A Conversation with the Mann (20 page)

Sid came along, would be along for the whole tour. He told me he wanted to get out of the office, that every now and then
you've got to go shake hands with the owners and the bookers. The hidden truth: He wasn't along glad-handing, he was hand-holding.
Mine. He made the trip to be sure everything was okeydoke for me.

But I didn't need a minder. I was a professional. The three bills a week I was earning said so. Not that there weren't things
to learn. I learned when you're an opener you've got to get your audience, get 'em big and get 'em fast. The suits in the
seats didn't pay to see you, had probably never heard of you, didn't want to know you (
GUEST ACT FOR YOUR LAUGHING PLEASURE
was all the more billing I got one week). You opened, and you were just a little something to let the lobster thermidor digest
before the real action started. So with all that working against you, there was no easing into the act; there was no moseying
to your good bits. They all had to be good, and they had to be good from the first word from your mouth or you had twenty
minutes of two hundred people giving you the igg while they tried to flag a waitress to freshen their drink.

I'd open my sets with local bits—bits a comic makes seem local, like he'd actually taken the time to find out something “unique”
about the town he was playing: “Boy, you people in Nowheresville, you all drive like the speed limit is just a suggestion.
I don't want to say there's a lot of construction around here, but the state flag should be one of those orange cones.” Follow
that up with a quick platitude supporting a position nobody could argue with: “Is it just me, or is this Khrushchev cat crazy?”

Wait for the applause and whistles to die off.

Then a joke about the obvious just to keep Mr. and Mrs. White America from getting too nervous. “I guess you can tell from
looking at me … I'm a New Yorker.” Then into my bits on my relatives—nobody couldn't relate to jokes about relatives, even
though my bits were made up. Some made up. Some borrowed. Sid kept on me to write more of my own stuff. Get my own voice.
I told him I would. Eventually.

Mix in some charm with all that, plenty of personality, timing, and talent, add an olive, and you're a comic.

Each night that cocktail did me well, Buddy pulling me back up onstage and milking some extra applause out of the audience
for me. Each set I got a little more confident, and confidence was the mortar that cemented my act.

Six nights and our stand was done. On the last night I said my good-byes to Buddy, told him what a talent I thought he was
and how I'd love to work with him again.

Buddy, turning to Sid, pointing at me: “Remember that, pallie. I'll need a witness a couple of years from now when I come
looking to open for him.”

Good Guy. Nice Guy.

The following week: a two-week stand at The Latin Casino in Philly, opening for Janis Paige. She was a different kind of act
from Buddy. Slower, more mellow. Torchy in her singing. Coming hot off my week in A.C. my act was tight as a harp string.
Opening night I whipped the crowd into a stir Janis had to work to follow and even at that didn't follow very well. The next
day Sid came 'round to tell me that Janis's guy had come 'round to tell him to ask me if maybe I couldn't tone things down
some. And Sid added that Janis's guy told him to tell me that Janis was asking me in the kind of way that would get me asked
right out of the club if I didn't comply.

Something else I was learning: As opener you could be as good as you pleased just so long as you weren't better than the name
on the marquee.

The next night I took a dive. I was subduedly humorous, and I was that way the next four nights, twice on Friday and Saturday,
and the same the week after.

Philly done, me and Sid trained our way to Cleveland, where we did a week at the Empire. After that we railed it up to Milwaukee
for an eight-show stand at the Riverside.

Five weeks.

Thirty-five days.

I was noticing something. The nights, after the shows, sometimes I would notice myself feeling … depressed is how I guess
I would call it. Having a club full of people laugh at you, clap for you, is a high hard to come down from. It's not made
any easier spending the dark hours by yourself staring at the bad art hung on the wall of your hotel room. After being loved,
the empty room had a way of making you feel all the more lonely. There was Sid to spend time with, but Sid, friend that he
was, wasn't what I needed to keep me lifted. There was liquor, but that was a habit I didn't want to learn. There was Tommy.
As often as I thought of her, after a show, lying on a bed, staring at a ceiling, I thought of her all the more. Thinking
of her was a tease that made me desire her voice. And calling her, hearing her voice … that just made me feel lonely all over
again. Sometimes, when I got that way, I would allow myself half a drink, then some sleep. If I was lucky, Tommy is what I'd
dream of.

After Milwaukee was Chicago opening for Vic Damone, the Jr. Sinatra, at the St. Clair. His wife, that looker of an Italian
actress, was in attendance every night. And every night, as her husband sang, she would cry nearly out of control. She must've
really been crazy for the cat.

I worked those Chicago shows. Worked them hard. I honed and trimmed my act. Made it tight, then got it tighter. I was a fighter
at camp. That week in Chicago was my last week before hitting Miami, before taking a shot at getting into the Copa by way
of the Fontaine-bleau.

It would also be the last week in my life of never having been almost lynched.

M
IAMI WAS A JEWEL
, a vacation paradise split between art deco hotels and beach resorts. Home to the rich, retreat of the stars, playground
to anyone with dough enough to toss around. Miami was Hollywood east. Vegas with shoreline. Glitz, glamour, surf, and sun.

And it was territory to some of the biggest white trash, pecker-wood, black-haters in all of America. And why shouldn't it
be? Florida is as far south as south in America gets. Virginia, the Car-olinas; Florida is below them. Mississippi, Alabama;
you still got some southward traveling to do before you hit Florida. Florida is straight down.

So is Hell.

The similarity didn't come to me until much later.

From the moment Sid and I stepped off the train the signs of racism were all around. Literally, WHITES ONLY. COLOREDS NOT
ALLOWED. A pleasant one written up:
NO DOGS, NO NIGGERS.

They'd take dogs before they'd take blacks.

There were other signs, subtle, but obvious: the way some blacks walked the hectic station head down and gaze turned so as
not to risk locking eyes with a white; an innocent act so often confused with being uppity, defiant, and in need of being
taught a couple of things. The few blacks who did speak with whites started every sentence with “Suh” and ended them the same.

In a nutty way, for these people, white and black alike, this way of living—the postings that told you which water fountain
and bathroom to use, the choreography of where to look and how to speak— was stricdy normal.

I was not naive. No black in America was naive to life in the South, and after my time in that logging camp I knew there were
people who couldn't hate blacks more if you'd raped their mother and shot their dog. But what was going on in Florida, it
was bigotry as a way of life. It was racism as a tradition. It wasn't hidden in a cold stare or reluctant service at a place
of business that was so slow in coming, you were long gone before it got to you. This racism was out in the open and proud
of itself.

It took me and Sid a good few minutes to flag a porter. Even though to a man they were black, when they saw me they figured
I had no money to tip with, or that if I did was too tight to part with it anyway. That's how deep Jim Crow had his hooks
in that burg: He'd taught us to hate ourselves. Finally, me standing apart from Sid, he was able to wave down a redcap to
take our bags to a cab.

Getting a taxi to take us to our hotel was a whole other adventure. Like everything else in Miami, there was black and there
was white. The white cabs—the cabs with white drivers who took white passengers—weren't about to take me anywhere, and the
colored cabs weren't allowed to take us where we wanted to go—hincty and restricted Miami Beach. Twenty dollars over the meter
paid up front got a white cab to run us to the Fontainebleau. The back door of the Fontainebleau. The only door they'd let
me in.

From there things only got all the more cuckoo.

“Your police card.”

“Police …”

Joe Fischetti was the entertainment manager of the Fontainebleau. From his hand I took the card he was holding out to me,
stared at it like if I stared at it hard enough for long enough I might be able to figure why I needed the thing.

Joe explained: “The beach area's got a curfew.”

“A curfew in a nightclub zone? That's like having restrictions on cheese at a deli.”

Joe didn't much smile at my bits. “A curfew for coloreds. You don't have a card, the police can arrest you on sight. Can and
will.”

I looked to Sid.

Sid, who'd obviously held back a few items from me concerning the Sunshine State, just shrugged and mouthed “Copa” at me.

The Copa. My reason for putting up with this nonsense.

Finishing his primer on sub-South Florida, Joe told us we'd have to work out something with the cabs. Probably get two—one
for me and one for Sid—back and forth from Miami to Miami Beach.

I told him we were already cozy with the regs regarding the transportation system.

Joe, apologetic but matter-of-fact: “I don't make the rules.”

The rules: I could work the Fontainebleau, perform at the Fontainebleau, but there was no way in hell they'd let me stay at
the Fontainebleau. Instead, I got put up at the Madison across the bridge from Miami Beach in Miami proper. Proper as in:
Away from the ritzy hotels was the proper place for coloreds to stay.

The Madison wasn't a bad joint. Wasn't a good joint, either. Leaking pipes came standard with each room. The cold water was
freezing, the hot was only warm. Housekeeping seemed to have taken the Emancipation Proclamation very seriously. Other than
that, the roaches didn't much have a problem with me moving in.

I looked to Sid, shook my head.

“The Copa,” he said to me.

The Copa was becoming my mantra.

I told Sid he didn't need to suffer staying with me, that he should go find himself a decent place on the beach.

Sid told me that rednecks weren't any bigger on Jews than they were on blacks. That gave us both a laugh. The only one of
the day.

We took a rest.

That night we got in our separate cabs, went over to the Fontainebleau, where I was opening for Mr. Mel Torme. The voice,
that
voice, the voice you know. Don't know it, get familiar with it because me describing it would be nothing but words thrown
at you. The man owned a skill and an ability and a talent that is beyond verbal description. He was to jazz and scat what
The Swoon was to standards. Mel the guy, he was a hipster. As swinging offstage as he was on. Mel didn't go in for any of
that black/white nonsense. He was cool, and cool was color-blind. One night he got into a real beef when he wanted to have
dinner with me in the hotel restaurant. The management nixed it. We settled for steak sandwiches backstage.

The shows were good. They were just about great. Maybe my best up to that time. We might have been in the heart of Crack-erville,
but crackers couldn't much afford to populate the beach hotels. Instead, we got the well-to-dos, East Coast intellectuals
and New Englander liberals come down for a few days of surf and sand. The audiences were smart, classy. In particular the
crowd Mel pulled in were hep, progressive whites catching a primer on jazz and scat to prove how broad-minded they were, plenty
receptive to the colored cat who warmed them up for it. I wished very desperately that Tommy could have been there to see
me, to see those shows. Of course, if Tommy had been there, she wouldn't have been able to see my shows because the management
wouldn't've let her into the hotel because she was black. Other than that, I think she would've been very proud of her man.

Saturday night. Last night of the stand. Late. Second show done and backstage meal downed by Sid, Mel, and me. Mel and I did
our good-bye bits before he headed up to his room. Sid and I were ready to trek back to Miami, the city of. We called the
cab company, the one black one we'd arranged to pick me up on the beach.

Sid and I waited. Sid was excited. Joe thought I was a sensation and promised to put in a word with Jules Podell at the Copa
back in New York. Well, let me tell you, that was all I needed to hear. Racist, bigoted, Jim Crowed to the eyeballs, I'd put
up with a city that was all that and more if it landed me at the Copacabana.

Sid and I waited. Excitement faded. Sid was looking end-of-the-tour tired. I told him to go on, hop a taxi, head back to the
Madison.

“A little fresh beach air isn't going to hurt me any,” he said, indicating he didn't mind waiting any.

Sid and I waited. Excitement died. I couldn't take the guilt of his slogging through the wait anymore.

“Sid, you've been with me eveiy night at every show since we hit the road, you're staying with me at that flophouse passing
for a hotel … the least you could do for me—since you're doing everything else for me—is go get some rest when I ask you.”

Sid “no” ed that, said he was fine. His drowsy eyes said otherwise.

The back-and-forth kept up until I just about pushed Sid into a taxi and sent him on his way.

I went back to waiting for my cab. A colored cab.

I kept waiting.

Fifteen minutes turned into thirty. So what? So I'd call for another cab. Only, the admiral-suited flunkies at the door weren't
about to let me back in the hotel—back in through the
front
of the hotel—no matter that the laughs from my set weren't even cold yet. Ego wouldn't let me beg my way past a couple of
uniformed Har-veys who would've been hard-pressed to scrape up the ready cash to so much as buy a ticket to catch my act.
I figured I'd take a little walk, find a phone somewhere.