In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
On Nov. 21, 1934, Ella Jane Fitzgerald appeared at the Apollo. It was the Harlem theater’s first amateur night, and Fitzgerald was just 17. Her friends had dared her. “They said, ‘Well, if you don’t go, you’re chicken,’” she would later recall in a 1978 television interview with the pianist and composer André Previn. She had originally entered the show to dance, but after watching the Edwards Sisters’ dazzling tap-dancing act from the wings, she told him, “I said there’s no way I’m going out there and try to dance.” As she stood awaiting her cue, the M.C. told her, “Just do something.”
In a raggedy dress and workman’s boots, Fitzgerald, who was then homeless and living on the streets of Harlem, looked out at the 1,500-seat theater with its glittering chandeliers and glamorous crowd. Designed by the American architect George Keister, the neo-Classical music hall was built for burlesque performances in 1914, when Harlem was largely white and African-Americans were not allowed in, but in 1933, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia cracked down on burlesque, and the following year the theater was transformed into a venue for variety revues. Harlem was 70 percent black by then, and the Apollo, on 125th Street, now open to black performers and audiences, became “monumental,” as the legendary Motown singer, writer and producer Smokey Robinson described it to me. “In the lobby,” he said, “there’s a mural with people I had grown up hearing about: Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington — and Ella Fitzgerald, of course. When I made it on that wall, I felt I had really made it, because the Apollo is the Apollo.”
The iconic dancer and choreographer Norma Miller, a contemporary of Fitzgerald’s who later made her name as a Lindy Hopper at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, was there for Ella’s debut. “We were a bunch of rowdy teenagers in the balcony ’cause they were introducing somebody we didn’t know,” she told me in 2018, when I was working on a documentary about Fitzgerald (“Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things,” which will be available to stream on Eventive starting June 26). “Can you imagine?” she said. “We booed Ella Fitzgerald?”
Fitzgerald, who had never performed in public before, stepped forward and began not to dance but to sing. She chose “Judy” (1934), by the great singer and songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, and suddenly, as she later recalled to Previn, “everybody says, ‘Oh, that girl can sing.’”
“We heard a sound so perfect,” said Miller. “She shut us up so quickly, you could hear a rat piss on cotton.” Within a few months, Ella was a star, singing with Chick Webb’s band at the Savoy on 142nd Street, where the crowd roared for the teenager who could play around with the band and swing like nobody else.
When I met Miller at the Apollo two years ago, Ms. Norma, as everyone called her, arrived wearing a sequined tuxedo jacket. Singing, Miller recounted, “You went through these doors and you were aware you were in … Harlem, Harlem.”
“Everything was race,” she went on to say about the neighborhood, where she was born and raised in the 1920s and ’30s. “You couldn’t go to Woolworth across the street from the Apollo,” she said. “If you wanted to buy a hat, you couldn’t try it on. They wouldn’t have black girls on the cash registers, you couldn’t go out of your zone. You can’t work for nobody — remember, slavery is over, but you don’t have jobs. So the confinement meant you had to do it yourself. How do you pay the rent?” In the 1920s, Miller’s mother would host rent parties where people would pay 50 cents for pig’s feet, potato salad and a place to drink and mingle. Dancing in her mother’s living room was the beginning of Miller’s career, and she subsequently performed at the Apollo and toured the country, including with Fitzgerald.
“Just as the theater itself is in the geographical epicenter of Harlem, the Apollo has always been ground zero for every major development in African-American vernacular music,” says Will Friedwald, the jazz writer and author of a new biography about Nat King Cole, “from swing bands in the 1930s, to bebop and R&B in the ’40s, gospel and soul in the ’50s and ’60s, followed by funk, reggae, rap, hip-hop and every sound that has come since.”
Painstakingly restored in 2017, with red plush seats and gilded balconies, the Apollo is somehow both dynamic — in 2018, it debuted a stage version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book “Between the World and Me” — and drenched in nostalgia. Sitting near the stage today, I imagine hearing James Brown, who recorded his most mythic album here, and of course Fitzgerald, who played the theater too many times to count.
Born in Newport News, Va., in 1917, Fitzgerald came north with her mother, Temperance “Tempie” Fitzgerald, and stepfather, Joseph da Silva, when she was 2, at the start of the Great Migration. They settled first in a single room in Yonkers and later in a mill town a tram ride and a couple of subway stops north of Harlem. A good student, Ella was crazy about music and dancing; she and her friends would sneak into Harlem’s ballrooms or stand outside the clubs where kids could listen to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong play. “You’re hearing blues, you’re hearing original jazz compositions,” the cultural critic Margo Jefferson says of Harlem during that period. “The Great Migration was bringing so many people like Ella’s mother, all with economic dreams, cultural dreams, social dreams. The world would have been opening up to her.”
When Fitzgerald was 13, her beloved mother died and her life fell apart. Her aunt in Harlem took her in, but she was angry, hurt and lost. She played hooky and, like so many other kids, most often black kids, seen as truants in Harlem back then, she was picked up by the police and sent upstate to a brutal reform school. The journalist Nina Bernstein would later reveal the story of Fitzgerald’s incarceration in a 1996 New York Times article. “Black girls,” she wrote, “were segregated in the two most crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory’s 17 ‘cottages,’ and were routinely beaten by male staff. There was a fine music program at the school, but Ella Fitzgerald was not in the choir: it was all white.” Deemed “ungovernable,” Fitzgerald was put in solitary confinement. After a year, she managed to escape and return to Harlem, where she had no choice but to sleep on the streets. “But she lived, she survived,” says Jefferson. “She became famous and she kept on keeping on — at what inner price, we don’t know.”
Fitzgerald, who was guarded, private and perhaps, Jefferson suggests, ashamed of her beginnings, never talked about the horrors of her early life. Instead, she sang. For half a century, she was the greatest jazz and popular singer in the world. She worked with Ellington and Frank Sinatra, Basie and Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Stevie Wonder, Dizzy Gillespie, Vaughan and Billie Holiday, Dinah Shore, Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson. Everyone knew hers was an instrument to equal theirs and then some.
Less than two decades after she wrote and sang her breakthrough hit, the swinging nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (1938), she recorded the definitive songbooks of George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen, songs that are part of what is collectively known as the Great American Songbook. And she sang them all over the world, in Tokyo, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Oslo. “She showed people that this is music Americans should be proud of,” says Friedwald. “It was really a radical move. It became the American equivalent of classical music. You know, where the Europeans have Bach and Beethoven, we have Cole Porter and Duke Ellington.”
I’ve loved Ella — a woman so famous she was known by only her first name — since I was a kid and my father took me to an outdoor concert in New York where she performed in blue chiffon on a balmy night, the lights of the buildings blazing behind her. She sang George and Ira Gershwin’s 1926 “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and I was hooked.
Though she spent the second half of her life in Beverly Hills, Calif., I always think of her as a New Yorker. In addition to the Apollo, she performed at the Harlem Opera House, also on 125th. She played the uptown ballrooms and later Minton’s Playhouse on 118th, where she joined Gillespie and Parker in the birth of bebop and met her second husband, the bassist Ray Brown. In the ’40s and early ’50s, she lived in Queens, in Addisleigh Park, where Lena Horne, Basie and Jackie Robinson also lived. She adored the Brooklyn Dodgers.
But New York could be tough, too. Shy and self-conscious, Ella was targeted by critics who, while they might have loved her music, were often cruel nonetheless (the jazz magazine DownBeat gave her the epithet “the plump chanteuse”). Fitzgerald suffered as many female artists did, but, says Jefferson, “There were always particular demands of glamour, of sexuality on black female performers.”
Fitzgerald wasn’t known to speak publicly about racial injustice, but in 2018, I found an old recording at the Paley Center for Media of a 1963 interview between Fitzgerald and her friend, the radio D.J. Fred Robbins. In it, she says, “I used to always clam up because you say, ‘Well gee, show people should stay out of politics.’ But we have traveled so much and been embarrassed so much. People can’t understand why you don’t play in Alabama, why can’t you have a concert — music is music … I think that these policemen down there that people can’t even pray without them going to put them in jail, I mean, I’m wondering what’s in their mind?” On the tape, you can hear her pause, take a deep breath and then add, “The die-hards, they’re going to just die hard, they’re not going to give in. I’m so happy I got a chance to get a few things off my chest. I’m just a human being.” Sadly, the interview was never broadcast.
Tony Bennett, who knew and loved Fitzgerald, told me for the film, “Ella never made a political statement except the one time she said to me — it was only three words, and it was the most complete definition of the ignorance of the world in the way they treat African-Americans. She said, ‘Tony, we’re all here.’”
Fitzgerald died in Los Angeles in 1996. The Apollo, though, is still a vibrant theater where young musicians get their start. Among them is Alexis Morrast, a singer who won an amateur night competition at the Apollo in 2017 with her performance of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.” When Morrast announced her song choice, she called it Ella Fitzgerald’s “My Funny Valentine.”
A year later, Morrast agreed to an interview at the Apollo for my documentary. Leslie Woodhead, the director, some of the film crew and I sat in the audience as she spoke. Standing on the stage, where a young Fitzgerald had taken her chance 84 years earlier, Morrast reflected on her idol. “Everything comes back around,” she said. “The way that Ella was reserved, the way she was poised and passionate, you could never tell what her feelings were until she got to the music, and then it was always happiness and joy and everything that you could have ever hoped for.”
“Ella Fitzgerald: Just One Of Those Things” is available to stream on Eventive starting June 26.
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