions is extraordinary, but he avoided publicity to such a degree that he was always a sort of “unknown celebrity.” Few who are not music buffs realize that he wrote, among other songs, “That Old Black Magic,” “One for My Baby,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “The Man That Got Away” and “Right as the Rain,” or that he did the score for both The Wizard of Oz, including “Over the Rainbow,” and A Star Is Born, Judy Garland’s comeback film. It is impossible to imagine American popular music without Harold Arlen.
Only one of the Dandridge Sisters achieved stardom. “From the earliest days, members of the [Cotton Club] company told me that I should be outside the trio and on my own,” Dorothy Dandridge later recalled, and eventually she became a star in films, among them Porgy and Bess. She is best known for her “tragic mulatto” roles, which were echoed, too dramatically, in her own life. She died in September 1965 at the age of forty-two. Her death certificate listed as the cause of death “acute drug intoxication.”
After leaving the Cotton Club, Dorothy Fields, whose father had been against a career in show business for her, climbed to the top. She went on to write the lyrics for “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Exactly Like You,” “Don’t Blame Me” and “I Won’t Dance,” as well as the words to the entire score of the Broadway musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Besides Jimmy McHugh, she collaborated with Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen. She and Kern won an Academy Award in 1936 for “The Way You Look Tonight,” which they wrote for Swing Time. When she died, in March 1974, at the age of sixty-eight, she was up for a Tony Award for her work with composer Cy Coleman on the musical Seesaw.
Sonny Greer, Duke Ellington’s famed drummer, was forced to retire from show business in the fifties due to the illness of his wife, Millicent, a former Cotton Club Girl.
Lena Horne, like Ellington, Calloway and Armstrong, needs little in the way of further identification. She became, and remains, a superstar. One of the frequent topics of discussion when her name is mentioned is her age, for she is as beautiful now as she was when she was hired at the Cotton Club in 1933. There is much speculation about her age, but if, as she said, she was “about sixteen” when she came to the Cotton Club in 1933, in 1976 she was about fifty-eight.
Bill Robinson died in November 1949, but his memory lives on. While he left no songs like an Ellington or an Arlen, he left a presence that is still felt today and is expressed in the song “Mr. Bojangles.”
Clarence Robinson, manager of the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia when Duke Ellington was playing there and the Cotton Club wanted him, and later choreographer and director at the club itself, is still active. In July 1975, he was at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Ethel Waters has become a legend. The fat, good-natured, dignified and all-knowing strong-Black-woman characters she now plays are so ingrained in the American mind that it is hard for many to imagine that she once sang adult “torch songs” in Harlem dives. She became as beloved, in her field, as Louis Armstrong did in his.
Elida Webb, choreographer at the Cotton Club until 1934 served as choreographer for Running Wild. She married Garfield Dawson, known as “The Strutter” and an active dancer until his retirement in 1973 when he was eighty-one. Two years later, on May 1, 1975, Elida Webb Dawson died at the age of seventy-nine.
Being individuals first and entertainers second, before and sometimes after being at the Cotton Club, most remember it with bitterness or fondness. But they do not dwell on it. Those who were part of the group then associated forever after the club with the group. For the Cotton Club Boys and Girls, the Cotton Club was like a school, and after the club closed they regrouped periodically, like the alumni classes of a high school or college.
After the Cotton Club closed, the Cotton Club Boys remained together for about a year. They toured with Cab Calloway for six months, then together as an independent unit, giving their last show at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. Fourteen years after the closing of the Cotton Club, the Boys, who started at $45 a week and were making $125 six years later when the club closed, held a reunion at the Club Sudan. Intending to comprise all the Cotton Club Boys, from the time the group was formed until the Broadway club closed, they were shy four members. Roy Carter had died in 1934, just a few months after the group was formed. Al Alstock died of tuberculosis in 1937. Ernest Frazier also died of tuberculosis, in 1949, and in 1950 Walter Shepherd died.
Of the Cotton Club Boys who reunited in 1954, only one had remained in show business steadily. Charlie Atkins went on to teach at the Katherine Dunham School and to dance professionally with Honey Coles, who in 1975 was with Harlem’s famed Apollo Theatre. Jimmy Wright and Tommy Porter did occasional television and radio roles for a while, but the former Cotton Club Boys seemed to have become primarily bartenders and salesmen. Jules Adger, considered the lady-killer of the line, went to law school, completing his studies at St. John’s University in 1955. Maxie Armstrong, after sporadic postwar night-club work, became a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service. William Smith, at the time of the reunion, was a swimming instructor at the Harlem YMCA. Eddie Morton became a bartender and moved to Detroit. Roy “Chink” Porter, who replaced Tommy Porter in the line in 1937, owned and operated a bar in Harlem. Freddie Heron worked at Harlem’s Silver Rail Bar, and Warren Coleman also operated his own bar in Harlem.
The Cotton Club Girls also had reunions, although those who attended them were primarily the ones who had, voluntarily or involuntarily, left show business when the Cotton Club closed. One exception was the former Edna Mae Holly, who married Sugar Ray Robinson, and who rarely failed to attend one of the many reunions. Altogether, some 150 girls worked in the Cotton Club chorus line. Some married stars or important men: Isabel Washington, who became the first Mrs. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; Edna Mae Holly; Lucille Wilson, who married Louis Armstrong; and Peggy Griffiths, whose light skin color aroused much controversy over her racial identity and who married a wealthy New Jersey lawyer.
Others continued to work, but rarely in show business. Tondelayo, who started in the line and later became an exotic dancer specialty act, opened Tondelayo’s Melody Room in Harlem, employing Margaret Cheraux, another former Cotton Club Girl, as a cashier. Mildred Dixon, who was divorced from Duke Ellington in 1939, went to work in 1945 as office manager for a sheet-music publishing firm. Hyacinth Curtis worked for a while at the Club Zanzibar after the Cotton Club closed, and then toured with the USO before becoming a dental technician. Evelyn Sheppard married a Harlem bar owner, Jack Fuller. Carolyn Rich Henderson became a salesgirl in a Fifth Avenue shop. Ethel Sissie divorced band leader Noble Sissle and married an attorney in Los Angeles named Walter Gordon, Jr. Maudine Simmons married Chicago Brass Rail owner Nelson Sykes.
In October 1948, several of the girls who had maintained close contact with each other since the club folded, decided to start an association of all the girls who had ever worked in the Cotton Club chorus or as showgirls. Response to the idea was very favorable, and the group that was formed was named the Cotton Club Girls Association, Inc. The officers: Hyacinth Curtis, president; Juanita Boisseau, vice-president; Carolyn Rich Henderson, secretary; Billye Schwab, treasurer; and Vivian Jackson, chargé d’affaires. They held reunions, to which males who had been associated with the Cotton Club were of course invited, and maintained a newsletter to inform members of each other’s activities.
Such associations helped keep memories vivid for those who were associated with the club. But over the years the Cotton Club has been kept alive in the minds of the general public through a series of “revivals” of the famous Cotton Club shows. Called Cotton Club Revues, they have often featured the talents who worked at the Cotton Club. Cab Calloway has initiated and starred in a number of them; Clarence Robinson has directed and/or choreographed several; and Benny Davis, minus J. Fred Coots, has staged and developed some. In 1976 Bubbling Brown Sugar, a musical recalling the Cotton Club era and seeming to have taken its name from the club’s 1930 show, Brown Sugar—Sweet, But Unrefined, opened on Broadway, featuring dancer Avon Long. Cotton Club Revues have also provided showcases for young talents who never knew the Cotton Club. Comedian George Kirby, dancer Lonnie Satin and singer Denise Rogers have, over the years, received needed exposure, and in 1957 a young singer named Abbey Lincoln sang “The Battle of Jericho” in a Revue that headlined Cab Calloway. Some older talents who never saw the inside of the Cotton Club have also benefited from the drive to keep the club alive in America’s mind. Redd Foxx headlined one of the Revues in 1961 and was praised in Variety for his clever and rapid delivery, although it was pointed out that he too often crossed the “pornographic border.”
The Revues have tried to recapture the mood, the feeling, of the Old Cotton Club, and many of the featured tunes are those that were made famous at the club. In a sense, it is difficult to understand their attraction and success, for the Cotton Club is of another time, of an era in which an entirely different mood prevailed. But places frequented by “the beautiful people” never lose their attraction, and there are few similar spots in American history that have produced the formidable array of talent and creative material that came out of the Cotton Club.
