Hard Times (63 page)

I don’t mind losing jobs. Every time I lose one, I get a better one. I got one at Carnegie Tech. I taught for three years there. I came to New York in 1942 and have been here ever since.

I wouldn’t expect a man in 1930 to think like a man in 1968, would you? Of course not. But there are many people who will take a point of view as artists: I’ll be an idealist. I’ll be a romanticist, I’ll be this or that or the other. You’ve got to be what you are, churning up the day in which you live and pull out of that experience something that is representative in artistic terms.

Artists have to live, right? Eat, sleep, breathe, build. The great difference is when you have a government as a patron or anyone else as a patron, who made no demands on you at all, there were no enlarged notions of making that extra buck. That was a very free and happy period. Social comment was in the wind. Now the wind has changed. But despite the direction any artist follows, he is still pure politically.

Artists have a chance of being good people ’cause they work alone. I go to my studio. I don’t work on a belt line. When your work is done, after dinner, you meet people and you become talkative. You’ve been alone all day. Now give me that first drink, will you? Right?

 

Some fear Government as an arts boss because of the dangers of political
censorship….

 

I think it’s the craziest thing. We live in a democracy. We call it a democracy, right? I can vote. I can agitate for my franchise, right? Why should I be fearful of my Government. I am a part of it, am I not?

Perhaps, there could be a dictatorial Government—that’s another story. Like Hitler, say: You can only paint blondes with strong breasts….

It’s fearful to think that today’s times are so affluent for me. I live real, real well. I’m in the upper ten percent. But when I see poverty, it’s still poverty. I hate it.

During the Depression, we were all more or less engulfed. Today when people say poverty, they turn their head. They don’t want to admit poverty exists. They’re living too high, so on-the-fat, right? If you’re living on-the-fat and see poverty, you simply say: They’re no good. In the Depression,
there was a little more Godlike acceptance of the unemployed guy, because you could be he.

His eyes wander from work to work, from face to face, as he remember
s….

 

You SEE, to me the Depression was a blessing. When the shock of losing what you had worked for comes, I found refuge in my art. To stew in a deplorable situation … where people were affected … some to suicide … I lost myself in my art. The pain that came with economic loss, I felt would pass. These things, like the eclipse of the sun … People first observed it and committed suicide … not realizing that this would pass.

I felt quite prayerful, and so I was at peace. Of course, the knock on the door of economics … disturbed. But you survived. I constantly counseled myself on the best way of survival.

 

 

No, no, no. It was so disappointing, I couldn’t participate. If it is done in the right way, the gifted artist benefits from the state and contributes: thus, body and soul are nourished. Then I would have participated. But the program went against my grain. I did not recognize true artistry in evidence.

Oh, the Depression years were hard. I managed with a commission now and then.

 

Days without food …
?

 

Those are days I don’t recall. Self-respect never allowed anyone to know I was in that state. I had quite a duplex studio. I had Bach and Beethoven. Nothing else mattered. I worked in the cathedral of the spirit. My body may have needed food, but I was unaware.

Once in the studio, a rat ran across my arm and bit me. Luckily, a visitor had left a bottle of whiskey, without my knowing about it. The bottle came of good use, I told him afterwards. I poured the whiskey over the wound. These are accidents, like the Depression. I avoid bringing accidents to mind.

 

MONTGOMERY: I was making a dollar a night on Sunday nights. And a spaghetti dinner. Playing house rent parties. On a Saturday night, I was playing for $3. No supper there. Weekends is when the stockyards workers would go. Tuesday night, I was playing for $2. My weeks were filled up with two, three dollars a night.

Monday night, that was the biggest night I had. $4. They had Blue Monday parties, the sporting people. Everybody who’d been out all Saturday and Sunday night, gamblers and hustlers. If they’d been hustlin’ anything, they’d be poppin’, buying moonshine, having fun, on Monday. From five o’clock in the morning until the wee, wee hours, way through the night.

SAUNDERS: Those Blue Monday parties had a meaning. The night life, the gambling, the prostitution and the pimps—they weren’t just something that happened. They were a necessity. Survival. Women had to sell their bodies for twenty-five cents, fifteen cents. You find fewer black pimps today, because the black woman is more independent.

In a flat, everything would go. In one room, they were playing a piano and drinking whiskey. In another room, they would have Georgia skin, poker or whatever game. In another room, they’d have whores, hustlers. Everything went. A person had to have some kind of life.

MONTGOMERY: They were houses where people lived. With a piano in the front room, where people danced. And moonshine, twenty-five cents a half pint. Pulverized alcohol. No admission. The money came from the sale of moonshine and supper. Spaghetti and chili … The house’d be packed, all kinds a ways. Six, five, sometimes four rooms, a hundred, eighty people would be in it. They were givin’ a party to get their rent together.

Lots of times we were raided by the police. Catch moonshine or catch
‘em gamblin’. They had some bad policemen around at that time. They had Jesse James, Big Six, Callahan’s Squad….

We had a lot of house party piano players in them days—a guy called Forty-Five, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Pine Top Smith, ‘Sippi Wallace, a guy called Toothpick. Piano’d be ringin’ all night. Guys would come in, weren’t workin’, they’d play. You’d find all kinds of piano players, great ones. Boogiewoogie began in house parties. But we didn’t call it that then. Doodley Joe, we called it … 1928, ’29, ’30. I paid $4 a week for a room. We made $15 a week. We got along pretty good.

SAUNDERS: There was a pickup in business when beer came in in ’33. They could go out publicly and drink. And the price was right. Beer was fifteen cents and you could get entertainment. With Repeal, you began to see a new light. You had to have these rent parties during Prohibition because there were no night clubs, to speak of. They were black speak-easies.

MONTGOMERY: I left around the early Thirties and organized a band around Jackson, Mississippi. Sometimes we’d play at a dance and make fifteen cents apiece. (Laughs.) You’d travel maybe two, three hundred miles in a secondhand Cadillac, and a beat-up Lincoln. The whole band. We’d get to a place and couldn’t make gas money. Places like Meridian, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg, all up in the Delta. 1935, ‘36 and up to around’38.

The main times is when they’re pickin’ cotton. They got a dollar a hundred for pickin’. (Laughs.) Some people could pick two, three hundred pounds a day. We played in tobacco barns down through the South. I remember one band was burned up in one of those warehouses. We played a white dance tonight and a colored dance tomorrow. But we didn’t mix. SAUNDERS: In those days, the black artist was at the mercy of the promoters. In later years, MCA
¹⁶¹
and others took them on, but at first they weren’t booking black bands. The hotels and ballrooms were for white bands. This was a time when radio was great. White musicians were having a field day, making all kinds of money in studios, in concerts and legitimate theaters. Big money. The poor black musicians just had the beat-up Lincoln. They were what you called starvation bands. Did you know black musicians created the one-nighters?

They didn’t have any homes. Out of five years, they’d maybe sit down ten weeks. They lived in the auto. The location jobs were for the Benny Goodmans and the Tommy Dorseys, hotels and ballrooms. The only time they would sit down would be like the Apollo in New York, the Regal in Chicago, the Howard in Washington … .
¹⁶²
MONTGOMERY: Even their music was taken from them. Clarence Williams
wrote “Sugar Blues” and that was called Clyde McCoy’s. “Dorsey Boogie” is Pine Top’s, which he played at house rent parties….

 

IN THE SPRING of ’32, I woke up with a violent hangover. An agent gave me this book to read for that afternoon: “You’re a southerner, you’ll dig this.” I went home with my hangover and read it and said: this is a play. So I took the book under my arm and went to live in Majorca for three, four months. I was quite broke at the time.

 

He completed the play in Hollywood, where he wrote films at “very big salaries.” One was a highly successful Shirley Temple movie. “Shirley Temple’s responsible for
Tobacco Road,
really.” (Laughs.)

 

It opened December 4, 1933. I couldn’t get anyone else to produce it. They all were afraid of it. They thought it wouldn’t run. So I put up all the money myself. No one else had a nickel in it. I gave away a great deal of it to associates….

The whole thing cost about $9,000 to produce. The reviews in the dailies were not too good for the play, except the raves for Henry Hull’s performance. I just had to get up another five or six hundred dollars a week to carry the play. Until the
Daily
News
¹⁶³
had the editorial. Captain Patterson
¹⁶⁴
fell for it and wrote an editorial. And the next day we were in. Later on, the monthlies came out—George Jean Nathan, Bob Benchley, Dorothy Parker, all came out for it.

 

 

No. Or I wouldn’t have spent that money. The play was dealing with poverty. The audience understood and they were concerned. Of course, it was based on a period preceding the Depression. It had existed for some time in the South. Cotton was five cents a pound, and all that sort of thing. There was shock value, sure. But I think its success was determined by its reality and honesty.

Mrs. Roosevelt helped. She loved the play, because it was about social
conditions. When it opened in Atlanta, she went down there in case any trouble happened. But there was none whatsoever.

 

 

No. Mayor La Guardia threw out burlesque, but he wouldn’t throw out good theater. Later, in Chicago, they called us intellectual New Yorkers.
¹⁶⁵

From then on, the Depression was a swinging time for me. Everything was so reasonable, and my income was so big. (Laughs.) I never had it so good. When you’re involved in making a living, gambling all your money, it was just something that passed in front of you without any feeling about it. And I was getting married quite often in those days, too. (Laughs.) Besides my artistic occupations, I had some marital preoccupations. (Laughs.)

Heaven knows I saw Hoovervilles—out of train windows. It was appalling to look at, even through train windows. But it didn’t touch me.

A great many people felt it, especially the young. That’s why so many at that time joined the Party. It wasn’t a lack of love for the United States so much as thinking some other system would correct this blasting horror of hunger. They were soon disillusioned….

But it was a more generous time then. There wasn’t this miasmic fear of unnamed things out there. Then it was specific: hunger. We had a more specific enemy to overcome. We were all in such a mess. When you’re in trouble, you never go to rich friends to help you, you go to poor friends. I was more fortunate, so I was able to help out friends.

Don’t forget, we were all younger. There was a spirit of adventure then, too. When you’re thirty years old, you don’t have much fear. You don’t have the same kind of fear I would have now after thirty, forty years. As I’m talking to you now, I’m seeing it with the eyes of a young man. Oh, it was a magnificent time for me. There was certainly no lack of girls. (Laughs.) I’m awful glad I was young at that time.

 

Two OR THREE BLOCKS along Times Square, you’d see these men, silent, shuffling along in line. Getting this handout of coffee and doughnuts, dealt out from great trucks, Hearst’s New York
Evening Journal
, in large letters, painted on the sides. Shabby clothes, but you could see they had been pretty good clothes.

Their faces, I’d stand and watch their faces, and I’d see that flat, opaque, expressionless look which spelled, for me, human disaster. On every corner, there’d be a man selling apples. Men in the theater, whom I’d known, who had responsible positions. Who had lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their families. And worse than anything else, lost belief in themselves. They were destroyed men.