[Dixielandjazz] Fwd: Fw: the cotton club -- 2/7/14

Fri Feb 7 00:56:10 PST 2014

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*From:* delanceyplace <daily at delanceyplace.com>
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*Sent:* Friday, February 07, 2014 10:36 AM
*Subject:* the cotton club -- 2/7/14

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In today's selection -- from *Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington* by Terry
Teachout. During the Roaring 20s and into the Great Depression, the hottest
club in New York was the Cotton Club, an establishment owned by one of New
York's most notorious gangsters. Though it featured black performers and
was located in the middle of Harlem, New York's preeminent black
neighborhood, black patrons were almost never allowed and the decor was
made to evoke a Southern slave plantation.

"In 1927 Harlem was a playground for white people who could afford to pay
for liquor and sex -- and who liked having sex with black people, so long
as they didn't have to talk to them afterward. Of the uptown nightclubs
that catered to white patrons, the Cotton Club, which billed itself as 'the
Aristocrat of Harlem' in its newspaper ads, was the best known and most
expensive, as well as the one with the dirtiest pedigree. Owney Madden, the
owner, was an Englishman of Irish parentage whose family had emigrated to
New York's Hell's Kitchen when he was eleven years old. He was slight of
stature and spoke in a high-pitched voice that sounded, Sonny Greer said,
'like a girl.' But appearances were deceiving, for Madden was a vicious
street fighter who in his youth had racked up a long list of cold-blooded
killings. He now ran one of New York's most successful bootlegging gangs,
investing his profits in Broadway shows like Mae West's *Sex* (and, it was
whispered, having a backstage affair with West herself). In 1920, while he
was serving an eight-year term in Sing Sing for manslaughter, he acquired a
failed Harlem supper club called the Cafe de Luxe that had been 'owned' by
Jack Johnson, the famous black boxer, who served as the front man for yet
another mobster. After Madden was paroled in 1923, he turned it into a
cabaret with a stiff cover charge whose scantily dressed dancers and
sexually suggestive stage shows became the talk of Manhattan.

"Located on Lenox Avenue at West 142nd Street, the Cotton Club was a
second-story walk-up that held between six and seven hundred people who sat
in two tiers of tables surrounding the dance floor. The walls were covered
with what Irving Mills, who was prone to malapropisms, called 'muriels.'
The rest of the decor, as Cab Calloway recalled, was suggestive in a less
innocent way:

*The bandstand was a replica of a southern mansion, with large white
columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters. The
band played on the veranda of the mansion .... The waiters were dressed in
red tuxedos, like butlers in a southern mansion, and the tables were
covered with red-and-white-checked gingham tablecloths .... I suppose the
idea was to make whites who came to the club feel like they were being
catered to and entertained by black slaves.*

"Spike Hughes, who visited the club a few years later, described it as
'expensive and exclusive; it cost you the earth merely to look at the girl
who took your hat and coat as you went in.' He was stretching it, but not
by much. According to [jazz musician and frequent Cotton Club performer
Duke] Ellington, the cover charge was '$4-$5, depending on what night it
was,' the equivalent of fifty or sixty dollars today. John Hammond
remembered the food as being 'bad and expensive,' and a menu from 1931
shows that he was at least half right: A sirloin steak cost two dollars.
Bootleg champagne (not on the menu) went for $30 a bottle. The prices meant
that only well-to-do customers could afford to take the ride that was
described in the club's ads as '15 Minutes in a Taxi Through Central Park'
to see 'The Best Creole Revue Ever Staged in New York with the Greatest
Array of Colored Talent Ever Assembled.' ...

"Madden hired only light-skinned women as Cotton Club Girls, and ... blacks
who sought admission to the club were turned away by the bouncers whom Carl
Van Vechten, a white critic and photographer known for his fascination with
Harlem and its residents, described as the 'brutes at the door.' In July of
1927 *The New York Age*, a black newspaper, warned its readers that the
club, by order of the New York Police Department, 'does not cater to
colored patrons and will not admit them when they come in mixed parties.'
The color bar, Spike Hughes said, was not quite absolute: 'If you were very
famous, like Ethel Waters or Paul Robeson, then the management would allow
you to show your coloured face inside the door; but you had to be tucked
away discreetly in an inconspicuous corner of the room.' It was, however,
strictly enforced whenever racially mixed groups sought admission, so much
so that W. C. Handy, the composer of 'St. Louis Blues,' was once turned
away from a show of his own songs. Connie's Inn, which opened in 1923, had
been the first Harlem cabaret to exclude blacks, but Madden went further:
While the shows at Connie's Inn were written and directed by blacks, the
Cotton Club only allowed them to perform onstage."

<http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001ohzVeCJZayS-xXlrDVL3XFEo68iEZ7ZcNULqWmXa8N0JWxfiOgMEWT5Tk7_oU6WZZK8FSyO7NPZz934IkyeXUWpizBurwXeDbtrSdVChBGZIc68IhPMlYL6RF7zL-T4ANPZJfkGPduu656he90tBU-L8AjW1Kw2GLafRiOGlTTLWTQTkTxKwBc1sngyFGwlQW51RynLgIRU9NlIoNjTepEaoSkLgNuF48zGFzTSd_K7sc2XoJPcLU7mWJpVxye9Co6wB_907MSPnqGcghUs870b7HNN9iJWu6C4IOdpHtzmfso-uuW7OMQ==>
Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington
Author: Terry Teachout
Publisher: Gotham Books
Date: Copyright 2013 by Terry Teachout
Pages: 73-75

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