Cafe Society: The wrong place for the Right people
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Cafe Society: The wrong place for the Right people
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Overview
Set against the drama of the Great Depression, the conflict of American race relations, and the inquisitions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Cafe Society tells the personal history of Barney Josephson, proprietor of the legendary interracial New York City night clubs Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown and their successor, The Cookery. Famously known as "the wrong place for the Right people," Cafe Society featured the cream of jazz and blues performers--among whom were Billie Holiday, boogie-woogie pianists, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, and Mary Lou Williams--as well as comedy stars Imogene Coca, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, and also gospel and folk singers. A trailblazer in many ways, Josephson welcomed black and white artists alike to perform for mixed audiences in a venue whose walls were festooned with artistic and satiric murals lampooning what was then called "high society."
Featuring scores of photographs that illustrate the vibrant cast of characters in Josephson's life, this exceptional book speaks richly about Cafe Society's revolutionary innovations and creativity, inspired by the vision of one remarkable man.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095832 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2009 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cafe Society
The Wrong Place for the Right People
By Barney Josephson, Terry Trilling-Josephson
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Terry Trilling-JosephsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09583-2
CHAPTER 1
"'Take my advice, go back to Trenton and open a shoe store that sells health shoes.'"
It was Wednesday, December 28, 1938, the opening night of my cabaret and the realization of a long-held dream. We were all set to open, everything ready—musicians, singers, comedian, waiters, bartender, hat check girl, food, liquor license nicely framed hanging on the wall, and such art as never was seen in nightclubs in this country. The room was packed with friends and relatives and friends of friends and their relatives. We were jammed with more than the legal 210 seating capacity.
Syd Hoff:There were so many celebrities there, either from the theater or from politics. In those days there were at least a half-dozen senators and congressmen who were like-minded. I don't even recall if the customers danced at all.
Jack Gilford:The whole dance floor was covered with tables. All the artists who had painted the murals were on due bills. The place was very crowded. Before I went on, Barney and his brother, Leon, called me into the office and said, "We must ask you not to get laughs tonight." "Why?" "Well, we forgot to get a cabaret license." So I went out and I got laughs because my routine was designed to get laughs. It was a funny routine. So they got a ticket from whoever was in charge of checking licenses.
I had forgotten to obtain a cabaret license. No entertainment in New York was possible without it. We had to do the show. So Jack Gilford went out anyway and opened the show. Every year on the anniversary of the opening of Cafe Society, no matter where he is, wherever he is working, be it on a movie location, television, stage, Jack sends a funny, nostalgic letter of those long-gone days, timed to arrive on December 28:
Dear Barney,
I keep telling you if you open a nightclub in New York City three days before New Year's Eve you will fail. I warn you three fat piano players will not attract business. Also a female black singer with a gardenia in her hair, a blues shouter singing about a sheik in any key, and a curly haired white comedian trying to convince audiences he looks and acts like a golf ball, will get you run out of town on a rail. Take my advice and go back to Trenton and open a shoe store that sells health shoes
Yours, Jack. December 28, 1977
After I had graduated from high school in 1919, I didn't go to college. I went into the shoe business with my oldest brother, David. We were six children, two girls and four boys. Our mother had been left a widow at the age of thirty-seven when I was about six months old. She was a talented dressmaker and slaved long, long hours to feed, clothe, and house her children. Over the years the family had managed to save enough money to buy a house. Mother bought one with two mortgages. As soon as one mortgage was lifted, Dave got another mortgage to start what was to become the most elegant shoe store in Trenton, New Jersey.
Dave spoke to me, "Look, Barney, you know you're not the greatest student. We have two lawyers in the family now. I don't think you're quite smart enough to make it in medicine. But you're one hell of a good businessman and I need you in my business. Come in. When you're twenty-one I'll give you a third interest in the place."
The year when Dave made that proposition to me our shoe business showed a profit of $75,000. That was an awful lot of money at that time. And I would have a third interest, $25,000 a year, plus my living expenses. I would not have to touch the $25,000. I could save the entire amount each year. There was no income tax. I figured that by the time I would be thirty, I would be in a position to retire, I would have so much money.
I took over part of the buying. There was a shoe building in New York City on 34th Street and 6th Avenue known as the Marbridge Building. Manufacturers from all over the country had sample showrooms for shoe buyers who would come in to look over their lines, going from showroom to showroom. I would come over from Trenton because we used to do our buying almost weekly. We'd do our heavy buying from season to season, but there would always be fill-ins and new styles coming out. I would select the styles and sizes, but not from stock. The shoes were all made with our specifications. I would look at a sample shoe made in patent leather, "Well, I want that style, but I don't want that 'last,' meaning the shape. I want a rounder toe. I don't want a French heel. It's not for my clientele. I want a Cuban heel." I would pick from their swatches the exact shade of brown, blue, whatever, that I wanted. Dave relied on my taste, on my judgment.
I loved jazz. We were not a musical family in that we played any musical instruments. We didn't have money to buy them or pay for lessons. But we did have a record player. No radio. Mother played songs of famous Yiddish singers. I listened to jazz. Dave and Leon would bring me records, presents for their baby brother. They weren't interested. As a youngster I had become involved in what was then known as Negro liberation, and from that I got to jazz.
Being an out-of-town buyer, the salesmen would entertain me. "Where would you like to go?" "I wouldn't mind hearing Duke Ellington," who was playing at the Cotton Club on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. He was about my age and already a big band leader. Ethel Waters was a star singer at the Cotton Club. There was a chorus line and variety and tap dance acts. We'd go to Small's Paradise or Connie's Inn at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, owned by the mobster Connie Immerman. These were the three most popular clubs in Harlem.
During the thirteen years of Prohibition [1920–33], speakeasies, established and controlled by organized crime, sprang up, selling their bootleg booze to any and all, effectively breaking down existing social barriers. The so-called social register set mingled not only with the hoi polloi but with people of color. Rules were rewritten. Issues of race and class were obscured for booze and a good time.
The years after World War I saw a flowering of African American literature, music, dance, and the arts. Known as the Harlem Renaissance, it lasted through the middle of the 1930s' depression. In 1903 a book, The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois, had laid the foundation for the renaissance. Dr. Du Bois wrote that black equality could be achieved led by an educated black elite teaching pride in their African cultural heritage. African Americans brought their jazz and blues to the speakeasies and jazz clubs.
Prohibition ended in 1933 and so did speakeasies when Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment. Some took on new faces and became fashionable nightclubs, like the Cotton Club, owned by a mobster, Owney "The Killer" Madden. In his early twenties he had served nine years of a twenty-year sentence in Sing Sing for killing another mobster over a woman. He had a deserved reputation for ruthlessness. It was known he rarely appeared at the club—had an unholy fear of publicity.
The Cotton Club was an enormous horseshoe-shaped room on two levels, seating over six hundred people, with small tables surrounding the dance floor and banquettes along the walls. The name Cotton Club alluded to the slaves toiling in the cotton fields down South; its jungle decor with artificial palm trees, a travesty. All their entertainers were Negro, but no Negro customers were allowed in the place. Duke Ellington couldn't have his mother come in to hear him play, in a manner of speaking. The greatest black celebrity could not enter as a patron. Or the exception was carefully screened before being allowed in and then only to be seated in the back near the kitchen or given the worst seating behind the columns—kept separate. To keep out the "undesirables," prices were exorbitant. A fifth of Scotch cost $18. To dance in the chorus line you had to be "high yaller"—"tall, tan and terrific" as the girls were advertised. The bandstand remained segregated. Black and white musicians were not allowed to perform together. Well, all this outraged me.
I would go to a club midtown called the Kit-Kat Club somewhere on the East Side in the Fifties, which stayed open until seven or eight in the morning and featured Negro talent. But the entertainment, if it was black, was all black. No mixing. The only time black and white musicians would play together in public would be in some small Harlem night spot. As more and more clubs began offering jazz in midtown they were not permitted legally to bar black patrons. But they could make it so uncomfortable that black people simply stayed away.
Colin Allen:This was before Barney started Cafe Society. A friend of mine was a bartender at the Venetian Bar on Lexington Avenue a few blocks from 42nd Street. The policy there was that they would serve a black person at the bar. But when he finished his drink they would break the glass to let him know he wasn't welcome.
Wherever I went there was no Negro patronage. I thought, "Look what they're doing to these people. The only unique thing that we possess culturally in this country is the music the Negro people have given to us, our only indigenous art form. Gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll, all originated from the spirituals and slave songs down South. Everything else was brought over from Europe."
Well, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front, a club whose stated advertised policy would be just that. There wasn't, so far as I know, a place like that in New York, or in the whole country for that matter.
And—above all—I wanted a political cabaret. When I had started thinking in terms of a cabaret here, one of the most important reasons I wanted to open one, which I kept secret, was to have a political cabaret such as I had seen in Europe. This was my true purpose. Yes, I wanted a club that would be a showcase for our uniquely American music. But it wasn't that I wanted only jazz. I wanted to make a statement, to make a social and political commentary. So I dreamed I would come to this big city and open my own kind of cabaret.
Then there was another thing about it all. I was a young businessman. I saw the way the clubs were operated. They were all run by the mob. I don't know of one that wasn't. The Copacabana, El Morocco on East 44th Street, the Versailles, La Martinique, all racketeer-financed and controlled. Sherman Billingsley, proprietor of that society hangout, the Stork Club on East 53rd Street, was a terrible snob, an anti-Semite and anti-Negro. He had started out as a bootlegger and could never have made it without his gangster affiliations.
As soon as you would enter these places and looked around you could pick out the bouncers. They would have these great big brutes standing there, ready to toss you out first thing if you got out of line, drank too much, said anything that created a disturbance. They used all kinds of gimmicks to cheat their customers, trick glasses that looked big and roomy but really held maybe half a jigger of whiskey. Those things would happen often enough.
I said to myself, "The nightclub is a business like every business, why can't it be run like a business? Instead they run it like any racket in which they have an interest. They don't give you a decent drink of whiskey. They don't serve decent food. They push you around. One of these days I'd like to open one of these places and run it like a business." So I had the notion.
But our shoe business was very successful and I was making a lot of money for a kid of my age, so I didn't do anything then. We had the quality shoe store in the town. My brother, Dave, opened a second shop and leased a department in a ready-to-wear shop as well. There were now three places in which we were selling shoes in this small town. And I was part of this with my brother.
The Great Depression, and Dave got caught—forced into bankruptcy, forced to close our shoe store. After Mother passed away in 1935 there was nothing to keep me in Trenton. I became a clerk and buyer in a shoe store in Atlantic City, living in a $4 a week room, eating in Bayliss's drug store across the street from the store. I trimmed the windows, did the buying, sold the shoes, fitted them. If there was a complaint, I handled it. I did all the orthopedic corrections, metatarsal pads, arch supports, wedges on heels for our shoemaker to put on. I had gone to orthopedic school to learn all about feet when I was with Dave.
It was coming on spring 1937 when my brother, Leon, telephoned me in Atlantic City. "Kid, quit your job. You're coming to New York. You're going to open your nightclub that you've been dying to open." "With what?" "I've got with what for you."
I quit my job. Leon knew my dream. We were very, very close brothers. My boss, who had been a shoe clerk in our store in Trenton, had opened his own shop in Atlantic City. I'm working for him now where he used to work for us. Our roles were reversed.
"Barney," he said. "You'll regret the day you walked out on me. You'll be sorry. You'll be wanting this job back. You're making a big mistake to leave." He was so angry. I walked out, and I took a train to New York. I had seven dollars and sixty-odd cents in my pocket. The country was still deep in the Great Depression. I never went back to Atlantic City.
Leon had a couple of friends in New York who had a little money, businessmen. Leon had borrowed $3,000 from each of them, a total of $6,000. He handed the money to me. "Go, open your nightclub."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cafe Society by Barney Josephson, Terry Trilling-Josephson. Copyright © 2009 Terry Trilling-Josephson. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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