Here Comes the Night (10 page)

Passman had pieces of records on Jaye P. Morgan and the DeJohn Sisters, although neither ended up doing much. He and Herbie Wasserman wrote this doofus number, “Don’t Promise Me (The Can Can Song),” that Mitch Miller did with the DeJohn Sisters, who had “(My Baby Don’t Love Me) No More” in the Top Ten the year before. The song’s publisher, Goldie Goldmark, a suspect character, always claimed he left the sheet music lying around, which is how this dame Robbin Hood ended up getting her hands on it and recording it, too. Still, when Miller got pissed off, Goldmark coughed up a thousand bucks to help him cool down. Nothing much happened with both records, so it didn’t matter to Passman and Wasserman either way.

Herbie Wasserman was a tall, spindly drummer who worked with pianist-vocalist Barbara Carroll. He and bassist Joe Shulman backed the doll who played like Bud Powell in a long-run engagement at the Embers, where the society crowd discovered her. They played in the cast of
Me and Juliet
, a Broadway musical in 1953 that also featured a young Shirley MacLaine. Carroll married Shulman the following year and, when he died only three years later, Herbie, out of a job, hooked up with Ray Passman. They cut an album with a big mama pianist and singer named Patti Bown, but got sharked out of the tape by someone faster and wiser upstairs at Columbia Records, and were both looking for a setup when they went into business with Berns.

Berns grew up around people like Passman and Wasserman, since all three of them were raised in the Bronx. The Bronx of Berns’s youth was a wondrous place, a happy haven on the slopes overlooking Manhattan where an old Italian gentleman used to take a merry-go-round door-to-door selling rides to kids in the neighborhoods. The fountain in Crotona Park behind the Borough Hall was surrounded by formal flower plantings and still called Victory Park from World War I days. Open-air trolleys and horse-drawn laundry wagons were common sights on the streets. And although the Bronx Borough Day parades down the Grand Concourse every year in June
ended in the thirties, there were still massive veterans’ parades down the broad, European-style boulevard every Memorial Day.

Landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who built Central Park, the Grand Concourse was a tree-lined boulevard six lanes wide that ran through the heart of the Bronx. The lower end was lined with art deco doorman apartment buildings built in the twenties, after the New York subway system made living in the Bronx fashionable. But it was Babe Ruth who put the Bronx on the map. Yankee Stadium opened for business in 1923 and during baseball season the Yankee home run hitter daily drew thousands of fans who had never before been to the Bronx.

The Concourse Plaza Hotel, across the street from the Bronx County Hall at 161st Street and Grand Concourse, was the social center of the borough, and while there were large Irish and Italian neighborhoods in the Bronx, the upscale Grand Concourse was Jewish. At 169th Street, in fact, three synagogues stood shoulder to shoulder. At 188th Street, just below Fordham Road, Loew’s Paradise Theater was a four-thousand-seat movie palace with a statue of St. George slaying the dragon above the clock on its impressive façade. The mahogany-paneled lobby featured an ornate marble fountain with goldfish swimming in the basin. The Italian baroque interior was a forest of columns and imitation Michelangelo statuary with a ceiling painted like the night sky with stars fashioned out of pinpoints of light. The Bronx was a world unto itself, a world in which children growing up need not dream beyond.

Bert Berns’s father, Charlie Berns, came by himself to the United States from Russia in 1912 at age twenty-one under the name Kisiel Berezovsky. He found work as a salesman in the Garment District, lugging huge bolts of cloth around all day on his shoulders. His future wife had arrived in New York at the age of two in 1901. Her older sister carried her in a basket. Charlie and Sadie were married Christmas Day 1924 at Grossinger’s, the Catskills resort where they met and would vacation every August for the rest of their lives. Owner Jennie
Grossinger gave them a silver samovar as a wedding present. Shortly thereafter, they started a little dress shop on Prospect Avenue in the East Bronx. That enterprise prospered, Depression or not, and in 1932, they opened Berns Dress Shop, next door to the sumptuous Loew’s Paradise on the Grand Concourse.

IF IT’S DIFFERENT, IT’S BERNS
read the store’s motto across the front window. They ran the finest dress shop in the Bronx. Doctors’ wives and builders’ wives from Yonkers and above shopped at Berns. Sid, as Sadie was known, was a hardworking iron woman, a self-taught seamstress and a tireless shop owner, good-looking enough to have worked as a model before her marriage. Charlie Berns was a man full of big ideas, a bit of a character. When his first son was born on November 8, 1929, he named him after the pacifist freethinker, the epitome of libertarian thought at the time, Bertrand Russell Berns.

Charlie and Sid worked day and night, from seven in the morning past midnight. They moved the family, which, two years after Bert was born, came to include a younger sister, Sylvia, to an apartment building around the corner from the shop. Like much of the Bronx, Creston Avenue was a canyon of boxy, five-story apartment buildings, although the Bernses lived in a building slightly more elegant with both an elevator and a doorman. The bare brick wall of the backside of Lowe’s took up much of the vista across the street. But the Bernses weren’t home much. Their life centered around the thriving store. The children were tended by nannies and, as soon as they were old enough, sent away to school. During summer, they went to camp. Their parents visited every Sunday. From the first of August through Labor Day every year, the dress shop would close and the family would spend the month at Grossinger’s.

Baseball loomed large for all young boys in the Bronx before World War II and Berns was good enough to dream about the major leagues while playing stickball in the streets. He also showed an artistic bent. He began by copying photographs out of the newspaper, and his
draftsmanship impressed his father enough, Charlie bought the young boy a full set of paints and charcoals. He and his sister would go down to Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History and Bert would set up his easel. A crowd would cluster watching him draw.

At camp, he was the designated sign painter, as well as camp bugler, blowing “Reveille” every morning and “Taps” every night. He also owned a pair of drumsticks and sat in the window playing them on the sill. If he and his sister led something of a lonely childhood, they came to depend on each other and never thought of their life as unhappy. Bert would sometimes wait at the front post of the camp on Sundays, eagerly anticipating their parents’ weekly visit and he would sometimes sneak out of the Creston Avenue apartment and check the shop, as if making sure his parents were still there, without letting them know. He once caught cold checking on them continually in a rainstorm.

During the war, the Bronx belonged to the women left behind. Men in khaki uniforms could be seen visiting before they shipped out. But the only ones who stayed were schoolchildren, old men, rejects, and those whose work had been deemed vital to the war effort. Windows on every street were filled with blue star cards signifying sons away at war. A gold star meant the son had been killed in action. There were shortages and rationing and air raid drills with sirens blasting in the night.

Bert was fourteen years old when he got sick in 1945. It started as a sore throat, but it didn’t go away. His fever soared. He went to the hospital, where strep throat was diagnosed. He went home. He went back to the hospital. He went home. He went back to the hospital several times. He was a very sick young man. He had contracted rheumatic fever, a bacterial inflammation that can severely damage the valves. It scarred his heart. For a teenager in the forties, when open-heart surgery was as much science fiction as flying to the moon, it meant a death sentence.

His parents sent Bert and Sylvia to boarding school in Florida. A doctor had recommended the warm weather for Bert’s health, but the
weather was terrible the whole time they were there. Neither of them liked the school outside Miami. They ran off to cousin Bertha, who used to work at the dress store, but who had married and moved to Miami. Bert got sick again. They went home and Bert never went back to school. He spent most of a year in bed, and once he got back on his feet, his attitude changed. He read it somewhere in a book or something and it became his creed—live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.

They bought a baby grand piano from the family upstairs and Bert took lessons. His father liked to think his son might pursue a career as a concert pianist and Bert did show promise at the piano. Neighbors would open their windows to hear young Bert play. Charlie used to like to stand at the window and sing bits of opera. He fancied himself a lover of serious music and thought a career in the fine arts would make an excellent choice for his sickly son. Bert learned quickly on the piano, but he still hit the streets. Over his parents’ vocal objections, he would play baseball. He went mambo dancing. He took out girls. He did what he wanted, when he wanted. Right away, he made it clear he was not going to live in fear of this time bomb ticking in his chest.

Bert also knew the angles. The guys he hung out with were attracted to his kind of crazy vitality. Whether they were roaring around drunk in someone’s car or trolling for dates at dances, Bert was the center of attention. He cultivated a practiced look—he fussed endlessly over his hair. He landed a job as an emcee at a small nightclub off Arthur Avenue. It was a place where people came to learn the mambo, and mostly he gave dance exhibitions. But he talked his way into a shot at the mike and loved messing with the crowd. “This week, as we do every week,” he said, “we bring you our annual show.” Nobody paid him any attention, but he didn’t care.

He was popular with the girls. He looked good, dressed well, danced great. His younger cousin Burt Gordon was astonished one night to see Bert having an argument with a pretty blonde at a dance.
Bert, it seems, wanted to hand her off to cousin Burt, but the girl was not having any of it. She was embarrassed in front of her friends about Bert’s cousin being a couple of years younger, but Bert managed to convince her. His cousin was dumbfounded to see this work, but he and the girl had a fine time, while Bert went after some other, more desirable prey.

Summers always meant Grossinger’s. Jennie Grossinger took what had been a seven-room farmhouse in 1914 and, ten years later, turned it into a hotel for five hundred. With his family spending every August at the
hamische
resort outside Liberty, New York, Bert practically grew up at Grossinger’s. The Catskills resort catered to the show business crowd, and people like Sophie Tucker and the Ritz Brothers were frequent guests. Other acts got their start in the hotel’s showroom, most notably Eddie Fisher, who was “discovered” by comic Eddie Cantor singing at the Terrace Room during the 1946 season. It was all a setup arranged by his manager, Milton Blackstone, a theatrical agent who ran the entertainment program at the hotel since day one. It may have been a ruse, but it worked. Fisher went straight from Grossinger’s into the Copacabana that fall and springboarded into stardom. Bert, who was less than a year younger than the singer, got to know Fisher that summer and watched the whole deal at Grossinger’s from the sidelines.

Bert knew his way around the resort. He would entertain the other guests after dinner playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano. He won a bottle of champagne for taking first place in a dance contest and he could follow the mambo all over that neck of the woods. Tito Puente’s band worked at the Swan Lake Resort and Tito Rodriguez played the Stevensville. Machito and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars were at the Concord, the biggest, fanciest place in the so-called Jewish Alps. Bert came to look forward to his family’s vacation as a time when he could operate without the constraints of the city, but stay on the inside track. So he was more than a little surprised to find himself falling in love. It
was nothing more than a summer romance with a big-city girl, but that had never happened before, and when the girl broke it off, Bert was devastated. It was his first taste of heartbreak.

There were tensions at home, too. Charlie was openly critical of Bert. He wanted his son to play classical music, but his son didn’t know what he wanted to do. The two men clashed and Bert decided to skip town. He had a car and he drove to Florida, where cousin Bertha arranged a job for him playing background music in the balcony overlooking a seaside hotel lobby. By the time he returned to New York, he was determined to live on his own. He rented a dump downtown in the West Village and got a square job working for Diner’s Club, which didn’t last long. He could always count on a handout from his mother when he went home for dinner on Sundays to get his weekly share of abuse from Charlie about how he was wasting his life.

He took a brief fling at marriage, a short-lived union with a good-looking brunette named Betty from Philadelphia. The woman quickly concluded that Bert, already in his midtwenties, clearly had little hope of assuming anything remotely resembling adult responsibilities in the immediate, or perhaps even intermediate, future. She went home and, again, he was crushed. In fact, he was still carrying something of a torch when he met Rita Constance.

A voluptuous, redheaded knockout, a few years older than Berns, Rita Constance played a little piano, sang like Sarah Vaughan, and looked like a million bucks. She grew up in Philadelphia and hit New York at twenty, ready to be a star. She got an $8-a-week apartment with Eddie Fisher’s girlfriend from the chorus line at the Copa and put together an act. Without realizing her loftiest aspirations, she did get work. She did some TV and played a lot of clubs. She spent seven years living with comic Len Maxwell, whom Berns also knew, although she kept other boyfriends stashed in various cities around the country. She and Berns struck up a romance and took over a crappy little walkup on Bethune Street in the West Village.