Christmas Riffing in the City of Dreams With Count Basie and the Centenarians
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By Stuart Mitchner
Let me not mar that perfect dream…. — Emily Dickinson
The four-line poem ends with the Belle of Amherst planning to “so adjust my daily night” that the perfect dream “will come again.” The far from perfect dream that follows has been adjusted to permit me a dreamer’s freedom of movement regarding time, space, life, death, and documentary authenticity. The main thing to know is that many of the celebrated somebodies and occasional nobodies who come my way happen to have been born in the year 1916.
It all begins in midtown Manhattan at Birdland, on Broadway and 52nd Street, the “Jazz Corner of the World,” where the Count Basie rhythm section is deep into one of those blissful interludes between the heaves of storm wherein the Count makes a few small bright notes do what the Belle does with a few small bright words. At a table to my left a silver-haired man with a comfortable face and a warm sure voice is speaking, not reciting, Shakespeare’s sonnet “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” Thanks to the transcendent serendipity of dreams, the words he speaks are as seamlessly aligned with the music as Freddie Greene’s guitar line. The moment he speaks of “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,” I recognize the film director and onetime matador Budd Boetticher, whose Bijou dreamworks ranged from One Mysterious Night to Seven Men from Now.
The two beauties at Budd’s table drinking in every word and swooning when the lark sings “at heaven’s gate” are Evelyn Keyes, best known as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister, and the demure Karachi-born Maggie Lockwood, who was on the train with Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes. Keyes can be seen online as the page-boy-styled hustler touching cigarettes (“Light me”) with a sullen hood in 99 River Street. Listening with closed eyes to Bud and the Bard, Lockwood shows what Hitchcock saw as her ability to live within her lines. In dreamland, you live within your lines even as they dissolve before your eyes like the words The End in a rainy rear window of a film noir getaway car.
Times Square Skies
The way it happens in dreams, Basie’s band has gone floating into the skies over Times Square. Out there in the aurora borealis splendor of the Crossroads of the World the doomed trumpet legend Freddie Webster is taking a chorus for the heroin angels in the smoke coming from the mouth of the giant Camel’s billboard. As if in brassy acclamation of “the best sound since the horn was invented,” there’s a shrill fanfare from Cat Anderson and Al Killian above the blaring boogiewoogie of taxis on Broadway where the vice-prez Paul Quinichette ascends through the floodlit haze like the Ghost of Jazz Christmas Past while Lord Buckley does Scrooge at the Royal Roost and the true prez Lester Young broods on Birdland from the window of his room at the Alvin Hotel.
Christmas With the Stars
Now I know it’s Christmas Eve, the Times building’s streaming with the lights of the season, and I’m on the roof garden of the Hotel Astor. Harry James and his orchestra are playing “By the Sleepy Lagoon” while his wife Betty Grable sits at the automat across from Childs being eyed through the front window by Laird I Wake Up Screaming Cregar. Up on the roof Kirk Douglas, Greg Peck, and Glenn Ford are toasting giant gaudy out-of-time billboards of themselves in Young Man With a Horn, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Gilda. Wait a minute, Douglas is tugging at the sleeve of my dream, telling me it’s 2016, he made it to 100, he’s still alive, Mr. Intensity. His pals show him his 34-year-old face in the gleam of a silver cigarette case, that’s him, I’d know that chin anywhere, a dimple as big as the Ritz, he’s ready to take on Spartacus and Van Gogh. But he’s getting too intense. Tables are rocking, silver and glassware aclatter. “It’s okay, it’s a dream,” I tell him.
What’s not okay is that the intrusion in my dream of the 100-year-old still-living actor brings with it the post-election miasma and a real-life problem, which is that my wife and I can’t get the Christmas tree set up. We’ve tried two different stands. I need to find one that works. Otherwise Scrooge wins. Anyway, what am I doing hanging out with dead and undead movie stars? While Douglas moans about Trump, his colleagues are being philosophical, Peck coming on like Atticus Finch checking the pocket watch of fate, and Ford earnest and stern like the schoolteacher in Blackboard Jungle, quoting George Harrison, who moved on 15 years ago, “All things, even Trump, must pass.”
Old Man Trump
You know how it is in dreams, no transitions, but plenty of back and forth, like the voice of dissent coming from a middle-aged lady in glasses sharing a table at the automat with Irving Wallace and Richard Hofstadter, who urges her to “Tell ‘em about Fred Trump, Jane,” so it must be Jane Jacobs, who saved Greenwich Village from Robert Moses’s expressway and she’s quoting lines from a Woody Guthrie song about “Old Man Trump,” who “drawed the color line” when he was Woody’s landlord at the Beach Haven housing project in Brooklyn. As for Woody, he’s in a booth at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem explaining to Charlie Christian and Slim Gaillard how he wanted to transform Beach Haven into a hymn to diversity “with faces of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.”
The Most Trusted Man
Here’s a banquet table, set up for some kind of Christmas event with wreaths of holly and multicolored lights. A waiter who looks like Perez Prado is showing me to a seat between a plumply rumple-faced, naggingly familiar nobody and a very definite somebody, wow, it’s Walter Cronkite. I’ve still got enough of the 2016 heebie-jeebies in my head to wonder what the “most trusted man in America” has to say about the recent election, but before I have a chance he’s on about growing up in Kansas City. Pausing between bites of a dream steak, a Porterhouse to die for, he tells me about KC back in the day, Signboard Hill, the Show Me State’s neon answer to Times Square. He’s going on about how as a kid he used to watch the great trains come and go down on the tracks passing in and out of Union Station, the fancy Pullman cars carrying movie stars, the rich and famous, and the coach cars of soldiers, migrant families, traveling salesmen. He’s getting misty-eyed about Lost America.
Don’t Squeeze It!
Wait, the little guy on my left just nudged me. “You may think I’m a nobody,” he says, “but I’ve probably been seen by more people than Walter Cronkite has.” So I say, “That’s okay, I’m a nobody, too. I’m supposed to be out looking for a stand for our Christmas tree.” “That sounds like a very normal nobody kind of thing to do,” he says, holding out his hand. “I’m Dick Wilson,” and I’m thinking what a normal name for a normal nobody, when I realize, oh my God, it’s Mr. Don’t squeeze the Charmin Whipple! This is getting too weird, my wife’ll make fun of me, she who never dreams about anything but going to the market and here I am instead of pinching myself I’m squeezing the life out of the package of toilet paper Dick Wilson just handed me, and it’s like there’s some sort of critical organic connection between the Charmin and Mr. Whipple because he’s getting smaller and smaller before my eyes, sinking into a dark dream spiral of nobodyness, and I feel awful, I want to bring him back, “Look, you’re a somebody, the star of maybe the most successful ad campaign of all time. Don’t take it so hard.” What to do? Quote Emily? “I’m Nobody!” I tell him. “Who are you? Are you Nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!”
“How dreary to be somebody,” says the person who’s taken Walter’s place. “How public — like a Frog!” It’s Walker Percy. We shake hands. I tell him how much I liked The Moviegoer. Elizabeth Hardwick, who has taken poor Dick Wilson’s place, says her Sleepless Nights is a dream out of Percy’s movie.
Riding It Out
It seems my quoting of the Belle of Amherst has roused the Count from Red Bank. Basie and Freddie and the boys are at it again, dealing forth more of the same spaced-out companions for the word-gems in Emily’s “to tell one’s name — the livelong June — to an admiring Bog!” Now here come the heaves of storm, the big band full force riding “Little Pony,” and as Wardell Gray stands up blowing the solo to end all solos, Princeton’s Milton Babbitt’s got the mojo, telling me how he scored Emily’s “Musicians wrestle everywhere/All day, among the crowded air,” now he’s coming round the table dancing with his shadow, for the wonder of Wardell is that every note has its shadow spirit.
Someone’s coming to the mike, a singer. Who? Maybe Dinah Shore, another member of the 1916 club? Or My Friend Irma? Or heaven help us, Martha Raye? No, she’s on the dance floor doing the Watusi with Phil Rizzuto. Wardell’s still going strong. Jackie Gleason’s performing the Reggie Van Gleason waltz, Yehudi Menuhin is all aflutter, he’s smashed his Strad, Maxwell Smart’s boss is dancing cheek to cheek with Mercedes McCambridge, the chandeliers are blinking and tinkling and swaying, and when the Count gives Wardell the cue, he sits down to wild applause, and the rhythm section is back in business in the meter of Dickinson, hold it now, wait, the singer, the little brunette all in white, it’s the Belle, it’s Emily, singing like the lark at Heaven’s gate, “We dream,” she’s singing, snapping her facile fingers, “it is good we are dreaming. It would hurt us were we awake.” A hush falls upon us, Basie stops playing looks up for a sign from the Lord of Swing, Freddie Greene holds the line, calm and cool as Emily sings, “What harm? Men die — externally …. But we — are dying in Drama — and Drama — is never dead.”
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