Hi Hi Blackbird

Today is the 90th anniversary of the beginning of Prohibition in the US.  Intending to do a post about it, I got sidetracked (I love when that happens) when I bumped into the life and career of someone who, without the freewheeling mood of the Prohibition and certainly the popularity of Harlem, may have never had success.  But I doubt it. So....

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Florence Mills!

To begin at the beginning, Florence was born to former slaves in Washington DC in 1896.  At age five, having won contests for Buck & Wing dancing, she was invited to do a dance exhibition for the diplomatic circle and the British Ambassador's wife presented her with a gold bracelet.  Shortly thereafter this photograph was made.

When the photographer asked her to remove the bracelet, Little Miss said, "No bracelet, no picture!"

Singing and dancing her way through childhood and adolescence on various Vaudeville tours as a member of various groups, Mills moved to Chicago at 20 and joined the Panama Trio (Bricktop, who became a lifelong friend was also in the group).  Already an extremely accomplished dancer, she received lessons in tap while there from none other than Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

The following year, she joined The Tennessee Ten and fell in love with fellow "Ten" dancer, Ulysses 'Slow Kid' Thompson.  After touring the US and Canada, Florence and Kid move to New York and marry.  Though a brilliant showman in his own right, Kid sees Mills' potential and quits performing to become her manager.  

Fortune smiled when she replaces Gertrude Saunders in "Shuffle Along" and overnight she's a star.

At the Plantation Restaurant on Broadway an all black show is built around her.  Billboard Magazine notes  she has " her name in lights on Broadway . . . an even hundred of them"  She becomes the first black to be featured in both Vogue and Vanity Fair.  She will eventually also become the first black to play and headline The Palace.

The next three years are a dizzying string of smashes.  She introduces what becomes her theme song "I'm Just A Little Blackbird Looking For A Bluebird" a melodic little ditty that is actually a  subtle protest song. The message that people of any color or creed have the right to search for "the bluebird of happiness" was well understood by her audiences, and contains the line "Building fairy castles just like all the white folks do".  Later the sanitized version "Just like all the other folks do" became the popular way to sing it.  With the Cafe Society happily kneeling at her feet, she took her new show "Blackbirds" abroad and conquered London and Paris.

About her dancing, ballet critic Arnold Haskell wrote, "I would put Florence Mills, as a dancer, on a par with any of the admittedly great artists of the dance. She had much to express, and the power and the means technically to express it."

And a Daily Sketch review said,  "It is notable how much the show attracts other dancers.  Anton Dolin has not missed a Tuesday matinee since the start and Massine, who saw it for the first time last week said 'After this all other dancing is futile. Never before have I seen creative artists able to achieve all they imagined'".

By 1927, exhausted, depleted from her breakneck schedule and ill with Tuberculosis, she was back in New York in the hospital.  But bed rest and even two surgeries don't help.  Knowing she is dying, she sings songs to cheer her nurses & husband.  At 4:00 am on November 1st, Florence Mills dies.  Her last words were "I don't want anyone to cry when I die.  I just want to make people happy, always" 

Florence Mills funeral was the largest Harlem had ever seen.  There is a legend that a flock of blackbirds flew over the funeral cortege.

Criminally, no recordings or film exist for us to discover the marvel of her performances for our selves.  But had she lived today, I suspect some of our self proclaimed pop divas would opt for an early retirement program.

 

  **If you would like to know more of dear Florence try going here.  It is a website compiled by biographer Bill Egan.  Of the many sources I went to in researching her this is a fine and complete one.





 

These Three Kings - A Christmas Carl. Part 3

Today we celebrate Carl Van Vechten, June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964, on the anniversary of his passing.

TITLE #3- QUEER!!

Though, in all fairness, I suppose one would have to say bisexual. He was married twice. For 5 years beginning in 1907, he was the husband of Anna Snyder, a childhood friend from Cedar Rapids. Then in 1914 he wed Russian born actress Fania Marinoff. They remained married for 50 years until his death. But a glance at the "self portrait" below, will tell you he wasn't the butchest thing on the planet!

Through all my research there is almost nothing that elaborates on the matter. Most sources simply say, "though married, an open homosexual." or "his personal papers were locked for 25 years following his death but when opened, letters and scrapbooks were found dealing with the matter". I did manage to find out, however, that he sat on the panel of judges for the gala drag balls hosted by the Savoy Ballroom. Now there's a fun job!

But really, the only research needed is ones eyes. When you look at the pictures, no matter their subject (authors, actors, dancers, or boys at the Harlem Public Swimming Pool) It's all there in black and white. And color.

Marlon Brando

Boy at pool

Dancer

Dancer

Dancer

Dancer

Dancer

Truman Capote

So today on my official Carl Van Vechten Day we say Thanks! Now go put on a Bessie Smith record and mix up a pitcher of Sidecars!

These Three Kings - A Christmas Carl. Part 2

Today we celebrate Carl Van Vechten, June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964, on the anniversary of his passing.

His next title is actually a three parter.

TITLE #2 - Photographer. Photo-Documentarian of the
International Modernist Crowd.
Champion of The Harlem Renaissance and it's Members.

After the death of his brother left him an inheritance of roughly six million dollars, he bought his first Leica 35mm camera in 1932. Chinese American actress (and Goddess) Anna May Wong was his first official sitting on April 20th of that year.

A small sampling of names that he would eventually shoot are: Judith Anderson, James Baldwin, Tallulah Bankhead, Jane Bowles, Marlon Brando, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Ruby Dee, Ella Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lynn Fontaine, Billie Holiday, Horst P. Horst, Mahalia Jackson, Frida Kalo, Sydney Lumet, Alfred Lunt, Norman Mailer, Somerset Maugham, Henry Miller, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lawrence Olivier, Diego Rivera, Cesar Romero, Beverly Sills, Gertrude Stein, James Stewart, Alfred Stieglitz, Bessie Smith, Gore Vidal and Orson Welles.

Billie Holiday and Mister

Harry Belafonte

Jane Bowles

Lady Day

Orson Welles

By 1924 Van Vechten became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance and in Harlem itself. Some of the members of this electric time of creativity were, novelist and NAACP co-founder James Weldon Johnson, nightclub propietrix Bricktop, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. He interceded with Knopf on behalf of the latter so that the groundbreaking collection of Hughes's verse, The Weary Blues, appeared in print in 1926.

Beginning in 1925, he wrote a series of articles in Vanity Fair on blues singers like Bessie Smith and invested in a staging of African American spirituals performed by Paul Robeson.

At the very height of his career as an author he invited controversy with the release of his novel, "Nigger Heaven". The shocking (then as now) title had many critics from both races. The phrase nigger heaven had two meanings. Firstly, it was Harlem's nickname by it's own residents, and it was also the term used for the theater balconies where blacks were made to sit, even in their own neighborhood. But for all the detractors, there were equal in numbers of supporters. In an essay in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Bruce Kellner termed the novel "a deliberate attempt to educate Van Vechten's already large white reading public, the novel presents Harlem as a complex society fractured and united by individual and social groups of diverse interests, talents, and values." James Weldon Johnson stated in his review for Opportunity that Van Vechten "pays colored people the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than puppets."

Zora Neale Hurston

The Weary Blues bookjacket

Bricktop

Smalls nightclub

Club Rendezvous

The Apollo Theater

Harlem Catholic Church

The Big Apple

Van Vechten's *sensitivity* to the arts and artists, both black and white was not merely intellectual.....

...Which will bring us to ...PART 3.

These Three Kings - A Christmas Carl. Part 1

Well it's really one monarch with three different titles.
Today we celebrate

Carl Van Vechten, June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964,
on the anniversary of his passing.

TITLE #1 - The Author.

In my cradle days (seventeen to be exact) I one day ventured into the Lambda Rising bookstore. It was then in a row house on S st., NW just east of Connecticut Ave. in our nations capital. About five minutes into my browsing, a paperback caught my eye. It was on the bottom shelf as the books were displayed in alphabetical order by author. It was called "Parties" by Carl Van Vechten.

I picked it up really for the cover art. It made me happy. Reading the back cover it seemed to have something to do with New York in the twenties. Well I had always kinda felt that I had been born in the wrong era, and the twenties seemed to be interesting enough from what I had heard: speakeasies, bathtub gin, flappers and what not. This might just be fun to read. Then I looked at the publishing date, 1930! Holly cow, a book about the twenties, written in the twenties. Sign me up! So to the sales counter I went. One copy of Parties and a free copy of the "Washington Blade" and off I went.

I loved that book. I devoured that book! And it began for me, not a constant and avid, but a never abated fascination with Mr. Van Vechten. Since that long ago day in 1977 I've only managed to read one other of his books (The Tattooed Countess) but the fascination in the man, and my research on him, has mined riches.

About "Parties": It concerns a group of beautiful rich young do-nothings each with their own fabulous art deco penthouse. Their lives being spent on a succession of days that go something like this: Four pm, wake up as the butler brings in a bed tray of sidecars. At six-ish or so, it's off to a favorite speakeasy. Around ten, to some glorious home for a dinner party. One am, head to a jazz spot in Harlem. Sometime after dawn, home to pass out. Then rinse and repeat.
And it's floridly descriptive of fashions, of Harlem, of cocaine use and of bisexual and interracial affairs. In short - it's dreamy. He started writing the book days after the '29 crash and it is, in fact, about the death of the roaring twenties. How funny it is that I should find the book in the late '70's (the gay community's equivalent of the Roaring Twenties.)

Van Vechten started off as a journalist, critic, reviewer and social commentator. He was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and went to college in Chicago. In 1906 he moved to New York and was hired as the Assistant Music Editor for the New York Times. He was at the Times for the next several years eventually becoming the first American critic of modern dance. Collections of his essays and articles were published through the late teens and finally Knopf Publishing put out seven of his novels between 1922 and 1930, ending with Parties.

By 1930 his career as an author was basically over. So what did he do with the remaining 34 years of his life, you may wonder.

Well, that's a story that takes us to.......
...Part 2!