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Shoe
shining underneath the Citicorp Center.
2:15 PM. Photo: JH.
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The
cover of the invitation was a sketch of Bobby Short by
his old friend Joe
Eula, leaning against his piano with
his dog looking
up at him. Inside it read: “Yanna and Warren Avis,
Larry Chrysler, Susan Fales-Hill and Aaron Hill, Alex Hitz, Casey
Ribicoff,
Lisa and David Schiff, Lynn and Oscar Wyatt and Christina Wyeth ...
Invite
you to join them for Dinner and Dancing to Celebrate the Birthday
of Bobby Short, Sunday, the Twelfth of September at Half After
Seven In the Evening, The Rainbow Room Rockefeller Center. Black
tie.”
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The
cover of the invite (illustration by Joe
Eula) which reads "Because
it's Bobby's Birthday."
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It was birthday number 80. There
were, at last count, 180 guests.
Peter Duchin played during the long cocktail hour
and Bobby’s
band played through dinner. Bobby Short is a real Mr. New York.
The boy from Danville, Illinois, who calls himself a “saloon
singer,” who first started playing professionally when he
was eight years old, settled here (after Los Angeles and Paris)
in the mid 50s, early 60s, and he’s been a mainstay of Manhattan
nightlife (thirty-five years at the Café Carlyle) ever since.
When I was a young kid I used to wish I could grow up to be another
Bobby Short. Just think, sitting there at the grand, rapping out
those Cole Porter tunes, Kern, Arlen,
Gershwin, Coward, you-name-it
and singing your heart out, and getting paid for it. Alas, although
I can carry a tune (and used to remember all the words), I’m
a banger on the pianer.
Whereas Mr. Short is ... the quintessence,
the top, the Colisseum, the Louvre Museum. My favorite album of
his – and I’ve got quite a few of them – is the
double one he did with Mabel Mercer at Town Hall
in the late 1960s. The two of them, Short and Mercer (he then the
baby, she by then
sainted of all the saloon singers – Sinatra would
have agreed too), singing separately and together and ending the
show with
Cy Coleman’s “Here’s To
Us, (my
darling, my dear; here’s to us tonight. Not for what may
happen next year, for it might not be nearly as bright ....)” Open
the Dom or the Cristal or the Veuve Cliquot and sing out Louise.
While we’re on the subject of albums, there’s the composer
songbooks – Bobby Loves Cole, Bobby Loves Noel, Bobby
Loves Rodgers and Hart, Bobby is k-k-k-k-krazy for Gershwin.
All brilliant, all vintage, all that stuff of New York that gets
under your skin
from the time you were a kid living somewhere out there longing
to be a part of the Big Town. Mr. New York, and it’s all
yours.
So, seventy-two years after his first gig – and then he was
on the road playing the joints across America by the time he was
twelve, the child prodigy of the jazz babies, (he can’t read
a note, they say; but he can literally play anything!) delighting
the masses and the greats (like Fats Waller) who
shared their wisdom with the boy – he’s still at it.
At Bobby’s table, among others, were Jean Bach,
his oldest friend in New York, and the great Jessye Norman who
also shares Bobby’s birthday (September 15) and who sang
for him acapella “Our
Love Is Here To Stay.” Barbara Carroll,
who has known Bobby for almost fifty years (Barbara opens again
at the Alguonquin on
September 19th) played and sang, and then accompanied Julie
Wilson who sang Jimmy van Heusen and Burton
Lane’s “But Beautiful” (“Love
is funny or it’s sad; or it’s quiet or it’s mad.
It’s a good thing or it’s bad, But Beautiful ...").
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Bobby's
birthday cake
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Then Tony Bennett gave a rousing and inimitably
sophisticated “They
All Laughed,” followed by Cy Coleman doing a medley
of his tunes and ending with the Carolyn Leigh collaboration, “The
Best Is Yet To Come.” There was a cake (in the picture),
the first page of Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top”),
tributes from his old friend (and one of the hosts) Lisa
Schiff,
as well as from a newer friend, also one of the hosts, Alex
Hitz.
The man just sat there taking it all in, bright-eyed, smiling face,
nary a word (or a tune).
I was watching and listening, taking it all in while thinking how
this man at the center of this most glamorous fete started out
life in a very different America, a poor middle America, in the
midst of the Depression. He was an eight-year-old working to help
his mother support her family. It was a rough life of show business
that he had to endure on the road, a rough life for anyone in those
days, and an even unimaginably rougher life for a child of color
faced with the harsher realities and ancient American laws of bigotry,
far far away from the safety and comfort of his mother’s
house.
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Above: Baby
Bobby, 1926-27. Below: Bobby, circa 2000.
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I was thinking how the young boy, blessed with
an unflagging enthusiasm and a photographic memory, armed with
a talent that was just there
from the moment he first sat down at the keyboard (about age three
or four), along with a god-given charm and curiosity, a drive and
an ambition to learn — not only about his music but about
life and culture — and a willingness and a joie de vivre;
I was thinking
how with these gifts he made a great and long career bringing joy
to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions down through the decades,
and how that has kept him, protected him, rewarded him and supported
him throughout his long and abundant life.
I was thinking how on this night, high
above the town that he epitomizes,
that once-upon-a-time little boy from 1034 Robinson Street, Danville,
Illinois, now listed in the New York Social Register, was surrounded
by scores of devoted friends, young, old, rich, not so rich, famous,
not famous, all adoring fans, so pleased to be in his company,
to share his largesse; how proud his mother would have been. The
stuff of dreams. And of dreams come true.
Among the guests: Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Dominick Dunne,
Agneta Marian, Tom Fallon (who also shares the September
15 birthday),
Ashley Schiff with Rusty O’Kelly,
Dina Merrill and Ted Hartley, Aileen Mehle, Anne Slater and John
Cahill, Geoffrey Holder and
Carmen de Lavallade, Ellin Saltzman, Helen O’Hagan, Nancy
Hamon, Brooke Hayward Duchin, Hugh Bush, Kay Pick, Liz Smith, Joel
Schumacher, Doug Cramer, Cynthia McFadden, Peter Rogers, Joel Grey,
Margaret Whiting, Peter and Jane Marino, Tom Teeple, Rosemarie
Stack, Thelma Golden, Abby and Robert Kimball (Mr. Kimball
is the great archivist of American musical composers, particularly
Cole
Porter), Elizabeth Peabody, Gerry Stutz, Marti Stevens,
Evelyn Cunningham, Joe Eula Mildred Roxborough, Michael Cannon,
Ray Gestal,
Pamela Fiori and Colt Givner, Lowery Sims, Dwight Owsley, Sam and
Judy Peabody, Frank Bowling, Brad and Amy Fine Collins, Preston
Young, Marguarite Littman, Ruth and Skitch Henderson.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOBBY. |
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Agneta
Marian
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Gail
Lumet Buckley
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Jean
Bach and Bobby Short
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Joe
Eula and Ellin Saltzman
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Kay
Pick
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Kevin
Buckley
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Wendy
Vanderbilt and Dr. Frank Perdito
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Tony
Bennett
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Liz
Spahr
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Lenny
Kravitz
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Rusty
O'Kelley and Ashley Schiff
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Alex
Hitz and Rosemarie Stack
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Joel
Grey and
Peter Rogers
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Tom
Fallon and Margaret Whiting
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Lynn
Wyatt and Ted Hartley
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Diana
Quasha
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Kitty
Carlisle Hart
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Barbara
Carroll
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Julie
Wilson
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Bobby's band
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Mica
Ertegun and Dominick Dunne
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Hugh
Bush and Liz Smith
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Jessye
Norman, who also shares Bobby’s birthday,
(September 15) singing “Our
Love Is Here To Stay.”
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Monday morning. A
beautiful day in New York, I went down to the Tents at Bryant
Park for a scheduled ten o’clock
Oscar de la Renta show. Traffic was hard to bear crossing midtown.
At ten after ten I jumped out of the cab at 39th and Fifth and
hoofed it over to Sixth and Fortieth, hoping that I’d make
it before the lights went down and they stripped the runway of
the plastic cover. No problem. Inside the still covered runway
was a mass of paparazzi, masses and masses, congested, clogged
in a narrow space of about twelve feet in length, holding up everyone
who needed to get by to their seat. And why? Ashley Olsen. Or one
of the Olsen twins (the one who didn’t go into rehab – you
fill in the blanks), and Jessica Simpson.
Oh yes, there was also The Donald and Melania, and
only a minute away wearing a Borsalino and white pantsuit, Miss
Joan Collins.
But this was the Ashley and Jessica moment and the photographers
and the vidcams and the reporters couldn’t get enough of
... What? You tell me. Meanwhile, about ten-thirty or so, with
the help of Mr. de la Renta’s famously brilliant and charming
sales impresario – the man who delivers high fashion (honest-to-god)
therapy for many of the most famous and stylish women of the world
(not to mention many of the richest), Boaz Mazor — the
rest of us found our assigned seats. I turned on the Digital, the
lights
went down, the music came up, and out they came, the fashion ponies.
I got most of the numbers, give or take a dozen or so that didn’t
come out well. |
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Under
the tents at Bryant Park
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Jessica
Simpson
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Dana
Schiff and Di Petroff
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Lynn
Wyatt and Emilia Fanjul
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A
Jimmy Choo moment
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