Anyone Who Had a Heart (4 page)

Chapter

3

I Married an Angel

A
fter I was discharged from the Army, I went back to live with my parents in their apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I hung around the city for a while and studied with the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů at the Mannes College of Music on the Upper East Side. I also studied at the New School with Henry Cowell, the avant-garde composer who had been one of George Gershwin’s music teachers when he was a boy.

I really liked Henry Cowell because he didn’t take himself too seriously. He once played a piece in a concert in Paris by banging out clusters of notes on the piano with his fists that was reviewed in a French newspaper by their boxing writer. I also studied orchestration with Eric Simon, but I didn’t really learn that much from him.

I went to a couple of John Cage concerts, one of which featured twenty-four musicians huddled around twelve portable radios. As Cage began conducting, the musicians turned the dials of the radios so the audience heard bits and pieces of music and speech mixed in with lots of static. I also saw a piece performed that Lou Harrison had written for Martha Graham. It was sixteen minutes long and thirteen of those minutes were complete silence. I was listening to stuff that was pretty out there, but none of it helped me decide what I wanted to do as a musician.

It was then that I met Paula Stewart, a stage singer who also happened to be very good-looking. Paula was working as an understudy on Broadway when she ran into my dad at a press party. When she told him how hard it was to find an accompanist for her auditions, he said, “Boy, have I got a guy for you!” My parents invited Paula to a party at their apartment, and I was sitting at the piano playing background music when she came over and started talking to me.

Paula Stewart:
I kind of sidled over to Burt but he was very cool to me and it was definitely not love at first sight. It was more like hate at first sight. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t like singers. But I’ve always been attracted to piano players. My father was a pianist and I dated Byron Janis for a while and Vladimir Horowitz was a great friend and then I met Burt. I told him I was looking for an accompanist and I asked how much he would charge to play at an audition for Richard Rodgers the following week. Burt said, “Five bucks,” and I said, “Good. Sold!”

Whenever you performed Richard Rodgers’s songs in a summer stock show back then, he insisted on hearing who would be singing them. Burt went with me to the audition for Richard Rodgers and he was a stickler. If you didn’t play his music exactly as it was written, he got furious. In the middle of my audition, Richard Rodgers said, “Miss Stewart, will you please send your orchestra home?” I thought it was funny but Burt was crushed.

From then on Burt played all my auditions, and after each one we would go to the Horn & Hardart on Fifty-Seventh Street and have a cup of coffee to discuss how we had done. Gradually he got to know me a little better and we started going together. He was still living with his parents, which I think made him insecure, but then he moved into my one-room apartment at 140 East Fortieth Street. Burt was a neat nut and he didn’t like the way I kept house, so the first thing he did was clean up my kitchen.

Burt was also a germ freak. If he went out in cold weather, he would never leave the apartment without a bottle of Cepacol in his pocket. He got that from his mother. He was also a little bit obsessive-compulsive and would get out of bed to check the front door like twenty times at night. He would also be up all night playing the Wurlitzer spinet piano Vladimir Horowitz had bought for me, and that would annoy the shit out of me.

Paula could sing but she was not my kind of singer. However, even after we started living together, I would still get five dollars whenever I played an audition for her. The attraction between us was physical, because she was really good-looking and had great tits, which back then could not be prefabricated.

I began living with her. While I can’t say it was wonderful, it was nice not to be living with my parents anymore. Paula and I were invited to a lot of fancy parties. I would walk in wearing black tie and we would be expected to perform. We were guests but we weren’t really guests, which I thought was odd, and then Paula would sing “You Are Love” or some other song from
Show Boat
for all these really rich folks and debutantes.

I remember going to a party one night and being fascinated by the woman on my left at the dinner table. The next day, the phone rang and I picked it up, and this woman said we had met at the party the night before. She told me she had written her phone number down on the cuff of my shirt and wanted to know if I still had it. I was going right along with it until I realized it was my mother, who now knew I was not really being so faithful to Paula. It was a mess.

Paula Stewart:
Burt and I used to be constantly invited to parties to perform for the Whitneys and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We would perform and then sit and have dinner with the duke and duchess. Burt would be talking to her and I’d be talking to the duke, who at this point was a doddering, falling-down drunk. Wallis was very much the one in control and Burt and I performed for them so many times that she gave me this beautiful art deco jade and sapphire bracelet as a gift.

Paula and I were living together when one day she said, “Either we do it or we don’t. Either we get married, or you have to move out.” So I moved out. And I was miserable the first night. And miserable the second night. On the third day I woke up and told her, “I can’t do this. Okay, Paula, we’ll get married.” I’ve since learned there really is a three-day cure, and I would recommend it to anyone. If you can get past the third day, you’ll be over it and it will be finished just like a cold. By the fourth day you’ll say, “What was I thinking?” But Paula wanted me to commit, so I did.

Paula Stewart:
We had been living together for six months and my father was constantly pushing me to get married. Burt’s mother, Irma, a teeny little lady who was very artistic, didn’t like most of his girlfriends but she really loved me, and when she found out we were getting married, she told me, “You know, honey, he’s really not marriage material.” She tried to warn me but I still went right out and bought our engagement rings.

Then Burt began working for Vic Damone. Vic was not terribly well educated but he was good-looking and well endowed and the girls liked him. He would ask Burt all the time, “Tell me some big words. I want to impress this girl.” So Burt would give him a couple of big words and I think Vic felt a little intimidated by that.

A well-known music publisher named Ivan Mogull, who lived in the same apartment building as my parents, suggested I go to work conducting and playing piano for his good friend Vic Damone. I was very inexperienced as a conductor and didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I auditioned for Vic and he hired me to go on the road with him. Vic had all the tools to be a great, great singer and could have become a huge star, but he was his own worst enemy.

Like me, Vic had also just gotten out of the Army, so we hit it off at first. I went to Palm Springs, California, where I lived with him and his managers, Marvin Cain and Nick Sevano, in a house Vic had rented in the desert so we could rehearse. But instead of working with him at the piano, I spent most of my time driving around with Vic in his car and watching him hit golf balls at the driving range.

One day as we were coming back from the range, Vic turned to me and said, “Burt, who’s the best driver you’ve ever been with in a car?” I thought this was a really dumb question, so I said, “Uh, Marvin?” When we got back to the house, Marvin took me in the other room and said, “Listen, schmuck, you want to get ahead in this business? When Vic asks you who the best driver is, you say, ‘You, Vic!’ ”

I was supposed to be getting paid fifty bucks a week for learning the act with Vic, but he didn’t want to sign my check. So one day Marvin stood him up against the wall, took out a pen, wrote out the check beside Vic’s ear, and made him sign it for me. I should have known right then and there that this was not going to last, but I was so happy to be working that I just went along with it.

Before we played at the Mocambo on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, Sammy Cahn wrote special lyrics to “The Lady Is a Tramp” for Vic to sing on opening night. Because Vic was too busy hitting golf balls and chasing girls to learn the words, he had to perform the song with a lyric sheet in his hand. Everybody in Hollywood was in the club that night so they all got to see Vic shooting himself in the foot.

Vic definitely had the singer’s ego, and I soon learned that whenever I saw him coming toward me with a girl on his arm, I had to cross the street and walk on the other side. After we finished up at the Mocambo, we went to Las Vegas, where I met Slim Brandy, a beautiful girl from New York’s Copacabana Club who had come to Vegas to dance at the opening of the Sands Hotel’s Copa Room.

Slim Brandy:
I had a lot of buddies in Las Vegas and one of them was Danny Stradella, who owned Danny’s Hideaway in New York. Vic Damone was singing at the Thunderbird and Danny asked me what I thought of him. I said, “Well, he’s terrific. Why?” And Danny said, “He needs someone to burst his balloon. He’s screwed just about everyone in this town and you just got here so I’m going to make a reservation and we’re going to sit ringside. Do you think you can flirt with him during the show and then brush him off when we go backstage afterwards?”

Vic had just absolutely destroyed one of my best girlfriends, who was a cocktail waitress there and had actually tried to commit suicide over him. So I was hot to trot. I got myself all dressed up and we went to this ringside table and for just about two minutes, my heart dropped because I thought, “Oh, he’s so adorable! I’m never going to be able to do this.” Then I got an elbow in the ribs from Danny, who said, “Hey, what’s going on? You’re not supposed to fall for the guy.” As I was listening to Vic sing, I was going, “What is that countermelody? What am I hearing? I know the song, but I’ve never heard it sound like this before.”

My eyes went to the right of the stage and Burt was playing piano and looking straight in my eyes, and it was kind of love at first sight. Danny and I went backstage and I gave Vic the brush-off. Two minutes later Burt said, “Let’s get out of here.” We went back to the Sands Hotel and we swam and we talked and we kissed and we spent the next four or five days together. We did not go all the way because I was still a virgin.

I thought Slim was beautiful and after the show was over, I found a piano so I could play her favorite song, “I Married an Angel,” by Rodgers and Hart. “Have you heard? / I married an angel / I’m sure the change’ll be / Awf’lly good for me.” Slim and I went to bed together in Las Vegas but she kept her bathing suit on.

Slim Brandy:
Burt was very straightforward in Las Vegas. He said, “I’ve got a girlfriend back in New York and we’re supposed to get married.” And that was Paula. I was just a kid and I thought to myself, “Oh, I don’t care about that. My mother would never allow me to bring a piano player home anyway.” And I told him that.

After I had been working with Vic for about three and a half weeks, we were appearing at the Chicago Theatre on State Street when his manager took me aside and told me I was being fired. The reason he gave me was that whenever Vic and I were onstage together, he thought I was smiling at all the girls in the audience behind his back. It might have started with Slim in Las Vegas, but Vic would have fired me in any event because as I later learned, he fired a lot of people, like forty-three different keyboard players and drummers.

Still, this was the first real job I’d ever had and what really hurt was that Vic didn’t even fire me himself. Instead, he had his manager do it, and I was totally crushed. The truth was I didn’t really know how to conduct and none of the guys in the band wanted a young kid telling them what to play. But when I got fired, all my self-esteem and my self-worth went right out the window. I had no job, and how was I supposed to explain that to anyone?

I went back to New York, where I knew someone who knew Bill Ficks, the manager of the Ames Brothers, and he hired me to play with them. Joe, Gene, Vic, and Ed Ames were really good guys who were always on the road working in places like Tuscaloosa and Tulsa. Sometimes we all played basketball together before a show and I liked that. It was not a bad life by any means, but I knew it was a definite step down from what I had been doing with Vic.

Paula Stewart:
Burt got a job with the Ames Brothers and went on the road with them. Even then he was the most incredible accompanist, and when he played piano, it sounded like an orchestra. But when he tried to write some songs for the Ames Brothers, they said, “Get out of here, Burt. Ah, please. Go listen to the radio.” But they were very sweet guys and they were all at our wedding.

Burt and I got married on December 22, 1953, and I even bought my own wedding ring, for which I still have the receipt. We were married by a justice of the peace and I made my own wedding dress. My parents and Burt’s parents were there, and we had the reception between shows, at the Versailles, a supper club on East Fiftieth Street between Third and Lexington where I was appearing at the time.

After we were married, Burt’s father found us a one-bedroom apartment at 404 East Fifty-Fifth Street, not far from Sutton Place. The rent was maybe a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and the apartment was just a block away from where Burt’s parents lived, which of course they liked, and it didn’t bother me because I loved them.

Hermione Gingold lived in the penthouse and Ben Gazzara and Janice Rule and Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones all lived in our building, and we would see Jack and Shirley a lot. Our other friends there were Steve McQueen and Neile Adams, who hadn’t gotten married yet. Steve and Burt liked to sit together and watch games on television. I hated that.