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The Producer
JOHN HAMMOND AND THE SOUL OF AMERICAN MUSIC
By Dunstan Prial FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
Copyright © 2006 Dunstan Prial
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-374-11304-1
Chapter One
THE BASEMENT ON EAST NINETY-FIRST STREET
In a home fit for a king, John Henry Hammond, Jr., found sanctuary in the basement with the servants. It was always warm and cozy down there, and the servants, usually so stiff and formal upstairs, laughed and joked with the boy when he came downstairs to visit them. But, as Hammond would recall, both in his memoirs and in countless interviews, the main attraction, the thing that drew him downstairs again and again, was the music. The year was 1918, and among the songs the seven-year-old boy heard on the servants' battered old Grafonola was Sir Harry Lauder's raucous "Roamin' in the Gloamin'." It became his favorite song, and he learned every word. "Music, especially music on records, entered my life early to become the catalyst for all that was to happen to me," he wrote many years later. "In the grooves of those primitive early discs I found in my house, I discovered a new world, one I could enter easily and as often as I pleased simply by winding the handle of a phonograph."
It wasn't as if the rest of the family disliked music. To the contrary, music was a constant presencethroughout the house. It was just that Hammond didn't like the music the rest of the family was listening to. On the upper floors of the Hammonds' majestic five-story mansion just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the boy's mother, father, and four older sisters listened to the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso, as well as to standard classics by Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. The music wafted like a soothing breeze up and down marble staircases and in and out of oak-paneled rooms. A brand-new Victrola record player, the latest advancement in early-twentieth-century audio technology, ensured the highest-quality sound. It was enough to make the boy more than a little sleepy.
Down in the basement, the mood was decidedly more upbeat. According to Hammond's sister Rachel Breck, John was often found perched on a chair in the corner of the servants' quarters, his feet dangling well above the ground, one toe tapping instinctively to the bouncy rhythms of the early blues and jazz records favored by the mostly black household staff. Hammond himself would often recall his fascination with the servants' emotional response to the music, which ranged from laughter to tears, or perhaps an impromptu dance. It was, he said, his first exposure to the visceral power that popular music could wield.
When John Hammond, Jr., was born on December 15, 1910, the Hammond family lived in one of the more spectacular private homes in Manhattan. The Hammonds-John; his mother, Emily; his father, John senior; and four older sisters (Rachel was three years older, Alice five years older, Adele seven years older, and Emily nine years older)-resided at 9 East Ninety-first Street in a limestone mansion located a half block to the east of Central Park between Fifth and Madison avenues, an area that remains to this day one of the most exclusive in the world. Mrs. Hammond's sister, Florence Adele Sloane Burden, lived with her family in equally grand accommodations next door. The girls had received matching mansions as wedding presents. John Hammond's cousin Frederick Field, who grew up in a Vanderbilt-funded mansion on Fifth Avenue a few blocks south, would later note acidly that the Hammond and Burden homes "boasted an elegant feature which our house lacked: a drive-in entrance so that you could walk into the house from your coach or automobile without exposure to the stares of the less privileged."
The Hammond mansion was designed to re-create the ambience of a European château. No extravagance was overlooked: eighteen-foot ceilings and marble stairways, paneled walls and gilded moldings, rooms furnished with heavy damask curtains, crystal chandeliers, tapestries, and Oriental rugs. A suite of reception rooms on the second floor included a library, a ballroom, and a music room that could hold as many as three hundred guests. The suite was often filled to capacity with Mrs. Hammond's society friends, who came to hear duets performed by John on violin and his mother on piano. Elevators were located in the front and rear of the home, but the children were cautioned to use them sparingly. John Hammond, Sr., issued frequent reminders that each ride cost twenty-five cents in electricity.
The museum-like surroundings were more than a little oppressive. "You had to have a sense of humor about it while growing up in these luxurious surroundings or else you could go a little crazy," said Rachel Breck. The home also included a regulation-size squash court on the fourth floor with a balcony for spectators and a locker room where players could change into their athletic togs. Instead of squash, the Hammond sisters used it for roller-skating and as an impromptu art gallery after an afternoon of painting.
Because the home was a gift from his wealthy in-laws, John Hammond, Sr., always considered the mansion something of an embarrassment. "It was one more reminder that he was married to a wealthy woman and expected to live in a house he could never have afforded to buy himself," John Hammond, Jr., observed many years after his father's death. While the father may have had little say over his family's living arrangements, or even the furnishings of their house, he was determined to raise his children how he saw fit. And he was adamant that his brood not fall into the vicious cycle of idleness and extravagance that sent a handful of his Vanderbilt in-laws into early graves.
A principled and hardworking man, John senior dedicated himself both to his family and to helping maintain the Vanderbilt fortune in his various roles as banker, lawyer, and railroad executive. One of six children, he was born in 1870 in Louisville, Kentucky, to a Civil War hero. After the war, the family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where General Hammond became a land speculator. As a teenager, John Hammond, Sr., won scholarships to Phillips Exeter Academy, then to Yale, where as a sophomore in 1889 he learned that his father had died unexpectedly. Despite his being the younger of the two Hammond sons by about a year, John senior took on the role of head of the family even as he earned a law degree from Columbia University.
Family pictures taken when he was in his mid- to late thirties reveal a handsome man just under six feet with a bit of a paunch and light brown hair that gradually receded into baldness. As a respected lawyer and executive, John senior rose each morning, took a carriage down Fifth Avenue to his law offices in lower Manhattan, and stopped most nights on the way home for a cocktail-a man apparently comfortable in his role as a Gilded Age captain of industry.
In the summer of 1919, when John Hammond, Jr., was eight, the family boarded a private railroad car in New York and headed west. John's father had been asked by the board of the New York Central, the huge railroad founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, which he served as a director, to determine whether the company needed a spur across the northern region of the Grand Canyon. Determined that his children should share in the experiences common to children outside the family's rarified circles, John senior brought the whole family along, ostensibly to expose them to the hardships of Western travel.
"Hardship" is a relative term, of course. The Hammonds' private car included lavishly upholstered living quarters and a huge master bedroom for the mother and father. The first stop west of Chicago was St. Louis, where a handful of railroad executives and their wives, all of them dressed in their summer finest, anxiously waited for the wealthy family from New York. Rachel Breck, who was twelve at the time, recalled the thermometer hitting 112 degrees that day. "The only way to cool off the car was to open all the windows," she remembered. "But that allowed in all the soot and dust from outside, and the family all wound up hot and filthy." The crowd gasped when the Hammonds stepped off the train looking as if they'd ridden the last hundred miles on horseback.
From St. Louis, the family continued west across the Great Plains and into Utah, where they swam in the Great Salt Lake, then headed into the picturesque desert just north of the Grand Canyon. Since the area was federal land that had only recently been opened to the public, there were no lodging facilities available, requiring the family to sleep on cots inside Army tents. The children all responded with gusto except for John, who remained aloof throughout the trip, expressing no interest in roughing it like the cowboys of lore. In his autobiography, he wrote that the only part of the trip that had any lasting impact on him occurred during a stop in the southern Utah mining town of Kanab. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Hammond was reading a Sunday-school lesson to the girls, the boy discovered a player piano at the inn where the family was staying. Incredibly, the piano somehow emulated the sound of a banjo. "I ran to the piano to find out how this was done and discovered that the instrument had been manufactured by Wing & Son of New York," he later recalled. "I took off the front panel and there was a row of little jangles which the piano hammers struck when the middle pedal was depressed. I thought that piano was the most intriguing instrument I had ever heard."
The trip further exposed a growing rift in the household. The father and his daughters seemed tolerant of life's foibles, more willing to let go and have a little fun than the mother and son. "I was very much like my father," Rachel Breck recalled. "I love peace and quiet and I hate arguments and fights. John lived to be a critic of every kind. Even when he was tiny, he would go to church with Mother, who was very religious and very intense, and he would say when, literally, he was about four or five, 'Mother, how can you take me to a church where the first soprano was singing off-key?'"
In his autobiography, Hammond recalled an uneasy distance between him and his father and cited the forty-year difference in age as the primary cause. His sisters believed the emotional chasm had everything to do with their brother's strong artistic inclinations. The elder Hammond was an eminently practical man; his son was almost defiantly impractical.
The boy's love of "race" or "popular" music set him apart from his sisters from an early age, and his mother encouraged his curiosity, initiating violin lessons well before Hammond reached his teens. His sister Rachel recalled playing with the other wealthy children who lived in the neighborhood, sometimes tossing balls from rooftop to rooftop. Her little brother usually went off on his own, absorbed in his music, usually the blues and jazz he was hearing in the basement. "My sisters and I always said that John grew up in a different house than we did. He saw the house from such a different point of view than all of us. It was extraordinary. We wouldn't have known that we grew up in the same place."
Musical curiosity turned to passion, and passion soon bordered on obsession, a predicament that sometimes led to conflicts between the children. There was the time the boy's collection of piano rolls disappeared while he was away at camp, for example. Hammond, an avid collector before he reached his teens, also began collecting the piano rolls that were inserted into a player piano located on the fourth floor of the family home. According to Hammond's version of the story, he spent the summer of 1921, when he was ten years old, at the Lone Pine Camp in the woods of New England. Left behind in Manhattan was an "irreplaceable" collection of piano rolls by such keyboard luminaries as Lem Fowler, James P. Johnson, and Fats Waller. When Hammond returned from camp at the end of the summer, he was horrified to learn that his sister Rachel had given the rolls away to the Salvation Army. "It broke my heart, but she just didn't appreciate their value. She understood her strange little brother no better than her sisters," he recounted. Eight decades later, Rachel Breck disputed her brother's version of the story. As she tells it, the fire department arrived for an inspection one day while her brother was away. The inspector told Mrs. Hammond that the stacks of loose piano rolls created a fire hazard and something needed to be done. Mrs. Hammond solved the problem by giving the rolls away to charity.
None of the Hammond sisters was musically inclined, and their father was tone-deaf. Emily Hammond and her son, meanwhile, were passionate about music.
Hammond also inherited from his mother a blunt sense of self-righteousness. When he thought he was right, nothing could persuade him otherwise. And, like any passionate crusader, he came to think that if you weren't with him you were against him. Emily Hammond and her son "lived on another plane," according to Rachel Breck. "They were gifted in their own way, and they were privileged in their own way, and because they could afford to be their own person, I believe, maybe they didn't see the world as realistically as perhaps it is."
Emily Vanderbilt Sloane Hammond was the great-granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt, who at his death in 1877 was by far the richest man on earth. Emily's mother was Emily Thorn Vanderbilt, the daughter of the Commodore's oldest son and primary heir, William Henry Vanderbilt. Notwithstanding the Commodore's penchant for referring to him as a "blatherskite," William, or Billy as he was known, doubled his family's fortune in the ten years after his father's death. But if Emily Sloane ever feared that her Vanderbilt inheritance wasn't enough to sustain the lifestyle to which she was accustomed, she could always tap into the fortunes of her father's family. William Douglas Sloane, John Hammond's maternal grandfather, had earned the right to marry a Vanderbilt girl by being born into the family that founded the upscale W. & J. Sloane carpet and furniture retail chain, furnisher of many of New York's most luxurious Gilded Age mansions.
Like most rich families of that era, the Hammonds split their time between the city and a country home in Westchester County about thirty miles north of New York City. The property was a working farm with barns for dozens of Guernsey cows, as well as poultry houses for chickens and several acres for vegetable gardens. But John, who suffered from severe allergies, was a city child from his earliest days and was always happiest on the tiny bustling island of Manhattan. There were no antihistamines in those days, and allergy sufferers did just that-suffered. So instead of joining the family in tennis, track and field, and swimming, he hid away in his room on the top floor of the huge home listening to records on his private Grafonola, even in winter when the room was unheated.
By the time Emily Sloane married John Hammond, Sr., on April 7, 1899, at the age of twenty-four, she was already a "prodigious woman ... considered odd by her friends, terribly earnest and undaunted by any challenge," as her son would later describe her. "When she wanted to do something, she did it even though it was often difficult and sometimes strongly resented." Growing up, Emily shunned the debutante balls and endless society gatherings that permeated the lives of her girlfriends. Emily's idea of a good time was playing the piano at Sunday school. Family members recall how in Lenox, at the Vanderbilts' country home in western Massachusetts, the teenage Emily would haul herself up onto a stump in the woods and preach sermons to her brothers and sisters.
Emily Hammond's faith was always a driving force in her life, and members of her family were prominent among the upper crust of Protestant clergy in New York City. Her first cousin Henry Sloane Coffin gained a reputation as a forceful speaker and an eloquent writer while leading the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1905 to 1926. He later served for twenty years as president of the Union Theological Seminary, a repository for distinguished liberal theologians, where he fought for improved educational opportunities for immigrants and equal rights for women and blacks. Coffin was eventually elected moderator of the General Assembly, the highest position within the American Presbyterian Church.
In stark contrast to many of her Vanderbilt relatives, who attended church each week in their Sunday finest, Emily was fiery, not ostentatious, in her religious practice. "We prayed every morning on our knees as a family to make the world a better place," one of her daughters recalled. Religion offered Emily an opportunity to assuage her apparent guilt at being arbitrarily born into such wealth and splendor while just a few blocks away the poor and unwashed masses lived in squalor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Producer by Dunstan Prial Copyright © 2006 by Dunstan Prial. Excerpted by permission.
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