Jazzletter 93023 October 1983 I
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G€I'l€ L665 , P.O. Box 240 Ojai, Calif. Jazzletter 93023 October 1983 i . Vol. 3 N0. 3 want to see Paul Desmond again,” and went a year without Paul 7 I speaking to him. Two platters of melon and cold cuts rested, along with a large deep Paul had an ability to maintain direct friendships with the wives bowl filled with ice and small bottles of wine, on a coffee table in a of friends. Indeed he carried on suspended loves with some of dressing room backstage at the Hollywood Bowl. On the open them, curiously pure and innocent. One of them was my wife, to door were two names, Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck. Gerry whom he said wistfully, “It seems to be my destiny to be in love had just finished performing. Distantly, from the stage, we could with the wife of one of my best friends.” Another was Iola, to her Stan Getz. A girl appeared in the door and told Gerry that whom he was very close. He was not of course the first man to Dave was outside and wanted to say hello but didn’t want to enter resolve a fear of marriage by investing his deeper feelings in a roomful of cigarette smoke. There was in fact little smoke in the women who were safely out of reach. room. It seemed that almost all Gerry's guests had quit smoking, After the months of estrangement, Paul turned up at Dave’s and Gerry, who has in recent years shown serious symptoms of house, doubtless looking woebegone. Iola went to the back porch, deration, smokes only occasionally. where Dave was hanging up diapers, and told him he would “went outdoors with him. It was a warm smoggy night. Dave simply have to see Paul. was wearing a white tuxedo jacket and ruffled shirt open at the After that reconciliation, they never looked back. Interestingly, throat. Gerry wore slim-legged black slacks and a white pullover though Dave repeatedly signed contracts with Paul, Paul never shirt with loose sleeves that vaguely evoked the Middle Ages. I signed and never returned them — another symptom ofhis fear of sometimes think Mulligan wishes he had lived then. commitment. Yet he never questioned the bookings and deals It was inevitable that we would talk about Paul. Desperate Dave signed on their behalf. And he became Uncle Paul to all Desmond, as Gerry now and then had called him. “And what was Dave’s children. that name he had for you?” Dave said. “G. Emily Guncloset,” Stan Getz ended his segment of the concert. It was time for Gerry answered, and explained that this what Paul had insisted Dave’s group to go on. - the French emcee is saying on that Paris album wherein he “I still miss him, Dave,” I said. announces. “E1 maintenant — Zhe-hree Moo-leh-gahn!” And for a moment Dave looked bereft, truly lost. He said, “Oh The last time I had seen Dave was at his home in Wilton, boy, so do I.” Connecticut — not all that far from Mulligan’s present residence in Darien — and that had been at least fifteen years before. Paul and Mulligan and I used to hang out together in New York in Dave was slim and youthful at sixty-four. Paul had insisted, the 1960s. Gerry was deeply involved with Judy Holliday then. when they were young, _that Dave must be part Indian. Dave Every man who knew her was in some way in love with her, doesn’t seem to be all that sure about it himself; where his father probably including me and Desmond. And certainly Alec Wilder. grew up, a mixed white and Indian blood was fairly common, as it Paul hada taste for complex puns, and so did Judy, who said of is in much of the American west. Anyway, whatever his roots, the ferns in the window of her vast and ancient apartment in the Dave does indeed look more and more like some distinguished Dakotas, the building that became famous when John Lennon Cherokee chieftain as he growsolder. was shot in front of it, “With fronds like these, who needs gave grinned he has a wonderful embracing smile that anemones?” Mulligan is by no means slow with a mot himself. akes his eyes crinkle — and he pointed at me and said, “I was Gary McFarland said, after an evening with the three of them, “I thinking about you just the other day. I was remembering when felt like I was caught in the middle of an acrostic.” you and Paul almost got us all shot in Indiana!” Desmond was the co-inventor of the most complicated pun I “Oh God, yes," I said, laughing. “I’ve thought about it often. I ever heard; I cannot recall who was his. collaborator in this think of you and me and Paul, lost at that crossroads amid all that silliness. Dave says thejoke dates back at least to 1954. It concerns corn in the middle ofthe night. We couldn’t see over the cornfields a boy of Italian parentage named Carbaggio, born in Germany. to get our bearings.” Feeling himself a misfit, with his dark curly hair, among all those “Would you say,” Mulligan offered, “that this makes those Teutonic blonds, he tries to be even more German than the people insular?” A Germans. In late adolescence he flees to Paris, where he steals one And we told a few Desmond stories. of those brass miniatures of the Eiffel Tower. Arrested by the Paul was chronically tardy. In the early days, he would arrive in police, he is given a choice of going to jail or leaving the country. his car at the last minute to pick Dave up for their gig at the Band He boards the first outbound ship and arrives in New York. Box in San Francisco. The traffic lights near Stanford were set for Thinking he would like a career in communications, he goes to the forty-five miles per hour. Paul reasoned that they should also RCA building in Rockefeller Plaza, takes an elevator, and walks work at double that speed, and so he would go tearing to thejob at into the office of General Sarnoff. Sarnoff tells him the only ninety. “And on top of that,” Dave said, “he’d be reading all the possible job is as a strikebreaker. The boy takes it. When the strike signs along the road backwards. And I just wanted him to watch ends, he finds‘ himself on a union blacklist. He goes to work the road.” making sonar equipment for a company owned by a man named Paul’s early life is almost a blank. He never spoke of it to me, Harris. After several years, his English is improved to the point and perhaps to no one but Dave. Dave says Paul adored his father where he gets a job on a radio station as a disc jockey. His show is but not his mother. “If you knew the story,” he said, “you could called Rock Time. And he has fulfilled his destiny: he’s a routine forgive him anything.” Teuton Eiffel-lootin’ Sarnoff goon from Harris Sonar, Rock- “I have nothing to forgive him for, Dave,” I said. Time Carbaggio. Dave did. Paul’s tardiness in the early days bordered on the I used to wonder what kind of mind would expend the effort _of truly irresponsible. Dave at one point told his wife, Iola, “I never working out something like that. ¢,,py,;gh, |9g3 by Gene rm Paul’s kind. He numbered many writers among his friends, as and used to give himself vitamin shots in the thigh -in the Judy Holliday did, and he was an habitue of Elaine’s, a bar on the momings, to diminish the hangovers. I used to imagine him, upper East Side of New York City frequented by novelists and whiskey glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, falling other scriveners, whereas Mulligan and I, during the waning asleep on the sofa in front of a television set hissing with snow afternoons of those years, could usually be found in Jim and after the National Anthem, and maybe burning a hole in his Andy’s. _ . ' trousers. He reminded me of Mitya, the Karamazov brother who Paul also had a taste for high-fashion models of which, in his wants to leap heels up into the muck to make himself as bad as he travels, he had accumulated a considerable collection. Only thinks he is and escape the burden of virtue in an ongoing recently a Toronto newspaper reporter friend of mine mentioned corruption. In the end, Paul failed, because he was a very gentle a famous Canadian model who had lived in his apartment man, and a very, very good one, haunted by his own romanticism, building. Soliciting a Bloody Mary from him one hungover which he mocked in words and a wry choice of notes, and never Sunday morning, she said, “I haven’t been this tired since the last finding that perfect love-for-a-lifetime he always, really, wanted. time Paul Desmond was in town.” He was the loneliest man I ever knew. Pianist Marian McPartland once wrote an article about Paul for me at Down Beat. It must have been about that time that I first Paul and Dave were native Californians. David Warren Brubeck met him. She asked Paul about his penchant for models. “Well,” was born in Concord on December 6, 1920.