THE KING OF 52ND STREET

Copyright - Jack Pearce Daniels 2020

(Working Titles) 1 That Old Black Magic 2 The Billy Daniels Story 3 Soul Pursuit 4 Mr Black Magic 5 The King of 52nd Street

By

Jack Pearce Daniels

07887 386601 [email protected]

Copy Retained at/Representation –

William Boone Daniels II Attorney at Law 3819 Montecito Avenue Santa Rosa California 95404

Title and all pages Copyright – Anthony Jack Pearce, Jack Pearce Daniels, JPDC Ltd.25OCT20

The King of 52nd Street

by

Jack Pearce Daniels

For Jeremy and Jonas

Contents

1 You should know, after all this time 2 Gene Norman Presents 3 Devotion 4 Touchdown 5 You go to my head 6 It was before TV had taken over 7 Love is a many splendored thing 8 The 'Search For' Button 9 I just wanted to sing 10 Val Parnell Presents 11 The Good Shepherd 12 It must have been fate 13 I have thought of you often 14 The Voyage 15 The City of Light 16 Boxed Memories 17 You've got a nice voice kid 18 Performance Beyond Promise 19 Blood Brothers 20 He knew I wouldn't let him down

Once your consciousness is tapped in a certain way, you see things differently. Everything reminds you, everything becomes significant, absolutely everything.

Eddy L. Harris, 'South of Haunted Dreams'

1

You should know, after all this time

"Your father came from there, Jack" whispered my mother, holding her map of Florida to shield us from my Dad and my wife Jane. We were visiting my parents one winter evening at their cottage in the shadow of Pendle Hill, between Colne and Nelson, Lancashire, in northern England. It was the eve of our first trip to America, a long awaited two-week holiday in the Florida Keys and I stared at the logs burning in the grate and silently absorbed the shock of the information that she had decided to share.

"Where was he from?" I asked having waited, what was in fact 40 years, Your father was born in Florida.... here...... " “JACKSONVILLE” a seaport on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida, 'Is that why as a child she sometimes called me Jackson?' the name Jacksonville was now positively alive with meaning. I was trembling, my mind filling with questions.

"And then he went to Columbia University in New York”

"Well I don't know anything about him. We are flying to Miami tomorrow morning and we are not going anywhere near Jacksonville" "That's where he was born, he made it in New York and then later for the rest of his life he lived in Hollywood." Jane and my Dad appeared with tea and sandwiches and my mother immediately changed the subject by asking what time our flight was due to land in Miami and in a daze I explained our itinerary.

As Jane and I drove home “over the tops” in a hailstorm we talked about my secret conversation with my mother and I heard myself say

"I'll have to find out about this biological father of mine, this holiday in America now feels like it’s a pilgrimage”

My life had changed in a sentence, from the moment she had pointed to Jacksonville my father dominated my thoughts. Who was he? What did he do? What happened? What was he like? Was he a good guy? I was completely bewildered and from my earliest memory, a picture appeared an apparition from my distant past was now a shocking reality.

My first flight to America became an investigation of my memory. My mother’s revelation sparked powerful recollections of my childhood, a flood of long forgotten events, a recovered memory that began to make sense.

I was using my bed as a trampoline, doing handstands on the ceiling and pestering my mother as she tried to make the beds one sunny morning. "Is that my Dad, Mummy? Is that a picture of my DAD? " I yelled and I can see her now, head in hands over a framed photograph I had unearthed from the linen drawer and when I saw that she was crying, I stopped shouting.

The picture was a card 'still' that years ago illuminated the foyer of a theatre or cinema. A moody black and white glossy 10 x 8 print, a head and shoulders portrait of a man in a suit with a bright spot-light shining in his face. It was an unusual image to my enquiring mind and ghost-like and I'm shocked to realise that I can recall my mother's reaction with a pang of anguish. A profound moment from my life that I all but forgotten, repressed perhaps until now. I remember the photograph disappeared, I know that for sure because I searched the house for it several times and the only possible explanation was that she had decided to throw him away. And looking back to that moment, so did I and the matter was closed that morning, until her revelation, 40 years later.

I was born in Brighton, Sussex, England in 1954 and I was brought up in Barnoldswick around 200 miles north on the Yorkshire, Lancashire border. I was around the age of 6 when I recall sitting with my Mum and my Dad, they had just recently married, in an echo filled wood-panelled room in Skipton "This is a court” I can recall the serious expression on my mother's face I’d not seen before “We have come here to see a Judge to change your name to Pearce and to get you a new birth certificate" in my enlightened memory, that was the moment I found buried in the back of my mind.

Examination of memory reeled me back to when we acquired our first television 'set' to see our local football heroes Burnley, lose to Tottenham Hotspur 3-1 in the 1962 F.A. Cup Final at Wembley. I was a ‘Supercar’ watching 8 year-old under a ceiling of dark blue wallpaper covered with a thousand gold stars. It had a bright circular frosted-glass light fitting hanging from the centre of the ceiling like a flying saucer. In those days after our tea-time, before the TV arrived the radio was always on and later in the evening before our television set had taken over, LP records boomed constantly from the Garrard Hi-Fi Radiogram. A polished teak cabinet that lived below a picture of a flamenco dancer in a blazing red dress.

During meals my parents “variety days” were talked about a great deal when I was a boy. My mother, Audrey Cockcroft from Oldham a contemporary of Petula Clark a singer in her childhood too, needed a stage name, became Rae Croft and left home to work the variety circuit and had performed in cabaret in London’s West End. In the summer she sang pool-side and swam ‘Esther Williams’ style in the Aqua Shows that toured the British seaside resorts in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The boom time of the British family holiday beside the sea-side, beside the sea, as the old song goes. My mother once told me and again it was a serious moment “you were born in Brighton, just because we used to live there, if anybody asks you why”. My mother also met Freddie, my Dad, during their Aqua Show days.

The Aqua Shows were a seaside Variety Show that took place beside but mostly in, the largest swimming-pool in the town which was usually close to the beach or to the pier. They were often municipal Victorian structures, with cast-iron conservatory entrances set in massive stone walls and some by a complicated arrangement of filters and sluice-cocks in huge pump-houses, were swimming pools that were filled with sea-water. The sea-front pool in many resorts were in the modernist style and contemporary with the town's 1930’s Odeon or Regal cinema, sweeping curves of red-brickwork with portholes of wired glass in cliff-like walls of black granite.

The swimming-pools in the large resorts like Morecambe and Scarborough were swimming stadiums with banked teak-plank seating that could accommodate hundreds of spectators. All resorts also had indoor swimming-pools, 'the baths' that had spectator-seating at high-level with a painted match- board roof with ornate biscuit-tiled walls. Many pools, indoor or seafront, boasted Olympic Standard diving facilities with spring-boards and high-boards at all competition heights. The pools and the entire pier and seafront area were immaculately maintained by the local corporation ‘Parks & Gardens Department’ with terraced flower gardens that swept the holiday-makers from the beach to the shops and the pier or to the sea-side arena. The Aqua Show took place in the evening and it was like going to a variety theatre by-the-sea.

The Aqua Show my mother toured Britain with, always by train back in the days before motorways and jet-travel, was Roy Fransen’s Aqua Revue. A 'Variety' extravaganza that opened with a novelty- act, Bob Braben, a Canadian log-rolling 'World' Champion, who ran an old Post Office Telegraph Pole, up and down the spot-lit pool to furious drum-rolls. He travelled in an all-original 1929 Cadillac, jet-black with a drop-down cream canvas hood with running boards and chromed spoked wheels with white-wall tyres. It was an 8-seater and plenty long enough to carry the Aqua Belles and his livelihood, a spruce telegraph pole, roped on the hood. With its polished coachwork and with the interior upholstered in french navy hide it was a crowd-pulling car straight out of a George Raft gangster film and perfect for driving up and down the promenade with a fluttering banner proclaiming that “The Aqua Show Is In Town”

My Dad Fred Pearce from Harrow, ex Royal Marine was briefly an actor under the name Freddie Fellows and appeared in several films made at Pinewood Studios, London in the late 1940's as an extra and often with his Royal Marines and diving skills was a ‘stunt double’ swinging from chandeliers in the fight scenes of swash-buckling pirate films. When my parents met he was working in Roy Fransen's Troupe as a high-diver and a circus clown. Roy Fransen himself was the archetypal high-diver, the kind of man my Dad often told me as a boy “He had to perform his stunts not once but several times during the show. He always had to prove he could do it, over and over".

His show-stopper was to climb a ladder encased in a ‘Curse of the Mummy’ costume, saturated in petrol. With a dramatic theatrical gesture at the top of a 70 foot tower of scaffolding, atop a roped-up ladder, swaying in the wind, with a burning torch and on embracing the very top rungs he awkwardly set himself ablaze and stood on motionless until the wind had whipped the flames to maximum fireball intensity. And only then, at the peak of anticipation, he would plummet gently falling head- first like a meteoric statue into a tank of water that was only five foot deep. The terrified audience were drenched from by his belly flop landing. My Dad, was a key member of Fransen's always touring, ‘comedy with daring’, diving troupe who often spectacularly topped the bill of the Sea side Aqua Show.

Their act was a radio-comedy routine around a microphone rigged on the ‘high board’ And those boards were high and they were high-diving stuntmen, who fooled around on all the diving boards like circus clowns in Edwardian fancy-dress hanging from boards or even wrapped around the roof beams, thrilling the audience by risking a fall. Of course the audience knew that sooner or later one or all would crazily somersault off the board to a ritualistic drum-roll and crashing cymbals to the cartwheel plunge in the floodlit blue water. With the ever-present potential for a fatal slip and a long silent drop to the tiled concrete below, they dared each other to extremes and one memorable night my Dad carried a delivery boy's bicycle complete with a basket of prop bread on his back in a spotlight up to the highest board in the roof and immediately pedalled straight off the end shouting the cockney punch-line "Where's the apples and pears" (where’s the stairs) with a thumping plunge that left the water pulsing and foaming with spaghetti waves of light dizzily reflecting the frenetic brass of the band.

They would bounce on springboards in unison dressed as the popular Saturday Morning Pictures star Old Mother Riley with spilling shopping-baskets and for the finale the whole troupe would engage in a Keystone Cops chase, lapping the Olympic-sized arena and climbing the ladders to the high-board, to a pyramid of divers a conga line climax of yelping divers, hooped costumes billowing to a splash finish. Then out of the pool, a quick costume change, more running around the pool, more throw-ins, dive-ins and splashes, a sprint up the ladders and straight 'off' again. It was fast music-hall slapstick accompanied by a delirious sports-style commentary punctuated with ‘serious’ exhibition diving by Greek gods in gold lurex trunks. With gasps and riotous applause from the often sun-and-beer-crazed audience, the seaside resorts of Great Britain in the early 1950's: Scarborough, Oban, Torquay, Southport, Bournemouth, Falmouth, Morecambe, Margate, Brighton, Skegness, Great Yarmouth, Blackpool, Ayr, Grange-over-Sands, Redcar, Weston-super-Mare, Bridlington, Colwyn Bay and a dozen others, in that post war era holiday-makers packed the coast and during July and August and almost every show was a sell-out.

I WAS 6 years old when my parents married, I always knew from their tea-time chats that they had worked in the Aqua Shows together for quite a few years before I was born and then later I deduced that they must have lost contact before or at the time that she had met ‘that man in the picture’ and then somehow they had got back together again a few years later. I had to speculate, because the period of time, just before and just after my birth, was never mentioned. I had no idea at all how long she had known the man in the photograph, who had made her cry, but remained a complete mystery to me.

When I reached my teens and beyond on the very rare occasions that another, the possibility of a 'real' father ever crossed my mind, I blanked it out and I reasoned that it had probably been a 'ships in the night' a brief liaison, a mistake, which explained why it was a never to be discussed secret. I had a father now, because my Dad has always been my Dad. I can barely remember the time when there was just me and my mother and my grandparents. My Dad has always been around for me and we have grown to love each other. But now out of the blue I have a real father who existed somewhere else and the picture I now remembered was a spectre that was haunting me. Since her sentence I felt different, something new had happened to me, a part of me that was unable to communicate had somehow been awakened.

My mother had stated, with her map of Florida as a shield from my Dad. 'He came from Jacksonville. He was a singer. He went to New York to study. He lived in Hollywood'. The knowledge she had planted in my mind had taken on a life of its own, her remarks were the crack of a starting gun and a quest for knowledge was in motion, a craving that required feeding with the constant nourishment of fresh information. I had to discover all I could about my father's life, it was now a mission and nothing else can possibly be as important.

I had taken the first step on a journey to find answers to a whirlpool of questions. How long had they known each other? What happened? How can I find out without distressing my parents? Where can I start? I felt activated but directionless and Jane and I talked about my thirst for knowledge. "Why don't you ask your Nanny, what she knows?" suggested Jane with brilliant clarity and so within days of arriving home from the Florida sun, as soon as I got the chance and the holiday pictures together we drove over to see my Nanny with the quest for my roots now a full-blown obsession.

"WELL, I BET you had a good holiday" said my Grandmother Ethel, who I have never called Granny, or Grandma, the whole family have always called her Nanny. "Yes, it was glorious" Jane and I were in Nanny's living-room surrounded by her ornaments and her family photographs. We looked through our holiday snap-shots and I told her about our time in America which was greeted with a long stare at the mantel-piece and a thought-filled tearful silence. I will just have to ask the question outright.

"I wanted to ask you Nanny, just before we went to Florida, my mother mentioned... Billy Daniels" Nanny was amazed, an expression I hadn't seen for a long time. "Did she?

"And I wondered if you had any memories of the time around when I was born" "What did she say?" I told her what my mother had said as we looked at her map of Florida, "I was very surprised Nanny because she's never talked about him before" "Well, she would not like to with your Dad being there.... I remember Billy Daniels very well, I liked him, yes I liked him alot"

"Did you meet him?" "Oh Yes!" she replied as if I had asked her a ridiculous question. "We met him a few times, the first time was when he came to see me and your Grandad to Weets View in Barnoldswick and then we went to see him do his show in Leeds and he then came to our house again after you were born. I liked him" Jane looked wide-eyed, sharing my astonishment. "How did you find out she was pregnant ?" said Jane, straight to the point. "Oh, I remember that day, she left a letter for us, she'd been to see us and she'd gone away back to the shows and then after she'd gone I found this letter on the kitchen table. I didn't know whose it was at first...you know, I thought it was mine. I just saw this envelope lying there" Nanny twisted around to look me straight in the eye. "Your Grandad was so upset, he nearly had a fit!"

A flood of recollection followed, "Things were very different then, in 1953...... nobody bothers now but then, she had to go to Brighton to have you. We didn't send her away Jack, she wanted to go, we didn't send her away you must understand that. She wanted to be away, she had already left home and I think she wanted to stay with the sister of his agent or somebody ....Mrs. Marsh her name was, she was nice. It was when she was staying in Brighton, before you were born, that he first came to see us in Barnoldswick. He was on in Leeds, he had a chauffeur who stayed in the kitchen while we talked in the front room! I kept forgetting he was there and every time I went into the kitchen there he was, sitting on his own so I kept feeding him, I fed his chauffeur in the kitchen!"

Nanny thought that was a funny story because they didn't live in a town where chauffeurs were commonplace and I had the impression that she had told that story before, but not to me. "He stayed all day, then after tea he had to get back to Leeds to do his show" I was hanging on to every word. "Was he a charmer?" asked Jane. "No, I don't think he was. He was a nice feller. He went over to our old piano and your Grandad said 'You'll be off tune tonight if you play on that!' I don't think he wanted him to play it because it was so out of tune, your Grandad was embarrassed; it was only an old piano. Billy Daniels was famous then you know, very famous. You used to play on that same old piano, we had it for years. Do you remember it Jack?"

"Yes I remember it." A huge black upright that had hinged brass candle holders high on the front. "Did he play the piano?" "I don't know whether he could play, he was a singer and he could really sing, not like they do now. His best pal was his pianist....what was his name? They were big pals, always together, Benny....something... Benny Payne that's it. He was funny...he gave you a silver christening tankard at your Christening...... yes he did" I recalled in a silver flash, an object from my childhood "I can remember it, I wonder if Mum still has it? she told me a friend of hers had given it to me when I was born, I remember it was engraved" When I was a boy it was used as a pen-holder on the 'sideboard' in the living room for a long time and now it shone like a lighthouse in my memory.

"Did he look like Jack?" asked Jane. "Yes, just like him" Nanny laughed "You didn't know that you look like your father till now did you love" I turned to face Nanny and I laughed with her but I was thinking 'There are many things I don't know because I have never had a conversation like this before. I felt my whole life had changed in the last five minutes. "What did he talk about when he came to your house?" "All sorts.....he talked about his parents and his childhood, his Dad was a postman and his mother was a teacher. I was surprised when he said that, he was older than your mother and we talked about that. It didn't matter, he was very nice, we had some dinner and then your Grandad took him for a long walk around the town" My father walked with him around the town of my childhood! He must have passed the Rolls-Royce factory gates where I used to wait for my Grandad when I was a boy, this was incredible.

"Then they came back and...... then we had our tea and a few days later, we went to Leeds to see him at The Empire Palace, I think it was. He was on right at the end and he was ever so good. We had our own box, the best seats, we really enjoyed it. He gave us the tickets when he came to our house and your Uncle Joel (Nanny's brother) went with us. I don't know how he got a ticket, because he only gave us two, I suppose he must have bought one. Anyway he was very good and after the show we went back stage to see him, he'd invited us"

"We had supper in his dressing room, there was a queue a mile long outside his door, you know just to see him and get his autograph. We had supper with him, he had to catch a train to London early the next day I remember when we left he gave me a picture of him. I kept it for ages but I threw it away when we moved house once. He'd signed it to me and Jim, I'm sorry I haven't got it now or I would have given it to you but it had all faded and curled and it wasn't worth keeping anymore. We thought that they were going to get married you know, he'd talked to your Grandad about it and he gave her an engagement ring. When she married your dad she sold that ring, so that they'd have some money to get married with. I think she bought some furniture and that radiogram they used to have"

The Garrard High-Fidelity Radiogram appeared in my thoughts like a long lost friend. "It must have been quite serious" said Jane, which jolted me back to life, I was in a trance. "How long did she know him? I thought it might have been just a one night thing...... and that's why she never talked about him" "No, she was away all the time so I don't know how long she was with him exactly, but she went on a tour with him. I think she knew him for about three years or so, at least three years, it might have been longer. She was away all the time in Variety, so we didn't know what she was doing, or where she was most of the time. We would get postcards from her, from all over the place, she was travelling around all the time. She'd left home and you can't be on the stage from home can you!" Nanny was enjoying herself.

"He came to our house after you were born, I think he stayed overnight. We stood outside in the garden and your Grandad took a photo. I don't know what happened to it, the neighbour saw us outside and came across and gave you some rosary beads. You were christened a Catholic. Did you know that?" This was all a complete and total surprise. It had been a serious relationship and I was christened a Catholic, nobody has ever told me these details before.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" "Who was at my Christening? Where was it?" Nanny racked her memory. "It was in Brighton, he organised it, well him and your mother. Toni was there" (My mothers friend, she married a famous bullfighter and now lives in Spain) "and Billy was there of course" He was at my christening "of course" but until tonight I never knew that he was even aware of my existence.

"With Benny his pianist and his wife. Benny Payne was a famous piano-player from before the war, he played with the big bands. There weren't all that many there, lots and lots of fellas, all crowding around. Benny cracked a joke when he gave you that tankard, I can't remember what it was, everybody laughed. Your Grandad told me that some of the men were gangsters from London. There was a man called Jack Spot there, I had seen his picture in the Sunday papers and most of the men were with him. They just liked being with your Dad because he was famous...... I can't remember your mother that day, I know she was there but I can't picture her now. Isn't that funny? That was the only time I've ever been to Brighton. Billy was always smart, he was a right smart fella. He smoked cigars and he put a big cigar from his top pocket into your little hand and you kept waving it about, he laughed and laughed at that. He held you a few times that day, I'm sure there were some photos taken, flash-bulbs, but I never saw any"

At my Christening my father held me in his arms, surrounded by gangsters! He was a cigar- chomping American Showbiz star. We were all locked in thought, staring at the gas fire when it blipped. "I remember the Christening and that cigar very well. I'll always remember that day" she turned to Jane "It was the first time I'd seen Jack, do you see? We always thought a lot about him Jane with him being our first grandchild" My Grandmother stared back into the past and continued.

"Before you were born your Grandad went to see your Mum in Brighton with your Uncle Alan" (My mother's younger brother) "Alan was a young lad then, they went on the train I think. I know Alan had a bad cold the week before and I'd said to him 'Do you really want to go?' But he said he did and when he got back the sea air had cleared it up and he was all right. They didn't go for very long, a few days, they must have had time off work, they both worked at Rolls Royce. All they said when they got back was 'She's all right. It was windy in Brighton, like Blackpool. We're all going down to see her soon' and that was that"

I wanted to know everything. "What happened to him, did he just go back to America and that was it? What did he tell you about himself?" "He was separated from his wife and he had three children, by her, with her, you know what I mean. Two boys and a girl, I can't remember their names. After you were born he used to send your mum money, one Christmas he sent her a cheque for £60, which was a lot of money then and she bought presents for everyone that year. I think he sent her money for a year or two, I don’t know how long" "When was the last time you saw him?" "Let me think, he came to our house after you were born because there was definitely a photo of him with your mother and me and you. I think we met him and your mother again in Blackpool once or twice and in Leeds. I can't remember the last time, it's such a long time ago now, it's history now Jack"

"I'm not that old! Do you know what happened to that photo?" "No, your mother took it and I haven't seen it since. It was taken outside by the kitchen door at Weets View" A door I ran through a thousand times, the door that reflected our fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night. "your Grandad said 'Let's take a picture' because it was sunny, it's your birthday in June isn't it. It wasn't long after you were born when he came to see us again, well he was with your mum. He was touring and he'd been all over the continent, all over the place. Then he had to go back to America to make a film, he sang in nightclubs and he was in films. Then nothing happened for quite a while, he sent her money and then I think she met him in London again or it might have been Manchester, I remember she took you along with her once...... and then one day your mother told me that he had met another woman in America and that he had got married, just like that"

"When did you meet Freddie? How did they get together again after I was born?" "The first time I met your Dad was not long after your Mum had joined the Aqua Shows and that was a few years before she met Billy Daniels. They were all in a show at Derby Baths and they drove around the streets in a lorry to advertise the show. It was a float with giant swans on the back of it, big swans which they used to row and swim around in the pool you know synchronised, they do that at the Olympics now and she called in, they all called in. There was your Mum and another girl, she was called June Garden, you can't forget a name like that can you?"

"There was your mum and June and about 5 or 6 lads including your Dad Freddie. That was the first time I met him. It was a surprise visit they were on their way to Aberdeen, Scotland in a war-time RAF wagon and they all slept on the floor, lads downstairs, girl’s upstairs. I remember I made them all a ham salad, we had nothing else in. That was a few years before she knew Billy Daniels and I don't know how Freddie came back in your mum’s life later after you were born. I don't think she was going out with Freddie, that time, he was just in the shows with her. And then Freddie came up to see her at our house when you were about 4...... or 5, she must have got back in touch with him I suppose, they got married and she started a new life"

"Yes, but what happened to him, did Billy Daniels just disappear? Was she upset about that?" Nanny seemed to find this a very difficult question and there was a long pause before she answered. "Well, I don't know really...... she didn't cry with me. I think it happened gradually, he always wrote to her there were air mail letters from America when he sent her some money but I don't really know how long that lasted, you'll have to ask her that. I didn't open her post did I? She used to get air-mail from America I remember those. He sent her cheques and she opened a bank account. He was involved with her then but he was travelling working all the time. I remember he wanted you to be circumcised. I'm sorry to..... you know, be intimate. But I’ve suddenly remembered that was what he wanted, we talked about it and your mother took you to the doctors"

It was simply another fact, I was learning many things tonight. "Did she often talk to you about him?" "Not with Freddie around no, but your dad knew all about him. I think he'd seen him in a show. He was very well known, he told me he sang in church choirs when he was a boy and then he went to New York before the war and sang in nightclubs and hotels. He sang all his life, when we knew him he had just finished his own TV show in America and he used to be on the radio before that and he had made some films. Jim talked to him more than I did, your Grandad liked him alot.

We once went all the way from Barnoldswick to Derby just to watch him on TV on ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’ It was when ITV had just started, before we got our own television, all that way just to watch him on television!"

'Jim liked him' I repeated to myself. I loved my Grandad, he died in 1980 and I assume he must have thought that I would never know anything about my father, we had never discussed it.

"He made records and your mother had some she might still. He was in a few films, one with Frankie Laine, a pirate film, no not pirates, he was on a riverboat that was it. I think he made three films....I'm sorry I can't remember what they were called. He was in a musical in London and this wasn't very long ago either. It wasn't long after you and Jane got married...'Bubbling Brown Sugar' it was called, it was on for a year at least in London and I saw a picture of him in the Daily Mirror once and I said to your mother 'You ought to take Jack to see that' but she said 'No I don't think so mother, I don't think Jack would be interested' He often sang in London, he was on television from the London Palladium lots of times you were too young to remember"

There was silence for a few seconds. "You'll just have to ask your Mum about him, I'll ring her and tell her that you want to talk to her about him" "No don't.....well, mention it next time you speak to her" "It's a pity you never met him. Isn't it a pity Jane? Your mother didn't want anything to do with him afterwards, they had both married other people hadn't they. You'll have to talk to her, she should tell you all about him now."

"I'm right glad you brought it up because I've often wondered what you knew. I once asked your mother whether you knew about it all and she said yes, so I just left it at that. She didn't want anyone to talk about it you see” "I know" I said "But I would like to know what happened" "Of course you do...... you'll have to talk to your Mother, I never see her without your Dad. I suppose it doesn't matter now, I don't think it'll bother him. Your Dad’s all right, I've always liked Freddie but I'll tell her you want to talk to her about him, you should know about him after all this time."

It was time to go, Nanny had enjoyed talking about that period and it was clear that she had never said anything to me before because she knew that it was something my mother did not want me to hear. My mother had started a new life, as Nanny had put it and what possible use would it be to talk about the past. I had a new Dad and the past was swept under the carpet. My mother had dealt with the situation as she saw fit, I was adopted by her new husband and they wanted me to be their child and I don't suppose at the time there was any alternative and that I can understand. It was much later than we usually stayed because it had been a most unusual visit. "You've always got your Nanny" she said as we gave each other a goodbye hug, she usually says that and as usual it cut me up. I always have a heart flutter at that moment, at 87 it could be the last time I see her but it's the memories which always flash back and tonight I was sitting on her knee listening to the BBC newscaster booming from the bakelite box 'wireless', as they called it.

A black cube, about a foot square that lived on the kitchen table 'Are you sitting comfortably children? Then we'll begin'. My Grandad walked in from work as 'Workers Playtime' with lots of laughter filled the kitchen and then we ate our dinner that Nanny seemed to spend all morning preparing. Nanny enjoyed singing along to the radio which she did to me often, daft songs like 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' and I can remember when Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth and when my Grandad burst in from work he took me out into the garden and pointed at the sky and waved his arms around.

THE REVELATIONS FROM NANNY were astonishing. My father must have been a fascinating character and had we known each other he could have added a whole new dimension to my entire life. He had worked frequently in London and in a long-running show in the late 1970's I realised with a pang that I could very easily have met him and I was furious that it had never happened. I drove home incensed, filled with bitterness towards my mother. He knew I existed so why the hell did she not tell me about him before? she has always followed the shows, it would have been the perfect opportunity to tell me that my father was in London.

Why was I not given the opportunity of knowing that it was possible to meet the man that she had kept a secret from me? Why didn't she think that for one day at least, I might have been interested to meet my father? WHY couldn't they be more open with me? yes they were both responsible. I can understand they might have reasoned when I was a child that I was too young for the complications or something? But I was 24 in 1978 and married and he was in London for months, surely I was old enough then MOTHER to meet the man from your past, MY FATHER! He would have remained buried in the back of my mind but SHE has brought him back to life now. WHY DO THIS TO ME NOW HE IS DEAD?

By the time I got home I had calmed down. I didn't hate my mother, I didn't hate my parents, how could I? They have always had my best interests at heart, they have both given me their love and they have loved each other, I can have no argument with them. And I have no regrets, I could have been adopted and never discovered anything about my mother, or my father, I would have known nothing of my parents.

Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that I'm now past 40 and beginning to come to terms with my own mortality, when like a slap across the face my mother mentions the fact that my Dad was not my 'real' father set me wondering on the roots of my character. I must get to know all about his life because my quest is to discover how we are connected. I've a stepson of my own from Jane's first marriage, Nick who was 3 years old when Jane and I met. I knew Nick's father and Nick displays traits and gestures that are almost identical to his father, with whom he did not live with except for the first year of his life.

My father was Billy Daniels and talking with Nanny he sounds as though he was a nice guy, but perhaps he was a charming rogue and it is also possible that he was a complete bastard and we must be in some way be alike. But how? Nanny said that she liked him and she can see through anyone and I should trust her judgement and just accept that he was an OK guy and leave it at that. But that is not enough, I have to find out for myself what kind of man he actually was.

I can now understand that her reticence was due to her desire to forget, to delete the entire episode from her memory and I know that is possible because I have done exactly the same thing with that man on the picture that had disappeared. But why had she suddenly mentioned him to me, out of the blue?

We had been gazing over the map for quite a while before she spoke, so she must have been thinking it over. I was about to visit the state where my father was born, she must have decided that I should appreciate the fact that Florida, a place that she has never visited, is where my father, a man she once loved came from and that invests Florida with a special significance. But did she realise what her remarks would do to me? I need to know everything she knows about him. And what about my Dad? I know they will be upset at just the thought of me bringing this 'back to life'. But I have an endless list of questions popping into my head at random and I know one thing that is clear, I must find him.

AND WHAT DID THE other members of my family know about my mother's relationship with Billy Daniels? Nanny mentioned that her son Alan had travelled to Brighton with his Dad, to see my mother just after I was born. Nanny had revealed many things that she has never spoken of before so I wasn't at all surprised when I spoke to my Uncle Alan on the phone and he said "Yes" and he too had also met him.

"Several times" I told him how Nanny had recalled his trip to Brighton on the train with my Grandad. "No she's mixed up about that because they went on the train to your Christening in Brighton. I was 18 and I can remember the trip to see her in the hospital very clearly. We drove down in a car my Dad had only just bought, he ran combinations before then, a motor-cycle with a side-car attached. It was his first car a Hillman and he kept it for a long time, it was a black 1938 Hillman Minx, cars were built to last then. This was long before the motorways and it seemed to take forever to get down there; I remember lots of AA boxes. It was an adventure, we didn't stop at all except for right at the last minute for petrol and when we finally got to Brighton we had a crash on the front by the pier. A taxi pulled out as we were passing the rank and drove straight into us, its bumper dug a groove right down the side of our car, there was a shower of sparks and we drove locked together for a second, nobody was hurt except the Hillman. Then a policeman on a bicycle appeared out of nowhere"

A family secret was unravelling and when I told him my mother had mentioned 'it' Alan was eager to tell me all he knew on the topic. I explained that I wanted to find out all about my father. He said I was opening another chapter in my life. My Uncle Alan lives 100 miles away and I barely talk to him or see him except at 'family occasions' with his wife Linda and their children Abigail and Guy, but we are close and he is an occupant of my earliest memories now coming into focus.

I can see myself looking out of the living room window at Weets View waiting for him to come home he’s coming on the train and there he is walking along the street waving at me, in his pale blue Royal Air Force uniform in his National Service. I used to pester him to play his guitar, which he did Lonnie Donegan style, with horse brasses fixed to the guitar strap like Joe Brown. And now decades later he is remembering for me, the trip to see his big sister in Brighton with her new born baby, me.

"We didn't know how to find the maternity hospital and I remember your Grandad asked the policeman for directions and he was very helpful when he knew how far we'd driven and why. My Dad wasn't concerned too much about the damage to his car, I think he was worried about your mother. I remember seeing you for the first time in a cot and then your mother in her hospital bed and she told us that Billy your Dad was coming to see her, travelling down from London later that night. I knew that he had been to see my Mum and Dad in Barnoldswick but I was at work that time."

"Did they tell you about his visit?" "Yes, the whole street knew. He was in a black Humber Super Snipe with a chauffeur called George. I knew someone had visited, as soon as I walked in the door I could smell his cigar smoke and then a few weeks later we had both taken time off work to go to Brighton. He came into the room with two other fellas all smartly dressed. Jack Spot said to me as Bill introduced him 'I didn't know Rae had a big brother to look after her' I shook hands with him and it was like shaking hands with a wet fish and I thought 'I don't like this bloke' My Dad told me when we were driving home that Jack Spot was a gangster from London, I had no idea. The other chap was called Sammy and he was a sort of butler-type to your father. I liked Billy, he was always fun to be with there was always lots of laughing going on"

Alan told me how the whole family went to meet 'Bill' in Blackpool. "We were staying in Auntie Edith's caravan at Knott End" Knott End! a windswept beach near Fleetwood a few miles north of Blackpool, a name that evokes my earliest memories of bucket and spade fun. We spent our holiday time there for several years and this must have been the first occasion. There is a cherished photograph my mother keeps in her album, of my Grandad holding me on the bonnet of his Standard Vanguard car with in the background Auntie Edith's caravan, a black-and-white 'Brownie' picture but I can recall the car was green and the pale-blue caravan smelt of gas and the sun had faded and crazed the paintwork of both.

"We all stayed there, my Mum and Dad and my sister, your Auntie Judith and you and your mother. This was before your Dad Freddie was around. I was with Moira, she came with us" Moira was Alan's girlfriend at the time, the last time I saw her was at my Grandad's funeral. "We met Sammy at the stage door for the tickets and we had the best seats in the house, you stayed with Edith, she was baby-sitting you that night" Auntie Edith was fun to be with and I was sad when she left for Australia.

"He was at Blackpool Opera House in a show with Alma Cogan. He sang a song to Judith during the show and I could see that the band were surprised, they hadn't rehearsed the part when he stopped and said 'This next song is for a young lady sitting right there' and he pointed up at Judith from the stage and they put the spotlight on her and she blushed like hell, I thought she was going to faint. We all went to a party after the show and had a meal together. We saw him before you were born in Blackpool another time too, we met him and your mother there"

"The last time I saw him was at 'The Hippodrome' in Derby. We all went to Uncle Jim's after the show, and he was on his own that time and I don't remember your mother that night. Bill was good company and I thought it was just a matter of time before they married and there was talk of you going to live over in America. But the next thing I knew she heard that he had married someone else and he wasn't spoken of again, that was it, finished. I think she was between two fires with your Dad Freddie and him, it was what your mother wanted, so I never mentioned it to you because I knew she didn't want me to"

'I KNEW SHE DIDN'T want me to' repeated in my head like a mantra and a few weeks later when Jane and I visited my parents to show them our Florida holiday photos, everyone was talking at the dining table after the meal but the big secret couldn't be discussed. 'I knew she didn't want me to' and I also knew that my mother would not discuss the subject in front of my Dad but I felt uncomfortable having the knowledge without my Dad being a part of it. I wanted to share my feelings with my parents, I was now determined to discover my father's story but after years of innocence I could not bring myself to break 'the radio silence'.

I was in my folks kitchen with a secret agenda, there was an important object I had remembered that might still be present in this house and I left them all in the dining room and headed for the pile of old records by the music system. The furniture had been re-arranged after a flood and the records were all stacked against the wall just asking to be flicked through. My parents are fanatical music lovers and they have a stack of albums; Rogers & Hammerstein, dozens of Broadway Shows and Gilbert & Sullivan, all the musicals that my mother has sung countless times.

I waded through the angled pile turning them over one by one and the soundtrack of my childhood flicked by. Ethel Merman: ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ when I was 10 my mother had wanted me on stage with Colne Operatic Society to sing in the kids part of 'Doing What Comes Naturally', but I was far too shy for that. Lena Horne: ‘Live at the Waldorf Astoria’ was played every Sunday afternoon for years. ‘The Ray Conniff Singers’ a bold 1950's cover with blood red diagonal bands. ‘Original Broadway Cast’ of ‘Guys and Dolls’ ‘Oklahoma’ ‘Showboat’ ‘South Pacific’ I know them all almost note for note, they were played to death on the Garrard Radiogram and as each side ended 'Two-Way Family Favourites' would blare from the radio to the cosy bubble and pop of boiling potatoes and the homely aroma of roasting beef.

I’ve found it, buried in the 'never played' section, a dog-eared cover almost falling apart. BILLY DANIELS - LIVE AT THE CRESCENDO. I was staring at something I hadn't seen for a long time, it was like finding an old book from childhood, but this isn't a Rupert Bear Annual or an Enid Blyton story, I can play it and listen to my father! I was holding 'him' in my hands. I held it to the light and I made a snap decision 'they won't notice if I borrow this' and I sneaked it out to the car and placed the record carefully in the boot. Why sneak? I wondered as I shivered outside and crept back into the house like a thief. I felt guilty of the concealment, not just the secret borrowing of the record but the knowledge that I now possessed and had chosen to conceal from my parents.

It has to be this way for now I reasoned, because it just doesn't seem appropriate to mention it, not yet. I have simply registered my father's existence and to walk in brandishing the record and say to my parents "Can I borrow this? I need to listen to it" would have been incredibly insensitive. The last thing I want to do is upset them and it would be cruel to break the family 'tradition' so abruptly and so I repeated the behaviour and kept the lid on our secret. I will be able one day, to break the cycle of non-communication and shame in my family. Shame!? what a thought, is that it really? even after all this time. My quest has changed everything, I was about to listen to a recording of my father singing, singing to me.

2

Gene Norman Presents

I took the record out of its sleeve and examined it under the spotlight over the kitchen table. It looked ruined and un-playable but I carefully washed and dried it and placed it gingerly on the turn-table and settled on the couch to listen. It began with a hiss and a repeated crackle, I thought the needle had stuck and I was half-way back to the deck when the recording filled the room. A quickly faded- in drum-roll double flourish to a clash of cymbals and then a smooth American radio announcer, purred between crackles -

"And now The Crescendo on the world famous Sunset Strip here in Hollywood, presents that international singing star, Mr Black Magic himself...Billy Daniels"

The music began and I heard my father’s voice for the first time.

“Well I fell in love with you the first time I looked into, them there eyes”

Piano, Drums, Guitar, Double Bass, Violin and Saxophone, a nightclub orchestra. I listened to the record all evening, side one then side two and then again and I was mesmerised. I'd not heard a voice quite like his before. He was a tenor, he had a very powerful voice with a terrific range, a tremendous voice from the past, a voice that could fill a theatre without an amplifier, but he could also be very tender, a romantic balladeer from a forgotten age.

I examined the cover which was almost falling apart and I remembered my mother’s house was flooded about 10 years ago and this record must have been underwater. It had almost been lost, it is very badly scratched and should not be played but revealingly my mother hadn't thrown his record away. I read the sleeve notes, poured over every word, the album was released in 1956 when I was 2 years old. On the front a photo montage headed 'Gene Norman Presents' above a black and white photo of Billy Daniels head and shoulders wearing a tuxedo and superimposed in the top corner a Las Vegas style roadside strip sign.

A dramatic white trapezoid against a jet-black sky with ‘Crescendo’ in blue neon script. On the 'Showing Tonite' grid-section below were bold black capitals 'Mr Black Magic BILLY DANIELS' On the rear a group of 12 head and shoulder shots of him spotlit, black and white with lots of shadow, gyrating and waving his arms around whilst singing with tie loosened, then off and his top- button undone, a filmic sequence. He must have had a dynamic stage presence, but the photographs were very dark and taken quite a distance from the stage and his face wasn't clear. I read the sleeve notes, written in the same style as his introduction and I could hear the radio announcer again -

No longer must he be seen to be appreciated. Hear these vibrant performances by Billy Daniels and you have to agree that all the intimacy and warmth that have made him an unrivalled international Cafe favourite are captured, for the first time, on recordings. The secret? This is the first time that Billy has been recorded actually singing to people. A receptive and enthusiastic audience that was completely charmed and in turn inspired Billy to give his irresistible best. You can almost feel the rapport. The setting was perfect. The lights were dimmed at the Crescendo on Hollywood's famous Sunset Strip accentuating the magnificent view of the entire city - a million lights twinkling through the huge picture windows, and all eyes were focused on the rhythmical peregrinations of the famous figure in the spotlight. Benny Payne at the piano, Billy's musical alter ego, is the ideal accomplice anticipating and catering to Mr. Daniels every musical whim. More magical than ever before, here is 'That Old Black Magic' at the Crescendo! - Gene Norman, Hollywood 1956

I had an incredibly powerful feeling of deja-vu whilst reading this introduction, because I'd stared over this sleeve before as a child in the radio gram of course but had never understood the significance, until now. The style of the sleeve notes were from a bygone age, the description of a million lights twinkling from Los Angeles, a magnificent view of the entire city visible from the picture windows of 'The Crescendo' nightclub on Sunset Strip, Hollywood and I imagined the rows of gleaming cars outside. The magical 1950's marques; Oldsmobile, Buick and Studebakers, Pontiacs and Cadillacs, bathed in the blue light from the 'Crescendo' neon, with this music in the background as V8 motors rumbled by, a blue ripple of chrome with red-tipped tail-fins and I turned off the lights and listened and was transported to the California of 1956. But where did my father live? Who did he live with? And where are my American relatives now?

Unusually, there were no song titles printed on the sleeve, they were only on the record label

Side 1 1) Them There Eyes (Tracey - Tuber - Pinkard) 2) Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing (Fain - Webster) 3) Sway (Gimbel - Ruiz) 4) Autumn Leaves (Kosma - Prevert - Mercer) 5) Deed I Do (Rose - Hirsch) 6) Medley:- (a) Easy To Love (Cole Porter) (b) Too Marvellous For Words (Whitting - Mercer) (c) My Blue Heaven (Donaldson - Whitting) 7) It's All Right With Me (Cole Porter) 8) My Yiddisha Momma (Yellen - Pollack) Side 2 1) You Were Meant For Me (Brown - Freed) 2) Lady Of The Evening (Berlin) 3) Medley:- (a) If I Should Love You (Robin - Rainger) (b) How Deep Is The Ocean (Berlin) (c) I Can Dream (Fain - Kahal) 4) I Live For You (Walton - Grant) Introduction to Old Black Magic with Sammy Davis Jnr. 5) That Old Black Magic (Arlen - Mercer)

I have not seen this LP for a long time and I’ve never heard this record before, I had never dared to play it, since my mother's tears that morning this was something that hurt, that spelt pain for my mother, for our family. But there was no pain now and this is a profound experience. I placed the needle carefully at the start of Side 2, this side is not quite as crackly. The opening bars of Benny Payne's liquid piano, the music is timeless. The songs are all standards, classic tunes from an elegant evening-gown era, romantic songs with lyrics that are eternally alive.

I listened intently, I spent many hours in my childhood listening to music and watching singers on TV with my parents and hearing their detailed critiques of performers and this man could sing as well if not better than anyone I've ever heard. It was easy to tell that he was good because he makes it sound effortless, like he'd sung these songs a hundred times before, which he probably had. But he also had that magical gift of making it sound as though tonight was the first time and he was singing solely for you. He performed each song with maximum emotion, a total commitment and his intense concentration was apparent even through all the crackles on this old record.

It has a very evocative nightclub atmosphere, it was a recording of a complete performance, not individual tracks mixed together, his entire act from start to finish. The flavour of the whole evening had been recorded for posterity, the occasional tinkling of glasses and the murmurs, laughter and the applause from the audience, right to the last clap. Then the band starts up again as he talks, or he begins singing another song immediately, there is no set pattern.

You could tell that he and the band knew at any given second exactly where they were, a 'tight band' as they say. At the end of some of the songs he talks to his audience in a smooth soft-spoken drawl. He was very confident which is not like me at all, but it was strange because I felt that he did sound in a way like me talking. He has a way of emphasising certain words like I do sometimes, with long exaggerated pauses between phrases, spoken over Benny Payne's perfect piano, with a dry humour.

His introductory style sounded like a technique he had developed for speaking to his audience whilst breathless from singing. It was relaxed and unhurried and he spoke in phrases as if speaking in song lyrics, with a very soft voice, the contrast with his powerful singing was a surprise.

“We'd like to...... sing a little tune now for those of you...... who might be...... so very much in love...... at the moment...... (a murmur of laughter)... And if any of you young fellas out there are in love...... I'd like you to ...... Please...... (deep exhalation)...... Enjoy yourselves...... (a lower pitch and louder)...Before you find out...... How much it costs!...... (a ripple of laughter then a change of tone, softer) But tonight I hope that you can hold hands with your...... chosen one...... and just relax..... and try to reach.... cloud number nine.... (now whispering)....Or whichever particular cloud it is ...... that you are able to make”

He was an artist whose remarks and humour perfectly complimented the late-night atmosphere. It was a very special evening for me, like playing an archaeological artefact but somehow I was hearing a part of my own history. Over the violin introduction to 'My Yiddisha Momma' he mutters almost off-mike. "This song is dedicated to my mother...." and then a name which sounds like "Mellisa" It was my Grandmother he was taking about! a thought that provoked yet another set of questions, but despite playing the part over and over it was impossible to decipher.

He could have been saying "I miss her" and I wondered whether there was a special reason why he had dedicated the song to her that night? Had she had died recently? or perhaps he was simply saying it to himself more than to his audience, to psyche himself up for this demanding ballad, a tour-de- force blockbuster of a song, that only a master of the art would even attempt to perform, it was operatic. And he could also perform very tender heart-breaking ballads, "Love is a many splendored thing" I felt connected to him in a very intense way, listening to my father performing his art for the first time was a once in a lifetime experience.

It was obvious that he knew for sure that this recording was an important document of his craft that would last forever. He transmitted that it was an honour for him to perform and he was very intense but underlying it all was a big thank you for listening. I could sense that he was thinking, 'It's a privilege to be recorded, singing my songs for you here tonight'. And his timing throughout the whole performance was extraordinary, even the occasional silence was of critical importance.

He had really given the audience everything he had and they had responded in full, even early on in the show he had generated such a potent intimacy it felt like he was singing and speaking to me only and that was his art and I realised that he actually was a 'star'. And for me hearing this record after all this time, I had released him from a time capsule and he had now stepped forward and taken his rightful place in my mind, having been left waiting in the wings for so long.

When the applause died he spoke again to introduce the next song and after a slow ballad he was very talkative and not at all out of breath. It was weird hearing him speak normally and I had a peculiar feeling, I felt that somehow he is speaking to me, to his audience at the 'Crescendo' but directly to me also, as if the period of time that has elapsed since 1956 has ceased to exist. It felt like he was here in this room, I had tuned into the past and here in the semi-darkness, I was listening to his ghost.

"We'd like to sing a song now, a song about love that we heard first in England" He said the word "England" as if it hurt him to. There was a restriction, a tightness in his throat that came over him as he said the word "Eng..land". I played that part over again and listening intently I knew I must have been in his thoughts that night at the Crescendo. I had been inside that word and in spirit I felt as though I'd actually been there. I'm finally listening to the record that I had seen but been unable to listen to as a child and as I played his music over and over it induced a blaze of recall, another trip down memory lane.

I WASN'T ALWAYS CHEERFUL when I was a boy but my memories are mostly of happy days. I also remember that I experienced some racism and whenever that occurred it used to upset me, because it was something that I could do nothing about. Someone, usually older and bigger than me would shout as a 'joke' "Your mother ran off with a black man" and I would sometimes be questioned in detail about my Dad, I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt unable to talk to my parents about those incidents but my Grandad would always listen to me and gently nod, although I didn’t realise until now, knowingly.

During my early schooldays he always pointed out any young 'coloured' faces we saw on TV. For example and I can remember many, we were watching a Boys Brigade Band on 'Blue Peter' and my Grandad piped up and I always knew it was coming as soon as a 'coloured' face came into view, "There's a black lad there look" he would exclaim and I would nod "There's a coloured lad there look, by the flag, can you see him?" I knew at the time that he was simply trying to build my confidence but that was all he ever said on the topic.

We would sit absorbed, whilst Alan Weeks on BBC TV commentated on 'The Harlem Globetrotters' the world famous exhibition basketball team. They all had joke names, Meadowlark Lemon, Sweetwater Clifton, it was all very impressive and funny and we would laugh but there was also a strange atmosphere in the room that I couldn't understand. I spent a lot of time with my Grandparents when I was a boy and inside their house I felt safe, it was Nanny's territory and she was always there, it was our nest and a loving home.

My Grandad would take me to Victory Park and we would stand on the cinders and watch Barnoldswick Park Rovers playing football, usually in the rain, in their faded orange kit. At every controversial incident my Grandad would imitate the referee's whistle, a realistic sound he created with his vibrating lips, after which he often said "A trumpet player taught me how to do that". He would take me for a drive around 'uptown' and he would sometimes even let me steer his bulbous black Austin of England Mayflower ZO3688, with a beige cracked leather interior, on the cinders around the lock-up garages as a special treat before we drove home.

He would talk all the time, he told me how he saw the gigantic R101 Airship fly over Oldham when he was a boy and he and his mates ran along in its shadow. He explained in great detail how he had made one of the first crystal radios in his street. "I finished it just before midnight on New Years Eve 1927 and my Dad refused to believe that the bells we could hear were coming from Big Ben in London. He thought it was a magic trick"

My Nanny, Ethel, and my Grandad, Jim, both came from a cotton town, Oldham, Lancashire and there was often talk of relations, Joel and Hilda, Ada or Edith, Uncle this and Auntie that, a list of names that seemed to stretch around the town and miles beyond and I sometimes found it bewildering. There was Uncle Jim and Auntie Ann who were always fun and her sister Monnie "The GI Bride who lives in Pennsylvania" was often talked about. That was the only mention of an American that had affected our family and I never spoke about my 'real father' suspicions with my Grandad, not even when I was older and had become a stepfather myself.

I had been married for two years and was 26 when my Grandad died in 1980. The last time I saw him, he was in hospital for what I believed was a minor matter and he told me for the first time what he thought was a funny story from my childhood that I have no memory of. "We were driving back from Knott End me and your Uncle Jim and you were sitting on Jims knees on the front seat, you had a toy you had got for your birthday, a plastic steering wheel with a rubber sucker that you had stuck to the dashboard. Jim kept beeping and bouncing you as we drove along 'Beep de de beep beep' then he would bounce you on his knee and you would go 'Beep Beep' this went on for miles, nearly all the way home 'Beep de de beep beep' bounce 'Beep Beep' when suddenly you started crying we both had to ask you what was wrong and eventually you said 'I keep going Beep Beep but I don't want to!'"

A week later my mother telephoned me one morning as I arrived at work "I've got some bad news, Jack" and I rode over to my parents on my motorcycle in a blizzard half crying and thinking, 'Don't crash and create more upset, concentrate'. The curtains were drawn and sense of deep gloom hung in the air and the house was full of sobbing. I quickly left with my Dad and my brother Julian and we drove to the other end of town and emptied the house of my Grandad's clothes and belongings before Nanny could go home.

A heart-string snapped when I caught a whiff of his donkey jacket, I was reminded of the welcome burying of my face in his coat which I was now throwing into a bin liner in tears. And a few days later, his funeral cortege slowed to a snail's pace as we passed the Rolls Royce Aero Engines factory gates, where he had worked for most of his life. When I saw his solemn friends standing at the gates in remembrance, I was overwhelmed with grief and wept for the rest of the journey, a major part of my life had disappeared.

When my Grandad was still very much around I began my schooldays at Gisburn Road Junior & Infants School, Barnoldswick, on the Lancashire Yorkshire border in 1959. The blast of warm caring air as I walked into my school every morning, was the foundation of my life, but from day one I always felt that I was different somehow. I didn't want to be, I wanted to melt into the crowd and be like everyone else I knew. I felt uncomfortable when the 'Blackie' was passed around the classroom for a penny for school funds, I had a solitary reaction to Blackie, a strange feeling deep inside from somewhere and my puzzlement at my darker skin, I did look like I could be Fred’s son but these were thoughts that I couldn't share with anyone else.

A tradition that had been in the school probably for decades, Blackie was an antique piggy-bank made of cast-iron about six inches high. "Blackie!" as all the class would shout was a negro minstrel's head and shoulders, grotesquely distorted with big ears that were twisted to make the red- coated arm lift the coin and drop it through the monstrous grinning mouth. It was a fun-time in the classroom and nobody else batted an eyelid at the money-box novelty, but to me the thing was monstrous and charged with fear. I remember "going shopping" holding hands with my mother, in and out of the shops along 'Church Street' and 'Albert Road' in Barnoldswick, or 'Barlick' as it is called by the locals.

And there 'uptown' was another Blackie that grinned at me, as an entertainment for children in his queue I suppose, a butcher had installed behind a small glazed recess in the wall, sitting on a box in semi-darkness was a golliwog. I can see it now, staring blindly down at me with a mindless leer. The doll was probably tiny, again a simple novelty, but it loomed large in my mind at the time. When I was in bed, in the orange street-light glow from the attic skylight, Blackie and that infernal golliwog lurked in the shadows of my imagination and haunted me. I never understood why they made me feel uncomfortable.

At Junior & Infants School I was full to bursting with energy and perfectly happy most of the time until somebody made a remark like "Look at the colour of his skin. He's a Blackie!" and I would feel grief-stricken. It was a horrible because I couldn't do anything about it, I couldn't wash my skin white and sometimes I wanted to tear my hair out and pull myself limb from limb in sheer mind-numbing frustration. I would often get into fights, I didn't look for trouble, I never had a bad temper and I rarely "started it" but fights seemed to just happen around me and I would suddenly find myself in the midst of flailing fists coming in my direction. I always fought back, but I never enjoyed the experience.

There was only one 'black lad' in the whole town, I met him when I reached my secondary school in 1965, Barnoldswick Secondary Modern on the 'New Road'. I did not consider myself black, I did not consider myself as anything, I was slightly darker than anyone else in the school and that was why I always felt that I was different. This was northern Lancashire in the 1960's and everyone else looked as white as a sheet to me. I was envious of their solidarity and I wished that I could be part of the crowd. All except this lone 'big black lad', we didn't form a friendship, we were on nodding terms only. He was older than me and I was very wary of him because he was so short tempered he'd lash out with both fists flying at the slightest provocation. He was usually in trouble with the teachers, mainly because he was always being picked on by older boys and often fighting.

The whole playground gathered around him and another boy one day as they battled it out in the pile of boiler-room coal for a reason that remained unknown. It seemed to be an extraordinarily long time before a teacher broke the fight up. There wasn't a clear winner and what I remember most of all is that he was in tears throughout, even when he was winning the fight. I knew that he was upset because he was forced to fight and I felt alone with my knowledge. He was battling his way through his life and that's the way I saw it at the time, because I saw the racism he had to endure and I had a very small taste of it myself.

When I was 13, I remember a violent incident that happened to me when two lads much older than I was, followed me home after school, kicking me along, spitting at me and shouting in my face "Who's your father you black bastard? Who's your father?" I was terrified because they seemed to get themselves more and more excited. It was raining and when they cornered me into a doorway and tipped out my bag and began to kick my books around in the puddles I lost my temper and to end the ordeal for the three of us I exploded in their faces and wildly punched both of them to the ground.

I can still see their stunned expressions, I had astonished them with a frenzied blur of violence and it was they that took a beating instead of me. I thumped one so hard on the side of his head the impact cracked a bone in my wrist. I cried after the fight on the walk home and in my bedroom until I had to go downstairs and face the music. And for once, unlike some previous scrapes, I told my parents the truth. I had to because I couldn't dream up a reason why I had a swollen wrist and blood that wasn't mine spattered on my torn school-shirt.

My Dad was pleased, which was a surprise because I thought I'd be in trouble. He said "You did a Cassius Clay on those bullies!" and when Grandad appeared they both talked about Uncle Bob my Grandad's long-dead brother who was once a travelling prize-fighter and as my mother bandaged my wrist my Dad shadow-boxed on tip-toe around the living room, enjoying his impression of Cassius Clay. But I was petrified, I wished that it hadn't happened, my wrist was hellish painful and I had to go back to school the next day and face them. After a long night I was surprised to find that I had no need to worry because they stayed away from school and when I saw them a few days later they kept their distance, in fact they avoided me, but I made sure the bandage on my wrist was hidden from view, just in case.

The incident affected me deeply, I thought about the reason it had happened for months afterwards and when word got around and I became 'one of the boys' I realised what could be achieved by will power, but I remained 'a quiet lad', most of the time.

If we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realise so many people are taught to hate us that we are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn” Martin Luther King, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955

MY PAST HAS ACQUIRED a new meaning, listening to my father's voice for the first time reminded me of events that I had forgotten, incidents that had occurred in my life because of the genes I inherited from him. I was cut adrift from him and his past but we must inherit a cultural history as well as DNA and now I had a craving to unearth my father's history to explain my past and the present, so that I can tell myself who I am and how I got here. My father's life spanned a period of history that has always made me feel uncomfortable, but I'm now ready to embrace the full story. To understand my father's youth I need to rewind to a black and white world of only a few televisual decades ago, when life in America was very different from today.

I know that my tiny experience of racism which was only an occasional discomfort of my boyhood and not in any way a disadvantage was absolutely nothing compared to my father's youth in a segregated society. He was born in Florida in 'the deep south' in 1915 less than a generation since the abolition of slavery. And in those days if your ancestry contained any trace of African blood, that determined your entire life because 'black' and 'coloured' were legally separated from 'white'. It meant where you could eat and who with, who you could travel with, who you could socialise with and who you could love and marry.

Through the crackles on this 1956 recording of my father, I was listening to a man that had lived through the struggle for civil rights and his face carried the haunting historical baggage of that uniquely American experience. It is a history that remains uncomfortable for us all because it was an obscenity that people were once treated as inferior and dangerous wild animals. In my father's youth, Louisiana state law listed people as you would classify a breeding line of cattle, in order of their 'blackness'.

Negroes = 3/4 or more negro blood; Griffe = 1/2 Negro 1/2 Mulatto; Mulatto = 1/2 Negro 1/2 White; Quadroon = 1/4 Negro 3/4 White; Octoroon = 1/8 Negro 7/8 White.

It was once a crime in 29 States, all over the USA not just in the South, for whites and blacks to marry. In Alabama the law stated "The legislature shall never pass any law to legalise marriage between any white person and a negro, or a descendant of a negro" The emphasis was on control, as no mixed marriage was permissible the segregation was absolute. You had been found guilty of having the wrong colour skin, so you were second class, permanently.

In Arkansas the law stated "The words 'person of negro race' shall be held to apply to and include any person who has in his or her veins any negro blood whatsoever" In Alabama; "The term negro includes mulatto, a person of mixed blood, descended on the part of the father or mother from negro ancestors, without reference to, or limit of time, or number of generations" In Georgia; "It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person"

There was no reference in any law to white men making love to black women because to some that was considered an unspoken perk of superiority. But in law, any permanent relationship was impossible. In Texas; "If any white person and negro shall knowingly inter-marry with each other in this state, or having so intermarried in or out of the state, shall continue to live together as man and wife within this state, they shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than five years" In Florida “1,000 Dollar Fine”

In Alabama it was "Illegal for a white person and a negro to play checkers or cards anywhere on public property" Even a social pastime together was unlawful, white and black could not ride together in a taxi and the ordinances governing public transport, where notices declared FOR WHITE ONLY or FOR COLORED ONLY. The rule was that no 'black' person could ever sit in front of a 'white' person on a bus. It meant the bus driver if he so desired could order the vacation of an entire row of seats to make room for one white person, ordering only 'Coloureds' to stand up throughout the journey, it was the law.

IN 1954 THE YEAR I was born the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education declared the doctrine of 'separate but equal' to be unconstitutional and the long evolutionary march to our multi-cultural society began in earnest. In the early years of the 20th century my father as a child sang in his isolated church, he was talented and became a professional entertainer and built a career in 'Show-Business'. At the height of his success in his 37th year he met my mother in England, who was from Oldham a cotton town in the industrial north then a community still teeming with cotton mills that had relied on the slave trade for their very existence, the rich historical mixture of my new found heritage.

In a peculiar way I miss my real father’s absence from my life until now and my big question is, did he miss me? Did he even for a moment wonder what I was doing and how I was? Even if he hadn't expressed it to others he must have thought about me, he had a son growing up on another continent.

3

Devotion

I recall my boyhood enthusiasm for all things American, my consumption of 'Americana' in films and music and my love of Marvel and D.C. Comics, was not uncommon for a northern lad in 1960's England. I can remember absorbing the television. 'The Mike & Bernie Winters Show' and 'Thank Your Lucky Stars', my parents always watched the variety shows but I was more struck by the shocking reality of the news. And the news from America in the mid-1960’s was dominated by black America. I remember my astonishment and fear at seeing peaceful protesters being fire-hosed and chased down the streets by police dogs. The threat of another civil war because a black man was attending a University previously reserved for white people only. The Governor of Alabama wanted no end to segregation. It seemed unreal, as if the images were being transmitted from another planet.

A vivid memory is a newsreel of Martin Luther King, the leader of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement, walking at the head of a protest march instinctively ducking on hearing a close bang. He was supremely courageous for the most primary of reasons, his life was in mortal danger. At home in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, nobody I knew or had ever heard of was in any danger of losing their life violently. The ghost-like black and white TV images of an impassive Martin Luther King, I have a dream, free at last! and a waving President Kennedy. They were the oratory wizards of the era and it felt important to listen to their every word transmitted over the airwaves, along with all the other disparate images, by the first generation growing up in England with mass television. There were only two TV channels 'on air' until the mid-sixties and the daily question "Did you see so-and-so last night?" had a 50-50 chance that you had shared the experience.

My childhood memories, probably like all my contemporaries, are saturated with American images from The Lone Ranger, The Lucy Show, 77 Sunset Strip, Highway Patrol, The Invaders, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, The Beverly Hillbillies, Seahunt, Bonanza, The Outer Limits. It is true that you remember the shocking and the unusual and I recall as if it was only yesterday watching my compulsory viewing of the ITV local evening news with that Friday night feeling when Mike Scott, the presenter behind the desk of Granada TVs' ‘Scene at 6.30’ from Manchester, answered an unexpectedly ringing telephone and announced with horror "In Dallas, Texas. President Kennedy is being rushed to hospital having been shot by an unknown gunman"

My mother was across the yard at a neighbours, she was at that time a telephonist at Rolls Royce, the factory down the road which was the lifeblood of the town and had replaced 'King Cotton'. My Grandad along with hundreds of others worked his lifetime at Rolls Royce. He had moved from his home town of Oldham to the home of Rolls Royce in Derby, churning out 'The Merlin' piston engine for the Spitfires and Lancasters, in frenetic shift-work during the war when each machinist was enclosed by a low brick wall, to protect the machines, the means of production from bomb-blast. In their 'tommy helmets' the munition workers fought the war with lathes. Then in those peaceful days that eventually arrived he moved again to an expanded research plant, that was originally built to hide from the strategic bombing, in the rolling Pennine Hills of Barnoldswick, helping to build state of the art jet engines.

The precision engineered marvels of the new jet age gave their proud names to the streets of the town's housing estate, Conway Crescent, Avon Drive. It was a company town and the surrounding country-side hummed to the high-pitched shriek from the test beds. The rows of silver tubes with blackened up-swept nozzles that pointed sky-wards, a column of jet exhaust shimmered to the clouds. A dynamic sight and sound that was unique to Barnoldswick. The super-sonic boom was often heard during my Infant School-days as Royal Air Force cold-war fighter jets from the plains of Lincolnshire buzzed the town where their engines were produced.

On that particularly cold 1963 Friday night during 'Scene at 6.30' my Dad was walking home from another day at his work. He was a workshop foreman in a small converted former cotton-mill at the other end of the town, for a new company 'Silentnight', a bed manufacturer. He was rapidly becoming embroiled in production figures, quality control systems to implement and targets to achieve at what became the largest bed factory in Europe….

I was a peculiarly receptive to all things American 9 year old and I can vividly recall that shattering news flash of 22 November 1963, I ran from the Living Room TV through the kitchen, to tell my mother, in the acrid fumes from the coke burning AGA she had just lit for the November evening, in my wide-eyed 9 year innocence I re-broadcast the news "President Kennedy's been shot"

We rushed back through the smog to our television beside our blazing fireplace, a biscuit-tiled mantel-piece above the open coal fire that filled the room with an orange flicker atop the grey shadows that played from the television. The 'commercials' were playing and an incessant Public Service Announcement that exhorted parents to always keep the fire-guard in place to prevent children in night-clothes, gathered by the only pre-central heating warmth, being enveloped in flames. I always preferred watching television with the light off whenever I could but my mother switched the lights on and after her habitual check of the fire-guard we watched with full illumination the shocking news.

People in the streets of America saying over and over that "President Kennedy is dead" shocked and bewildered people were speaking to us in Lancashire via Telstar satellite direct from America. I was upset too because my mother was crying over an American that had obviously been very important to her. A few days later when I saw the televised killing of the alleged assassin, it impressed my young mind with a frightening image of America. It was a place that was hideously violent but a place that fortunately for me, was a long way from home.

THEN SOMETHING NEW CAME along that pushed the news firmly into second place. On the same day as President Kennedy's assassination, Friday November 22nd 1963, The Beatles released their follow up to ‘Please Please Me’ with their second 'LP' ‘With The Beatles’, another dominant memory of my childhood I remember when 'With The Beatles' immediately soared to the top of the LP chart as the country was engulfed in a tidal wave of Beatlemania. I was thrilled to find 'With The Beatles' in my Christmas 'pillow case'. 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' was the Christmas No.1 and their previous single 'She Loves You' was one of the biggest selling records of all time.

'She Loves You' was the first record I ever bought from Slaters record shop with pegboard walls with bright red electric guitars in a circular display with Bert Weedon - Play in a Day guitar tutorials at crazy angles alongside. To me and my friends back then it was a magical place and the centre of our universe. "Six and Eight" Mr. Slater required in his palm before he handed out the brown paper bag and I had my own piece of the Beatles magic. When I got home I played 'She Loves You' over and over with my ear pressed tight against the woven black, green and gold cloth of the Garrard Radiogram's speaker, while on my knees the two minutes of mono aural heaven were embedded into my brain.

The Beatles Liverpool home was in the same county, only a few miles from where I was kneeling and I was a big fan from that moment. The Beatles belonged to their fans, they became our personal property and everyone who 'thought they were fab' bought their 45rpm singles on the day of release. I would rush home from the record shop, in my eagerness for the first play of a new Beatles record, pausing to inhale the inside of the record sleeve, that buttery resin smell of a brand-new record was as close as you could get to them!

It took a minute for the radiogram to warm up and with the aroma of hot dust from the valve amplifier and the comforting orange glow from the grilled rear of the cabinet, the first play of a new record from 'The Fab Four' was an experience to relish. When the needle hit the vinyl, a dramatic expectant kaaooommmmmmm the anticipation was addictive. I was amazed when each record was better than the last and exhilarated when The Beatles even produced their own dramatic electrical- hum introduction to I Feel Fine, another awesome two and a half minutes of pop wizardry.

It was absolutely vital to see every television appearance, especially the annual pop-highlight - The New Musical Express Poll-Winners Concert a rare live TV performance, plugged into their 'Vox' Amps you could barely hear above the screams. Of course back then you could only record the sound, which I did religiously on my mother's 'Phillips Elizabethan' reel-to-reel tape recorder which was the size and weight of a suitcase full of bricks. The play-back was only a pale souvenir of when you had been a part of the TV audience and had shared an experience to be discussed in exhaustive detail with other confirmed fanatics.

After school, especially on a Thursday when I'd been paid my Two and Six wage from my paper round and my pockets were heavy with pennies we would congregate in the 'Milk Bar' and drink 'Hot Vimto' out of the rain crowding around the cafe juke-box listening to every Beatles A and B side until someone got tired of them. Then we would enjoy golden-oldie hits that were still popular, Carole King: It Might As Well Rain Until September and The Everly Brothers: Walk Right Back. In the summer we would meet outside the Record Shop and eat our 'Cornish Mivvi' ice-lollies before going in to flick through the latest LPs, or hang around the newsagents reading about our gods in a devotional 'Fanzine' called 'The Beatles Book Monthly'. My friends and I sent a 'postal order' and joined the fan club and received exclusive pictures a personal acetate recorded Christmas message from our mentors and an eagerly awaited monthly 'Newsletter' from Fan Club Secretary, Freda Kelly.

When The Beatles left for America, my dreamland, for the first time in February 1964, 'Granada' the Lancashire TV Station followed, so that all the fans back home could travel with them. And from footage flown across the Atlantic daily, Granada broadcast a half-hour documentary that followed the early evening news every night for a week. It was riveting viewing which wasn't "on too late" and I absorbed every image. The backgrounds were a fascinating glimpse of a behind the scenes America that was rarely seen, it was the first time I had witnessed my heroes through the eye of a fly-on-the-wall camera and I joined them besieged in their suite in New York's Plaza Hotel, looking serious for a change.

In crisp white button-down shirts and cuban-heeled 'Chelsea Boots' they watched the TV evening news-coverage of their arrival. The American nation saw them waving from the open-air steps of their plane as the newscaster, rambling on about teenagers gravely intoned, over a background of hysterical screams ".....and this is their biggest day since we repulsed the British at Bunker Hill but there is no indication that our teenagers are going to do it again today. The British invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania. D-Day has been common knowledge for months and this was the day. The invasion took place at New York's Kennedy International Airport"

In one memorable sequence Paul McCartney walks briskly down a hotel corridor towards yet another skipping backwards camera-man with a transistor radio to his ear blaring out Murray the K the New York disc-jockey that had continually broadcast Beatles records since their arrival, with a loud "They're HERE!" bellowed between songs. McCartney, shaking the radio at his ear like a tambourine, hamming up to the entourage in a Nanny-like Lancashire accent shouts, "EhUp! I love this place America, they're playing us records ont ray-de-oo. Luvly!"

In their smart grey suits with black velvet collars they performed on the now world-famous 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and by their third appearance had drawn the biggest-ever TV audience to date. The Beatles were at numbers 1,2,3,4 and 5 in the 'Hot One-Hundred' and I watched all the Beatle news unfold avidly. It seemed that now the whole world had gone completely Beatle crazy, they had conquered America and any news however trivial was eagerly lapped up by the fans back home. The world was suddenly much smaller and for me, America was now a friendlier place and was no longer on a different planet.

4

Touchdown

I know what it means to be a fanatic. My next serious bout of fan worship was right at the very end of my schooldays, when I was a fifth-form prefect in a crisp white shirt and concerned to keep my school tie straight and my black shoes polished. But in the breast pocket of my blazer I kept folded as a token, a poster of an American musician who had made his name in Britain. A full-frontal portrait of Jimi Hendrix leapt off the page and always shocked the most boring girls in the class whenever I flashed them the subversive image.

The first time I heard the opening seconds of 'Purple Haze' I was hooked. "What's this?" I shouted as I turned up the radio, my craze at the time was the glorious sound of Motown but this sounded futuristic, like everything fused into one. On my talisman picture of Hendrix he stood defiant wearing love-beads and wild hair dressed in a Victorian colonial uniform, with a dome-topped black hat sprouting Indian feathers. He was 'far-out' and his music and his hair were colossal "like tendrils reaching out into space" I was hooked and my volume control had reached an all-time high.

The Garrard Radiogram was now all mine, my brother Julian had helped me carry the heavy cabinet up the stairs to my attic bedroom above my mother's ladies-wear shop and Julian held the step-ladder while I pinned my Hendrix album covers onto the sloping ceiling. That old valve amp could almost blow the tiles off the roof which I attempted frequently, especially on Voodoo Child (Slight Return) If I don't meet you no more in this world. I'll meet you in the next one and DON'T be late. A track that always induced a fit of exuberant control twiddling until my mind-boggled mother would scream up the stairs "Turn it DOWN!" I was glad when I left home to attend the Regional College of Art in Bradford, Yorkshire. It was 1970 and I was 16 and sorry to leave the Garrard behind but it was just too big to strap on the back of my motorbike.

WHEN I LOOK BACK on my life now, I realise that I have always displayed a somewhat fanatical nature and now I wonder if I inherited this from my father? And what was he fanatical about when he was 16? In 1931 when 'youth' as a cultural force and an economic entity did not exist. When instant global TV news and mass-marketing was unimaginable, except far away in the science-fiction of the future. The world my father grew-up in was totally different to mine, a thought that occurred to me at the moment I arrived in the USA for my first time, holding my breath on touchdown when Jane and I landed in Atlanta, Georgia, en-route to Florida. I was still in a state of mental nausea from my mother's astonishing 'Your father came from there'.

Whilst I was wallowing in the past, we had flown thousands of miles in a 'Luxury Jet Liner' cruising at 537mph at 37,000 feet. Jane and I enjoyed our refreshments over Greenland, marvelling at the view of snow covered mountains bathed in bright sunshine. The landing was an intense moment, rich in meaning and by the time we decelerated to walking speed I had already tapped into a previous, younger version of myself. I was 'in' America at last, for me a place that held a profound significance. It was a typical Lancashire day in Atlanta, grey and drizzly, but it hadn't been raining in Manchester as we took off ten hours previously with our son Nick on the roof terrace, watching our jet climb through the sky with the aviation fans tuned into the pilot on their short wave radios.

We entered United States territory by crossing a yellow line on the floor of a glittering 'Star Trek' interior and passed through passport inspection with a rattle on a computer keyboard and a loud thunk in the passport. We walked across the huge expanse of the international arrivals concourse and following the signs we travelled by underground train to the terminal for our onward flight to Miami. Harstfield Airport, Atlanta is impressive in the American way, its immense.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the sky was alive with travel as we took off for the sun in Florida with mostly teenagers on board and as we reached cruising height they wandered the aisles changing seats and some made calls from seat-mounted telephones. A youth seated in front of me wearing a 'Miami Dolphins' cap read his E-Mail on a laptop computer. A girl behind complained to her boyfriend of a rash on her arm from her computer mouse "I've been overworking honey" There was a grey dusk on one side of the plane but on the other a vivid tropical orange sunset with a brilliance I'd never seen before, when an overhead speaker crackled into life with a buzz then a voice not unlike Neil Armstrong, babbled in customer-service-speak -

"We outta-be landing in Miami on schedule tonight and we should be arriving at the gate on- time...... We'd like to thank you for flying with us today and we realise that you do have a choice and in the future, when your schedule calls for air-travel we sincerely hope that you'll select Delta Airlines...... It's a beautiful evening for flying and on our left there's a great view at the moment of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral.... Please relax and enjoy the flight.... Thank you"

Great! Cape Canaveral in the sunset, but we were in the centre row and I couldn't get close to a window, I noticed that there was no-one else even remotely interested in looking out at the view. On our aisle from a bottomless bag she had heaved out of the overhead locker 'Donna' was passing 'Bobby' an orange drink, "Or a soda, and would you like something to eat, some chocolate chip cookies?" and I didn't see a single head turn to look outside to see the famous Cape Canaveral. This flight through space at 500 miles per hour was nothing but a simple bus journey to these people. What must they think when they see the Space Shuttle returning to Earth? apparently in the southern states you can watch it streak through the stars like a meteor before it lands on a runway like an airliner. 'We've seen it on TV a hundred times. It's just another one of our spaceships'

As we waited for our luggage, which appeared within minutes of landing on the carousel at Miami, our fellow travellers were from all over the world. I had listened, on the in-flight radio, to a sociology professor stating that 'Miami is a place worthy of study as it's the closest we have on the Earth now to what a city in the future will actually be like' From our house in the country in 'littl'ol'England' I knew that to touch-down in Miami on this our first time in America would be a culture shock and simply listening to the cacophony of languages it was. But the realisation that we had travelled halfway around the globe came when we stepped outside.

We had left the inter-continental travel system and were now under our own steam and walking under the cool air curtain to exit the terminal, the combination of new sensory experiences all occurring at once was extraordinary. The humidity, the apparent lack of air hits you in the chest first of all. It was dark and looking beyond the flat horizon of the runway the planes rapidly approached and at that angle appeared to be only yards behind each other. A bright dotted line of landing lights streamed in a continuous line high into the night sky, as if all the way back home. A row of tall palm trees curtained a dozen neon-highlighted skyscrapers in the distance with twinkling airplane lights all around accompanied by a sudden drone as a helicopter, landing lights ablaze wapped over us. We had landed on an unknown world and 'eyeballs out' as the astronauts say, we noticed with a heightened awareness every detail, because we had seen nothing like this before.

As we waited for the 'Rent-a-Car Courtesy Bus' in a giant circular concrete 'Pick-Up-Drop-Off Zone Only' vehicles of every description cruised past. A 'low-rider' rumbled by, a squat pink customised muscle-car with bright red floodlights underneath that shone on the road below to produce a space hover effect. The driver, what you could see of him through the purple tinted 'windshield' didn't care whether anyone had noticed his amazing vehicle or not, he looked as though he'd just nipped out on a boring errand. That was the way he wanted to look of course, as cool as an android.

We quickly reached our car a 'Chevrolet Corsica' at Bay 214 inside the 'Hertz-Car Pick-Up Area' which was a fenced-off tarmac slab the size of a small English town, we had silently hovered there in a brilliantly lit space vehicle, routed by a dashboard-mounted computer. We threw our cases in the 'trunk', bounced over the one-way nail barrier exit and headed south towards the Florida Keys down US Highway 1 as straight as an arrow. We soon left the hothouse of central Miami behind and maintaining a steady air-conditioned 55mph, I realised that driving in America is simply a comfortable cruise, American cars are space-cruisers, with blazing rocket-exhaust tail-lights. And the roadside images of an America that I had previously glimpsed only through a keyhole from another continent gushed over us. America! I had finally got here.

The strip, leaving Miami for The Keys, a total car world, it was dark so the effect was startling, an electrified blizzard of red hot images filled me with an exhilaration I had never felt before in my life. The names reeled off the signs, a continual ribbon of information, screaming to be heard above the crowd; Homestead Air Force Base Next Exit - Welcome to the Florida Keys - America's Holiday Playground - Key Largo - Coral Reef State Park 2 Miles Ahead. These were the destinations I had studied on the map at home before we left. What could not be anticipated by map reading back home in the windswept hills of Yorkshire were the multitude of advertising hoardings, a swirling whoosh of brilliant colours of every conceivable hue using every graphic device imaginable. We were driving down the aisle of a gigantic supermarket and I was transported back and re-read the DC Comics from my childhood all over again within the space of five minutes.

I had tuned into a part of myself that I had forgotten and my first few hours in America were rich in emotion. The roadside strip triggered a flashback of a yearning I had when I was a boy of the 'I'm going to go to America one day' variety, an aching desire I had repressed at adulthood, when all the pressures come into play of getting on and making a living. I felt that I had achieved an ambition and had reached some kind of turning point and I felt strangely relieved. We were exhausted after the long flight and I was glad when eventually by a gradual count down of roadside mile-markers we reached our destination. It was announced by a final floodlit sign, not exactly a sign, it was a large thatched-roofed beach hut and like everything else fabulously imaginative and direct. It read - Welcome to Islamorada The Sports Fishing Capital of the World - and floodlit and diving over the roof, a gigantic fibreglass sailfish.

We checked into our hotel 'The Cheeca Lodge' with a very comfortable signature amongst the wall- mounted Marlins, quarry tiles, foliage and cane at the desk and were shown splendidly to our room with an ocean view. We were worn out but too tired to sleep, our minds had been excited by the journey. It was 11pm in this room, but inside our bodies it was five hours on at 4am and we were at home in bed. We felt we had earned a celebratory drink, for successfully negotiating the simple 'bus journey' the thousands of miles from our home to this particular mini-bar by this ocean here and so giddy with tiredness we opened the half-bottle of champagne whilst we sat on the balcony and swallowed the view.

The lights from our hotel reflected on a flat ocean, there was no surf, the coral reef offshore means the inshore is flat calm like a lake, a water-sports paradise. A spotlit Stars and Stripes flapped with the palm trees that hissed in the late-night breeze and through the fronds a board-walk jutted out to sea and disappeared into the darkness. The sky was pitch black and I scanned across the stars but I could not recognise anything! The constellation of Orion was tilted at a crazy angle and I had to bend my head onto my shoulder to see the stars as they looked from home, which I now knew as a geographical fact was a very long way from here. On the horizon was a lighthouse, probably on the reef and I focused on the light sweeping from side to side and I thought about Jane, our home and our life together up to this moment.

And how it was once an enormous distance, a life-threatening undertaking to travel across the vastness of the Atlantic. I thought about the millions of people that came here across that ocean there and under this sky. Then I thought about my father and instead of drowning him out, I let him surface. He was born on this coast, only a few hundred miles from this spot but he is dead and I can never meet him, I realised that knowing your family and where your parents came from is the very essence of belonging to a place. I have relatives here in America, to whom I probably don't even exist. I'm here in my father's territory and his ancestral home and I am related to all of them and to this place.

I gripped the rail and took a deep breath to compose myself because I felt like crying out loud. It was a heady combination of sadness and relief in equal measure, but instead I went back inside, took a big slug of my drink and said to Jane who was now lying provocatively on the bed, what I have always known but have never told anyone before in case they asked why, "I've always wanted to come here"

5

You Go To My Head

I have found another Billy Daniels record! my friend Peter Dugdale found it rummaging in an 'Antique' shop in Wigan, Lancashire and there he was, in a cardboard box packed with old records just waiting to be discovered; Billy Daniels with Orchestra conducted by Benny Carter - YOU GO TO MY HEAD. Peter rang me with the news, he said he was stunned at the likeness to me on the cover photo and as soon as possible Jane and I rushed the 70 miles to visit. Peter had wrapped it for postage in a hardboard sandwich bound tight with a mile of adhesive tape and like a critically important game of 'Pass the Parcel' it seemed to take forever to unwrap it and felt like an ordeal that I had to go through but finally with a shout of relief and a smile from Peter's wife Jennifer, I held ‘him’ in my hands on a 10 inch LP from 1957 a year later than his 'Live at the Crescendo'.

I placed the needle in the starting groove and it was a clean as a whistle "Great! it's hardly scratched. What a find!" Side 1, Track 1 Blue Skies opens with the rich multi-layered sound of a big band orchestra, a resounding echo from the past and very different to 'Live at the Crescendo' and after a few playings I got the feel of it. A jazzy arrangement that is swept along by a posse of Jazz musicians with Ben Webster's honking sax, Benny Payne is there on piano. It hasn't as many ballads as 'Crescendo' so the feel is completely different and evocative of spotlit standing trumpet-sections with swinging synchronised saxophones. On the cover there he is in a dinner suit with boxed shoulders like a gangster. The big band era was long over by 1957, their peak was the 1940's and this is a recording of musicians at the height of their musical powers 'strutting their stuff' -

Side 1 1) Blue Skies (Berlin) 2) Blue Prelude (Jenkins-Bishop) 3) It's D'Lovely (Porter) 4) You Turned The Tables On Me (Alter-Mitchell) 5) Comes Love (Brown-Stept-Tobias) Side 2 1) Just In Time (Styne-Comden-Green) 2) Just Like A Melody From Out Of The Sky (Donaldson) 3) How Am I To Know (King-Parker) 4) You Go To My Head (Coots-Gillespie) 5) Hallelujah (Youmans-Robin-Grey)

I stared at this new photograph I had of him and listened. He was an incredibly versatile singer with a remarkable range and had no particular style that dominated and 'playing the wax off' this record I'm beginning to realise just how good a singer he was. His dominant characteristic is the power in his voice, that operatic and gospel 'pre-microphone' voice of his. I closely examined the sleeve picture, we are alike so much it is almost frightening. I wish I could talk to him, it's ironic that he never saw me his English son grow up to look like him. Jane remarked that our hands are exactly the same and the analytical sleeve notes, the part of the cover which like the graphics is so directly from its time also tell me a little bit more about him -

In recent years, Billy Daniels has become an extrovertishly assured, high salaried member of the show-biz international set. For a long time previously, he has paid his dues in clubs, Broadway shows and through the ragged circuit of suspicious towns and uncertain sleep that slices the memory of most 'stars' that have finally made it. Now Billy Daniels travels first class - and better. He plays the major supper clubs in America and is a familiar figure of glamour in Europe, particularly in Britain where he has headlined at the Palladium and finger-snapped his way through the beguiled provinces. Most recently, he has been giving thought to extending his range into TV drama. Daniels has also had a measure of success on records, chiefly in his customary style of rococo invitation - an approach to a song that transforms it into a promise of imminent consummation of passion. This is a way of singing that is often difficult to support in terms of aesthetics but which night club owners and disc jockeys find undeniably effective. Fortunately, however, Billy Daniels in this recital has investigated another direction of vocal self- expression. These are the most musical and least postured of any recordings Billy has yet made. A major reason for the consistent emphasis herein on relatively spare (although vibrato pronounced) direct singing is the pervasive arranging presence of Benny Carter. Mr. Carter, an airily expert alto saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter (and far from amateur on several other instruments) is one of the more functionally eloquent arrangers in American big band history. Unfortunately, although he has headed from time to time - particularly in decades past - bands of remarkably persuasive musicianship, none of them ever attained the commercial success and concomitant fame of Goodman, the Dorseys,Lunceford or Basie. As a result, Benny's reputation as a band arranger is strongest among musicians (who regarded working for him as a through education) and those record collectors who continue to guard the 78rpm listening annuities that are 'Carters Sleep''Plymouth Rock''All of Me' and 'My favourite Kind of Blues' among several others. The mark of a Carter arrangement is a cohesive, unerringly musical logic that conceives of a chart as a whole in which sections interweave and build to a series of climaxes. There is an accompanying vigour and virility in Benny's scoring that can be exhilarating as in sections of the stringless first side here. On ballads, he underlines deftly, neither obtruding nor collapsing. Another positive factor on this record is the musicians behind Billy. On Side 1 and 'Hallelujah' the rhythm section includes alternating drummers Milt Holland and Frank Carlson (the latter of the Woody Herman band of yore 'that played the blues'); Joe Comfort, bass; Howard Roberts, guitar; Billy's long-time accompanist, Benny Payne, on piano, and also Jimmy Rowles. The trumpets are Pete Candoli, Buddy Childers, Harry Edison (who has most of the solo spots) and Shorty Sherock. Trombones are Milt Berhart, Tommy Pederson, Bill Schaeffer and George Roberts. The reeds are Willie Smith, Morris Bercou, Buddy Collette, Chuck Gentry and the big tenor, Ben Webster, bursts of whom can be heard on Blue Skies, You Turned The Tables On Me and Hallelujah. The rhythm section for the remainder comprised pianists Paul Smith and Benny Payne, bassist Red Callender, guitarist Bob Bain and drummer Milt Holland. On four tracks there are strings and reedmen Harry Klee, Buddy Collette, Jack Staley and Chuck Gentry with Harry Edison on trumpet. This record to some extent, is a lesson in the unexpected. To previous devotees of Billy Daniels, his work here indicates that he is really a more convincing singer (leaving the show-biz on-stand projection aside) than he has appeared to be on records for some time. For those jazz-orientated listeners who have been sceptical of Daniels, this set may or may not convert them, but should certainly provide them, particularly on the first side, with a sharply satisfying series of kicks in Benny Carter's spiritedly mainstream arrangements (and don't overlook the reed voicings on the second side). And there are kicks in the zestful smack on the stringless sides which these sidemen of the jazz nobility execute the charts. It is to Billy Daniels' credit that he respected his surroundings and adapted himself to the arrangements and sidemen, instead of trying to utilize them just as punctuation for italicized stylization. NAT HENTOFF 1957

This is from the days when sleeve notes were a medium for serious study, for explanations from an expert, critic or 'personality of the day'. This is a great album, I was listening to quality music from a forgotten age as I examined the cover photograph of him again. A 'de-luxe' colour montage, a perfect specimen of 1950's kitsch. His hands held in the air gracefully curved like a dancers with a tortured expression as though he was struggling to get the words out. In this pose he looked as though he was trying to come across as a sort of dancing blues singer. A shimmering curtain of green and orange with hundreds of various sized bubbles, like a close up of a champagne glass was placed behind him as an abstract backdrop. This is a reference to the lyrics of the title song 'You go to my head, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne' (Bryan Ferry has covered this in recent times) but also to his 'King of Cabaret' image I'm beginning to realise he possessed.

As journalist and jazz historian Nat Hentoff referred to in his exhaustive sleeve notes Billy Daniels was '..an extrovertishly assured, high salaried member of the show-biz international set' and 'a familiar figure of glamour in Europe'. I imagined him in London on reading those lines, impeccably dressed and shopping for exquisitely tailored shirts in Piccadilly and suits in Saville Row, but I wondered if the glamour was actually a part of his character or whether it was a carefully cultivated image? A question that only confirmed that I have a thirst that will not be quenched until I have extracted from the entire universe all there is to know about him, all that matters to me now is, what was he like to know?

I HAVE BEEN AFRAID to before but now I'm ready to talk to my mother, she will have the answers to a whole sack-full of questions that I need to answer and even if she finds my confrontation an ordeal I must have the facts. I rang and we had the usual what's new chit-chat and I wondered how I could possibly raise the topic but then she asked me if I was OK again and told me that Nanny had mentioned that she had talked to me about 'him'. "I'll talk about him Jack if you want me to" "I had no idea he knew I existed and that he met Nanny and Grandad. I was astonished when she told me that he'd been to see them in Barnoldswick and from what she said it sounded as though you had a good time" "Why?" "I didn't know you had spent so much time together, it must have been great travelling around with him" "No it was awful, I was hurt. Have you ever been in love? Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes.... I do know what you mean. I'm sorry. It's just that you have never told me about him, about that time in your life and now I want to know all there is to know. I'm very interested" "Well, it's a long story...... and it's a long time ago, to start going through it all now" "You started it all this when you told me that he came from Florida, just before we flew over there" "Didn't you go for that reason?" "What! No! I didn't know he was from Florida. How could I? I've never known anything about him. You told me that and ever since I've been thinking about him non-stop" "Yes...well OK, we'll arrange something. It's all right now"

What on earth did she mean 'Didn't you go for that reason?' that remark had really thrown me, did she believe that she had already told me those facts about my father before? I don't understand what goes on in her head, she seems to talk in riddles sometimes. I wondered if 'It's all right now' meant that my questions will not upset her? She can tell me all about him now, because it's not a problem? I think it might upset her but so what if it does! It's so long overdue it's ridiculous, but what exactly will I find out?

THE FOLLOWING EVENING I left the house alone to see my mother, I was driving to confront the secret that had been locked away in my childhood, a psychic casket it was now time to open. I had only travelled half a mile down the hill from home and already I was in turmoil. I felt like an archaeologist about to open a tomb that may be horribly cursed and I wondered whether I should pursue my enquiry because, be rational, Billy Daniels was never a father to me. I have a father and will I drive a wedge between us with this new pre-occupation on the past? This is certain to upset my parents and what is the point of that? but a risk always comes before fulfilment and this may be exactly what I need.

It felt as though I had arrived at a crossroads in my life, our arrangement to meet had been casual and I could easily turn right and return home and tell her later that I was too busy to spare the time and she would probably never say another word on the subject. But there will never be a better time than this, the challenge is here now and I felt propelled by the inevitability. I have always felt like an outsider, never like one of the crowd and perhaps the truth will be a resolution of something profound. I drove straight on and accelerated and I was so happy that I had made the decision I almost cried and now elated, I resolved that I wouldn't press her on anything. I had been aggressive on the phone when she said something that confused me and I had snapped at her hesitation. I must not do that again, it will be difficult for her tonight and so without interruption, I will quietly receive whatever it is that she wants me to know.

6

It was before television had taken over

"We saw each other across the room and that was it" My mother and I were in her room, a small box-room which contains her music books and her office desk to run her ladies-wear shop. My Dad was watching TV in the next room, ostensibly I was showing her how to use the word processor my brother Julian had set up for her, she had been compiling show schedules and what-not for her Amateur Dramatic Societies and producing a photo- copied cook-book for charity. I planned to talk about computers if there was an awkward silence or a need to pause, but I found that all I had to do was listen.

"We saw each other through a crowd and that was it..... the start of it...... I'll answer all your questions Jack but I don't want to talk about him in front of your Dad, there's no point in bringing it all up with him now. It's an old romance which was before his time and I don't want to upset him" These were the rules of engagement, we are not going to discuss this openly in front of him "OK" I said quietly but I was thinking 'What she really means is, do not mention this to your Dad, so what else is new?'

I met Billy Daniels in Manchester at a party towards the end of 1952. I was in a revue at the ice rink, I used to do the Aqua Shows in the summer, but I was singing in an ice show in Manchester with Toni, that's what I was doing when I met him. Toni was a skater she'd been a figure and free skating champion, she was on the rink and I would be with the band singing and doing her dialogue over the speakers, a 'theatre on the ice' type show. Toni and I spent years working together.

I first met Toni in 1950 when we did 12 weeks at The Grand Theatre in Leeds. All the largest theatres in England gave charity performances for the survivors of a flood disaster and at The Grand they had installed a skating rink that actually filled the stage. I remember Albert Modley, a northern comedian who did his normal routine but with a big cushion tied around him and he kept falling around on the ice as he told his funny stories but he never once mentioned the ice. All the other acts ignored the fact they were in front of the curtain because the stage was now an ice rink, but he used the ice every night brilliantly and that impressed me. It's funny the things you remember.

Toni was a close friend of Marion Ryan who was a singer, later she did 'Spot the Tune' and 'Come Dancing' on TV but you might remember her twin sons Paul and Barry, they had some hit pop records in the 60's. Marion's husband then was an impresario, Harold Davison who booked the American entertainers to appear in London and I went along to their party with Toni. I had been to that kind of thing before, they always threw these parties for all the artists at the start of a tour and all the acts and the theatre managers were there and so on and I was introduced to Bill and we were instantly attracted and I immediately started going out with him.

He was a big star then, he'd just had his own TV series in America and he was following that with a headlining tour of Europe, only the biggest American stars came over here in those days. He had a big entourage, his accompanist Benny Payne who was a lovely man and his manager always travelled with him and a publicity agent and his band. He was just divorced for the second time when I met him, he was seventeen years older than me, he was only four years younger than your Grandad but that was never a problem for us.

There was a definite air of mystery around his first wife, she had died suddenly in tragic circumstances and he never talked about her, I think she might have died in childbirth. He talked about Martha his second wife that he had just divorced but he never really talked about his wives very much to me obviously. He had fallen out with Martha for good and he had his three children from his first marriage to look after. He couldn't pretend anything, Benny or the band were always around and they would confirm that what he said to me was true because we were all friends. He had three children two boys and a girl, Diane was the eldest...... I can't remember the boys names, they were all away at a boarding school in Switzerland, having a very expensive education.

I was in revues in theatres up and down the country and I used to meet him all over the place. I'd leave Edinburgh or somewhere and get the overnight train to London or Bristol, to wherever he was, or we would meet half way and catch a train together to wherever he was playing. It was the days of 'Variety' and all the theatres were still open and people would go either to the cinema or to the theatre, there was no television, it was before television had taken over. It was a long time ago and everything was very different and it's hard now to imagine just how different everything was. I would be contracted to sing at various places but I'd ring up sometimes and I'd go sick or tell them that my mother was ill, anything so I didn't have to go, so we could be together. I got very good at that, getting out of contracts and I got a reputation for it I suppose.

I know I'm biased but I saw all the stars at the Palladium in those days, Toni could often get complimentary tickets, I saw them all and he was by far the best singer that I have ever seen, then and since. He had a charisma that was breath-taking, he could walk out on stage and have an audience in the palm of his hand in seconds. His voice projection was amazing, he could fill the whole theatre without the mike but he knew how to really use a microphone, unless you were in the business you cannot imagine just how unusual that combination of ability is. He had such a range he didn't have a problem key, he could sing any song and it didn't matter who he was singing with. You won't believe me when I tell you that the only other performer I saw come even close to him was Gracie Fields, she also had that very striking charisma, that's what it was all about in those days, stars like that just don't exist now.

He was good Jack you can be proud of him, he could sing any song really well and when he was on top form he was fabulous and he was always good to watch because he took his work very seriously. He was known as a good-value performer, 'you must entertain every night' he would tell me and he was new and different because he would do high kicks and dance, he must have been one of the first to start moving around and not just stand there behind the mike. He sang all the popular songs like 'Secret Love' and 'I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine' and for his song 'Black Magic' he would dance and snap his fingers and when he acted out the lines 'fingers down my spine' he would make all the girls scream, you know.

But he could also sing something very emotional like 'My Yiddisha Momma' a song that had body to it and needed real operatic power to sing. We shared the love of song, I started singing with your Grandad and Nanny around the piano, Nanny has a lovely voice you know, because that's what people did then, before TV we made our own entertainment. He never talked about his parents, I think he came from a poor background and I think that's what drove him. He sang from being a little boy in church, gospel music, all that. He sang at school and he was in a well known choir that toured. He sang all his life and because he was always working he was always learning new music, he knew hundreds of songs. He loved poetry and he learnt the lyrics off by heart like a poem, he was clever that way.

We used to read the scores, the sheet music together, we did that everywhere, on the train, backstage, we both loved songs. He would talk about music all the time, the difference between English songs which he thought were too sentimental and French songs which he liked because they are often unique structurally. He said that popular song was invented in America and you can travel the world over and hear American songs because people from all over the world live in America! and he would laugh. He was always fun to be with and he enjoyed himself, I remember he used to say to everyone 'Singing! That's the only thing I can do'.

I remember on the train once, looking through some sheet music and he stopped and said 'Oh that's my mother's favourite song, 'Among My Souvenirs' and I asked him where his parents were and he said 'Jacksonville, in Florida' He told me all-sorts of interesting things and I never asked him many questions, I was like I am with Freddie I didn't want to offend him, I suppose I was frightened of offending him, I was young and so naive. I would see him whenever he was over here from 1952 to 1954 when you were born. I did almost a full tour with him in 1953 and he was a big name then, every show was completely sold out, I suppose that was the height of his success over here. Stan Stennett was on most of the bills on that tour, he was a comedian 'Certified Insanely Funny' it said on the bill and he was, on and off stage. You might remember him, he was in that TV soap 'Crossroads' for a while in the '70's. That tour in '53 was the longest period of time I spent with your father. I was living a two-part existence, those weeks on that long tour.

It never occurred to me how I was coping, living a bi-focal life, I was able to switch vision from my weekday existence to my weekends of the opposite extreme in luxury. I had the rich living in Mayfair with the contrast of my third rate tour to the number one - top of the bill vitality of my boyfriends existence, with all the opulence and limousine travel then during the week living a meagre existence in pathetic digs. I survived each week looking forward to the weekend travelling to meet him on slow midnight trains and returning on the milk train. I used to walk miles to some gruesome digs, although it was safe then, never a thought of any danger. There were some landladies that never stayed up because they had day-time jobs and were up at dawn, they were grateful for the rent even though it was bread and cheese at some places.

I sang with Benny Payne on piano a few times in rehearsals which was wonderful but there was no audience. I would do the band call with Benny sometimes while Bill was opening a shop or something to promote the week's show. Although it was called the number one circuit some of those pit bands were terrible and Benny would have to coach them. They often had a woman on a harp that was a running joke, he'd let them do the opening and that was all, some were local part-timers you see. Benny knew exactly what he was doing when he had musicians around him. He had a blazing row with a drummer one day that turned into a funny story that people in the business told for years afterwards. I remember Roy Castle telling it once on a TV interview.

Benny told this drummer that he wanted three beats to the bar and when he started the drummer went boom,boom,boom,boom Benny raised his hand and said, he talked very New York you know, 'Hey man! this song has three beats to the bar not four so gimme three beats not four' but this drummer could only play one way - boom,boom,boom,boom. Then it got heated, Benny thought he was playing it wrong deliberately and being argumentative 'Hey! there's always one in every band but you have met your match in me, now gimme three beats man and now' When he still played boom.boom,boom,boom and Benny stopped again he leapt up from his drum-kit and stormed out, he got to the door and then he turned around and shouted 'I don't need this pal, I've got milk to deliver at four-o'clock in the morning!' Benny just smiled at him and asked the stage manager to phone around and find a new drummer, he took it all with a laugh, he was a lovely man.

I NEVER SANG WITH your father in a show, I was way out of his league. When we went to parties if he didn't want to sing he would ask me to sing, in front of all sorts of people in the business he would say 'My girl can sing'. I sang with Benny one night in a big house in Blackpool somewhere 'Oh My Beloved Daddy' which was an opera song. I remember a party at Winifred Atwell's house in London, she had the whole place in white with a TV mounted into the wall, very modern and she played Chopin and then I sang with her and she was a wonderful accompanist, she married and emigrated to Australia. When I was performing, my highlight was singing with Johnny Franz on the piano, I did a week at The Grosvenor, he was Anne Shelton's accompanist and I sang at Edmundo Ross's club, The Coconut Grove.

Bill would always be going back to America to Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Atlantic City or Buffalo or somewhere, they were just names to me. 'I have to go to work' he would say and I understood that. I had been on the stage for years myself when I met him and I knew it was a nomadic life. He always enjoyed performing and it seemed like he had to work all the time because I think he used to get his cash after the show and just spend it all. Although he never talked to me about money I knew he was successful and he always had his manager travelling around with him. He was the one who handled the money....I can't remember his name...... he had an icy stare I remember that, you wouldn't short change him.

When he left to make a film called 'Cruisin. Down The River' in Hollywood it was just another job to him, another pay cheque and I don't think the film was very good. It would be interesting now though, but in those days if you were coloured you could only play certain roles, usually a maid or a servant or such like. The racial laws were so severe you couldn't even be seen to hand a glass or anything directly to a white person so you had to pass things to each other on a tray! I remember he talked about that film but it wasn't a big deal to him. He'd been in many all-black films, which were musicals that were made to show in the negro cinemas only and he'd enjoyed making those.

He often used to talk about those days in Harlem before the war...... It was called the colour bar in England then, but nothing like America had and that's one of the reasons why he liked it over here so much because he could stay anywhere, any hotel. It just wasn't like that in America, he knew Nat King Cole well and he was beginning to sell lots of records to white people, but even he couldn't stay in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and nor could Bill but they could stay in Claridges or at The Savoy in London or almost anywhere they wanted to over here without much of a problem.

In New York he could perform on Park Avenue or some top hotel but he wouldn't be able to stay there, so he would be driven from the hotel in their limo to sleep in a hotel in Harlem, even though he was very light skinned and could often 'pass for white' as they used to say. Benny and he never stayed together in those days, it was awful really but that was the law...... You look like him and you've always reminded me of him. He told me that he was an Octoroon which meant 1/8 Negro and 7/8 White. He said that his Great Great Grandfather was a white overseer on a plantation and he said that he had some Red Indian blood in him and that all Americans are a colourful bunch. He joked about it but when he was born if you had one drop of Negro blood in you it meant that you were coloured and you may as well have been as black as soot, it meant just the same, so he had always lived and worked as a Negro and had always been called a Negro singer, we have come a long way since then.

He told me he thought that was why he broke into television as the first black man with his own series because he wasn't very dark, he could 'pass' for white especially under the bright lights they needed then to produce television. He had to have an argument about Benny often because he was, well you know black like Louis Armstrong. He got bad press from black and white people because some said that he tried to pretend to be white, or black. He just tried to get to the top by being himself and in his day he did. He sang at the Oscar ceremony in 1953 and he was very proud of that. I think he was the first coloured man to do that as well, that might be on film somewhere. There was a lot of talk between him and Benny Payne about racial things, they felt they were pioneers in some ways, they used to laugh at everything though and nothing seemed to be taken seriously. He was definitely the first to have his own TV Show, but it was the early days of television, he was one of the first entertainers of any description to have their own show on television.

In England he was famous long before Frank Sinatra, it wasn't until the mid-fifties that Sinatra began selling lots of records, in England in 1952 Sinatra had faded away after his bobby-soxer days and he was nothing until he did that film 'From Here To Eternity' then suddenly he was a film star and started singing again off the back of that. I know your Dad likes him but I never rated Sinatra much, he is a conversational singer he can't sing opera. I've seen him sing often and I met Sinatra once in London, he was doing just an ordinary tour not a big headline thing in fact it was a mostly a 'house empty' tour. I sat at the next table with Bill's lawyer who suggested that I should be introduced to him and his wife said "No! Rae's not like that! If he wants to talk to us, he can walk over here and join us himself!" and he did but he seemed a bit fed-up with himself. I was pleased that she had said that, because it was true I was not a hanger-on, there are women that hang around celebrities that want to be 'Mrs. Somebody' I wasn't like that. Bill knew Sinatra very well, they shared the same lawyer in New York but I don't think they were close.

WE SPENT LOTS OF time together your father and me. He started my interest in art and poetry, he used to read poetry all the time. He taught me about stage-craft and I saw him perform all the time which was an education in itself, he would play the biggest theatres and fill them all. He's not remembered very much now because he wasn't really a recording star although he had some hits, his one big hit was Black Magic and like many that have a massive hit they can't shake the song off and that's all they are afterwards. He was often compared to Al Jolson because of his powerful voice which was similar, but he was better than Jolson in my opinion, because he appreciated his audience more and that always came across when you saw him perform.

He used to say "I'm a fan of my fans". I remember when he played The Glasgow Empire, which was one of the biggest theatres in the country, it was enormous and one of the hardest audiences to please. It became a cliche and people still make jokes about it but it was true, there were places that if they didn't like you, a crowd would boo you off the stage. The morning we arrived in Glasgow we couldn't get to the stage door for an hour, it took ages to get in because there was a queue right down the street, people wanted to get a seat that badly and when he walked out on stage that night, they went barmy.

I would be performing in Rotherham in a small revue or whatever and he'd be playing to packed houses in all the biggest theatres. I remember meeting him at The Hippodrome in Manchester, The Gaumont in Bradford, Bristol Hippodrome, most of those theatres no longer exist, most of those city centres no longer exist! He was very popular, on that tour with him in 1953 I saw nearly every performance and he never gave anything but his best. During that tour you were conceived in the Queens Hotel in Leeds, by the Railway Station. I knew it was then...... because the tour ended in Leeds and I didn't see him again till a few months later.

After Leeds he had to go to Paris to be in a show at Paris Lido for a few weeks, then he went to Australia for months. He had a full list of engagements booked well in advance which was the mark of success then and he was always very busy and in those days if the show was a hit it would sometimes be held over. No, it wasn't just a one night thing, or a fling we were very much in love. Benny Payne used to say to me 'How does it feel to be the next Mrs Daniels'. He was a funny guy, Benny and his wife Alice was very nice, I spent time with her backstage and travelling. You've got to remember that it was a completely different society then. The whole attitude to life was different, everybody kept very much to themselves and nobody ever talked about who was being paid and how much, there was none of that in the papers.

I was with him when he was a big hit at the Palladium in 1953 but I had to be discreet, girlfriends didn't walk arm-in-arm with celebrities then like they do now. Friends always sat at the very back of the theatre, up in the gods sometimes because the front row seats were very expensive, they made all the money then from the ticket sales. You remember John Lennon on TV at The Beatles Royal Variety show when he said 'those at the back can clap and those at the front just rattle your jewellery' well that's exactly what it was like. The records barely counted in those days, there was no television to speak of and the theatres were still busy everywhere and if you could only sit on the front row if you could afford it.

When you came along it all sort of fizzled out, he was constantly working and he didn't want me with a baby travelling with him. We talked about getting married for a spell. For you, he sent me £3 a month for almost two years. I remember he asked me if I wanted it 'quarterly or so much a month' I said 'monthly' because I thought that would be more reliable but a few times he sent me extra cheques as well, he was like that. He went to see my parents, Nanny's told you about that hasn't she. I was in Brighton, just about to have you, there had been a lot of upset for me around that time and it was a shock to me when he turned up there. I don't know what they must have talked about, it was only the second time they had met and I wasn't even there! But your Grandad had a lot about him, he could have made a career in music, he led a 5-piece Dance Band for a while. That's how they met, Nanny and Grandad, he was playing with his band in Blackpool. But Nanny soon put a stop to that, she didn't want to be a 'wallflower' while he played his piano! I would think they probably talked about music.

Bill was always very nice to everyone, he was well educated and could talk about anything to anybody. He could think on his feet and talk his way out of any situation, he had a talent for that. He'd been around a long time, even then he had been performing for years and he knew gangsters in New York because most of the nightclubs had been owned by gangsters since the prohibition days. He used to mix with gangsters in London sometimes as they have always hung around celebrities, but it depended on where he was performing. He named you after his friend Jack Spot, I wanted to call you Adrian but he wanted to name you Jack after this friend of his. I'm not proud of this, but this character, a gangster and his wife, Rita were your Godparents at your Christening. Jack Spot got his nickname from always being in the right spot at the right time.

Bill liked all that, he liked unusual people and he thought it was a huge joke to be around people who were notorious. He liked to have fun and he and Benny were great jokers. Benny Payne gave you a pewter tankard at your Christening. I haven't seen that for years, I'm sure I put it away in a cupboard somewhere, I'll try and find it. Benny was a born comedian with great timing, he was always joking and as he gave me the tankard he said 'That's for his drops of...... Jack Daniels because he will be a drinker' That was at the party after the Christening and then Bill left again to go off to work that night of course, he had to travel all the time.

I remember taking you with me, on the train to meet him at The Midland Hotel in Manchester and his son was with him, Billy Jnr. He was a young teenager then on a school holiday and Bill had just bought him a complete set of hide suitcases and they were all stacked up in the room. I remember looking at those beautiful tan leather cases with re-inforced everything and thinking that they must have cost a fortune and there we were, you and I in Barnoldswick at my mother's and all we had was just enough to live on. But he was very nice to me that day, he liked children but he didn't have much time for anything other than his career, he was a big star and in demand and I was young and naive.

In America before he left for Europe in 1953 he had advertised for a governess to look after his children, this was before you and not long after I met him. Perri she was called, she was French- Canadian and she turned up in London applying for the job, she had already been his part-time Nanny when he worked the theatres in Canada and she was all over him. I just didn't realise at the time how she was trying to get to him. He didn't want to know her at first so she went off to tour Europe, to see all the sights and she had money, she always wore a mink stole I remember that. He never told me what he thought of her, I didn't realise at the time that she was in love with him even when she kept coming back, she followed him and he ended up marrying her, she knows about you I'm sure she does.

I remember a few years later after I had married your Dad and he was married to Perri he wrote to Nanny asking how you were. I can't remember exactly when that was, it's hard to remember the dates. I thought if I don't get in touch with him he'll turn up on the doorstep or something and there will be a scene. Your Dad didn't want me to go and see him, I had not even decided to but we had a big row so I rang Bill at the theatre. I think he was in Morecambe, and I told him that I couldn't see him anymore because I was married now and goodbye and all that sort of thing. It wasn't particularly sad, it was very matter of fact, we were still friendly. We talked about his house in Hollywood, he had recently moved to California from New York to a house in the hills with a swimming pool and a den and what not. He told me he was doing OK, trying to concentrate on making films instead of travelling around all the time. A few weeks later I got a letter with a card, it was a non-letter really like a post card message and he enclosed his calling card with a map of how to find his house in Hollywood!

I had that card for years, I don't know what happened to it. I remember writing to him at 'The Sahara' in Las Vegas but I can't remember when that was exactly or whether I spoke to him last on the phone that time, or whether when I saw his son was the last time I spoke to him. I just can't remember the last time I saw him, it's too long ago. He stopped sending money soon after that though, I knew that wouldn't last forever and when he knew I was married the money soon stopped. When I think about it now he might have thought that I would be here for him whenever he felt like it, like a girl in every port but he never acted like that. Freddie, well, he has never really cursed him much but he thought that he'd been a rat with me.

Bill probably thought 'I've got this woman now who already looks after my kids so she can be my wife as well' I don't know how long they were married or what happened to him or her afterwards. I tried hard to forget all about him but I couldn't help myself half expecting a letter from him for years. I got over it eventually then 30 odd years later I read in the Daily Mail that he had died and that was an ending for me in a way. I didn't even read the whole article, it wasn't my paper I read it over someones shoulder. I don't think he ever really thought of me as a future wife, but we were very close and I can recall my feelings for him exactly, but what he really thought about me...... I can only remember the things he said. He was an unusual man, unique. I've never met anyone like him before or since.

Not long after you were born he had to leave for France and then an Australian tour and back to America to appear in Las Vegas for a few weeks because he had to work and do the best for his career, like everyone does. I tried to get back on stage and I often went down to London to try and find a job. I remember being in London one day for an audition, and I met someone I knew from the Aqua Shows, he was a high-diver and he said 'Guess who's just been in here?' he meant Freddie who we had both worked with. I met your Dad Freddie in 1949, he says 1948 but I know it was '49 and we worked together for several seasons, until we changed shows.

It was always a big cast doing those aqua shows, meeting new people from show to show, so I'd met up with him again by chance in London when we were both looking for work but then I didn't see him again for a while. I didn't tell him about you straightaway, you know the neighbour's thought that Nanny was your mother at first, things were very different then. In 1954 the theatre was starting to change as television came in, suddenly many people had started buying TV’s after the Coronation. It was a big change and everybody in the business was talking about working in television, but there was hardly any work available and there was only one channel then, the BBC and it was only on-air for a part of the night.

We thought about staying in London, in Harrow where Freddie was from but we couldn't get work. I had you which made a difference and we couldn't afford to buy a house in London, we couldn't even get a council house the waiting list was so long, there was still a shortage of housing since the war. We just couldn't get any theatre work, there just wasn't as much of it around as there had been. We had no real prospects and no money, so we came up to my mother's in Barnoldswick and Freddie got a job working for Silentnight the next day, or the next week more or less and we started a new life, we had settled down.

7

Love is a many splendored thing

My mother has never talked about my father before which is extraordinary but the more I thought it over the more it all began to make sense. It was no more than the social stigma of bearing a child out of 'wedlock' that had kept him a secret from me and at the time that must have been tough. It was understandable that she had erased the past because their relationship had come to an end and it had obviously been decided that it wasn't necessary to tell me. Perhaps, they reasoned it would be better for all of us if I wasn't told, when I was a child, about my 'real' father, a show-biz star who lives in Hollywood.

My father knew that I existed and now I feel that I owe it to his memory to try and find out all I can about him. On the drive home I indulged myself in the fantasy of an alternative life in which my mother had married him or a life in which contact with him had been maintained. When I was a young impressionable boy I would have jumped at the chance of leaving the smoky grey north, possibly for a little holiday at first which later could easily have led to a life in the sun, in a mansion in Hollywood! The glamour of it all would have whisked a young boy off his feet and what would there have been to come home for? And if they had married what would I have become had I grown up in Hollywood? a musician? a rock god! a film star!

But fantasy is meaningless, in America my mother and I could have been desperately unhappy and our lives could have been tragic. My parents have always had their feet firmly on the ground and in the 1950's theirs was a typical austere English reaction and in their shoes at that time I would probably have done exactly the same. It was pointless for me to know about him then because in all practicality he had no relevance to our lives and as time passed it would have become more difficult for them to raise the subject. And I suppose the main reason I have never known these facts before was simple, we don't really talk to each other and in our reserve we are a typical English family.

Now I have reached the age he was when they were lovers I must remind her so strongly of him, the man she loved all those years ago who certainly left her something to remember him. I had found a new side to my mother when I saw for the first time how she must have suffered to raise me in the climate of the times as an unmarried mother. I admired her courage and her strength. And my Dad! he 'took me on' and he was always there. My parents argued like hell sometimes but they also showed affection towards each other and I never had to question their love and with my two brothers Julian and Jeremy, they gave the three of us a stable family upbringing.

I'll never look at my parents in quite the same way again. Billy Daniels was never involved with my life, he gave my mother some money, fairly generously compared to some men in that situation but that fizzled out and such is life it happens every day. I have now unveiled the depth of their relationship, they were very close for quite a while. And apart from the photograph I found as a toddler, I cannot remember thinking he was my father and she had that record of his in my boyhood very much at all, the portrait was buried in the back of my mind so completely he became a figment of my imagination.

I never day-dreamed on who he was exactly or where he might have lived. I never knew that my father was a singing star in his day and lived in Hollywood, which was something that a young lad might well have boasted about, in The Beach Boys era of my youth, when California was all surf and glamour. But what good would that have done? there would have been no benefit in that knowledge when I was a boy I'm sure. My attitude to life could have been quite different, I may have nurtured false hopes and become a permanent dreamboat, knowing there was the possibility of a lifeboat on the horizon and all I had to do for help was to shout for it, no matter what kind of mess I had got myself into. No, that wasn't how it had been, I had a 'normal' life the same as my contemporaries, steady and boring possibly but what else do you need as a child but a stable family life?

My father was born in a racist society, a major factor in his background, she said repeatedly that he talked to her about the 'colour bar' often and he liked being in Europe and that experience must have influenced his behaviour. The race 'thing' hasn't been any problem for me, I have no knowledge of any direct discrimination that changed anything in my life. I was picked on and very distressed sometimes but that is a part of growing up. I loved the town I grew up in and the people I grew up with and there have been no 'no-go' areas in my life. I have learned some details about him from books it always mentions he was black making me have these thoughts. I need to know the story of his life, which might reveal the nature of my inheritance.

If I had lived through my childhood with the knowledge I had now gleaned from my mother would I have tried to contact my father at some point after I had left my mother's 'apron strings'? It is impossible to say but on balance probably not, in my teens I was more interested in my girlfriends or Burnley Football Club, or my Triumph Speed Twin motorbike. The fact that he was a musical star would probably have appealed, but I'll never know what might have been. I'm certain there would not have been the shocking identity crisis that has now occurred, when I'm only half the person I thought I was. I'm approaching this with a fanatical intensity because I know that I will actually discover another part of myself. I have embarked on a quest for my identity and this must be what life is all about, a journey of self-discovery?

My mother had closed a lid on that part of her life but she had opened her memories for me, memories that she locked away 40 years ago in a cerebral time capsule. I had glimpsed a vivid illumination of the past which was quickly returned to darkness once again. It had been inevitable, to wrap it all away was her way of facing the future without him, that had been her solution, it was how she had coped. I understood from her first sentence that she had been deeply hurt, she had not enjoyed answering my questions and she kept repeating to herself almost like a mantra that it was a long time ago. As if her pain might return if her memories were unlocked she had closed the subject once more and I felt that she would never want to mention him to me again.

It was a long time ago and perhaps my mother has thought about her own mortality and she didn't want to continue maintaining the secret she has kept for so long, but now she openly spoke and I know much more about my father I cannot simply forget about him just because it was long time ago, facts do not alter because of the passage of time. But times do change and the curious thing is the past seems to change too. Her memories were very evocative of what the world was like for her when I was born, she has never talked in detail about that period in her life before. Her days in the shows have never been mentioned since I was a young boy, I suppose the topic was dangerously close to an awkward question that, by not being given the opportunity, I have never felt the need to ask. I'm beginning to understand my background and my past is changing the more I learn.

OUR DAY TRIPS TO the seaside, long sleepy car-journeys punctuated by snatches of my parents conversations I heard from the back seat of my Dad's red Mini Cooper, 1618WY. Later when I had brothers, Julian born in 1959 and Jeremy born in 1965, we had a bigger car, a pale blue boxy Vauxhall Viva AEN112B and the frequency of the day-trips to the coast increased. The whole day was a running commentary of references to the past 'I wonder what happened to so-and-so' and when driving 'along the front' the memories came thick and fast. 'Do you remember when we stayed in those digs at... What was her name?' The drive home was a drone of half-sleep under the sodium- yellow street lights which blazed a beat over the back window and hypnotised me to sleep.

When my parents were in show-biz, they must have zig-zagged around the country to all the 'end of the pier' destinations and then the rest of the year, out of season, my mother had played the provincial theatres, or worked in cabaret in London. I have a photograph of her, taken in The Coconut Grove where she sang in 1950, she's wearing a black sweater, her hair tied with a chiffon scarf and a string of pearls knotted at the neck, looking very french. My Dad has boasted for as long as I can remember to 'his boys' what a "wonderful looking woman your mother was in her youth" I was always slightly puzzled by that remark but he meant stunning, as in 'Film-Star Annual', looks.

In my favourite picture of her she is clutching the air standing at the microphone singing to an arena packed with holiday-makers. I asked her about it once "That was Southport in 1952 at The Sea Bathing Lake" she replied instantly. A split-second of history captured, an exciting period in my mother's life that must be strong in her memory, she could even remember the song, "Flamingo in E Flat". Perhaps someone at some point took a photograph of her and my father together and if one has survived, what a find that would be. I remember a picture in an old photo album, a snapshot that could be the photograph my Nanny recalled was taken in the garden at 4 Weets View Barnoldswick.

On this black and white 'Brownie' my mother is standing on the left, looking glamorous with long sideways swept hair like Lauren Bacall, in a belted 'A' shape summer dress and wearing expensive shoes, she is 'dressed-up'. My Nanny is in the centre in her housewife's apron holding me tightly wrapped in fluffy blankets and on the right...... there is nothing. My mother is leaning forward and smiling at someone out of the shortened frame. It must have been him and later, possibly years later his image was cut off, his physical evidence destroyed and then mentally scrubbed out. I've thrown love letters away like that, that is an emotion that occurs in life.

I was churned-up talking to her about him, I was angry with my father for hurting her so much. I could feel her anguish when she recalled the simple pain of being in love and had almost distilled the whole experience down to that feeling. When that person is the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think of at night. In a dreamworld, as you are when madly in love, she told me she had waited for a letter from him for years, for what? The letter that says 'I've made a terrible mistake, we'll never be apart again and we'll live happily ever after'.

If only life was that simple, instead she must have cried herself to sleep over him and just looking at me must have been torture for her at times. But eventually it sinks in that it's over, finished with and the pain heals. It is true that in time the hurt recedes and you get over it and get on with living the rest of your life when the target of your attention has ceased to exist. If you have lived at all you have experienced a hurtful parting and true love is a part of life that you are considered lucky to have known. My mother and my Dad have never been unkind to me, their love was unconditional and I can remember many happy times at home and I’m lucky that have always known that they love each other.

Apart from the ending she must have had many happy moments with my father and I hope that over the years she reflected more on the good times they had because it must have been an adventure. I can imagine them rushing to hectic rendezvous in railway stations, always on the move from one painted-brick dressing room to the next, criss-crossing the country on the London-Midland-Scottish steam trains, leafing through the sheet music with a kiss and a joke. The smoky goodbyes on the railway platforms, the whole black and white scratched film, train whistle nostalgia scene for me, although for her the memories will be in colour and feel like it was only yesterday.

I'm relieved that I have finally spoken to her about him, it must have been just the right time to talk about it all. It has drawn me closer to my mother but it was also in a way an anti-climax and I feel disappointed because I really wanted to talk to him but that is impossible. I think she knew that I was trying to get to know him through her. The most revealing moment of the whole conversation was when she said, with a tear in her eye, that she could remember exactly the way she had felt at the time, but regarding my father's feelings she can only remember what he told her.

A FEW DAYS LATER when I rang to see how she was, I realised how important the conversation had been for us both. I have now extracted her secret and whilst we talked on the phone I sensed that she has become more relaxed with me and now it is all out the open I know that she will tell me other things about him when, from time to time she is reminded of the time they spent together and that must be healthy. But I doubt whether we can experience anything more profound than the moment she talked to her son about his father for the first time but the fact is, any views I hear, even my mothers, although fascinating they are simply opinions.

People are not easily described, a description of another person is always coloured by events, a recollection is often the chance to re-write the past and produce your own version of history. It is impossible for my mother to tell me what he was really like to know, I have to find out for myself. I must find everything that there is to know about him from whatever source. My quest is to expose for myself and check all the facts on his life, which will become a record of his actions and will result in an understanding of his character.

I will learn all about his past and will explore his world from this distance of time to get to know him and even though he is gone it will be a way of meeting him. I'm very fortunate because his life was public and I can investigate his career and will inevitably discover him in stages, the same as would have happened if we had actually spent our lives together. I am aware of the traits my mother has given me but the more I discover about my father, in a weird way I'm finding out more about myself. I know now through a sixth sense almost, that in the past I've felt deep emotions that must have come from him.

My constant sense of duality, one name then another name, always feeling like an outsider and carrying around with me a paranoia of inferiority, coupled with an unreconciled striving I realise now, to get rid of the chip on my shoulder. These feelings could have originated from my circumstances but the question is, where is he in my make-up? and if I can answer that question I will have touched what it is, that is at my soul.

When I was younger I often felt frighteningly insecure and I would retreat into a silent world. This feeling of simultaneous terror and loss would occur for no apparent reason. I would listen intently but not speak at all except for a mumble and only when prompted and unavoidable. I would remain silent for hours, absorbing even the smallest detail in my surroundings but at the same time completely withdrawn and lost in my own thoughts and wishing that I was invisible. I had the blues, a paralysis of melancholy but fortunately for only a short period of time.

I don't understand how but I know instinctively that intense crushed feeling was either inherited from him, or was because of his existence in my life as a phantom. When I was young I sometimes found it very difficult to snap out of my blue periods and I would usually have to sleep and wake the next day to see what mood I found myself in. I've aged and mellowed now of course and I don't suffer from mood swings quite as much. I've learnt to control myself and looking back now I suppose those were periods of self-examination and perhaps everyone goes through a similar process, but I can only recall the experience of my life.

At other times in my youth and again this would occur at random, I could be a wild extrovert, vocalising musical sound effects and frenzied comedy impressions and behave like I was possessed. Always in fun and I was rarely in trouble, but why? I am searching for a part of me that has always been missing. I must embark on this journey to discover who I am and through this pilgrimage, this headlong pursuit into my father's history I believe I will find myself. I will then be complete, because I will finally be me.

I must aim for my summit of knowledge by uncovering every detail there is to know on my father, my chosen subject. And I know as if it is my destiny that I will reach the end of my journey from innocence to knowledge and stand at my mountain-top of personal experience. But how will it change me? Perhaps the reason for this quest is to discover how relevant my knowledge will be to the rest of my life. I have no choice but to continue because now it's already too late to turn back.

8

The 'Search For' Button

I must contact my relatives in America. I need to research his career and hope that will point to a way of finding my relations on another continent. I can use the wonder of the Internet which will be my 'superhighway' into the past. I sent my first message out. It was onto the 'American Diner - Golden Oldies Forum' that had caught my eye -

To All Diners Subject: Billy Daniels I'm researching for an article on Billy Daniels (US Singer d.1988) and would appreciate help on where I can find biographical information I can read. Thanks. Jack Pearce.

It was deliberately vague because I thought researching for an article was less personal than declaring that I'm looking for my father, and at the beginning of a journey that may change my life! this was going to the whole group after all. I then sent a message onto the 'Genealogy - The Roots Forum'. This forum was always very busy, you can click on a button and see a list of who's in the forum at any one time. I had read a series of messages in the 'US Surnames A-D' section and they all seemed to contain personal history details from people who were delving back in time. Eventually I found a few message exchanges headed - DANIELS - and noticed a Mary LaSalle who wrote pleasant messages and was researching for a Daniels family tree, she read like an expert and many people had asked her questions, so I sent a message direct to her personal E-Mail address so that no one else but her would be able to read it -

Subject : US Surnames - Daniels

I wonder if you could help me - I'm trying to locate information on Billy Daniels - US Vocalist 1915 - 1988 very popular in Europe in the mid-fifties known as 'Mr Black Magic' - and would appreciate help on where I could source biographical information both on his career and family history. I never met him but he was my father.

I never met him but he was my father sounded crazy when I read the message I had sent it too soon automatically loaded into my 'filing cabinet' it was too late to alter, I had clicked the 'Send' button and it had been shot irretrievably into cyberspace. I looked around again in the messages section and saw that messages in the Roots Forum are littered with phrases like 'His Dates are 1886 - 1959 I never met him but he was my grandfather' at least she would know that mine was a serious roots request. When I logged on a couple of days later I had a reply from the 'American Diner Golden- Oldies Forum' and the message incredibly, gave me some news in an unexpected direction and a nugget of real information -

To Jack Pearce From SM - Golden Oldies Forum Subject : Billy Daniels?

Billy Daniels daughter Yvonne worked in radio here in Chicago for many years, including at WLS in the late 70's early 80's. Her last radio job was at WNUA, the new age smooth jazz station. She died of cancer in 1991.

Yvonne his daughter and my half-sister is dead too. My mother had said his daughter was called Diane, so this must be a different person that may have been born to Perri and my father. I know nothing about his family at all. How many more children are out there? How large and complicated is this family? This man in Chicago thinks that Billy Daniels was there in later years. Did he die in Chicago? I wonder how he was during his twilight years? Maybe he died alone in utter poverty, and what did he die of? My half-sister is now dead from cancer, what is there in my genes?

What is happening right now or has happened to his other children? My half brothers and sisters? Did Billy Daniels have brothers and sisters? What else I'm I going to find on this exploration? Every step brings a new set of questions and I realise possibly that there may be some things that I will not want to hear, but having started on this journey, like a man possessed I have no alternative but to press on.

A few days later from the Roots Forum I received a reply from Mary -

To Jack Pearce From: Mary L Subject : US Surnames A-D Jack, Most of my research is back about a century, however if you go to the music forum they have lots of places to leave enquires and messages depending on the type of music your father was into. Let me know if you find anything more. Or if you have names and dates of perhaps his parents or grandparents you could look at the U.S. National Archives Census records and go from there. It would probably be the 1920 one that would be the first one taken after he was born. Or you could also ask about newspapers in the area where he started his career. You would have to know a city and a time period. If I get close to a Florida census record for 1920 I'll see what I can find. You never know he could even be a relative of mine, stranger things have happened. Mary

There was a lot of information packed in there and it was a friendly note so I sent her a thank you message. I found it interesting to chew on the possibilities of researching into his parents and his ancestry, but her remarks about newspapers had instantly given me an idea. His obituaries of course! But are they accessible by computer? He died in 1988 well after the newspaper industry had begun to use computers and eventually I found a 'Newspaper Archive' section and I soon had the first newspaper extract hurtling towards me and after a mass of text had downloaded the article title appeared on my monitor, this was a major development and eagerly I clicked the ‘Open Document’ button -

Los Angeles Times All rts. reserv. 60863195 25742 BILLY DANIELS ; SINGERS TEMPESTUOUS CAREER SPANNED NIGHTCLUBS TO BROADWAY Saturday October 8th 1988 by JACK JONES Times Staff Writer. Section: ONE Page 26 Pt.1 Col. 1 Story Type : Obituary. Word Count 750 CAPTION : Photo: Billy Daniels- Associated Press. TEXT......

This had appeared in his local paper the day after my father had died, in effect I was time travelling and the evening turned into an orgy of skimming through the titles of archive files, opening up the news stories by headings and with a click on the File It button instantly downloading them for later viewing. When I had retrieved a highlighted article dated Saturday Oct. 8th 1988 from 'The Washington Post' I had finished my A to Z trawl of the newspaper archives. I now had copies of stories that had appeared in all the major newspapers in the U.S. and Britain from 1985 onwards - Note - Pre. 1985 Not on Computer Database.

In the main his appearance in the newsprint of the late 1980's was his obituaries but there were also references to his shows and various functions he had attended or the deaths of associates where his name was mentioned. My computer search had found any mention of Billy Daniels because I had typed his name in the Search For box and clicked a button on the Story Lead - The first two paragraphs of all articles will be searched. I had skimmed through the entire contents over three years of each newspaper in seconds! There was a pro-baseball player, a singer with a De-Wop pop group called 'The Ly-Dells' a porn-movie star and a Hollywood lighting camera-man all named Billy Daniels, I read all about them too, they were also in America and for all I knew there might have been a connection.

To receive newspaper articles on my fathers life was extraordinary and I yelled from my home office 'Come and look at this!' and Jane joined me, reading avidly as I opened the files I had saved one by one. It was all extraordinary reading because there were snippets of fresh detail from even the smallest article. The 'Entertainment' reporter on each paper had written their obituary and had added his or her own knowledge culled from their coverage of Billy Daniels long career. I discovered just what a long and successful career he had enjoyed and how much a part of the showbiz. establishment he became. I had obtained the pieces of a fantastically interesting jigsaw puzzle and I could now complete the public portrait of his extraordinary life.

He is a now a latent image in the process of development and all I need is the correct mix to produce a detailed portrait. I have obtained actual quotations from him which are the nuggets in a gold-rush of facts I had suddenly amassed, from nothing and then Zap! like a jack-pot win on a slot-machine. I have all his career highlights with warts and all, scattered over dozens of articles and to fuse his story clearly in my mind, I need to piece these details together to generate a clear picture.

I was excited by the huge amount of 'news' I had acquired but there was a large part of his life that I knew I would not find here. I had no physical evidence, I didn't know the way he walked, the way he talked, did he scratch his chin or his nose or wave his hands around when he talked? Did he laugh often? Was he funny? I desperately wanted to meet him, to discover what he was like to be with and whether I would have loved him as my father. I have the satisfaction of obtaining many details on his career and these clippings represent significant progress in my quest, but I still do not know anything personal about him. I must talk to someone who knew him but who can I find?

I have a maze of text in front of me to analyse and somewhere in these articles, I may find the key to contacting his relatives, my relatives in America. As I assembled the clippings they also highlighted other areas of research that I must complete, so that I can fully understand his life and the times he lived through. There are many archives that I can plunge into and eager to explore these uncharted waters I swam feverishly through any book that was even remotely close to his era, to try and find anything that told me something personal about him. I researched with the enthusiasm of madness, as the fanatical biographer I had now become but this is more than an assignment. I will explore his public life from this distance and then one day find my relatives in America who can tell me first- hand all about my father and then hopefully, I will find peace at the end of my quest.

9

I just wanted to sing

One of America's all-time show-business greats, Billy Daniels was one of those rare entertainers able to create the enthralling atmosphere which made every member of his audience the personal recipient of his musical message and after a world-wide career as a master of song for over 50 years it was the end of an era when he died on Friday October 7th 1988 in Los Angeles. Billy Daniels was a former big band singer that was a star attraction before Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. His talent, the ability to present the kind of music that everyone seems to love in a happy relaxed atmosphere, made him one of America's most popular entertainers.

Billy Daniels was born on Sunday 12th September 1915 in Jacksonville Florida, the son of a mail- clerk on the railroad, as William Boone Daniels. He was part black and the white part of his family could trace itself back to the frontiersman Daniel Boone. In his era his background meant that he would always be classified as a 'Negro' performer. The fact that Billy's mother, part Choctaw Native American, was a fine organist added to his musical talent from an early age. All his family were enthusiastic choristers of the biggest Baptist Church in the South and as a youngster he was encouraged to sing which pre-destined him to a theatrical career.

At St. Emmas Catholic Academy in Virginia he was a prominent member of the Glee Club which performed its own spirituals throughout the state. It was while still a student in 1931 that he received his first pay for singing. The Ponce-de-Leon Hotel in Florida's oldest town St.Augustine, was his entrance into the show-business world at 16 years old. It was the first time he had a taste of the good life and after seeing a pheasant under glass; "I decided there and then, that the best thing I could do to get a taste of that myself was to keep right on singing"

His father had visions of his eldest of six, becoming a lawyer so he travelled to Columbia University in New York to study, but this was in 1933 during the height of the depression. He stayed with his grandmother in Harlem who worked for Brooks Brothers as a seamstress, in a factory that manufactured the costumes for the huge musical shows produced by theatre impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Billy would often accompany his grandmother when she went to fit costumes on the famous 'Ziegfeld Girls'. "Here were these big, tall girls, who had everything a 15-year old could possibly want to see" Daniels recalled in later life "I said to myself 'I think I'll stick around'".

He determined to combine his vocal career with his studies and obtained employment as a singing waiter in the famous Dickie Wells Cafe. In the 1930's, New York was the world's uncrowned capital and north of the Manhattan heights that peaked at the new 1,453 foot Empire State Building and a short drive along the canyon of Fifth Avenue beyond Central Park lay the borough of Harlem, a hot- house of jazz clubs and musical theatre and a magnet for black musical talent. At one of his very first theatre appearances, at the later to become famous Apollo Theatre's weekly amateur night, Billy Daniels sang and came second, the very same night a young Ella Fitzgerald won the first prize. It was the beginning of a lifetime in show-business for both of them.

While singing at the 'Ubangi Club' he was spotted by Erskine Hawkins, the leader of a successful dance band 'The Alabama Collegians' and he became the band's featured vocalist. It was the 'swing' era and the band criss-crossed the country playing a gruelling string of one-night stands. He would say of his youth years later "I didn't give a damn if I got paid, I just wanted to sing" and with Hawkins he got plenty of practice. Trumpeter Erskine Hawkins had joined the Alabama State Teacher's College Band in 1935 and took the band, by then one of the top negro bands of the south to New York in 1936 as its popular leader. They had hit records on Bluebird and Victor but their first major hit was 'Until The Real Thing Comes Along' with vocalist Billy Daniels. It was the period when songs were manufactured in Tin Pan Alley and distributed by song pluggers to bandleaders that would tweak and re-arrange the tune into their own style and among others Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy recorded 'Until The Real Thing Comes Along'.

A DANCE-BAND VOCALIST provided a chorus of rousing jazz lyrics with alternate slow smoochy ballads performed so all could catch their breath. A bands function was to belt out the dance rhythms and the heart-stopping volume of the whole band swept the dancers off their feet. Their habitat was the cavernous ballroom with its ornate plasterwork, glitterballs and polished maple dance floor. The dancers were a powerful stimulant to the band and an integral part of the whole experience. Fifteen, sometimes twenty musicians with virtuoso soloists united, as if playing on one golden instrument. And when that harmony was communicated to the audience and the spotlit ball of mirrors spun a thousand dizzy diamonds, the dance band days were an intoxicating combination of music and showmanship.

A night out would begin by queuing outside the venue of the latest 'hot band' and then all would mingle on the dance floor to get acquainted until their masters came into view and settled to play then WHAM! the whole band would spectacularly burst into life. The famous Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra threw its trumpets spinning high in the air and caught them in unison, Lunceford drilled his men so thoroughly they would 'do-wah' their instruments by waving their silver derby-hat mutes before the bells of the horns all precisely in step. Cab Calloway's swinging band had megaphones, band-leader Calloway would sing a line at ear-splitting volume and all would hold up their megaphones and respond. It was top-notch entertainment and the hot bands had the many dance floors jam-packed and hopping.

Billy Daniels gained a rich musical apprenticeship with the Erskine Hawkins Band but life in this period would not all have been non-stop fun. The top bands of the day, in fact virtually all the financially successful bands in the segregated days of 1930's America were white. The position of even the leaders of the top black bands was entirely different, the choice location jobs in the best hotels next to the railway stations were not available to them, so they were forced to perform more arduous 'One-Night' tours where they were likely to be exploited by unscrupulous promoters and cuts of around 40% were common.

Not only that, the travelling arrangements were always difficult, especially in the south. The bands all played happy music but happy musicians were not always present and there are many stories of musicians broke and stranded in the middle of nowhere after the sudden disintegration of a band. Billy Daniels time with the Erskine Hawkins Band would have been a hard apprenticeship, especially when they appeared south of 'The Mason-Dixon Line' where the racial segregation was total. They often performed in barns or out in the fields in tent-theatres, the 'juke-joints' of the south where before the dominance of vehicles, the music on those now long ago nights, would travel far across the town and fields and advertise the show.

There would often be no electrical amplification at all so a vocalist was required to 'Sing out, and loud' in order to be heard over the band at the back of a noisy tent or temporary theatre and there was no way you could gain acceptance as a singer unless you could really project your voice. The Erskine Hawkins Band is best remembered now for their recording of a Hawkins composition, an instrumental that became a swing anthem 'Tuxedo Junction' which Glenn Miller later re-arranged for his big hit of 1940. Erskine Hawkins blew a stratospheric trumpet which together with horn solos from the Bascomb brothers, Wilbur on trumpet and Paul on tenor sax and another hit record 'After Hours' the band became increasingly popular.

To sing with The Erskine Hawkins Band was a very big break for Billy Daniels. He could sing every night and for an entertainer there is no teacher like experience. It was also a job that paid during a severe depression, a job which might lead to other things away from the bandstand. A vocalist with a Dance Band was a hotly contested position because the vast majority of vocalists were never comfortable financially. As there was no union for non-instrumentalists, the singer would often be paid much less and there were many more singers available than instrumentalists so there was always a steady stream of hopefuls, looking for a spot with a working band.

Most singers earned just enough to pay the rent by performing in the numerous bars and clubs where live music was then the norm, or in the flourishing underworld of illegal drinking joints and brothels that would have a pianist and a singer to entertain their customers. Few singers reached any sort of affluence and the best that most could hope for was a slow rise to a better class club, the dream was to work with a successful band and that was the top. There were around 200 Dance Bands touring at that time and virtually all had vocalists, Billy Daniels must have been an exceptional talent to find himself inside this top 200 at only 19 years old.

It was the golden age of radio and the broadcasts were always live because the primitive recordings sounded 'flat' over the airwaves and apart from the technical difficulties many record companies refused to allow the radio stations to play their discs for fear of losing sales. The radio was an open telephone line to the outside world for people who had never been to places like the Savoy Ballroom, the top dance palace in Harlem, who could now experience live music in their homes. A permanent telephone line from a single giant microphone fed the sound of the dance hall to network headquarters in downtown New York and from there was transmitted to affiliated stations all over the country. Billy Daniels had begun to sing to a larger audience and the song had to be right first time as the bands whole reputation was at stake.

The band performed to the clock during a 'live wire' and a good performance on radio was essential to generate record sales. Musical stars were created overnight on a radio show and the producers would create as much 'Saturday-Night' atmosphere as possible from the remote broadcasts. The Erskine Hawkins Band was one of the most popular bands of the era, Hawkins became known for his super-high trumpet notes and was introduced as 'The 20th Century Gabriel'. In the 1930's the bandleaders were the undisputed stars of popular music.

BUT ONLY A DECADE before several powerful women singers had been hugely popular. The 'Blues Queens' were a significant component of 'The Roaring Twenties' which began after Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues in 1920. This milestone recording sold like 'hot cakes' making her an instant star and the 'race' record labels proliferated overnight. These were recordings produced for the distribution divisions of record companies, named 'race stars' or 'sepia series' to distinguish the product that was marketed to negroes only. This was the last period of time before the mass market existed but surprisingly, there was a wider diversity of music available from the major record companies than at any other time in history.

There was a catalogue for record buyers in the northern states and another for the south and it wasn't simply a question of colour discrimination alone. The record companies assumed, often correctly, that Italian immigrants wanted to hear opera, waltzes for Germans, Jewish people wanted cantors, white Southerners wanted to hear hill-billy and black people 'Negroes' as they would have called then would prefer, Gospel, Blues and Jazz. It was a surprise for everyone when the new 'negro jazz' appealed to white people too and when 'Crazy Blues' eventually sold the unheard of figure of over three million copies, new labels such as Okeh Records began combing the south looking for new black talent to 'pull on-board the bandwagon'. "Record three or four songs and you were through with that performer and on to the next because there was so much new music available" was the view of most executives from the still-new recording industry who regarded most black performers as cheap and interchangeable.

It was the era of recording singers that had voices schooled in a world before recorded sound existed. Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter and Helen Humes to name just a handful, dominated the American music scene in the early 1920's. 'The Empress of the Blues' herself Bessie Smith cut her first record 'Down Hearted Blues' in 1923. To 'cut' was literally the case, a needle at the end of a horn, cut grooves into a wax disc, for play-back on a clockwork gramophone. A development on the 'Phonograph' invented by Thomas Edison was the only recording technology available. A complete performance was required facing the cavernous mouth of a giant acoustic horn whose tapered neck disappeared like a snake through the wall of the recording studio and into an engineering booth where a needle at the tip cut deep grooves into a spinning master disc, as the wax shavings filled with echoes littered the floor.

The primitive technology often required many 'takes' because if even a brilliant, word perfect performance was too close to the horn, the recording stylus would have jumped and the entire process would have to be repeated. The performers were carefully re-arranged around the horn by the recording engineer as he struggled to obtain the best 'pick-up' of sound. Trumpets were notoriously difficult to record but a voice was not in comparison. It was an exceptional talent that could re-create the emotion of a ballad in those circumstances and with her marvellous vocal skills and larger-than- life personality Bessie Smith became a legend in her own lifetime and a tremendous attraction at every appearance.

The growth of radio stations generated new listeners eager for 'fresh fodder' and music began to reach an audience that increased in size every month. The feudal share-cropping system that had followed the abolition of slavery left most black families permanently in debt to their landlords, but by 1933 even in the very poorest regions of the south a third of rural black homes owned a Victrola wind-up gramophone. A portable 'talking machine' that now radiated new music that could be copied by other musicians. The radio and recordings were the new stimulus that rapidly advanced the evolution of American music between the two world wars.

The world of entertainment was viewed by many liberated rural blacks as an excellent way to be your own person and avoid the communal drudgery of agricultural labour. But many 'respectable folk', regardless of race still looked upon all popular music and Jazz music especially, as the work of the devil. Jazz was played in places where the 'demon drink' was consumed and therefore unacceptable to many on those grounds alone. The racial segregation meant that the white and black cultures remained almost totally separated so although the race labels sold records in huge quantities even in the same locality the white press and therefore most of the white public, remained largely ignorant of the existence of the Blues Queens, Louis Armstrong and the rising tide of popular black music.

And because of the strict cultural segregation 'Whites' almost universally reacted to 'Black' music with a mixture of ridicule and horror, dismissing the songs as dangerously wild and uncontrollable. It was labelled 'jungle music', a dangerous corruption of morals and besides negro singers broke all the rules of 'proper singing', taking breaths whenever they wanted, chopping phrases and lyrics, hollering and shouting and worst of all they were un-dignified and would often dance uncontrollably! Race recordings were mostly bewildering to a white audience, except to a small minority, the sophisticates in the major cities who ventured into the black areas for the adventure and cultural experience of travel and friendship and many began enthusiastically collecting the race label recordings.

In 1938 a landmark concert at New York's Carnegie Hall, promoted by influential white music-critic and producer John Hammond, from the Hammond Organ family firm, From Spirituals to Swing show-cased black music to a large white audience at a prestige venue for the very first time. They saw the legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson singing opera songs, together with traditional blues singers like 'Big' Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing and it would be only a matter of time before black musicians would openly entertain white audiences in live performance. But over on the West Coast, thousands of miles away in conservative Hollywood, a recent memory was white Al Jolson singing in the first 'talkie' The Jazz Singer wearing traditional minstrel's black-face. At that time a Negro or a 'Negress' never appeared on a movie screen unless playing a role that 'befitted their station' which usually meant playing a railway porter a waiter or a maid.

When the Erskine Hawkins Band returned to New York in early 1936 their vocalist Billy Daniels had already established a reputation for his dramatic interpretation of the current hit song Diane. He recorded this number and enjoyed his first hit record in the New York of 1937 and then began to perform solo on the radio without the band. In 1938 he sang live every day on various New York radio shows for 12 different sponsors. Although America was still in the grip of the depression Harlem was a booming entertainment centre and Billy Daniels sang nightly in the 'Bar & Grill Circuit' in Greenwich Village and in 52nd Street jazz clubs many of which, such as Smalls Paradise and Connie's Inn, had started as 'speakeasies' during prohibition and had remained fashionable places for the downtown intellectual white crowd to visit. The most influential night spot of all in those days was The Cotton Club, a very lush setting for a young solo singing artist.

THE COTTON CLUB WAS located at the exact heart of Harlem at the corner of 142 St. and Lennox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) and it was the kind of place that demanded the very best. It owed its entire reputation to the artistry of its black performers who performed musical revues unique to the locale yet no black customers were allowed through the front door, they were acceptable on the stage or in the kitchen but not out front as the paying audience. It was high prices for New York's highest in society and The Cotton Club's exotic and sometimes erotic night-life bordering the seamy side of town was the place to be seen. Harold Arlen, the later to be famous white Jewish Broadway composer who worked there as a songwriter at the height of its fame called it "The hang-out for the mink set, escaping the altitude of Park Avenue for the earthier realities of Harlem"

The front tables was the haunt of mink coats, ermine and chinchilla furs worn with diamond bracelets, a limousine drive away from the white world. In the 1930's The Cotton Club was well established and experiencing the very best of the golden years of Jazz. In 1927 Duke Ellington had arrived in New York and began his career as the resident band leader and he had only recently been replaced by the greatly influential Cab Calloway. The radio broadcasts live from The Cotton Club made Cab Calloway into a star and turned his "Hi-De-Hi" into a national catch-phrase. Almost all the black musical stars of the period appeared at The Cotton Club sooner or later but another reason for the Cotton Club's dominating popularity was the fact that the management, whenever the need arose would not hesitate for a second to destroy a rival establishment.

It was a well-known that most of the clubs in Harlem had been in the hands of white mobsters that since the beginning of prohibition and had used them as their main outlet for the sale of their sometimes appalling bootleg liquor. The Act of Prohibition itself, created by a religious movement that began lobbying in the 1890's, immediately placed all alcohol consumption straight into the hands of suddenly powerful criminal gangs, so as the underworld controlled the consumption of liquor, they controlled a large proportion of clubs and therefore live entertainment. The Cotton Club was no exception, originally owned by the infamous Madden Gang, it was a former illegal drinking joint, a 'speakeasy' that sold the famous Maddens No.1 Beer - The Real Stuff.

A featured attraction at The Cotton Club and many others were the 'Yeller Gal' or 'Cafe au lait' mixed-race dancing girls. A large banner over the entrance boasted '50 Copper Coloured Gals - 3 shows nightly 7-12-2am' The dancers, often exploited on so-called exclusive 'lifetime contracts' would dance for hours in scanty costumes whilst the band played an endless unwritten accompaniment. This part of the evenings entertainment gave the musicians an opportunity to improvise, to jam with each other and many jazz musical patterns can be traced back to those improvisations that rumbled on as a stylistic background music to exotic floorshows, that usually preceded the frenetic swing bands.

To be noticed in these often frenzied surroundings you had to stand out as something different and with his tap-dancing, hip-swivelling, finger-popping cool Billy Daniels soon became a favourite and a regular fixture on the New York and Atlantic City music circuit. His exceptional vocal talent and versatility made him equally at home fronting any band, large or small. This was a very valuable asset to have in the crowded, competitive world of musical theatre and clubland. His growing stage- craft became well known, although still a young man he was already an experienced performer and was soon very much in demand.

In the late 1930's Billy Daniels left The Erskine Hawkins Band for good to sing on his own as a 'single' attraction. He had completed his apprenticeship on the grind of 'one nighters' a relentless cycle of the bus, the bandstand, a cheap hotel room (more usual was to travel overnight and sleep on the bus to save money) the greasy spoon diner (unless you were in the south where black people would rarely find a place to be served indoors) the dressing room (if any as the bus was always available and used for everything) and back on the bandstand. After the show the 'jump' to the next gig possibly 500 miles away, sometimes arranged by a booking agent who never left his office and whose knowledge of the geography and difficulties of travel outside of the city was slim. No show meant no pay and in perpetual motion, the un-glamorous cycle had rolled over again and again for years.

Erskine Hawkins ran one of the top bands of the day and it was a good job that paid and Billy Daniels decision to leave must have been a major one because it was uncommon then for any singer to be a popular solo artist. The bandleaders were the heroic draw and at the centre of attention, the boy vocalist or girl canary was simply an instrumental component of the rhythm section of a big band and that was by far the conventional model. Big-Bands with vocalists occupy a glittering era in popular music history. Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford evoke memories of Tommy Dorsey. There was Doris Day with Les Brown, Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb, Peggy Lee sang with Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, an ex Cotton Club dancer, with Charlie Barnet. Perry Como, Dick Haymes, Billy Eckstine, Vaughn Monroe and Billie Holiday, all were big band graduates.

All the top bands had vocalists, Count Basie - Joe Williams, Freddie Martin - Merv Griffin, Kay Kyser - Mike Douglas, Cab Calloway - June Richmond, Glenn Miller - Johnny Desmond. Harry James - Helen Forrest, Earl Hines - Sarah Vaughn, Lionel Hampton - Dinah Washington. And when Billy Daniels left Erskine Hawkins he was one of the first, possibly the first, to leave the relative security of the tightly knit community of a dance band and strike out into the big wide (white) world on his own. With his talent and growing reputation he quickly 'rounded the world' as the black theatre circuit of the Apollo in New York followed by the Pearl and Lombard in Philadelphia and the Howard in Washington, was known. But it was New York that was his home and the centre of his orbit.

In 1939 he landed the part of Ralph Rackstraw in a Harlem jazz production of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore with dancer Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, who due to his 'Step-n-Fetchit' type roles in Hollywood with Shirley Temple was by far the biggest negro film star of the period. The colonial HMS Pinafore re-done as a jazz musical was a popular hit and he went on to perform a sell-out season at Kelly's Stables, one of the top clubs in New York. The young virtuoso pianist from Montgomery, Alabama, fronting The Nat - yet to become King - Cole Trio was the intermission group, top alto sax-player and later bandleader Benny Carter led the cafe orchestra and Billy Daniels was the featured singer in the spotlight, now top of the bill and a regular of the New York club circuit.

ON BROADWAY IN 1940 Ethel Waters starred in Cabin In The Sky an all-black stage musical that had an electric effect on the city. It was the biggest show in a series of new theatre experiences that featured black stars and black culture and when transferred to the cinema 'Cabin In The Sky' was a milestone, the first and for a long time the only, black Hollywood musical. The film directed by Vincente Minnelli who filmed every scene in sepia, a masterstroke at the time, was a show-case for the Harlem stars of the period, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters and Lena Horne whose passionate display of singing and dancing honed on the stage of The Cotton Club, transformed her into a film-star overnight.

Billy Daniels too had reached dizzy new heights in his career and was signed to appear again with Bojangles Robinson, this time in a step-up to the fabled Broadway in a new musical that was typical of the age Memphis Bound. This was a step forward in his career but the disaster of a world war intervened and Billy Daniels served as an able seaman in the Merchant Marine with a cast of thousands in an all too real drama, delivering munitions for the battles across the Atlantic from ports on the east coast. And between long periods at sea he was able to appear in Atlantic City and enjoy the occasional foray into New York, a talented entertainer in a city crowded with service-men and women from the massive increase in shipping that packed the New York piers, whose contents spilled over Harlem looking for a good time.

When the war was finally over, increased leisure time was the new priority and live entertainment reaped rich rewards. Billy Daniels returned to the honey-pot of New York clubs where he was gaining a reputation for performing emotional numbers that had a strong element of soul before most people had even heard of the term and he became established as one of 52nd Street's most popular artists. He was now an exceptionally versatile singer, a master at performing intimate ballads but he could also swing with the conviction of a gospel singer in full flight and his singing talent when combined with dance routines began to generate adulation.

HE WAS WELL AHEAD of his time in this respect as he had been in his decision to leave the big band scene. The late 1940's saw the rapid decline of the Dance Bands, the musicians went to war along with everyone else and the war effort necessitated non-essential fuel restrictions. The touring band scene collapsed and perhaps more influential was the simple truth that the catastrophe of war had led to a tremendous rise in the popularity of sentimental, romantic ballads. The solo singers became the new stars of musical entertainment at centre stage in their dramatic spotlight eclipsed the personality cult of the bandleaders to begin their own.

In late 1947 whilst playing at The Savannah Club in Greenwich Village, Billy Daniels met the brilliant pianist Benny Payne and they immediately forged a strong musical partnership. Benny Payne was a major figure from the era of swing, for 16 years pianist and arranger with Cab Calloway's Cotton Club Orchestra, one of the most influential dance bands of the era* After Calloway, Payne was the longest serving member of any dance band and had also played on memorable recording sessions with Pearl Bailey and with one of the greatest bar-room pianists of all time Fats Waller (who once toured with Bessie Smith) they cut a masterful recording, a collection of astonishing tour-de-force duets called 4-Hands 2-Pianos.

[*Footnote - Benny Payne travelled to England in 1934 with ‘The Calloway Crew’ in a Harlem Blackbirds revue show. By an odd co-incidence they crossed the Atlantic on the White Star Liner The Majestic - The old cinema (now demolished) in my home town of Barnoldswick was named The Majestic Cinema, because an elaborate plaster panel salvaged from the scrapped ship formed the centre-piece of the ornate foyer ceiling, below which I queued with my pals, to see the movie hits of the 1960's]

Billy Daniels with Benny Payne became a superb double act, re-arranging and performing the finest songs from 'tin pan alley', which they contrasted with comic introductions with Benny Payne as the front man and the occasional dance-step into the old 'Swinging Harlem' magic. With a subtle tap- dancing, they were both capable song and dance men, impeccable ballads interwoven with beautifully crafted close harmony arrangements of the standards, they could work-a-room to perfection like no-one else. A career turning point was when an initial 2 week spot at the exclusive Park Avenue Restaurant, was extended to an unprecedented 6 weeks, turning Billy Daniels into a headline attraction.

He now had a master musician and arranger behind him and could develop his confident and yet intimate conversational phrasing, a characteristic of all popular American singers but coupled with at times his powerful operatic tenor voice, an unusual combination. They developed such a close brotherly rapport they could perform for hours without once having to name a song or a key. By the end of the 1940's the celebrated jazz clubs of 52nd Street had almost disappeared, swept aside by the combined forces of an anti-crime clean-up spree and the dawn of a new entertainment medium, television. Billy Daniels continued to perform, working the new hotel supper-clubs and plush cabaret nightclubs that sprang up almost overnight from an economically booming America, blazing a trail as a popular solo singer he was one of the first of the modern era and was now acclaimed as 'America's Most Exciting Singer'.

Only the very best vocalists could expose themselves to the close audience scrutiny of cabaret, a more intimate setting than the dance hall or sometimes boisterous jazz club. The nightclub cabaret was an arena where Billy Daniels now reigned supreme as a brilliant exponent of an art form that today is almost extinct, as the great Lena Horne wrote in 'Lena!' her autobiography -

In a nightclub you're you. Nothing equals the loneliness a performer feels in a cabaret. It is the most exposed kind of show-business. It's so physical, it's all body. There is whisky, there's sex and there's something that is experienced only when people are drinking and having a good time in a nightclub. In a play, in a film, you are masked by the framework of costume, scenery, lighting, you are 'in' something, you are being someone else. In a nightclub it's you on your own and you're at the mercy of their every thought.

This period established Billy Daniels as a top singing star and critics enthused over his individualistic song styling and magical ability to project every lyric with Payne as the perfect partner. The famous newspaper columnist Walter Winchell dubbed him 'The sexiest singer of the day' and this was quite an achievement because in the post-war years it was still considered almost indecent for black entertainers to sing songs of love and romance to a white audience. His light colour with the darker Benny Payne as his constant companion helped to tear down the barrier and pave the way ahead for black entertainers -

The Sunday Express 12 January 1950, from Newell Rogers in New York, Wednesday. GIRL 21, ELOPES WITH NEGRO Mother says "I am shocked" Martha Braun 21, daughter of New England socialites is on a honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean tonight with 34 year old Billy Daniels a negro entertainer. In Lowell, Massachusetts, her mother said she was "shocked and humiliated". She revealed that Martha turned down a young white man, heir to £175,000 to elope with Daniels. She and her husband had offered her a trip around the world if she would forget him. Martha slim and dark haired went to expensive schools. She wanted to be an actress and played small television parts. "A month ago Martha phoned and told us she was engaged" said Mrs. Braun "She asked us to go to New York to meet Mr. Daniels" "She told me there is a little Choctaw Indian in him besides a little Portuguese. He has blue-green eyes, fair skin and dark curly hair" Mrs. Braun said she objected to the marriage because Daniels is a widower with 3 children..."I asked Martha to come home and think things over. I suggested a round the world trip so that she could be certain that this was really love and what she wanted. But when we returned home on Saturday night she had packed and gone" The couple were married by Judge Monday in Weehawken, New Jersey. On the application form Daniels gave his race as Negro. There was a reception at New Yorks' smart Park Avenue Restaurant where he sings. The couple cut a four-layer wedding cake topped with flowers a bell and a little bride and bridegroom. Martha phoned her mother again...Mrs Braun answered "It has almost killed me, but if that's what you want there's nothing we can do"

The story had also made the papers in England because thanks to the spread of record sales overseas, he was news on both sides of the Atlantic. Billy Daniels headlined again at the ivory tower of The Park Avenue Restaurant, where he was 'held over' for an amazing 26 weeks. Charlie Morrison the impresario of 'The Mocambo' saw Billy's act and immediately booked him to appear at the famous Hollywood nightspot, where a flag draped above the entrance announced the arrival of 'The Rage of New York' and he made an instant hit with the movie colony. Returning to New York in August 1950 he opened at the biggest club of the era, 'Bill Miller's Riviera' in Fort Lee, New Jersey. His happy, electric delivery with Benny Payne as the perfect accompanist captivated the packed audience and that night became legendary as perhaps the most exciting club opening night of all time.

Billy Daniels had 'made it' and now embarked on a whirlwind series of engagements nationwide and so outstanding was his popularity that the Manhattan night-spots all vied for his services. It simply did not matter that he had played at a rival only the week or even the night before. The audiences wanted more and Billy Daniels is possibly the only act that played them all one after the other, sometimes several on the same night. The Onyx Room, Kelly's Stables, Hickory House, The Ebony Club, The Yacht Club. Then travelling the rest of the country, The Eden Roc and The Fontainebleu Hotels in Miami, The Chez Paree in Chicago and he received rave reviews at them all -

NEWSFLASH Dec.2 1950 Negro Singer gets face slashed From Hollywood - Billy Daniels £1,800-a-week Negro night-club singer had 35 stitches put in his face and neck today. He had been slashed with a butchers knife. In Jail on suspicion of assault was 29-year old white actress Ronny Quillan. Miss Quillan was later released from the slashing charge after Daniels refused to prosecute.

In 1952 he starred in his own TV Show on the ABC Network The Billy Daniels Show with Benny Payne on piano and they were one of the first black acts to appear on TV. It ran for a full season of its 15 minute shows and in the infancy of television Billy Daniels was one of the first entertainers of any description to star in his own TV show. It was six years before the next 'negro' entertainer appeared on America's TV schedules hosting a networked TV show, a classy crooner who was by then selling millions of records. But even in 1958 The Nat King Cole Show became a cause-celebre, because no sponsor was willing to underwrite the show nationally, worried about their product sales in the south and it was dropped despite the attempts of many high-priced stars to keep it from going off-the-air by offering to appear without pay.

In 1952 Billy Daniels appeared on his TV show with Benny Payne, an unmistakeably Negro figure, because he insisted that he couldn't sing at his best unless Benny was close by at the piano. Billy's light colour enabled him to push open a door that was otherwise kept firmly closed and that argument was won but one of the greatest pianists of the era was often kept in the shadows well out of the spotlight and sometimes even made-up to appear 'white' but it was to make visible to the camera against a dark background. Billy Daniels appeared with Benny Payne, on the very first Variety Shows on television - The Tallulah Bankhead Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Nat King Cole Show, and was a frequent guest on The Ed Sullivan Show 'from New York'* [* Footnote - Billy Daniels with Benny Payne at the piano were a natural for the new medium of television and they appeared throughout the 1950's & 1960's on almost all the 'personality' TV variety shows of the era - Milton Berle, Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore, Carol Burnett, Andy Williams]

In 1952 a 2-week Copacabana appearance in New York stretched into an phenomenal 16-week stand, a record hold-over that stands today as a feat untouched by any following performer. He was now established as a star that could always be counted on to produce an impressive performance. At The Casino Theatre in Toronto he was the only act held over for a second week in the history of the theatre. 'The Greatest Song-Man of the Era - Thrill to his Spell-binding Voice' proclaimed a banner draped across the frontage, above the crowds that lined the streets to witness 'Mr Black Magic' perform 'in person' on their local stage.

IT WAS HIS RECORDING of That Old Black Magic a Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer song from the film 'Star Spangled Rhythm', that propelled him into the national spotlight. He adopted it as his theme tune and Billy Daniels will always be associated with that song. Although Glenn Miller and a host of other bands and singers had recorded the number Billy Daniels stylized version became the most well-known, agent Eddie Yawitz of the Starfame Agency in West 57th Street, New York is credited with persuading Billy to record his rendition of the song which he recorded for the first time in 1947.

The record eventually was reputed to have sold more than 10 million copies, a massive hit and although black acts never appeared in the pop charts at the time, it contributed greatly to his success.

That Old Black Magic has me in its spell That Old Black Magic that you weave so well Those icy fingers running up and down my spine The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine Same old tingle that I feel inside When the elevator starts to rise Down and down and down I go, all around I go Like a leaf caught in the tide

I should stay away but what can I do I hear your name and I'm aflame with such a burning desire That only a kiss kiss kiss can put out the fire

For your the lover that I have been waiting for The mate that fate had me created for and everytime your lips meet mine Down and down and down I go, all around I go, in a spin Loving that spin I'm in Under That Old Black Magic called love

He first sang 'That Old Black Magic' at the Harlem Club on Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City in 1943 adding the song to his act at the last minute, pulling the tune from a stack of sheet music just before going on stage. He remained linked to the song for the rest of his career and he once estimated he had performed it more than 25,000 times. He described to a reporter how he had once tried to skip the song at one performance early in his career in Atlantic City to reduce time as he was suffering from a leg injury, incurred playing volleyball on the beach.

He was asking the band leader to shorten the show when he was overheard by Sophie Tucker who pulled him aside and told him "I'm stuck with 'Some Of These Days' Al Jolson was stuck with 'Mammy' and now you're stuck with 'That Old Black Magic'. You should never perform on a stage without singing that song, people have come from miles around to hear you sing it. It means something to people!" He realised that he had found his very own signature song.

ALL ENTERTAINERS SEEK a talisman to be identified with, a catch phrase, a theme tune or a song, that becomes the trade-mark of a successful performer and they have a history as long as show- business itself. The signature tune was a common device used throughout the dance band era radio broadcasts. At the start of the live show, the opening bars of the bands theme would supply an immediate musical identification, a radio call sign to grab the attention and it became a convention for theme tunes to be ritually played before each broadcast. It was nostalgic and mood provoking, the band could barely perform until the theme tune had dutifully been played instantly introducing the performers and therefore who it was that was playing the next new 'hot' tune.

Louis Armstrong's was one of the first, a spiritual cornet blues from a previous era ‘When Its Sleepy Time Down South’, Count Basie had the sparkling ‘One O'Clock Jump’. Duke Ellington's typically elegant, ‘Take The A Train’, Glenn Miller's spotlit, controlled emotion of ‘Moonlight Serenade’. Of course a singer would always perform their major hit record so ‘That Old Black Magic’ a sometimes reported 15 million seller was very well qualified as a signature song. Billy Daniels had other major hit records including Diane, Lady Of The Evening, On The Sunny Side Of The Street, I Get A Kick Out Of You, When You're Smiling and Cruisin. Down The River. But it was his live performance as a highly stylized singer where he made his name.

In common with many American entertainers of every description, Billy Daniels also found success in Europe. To name only three, the singer Josephine Baker and bandleader Noble Sissle had made their reputations in Europe in the 1930's where they could be artists and not just 'coloured entertainers'. Hollywood musicals embraced the world and in the war years when thousands of Americans were based in Britain and the extraordinary Glenn Miller became a huge star and Britain’s permanent love affair with all things American was complete.

Since the end of the Second World War, Britain has always had a ravenous appetite for rich slices of 'Americana' and Billy Daniels was a big favourite on the air-waves before he even crossed the Atlantic. His success was almost guaranteed when one of Britain's most influential disc-jockeys, ex bandleader Jack Jackson enthused over 'That Old Black Magic' on B.B.C. radio "There was the most sensational popularity reaction from one playing of this record from every part of the country. More than from any other of the thousands of records I have ever played on the air" raved Jackson.

The first music press article appeared in England in February 1952* in, the yet to become 'New', The Musical Express; 'Britain's Foremost Entertainment Newspaper' written by Kenneth Pitt, the publicist and press agent - [* Footnote - The NME 'Hit Parade' at that time was for sheet music sales, not recordings. Britain's Top 3 songs in February 1952 were 'Loveliest Night Of The Year' 'Mistakes' and 'Longing For You']

Introducing Billy Daniels No Sir! Billy Daniels currently the darling of Hollywood's night life and the rave of the cabaret circuit is far from crazy; even though Mr. Daniels senior thought so after seeing his son perform for the first time "You ain't that crazy are you?" said his Pa. In less than two years, since first he began to command attention. Daniels has risen to the $250,000-a-year bracket. Much of his income is now invested in Benny Goodman's real estate empire and also in his own music publishing venture. Still on the upward climb on the popularity ladder, his income will increase picture by picture record by record. Like Frankie Laine, Daniels has met with success after many years of hard work and no recognition. A few years ago he even went as far as quitting the business for almost a year, but his over-riding love for singing put him back on what proved to be the road to success. Visually, the focal point of his routine is his exquisite hands. He uses them with dramatic artistry that carries a punch, more than making up for any deficiency in his voice. He now places so much value on his hands that he plans to insure them with Lloyd's of London. A sure sign of his position in the world of show-business is the ever increasing number of his imitators throughout America. Almost every large town now has its own Billy Daniels. Billy doesn't mind this and even goes to the extent of coaching other artists who wish to acquire a little of his technique.... Billy Daniels sings just however the mood takes him. Sometimes he cares little for pure notes but just makes rhythmic noises. Sometimes he growls "When I do that" he says "its because I get a kick out of growling, just at that particular moment" Daniels collects classical records and also enjoys singing straight ballads. When Mario Lanza walked into Hollywood's Mocambo and heard him singing "Danny Boy" he said : "That guy sings popular songs the way I would like to sing opera" There are three young children in the Daniels' family; the eldest boy is at a military college and Daniels is hoping to send his daughter to school in Switzerland very soon. His new picture "Rainbow Round My Shoulder" has just been completed and his latest album "The Torch Hour" is already a big seller. Accompaniment and arrangements are in the hands of Benny Payne who was the featured pianist with Cab Calloway for sixteen years. Billy Daniels, himself one-eighth negro, is keenly interested in Negro welfare and donates large sums of money to the St.Saviour College in New Orleans, enabling poorer Negroes to receive an education there. He has so far generously given over £30,000 to Negro charities. Britain's Palladium-goers will be able to hear the voice and see the hands when their owner ships them across the Atlantic some time in March.

In March 1952 Billy Daniels left New York harbour in the glow of his stardom as America and the Commonwealth waged a war in Korea with the background of atomic weapon tests in Nevada and the fever of Senator McCarthy's communist witch-hunts. And most American's political thoughts were overseas and domestic problems were largely ignored. Billy Daniels was a celebrity and his racially mixed party was able to board a British liner and cross the Atlantic on 'a grand hotel' The Royal Mail Ship The Queen Mary with his wife Martha Braun, Benny Payne, his wife Alice and an entourage of management.

The Queen Mary was built between the wars when Britain was the largest maritime power in the world with all the industry that created her empire largely intact. In an impromptu concert he sang for the cabin-class passengers in the peach glass veneered splendour of their Art Deco lounge and docked in a smoky and cold Southampton at 5.00pm Wednesday 19th March 1952 and boarded the boat-train headed for the biggest variety theatre in Europe at that time. The ruby in the crown of Val Parnell's Moss Theatre kingdom, the sumptuous crimson and gilt cavern of the 2,500 seat The London Palladium.

Billy Daniels, opened on Monday 24th March 1952 in a sell-out standing-room only concert, with Benny Payne on a white grand piano spotlit and centre-stage, backed by Wolff Phillips conducting the Palladium Theatre big band 'The Skyrockets'. His opening night was one of the biggest ovations ever recorded in the history of that famous theatre and it was reported in several reviews that the roof almost caved in as many in the audience stood on the seats in rapturous applause. He had 'brought the house down' -

The Weekly Sporting Review 29th March 1952, by Ken Gordon -

BILLY DANIELS ELECTRIFIES THE PALLADIUM ! Biggest Hit Since Judy Garland Billy Daniels, current headliner at the London Palladium, certainly gets hold of the majority of his audience and keeps them either silent or yelling with laughter with his first fast, then slow, then fast again routine of songs. After every number, the applause swept down on him as he shot back his wide smile and nodded his head in thanks. Like most modern American singers you either like him or you don't and there were those who left during his act (some to catch trains, obviously, but others because he wasn't their meat) But for the majority - and especially in the upper balcony - he was pure joy and only 'The Queen' stopped the mad shouts of 'more' the whistles and the cheers. He certainly electrified the vast auditorium and was the biggest hit since Judy Garland. As with most American entertainers Daniels has a child-like face, with a broad open grin, a high forehead, wavy hair and eyes with a glint of the devil in them. His Alpaca-clad figure is trim, tapering inwards from his shoulders and he uses his small, lady-like hands to add emphasis to his notes. 'Lots of Fans' His greatest applause comes after numbers in which he is joined vocally by Benny Payne, such as 'Sunny Side Of The Street' 'Do I?' ' Bye Bye Blackbird' and his biggest applause-getter 'That Old Black Magic' To wind up these numbers the combined jive-let-loose of the pair, belting the final line, brings shouts of rapture from the swing-music fraternity which obviously filled the major portion of the seats.They went hook, line and sinker for his warm up before each fast number, a snap-snap of his fingers, a jivy walk from piano to stage front mike, plus a dance step or two. They roared at his ar-r-r-r during 'Black Magic' and they palm-pelted themselves sore when he hit the last note, his right hand covering his ear as if he was on the phone, his left rising heavenward like the Statue of Liberty. 'Dramatic Intensity' For less rabid fans, the commercially minded Daniels sings slower, sentimental dirge-like numbers with the accent on suffering and remorse. To these he imparts a dramatic tension by lowering his pitch and using his face and hands to emphasise agonised feeling. Typical of these numbers were 'September Song' ' The Thrill Has Gone' ' Love Is A Gambling Thing' and the evergreen 'Yiddisher Momma' which he does extremely well. He also has a sense of humour, making a crack or two against himself, such as 'In case you don't believe it, the song we've just sung was 'Sunny Side Of the Street' and when discussing his next picture in Technicolor, he added 'Makes us look real sharp especially Lover Boy at the piano there' He's a definite click and we'll be seeing more of him at the Palladium after his 1952 closing night next Saturday. In Benny Payne, he has an able assistant and at times when they were both singing together, we were reminded of the old Layton and Johnston days. Back-stage following the phenomenal triumph of Billy Daniels there were scenes of tremendous excitement and enthusiasm. When at last the curtain was lowered, Mr. and Mrs. Val Parnell greeted Billy with handshakes and kisses, congratulated him on one of the biggest hits yet scored at this famous theatre of stars. Crowds of Billy's closest friends surged round him as he made for his dressing room. A particularly hearty hug and a resounding kiss for the American singing star came from his beautiful wife Martha. 'Well honey' she said 'you certainly made it' In the dressing-room, packed together like sardines, were well-wishers who could not control their admiration. Billy was just as overwhelmed with the ovation in the room as he was on stage. He begged for breathing space and the chance to get changed. When he again emerged, he looked as fresh as a daisy. 'Not tired?' I asked him 'Not a bit of it - I could have gone on singing all night. I'm just excited, too excited to believe I really went over so well. Honest did I go over that big?' he asked, when I assured him he had ' Well that's the swellest thing that's ever happened to me. I sure never expected that sort of reception' Eyes sparkling, lips always laughing, dazzling white teeth always gleaming. Billy thanked one and all for saying such nice things about him. I liked his off-stage manner immensely. He's a jolly, friendly guy is this Billy Daniels, a personality you can't help being attracted to. It's a pity he can't stay here longer than April 3. He'd be a box-office cinch for a three-months 'standing room only' hold-over.

10

Val Parnell Presents

In fact Billy Daniels spent months in Britain in the early 1950's, working non-stop on sell out tours on the 'Number 1 Circuit' of the Moss Empire Theatres. Benny Payne, a permanent fixture without whose approval Billy would not sing a note, was often quoted in the press; "My partner has the greatest ability to memorize of anyone in show-business today, he knows the lyrics in his head to every popular tune of any consequence written in the last 30 years" Always billed as America's Most Exciting Singer - Billy Daniels with Benny Payne at the Piano was hailed as the biggest singing sensation to hit Britain since Al Jolson. Billy Daniels became very popular touring the 'Moss' variety circuit returning for appearances in New York and Atlantic City and on to Hollywood to appear in his none too successful films.

He was promoted by Hollywood alongside successful white singers, Frankie Laine and Dick Haymes, but his film career never quite took off. It was still a race sensitive Hollywood and as a 'Negro Artist', he was always destined to have difficulty in achieving any kind of film fame. He would not be granted a star vehicle, due to 'the colour code' he was always cast in a supporting role with no realistic social interaction with a white person on screen. It was usual in those days for any scenes featuring black actors to be shot separately and the films were structured and edited so that scenes could easily be cut out when the films were shown in the southern states.

His first mainstream studio film was a short for Universal called 'Mr Black Magic' he then appeared as co-star in movies that ran in cinemas nationwide in America, Canada and England. The Hollywood black and white musical of 1950 'When Your Smiling' in which he performed 'That Old Black Magic' gave a huge impetus to the songs popularity and 'Sunny Side Of The Street' in Super Cine-Color in 1951 was followed by 'Rainbow 'round My Shoulder' in 1952 Technicolor in both of which he shared top billing with Frankie Laine.

In 1953 a major-feature in Technicolor 'Cruisin. Down The River' with Dick Haymes, he made during the period in his life that my mother knew him and she remembers him talking about "the colour code in the movies". Although he was one of the biggest singing stars in America at that time, he played a butler, "That's just the way it is" he told her and she knew that his efforts to diversify were hindered, like so many other artists, by the unspoken racial code. In her opinion "It was such a pity for him, because great actors are rarely good singers. But great singers are often very good actors because to perform the lyrics of a song well is to produce an emotional performance from a script and Billy excelled at performing every song. He sang the whole story and that was his talent, he could act".

In 1956 in the movie 'High Society' starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra, in a nod to the alternative society that existed at that time, the great Louis Armstrong and his band 'The All Stars' appear in a party scene, on the bandstand only, performing one number before vanishing out of sight and mind and back into their own world. And although a very influential singing star of the period Billy Daniels made only a small contribution to the Hollywood musical. He actually appeared in more than 20 'Race' productions for the negro cinema, his first credited film appearance was Sepia Cinderella made in New York in 1947.

If those films still exist, his 'race' films are historical artefacts, a document of a Harlem. At least his Hollywood Studio films may still be canned in storage somewhere, I imagine that today Billy Daniels films will appear hopelessly dated, locked in their time but my father in the flesh belting out his songs was captured on 35mm celluloid at the time of his relationship with my mother, they are a 'must see'! [* Footnote - In 1959 he appeared in MGM movies for producer Al Zugsmith in small dramatic roles 'Night of the Quarter Moon', with Nat King Cole and 'The Beat Generation' and 'The Big Operator']

Billy Daniels also made little impression on the pop music charts. In 1952 Johnnie Ray enjoyed a huge hit with 'Cry' an activity he incorporated into his stage act and in 1953 Tony Bennett reached number one with 'Rags To Riches'. Their records were plugged on white radio stations playing white music to a white audience. It was before black performers had 'crossed over' into the mainstream of popular entertainment. Instead, in the negro-world Billy Daniels enjoyed juke-box hits that received little airplay. To remain popular and in demand he had no alternative other than to concentrate on his live act which by then, he and Benny Payne had mastered the daily grind of touring but never failing to produce an impressive performance, night after night.

After a run of appearances on the now expanding Las Vegas strip at 'The El Rancho Vegas' and 'The Sahara' and the nightclubs of Hollywood and New York and after the release of 'Crusin. Down The River' Billy Daniels returned to England in the spring of 1953 to an ecstatic reception. This was the headline tour my mother recalled completing with him and here The Coventry Evening Telegraph reported in July 1953 -

ALL WENT WILD ABOUT BILLY Teenagers - and others- went into raptures at Coventry Hippodrome last night over Billy Daniels, the American singer who has just completed a fortnight's appearance at the London Palladium. 'Oohs' and 'Aaahs' punctuated the announcement of each song and there were shrieks and shouts with the applause for each number, girls draped themselves about the seats in front and gazed stagewards at the new heart-throb. Billy puts unlimited expression into his singing, breaks off into a few steps of rhythm and goes all emotional. TURPIN PRESENT The fans love it. Certainly a hit and he makes Bing Crosby seem dated. Accompanying the singer at the piano is Benny Payne, who also arranges for him. Randolph Turpin, world middleweight champion greeted the two coloured Americans on the stage during the second house.

The same month, Arthur Brooks of the Manchester Evening Chronicle wrote -

At Manchester Hippodrome last night this impish, coffee-coloured vocalist sledge-hammered us with 'hot' numbers and had the gallery shrieking, yelling and cheering wildly. It was the most riotous reception I've seen afforded to a top-billing act (British or American) since I heard Gracie Fields bringing the rafters down at a war-time troop concert overseas. If we are to have more American imports of the Billy Daniels stamp, then I say: Let 'em come-in droves! For Billy Daniels certainly knows how to entertain.

Throughout the newspaper archives I didn't find a single bad review and they also recorded the occasional remarks from people who had spent some time with him and however brief, they gave me a twang of disappointment at never having done so myself -

The New Musical Express - 24th July 1953 - Reader's Page -

'Wonderful Daniels' Please tell the world what a wonderful person Billy Daniels is (apart from being a great show-man!) Although he was "dead-beat" after doing one show and had another to do, he chatted with my fiance and myself for an hour in his Palladium dressing room. How many other top-liners would spend time with their fans? Some of our stuffed shirt so-called singers could take a tip from this unassuming, shy, wonderful artist. Best wishes, Billy, wherever you go! (Miss) Terry McCaffrey, Aldwick, Bognor Regis.

I then found a report on his appearance in a one-off show in Blackpool in July 1953 which was the show that my Uncle Alan said the whole family had gone to meet him and he spoke from the stage to dedicate a song to Judith my mother's sister. I found this clipping especially fascinating, perhaps his direct comments to someone in the audience prompted the local reporter to write a more personal piece -

ELEGANT It is not necessary to look fresh off the campus to be a successful American singing star. Billy Daniels, the latest of the American song idols to come to the Blackpool Opera House is on the mellow side, soft-spoken and unassuming and unlike some of his contemporaries he talks to you and not at you. The man who has been called "The hottest attraction in show-business since Al Jolson" sat in a corner of his overcrowded dressing room and said mildly: "The audience were very kind didn't you think? And this theatre! I have played in some of the smartest places in Miami, Hollywood and New York but this theatre is certainly one of the most elegant" DETACHED Billy started his career as a college graduate from Jacksonville, Florida singing in a choral group travelling around the state singing spirituals. Today, a top radio and recording attraction, a star on stage screen and in cabaret. Billy plies his rich tenor voice between New York and Hollywood. He likes English audiences. He was told that he might find them a little conservative and detached. "Detached" says Billy "Did you hear them tonight?" He found them even less detached when he came out to a forest of waving arms and autograph books.

One of Britain's biggest seaside resorts, Blackpool is England's Las Vegas, a sea-front resort that began in the Victorian age, with its own version of the Eiffel Tower, a gigantic cast-iron masterpiece below which a palatial cathedral of fun houses a full-size circus, a zoo and an aquarium fronting the Irish Sea. The adjacent Opera House is a showpiece building, the zenith of ornate Victorian grandeur and it was here that my famous Floridian father, in the presence of my mother's family wowed the summer season crowds, a year before my birth.

Blackpool has always been a venue for the top entertainers of the day, performing in some of Britain's largest theatres to packed houses of enthusiastic holiday-makers. With the railway station within walking distance and a tram system all along the sea-front, Lancashire mill workers had shunted to Blackpool for their annual festivities since the dawn of the concept of holidays. My Nanny and Grandad met on Blackpool's North Pier back in the 1920's, when both were on a day-trip from Oldham. A frequent 'day-out' destination in my childhood, the long pre-motorway car journey there was dominated by a long wait for the first sight in the distance of Blackpool Tower! a beacon of fun and one of the largest signs in the world.

In the early 1960's my parents took me to see the legendary circus clown, Charlie Caroli at Blackpool Tower Circus (Cliff Richard was appearing at The Opera House) whilst we weekended with my mother's friend Toni, who was still in show-business skating in the Pleasure Beach Ice Show, the amusement park at the opposite end of The Golden Mile from the tower. Blackpool that weekend was sunny and packed, the shining sea could hardly be seen for the herd of thousands, that flowed from one end of 'The Golden Mile' to the other. Now I had unearthed a tangible link to my father's past, evidence of events that occurred in a place I know well but it still feels like a fantasy even though I know it actually happened -

Friday July 9th 1954 THE NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS BILLY DANIELS TO START OWN CLUB AND RECORD Co. HERE Will live and work for months every year in Britain Billy Daniels is making arrangements to buy a house in England almost immediately and from now on he intends to spend a few months every year living and working in this country. He has plans to establish a recording company and open a nightclub here. "I am looking for a house somewhere near Reigate" he told our reporter "In fact the whole matter is already in the hands of estate agents" BUSINESS VENTURES "Apart from touring the music halls, I plan to open in London a nightclub of my own. An intimate affair seating about fifty or sixty people, similar to the Black Magic Rooms which I have operated in Florida, Chicago and Montreal. I can't say much about my proposed recording label plans at present or about several other important business ventures. Other people are involved and I musn't speak out of turn. I'm interested in the development of commercial TV in Britain. You can count on me living and working four months of every year here in future. I love Britain and intend to bring my three children over shortly to reside here. Their names are Diane aged fourteen, Billy Jnr. aged twelve and Bruce aged nine" AUSTRALIAN OFFER A fabulous offer amounting to $40,000 for Billy to tour Australia later this month had to be turned down owing to Billy's prior commitments. He is booked in Britain until July 25th and opens at The Mocambo, Hollywood, on August 3. Billy's remaining variety engagements during his current British tour are both in London - Finsbury Park Empire (July 12) and Chiswick Empire (July 19)

This was a public pronouncement on his love for Britain, two weeks after my birth he was considering making a home here. But his relationship with my mother was not a public event, the fact that he had fathered a child in England did not appear in the news. In late 1954 he toured Australia as 'The Voice You See' in Lee Gordon's 'Big Show'. It was a tour of football stadiums, the rock concerts of their day. Along with supporting acts The Andrews Sisters; Maxine and Laverne were still touring, stars from the war years and The Spence Twins a whirlwind dance act of twin black-American women, with The Master of Ceremonies, comedian Dave Barry, he performed to the world's largest audience to date, a capacity 100,000 in Melbourne.

The tour having taken the risk of booking stadiums was a success and prompted huge sales of Billy Daniels hits 'Lady of the Evening' 'Too Marvellous For Words' 'I Get A Kick Out Of You' and of course 'That Old Black Magic' He had reached the peak of his career and I realised that his relationship with my mother was during an extremely busy and successful period for him. They met after he had just completed his own TV show, a pioneering entertainer in the new medium, performing in Europe as an established American star, returning to fulfil commitments at major studios in Hollywood he was at the height of his fame -

The New York Journal, June 10 1955 The Voice Of Broadway: POLISHING OFF TORCH SONGS AT 5:30AM In the 30's Things Were Rough; Gangsters Went for Love Stuff (Dorothy Kilgallen is on vacation. Her guest columnist this week is the famous crooner, Billy Daniels) BILLY DANIELS WRITES THE PANGS of unrequited love are greatest at 5:30 a.m. Many of my earliest singing assignments back in the 30's were for the world's championship torch bearers in after hours spots in Manhattan. I quickly learned that victims of this almost universal Broadway show business symptom did not want to hear rhythm singing. I should have dug both Solomon in 200BC who said: "Slay me with flagons , comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love" and Propertus; "Love enjoys the falling tear" These audiences wanted to feel their pain to their innermost depth - the later in the morning the more innermost. Here I developed the style and technique of singing which then I was happy to do for $20 a week and for which now I am pleasantly surprised to be far more handsomely rewarded. THERE WAS A GENTLEMAN who came to hear me in an uptown spot who had a fascination for "Melancholy Baby" I was very happy to sing "Melancholy Baby" for him - but for three hours steady? somehow I was never impatient about it no matter how tiresome "Baby" became. My reward for singing was always a $100 tip, plus the fact that I stayed alive. The gentleman's name was "Dutch" Schultz who besides carrying a torch, was, according to rumour commonly believed to have a regiment of combat strength in his party I was always curious about who came to hear me sing after 4.00a.m., and why they came. Some were those who lived at night - entertainers. The others came for a feeling of belonging. It catered to their self importance to know that all of us were breaking the law together. POOL OF SADNESS Most of the customers were as determinedly unhappy as though they had come to pool their sadness. As I dug it, these were the folks who got their kicks from running to the most crowded places possible. "Why?" I asked my high domed friends, the social science experts. "Loneliness is our major disease. These were the unconnected people. They usually grew up in broken homes. They would rather be with other people than face themselves" was the answer. "You mean they're not unhappy because they're disappointed in love?" I asked. "No, they're looking for an excuse to feel sorry for themselves. So they manage to get themselves rejected in a romance" my experts said. Can you think of a better excuse for carrying a torch? I couldn't. But where did I meet all these experts? In the after hours spots. And what did they want me to sing? Ballads to make them forget the girls they weren't with! MY STYLE HAS BEEN SO FLATTERINGLY IMITATED and possibly improved by such great showmen as Sammy Davis Jr., Jack Carter, Dick Shawn, Betty Kean of the Kean sisters, George deWitt. I often find myself doing imitations of them. But my habit of cupping ears is not due to sheer display. Most of the after-hour spots were a second chore. I usually sang from 8pm to 4am for more law abiding proprietors. By 7am you'd have to pardon me if my voice was so strained that I had to cup my ears to catch the high notes. Those "sounds" that I suppose are my trademark, emerged from the same high strain. Instead of high notes there would be these syllables which I kept in the act because they were easier to hit than the notes. I SELDOM PASS A 52ND ST. parking lot without a pang of nostalgic reminiscence. This was the site of my big chance. Our cast included Ramsey Ames, now a movie star in Spain as the girl band leader; Sonny Tufts was the emcee and Zorita and her snakes was the headliner. I believe I was the opening act. Zorita believed that snake dancing should have an intimate quality and would make sure the snake got close enough to get a look at the customers. Death nearly disturbed this charming atmosphere on several occasions. Several irate mobsters pulled their gats, held them on their laps and waited for a chance to plug both Zorita and the snakes. They were talked out of this unique target shooting by companions who had the interests of the proprietor at heart. However the one advantage of these many jobs was the excellent opportunity to study the "carry the torch" brigade. Whatever these people were trying to prove by staying up until long after sunrise while I carried on in song about the joys of being miserable, I'm glad they came. I can't think of a better training school than those audiences. It was a wonderful apprenticeship for singing, but no way to get into the habit of sleeping at night.

In my journey through the past, I found the woman that Billy Daniels married in November 1955 and remained with for the rest of his life -

Singer Billy Daniels Weds Montreal Beauty HOLLYWOOD - Singer Billy (That Old Black Magic) Daniels left Hollywood yesterday, with his children's governess, a beautiful French blonde from Montreal, on a plane for El Paso Texas. The famed Negro cafe artist and Pierrette Cameron, a McGill University graduate, were away from Hollywood only long enough to be married by a Mexican judge in Juarez and return. The pair were accompanied by writer Hal Conrad who was best man. The elopement of the two will come as no surprise to Hollywood. 'Perri' has been the singer's constant companion for more than a year. It is the first marriage for the 23-year old blonde. It is Daniels third and he says his age is "the same as Jack Benny's - under 40" The bride told a reporter that "I think he's just wonderful" Then she added that she had been a fan of her husbands singing long before she met him. Billy said that he met his bride more than a year ago, when he took his children with him on a Montreal engagement. "An agency sent her over to take care of my kids" he said "The children liked her and so did I" Daniels has three children by his first wife, Adriene, who died 8 years ago. The children are Diane 15, now attending school in Switzerland; Billy Jnr. 13 and Bruce 10, students at St. John's Military School here. Daniel's second wife was Boston socialite Martha Braun they were married in 1950 and divorced three years later. There will be no immediate honeymoon. Daniels explained: "I have to go to work. I owe too much money" The crooner will leave today for the east for his engagement at 'The Stage Coach Inn' in New Jersey and for an appearance Saturday night on The Jackie Gleason television show.

On the now world-famous Las Vegas Boulevard, new even more luxurious hotels were opening with a breath-taking frequency. No longer glorified motels with landscaped gardens the second generation casino-hotels were immense multi-million dollar entertainment centres, a calculated gamble designed to attract customers to the lucrative gaming tables of vast air-conditioned casinos. The sheer scale of development quickly established Las Vegas as one of the focal points of show-business and a major venue for entertainers of any kind. The Las Vegas strip became a show-case of show-business talent, a giant 52nd Street. A star from the golden age of radio and television, Billy Daniels was top of the bill the opening night of the biggest hotel in the world The Stardust. He signed a 3-year deal to appear in residence at The Stardust for 40 weeks per year, a contract that was the very first of its kind.

He performed in a Las Vegas which was practically doubling in size annually, at The Dunes, The New Frontier, Wilbur Clark's - The Desert Inn, The Sahara. He also remained a top draw in nightclubs frequently appearing at all the top-spots of the day, The Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, The Starlight Roof at the fabulous Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, or in small intimate supper clubs like New York's exclusive The Onyx Room -

New York Post Thursday February 23rd 1956 DANIELS PLEADS INNOCENT TO CLUB SHOOTING By Charles Gruenberg Singer Billy Daniels minus his customary smile, pleaded innocent today to a five-count indictment growing out of a Harlem bottle club shooting. Accompanied by his lawyer, Sol Gelb, Daniels appeared before General Sessions Judge Goldstein, who continued the singer in $2,500 bail and gave the defense two weeks for motions. Daniels who usually smiles widely and constantly, appeared glum when he arrived at Idlewild Airport from the West Coast and later when he made a tour through three courts. To photographers pleading for a cheery look, Daniels said glumly : "It's pretty hard to smile under the circumstances" Occasionally, however, he forced a wan grin that vanished abruptly when the flashbulbs stopped flashing. The singer sidestepped all questions about the case. When he was asked how he felt about it, Daniels parried saying: "I'm feeling pretty rocky - it was a rough trip" Daniels drove directly from the airport to the office of District Attorney Hogan and from there he and his lawyer went to Felony Court, where Magistrate Bottiglieri dismissed Sullivan law and assault charges because a superseding indictment had been handed up. From there Daniels and Gelb went to General Sessions. And, from there, he went to Traffic Court over a little matter of a speeding summons that had been hanging since 1951. Gelb explained that Daniels thought a friend had taken care of it. "Fifty Dollars or five days" said Magistrate Milton Solomon. Daniels drew a large roll from his pocket and peeled off $50. The singer arrived at the airport under the name of "Mr.Rockman" which apparently did not fool American Airlines. A red carpet was rolled out to the plane for Daniels. Daniels was met at the plane by a woman in a red coat. She said she was his cousin, but refused to divulge her name. She greeted Daniels with a cousinly kiss. Daniels said he had cut short a singing engagement in Palm Springs to come here for the arraignment. He had been allowed to leave the state to fulfil singing dates on the West Coast. Daniels,40, was indicted on two counts of assault, two of possession of a pistol and one of discharging a pistol in a public place.

In stark contrast to Las Vegas and the hotel supper-club and nightclub cabaret circuit of America and immediately following this court appearance, Billy Daniels again crossed the Atlantic and toured the variety theatres of Britain. He remained a very popular entertainer in Europe and in total he appeared in eight Royal Command Performances in London, the annual charity, variety show-piece attended by a member of the Royal Family -

The Liverpool Echo 13th June 1956

Riding Along on the crest of a song! Billy Daniels brings back to the Liverpool Empire that old black magic and puts the hoodoo upon the adoring adolescents. Fundamentally his art is negro - the rhythmic drum-beat, bodily contortions, rapt humour, rueful style of nostalgic narration, intense spasmodic plaintiveness, smiles breaking through, colloquial matters discoursed in an epic style. Yet the great little Billy has his Anglicised aspects also; while the stick-and-boater pertain to the french, not the English, Chevalier, with something of Maurice's cherubic charm. Today Billy seems in a process of transition. Modifications in his manner lend it a faint incongruity. He enquires 'How Deep Is The Ocean' as Othello might. His new uplifting item 'Forgiveness' avoids that slick phony piety recently cultivated by so many singers on both sides of the Atlantic. Behind all the black magic nonsense lies a sincere philosophy of life, skilfully orchestrated this side of honky- tonk. And there, at the pianoforte, Benny Payne, picks out the counterpoint with cascades of glittering notes. Billy does not sing a song; he rides to town on it. Oddly, it is the established romantic numbers which enchant the younger generation. 'Begin The Beguine' is, however not quite the number we used to know. It vividly illustrates Benny's method of reorganising an entire score. 'A Many Splendoured Thing' too, suits the wavecrest Billy, in his intermingling of the intimate and the spectacular. The supporting variety programme is one which any theatre might be proud to offer. Alan Clive is brilliantly effortless as mimic and ruminator, Joan Winters and Guy Fielding shine in sprightly patter. There are four acts which all stand at the apex of achievement. The Four Kelroys from Australia present by far the most artistic and precise trampoline feats Liverpool has ever seen. The Four Furres, with nine chairs, have developed the mathematics of sheer balance to new altitudes. El Granadas, another quartet add something new to whip and rope work. On the slack wire, Jimmy Jeff, assisted by the deft June, juggles complexly. All this and the rather confined but pleasantly unconventional dancing of Ann and Val Shelley too!

Top of the bill on the still thriving Moss Empire 'The Number One' Variety circuit Billy Daniels again broke all attendance records. A tour highlight was a week at The Glasgow Empire one of the largest theatres in Britain, where the queue for his shows stretched around the block. His appearance prompted this article in The Glasgow Herald on 11 July 1956, in a 'Showtime' column that appeared next to a pin-up of a sultry polka-dot clad 'busty babe' -

NOW THIS MR.DANIELS IS REALLY LIVING... Showtime with Gordon Frogatt (Gordon Irving is on holiday) Billy Daniels looked up from autographing the thirty-seventh picture of Billy Daniels and said: "Sit down fella" I did. He signed the thirty-eighth picture, brushed a speck of cigar ash from his worsted suit and murmured in that black velvet voice: "Sure I've done OK by singing. Got a roof over my head anyway" I report and with an envy that is shameful that underneath the roof in Hollywood is eight bedrooms, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, two lounges, a playroom, two dining rooms...AND A PICTURE OF BILLY DANIELS. The roof and its contents cost a cool, cool, cool 100,000 dollars. FIVE CARS A slight intake of breath - my breath - and Daniels talks again: "I also have a house in Cuba, four cars - oh yeah I'm taking a Bentley back with me - five cars, a real estate business in California and a fancy Jewellery business in Birmingham, England" Billy Daniels signed his 39th picture. The light glinted on a thick gold ring built around a giant sapphire. I goggle. He says: "Present from my wife Pierette, she's ash-blonde. Used to be governess to my kids y'know" I said I didn't, but DID know that she was wifie number three. He says "Skip it." I further report BILLY DANIELS is really livin'. DAUGHTER DIANE goes to a nose-in-the-air finishing school in Switzerland. Sons Billy Junior and Bruce play soldiers in a Military Academy in the States IT'S RARE "Twenty years" murmured the maestro with a burp in his singing voice "has sure made some difference"...read that again dear fan it's a rare, rare thing...an UNDERSTATEMENT from an American actor. TO be honest...Billy is fattish, definitely fortyish, but can still persuade American TV moguls to part with 10,000 dollars a show. Even with my arithmetic you realise that that well-rounded figure is quite some ways different from the 15 dollars a week he used to earn for singing and waiting on tables. Billy signed his fortieth fan picture. THAT SONG You will have gathered that Billy boy is filthy rich. And he admits he owes it all to one song, one little song that had been battered around every honky tonk in the world before he got to work on it. "Sure" husked dandy Daniels"I know what That Old Black Magic song did for me...and next to the Lord's prayer the words mean more to this fella that any others I know" I report in brief. Billy Daniels is a nice guy, sincere and still wearing the same size hat he wore as a waiter. He smiles alot and means it. Billy Daniels signed his forty-first picture. I said "Be seein' you." He said "Sure Fella, don't forget to mention my new picture" I've mentioned it.

Later on that same tour of England when I was 2 years old in The New Musical Express published on Friday October 12 1956, Keith Goodwin wrote -

Billy Daniels Casts His Black Magic Spell A talented gentleman by the name of Billy Daniels waved his arms and occasionally his legs in the air and cast a spell of Black Magic over the first house audience at London's Prince of Wales Theatre on Monday. He mixed latin rhythm and romantic ballads into a tasty brew, liberally seasoned it with dashes of impish humour and served it with a dressing of masterly showmanship. The result was a first class act, the like of which can only be associated with one man - Billy Daniels. The "Black Magic" artistry of this man has never waned over the years. It has if anything matured and so too has his voice. Billy's set-up on stage is very impressive and aptly suited to his own singular style. Pianist Benny Payne - himself a very important part of the act - sits to one side of the stage, with drummer Danny Craig and bassist Dave Willis flanking him. Billy himself occupies the centre of the stage and also utilises the surrounding area for the dances and body gyrations that have grown to be his trademark. The effects are not overdone and his finger flicking, leg kicking, ear holding, and other visual "gimmicks" are reduced to a minimum. The Daniels voice is the important thing - and there is little to hamper the listener enjoying it in full. It was a refreshing change to find that Billy's act although received with great enthusiasm was not greeted with screams and sighs from teen-agers every time he kicked his legs in the air. Maybe they've forgotten how to scream. Or, better still, perhaps realised that there is far more pleasure to be had from hearing the Daniels voice rather than drowning it every time he sways and bends his lithe body! Billy opens his act with a rocking duet with Benny Payne. What they do to "Bye Bye Blackbird" is nobody's business, but it certainly swings like mad and is as good an opener as Billy could ever find. Billy for the most part, ignores the current hit parade tunes. He prefers to sing "evergreens" - pleasant palpable standards. But he made an exception on Monday with "Walk Hand In Hand" - possibly the best of today's popular tunes. His interpretation was far removed from the hit version recorded by Tony Martin, but extremely likeable in a very different way. His sense of dynamics, of light and shade, is near perfect."Them There Eyes" has become an accepted part of Billy's act and the joyous, soaring sound produced by "Mr Black Magic" and Benny Payne is intermingled with a good deal of happy spirited humour. Billy's treatment of "Autumn Leaves" is another gem of artistic interpretation with delicate touches of light and shade, and the whole thing bears the inimitable Daniels stamp of good taste and excellent musicianship. "Begin The Beguine" is another"swinger" and also the cue for finger flicking and body gyrations by maestro Daniels. A break in the programme allows Benny Payne scope for a pleasant caricature of the immortal Fats Waller singing "Aint Misbehavin" As a singer he is moderately pleasant - as a pianist, brilliant. "I Need Your Love" a British composition which Billy has recorded for Polydor, could well turn out to be a hit record. Both melody and lyrics are good and it is ideal material for Billy. He closes his act with need I say it "That Old Black Magic" Tie hanging loosely round his neck, top shirt button undone and body swaying to and fro, he sings it with all the vitality that we have come to expect from him. With its pulsating rhythm and genial humour, it is still the highspot of an excellent set. Also featured on a better than average bill are The King Brothers and vocalist comedienne Joan Turner. The Kings present a lively well balanced act both instrumentally and vocally and make quite a good job of "See You Later Alligator" Joans contribution to the show was a slick fast moving act with some neat touches of humour and good imitations of Rose Murphy, Eartha Kitt, Yma Surmac and Vera Lynn. Space does not permit a full review of comedians Bill Maynard and Dickie Henderson but suffice to say that they were both on top form. Ditto ace ventriloquist Arthur Worsley.

Billy Daniels was at the top of a bill that was incomplete without trampolinists, chair balancers and 'ace ventriloquist Arthur Worsley', the music hall in England was alive and still kicking. The King Brothers sang on that packed opening Monday night in 1956 'See You Later Alligator' an already famous Bill Haley and The Comets number. Unknown to them all the entertainment industry was about to experience an earthquake centred around Elvis Presley who shook the music world to the core. On his first television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, with his gospel-like backing singers The Jordanaires, Elvis sang 'Peace In The Valley' the touching negro spiritual.

The Rock'nRoll phenomenon changed the music business almost overnight and again radio was the driving force, now with powerful transmitters that could be heard across entire states all over America. And by 1950 the race labels had evolved into Rhythm & Blues when white disc-jockeys raved over the air-waves about Rock 'n Roll music at the new mobile car-borne youth. Little Richard, a maniacal negro hollerer, out-sold the lily-white cover version of his song 'Tutti Frutti' by 'waspy' Pat Boone, whose effect was to make the music more palatable for his white audience.

THE REAL THING was now more popular and the doors burst open for a host of talented performers. Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino who among many others became energetic components in the gradual evolution of popular music and in America, accelerated the process of de- segregation. It was a revolution whose explosive demand for Rock'n Roll recordings fuelled by mass marketing aimed at teenagers for the first time made million-seller sales of discs practically a weekly event.

Billy Daniels was from an earlier generation, among a group of performers that had blossomed pre- war in the 52nd Street swing clubs of Manhattan and with his musical pedigree he continued to star in the cabaret scene throughout the Rock'n Roll period and well beyond it. He was now regarded as an expert exponent of the art of sizzling cabaret performance, an art form that he had helped to establish. By the end of the 1950's and the dawn of the swinging 1960's he was performing almost non-stop in the U.S. and Europe practically in rotation at the beginning of the jet age -

Daily Mirror London, 17 March 1962 SEE WHO'S TWISTING! It's Ryan in the Daniels den! British singer Marion Ryan 28, and American entertainer Billy Daniels 46, do the twist at a London nightclub where Billy was starring in cabaret. The Billy-Marion Twist so delighted other diners that like Oliver Twist they asked for more! The twisting stars are pictured at The Bal Tabarin. But shortly afterwards Billy got laryngitis and was ordered by his doctor to quit his £2,000-a-week date.

A week later The New Musical Express printed the story, symptomatic of the gradual decline of cabaret nightclubs, whose heyday by now was almost over -

BILLY DANIELS ENDS CABARET SEASON : BAL TABARIN POLICY CHANGE In a dramatic move, Billy Daniels obtained his release this week from his current London cabaret season at the Bal Tabarin. The venue is ending its star cabaret policy. The projected appearances by Rose Murphy, Mel Torme, The Deep River Boys and The Delta Rhythm Boys will not now take place. "The contracts have been cancelled" Bal Tabarin chief Paul Raymond told the NME. The venue will be closed next week for rehearsals for a new "Floorshow" which opens on March 26th. Daniels was not able to complete his performance on Monday night because of laryngitis. Dick Jordan took over for the rest of the week. Doctors told the American star he would have to rest completely if he was to be fit for a Las Vegas engagement next month. His accompanist Benny Payne, returned to New York on Wednesday, Daniels planned to follow when fit to travel. Not affected is Billy's appearance in ABC-TV's "Thank Your Lucky Stars" tomorrow (Saturday). This was specially tele-recorded last week. He was backed by the Bal Tabarin's MD Frank Weir, and will be seen in a full performance instead of miming as most artists do on the programme.

Back in the USA at the time of The Beatles invasion and after a period well out of the spotlight due to the wave of club closures, Mr Black Magic starred again in a musical theatre production that was also a fresh start for him. In 1964 he appeared on Broadway at The Majestic Theatre playing opposite Sammy Davis Jnr. in ‘Golden Boy’ It was directed by Arthur Penn who would later direct one the biggest movie hits of the 60's; Bonnie & Clyde. (I vividly remember its first night in a packed Majestic Cinema in Barnoldswick) Arthur Penn cast Billy Daniels as a homosexual gangster named Eddie Satin (Benny Payne appeared as his henchman, Benny) and his involvement with fighter Joe Wellington (Sammy Davis Jnr.) in a fierce contemporary tale of a mixed race love affair, the mob and the fight game.

Based on the book by Clifford Odets and William Gibson and a stage play by Clifford Odets, the musical was a critical and commercial success and ran for almost two years. His songs 'This Is The Life' which closed Act One and 'While The City Sleeps' were both technically difficult numbers that moved the highly controversial plot along at key moments. He was quoted at the time "The theatre gives me a chance to stay in a character from a song and let me go into some depth and I'm really enjoying being someone else every night!"

The New York Post Wednesday March 17th 1965 DANIELS, WIFE AND FRIEND IN COURT ON GUN MYSTERY! By Lael Scott Billy Daniels, his wife,Pierette, and a pretty blonde named Lola Hind appeared in Criminal Court today to answer questions about who fired what gun at whom and why in the singer's Mayflower Hotel suite. "It was all a mistake" said the 26-year-old Miss Hind, who works for Daniel's show business pal Joe Fontana. "I'm going to withdraw the charges. It was a case of people mis-understanding each other in the pressure of the moment" Mrs. Daniels, chic in sun-glasses and a beige mohair suit, said she didn't know anything about the gun in question. She is charged with felonious assault and illegal possession of a gun. The pistol went off yesterday and smashed a mirror in the singer's suite while detectives were questioning him and Miss Hind about a domestic spat: Mrs. Daniels apparently had come into the apartment and found Miss Hind and her husband there, to the wife's fury. The three principals arrived in court separately today but seemed in agreement that the whole incident was just a "mistake" and that the gun didn't belong to anybody. Before Mrs. Daniels was called into court to answer questions about the charges against her, Miss Hind was summoned before a grand jury, presumably to explain why she wants to withdraw the charges.

Billy Daniels loved performing and after the success of Golden Boy he appeared on the televisions and hotel nightclubs of the globe. With the rise of long-haul air travel he could punctuate his residence stays in Las Vegas, New York and Atlantic City with appearances further afield in Hawaii and Acupulco, then onwards to Hong Kong, Singapore and in that mobilised year of 1968 at U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, Taipei and Bangkok during the Vietnam War. He toured New Zealand and Australia in 1968, where he had maintained his popularity from the 1950's and then like a boomerang he returned to the music capital, New York -

Bouncy Star Billy Daniels Forgets Troubles on Stage By Fraser Kent

"If you think about your personal problems when you're on stage, you're lost" says Billy Daniels performing this week at Elmwood Casino. "It's when you're all by yourself in a lonely hotel room in Schenectady that it hits you". Daniels faced the news conference with a wary eye. His personal problems had been aggravated that morning, when a New York gossip columnist had reported that Mrs. Daniels had gone home to mother and that their marriage was on the rocks. The singer was glad of the chance to deny the story - aided by a timely long distance call from his wife's parental home in Montreal, where she was visiting. But he seldom relaxed as he spoke of his tour aboard (loves London and Southern France) and of his shoe collection (300 pairs, but he's no "shoe faddist") Daniels was obviously tired after a day that began with being trapped in a plane for 40 minutes because of a broken door which could not be unlocked at the New York airport. He had Elmwood management chewing fingernails when he failed to appear until half an hour before show time. Tiring too, would have been the hour-long contribution he made to the floor show, with songs ranging from the bouncy "Masculine Touch" to his top hit "That Old Black Magic" Daniels "free wheeling" style was described by accompanist Benny Payne as being similar to that of Cab Calloway. "There are some entertainers who just can't be classified. Sarah Vaughan, Pearl Bailey and Billy. They don't sell millions of records, but they're always top artists" Billy Daniels is no youngster. He knows how to quiet a nightclub audience to a hush with "Yiddisha Mamma" and how to rock a song across with snapping fingers and tapping toes. And faced with a roar of applause, he knows how to bow.

He was now singing his way around the world entertaining cabaret audiences from Monte Carlo to Miami. In fact to the beach-hotel where Dustin Hoffman sprinted in John Schelsinger's Midnight Cowboy, another dazzling film I absorbed as a teenager. I remember hobbling out of the Majestic Cinema in a downpour, imitating Ratso's limp pretending to be in a rainy New York instead of Barnoldwick. And now I discover decades later that my father was there, performing to sun-kissed crowds at sundown ‘Nightly at the Beachfront Diplomat Hotel ‘on a neon-soaked Miami Beach, he sang for his supper.

The Miami Beach Sun - Thur. Feb 15 1968 Paul M. Bruun 'Over Miami' writes - Billy Daniels: The Bruuns made one trip suffice to review both Buddy Hackett in the Diplomat's Cafe Cristal and Billy Daniels in the Diplomat's Tack Room. We drew straws, I drew Billy Daniels. For as long as I have known Billy Daniels and I have known him a very long time, he never seems to grow any older. The very same infectious smile that marked his premiere on my Dawn Patrol is still wowing the customers today. The only noticeable difference I can observe is that today Billy Daniels brags and boasts and talks about his 'kids' with an understandable fatherly pride, his only concession to ageing at all. He tells us that they still refuse to play his records, that if you come to his home, he will have to receive you in his garage, that his 'kids' use his home as a 'loudspeaker' Just back from a tour of Australia and soon headed for Thailand, Billy greets his audience with the flair of a grand host about to do honours to his guests. He opens (with Benny Payne at the piano) singing 'Almost Like Being In Love' His voice he said was a little hoarse from having spent much of the day taping a session with John Gary for John's new TV show but if it was hoarse it was only until he hit a couple of notes. They simply don't come any finer than Billy Daniels and Benny Payne. Listening to Billy again is as thrilling and satisfying as it was the first night I listened to him. He sings songs that live, just as he lives, forever.

THE REVIEWS OF HIS perfomances I had unearthed were always favourable but throughout his career he remained a favourite subject of the lurid spotlight directed by the scandal pages. This time the story splash was when he was stabbed by a 48-year old man while on stage at New York's Latin Quarter Theatre in late 1968. The story disappeared from the press without any explanation and again he had hit the headlines with negative publicity. I was surprised every time I came across a report of a sudden, violent episode in his life that was never fully explained, simply exposed. It was such a vivid contrast to his suave-crooner image, but why did those incidents occur?

Of course in the public domain I can only find the gloss, the lustrous surface of his public celebrity- life, the categorised celebrity that, for whatever reason, was sensationally reported in newspapers and magazine articles. I was looking for some depth, searching for the man inside. What is his story? were his performances always so well received? Following an incident, did he perform through hecklers during those, what must have been, fraught times? In one newspaper article, when asked why he never lost his appetite for performance no matter what he replied -

'When I perform it's a transfusion. It's the only thing I can do well and man it's a shot! You know how you feel when you're real dressed up and you know your dimples look good and you can look in the mirror and shout 'YEAH!' Well , it's that same feeling'

In 1975 he appeared in Hello Dolly as Horace Vandergelder co-starring with another veteran from pre-war Harlem, the sensational Pearl Bailey in the sentimental tale of the old south now reversed into an all-black production. The show played for seven months to packed houses all across the states and in Gerald Ford's White House. When his appearance on the NBC TV-Special Cotton Club '75 show-cased his talent to a younger audience, he had become one of the most famous showmen singing stars America has ever produced. On May 18th 1977 Billy Daniels became the 1,682nd entertainment luminary to be honoured by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce when his star was dedicated in the 'Walk of Fame' at 6819 Hollywood Boulevard between the stars previously dedicated to Gerry Lewis and Mabel Normand. His star bore the recording artist's Record Stylus logo in honour of his hits at the dawn of microgroove recording. The Los Angeles Times reported "The Hollywood High School Band played That Old Black Magic for the ceremony guests which included Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and the Daniels family"

Later that same year he began another long running musical production this time at the Royalty Theatre in London, playing the role of John Sage a former 52nd Street head-liner in Bubbling Brown Sugar. The show was a nostalgic light entertainment concoction, based on a book by Loften Mitchell, concept by Rosetta LeNoire. It was a musical tour of a Harlem long gone and strongly evocative of the musical experiences of the era. The show featured the Harlem 'Tree of Hope' a tree stump in New Yorks' Seventh Avenue, chopped down with the others in the street by Mayor La Guardia in an economy drive and then adopted by musicians as a shrine.

It was there, much as in Londons' Archer Street, that singers, dancers and instrumentalists would gather looking for work. The remains of an old tree became a psychic wishing well, touch the bark to make your wish and enlist the help of the generations of performers who have done the same before you and made it through the hard times. A living and fully functioning legacy from the period, Billy Daniels was perfect for the leading role. "It was my story from beginning to end, I remember when that tree was chopped down. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, myself and many others would sit on a bench under that tree. It was right opposite the Musician's Club on Seventh Avenue so the agents always knew where to find us if there was some work someplace"

He played himself thinly disguised, making a time-travel trip through Harlem night-life arm-in-arm with an old show-biz sweetheart now the toast of Europe and her easy mark husband. The vibrations of Harlem deeply affect the rich nerd and his lady but not their guide John Sage. The high steppers of the chorus line burst on stage wearing top hats, white ties and tails for a tap routine, just as the old romance looks about to be re-kindled. At the time Bernard Levin reviewed theatre for The Sunday Times -

Before Bubbling Brown Sugar (Royalty) criticism falls silent and not only because it would have the devil's own job making itself heard. The show is a tour de chant of American urban negro songs, strung like black pearls on the almost invisible thread of a story about a wealthy white socialite being taken on a visit to the most celebrated Harlem night-spots, starting in the days "when it wasn't safe to be black" They should throw away the book and just treat the whole thing as the anthology it is, for Bubbling Brown Sugar is free of politics and other cant and demands nothing but the surrender it enforces within ten-minutes of curtain rise. It includes many of the most famous songs in this genre, like "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Ain't Misbehavin'" and adds some fetching new ones. It is staged and performed with a combination of perfect professionalism and uninhibited joy and a cast so integrated (oops) that it seems like a single performer. I see no reason why the Royalty should ever need another show.

Naturally Billy Daniels assisted by the energetic chorus line roused the audience every night with rip-roaring renditions of the period pieces of the era. Earl Hines Rosetta Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Lady and I Got It Bad Bert Williams Nobody and Sissle & Blakes In Honeysuckle Time. And like a returning King he wandered happily in and out of exotic sets, careful reproductions of the famous Cotton Club, Savoy Ballroom and the Lafayette Theatre and a typical house rent party. The finale, a vocal and dance exhibition, the set a dizzying mix of the New York skyline with giant reproductions of the 1920's race record labels, left them shouting for more, it was 1978 I was 24 and I'm sorry I missed his show and him.

Bubbling Brown Sugar notched up over 700 performances and Billy Daniels was awarded the London Critics Award for Best Musical Performance of 1978. In its long run the show featured among others Helen Gelzer, Elaine Delmar, Lon Satton, Stephanie Lawrence and Clarke Peters. In October 1979, Sydney Samuelson invited Billy Daniels to perform with the National Philharmonic Orchestra at The Royal Albert Hall for the Filmharmonic '79 concert. It was the first time that a singer had performed with the full orchestra at the festival of film and TV music.

Billy Daniels is usually remembered as the first big-band vocalist to make it as a solo artist, his forte was always to produce a superb performance which he continually excelled, a romantic balladeer from the days of swing he was arguably the greatest nightclub entertainer of all time. He performed almost non-stop throughout a career that spanned half a century and he continued to entertain until his health stopped him. In 1986 aged 71 he opened the 'Bravo!' showroom at the new multi-million dollar La Costa Hotel & Spa Resort in San Diego California, headlining a self-penned show -

Los Angeles Times The Black Magic Revue - As a living tie to the heyday of Harlem's fabled Cotton Club, Daniels performs the music from that era twice nightly, Monday through Saturday until December 13th

He was interviewed sipping coffee on a sunny morning overlooking one of La Costa's world championship golf courses, now an elder statesman of the entertainment world he spoke of a career of nearly half a century that spanned from The Cotton Club of 1930's Harlem to The Ed Sullivan Show and the nightspots of the world. As Billy Daniels smiled at the attractive La Costa waitress who was serving them breakfast, the reporter Hilliard Harper noted -

Although Daniels clearly has an eye for the women, he never married an entertainer. 'I've had some tempestuous relationships with show girls, but never got to the altar' he said. For more than 30 years he has lived with his fourth wife, Perri. Their love affair is straight out of the Sound of Music. Daniels met her in Montreal when she became Governess to his three children from a previous marriage. Their relationship 'evolved and then my position became indispensable' said his wife, who is now his manager. They will soon celebrate their 31st wedding anniversary.

In April 1988 only a few months before my father died, the New York Newsday ran a story -

Billy Daniels ready to work his 'Old Black Magic' again The name isn't especially familiar now except to middle-aged fans who remember the guest slots on TV's old 'Ed Sullivan Show' the frequent nightclub appearances and the association with a marvellous Harold Arlen song 'That Old Black Magic' Nobody sang it better than Billy Daniels, who made the tune his trademark during a career of more than a half-century. Daniels still sings in Vegas and Atlantic City and he looks forward, at age 72, to a time when he'll be back on the circuit on a regular basis. The past few months, however, the singer has spent most of his time recovering from surgery to correct heart and circulation problems that have plagued him in recent years. Daniels underwent triple by-pass surgery several years ago, and was able to resume his career. In the fall, he required quadruple by-pass surgery followed the next day by amputation of part of his right foot. It has been observed that growing old is not all it's cracked up to be, but Daniels has taken a positive attitude in handling his physical set-backs. He even plans to continue combining his singing with his old softshoe routine. "I'm fine. I'm in pretty good shape" he said in a recent published report in Atlantic City. The resort town is the same place where he got his start, in a 'chitlin' circuit' cabaret called Club Harlem."They say that I did remarkably well. I'm able to recover pretty quickly" Daniels made light of the recent surgery, describing his operations wryly as "adventures" But his wife of 33 years Pierette said the second by-pass surgery was a life and death situation for her husband "He really almost didn't make it" she said "He knew that. But he has such a great determination and strength that he pulled through" Acknowledging the seriousness of his situation, Daniels praised the work of his doctors during his fall stay at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, and said he was happy to receive visits and calls from friends such as Bill Cosby, Pearl Bailey, Tony Bennett, Shecky Greene, Milton Berle and Sammy Davis Jnr. But the main topic of discussion was his desire to get back to work after relaxing at his Hollywood home. "It's a challenge, but it is something I love" Daniels said and he stressed "Once something happens to you it gets around and if you don't show up, pretty soon they think you're gone. I don't want people to think I'm out of it"

He completed a sell-out 4-week 'come-back' at The Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, following recovery from quadruple heart by-pass surgery that previous summer in La Costa. In his 73rd year he returned to his southern California home from Atlantic City and complained of a nagging pain. He entered Scripps Clinic in La Jolla where stomach cancer was discovered and his condition diagnosed as inoperable. He bravely wasted away and died six months later on October 7th 1988 at the University of Southern California Kenneth Norris Cancer Hospital & Research Institute in Los Angeles. His wife Perri was with him when he died and she was quoted in the newspapers "He was a superstar to me and he was a superstar to millions of others".

Don Phillips of the American Guild of Variety Artists said, "Billy Daniels was one of the greatest showmen ever to appear on the entertainment scene. He was comparable to Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier and Danny Kaye. Billy was a warm and wonderful person and someone I'll never forget". Hollywood was where he had spent most of his life and he received a Hollywood send-off as a last bow. The viewing was over the weekend of 8th October '88 at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills. The funeral was held at 10.30am Tuesday 11th at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills where comedian Red Buttons gave the eulogy.

The honorary pall-bearers and guests were; Milton Berle, Tony Martin, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, Danny Thomas, Sidney Poitier, Robert Stack, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Englebert Humperdink, Anthony Quinn, Lloyd Bridges and Vic Damone. For the family only there was a private internment the next day in La Costa. The obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that The family has suggested that contributions be made to the Kenneth Norris Cancer Hospital or to the USC Cancer Centre. The Chicago Tribune nearly two weeks later published a story by Rick Kogan and amongst the dozens of my father's obituaries I had read after the event, I found this one the most poignant -

Remembering Billy Daniels The last time we saw Billy Daniels, he looked terrific. Though into his 70's he had a youthfully handsome face, a full head of hair the colour of new snow and eyes that twinkled. But these physical characteristics were not the principal reason we found him such a delight. Rather it was his spirited way with a song and , especially, with life that made him one of the most ebullient performers we've ever met. Late in the summer, we heard that he had stomach cancer. The end came relatively quickly : Daniels died nine days ago in Los Angeles. At his funeral earlier this week in Beverly Hills, he was eulogized by Red Buttons. We don't know what was said but we will remember forever what Daniels once told us after a performance last year at the Gold Star Bar. We had just watched him perform and asked why he seemed to still get so much joy from singing. "Life is a lot like a good song" he said, smiling. "Take it slow and easy and the music will carry you through"

He enjoyed a fascinating life at the heart of American music, but whilst obtaining all of this documentary on his career, what interested me more than anything else was any mention of his family. One newspaper reported - Daniels is survived by his wife Perri, six children, six grandchildren, two sisters, and two brothers. The phrase 'survived by' struck me because Billy Daniels is also 'survived by' me. His other children, were named in one newspaper and now I had the names of my unknown relatives - Andrea, Dominique, Yvonne, Diane, William Daniels II and Bruce. I was compelled to scribble on my print-out, and Jack!

I wonder where my half-brothers and sisters are at this moment and I wonder if they will want to know me? I know from my internet friend in Chicago that Yvonne, once a top disc-jockey, has died. But where are the rest? And who was and what happened to their mother(s)? My trip through the public archive had only increased my raging thirst for personal information and to quench it, I wondered most of all about Perri Daniels and whether she would welcome any contact from me.

11

The Good Shepherd

I must contact Perri Daniels because it will be tantamount to meeting my father. Perri Daniels will have physical evidence of his presence; she may even live in the house they shared, perhaps surrounded by their memorabilia. It would be an extraordinary experience for me to meet her and to visit my father's home. It was obviously the next step to take but how can I find her? Is she still living in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles? Do I fly over there and track her down like a private detective? That would be an adventure but I need to be careful, my mother told me, that unreal evening when she discussed my father for the first time, 'As you grow older, you look more like him' and to arrive un-announced on Mrs. Daniels doorstep I would be a ghost from her past, a skeleton from the cupboard made flesh.

Perhaps I could obtain her telephone number somehow and call her, but what could I possibly say? "Hello I'm calling from England and....." No! I must find her address and write to her, I'm not an unknown 'offspring' she knew my mother, she knows that I exist. I could check this out further by asking my mother for details but she might not remember, or want to remember. I know that memory is selective, its function can also be to edit, or even delete events. What will my mother think of me trying to contact Perri Daniels? I don't want to upset anyone, so as I may never find the famous Mrs.Daniels, it is probably best not to mention anything at all to my mother for the time being.

I'm only interested in my father's character and his history rather than the story of his former possible rivals in love? I do feel as though my mother has not given me the full picture, but that isn't my quest. It is him I'm looking for, not the circumstances around my birth, they had a love affair, I was born, that is all there is to that. I have no information on his childhood, which is still veiled in mystery. In 1915 the year of his birth, Jacksonville, in the deep south, on which 'side of town' did my father live? It's likely that he lived 'on the other side of the tracks'. But there are other possibilities, his grandparents what was their background? It is a complicated question, for instance it was common in the now distant past that the mixed race, 'light' coloured slaves, would have been employed in the 'big house' as servants.

They became a middle class and lived very differently, in a version of an English Victorian class system, an 'Upstairs and Downstairs' society. There has always been a black domestic service culture in America and that was how in the past they were always portrayed in the movies. It was once upon a time, a routine part of American life, just as domestic service was in England and not all that long ago, certainly up to the time of my father's birth in 1915. There was another possibility, it was also not unusual during that period for a white man to have two 'wives', or even to maintain a secret 'black' family. I have no evidence of who his parents were, or in what circumstances he was brought up.

But I only had to look closely again at the evidence I had already amassed to find the answer was staring me in the face. I have now read many times He was a negro in any reference to him it seems compulsory to state ‘The negro singer’ which means that he must have originated from a black family background. To always find it necessary to repeat in every single reference a negro singer is racism, a way of continuing the message of categorisation that was much more commonplace in the past. He had often talked to my mother about his heritage of segregation. The way the world was then, with racial matters much more acute, must have been a crucial part of his experience and must have contributed to his character.

And if what my mother remembered him telling her was true "He said that his Great Great Grandfather was a white overseer on a plantation" He was from a black family impregnated with white blood that could be traced back to frontiersman Daniel Boone according to the obituaries, a family legend perhaps. It is a fact that in his youth he would have been termed by his community as a 'high yellow’; a light-skinned negro, a 'type' that was often derided on both sides of the racial barricade.

But who can I contact? I read again the list of people who attended his funeral, I don't know any of them of course, but they presumably were all friends of his or at least must have met him and Perri several times. In the 'heart on the sleeve' world of show-business the funeral had been packed with singers paying their last respects to one of their kind. But were any of those singers close friends of his. Tom Jones or Englebert Humperdinck? both from Britain, would I be able to get in touch with either of them?

Is this crazy? I'm constantly playing the two Billy Daniels albums I have, speculating about his life permanently and now I'm thinking of writing to Tom Jones! If I could send a letter to Tom Jones how on earth would he react? I probably wouldn't be able to find his address any easier than Perris'. I suppose I could write to his fan club or better still to his booking agents but would it get through the barrier? they probably consider all hand-written mail addressed as 'personal, private and confidential' as ordinary fan-mail, they will receive letters marked like that every day of the week and even if I reached him would he help, would he listen to a long-lost child?

Perri is the one to contact and to contact direct. It would be wonderful to get to know her and hopefully we could become friends. It would be fantastic if she could then put me in touch with his friends, who could share their anecdotes with me. My mother said to me that night "Do you think you'd be interested in him if he hadn't been famous?" It was an incisive question, she had asked when I told her of my desire for more information, she knew I'd find plenty and I replied without hesitation, "Yes I would, I'm lucky that his fame means there is more of him to discover and it will be easier to find. He was my father no matter what he did for a living. His fame means he might have had something special about him, a talent and that is interesting. If he wasn't famous there just wouldn't be any publicity to read, or as much to discover. He was my father and I want to know what he was like to know."

"He knew everyone, he met them all" "Who? What do you mean?" "Well, all the famous people backstage" "Yes but backstage is not real life, fame is just an occupation"

My whole experience reminded me of those heart-rending stories from women who, in a previous age, had babies taken from them and adopted under sufferance but they have always remembered and in some cases later in life set-out to find the child they gave birth to but have never known. I know that a maternal love is different but my case is the reverse, I'm like the adopted children who search for a 'birth relative'. The fact that he was famous is an interesting bonus and means I'm fortunate because his life was documented and I may even 'meet' him on film one day. I feel as though he is waiting for me to discover him and all it needs is some simple detective work to unearth him from the cellars of the past.

He was in show-business and to be a 'name' in show-business is the goal and that brings the fame that goes with the territory. His long career meant that he must have been an exceptional performer simply in order to sustain the top bookings, even late in his life. He must have been one the best singers of his generation. And I wonder how it felt to walk across the stage of a packed theatre to that solitary microphone, waiting for you, under the spotlight? To sing in an ornate cavern to an audience in tune with your every move, all hearts and minds in synchronisation with the intense flow of communication between a performer and an appreciative audience.

The collective memories, the sighs of appreciation at the recognition of the opening bars of an old favourite. The pleasure of the nostalgia and shared emotion and finally at the resolution of the song, the tumultuous applause. The moments on stage when all is perfect with superb musicians producing marvellous music for you to sing to, must be wonderful. To be able to entertain, sometimes thousands of people must be exhilarating and being in the spotlight and the centre of attention might have been addictive for him. The power a performer is able to exert over an audience is an ancient phenomenon, the human voice combined with dance extended to extraordinary prominence holds a powerful attraction and has always held a deep fascination in the communal psyche.

Bessie Smith The Greatest and Highest Salaried Race Star in the World as she was billed in the 1920's, was capable of hypnosis and would often do more than mesmerise her audience. A legendary performer she often remarked before a show "I'm gonna get me a walker tonight". The victim usually male, but not always as Bessie Smith had male and female lovers, would be captivated by her spell and stagger to the stage in a trance, drawn by her voice and persuasive movement, transfixed by her emotional hold and as in a medical hypnosis once the song was over the 'walker' would have no recollection of the incident.

The awesome mass hysteria generated by entertainers, or simply the 'hairs on the back your neck' reaction to a live performance or even to a recording, are indicative of the ability of the voice to create a powerful emotional response. If you are one of the chosen ones, people that are said to have 'the talent' that can generate an extraordinary experience and therefore adulation, the appreciation of your performance must be extremely satisfying but the contrast when the day comes when you are not wanted or not able to perform, must be acute.

A singer has acquired through exercise a musical instrument that is physically a part of them. A voice is trained by years of practice but a sore throat one morning could signal the beginning of the end of a career. 'Singing. It's the only thing I can do' my mother recalled my father would often say. He must also have wondered, at least occasionally, 'Will I be able to sing at the top of my voice for an hour tonight?' A popular singer and there are very few, enters a new territory and becomes a celebrity, a 'star' who is then constantly on show performing off stage as well as on, scrutinised at every turn by the incessant glare of the media, moving around in a 'flying wedge', surrounded by people most of the time.

Perhaps it can be lonely, locked into an hermetically sealed mobile world with gruelling travel plans always ahead. It is possible for fame to be a hell of sorts, an endless diet of working hard to feed the demands and spiralling costs of survival, telephone number figures of payments received but quickly paid out to managers and agents and to pay for the ever increasing entourage. The sometimes grotesque fan worship, ridiculous proposals, the temptations, moments of wild abandon with the consequent regret, increased pressure and the worry. The relentless search for new material for your hungry audience, all the while being bombarded with an endless list of questions from the insatiable media. There's no business like Show-Business, a series of peaks and troughs as in any endeavour but the highs and lows are probably more intense than most other professions. This could be the last time, it may all be over tomorrow.

My father enjoyed a showbiz career from 1935 through to 1986, over 50 years. His memories of his world must have been fascinating. The changes in the music business he experienced first hand, the high points of his career, the golden age of swing bands and radio, hit records, topping the bill at the biggest theatres and night-spots in the world, his own TV series made during the infancy of television, living and making movies in 1950's Hollywood. The people he knew as friends. Billy Daniels was the acknowledged 'King of the Cafe Singers' and later 'A Masterful Nightclub Performer'. His was a magical way to earn a living.

BUT WHAT WAS IT that drove him? What made him tick? and what about the low points in his life, which are not fully re-counted in any books or newspaper articles. I am driven to uncover his character, not just his career highs and lows, everyone has those. If he was still around would I enjoy his company? Or was he a one-dimensional person and music and show-business was the only thing he could talk about that was worth listening to? Was he a happy man? To talk to him now can only occur in a dream and his memories passed away with him but if I can get close to Perri Daniels and her memories, it will almost be a first-hand recital. And she must be able to illuminate the episodes in his career that I find disturbing. His various 'scrapes' have an air of mystery around them, violent events had occurred at intervals throughout his long career. He had inhabited a world as far removed as it was possible to be from my life.

The heritage I have discovered is mind-boggling. My mother grew up in Oldham, in Lancashire and most of her ancestors were mill-workers for King Cotton. Only 20 miles from Oldham is Liverpool, a city which in the past was a potent link to America, the place where thousands of bales of cotton, hand-picked by slaves, were landed for delivery to the smoky mills of Oldham and the rest of Lancashire. In the mostly cold and wet north of England, a climate perfect for fabric production, my mother’s ancestors worked in the Victorian mills that my father’s ancestors had supplied with their raw material. By a bizarre mixture of geography and circumstance I'm linked to an epic past in a way that is extraordinary, but also a slice of history that can be easily understood.

But I've a complete void when I try to understand my father’s character, because that is an abstract thought, not an historical fact. A series of events, economics and environments, people as a group en- masse, are understood as a simple matter of fact. But can you imagine, is it even possible to know what an individual was like to be with, without ever having met them yourself? I have only one way to find out, to experience my father to the maximum possible, I must 'out' myself and announce to his family in America that I exist! Now I feel as though I've spent my life in silence and I'm wasting more time now, I must speak to Perri Daniels as soon as possible and come right out with it "I want to know all about my father and you have to tell me!"

If I can get through to her by phone, she will just have to listen and understand my sudden appearance. I convinced myself that she will not mind, she had been his manager towards the end of his career and must have had contact with many people, she had not been tucked away at home away from all the glare, so she will now have to handle me! I had become a random enquirer of the most dangerous kind, a haunted soul searching for more and more detail, an obsessive who will never be satisfied. But I'm not a crazed fan! HE WAS MY FATHER. I never knew him and I deserve attention, I need her to help me.

I read all the obituaries again, diligently cross-checking the facts and in several it stated that their home was high in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, I snatched the telephone in almost sheer desperation and rang 'International Directory Enquiries' 'USA' 'Which State?' 'California' 'Which City?' 'Los Angeles' 'Name and Address?' 'Mrs. P. Daniels, Hollywood Hills'

I was told within seconds, 'I have two numbers here for P. Daniels in the Los Angeles area. Do you have a postcode?' 'No, I haven't, are they both for a Mrs.Daniels?' 'I can't tell. It's just listed as P. Daniels. I'll have to give you both' And with that she rattled off two telephone numbers that I could dial direct from here and possibly be answered by the woman my mother knew in 1954. The woman that was married to my father for 33 years, but probably not. I will be amazed if she can be contacted so easily and these numbers are most likely nothing to do with her. But I have to ring to find out and reveal myself 'Er..Hello...Your husband...... WAS MY FATHER!'

I got cold feet, I didn't ring, but I got very close. I imagined someone other than Perri answering 'Who's calling? She's not here at the moment. Who's calling? Can I take a message?' The chance of Perri answering the phone is perhaps remote and if I have to speak to a total stranger I suppose I could leave a message for her but what can I possibly say? I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the whole business and maybe it would be better if I just forgot about him, again. I'm being completely over the top and this is just another maniacal craze. I have never lost touch with reality but I've always had crazes that turn almost into obsessions. But this is of a new kind of critical importance, a totally different experience that feels like the most important thing I have ever done in my life.

It struck me that nearly all his obituaries found it appropriate to mention various shootings and stabbings, to remind the reader of sensational splashes in the past. I know this is always the way with tabloid newspapers and the scandal sheets, his outstanding talent was barely mentioned, but was there more to it? Was my father somehow involved with the mafia? Over his long career none of his many crooning contemporaries, on both sides of the pond - Billy Eckstine, Guy Mitchell, Dick Haymes, Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, Mel Torme, Perry Como, Johnny Ray, Nat King Cole, Dickie Valentine, Vic Damone, Frankie Vaughn, Tony Martin, Matt Monroe, Gordon Macrae, Sammy Davis Jnr. and more recently Tom Jones and Englebert, do not seem to possess the same scandalised atmosphere when you read about their lives in the spotlight.

I wonder if the newspapers made him a regular target for some reason that they couldn't explain in full, so they trashed him instead as much and as often as they could? Frank Sinatra, the biggest star of them all is an exception. He lived with allegations of his direct involvement with the mob, hounded by the proof that he knew Sam Giancana, a one-time powerful Mafia figure (until his violent death of course) by way of a single photograph of Giancana and Sinatra together taken at a backstage party. It is a fact that all entertainers met criminals in that period and it must be considered within the context of the history of entertainment. In America the entertainment industry and organised crime literally grew up together and in precisely the same neighbourhood.

IN THE DAYS OF prohibition and the heyday of Al Capone and the speakeasies, entertainment and crime had become inseparable and when the roaring flow of funds from prohibition was turned off, the main revenue for organised criminal gangs was entertainment and prostitution. Crime of any kind, has always lingered on the fringes of popular music venues, simply any place where there are plenty of people and their money. And that means criminals - Mobsters, Hoodlums, Gangsters, men with flashy ties, silk suits and a fondness for pretty token women and ownership of all kinds of nightclubs and theatres, often legitimately run meeting places that made easy money. There was booze to sell legally at vastly inflated prices and cigarette, 'hat-check' and photograph concessions all lucrative, especially with a big act every night up there on the stage and on the lit sign outside.

In fact many of the nightclubs and casinos in the 40's and 50's were openly known as 'carpet joints'; places that were controlled by the mob, establishments where cash was generated continually and easily laundered, where the art of double book-keeping was the standard procedure. The calculations that never stopped producing the figures that were declared to the Inland Revenue Service, books that cleverly concealed the cash payments and bonuses that were dished out to the entertainers from under the table. An entertainer in a carpet joint would be booked to do two shows but did five and would be paid on 'three percentages'; on the table, above the table and below the table. All the entertainers that played there were often paid in illegally earned money and unless they were peculiarly stand-offish they had to socialise with their paymasters.

From the early days of vaudeville it was routine for entertainers to be paid in cash, the cash paid on the door funds the whole show after all and you would have no idea of the source of the cash you had received, or the deals that had been struck behind your back. Often the performers themselves would not even be involved in the negotiations, the mob would 'ask' the promoter or the club owner, "We want $100,000 for 'our' act" and if the show was to go ahead without incident it would be paid, especially if a star was playing the 'big room' in a casino, they had no problem finding the money then, providing the draw was big enough. And as a last resort anyone can be threatened at gun-point to pay somebody or promise to appear, or to guarantee an appearance, at a particular venue under the threat of death. "Do this as a favour to me"

Therefore as an entertainer from the 1940's it was inevitable that you would know or at the very least had met many crime figures. In that world to refuse a social drink with the owner of the place you are also refusing their offer of work in the most popular venues of all. The bigger the star the greater the attraction to jam-pack the place and no entertainer was immune from contact with the underworld. The criminal organisations also had money, huge amounts of it and the potential to secretly fund and contractually own a hungry new rising star, producing and managing entertainers and recording hit records is hugely expensive and always speculative and only people with money to burn can afford to take the risk, more than once.

The entertainment industry in its infancy was wide open to corruption, the takings from the door and later the sales figures of records could be manipulated, records could be 'stolen' from the manufacturer and sold under the counter or even on the street, some record labels were taken over and openly controlled by hoodlums straight out of a B-movie. It is a fact that many entertainers steered clear of any kind of contract and especially a recording contract for that very reason. It is also a fact that some, especially black entertainers achieved their success and were exploited by the mob, because that was the only route open to them, crime has no prejudice 'the buck is king'.

And for a variety of reasons entertainers could turn to 'a friend' for help to maintain or rescue a faltering career, as a skeleton in the cupboard story could be ruthlessly eliminated from exposure and criminals always had the muscle to make sure that their artists were treated favourably in difficult circumstances. In the past, before the days of giant multi-media corporations with global share- holders and lawyers, organised crime and show-business was a marriage in which each had the benefit of the other and it was rare when anyone outside the secret organisation 'in the public eye' got hurt, or worse.

In smoky nightclubs singing sentimental songs that spoke of love and hope my father must have socialised with men who led the double life of a criminal. The often charming benefactors with charitable social graces that masked savages who used violence as an everyday aspect of life, a command from the latest 'fuehrer' that spelt a violent death for a former 'business' associate, or anyone in the way. They inhabited a world where cloaked as businessmen a request to 'Do as I say' always carried the threat of violence. Was my father any part of that! Did he use his contacts in that world to further his career? Perhaps there are elements of my father's character that I will bitterly regret that I ever discovered, but I have to know why Billy Daniels received a bundle of negative publicity and whether that was due to a dark side in his character?

The Los Angeles Times obituary stated above all else His career was marked by several unfortunate episodes that landed him in the scandal pages. Billy Daniels enjoyed a show-business career of more than 50 years and as one of the first black artists to be accepted in the mainstream of popular entertainment he must have been a target for demonisation at times and perhaps that was his problem. And surely he's permitted some scrapes during half a century in the public eye. I worried about this aspect of my father's life but I resolved that it is important to discover a personal history of any description in order to learn about yourself and be able to understand where exactly you have come from, otherwise as the saying goes you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of your ancestors.

It was a possibility that he was once 'owned' by criminals and I could forgive him that, but my nightmare scenario was the dreadful thought that he was actually one of them. I can never switch this topic off and forget about him now, I can never revert to my former attitude and just blank him out of my mind. Even if that was a possibility will I regret it in 10 or even 20 years time? When, even if I could find someone still alive that knew him, the memories would be distorted by the passage of time. I might not get another chance if I don't pursue this now, life is too fragile, I have no alternative but to contact Perri Daniels, even though I know the truth can sometimes be painful, it's the only way I'll find peace.

I clutched the phone with my mind reeling and rang both telephone numbers fully prepared to converse with my father's widow and accomplice in crime!? "I'm sorry I can't help you, there is nobody called Perri here" said a crackling female voice 6,000 miles away in Los Angeles named Daniels. The other number sounded like a busy Mexican restaurant, "Who?" they had never heard of anyone called Daniels and wondered what the hell I was talking about. It had been another dead-end, an avenue had closed down and I felt lost and adrift with my feverish imagination.

I READ ALL HIS obituaries yet again, wondering how I could possibly progress my search when it occurred to me in a flash of inspiration that I might be able to contact Perri Daniels through The Church of the Good Shepherd where my father's funeral service was held in October 1988, Perri has probably moved from their home since then, but it is a path that might lead me to her that has to be worth a try! I rang international directory enquiries again and this time obtained in error the number of the Good Shepherd Baptist Church. I talked at length to a secretary in Beverly Hills, a woman I instantly managed to confuse told me categorically that his funeral service wasn't held in this church. I was thrown "But there's a Catholic Church of the same name around here, are you sure his funeral wasn't there?" I hadn't thought to mention the denomination of the church when I rang directory enquiries.

I managed to concentrate my mind on the task in hand and ignore the endless train of questions and obtained a number, which turned out to be "Good Morning this is The Good Shepherd Catholic School" This is obviously the Good Shepherd district of Beverly Hills, but a man there gave me the number of "The Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd, which is just around the block" The line was so fast and clear he had no idea I was speaking from another continent. I rang the number he gave me immediately and spoke to an efficient sounding secretary.

'Hello, my name is Jack Pearce and I'm calling from Yorkshire, England' '...... Yeah?' 'I'm trying to contact a Mrs Perri Daniels but I have no address or phone number. Her late husband was Billy Daniels and his funeral was held at your church in October 1988. I'm the son of an old friend of hers and I am trying to contact her' '...... I remember that funeral it was shortly after I started here and I will have files. Do you have an exact date when his funeral was?' 'Yes, it was held on 11th October 1988' There was an electronic echo of my voice and an un-nerving time delay of a second or so which made the conversation very out of this world but her manner was as if she was on an intercom in the next room.

'...... It's the church policy not to divulge any addresses or personal details but we may have some other details on our file I could look up for you' 'Yes I understand, you obviously can't give an address out to someone on the phone, but I thought that I could write to you and maybe you could pass my letter on to her' '...... Yeah, no problem, I can do that. But give me a couple of days to see if we have a contact number, I don't think she was a parishioner and in that case we will just have an address on our file for her from that time, but if there is a number I could ring her and leave a message for you. What would you like me to say?' 'Thank you...... could you tell her that I'm the son of Rae Croft thats R.A.E. Croft' '...... Is that your fathers name?'

It was my mother's stage name, the name she had back in the time I was trying to re-surrect. Why had she asked if that was my fathers name? I hesitated, momentarily confused but I had pre- determined what my message would be so I stuck to the plan. 'No, that was my mother's name, would you tell her that I was born in June 1954, I've been looking for her address and that I would like to write to her. Could you do that for me?'

'...... Sure, why don't you call me later in the week and I can tell you whether I have found an address or I've been able to pass on that message to her by phone. If I have you could then write to me and I'll post your letter on to the family' The 'family'? perhaps she knows them all and was being cagey, of course it is possible that Perri has married again. 'Thank you. Shall I ask for you when I call back?' '...... Yes, my name is Michelle and I'm here most of the time' 'Thank you Michelle' '...... You're welcome. Have a nice day.'

A helpful woman in Beverly Hills is now trying to contact Perri Daniels on my behalf and from that message, if my mothers memory is correct, Perri will know in an instant who I am. I just hope that her reaction is positive and my optimism is telling me that even after all this time she will not be surprised in the least. I just hope that Michelle gets through to her, she was confident, unlike me and made it sound as though it was a sure-fire bet but a week later when I rang Michelle, 'I'm expecting a baby and I've been off sick for a few days and not had a chance to look in the files but if you hold on I'll look rightaway'

It felt like a hour but within a few seconds, 'Hi Jack...I've found an address for her but it is now er....seven years old, but even if she has moved the letter will get forwarded to her by US Mail... So send me a sealed letter in an envelope to her and don't forget to note the date of the funeral. I can then pull her address out of the file again. You must let me have your address so if it does get returned to me undelivered I'll let you know OK.'

This was progress at last, so I wrote my letters immediately and posted them off to Beverly Hills the next morning -

Dear Michelle Ref. Mrs Perri Daniels Please find enclosed a letter to Mrs.Perri Daniels, which is a request for her memories of England in the early 1950's. I would be obliged if you could post this letter to her as discussed. You will recall I telephoned you with regards to her husband's funeral - Billy Daniels - which was held at your Church on 11 October 1988, you explained that you had an address for his widow Mrs. Perri Daniels on your file. If this letter should be returned to you undelivered, could you please let me know. I am very much obliged to you, thank you for your help. Yours sincerely

The letter I sealed inside to Perri Daniels I spent some time composing, I thought it may be a mistake to make this too personal and instantly revealing as I really didn't know who in fact would read it, so I left it open to interpretation -

Dear Mrs.Perri Daniels I am writing to you in the hope that you will let me have some information. My name is Jack Pearce, I am the son of Rae Croft, which was my mothers stage name. I was born June 23 1954 in Brighton, England. I am very sorry if you consider this letter as an invasion of your privacy, but I have felt compelled to contact you. I have been researching into my roots since my mother, for the first time, told me some details about them on the eve of my first visit to America - my wife Jane and I had a holiday in the Florida Keys, last November '94. My mother (real name Audrey Cockcroft) married my stepfather Freddie Pearce when I was 6, I remember my surname was different until l was adopted. My mother and stepfather are retired now and they do not know I am writing to you. I have been happily married to Jane for 16 years and I have a stepson who is 22. I studied Interior Design at Art College and for the past 8 years I have run my own store-fitting business which operates throughout the UK. I would like to correspond with you more personally when I know that my letter will be directly to you only. The last thing I want to do is cause any upset for you or your family, but I am desperately hoping for a note from you giving your address so that I can write to you direct. I am simply requesting information on the past out of a need to satisfy my curiosity. This interest may be partly due to the fact that I have now turned 40! I very much look forward to your positive reply. Yours

What will her reaction be? And how long will it take to find out? It is simple, she has three choices, she can send me a curt note of dismissal or worse, not reply at all, or...... she will send me her address. I suppose it is possible that she may not have sufficient desire to write and that she might want to phone me and with this in mind just before I sealed the envelope I scribbled my home number across the top of the letter. I also thought that if I was her, even if I had a totally negative reaction I would be curious enough to get a friend or relative to call and deliver the address, so I would then receive the second more detailed letter referred to. But all I can do for the moment is just wait and see.

12

It must have been fate

I was late home, it was a busy Friday which happened to be my 41st birthday and my mother had called twice by the time I arrived home from the office. I returned her call as I opened the birthday card she had posted to me. It was a comic-strip illustration of a theatre frontage with a neon sign over an ornate canopy that read That Old Black Magic in electric blue and on the theatre steps a coffee- coloured man descended towards a 1940's Cadillac wearing a fedora, smoking a fat cigar and grinning at an attractive woman wrapped luxuriously around his arm.

I was amazed that the card she had chosen to send me for my birthday was a cartoon image of the two of them in those days. I thanked her and she told me that when she spotted "that one" on the shelf, "I just had to get that one for you. It felt strange talking about those old times, it has always been my secret you know" A little secret. "Would you mind if I told my close friends who your real father was?" "Of course not, there is no reason to be secretive about it now mother!"

Then she told me they had spent "all afternoon in the garden" and had enjoyed a bottle of champagne to celebrate my birthday, I thought she sounded slightly inebriated and she had just got herself "ready to go out to a rehearsal", a line I have heard all my life and she was "waiting for a friend who was calling for her", good she's not driving and they were "almost at the end of rehearsing" for a local 'Am-Dram' production of '42nd Street'. I promised her again, that Jane and I would go and see the show next week as arranged and she sounded very happy which naturally I was pleased about and I began to unwind and enjoy my birthday evening in the garden with a few beers.

Jane and I had invited some friends round and we had just started our barbeque meal when suddenly my Dad was on the phone asking to speak to me, a very unusual occurrence, simply because he has always associated the telephone with work problems and consequently never uses "That thing" as he calls it. When we established that everything was OK I realised that he was drunk but he was not incoherent, he explained that after my mother had gone out he had walked to his local pub and back, he never goes with my mother to rehearsal nights but he will always see the finished production, unlike me who rarely goes to my mother's events. He announced that he thought that he would ring me on my birthday for a chat. I had consumed a few drinks by this stage of the evening myself and we began a rambling conversation, as I stood at the kitchen phone.

He said that he and my mother had talked in the garden "all afternoon it's been a super day, sunny and warm" and they had "gone all nostalgic" on their aqua-show days. "I remember when we first met, I drove the cast from Bournemouth to Aberdeen in an ex. R.A.F. truck with no hand brake and the doors tied up with rope! We arrived in Aberdeen on New Years Day 1950 and the heater didn't work and it was freezing. It was a struggle, I've never been as cold, there was eight of us and we had all the props, the papier-mache swans for the girls to swim in, the costumes and all the gear for Fransen's dive in this old banger. Fransen was the leader but he never travelled with us, we were just the boys and girls that did the show, but we had pooled the money he gave us all for the train fare and borrowed this truck from somewhere"

"We were all crammed in the cab and took turns at rolling around in the back which was full of scaffolding and tarpaulin for his high dive. Fransen would dive somewhere, anywhere for publicity to attract a crowd. I once saw him dive off a 100 foot scaffold tower he had built on a bridge over the River Trent in the centre of Nottingham. He carried his own scaffold around but he would hire a local firm to erect the tower and wrap it in this green tarpaulin and he would tie up the ladders himself and shin up and down like a monkey. In Nottingham that weekend it was the city quincentenary or something and thousands turned out to watch him dive because they all thought that he would kill himself."

"It was well known that the river was shallow because in the summer the kids could paddle and almost wade across the river but Fransen had asked around the old boys in the park and he knew there was a bomb crater around the bridge somewhere, so he had swum around diving underwater and had checked all the depths so he could aim his dive. He had me and Stevie Blake in the rowing dingy we always carried, setting fire to some petrol in the centre of the crater so he could aim for it. He must have told me a dozen times, 'Freddie, when it fires. Get out of the way!' He had no time to think and as soon as it was burning he was off that board and in his usual style he stayed under the water for as long as he could and then he surfaced with a shout. The crowd went bananas, he was a real showman just like Harry Houdini"

I knew my Dad hadn't rung me to tell me all his old Aqua Show stories but he was warming up and now he changed the subject to something quite new. "We talked about the time when you were born Jack. I asked her to tell me all about that day as we have never spoken about it before. It's his Birthday today, 41 years ago today. Where were you? What time was it when he was born? I asked her because I didn't know, she has never talked about the day you were born, can you believe that? I knew why, when she told me that she was so upset during the whole of the pregnancy and the night before when she went into labour she said 'I didn't care whether I lived or died and I cracked up at the end, I prayed for forgiveness, I felt that I was in mortal sin and his birth was a nightmare for me, an extremely difficult day that I'll never forget'"

"Your mother had a nervous breakdown and that's why we have never talked about it before, to avoid the memories" This was heavy, as I had feared my probing into the past had provoked vivid reminisces for both of them. "It was a sin then you know, a sin to have a baby out of wedlock. It used to be such a terrible scene when that happened. It is hard to imagine how she must have felt at the time, the fact that she was having an illegitimate child, can you imagine that?"

He said my brothers had told him that I was trying to find out "all about Billy Daniels" and that had prompted his memories and his desire to finally talk to her about that time in her life in detail. "We first met in 1948 and we worked in various shows together and began going out but we drifted apart because I was a bit flash then and like a lot of fellers, I used to ignore her sometimes and flirt with other girls. We were very young and I was playing around and only interested in having a good time. I don't think either of us wanted to get too serious" They lost contact completely having changed shows and then a few years later my Dad accidentally bumped into Toni, my mother's best friend.

"I was walking down a street in Morecambe, I don't remember why I was there now and I looked up and there she was; Toni. It was by sheer chance, so completely unexpected it must have been fate. We talked about what we were both doing now and I remember asking her 'Do you ever see Rae these days?' and Toni didn't say anything about you but she gave me a strange look and suggested that I write to Rae 'Because she has been a bit poorly recently' I knew something was wrong, Toni gave me the address and I wrote to your Nanny and then a few days later, your mother rang me and that's how we got back together. When I saw Toni, I should have crossed the road!"

'It must have been fate' somehow had the ring of truth, they arranged to meet in London and my mother told him about me "up in Barnoldswick" with my Nanny and Grandad. "Billy Daniels" my Dad said "In the early 1950's he seemed to be everywhere and everyone was talking about him. He was one of the first big American stars we had seen here and he was on the television all the time which was all new then. He was as famous in his day as anyone can be, but some stars seem to keep their popularity forever, not really anything to do with how good they are, their popularity stays with them and they are always remembered, but Billy Daniels just disappeared, he just came and went. And I've often wondered why? because he was a great performer. I suppose it's because he never made much of an impact on records, you had to see him singing"

LONG BEFORE HE SAW my mother again, "I was going out with a gorgeous woman and she had a friend who had been besotted with Billy Daniels and she had a baby with him" "Really?" That took my breath away and I was surprised that he would know such a fact, but he moved in show-business circles at the time. I felt like a deflating balloon, my image of their fairy-tale romance had popped and vanished in an instant. "Yes you are not on your own, he was a right boy, you're not the only one you know. What I mean is he liked women, he was a bit of a boy!"

I wasn't surprised, success in show-business is a powerful aphrodisiac but I could not stop myself from feeling crushed. My reaction was purely practical initially - Now there is no chance of Perri Daniels wanting anything to do with me and I'll never be able to discover anything personal about my father. Then I felt diminished - I'm just a by-product of another one of his conquests, he'd gone around Europe bedding any woman he could get. Then fury - He was a complete womanising, philandering bastard after all! Just what exactly was this crooner that had seduced my mother at the peak of his career? How many of 'us' are out there? I stood holding the phone to my ear with a bitter taste in my mouth and I wondered whether this moment is the end of my journey, perhaps it is all over now and I will never find him.

My Dad was now recalling the time when, years later Billy Daniels had written to Nanny and Grandad asking to see me, then I heard him repeat. "Are you still with me Jack?" I had lost concentration because I was wondering whether my Dad had said things designed to turn me off Billy Daniels. I felt desperate until I realised from the warmth in my Dad's voice that we are simply opening our hearts out to each other but we needed to be drunk and talking over the telephone to do it. "Yes I'm listening Dad, I'm pouring another"

"He had contacted your mother through Nanny while he was in Blackpool at the Opera House, no I think it was Morecambe. I don't know whether he was there for a season or just a 'one-off' a weekend or what the hell it was but he had got in touch with your mother through Nanny and he asked to see you. We had a massive row because I said no...... Well I said 'If he wants to see him why can't he come here? He's been here before! Why do you have to go all the way over there? He'll have to come here to see him, tell the bastard that! If you go over there Audrey after all we've been through. We're finished!' and well, you know...... Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine Dad, I'm listening, what happened?" "A few days later he was all over the Sunday papers he'd had a punch up with some waiters in his hotel and they had called the police. He must have had a few too many drinks when she said no to him and some waiters bundled him out of the hotel bar in the early hours. Yes he was in Morecambe I remember the paper now. He denied all of it, he said the waiters had attacked him for no reason! He was a real character you know, a character." My Dad chuckled at the memory but then got serious again.

"I was never adopted myself, Jack. I wanted to adopt you because when I was boy people bugged me just because I had a different name to my sisters and I didn't want that to happen to you" He told me that he has often regretted not saying to my mother that day, "'Go on, go over there and take Jackie to see him and get him out of your system'. Because it might have made a difference to your life. I have often wondered whether anything would be different for you if you had kept in contact with your father, sometimes I felt that was mean of me" I told him that I would have reacted in exactly the same way and I had done so in the past over my own stepson Nick.

"Nick's father, Geoff was sort of around for a while as you'll remember, because we never stopped him having any access. I didn't mind that but he would annoy me sometimes because I had taken on the responsibility of being Nick's Dad and I had all the headaches to contend with, the reality of keeping a roof over our heads and him, his so called 'Daddy' just had the happy times with his son. It was a difficult time for us, because I felt that Nick was 'mine' now and Jane and I had to cope with his terrible disappointment when his 'Daddy' hadn't turned up as arranged, or not bought the bike or something that he'd promised to buy him for his birthday or Christmas or whatever it was he had promised, but it hadn't happened, children can't understand things like that. It's common for this sort of thing, it happens every day with partners with children from other relationships Dad, think of how many broken marriages there are with kids involved, stepfathers usually react like you did and I would have done exactly the same"

"I have often thought since you took Nick on that you would probably agree with me. I know that's something we have in common and I'm really glad you said that Jack. I hoped that you would understand and not think that we should have taken you to see him. I know I really upset your mother that day...... it wasn't her fault" He was in tears, I was emotional too.

"It's OK now Dad...It's all right....I know it was difficult for you both" We were sobbing to each other. "It's all history now Dad, think of how many illegitimate children there are these days and what does that word mean now anyway? people just name themselves whatever they like and have kids any time they like whether they are married or not, it was typical to keep it a big secret back then. It's crazy not to talk about things, you should tell her not to get herself upset anymore." I ended up lecturing him and talking as if it was me that was the most drunk, I had been downing gulps of beer after every sentence so I probably was.

We agreed on how sensitive my mother is, "Too sensitive Jack, she will not accept that's just what happened all that time ago and that's it, let go of it. It's not that she bears a grudge or anything like that, she just dwells on things that she ought to forget" I laughed because I could see myself in that analysis, "It's as if she carries the worries of the whole world on her shoulders and I know all about that. If I come home and the telephone isn't working, it may have been struck by a bolt of lightening but it's all my fault! I take everything too personally" We have always enjoyed a good conversation and now we had discussed a topic that had never even been mentioned before, we felt relieved and I really enjoyed my 41st birthday.

My Dad has been a very stabilising influence on me. I cannot think of him without the association of his working life. Before retirement and moving away from Barnoldswick to live in the country, he was a manager in a hard-working manufacturing plant for a company that grew to be a huge concern. He still speaks with a cockney accent and has a past very different to most of his contemporaries, but in the whole factory he was respected for his fairness and everybody in the town knew him.

In my childhood he was always either just going out to work or just coming home from work, it was relentless and looking back, from this distance of time his "working overtime" meant that we were never short and my Dad never promised me things that didn't materialise. He was dependable and as we talked I felt that my quest to find my real father's family is a self indulgence and so I was reluctant to discuss it with my Dad, so I let it pass. I felt as though I wouldn't be able to find the right words, especially after a drink.

MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF my Dad is holding his hand while walking to Victory Park in Barnoldswick to sail on the boating lake a model we had of a WW2 RAF Vosper Rescue launch. I don't recall whether he actually gave that boat to me and I don't remember what happened to it. When we got home after every "sail" which was a very special occasion, it was ritualistically cleaned and dried and stored away in its original box on top of my parent's wardrobe, where I couldn't reach it. My Dad was a strict disciplinarian when I was a boy and right up until I left home at 16 to attend Art College, every Saturday morning we would clean the house from top to bottom, all the furniture was polished, windows cleaned, floors mopped and sealed, the bathroom shone and the brass coal scuttle was burnished to a mirror-like glow, the whole gleaming barrack-room routine.

I had to be home at certain times without fail or else and my Dad had a peculiar fixation about who I played with, deciding to me it seemed at random that certain specified persons "I don't want you around". His approval was required for everything and all under the threat of a slap if his rules were not rigidly adhered to. I hated him for it sometimes but when he got older he mellowed and as I got older we got to know each other and I began to understand him as a product of his own upbringing, as we all are and in our own unique way we grew to love each other.

My Dad has never said anything to me about his own father, my mother once told me that his mother never married him, her mother wouldn't permit it because of conflicting religions and this is all I know on the subject. My Dad grew up in Harrow-on-the-Hill in north London and his family were torn apart by war. His grandfather "Grandad Pearce" was killed in The Battle of the Somme, he was drowned in the mud at the height of the First World War. I recall my Dad talking about relatives and friends that were killed in Hitler's bombing blitz on London and almost at the end of the Second World War my Dad was lucky to escape with his life when a pilot-less V1 Flying Bomb landed in the next street and the shock wave blew him out of bed without a scratch. He tells it as a funny story now but it must have been terrifying.

In 1944 as soon as he was old enough, he joined The Royal Marines which since the days of Admiral Nelson was a fearsome highly disciplined force where volunteers for special duties were always in demand and having been a bakers boy typically he told them he was an expert horseman and behind the front he zig-zagged across Europe to Berlin with a platoon of marines in charge of a general's stables. Often barracked in chateaus previously occupied by the enemy and wearing, like Hitler's SS, cavalry jodhpurs, he and his colleagues were feared in the French cafes until they got to know the fun-loving 'Cockney Sparrows'. He saw Hamburg in ruins with its citizens reduced to being capable of "anything" for a square of chocolate and fields piled with bulldozed corpses and pulverised weaponry, the aftermath of battles as the allied army battered overland to Hitler's Berlin and victory.

My Dad never knew his father, this we now share and have in common together. And he is a stepfather to me as I am to my son Nick. His boyhood was a struggle to keep afloat, an endless chore of delivering milk and newspapers at dawn and then a stable hand and baker's boy who then enlisted in The Royal Marines in war-time. How he ventured into show-business after the war I think he's forgotten in the social whirl he found himself in as a handsome bachelor, looking for a break, in war ravaged London. Always an ex. Royal Marine, although he does not have the need to join associations or attend re-unions, he still feels proud as he watches The Royal Marines band play at half-time during the Football Association Cup Final at Wembley.

My Dad instilled in me the puritanical discipline of work, I too had a paper round at his instigation, which I enjoyed and in my student days from my first holiday from Art College onwards, I was labouring in the factory where he worked so that I would appreciate the reality of the "real world" as he called it. And even now the very thought of not working at least 9 to 5, 5 days a week is a psychological death which must be recovered from as soon as possible. He makes me feel that my yearning to discover all about my real father is an extravagant nonsense.

But how can I expect him to understand? when I'm confused over all of this myself. My odyssey for the truth has made me feel decidedly unstable because I can not predict what the effect will be on my parents and me. I have made the effort to contact America and I feel absolutely certain that I will visit Perri Daniels in California even if I only get half a chance. But I have no idea what impact that might have on the rest of my life.

13

I have thought of you often

I was driving to London on business, to meet an Architect about a store we were about to build, joining the busy M25 London orbital motorway 200 miles from home when Jane rang me on the car phone. "You've got a letter from California this morning from Perri Daniels!" As always, like all things you are waiting for it occurs when least expected. It was over two months since my letter to her I had sent via the church and I had almost given up hope.

"Is it a nice letter?" "It'll make your day, but it might make you cry" "Read it to me, is it long?" "No, its written on a greeting card and she has sent you the printed event eulogy thing from his funeral with her writing about his life, it's really interesting. She has virtually invited us over there" "Read it to me then"

Dear Jack I received your letter an hour ago. I know your mother we met many years ago. I found her to be a lovely lady. I have thought of you often. (Jane sobbed at this point and then she collected herself) I am pleased to know how well you are doing and how much your career means to you. God bless you. Should you ever return to the U.S. I hope you will think of California. I live near San Diego. You and your wife will be welcome to visit with me. I am enclosing a candid picture of your father which I chose for the Eulogy. Please know that I shall welcome your letters and I will be forthright. Regards to your mother I do believe we are around the same age. My best wishes to you and your family. Sincerely Perri Daniels

It did make me cry, 'I have thought of you often' did the trick on me too. It was a marvellous letter and could not have been more positive, I felt elated. The picture she had chosen for the cover of his funeral service was a close up of him in a raincoat laughing at the camera. It was a family snapshot, not a showbiz image photo at all and inside she had written her Eulogy to her husband of 33 years. All that time she knew that I existed and she had thought about me, it must have meant that he too had also 'thought of me often'. I could barely believe how close I was to meeting him in spirit especially when reading what I would have read, had I been present on the day of my father's funeral.

It is extraordinary how things have now turned, I had hoped that I would be able to contact Perri Daniels for a way of being close to my father, I knew that was the only way of finding out all there is to know about him. I had been pessimistic about my chances but now I had received a reply that invited me to her home! I wrote back immediately and told her exactly how I had found her. I was happy to express my feelings without any reservation at the end of my letter -

Now you have read this far you can imagine how I felt when I read your positive reply. It made my heart soar to think that we will meet one day and I will be able to talk to you about my father. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am enclosing a photograph - Jane says I look like him very much! I hope you and your family are well and you will be able to find the time to write back to me soon.

My mother would not know that I had contacted Perri Daniels, it may be wise not to mention it, not just yet. I know that I am displaying the same trait as my mother and what is the problem? Why not tell her? The only reason is to save her feelings and my Dads, to avoid opening an old wound. They might find it difficult to understand why I need to know about him and they may think I am searching for something that they haven't given me but that isn't true. And like a man being un- faithful to his wife and thinking all is OK as long as she doesn't find out, I could not help feeling guilty about the deception. But I must visit my father's home and meet his widow and possibly his daughters and sons, we are related. There is an end to this in sight and I can not stop this now, all I can do is hope that my parents will understand my quest for the truth.

A few days after I had posted my reply to Perri I read my copy, I was very sentimental and I thought I may have gone over the top when I wrote how I have only seen three pictures of him and that I'm curious about his history, his childhood and his parents. It was a very intense letter and after a month had passed and I didn't get a reply I began to dwell on the possibility that she may have changed her mind about having any contact with me. I could imagine her discussing my letter with someone close, "You don't want to be getting involved with him after all this time. He might be a nut!" Or it is possible that she wouldn't want her children or anyone to know that they had a brother that had remained a secret until now. I had no idea what to expect, or what my brothers and sisters attitude towards me might be, they are total strangers who exist on another continent.

Then one Saturday morning another letter arrived from California.

I'm sorry that I have been unable to write any sooner. I have been staying with my mother who has been very ill. I was so touched by your second letter. It was a very moving and emotional experience. One of tears of joy both for you and for me. Thank the Lord that your determination paid off!

We were invited to visit her home and travel to Las Vegas with her for a weekend, I had said in my letter that we planned to visit the Grand Canyon via Las Vegas so Perri had combined our stay in Las Vegas with meeting my sisters Andrea and Dominique. We can all weekend in Vegas together and on your last Sunday we can spend the day at Andrea's ranch.

Perri had noted her number and I had no hesitation to ring her that night, early morning in California. The first thing she said to me was "How is your mother?" and we talked as if we were close friends and Perri was thrilled I had made contact and she wanted us to fly over there as soon as possible! When I hung-up the phone I realised that I must tell my mother about my contact with my fathers widow and the plans for our visit to meet her in California. I had received a positive response from Perri Daniels and she had immediately asked about my mother and it seemed madness not to share this with her.

MY MOTHER'S REACTION ON the phone was complete and total surprise. I knew she was shocked because she was very quiet and made no comment. But within days both she and my Dad - It had now become totally confusing he is still my Dad but now I have two fathers - came over to see us and she secretly passed me a gold wedding ring that Billy Daniels had given to her, it was obvious that my Dad was completely oblivious to what was going on. "I'd like you to have this, he gave me this ring, he told me that it was his mothers. Don't part with it will you". I ignored that remark, it was a nonsensical comment, does she actually think that I would sell it?

"When did he give you the ring?" "I can't remember when exactly but I can remember where. When in London we would always stay at The Washington Hotel on Curzon Street near to The Grosvenor, in Mayfair. I sang at The Grosvenor sometimes" I turned the gold wedding band around in my fingers with 'When in London we would always stay at' ringing in my ears. "We used to go to the Astor Club off Berkeley Square or to the Edmundo Ross Coconut Grove, I sang there too. There was quite a cabaret scene, The Brown Derby where Eric Sykes, Max Bygraves and Diana Dors frequented, or we'd go the The Panama Club" Then we were no longer alone and characteristically she changed the subject without missing a beat. I had to disguise my laughter at her accomplishment, the dazzling actress she could have been.

I had so much of this swimming in my mind now I felt almost overwhelmed by the now constant revelations so I focused on the ring, a physical link to my father. I even wore the ring on my 'pinkie' for a few days but it was just not me and I felt like a gangster so I carried the ring around in my pocket like some kind of weird good luck token. I scrutinised the pictures I had of him and on the 'You Go To My Head' cover I could just make out a similar looking ring on his little finger, but the date note reads; Recording first published 1957 so it could only have been a photograph taken pre- 1954 for it to be the same ring. I now had everything under a microscope as my quest snowballed, I had a wedding ring he had given to my mother and an invite to visit his family in California!

On our next 'secret exchange' later that afternoon my mother said "It will be better if your Dad is not told about your plan to visit the Daniels family, not just at the moment. I don't want to upset him" I told her that his feelings are perfectly natural and it is possibly difficult for them both to dwell on the past. I could see that she was still wounded by the events of all those years ago that were now back in her mind at my prompting. And so I still wondered whether I should just drop the whole thing. In my state of confusion I hadn't spoken to her for weeks because I didn't have the courage to ask her opinion on my quest, in case she asked me not to pursue it. I wanted to tell her this but instead I told her that "I have to solve the mystery, the challenge I've now set myself. I'm sorry but I have to find out about him for myself" We walked around the garden, my mother and I alone in the sunshine of truth.

"I've been thinking about him again recently and I can remember the last time we were together, everything, it has all come back to me all over again. I had arranged to meet him in London and I took your Auntie Judith with me to baby-sit you in the hotel and when I arrived at the club in Bond Street he was sitting with Perri on his arm. It was obvious they were together romantically and I felt humiliated. We had a meal and we talked, all very polite and they acted as though nothing was happening. His son was in a hotel room around the corner, it was as if you were a complete stranger but I was never the type to make a scene. I excused myself and went to phone the hotel to ask Judith if you were OK, she was too young to look after you really. The telephone bell was so loud it woke you up and you were screaming in the background when Judith answered so I made my excuses and left and I never saw him again. That was the last time I saw him, a pathetic scene in a club. I knew that Perri wouldn't let him go but even when I read in the paper they had married I still had dreams that he would come back to me. I waited and waited for a letter from him for years. It took me a long time to get over it"

I felt guilty, since I had gleaned from her the bare facts on their relationship I had turned all my attention onto him and had thought of nothing but him, not her. I had placed him on a pedestal and blinded by his fame and the cult of celebrity I have completely ignored her side of the story. Until now, whilst wandering our rhododendrons I learned the full extent of the anguish she must have felt over her secret relationship with a superstar of the day that had ended in tears, topped off with a 'love-child'. I have always visualised my mother in her youth walking the rain-lashed cobbled mill streets of a smoky Oldham, a half-baked northern romantic toffee, pigeon-holed past. I have never projected her out of that scene. But she was a professional singer performing in the Hippodromes, Empires and Palaces during the last gasp of the music halls "before television had taken over". My mother has led an interesting life too.

As my parents left for home that night the fact that Jane and I were about to holiday in California was as far as the general conversation had reached, there was no mention at all of the Daniels family. But when my Dad was getting into the car ready to leave he fished a shining object out of a paper bag and handed it to me. "I found this the other day Jack. I've polished it for you, I thought you might like it" I read the inscription on the gleaming tankard To Jack Anthony from Benny Payne and tears welled and I felt crazy and embarrassed. "Don't get yourself upset. OK" "Thanks Dad"

THE DAY HAS ARRIVED, the eve of our trip to California, the bags are packed and Jane and I are counting down to take-off, when I suddenly thought that I ought to speak to Nanny and tell her where I am about to go, it was after all her memories that were instrumental to the beginning of this journey. As usual my heart twanged when I heard her voice, although she is 88, we talk on the phone as if we are the same age. I tell her that I have been in contact my father's widow Perri and we are flying to California in the morning to visit her and meet my relatives. Nanny was, in an expression that she would use, flabbergasted.

"Are you!" she shrieked in astonishment. It felt good to talk to Nanny, she was thrilled that we were to visit the haunts of my father and meet his family and she was glad that I had rung to tell her. "Where do they live?" she asked excitedly and I told her all I knew about them. And when I explained that I was worried about my parents reaction to the trip I suddenly got emotional as if I was a little boy sitting on her knee again. "Don't be upset Jack, you must not be upset" and just as if I had run into the house with a grazed knee Nanny spent some time talking me round to being positive about my journey.

"You should do what you want and not get upset about it, you must promise me that you will be happy while you are over there. They will be very interested in you and pleased to see you" I'm going to miss her when she's gone, she completely understood and agreed with my conviction that I have to find out about him for myself. "He was a nice feller Jack believe me, your Grandad liked him. It's a pity you never knew him, you would have got on well together. If he were alive today he would be pleased to see you and your mother and he would have been proud of you. It will be all right in the end, believe me. I'm glad that you are going, you have got his blood in you so there is no reason why you shouldn't go and see them. Don't be afraid, you are going to go aren't you?"

I think she thought I was about to abandon the trip right at the last minute, but that wasn't on the cards. I was emotional because I was anticipating the feeling of relief that I knew would come soon. We had not spoken like this for years, she brought the conversation to a closeness we have not had for a long time and she hardened my resolve. It was so typical of her, she has always loved me to death, in my pre-school afternoons she would often sing her favourite song to me, adapted to 'If You Were The Only Boy In The World' although what she had said tonight was rich in sentiment she had boiled the whole thing down to rock solid common sense. I promised that I'd visit her when we got back and tell her all about our trip.

I couldn't sleep, I was wound as tight as a drum-skin. Why had I started all this self-absorption that I have never experienced before? I had no choice, when my mother uttered that magical sentence 'Your father came from there Jack' it had started in motion a series of questions that had no immediate possibility of any answers. What was he like? Are we connected in any way? These cliched simplicities matter because I keep finding clues about a person I didn't know before, of who I am inside. I've reached a critical stage in my journey, I'm flying to America to meet my new found relations in the morning and I know that the trip will change me in some way and perhaps I'll be able to look back at the person I was before I 'knew' my father.

I recalled how uncomfortable I was when I talked to my mother about him, after Nanny's revelation it had taken me weeks to build-up the courage to confront her, to ask her the truth. It was only now, looking back six months that I could make sense of how I felt that night when my mother told me about their relationship for the first time. I was uncomfortable listening to her because I felt an inner turmoil at a turning point in my life. As a preparation for the journey I was tormenting myself with unanswerable questions. I just couldn't understand why this trip had not happened when my father was still alive! Perhaps it is only now when I can actually afford to go to California under my own steam that subconsciously, I have made this happen? Is that why my mother told me about him? Had she always waited until she thought it was appropriate when I was going to America under my own steam and then, when I had decided myself to visit America, at last she had decided that it was time to tell me that I was half American?

I knew I had a real father somewhere but why have I always denied his existence? This was the central question that I wrestled with. I didn't want to acknowledge him because he had hurt my mother? This was the reason that appealed to me but I found a dark sobering thought on the eve of my journey of discovery. A possibility that filled me with horror especially when I recalled that I have always had a secret interest in all things 'black' and to reach this conclusion now was absurd. But I couldn't shake it off and feverishly throughout the night it occurred to me over and over 'Did I always reject any thoughts of my real father because I didn't want to be black?'

I was appalled because it meant that I had been racist about myself! But could that possibly be true? Had I been conditioned to think in this way? No it was unfortunately, I reasoned, a common deep- seated arrogance to believe that black people actually wish they were white, no that's definitely not the explanation. Then in the early hours of the morning, I wondered if that as a child I had simply bottled him away in my mind as an inanimate object, rather than the individual that was my natural father and now I just needed some facts to make him real. My formative years were during the dying embers of the British Empire's institutionalised racism and perhaps, in the dark recesses of my childhood imagination I had also preserved him as a racist stereotype. The golliwog, the bogeyman that lurked in the shadows, after all even his name had once horrified when I had made my mother weep by just a brief mention, was that why I had denied his existence?

There was a time when I had to avoid the very thought of him at all costs but now, after my mother's revelation I had found the courage to confront him at last, this I felt was a true statement but the rest was all conjecture. I'd tried to use my sometimes painful speculations to reveal my motives and answer my central question which remained as puzzling as ever. I still could not understand why I have always ignored his existence but I knew that this was the reason my journey would continue, to find the answer to the question that had now overwhelmed my life.

In the depths of my arduous self-examination the alarm clock bounced me back to the reality of time and I leapt out of bed and snapped out of my blues in an instant as always, with a chuckle thinking that it is crazy to think like this. And I got ready to leave for the airport feeling great I relished the conclusion from my sleepless night and there must always be a positive resolution to reward the effort; As I discover more about my father, I'm gaining in confidence from somewhere and I'm totally convinced that I will find contentment, when I finally discover my father's roots and my own.

14

The Voyage

After flying for hours across a green and brown chessboard that ranged over thousands of square miles, followed by an enormous orange desert we coolly glided past the skyscrapers of night-time San Diego and descended to the runway below the neon. The airport is practically in the centre of the city and Perri Daniels would be waiting at the gate. I had called her from Chicago, when we changed planes, she had asked me to call because she was concerned about the weather "It's November Jack, there may be a change to your arrival time" and Perri insisted on meeting us at the airport.

Perri had, since the first of our many telephone conversations, been amusingly confused by the time difference and then even more puzzled by our travel arrangements. I made her promise that she would keep my letter listing the flight details by the phone so that when I rang to confirm our arrival time she could note any changes on the letter. And eventually when I rang, after I had finally worked out how to use the public telephone from a blizzard-swept Chicago later than expected, she said "I've seen the weather on TV and I was worried. What time is your arrival? What is your flight number? your letter was here by the phone, but now I've forgotten where I saved it"

Perri was younger than I thought she would be, she was 17 years younger than my father, the same age as my mother. I had no idea what she looked like, but as I had sent her a photograph of me and she was expecting a mirror image of my father she spotted me immediately. "Hi! Hello! Jack!" I heard her shout through the crowded huddle around the luggage carousel, she is not without confidence I thought as she talked to Jane about our flight while I was busy trying to find our cases. Perri was clad in Denim from head to toe except for a suede peak on her baseball cap with 'Sundance' on the front, a blonde pony-tail and a friendly smile. I knew immediately she was genuinely pleased that we had made the trip. Perri is a 'take over the situation' kind of person but helpful to all and I knew we were in for an eventful time with this obviously very capable woman in control it suddenly seemed, of our every movement.

Perri drove us to the Avis Rent-a-Car in her Oldsmobile, an electric-everything model with sheepskin seat and steering wheel covers. The full-width dashboard nacelle was a green glow of light emitting diodes, more like the bridge of an aircraft carrier than the controls of an automobile. We had arranged to stay close to her home an hour's drive from San Diego and following Perri in our hired Chevrolet Illumina in convoy, "in caravan" as she called it, we caught sight of her occasionally, in her driving gloves spinning the wheel in an urgent green haze. It was very late and after our 20 hour trip we were shattered but running on adrenalin.

We had journeyed 'out west' to the edge of the continent but America was much more familiar the second time around despite the long flight that had emphasized the tremendous distance from home. We slowly entered the freeway heading north from San Diego gliding under the images I remembered from a year ago, the blue shield motif of the highway numbers and the green and white destination boards only this time the place-names were Californian, Los Angeles is only a 3 hour drive north! And following the red stream of tail-lights that snaked into the far distance I cruised into the correct lane with the stream of aircraft flying into San Diego overhead, the wide-bodied jets reflecting the acid-red runway lights. An airport at night is always a thrilling place, people constantly on the move, their heavy baggage in the hold beneath their feet as they arrive and depart at regular intervals as if synchronised components of a gigantic clock.

At our hotel The La Costa Resort and Spa, a multitude of single story buildings tastefully clustered around two world championship golf courses, staff whizzed around the complex moving people and baggage in golf buggies with headlights illuminating the rugged trunks of the palm trees. We checked in under a chandelier surrounded by gilt framed paintings of lush California vegetation and following a golf-buggie we drove to our 'Villa' in a long, low block surrounded by manicured gardens illuminated orange and green. It was an extremely pleasant room, with a monster sized bed, blonde wood furniture and a brown marble bathroom with his and her sinks with brass fittings. Perri had upgraded the room we had originally booked on a 'special deal'.

We were surprised by an enormous basket of fruit, bottles of spirits, cheeses, a couple of hard-backs, John Grisham 'The Chamber' and Colin Powell 'My American Journey' The entire basket was wrapped in yellow cellophane and tied with a yellow ribbon. It was a welcome hamper from Perri, 'Welcome To Jack & Jane - Enjoy - Love Perri, Mr Buffington & Lena' Mr. Buffington and Lena, Perri explained "They are my dogs!". Perri was full of enthusiasm because tired as we all were she wanted us to go to her house now for a nightcap. Perri's home was five minutes away where the hotel grounds gave way to homes built around the rolling hills in a quiet residential area.

It was literally around the corner when we pulled into a yard in front of a long low house smothered in foilage. A faded 'Stars & Stripes' fluttered from a pole mounted on the fascia of the garage, whose doors had opened automatically switched from her car and filled the yard with light. I parked in the yard as she drove inside the garage, and across the "hood" of her car I saw a large nightclub foyer picture of my father beaming down from the rear wall. A radio babbled from the floor "I always leave that on, makes people think there is someone home" On one side of the garage was a large freezer and on the other wall, behind partly open sliding doors, stacks of cardboard boxes containing papers, overflowing as if an office had been moved there in a rush.

I asked if he had lived here and she told me that they had bought this house as their retirement home but my father lived here for only 18 months before he died. "We still had the house in Hollywood, that wasn't sold until after he had passed away. He wouldn't let me sell it because it meant such a lot to him. Those are your fathers papers that I had sent here from the house when I sold it. I'll take you there, to Laurel Canyon to see it." I knew that we would receive the whole of Perris' attention throughout our visit and I was elated to realise that she wanted to show me everything and I wondered just what the boxes contained, I had a thirst for pictures from the past.

The double door to the house was fenced off in line with the garage, the whole area was floodlit and on the gate protruding from the bushes was a sign with the logo of the alarm company and in black heavy bold letters on yellow the words ARMED RESPONSE. Perri opened the gate and the house door with a buzz and a rattle of keys as a grey dog like a long-haired mobile cushion with a centre- parting scuttled out between our legs. "Hello Buffy!" Perri patted her dog and then shouted into the house "Berta! He's here !"

We stepped inside and met Berta, her Mexican maid who applauded as Perri gave me a hug on the threshold, "It's Billy's son!" she cried as I walked into his home. It was a beautiful house with cream ceramic floor tiles throughout the ground floor, it had a Spanish California feel with white wrought iron plant-stands, full height glazing with large patio doors onto a lush semi-tropical garden. The lounge was off to the right with a high pitched ceiling with green limed-oak boarding over an opulent flowery seating area with glass coffee tables decorated with photographs in silver frames. I headed over, I couldn't wait to look at the pictures, images from a past I was desperate to discover.

BEFORE I REACHED THEM I noticed a chain-mail spark-screen to the open fireplace and hung on the river-rock chimney breast above was a large black and white photograph of a seated Billy Daniels smiling down, at me. He looked relaxed with his hand cupped on his chin in a pose I frequently adopt. It sent a shudder through me, I was actually here in his house! I could barely believe how things had worked out. It was very late but Perri was so friendly I didn't feel as though we were imposing on her, in fact I felt as though I had every right to be here in my fathers house but I was saddened because I was too late in my effort to meet him. If I had tried earlier I would be talking to him in person now. 'Be happy while you are there' my Nanny had said and this was the nearest I would get to meeting him so I was determined to make the most of it.

On every surface were dozens of family snapshots and some were quite old. The first to catch my eye was a black and white photograph in a plain frame. I guessed from the mid-fifties of Billy and Perri walking through what looked like a glittery Las Vegas hotel foyer, it was a head and shoulders shot of both of them looking happy and on the move. I stared at this picture for a long time because it must have been taken not long after I was born. His face in this photograph must have been the face that my mother had known so well, he was much younger on this than any other picture I had seen so far. On his arm was Perri who in her youth I could now see was a Monroesque blonde bombshell and as I crouched staring at this photograph she came over. "You could have been in the movies" I said.

"I was never interested in all that" and she chattered away whilst I examined the photographs one by one. Perri is French-Canadian and her family was called Cameron and originally from Scotland "My Mom came here to California from Canada too and also my sisters Margo and Marty. Bill used to joke about how it was the Canadian invasion. He used to say 'You can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl!'

There were photographs everywhere and I didn't know which to examine first, so Perri showed us around her home and as I saw for the first time photographs of people who are related to me, she explained the background story to each picture. Yvonne, who I knew from my E-Mail from Chicago had died, was his first child. "That's Yvonne when she was in her twenties, your father took care of her mother Gladys, for the rest of her life. Gladys was an only child and very beautiful, she was very active in the church and sang in the choir. Bill said she had a terrific voice and could have been in the business too but she wouldn't leave the south" "Was Gladys his first wife?"

"Yes, well in those days in that part of the world most marriages were common-law, your father grew up in the 1920's in a very different society and it was a question of survival. When you consider history and his background he had a great career, a great life! Bobby Short put it best, he told me that 'Billy Daniels had good times, when good times were hard to find'" Perri looked up at my father's portrait on the wall and I knew that she had loved him and then she turned to the photograph of my late sister I was examining, Yvonne was beautiful. "Yvonne became a great broadcaster and she's in The Radio Hall of Fame" On the bevelled glass topped table was a tear-off notepad - Yvonne Daniels - In The Mornings 5 til 10 on AM1390 - The Voice of Chicago "She has a street in Chicago named after her, Yvonne Daniels Way, its right by Marina Towers where she lived, she was a wonderful. We would always meet whenever your father worked in Chicago"

I gravitated to the older photographs, the next picture I saw was of two teenage boys; my brothers. "In New York in the late 1930's he married Adrienne and they had three children. Diane, Bill Jnr. and Bruce" I asked if Adrienne was still alive. "No..... she died right after Bruce was born, later on Adrienne's mother, Mary Clockworthy lived with us at Beech Knoll in Hollywood until she passed away" I wondered if Adrienne had died in childbirth and what kind of effect that must have had on my father and their children. These boys I'm staring at are my brothers! Perri had already told me before our visit that Bill was a lawyer and lives north of San Francisco, Bruce had not been mentioned so I asked where Bruce was because looking at these photos I was hoping I could meet him, he could have been my twin. A pained look came over her and she said quietly "Bruce, Poor Bruce...... He's in prison"

Bruce was the one born just before me, I wondered what had happened to him, apart from the usual trouble of being a famous man's son and the constant comparison. But it wasn't appropriate to ask what crime Bruce had committed to put him in prison, Perri and I had only just met. I had established that I was born in the middle out of of 7 children, Yvonne was the first, born in Jacksonville in the 1930's before Billy Daniels moved to New York then he married Adrienne who had died after 3 children, Diane born 1940, Bill Jnr. full name William Boone Daniels II born 1942 and Bruce, born 1945. My mother knew Perri as an employee, the governess of his children. As Perri had described in the interview I had archived from the Los Angeles Times (which had taken place at La Costa Resort where we were staying) she had told the reporter that she "had made herself indispensable"

Now I had met Perri I knew that if there had been any kind of competition between them, my mother would not have stood a chance, she has a stronger personality that would not take no for an answer but I had no malice towards her at all, in fact I was beginning to like her and she liked me, of course physically I was a model of Bill, she told me it was uncanny how I even had his mannerisms. I took my jacket off and sat down and heard he shout to Jane "Oh boy! He’s so like him it's not true!"

My father and Perri were married in November 1955. "I was working in an office in Montreal for an airline when one day I saw Bill's picture in the paper and I fell in love with him right there. Of course he was well known and I heard on the grapevine that he had advertised for a governess and I immediately went for the position and offered him my secretarial services too. I started temporary at first, at the time I was engaged to a man from Paris. We all got on well together and I don't mean romantically at first, your father was a gentleman, despite what the papers said about him. I got on very well with Mrs. Clockworthy, Bills mother-in- law and the children. My fiancé made three trips to California to try and convince me to return to Canada and eventually after two and a half years I decided to return but no one in the family wanted me to leave. I loved Bill from the moment I saw his picture in the paper but we hadn't any kind of relationship other than business. He was there the day I was due to leave for good, everyone was at the house saying goodbye with a taxi waiting outside when Bill proposed to me. We married three months later with the approval of the children and their grandmother. We had our bad times like all couples but our life together was mostly good because we loved each other. I always used to say to him 'I may not be your first wife but I'll be the last!"

"We had two daughters Andrea who was born in 1956, and Dominique, Domi, who was born in 1959. They are both married, Andrea to Ulf 'The Swede' as Bill called him, they met when Ulf was odd-jobbing in Hollywood, he painted the house at Laurel Canyon when he and a friend were in the middle of a round the world trip. Andrea and Ulf lived in Sweden for five years" There were some snowy pictures dotted around "and they have two sons Bo who is 13 and at Ski School, he is hoping to make it into the US Olympic Ski Team, he's good enough at the moment and Jonas who is 8 and full of life, full of his grandfather"

The picture of Jonas was almost a perfect mirror image of myself at that age and for a split second I thought it actually was me! There was an element in all of this that was frightening, a spiritual ordeal that I had to journey through to reach my father. It was an incredible experience to suddenly see the faces of my relations. I wanted to find for myself the facts on my father's life, but what I hadn't anticipated was the impact of joining a whole new family and these were only a few photographs. I hadn't met anyone from the family except Perri, I had been trying to contact her for a long time and now here she is, beside me and telling me all about them and him, it was a dizzying mixture.

"Domi, here" said Perri tapping on a silver-framed picture of a wholesome an all-American High- School-Girl who looked vaguely like me "Is married to Ken 'The Persian' as your father called him, Bill had a nickname for everyone and they kept the Daniels name because Ken's is totally unpronounceable. They have a daughter called Desiree" There was a picture nearby of Domi with her sister Andrea taken at a wedding. Andrea the bride in a sparkling white wedding dress and Domi the bridesmaid in a tight deep purple silk gown with a matching headband. "That was taken at Andrea's wedding reception at the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel" I examined the wedding group portraits of sisters and brothers I have never met, who have lived on seperate continents with different lifestyles.

"Will Bill be here, will I be able to meet him?" "Well, Bill is a lawyer and he told me last night that he is busy on a case right now...... I said I would call him in a couple of days" Perri had told me on a crackling line when we finalised arrangements weeks ago that "Bill said that he would like to meet you when you come over but he doesn't know how he will take it" When she said he is 'busy on a case' I thought 'That's obviously his answer, perhaps he is not interested' and I felt stung by the rejection.

We moved to another lounge where the TV and Hi-Fi lived, a small cosy room with a hi-fi and grey leather sofas below portrait oil-paintings of circus-clowns. The pictures in this room were almost all show-business although this is not the home of an obsessive trophy collector. A framed letter from Hubert Humphrey (lost the Presidential election to Nixon in 1968) expressed 'sincere' thanks to 'Billy and Perri Daniels for their help in the campaign'. "Was my father a democrat?" "Yes, we are. Bill campaigned for Kennedy and met his family and sang at his White House, then we campaigned for Robert his brother and Humphrey later on. Bill always said that he was born to the cloth" I was relieved, on the same table there was also a picture of him with Republicans, Gerald Ford and nearby a framed signed letter with a picture of Ronald from Nancy Reagan, "Reagan didn't impress Bill, he said 'He looks good, talks good, but you get the feeling he's heard it all someplace before' The White House puts on regular events, Bill sang at the White House for 5 Presidents all together"

"I became an American citizen because I wanted to vote for John F. Kennedy. I watched his career and saw the momentum building in his favour and I studied so that I could be an informed supporter. After the assassination I was an avid supporter of Senator Robert Kennedy until he too was murdered not long after Martin Luther King and later that year during the 1968 campaign Bill and I travelled along the West Coast with Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie. We accompanied them at the Democratic Convention which was quite an experience, except for election night when I was watching the returns at a neighbours on TV when there was a newsflash that Billy had been critically stabbed. It was terrible, whilst he was working in New York a nut leapt on stage and stabbed him in the back. Bill was lucky because he turned his body which caused the stab to be deflected. The man was an escapee from a hospital, who earlier in the day had stabbed a woman coming out of the subway"

"Who is this man here?" In a dinner suit surrounded by the vented steel boxes of early television cameras, in the middle of some sort of a joke my father was laughing at a smiling man on his knees and Perri laughed at the memory. "That's Ed Sullivan on his knees to your father!" above was a picture of Billy Daniels horsing around with Louis Armstrong, enjoying a raucous sing-song in what appeared to be a log cabin. My father knew Louis Armstrong! It was a shock to see these seconds of my father's life in photographs. Perri explained that the photo "with Louis" was taken in the den by the pool at Beech Knoll at a house-warming party they had thrown, "I think it was Christmas-time 1955" I looked closer and I could see Cab Calloway and Peter Lawford chewing at a buffet table in the background and a pelmet topped with Toby Jugs above a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

At the centre of an arrangement on the cabinet below was an enlargement of my father with his parents standing in the sun on their porch "in Jacksonville" Perri confirmed. It was an image of a successful son on a home visit, posed outside in the evening sunshine to preserve the moment of parting. His elderly father stood bolt upright wearing a brown pin-striped waistcoat with a watch- chain and creases in his trousers you could cut bread with. "Your grandfather" emphasised Perri "worked on the railroad, he was a clerk and I think he was a postman too at some point" The paint on the clap-boarding had peeled in the sun and his mother in a cook's apron was wearing socks that sagged around her ankles, they both wore 'jam-jar' spectacles.

It was a pin-sharp colour photograph, my paternal grandparents were people that were once pigeon- holed in racial terms as 'High Yellows'. It was a picture that was worth the trip if I saw nothing else and I could close one eye and see adjacent photographs of him with Martin Luther King, Noel Coward and Frank Sinatra. I felt proud of him, I had found a champion. Perri could see that I was impressed, "When he was introduced to Jackie Kennedy she told him that he walked across the stage like a panther" It was all fabulous and fascinating and confirmed that the man my mother knew was quite a guy. My mother, if she could see me now! and what about my Dad? I felt bewildered when I thought of my parents, I was a long way from them here.

And yet strangely I felt comfortably at home, sitting in Perri's kitchen at midnight, having flown halfway around the world to meet for the first time only hours earlier, drinking a miniature celebratory Jack Daniel's Old No.7 Tennessee Whiskey from a presentation Victorian turn of the century tin-box made in Carlisle, England, surveying the jumbo sized fridge with the chopped ice dispenser, the hum of the air-conditioning and the heavy five-gallon chilled water dispenser bubbling in the corner and the sub-tropical aroma of southern California flowers but I felt as though we had known each other all our lives and in a way we had. As Jane and Perri talked about the plans for our forthcoming trip to Vegas I was glad that I had made the effort and all my apprehensions about meeting Perri were dissolving with my ice.

I wandered dreamily towards various presentation frames that dotted the walls and tucked in a corner a certificate with a seal from Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley declared a 'Billy Daniels Day' in the City of Los Angeles. A wooden plaque with a mirror-chrome five-pointed star from the 'Hollywood Chamber of Commerce' commemorated 'Billy Daniels Star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame on Sunset Boulevard'. "I'll take you to see that, we can go there when we visit LA next week, that's not far from where Domi lives" We sat down in the music room and facing me on a glass shelf in the Hi- Fi unit lay a wooden box with a well-thumbed lid.

I felt like 'Tom Thumb' roaming a house of memorabilia that would take an age to uncover. "That's your father's humidor, it was a gift from Vic Damone" I touched the corner "You can open it Jack, if you want to" I inhaled the aroma of cigars as Jane and Perri discussed the clown paintings. It was a heady moment, this wasn't my imagination, I was actually here in his house! I had asked for information from Perri, his widow and for the next two weeks I will get nothing else. Perris life with my father was coming at us thick and fast and I was reeling from a heady combination of grief and elation. My father was gone and I was missing him but it was extraordinary to hear about him first hand and I will soon meet my blood relatives? How will I feel then?

THE FOLLOWING MORNING I awoke to a tapping sound as Jane shook me "Someone's knocking!" I dragged myself out of bed as a note slid under the door. ' Jack. I have booked you into the spa for a full massage and a facial at 1.00pm I'll call you later Luv Perri' After we returned to our room from breakfast the red light glared from the phone indicating that reception had a message for us.... I spoke to Perri, "Did you sleep well Jack. I've booked you for an afternoon at the Spa." "Was that you at the door at 7.30?" "I take Mr. Buffy and Lena for their walk at that time, you didn't have your 'Do not disturb' sign hanging " I had never been to a spa before. "How long will it take at the Spa?" "Why worry how long? you're on vacation, be kind to yourself. I thought Jane would like to go but I wasn't sure what she would like to have, I'll talk to her first. You must go for an afternoon in the spa Jack, you will enjoy it, your father used to go there"

'Your father used to' sounded like a line that I would hear again and I couldn't think of a good reason not to go and so later at the allocated time I left Jane relaxing by the pool and strolled around the block to the 'The Mens Spa'. This is a wonderful place, the climate in Southern California is perfect, a deep warmth tempered by a pleasant breeze from the ocean, for this reason alone no wonder its one of the most populated states. I checked into the reception computer and was led to a communal changing area.

The clientele was elderly and after a thunderous shower I walked into the massage room, Beethoven reverberated over the music system and inside arranging towels was a very tall black guy in medical white t-shirt and crisp trousers wearing a white baseball cap perched backwards with the duck-bill peak curved around his muscular neck. "Hi there and how are you today?" As soon as I spoke he knew immediately that I was from England and it turned out that he had once worked in Harrogate, a Victorian Spa town only an hour from our home.

We talked as he massaged oil all over my legs and the soles of my feet, 'Be kind to yourself' Perri had said, a California lifestyle, a different outlook on life. But I was struggling to relax and resisting the feeling I realised just how much I needed this holiday and how rarely I have been 'kind to myself' as Perri suggested. He asked just what was it that had made us choose to travel all the way out here from England to stay in La Costa Resort. I wondered whether it was possible that anyone would not want to stay in such a beautiful place and I started to give him a rambling answer about the need to stay in the south of the U.S. for a sunny holiday in November then I thought 'Why not just tell him. Why be secretive? What's the problem?'

He had been very candid with me when he spoke about the people he had worked for in England, his memories seemed to be dominated by cleaning out stables. 'Tell him! Americans are so up front and we English are so reserved'. "I'm visiting my father's widow, I've recently traced her. We have never met before" "Really, who was your father? Did he live here?" "Billy Daniels" It still felt strange to speak his name. He stopped and stared at my face, I could feel his breath and felt uncomfortable for a second. "Yeah, I can see that you look like him. Bill Daniels yeah I knew him, he used to sit around with the other guys out there. Nice guy."

He began kneading my back and deep in thought his concentration hung in the air "Hold it! There was a guy here earlier who was an old friend of your father's. I'll go and see if he's still around" He left me wondering who that could possibly be and almost falling asleep on the massage table with the subdued lighting and classical piano twinkling in the background, yes this is the life, then the door burst open. "He's still here. He's having a massage next door but he'll be through around the same time and I'll introduce you to him" After twenty minutes vigorously massaging my legs, back and shoulders I felt like I'd just completed a track event, it was invigorating without all the bother of the exercise. It was also an excellent way to recover from the journey and it occurred to me that this must be how Perri and my father had lived, being kind to themselves all the time, luxuriously.

I slipped on my robe and plastic slippers and flip-flopped into a central courtyard visible through a wall of glass. A tiled whirlpool area, jacuzzi pools and plunge baths were open to the bright blue sky and around the perimeter a collection of elderly men of various shapes and sizes wandered, passing the time of day nude and sipping from paper cones. I stepped through the door and into the yard following the masseuse and was dazzled by the intense California sun, until I focused on an elderly man, stark naked, standing with his hand outstretched. "This is Alard Roen" said the ex. basketball pro. then he disappeared.

I shook hands with a wizened figure who surprisingly had a grip of iron as he fixed me with an intense stare from laser blue eyes and when he had completed his instant X-Ray of my entire being, he released his vice with a smile. "I knew your father very well" He spoke slowly and I sensed that this man had been a powerful figure in his younger days, his stare was hypnotic.

"He worked for us when we had 'The Sands Inn' in Las Vegas" "I'm very pleased to meet you" There was a long pause, I was thinking about my aching hand and gangsters in Las Vegas. "Perri is very pleased that you are here, she told me you were coming over and she was right, you look very like your father" I had sent Perri a photograph and she had spoken to people about me, which surprised me for some reason. We talked about how much Jane and I were enjoying the climate and our plans later in the week to visit Las Vegas, "I met your father there in 1949, Vegas was just a roadside town then. It's kinda busier nowadays" A friend called out to him and we shook hands again but not quite as severe and this time I received a friendly grin "Enjoy Vegas! but be sure to keep a hold of your wallet" and he shuffled away to the hot tub. He gave me the impression of someone who could afford to be kind to himself, permanently.

The facial turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the afternoon and took place in the 'Ladies' section of the Spa. After a burning close shave in 'The Steam Room' where I had struggled to see myself in the mirror and took great care not to cut myself and look like an idiot, the attendant gave me a pair of shorts to wear with a stock line; "We don't want to upset the girls" and I was led into the facial area through a linking door. A feminine scented atmosphere now with subdued lighting and the communal piped classical music, there was no one else around except for a man wrapped neck to toe in towels lying at the far end of a long narrow room filled with couches all with side pedestals and adjustable angle-poise lighting, like a kind of assembly-line dentists. I followed him through "This is the beautician, Sue" said the attendant and disappeared through a doorway. "It's my first time" I responded, she laughed, probably at such an inane remark. "Don't worry about that" I was laid on the couch and was treated to a vigorous oil rub in the face by her extraordinary fingers.

This was all new to me and very pleasurable and I began to wind down into a stupified doze, enjoying a sensual facial massage until she stopped and unscrewed the top of large pink bottle and began applying a hot liquid to my forehead with cotton wool. "What's this you're putting on?" "Relax, this is a facial scrub, it will clean out your pores" I already felt cleaner than I have ever been in my life but I was obviously not cleansed enough. It was deftly applied as we talked, she had worked at La Costa since the place opened "Back in 1986" I knew from my research that Billy Daniels had opened La Costa with a show called 'The Black Magic Revue' performed in the luxurious lounge of this multi-million dollar hotel, she told me that Alard Roen (I could still feel the echo of his handshake) and two partners moved here from Las Vegas in the early 1980's having sold their casinos and they converted the old La Costa Ranch here into the Hotel Spa complete "with two World Championship golf courses"

They had recently sold the whole complex "to the Japanese, for a fortune" and had now retired. This was obviously the connection between Billy Daniels and this place, the Casino work in Vegas and later to help open an old friends new venture. It may also have been the reason that they moved from Hollywood to retire just up the road from here. Next, she placed cotton wool over my eyes and quickly covered my face with another hot liquid that formed a cooling crust as she coated the backs my hands in the hot paint, applied by a brush which felt like the tongue of a small dog which was weird but extremely comforting. When she started on my face again I asked what the liquid was and Sue replied in a whisper, "A relaxant oil, this is the part I like to call the adult Disneyland" The idea was not to talk through this portion of the treatment and just completely unwind. I soon drifted away as she massaged my temples and over my brow, there wasn't a square millimetre of my face, neck or chin that did not receive soothing strokes from her wonderful fingers.

I slipped into a trance, carried into that twilight zone just before sleep, when the mind wanders dreamily of its own accord. I was lying in the shallows of a soft sloping beach, the gentle surf lapped around my face, washing my stress away and my deep breathing provided the tidal-beat sound-track. I was under the influence of something mind altering but I felt safe and comfortable with my thoughts which wandered dreamlike without logic or analysis. I had reached a zone in my mind that was reminiscent of a recurring dream I had as a child of floating slowly around my bedroom at ceiling height hovering at will, as if on a magic carpet.

My father appeared on the beach beside me in a white tuxedo, we smiled at each other from the inside. He was sitting in a deckchair a few feet away and I wanted him to say something but he just smiled. Then he looked down to concentrate on some sheet music he had in his lap but I couldn't focus enough to read the title of the song. Then the waves stopped abruptly and after a second of a total silence as if I was drifting in outer space, I heard a rumble increasing in volume until recognised, she had finished and was washing her hands and the sound of running water had brought me back to reality. After she removed the cotton wool from my eyes I took a deep breath, Sue had certainly taken me on a trip somewhere and it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the fact. I exhaled and croaked, I had almost lost the power of speech, "Thank you, that was transcendental."

I knew she was pleased by that remark, she was at the console with her back to me and she shivered when she heard it. We talked again as she wiped my face with yet another liquid deftly applied with cotton wool and I soon answered her question, the one that all Americans seem to ask sooner or later. “Where are you from?” I told her that I was "raised" in Barnoldswick a small town in northern England on the Yorkshire Lancashire border. "Is that is anywhere near Liverpool?" "In the same county, Lancashire, Liverpool is 70 miles away" "I knew from your voice that you are from somewhere connected to The Beatles"

A Beatles fan, she had just seen ‘The Beatles Anthology’ on TV and we instantly immersed ourselves into a mutual interest, as fans do. We agreed that the Fab Four, before they changed the history of recording with multi-tracked sounds and living in the studio albums, were one of the last greats in the line of recording artists performing and recording in one ‘take’. Sue "adores" Paul McCartney and her ambition is to give him a facial. Ha! a genuine fanatic, I have never even for a second imagined any form of physical contact. Sue pronounced ‘Beatles’ the American way with the 'L' swallowed and fondly recalled the day her father had taken her to see The Beatles at Balboa Park in San Diego in August 1965. I could tell it was a cherished memory, I never saw them in live performance except in my imagination and she has never forgotten that extraordinary, eventful day. "It was wonderful" she sighed.

When she asked why I had come to La Costa, I had gained the confidence from somewhere to give her the same reply I had given the masseuse, she closed her eyes for a second and then looked at me closely, motionless. "Hmmm...... Billy Daniels, I haven't thought of him for a long time...... " I wondered what she was about to say, she was rooted to the spot, then she gazed right through me and smiled. "People loved him"

15

The City of Light

Las Vegas is only an hour on a Southwest jet from San Diego and is in the middle of an apparently endless desert. We arrived Perri, Jane and I on a dust-swept sweltering mid-morning and took a taxi from the airport to our hotel 'The Barbary Coast'. Perri had booked the flight and we had pre- boarded, it was obvious that Perri was used to travelling first class at all times. Perri had booked "the whole family" into the Barbary Coast because "Kenny Epstein is one of the owners and he's an old friend of ours"

We ‘window shopped’ Caesars Palace 'The Forum' a sizeable shopping mall. The architecture is triumphalist coliseum, entirely under cover with a marble floor and gigantic columns supporting super-smooth plastered dome ceilings painted in a sky-effect Mediterranean blue with high wispy pink-tinged clouds lit in a permanent twilight or is it dawn? The real sky is never visible from indoors in 'Vegas' so you have no idea, no reference to the time of day and there is absolutely no need to know. We strolled around a Western Store and I tried on a black cowboy hat for a laugh and Perri immediately insisted on buying it for me. It's what many tourists do, I saw plenty in full Western Regalia and now to my surprise I had joined them. I was wandering Las Vegas wearing a cowboy hat in a building styled on ancient Rome.

It is impossible to tell how large Vegas actually is because there is no precise central area but the world famous Las Vegas Boulevard 'The Strip' is several miles long and packed with large scale attractions, pirate galleons and erupting volcanoes compete for attention. The giant casino hotels are served by covered walkways, travelators that glide thousands of people an hour off the strip and into the bowels of the palaces of excess. It is an astonishing spectacle and everywhere you turn it appears that the owners are continually attempting to out-do one another in garish grandeur and sheer daring. The no-expense-spared interiors and the mind-numbing quantity of 'slots' and gaming tables, bars, restaurants and shops all with an endless stream of cash pouring in, barely need the lurid signs that scream that this place, more than any other spot on our earth was solely constructed to lure the money from your pocket.

The Barbary Coast Hotel Casino’s theme is 'Ol' Mississippi Riverboat Cowboy Town’. The whole place is Victorian Western Saloon Bar Chintz sprinkled with prints of top-hatted gun-toting mustachioed toffs helping petticoated ladies out of horse-drawn carriages. The room was a small but comfortable 'pod' for sleep with a brass bedstead, rose-patterned everything, no clock, forget all about the outside world, you have all you need here, stay in this building and gamble your life away! To really enjoy Las Vegas it is necessary to concentrate on maintaining a state of light-headedness and suspend all rational thought. I had to try hard to stop my time in Vegas from becoming a nightmare vision of the future, a glimpse of what life may yet become for all and already has for some. A state of neon-soaked suspended animation, wandering a consumerist paradise, an endless stream of possession junkies waiting for a windfall of instant happiness that will never come.

Almost the entire ground floor of The Barbary Coast, like all the other 'hotels' is an enormous casino, open to anyone prepared to be embraced by the atmosphere of controlled frenzy. By the elevators to the accommodation floors above sat a security guard, permanently stationed to check that you have your room card key, that you are in fact a guest of the hotel, no-one enters the elevator without a room card key. It was evidence that behind the scenes and visible only occasionally exists a closely guarded well-oiled security set-up protecting the money-making machine and its occupants. With your every move monitored on close-circuit TV, it's actually a very safe environment to inhabit. It is a hell of sorts but on the surface incredible fun and you can do nothing but smile at a huge building, lit by thousands of bulbs to represent a riverboat, complete with funnels and spinning paddle wheels.

Although a 24-Hour sensation the real dusk in Las Vegas is the calm before the thunderstorm, the atmosphere is tense, braced for another torrent of excess and as Jane slept off our 5 mile walk I sat in the window of our room on the fifth floor of The Barbary Coast thinking about my father as I watched the strip come to life as darkness fell. Perri next door was also "taking a nap" and we had arranged to "call her at 5.30". Our room overlooked Ballys Casino and as the sun dipped below the mountains beyond the desert a storm of electrical devices gradually came alive in a full frontal assault on the retinas. Across the street The Bally Casino main sign, began to image wipe an endless series of inducements, Win a Harley with 50 cents !!! and RIDE ONE HOME TONIGHT !!!

I felt as though I had won something unique in Vegas because I was awaiting the arrival of two sisters that I have never met who would be arriving in town this evening with their husbands. Andrea the eldest, with Ulf was driving from her home, a 4 hour drive from Temecula straight through the desert. Dominique would fly in from Los Angeles with Ken and they were all staying here at The Barbary Coast for the weekend. The evening ahead would surely be memorable and it began when Perri knocked on the door, she was concerned because Andrea and Ulf had not yet arrived and she was worried because they were on the road "Why doesn't she call me, she has a mobile?" Perri's mobile was never out of her reach. We decided to eat in the hotel restaurant because that way she could keep quizzing the desk on whether the rest of the family had arrived.

WE HURTLED DOWN TO the lobby in the elevator. I was wearing my Cowboy Hat and feeling good in a mildly insane kind of way as the mirror reflections made me look like a posse, when Jane hissed in my ear whilst we descended three floors a second "Why are you wearing that? That's not you" I wasn't sure who I was at that point "It's only a hat Jane". We were emotionally traumatised and when the elevator doors swished open there she was, my sister, we had literally bumped into Ulf and Andrea as they arrived. "I'm so pleased to meet you!" she said and held me tightly for a second. I knew instantly that I would like her, she was 'family'. Andrea reminded me, strangely, of me, she looked like I did once when I was 6 years old, it was incredible I was staring into a face that was mine when I was a child, Andrea was Jackie Daniels! I saw myself in the face of someone else for the first time in my life.

It felt surreal, it was uncanny and I held onto my hat as Ken arrived, Domi's husband and announced that Domi was full of cold, something to do with desert air combined with the flight and was confined to her room for the night. I spoke to her for the first time on the telephone from reception, I was reluctant but every-one insisted that I call her room, Americans communicate with each other continually. Domi apologised profusely for not being able to make it, which of course couldn't wait till the morning it had to be said now, an admirable trait and typically American. Domi told me she was envious of her sister having me all to herself tonight and listening to her smooth Beverly Hills purr I wasn't sure whether I could have coped with two new sisters at once.

Perri's sister Margo arrived, she had flown in from LAX; Los Angeles International Airport, she was younger than Perri, an executive with an international corporation and completely on the ball. We started an in-depth conversation immediately, Margo asked me all about my mother and just how and when did she met my father? Margo met her Italian husband Gennaro while on a cruise "A working holiday for your father, he always enjoyed singing for his supper" Gennaro was at work on the liner and now owns an Italian restaurant in Glendale, Los Angeles and another up the coast at a place called San Luis Obispo and works 24-hours a day by the sound of it. Margo and Perri have a sister, Marty who lives in Thousand Oaks. As I listened to a myriad of interesting family facts I simply reflected on the American place-names which as usual were magical sounding to my ears. Then Margo said something that had resonance "It's good for you to come here to Las Vegas, Jack because your father spent a great deal of his life in this town"

He was an entertainer in Las Vegas and gazing across an acre of spinning lights with an orange- metallic pick-up truck that you could WIN! suspended above the slot machines, I realised how totally different my father's life had been to my own. "It has changed so much since the early days" Perri recalled wistfully and decided, to escape the noisy entertainment saturated atmosphere of the casino, that we would all eat at a Chinese Restaurant she knew "a half-mile down the road". We left The Barbary Coast in Ulf's metallic gold Volvo and our faces glowed with a pink haze from the brilliance of the strip, where night is turned into a day that is out of this world. A million reflections bounce off the traffic in a total bombardment, like being under the glass inside a giant pin-ball machine and with the impact of moving messages shrieking hysterically for attention, you could very easily go insane in Las Vegas.

A monstrous illuminated portrait of Barry Manilow towered over the strip, his Mona-Lisa smile that says 'You can make it too. Here in America!' We valet parked at The Mirage and hit The Jungle Bar complete with live parrots perched in real palm trees with scantily clad goddesses that scurried around at your beck and call for any refreshment imaginable. We sat drenched in the eerie purple light and after I had digested the amazing surroundings I tuned into the conversation. The talk around our electric candle-lit tropical cane table veered onto the owner of this extravaganza a Mr. Steve Wynn, the owner of the famous Treasure Island and connected by an overhead railway The Mirage casinos, complete with resident magicians, performing nightly with white tigers in a packed purpose built state-of-the-art auditorium, the fabulous Sigfried & Roy.

Steve Wynn was talked about as if he was a neighbour, I was with people who knew Vegas intimately. The story being re-counted was how his daughter had been kidnapped recently and "Steve Wynn raised millions of dollars in cash in an afternoon" and had then informed the Police just before the arranged "drop". It was a successful operation and the "hoods" were caught and he got his daughter and all the money back in one piece. There was a murmur around the tables and Perri called out "Hello Charlie!" I looked around and saw an elderly gent, immaculately groomed in a Presidential dark blue suit with a young blonde woman on his arm. "It's Charlie Myerson" Perri whispered to me, "He knew your father" The girl on his arm was the topic of conversation, Steve Wynn's daughter, long blonde hair, very tall like a model, smiling and very much in one piece. Perri introduced everybody around the table to him, leaving me until last. I stood as Perri said "and this is Bill's son who has come over to visit us from England"

"Hi there!" he said as we shook hands, he looked me over, I guessed he was in his late sixties but I was wrong. "I knew your father for what, at least 50 years. How old would Bill be if he were still around Perri?...... I'm 83 now, so I knew him 53 years ago when we had 'The Rooster Club' in New York" "Back in the old days" Perri said. He stared and then pointed at my face, "Yeah, amazing, you sure do look like him" and everyone laughed, he had a Brooklyn twang and a comedians perfect timing. "Can you sing like him?" more laughs. This man had charisma, or something, the waiters hovered around him as if he owned the place.

"Who's taking care of you?" said Charlie to the whole table and he waved a waiter over "Get these people the same again all round, twice" The waiter practically ran back to the bar and another appeared from nowhere and began fussing around the table, "Charlie got Steve Wynn started at the 'Golden Nugget' in Atlantic City, before they moved to Vegas" Perri said. Charlie had moved to another table, in conversation with the head waiter, pointing to his wristwatch and the empty glasses.

"He is such a doll" said the daughter "He has a line for everybody" she went on to say how he is staying with them for a few days and they are just walking around town tonight. "But it's very quiet" a remark which surprised me as the place was packed, she must have meant that not many people are actually gambling and of course she is 'in the know'. "It should be busy later when the rodeo is over" the National Rodeo Finals were underway in another part of the city and live TV coverage beamed into the casinos so bets could be placed on the cowboys riding the bulls which explained the abundance of 10-gallon hats and women in Dale Rogers outfits. The sky-blue fringes with live parrots fluttering around in the lush foliage created a bizarre mixture of the wild-west and a tropical paradise, with the pulsing lighting, a cacophony of musak and wave after wave of hundreds of people from all over the world with half wearing stetsons, this was Roy Rogers on acid.

I asked Ulf if Charlie was a 'wise guy' and he laughed at this description and then looked over his shoulder at Charlie perhaps to check if he had heard and said that he would really like to be able to use one of his calling cards, "Everyone on the staff at these places is so scared of being fired that you would only have to flash the card and say 'Charlie sent me here....' and you would get top service and no-one would dare to check, especially late at night. Would you risk waking him up?" Ulf told me that my father carried the same atmosphere around with him, "an aura of invincibility, all the people I've ever met from those days seem to have that presence" I was beginning to realise just what a dominant figure in this family my father once was.

Ulf continued "There was always an element of the mob around the New York night-spots and especially close to the stars. It was the only way mobsters could appear to be important, to look special. They couldn't go out to a club with the state governor but to increase their celebrity status they could be seen dining with the entertainers. Your father told me he would often have to say from the stage, because he had been asked to 'Hey Tony! How ya doin!' because it would impress the girls that they were with. The wise guys would always be at the front on the best tables, because they often owned the place or had control, or at least owned a piece of it"

Ulf is Swedish and after University enjoyed a variety of occupations including, a Prison Warden and then the manager of an Art Gallery, both in Sweden. He then left to work his way around the world which included a stint as a painter and decorator in Hollywood (where he met Andrea) and a croupier in Las Vegas before settling and becoming very successful in Real Estate. I told him that those were precisely the credentials an Estate Agent needed and he laughed along with me as we strolled by an erupting volcano. The evening culminated with Andrea and I sitting at a bar counter, back in the Barbary Coast, with a flashing electronic poker game inset into the glass top, talking over a series of nightcaps with the bell-fruit cherries reflecting in our face, whilst Jane and Ulf played on the slot machines beside us.

ANDREA TOLD ME THAT Pop had enjoyed his life and how hard he had always worked at his singing, she recalled her first trip to Vegas when Mom had taken them all home after Pop had refused to have the air-conditioning on in their room because he insisted on protecting his voice. "He kept saying 'I'll get desert throat' and they argued over the switches on and off until Mom just packed Domi and me in the car and we took off back home. Whoosh! and after a non-stop drive we were back at Beech Knoll"

When she once asked him what he considered to be his most satisfying performance, he laughed and said "Do you mean the best performance, or the best pay!" His best performance he told her was "The first night I opened at the London Palladium and the theatre was packed to capacity and I was top of the bill. We were only supposed to be on for 25 minutes but Benny and I performed for an hour. The audience wouldn't let me leave the stage, we had them all shouting for more, then suddenly the national anthem 'The Queen' came over the tannoy and everyone instantly calmed down. I had never seen anything like it" His most lucrative performance was when he stood in for Mario Lanza at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, "Lanza had backed out with a cold and I was asked to fill in, they wanted his part sung precisely which they knew I could. I surprised some people that night and I was paid $60,000 for one performance"

We talked about our college days, we were getting to know each other and as Andrea talked her memories of his showbiz life flooded back and she tried to remember more and more for me. I told her that I was interested in my father's character rather than his career, the inner man rather than the public figure I wanted to know about the times she had spent with him. "What was he like to be with?". "Well, if he was here tonight, on meeting you he would have laughed and said 'What d'ya know?' He'd say that to everyone, he was always working when I was young and he was rarely away from the job which is an entertainer's life, show-business is a tough life for families" This reminded Andrea of her first trip to New York.

"He had a six week engagement, Pop loved New York and Mom, my sister Domi and I stayed home. After about two weeks of being away Pop stopped calling and was perhaps drinking too much, so Mother decided to send me over as a surprise! Her game plan was of course, how badly could he misbehave if he had me to look after? It was the most memorable time I ever had with Pop. I was only eighteen and Mom sent me with some lovely clothes, grown-up clothes and loaned me some beautiful jewellery to wear. I mean I had handbags to match my shoes, and even some beautiful cocktail dresses to wear to his shows. I felt really grown up, I took the red-eye to JFK and arrived at his hotel at 7.30am. In the lobby I ran into Benny Payne, his face was one of wide-eyed absolute surprise, he couldn't believe that Mom had sent me over"

"I said 'Let's go up to Pops' room' but he said 'No way, I'll get you get another room' and he would tell my Dad that I was here, I think they had just gotten in from being out all night. I hadn't been in the least bit worried that Pop would be anything other than happy to see me, but Benny's reaction made me think twice and I was afraid that Pop would put me on the next plane back. Later that day, I remember going up to his room, I think it was on the 45th floor, very high up and holding my breath when he opened the door. The first thing he said to me was 'Do you think I should do 'Hello Dolly' with Pearl Bailey?' I knew at that moment he would let me stay with him and I moved into his room, which was huge and we had two fantastic weeks together"

I was locked on to her every word and gazing far beyond the rotating slot-machines she took me back with her to New York in 1973. "One morning while he was sleeping, I took one of those 3-Hour bus tours around Manhattan. I remember driving by Rockerfeller Center and the bus driver announcing to everyone that the 'Great Billy Daniels' was appearing there tonight and not to miss the show. I was so proud of him. I went to see his show every night and there were always friends or fans for me to sit with and have dinner. Pop was always best in that intimate setting, he could enthral the whole room, he was so at ease he would talk to the audience as if he had known them all for years"

"His voice was so powerful he would often hold the mike down by his side, because he didn’t need it. He was so expressive with his face and body movements and with his beautiful voice you would experience the song totally. He would weave the story for you and everyone was moved. My favourite song was 'My Yiddisha Momma' he hit notes in that song that you just couldn't believe. I would get goose-bumps, he would always sing it for me and for his mother whom he loved dearly. We went everywhere together, he took me to see 'The Wiz', my all time favourite show. I remember sitting beside him in the dark and our fingers were snapping and we were totally taken up by the music and the dancing. The costumes were spectacular and the finale was a wonderful song about learning to believe in yourself and everyone jumped to their feet in ovation, it was incredible"

It was incredible for me, in Las Vegas hearing about my father from a sister I had only just met. "Wherever we went, when we would walk the streets of Manhattan, he would be recognised. I mean by every fourth or fifth person. They would say 'Hi'ya Billy, you've been away too long' or 'Good to see ya Billy' and he would always answer 'What d'ya know'. When we walked he would want to hold my hand and always I had to walk on the inside of the sidewalk, so he could protect me from the street. He opened doors and lit my cigarettes and I felt like I was the most cherished daughter in the world. After the show we would go to some late night joint, an after hours club always with a show. He loved those places, sometimes with friends or just the two of us, he always enjoyed to see young up and coming talent"

"They would serve us cocktails in our coffee cups and we would listen to more great music. Then we would go and have breakfast somewhere and end up back at the hotel at six in the morning. When he was working he slept during the day, Pop's day-time began late afternoon and stretched to early the following morning. Being with him was wonderful, he was a great story-teller but he had a way of focusing on whoever he was with like you were the whole world for him. He was a great listener and everything you had to say was important to him. He had so many friends and was always making new ones. Men liked him and wanted to be with him as much as women. In a group he didn't dominate or monopolise, but he was always the centre of attention."

Andrea was wishing he could be here now and so was I, but instead of slobbering we ordered another drink.

"The laughter we shared Jack was the best, he had so many different laughs and if he was laughing you had to laugh too. Everything he did was done with fun and gusto, he was never bored or boring. He treated everyone with respect and kindness and he would remember everyone's name, the bellboy, the front desk, the doorman. He would always personally thank the maid who cleaned our room, he'd tell her she was lovely today and he liked her hair or her earrings, and they all got a generous tip. People would fall all over themselves to do anything for him, because he appreciated them. He was just the greatest man I ever knew. He was magic"

16

Boxed Memories

I'm kneeling on the concrete floor of a garage but it's not cold, I'm in southern California, so it's pleasantly cool. I'm in Perri's and what was fleetingly my father's, garage. And although the garage is a huge 'double' Perri's Oldsmobile is now parked outside in the yard, she thought I would have more room “to spread out". I’m surrounded by a stack of cardboard boxes, regular office-suppliers cardboard printed with a loud woodgrain pattern, typically American to decorate a simple cardboard box to provide added value. I have lifted from shelving neatly concealed behind a wall of sliding doors the boxes that were moved by a removal company from Beech Knoll, Laurel Canyon, Hollywood to here, to this spot and now to me. No-one has looked in these since my father died and I believe they are packed with the memorabilia of my father's life.

I open the first and inhale the musty smell of old newsprint, it is a pile of jumbled papers with glossy photographs stacked randomly between newspapers and magazines. I examined photographs of my father with Judy Garland, then Liberace then Robert Mitchum and who is he with here?..... the heavyweight boxing champion ‘The Brown Bomber’ Joe Louis. It is not catalogued, just tightly compressed memories of a life which has not been examined for a long time. I felt as though he was looking over my shoulder as I raised a fragile letter from his past. The pages held together by a rusty paper-clip, are typed on very thin notepaper. I lifted the tissue-paper memory out of the box and noticed the typewriter had made a neat pinhole at every full-stop. At the top of each crumpled white page a small, black pre-printed letter-heading –

Notary Public A.W. Daniels 1371 Evergreen Avenue Jacksonville Florida

Typed below left, with the first neat pinhole, the date November 6th. 1955. A letter written by my grandfather when I was his grandson, 18 months old on another continent, as he typed this to his son, my father -

My Darling Boy,

I must write you just a line and acknowledge the arrival of this wonderful and most beautiful "CONTOUR" Lounging Chair, which was the greatest surprise of my whole life and it must have been shipped out to me the very day that you bought it. The reason why I think that is because Gwen and her hubby brought Mamma home, and being younger, they jumped out and came bouncing in to be the first to tell me that the gift was on its way, so that I would be expecting it and lo and behold, I was already lounging in my new chair enjoying my TV programs. Of course they were quite flabber-gasted, but it was around midnight when they came and the van drove up to the door with the chair in the late afternoon and although I told him he was at the wrong address, he insisted he was not and when I saw his freight-bill and found it was from a boy who is always thinking about his old Dad, I became convinced that he was right and so told him to bring it right in. Tillman was sitting there with me and he gave a helping hand to the young fellow and then helped me to unpack and get it in. It is undoubtedly the most beautiful thing in the line of a chair that I've ever seen and it is the very last word in the way of TV sight -seeing comfort. Another thing I am so happy about is that Mamma enjoyed her trip down there in Miami to the very highest as I knew she would and you took such loving care of her - as I knew and told her you would. I can understand that she didn't want to leave me and you also know how devoted we are to each other but she thinks I am in worse condition than I really am and too, my Doctor had advised against my taking long trips by Auto - trips like that are more restful and relaxing on a train. So I had to remind her that I was 32 years old when we married in '13 and had struggled along through those years in single blessedness without much difficulty, so it was just possible that I may survive a day or two while she was enjoying a much-needed rest with her eldest son and see him at work. Now she is raving about the trip, she enjoyed every minute of it - the scenery, the people - all of whom were so nice to her and happy to meet her. First time she has ever been down further than St. Augustine since we've lived here, but to letter-carrier Conventions, I have been to Ocala, Orlando (where she was born remember) Tampa, Stuart and St. Petersburg, but I have never visited Miami. The pecan trees have been very full this year but they are not the largest we have had. Our trees and in fact all the pecan trees around here have been infested with an unusual number of worms this year. There is always something to contend with whatever you try to do - and that is largely why some folks never make any attempt to do anything. These worms develop in great numbers and make a network around the nuts, if allowed to. They have to be scorched or burned by attaching cotton to a long pole and setting it afire. We have been told of a remedy which will prevent this development and next year we are all set and ready to put it into effect, should the good Lord spare us. Give our love to all the children. Mamma has Diane's new address now and is planning to send her something, it is so nice that she likes it in Italy. I think Mamma is packing some pecan nuts for Billy and Bruce, I trust they are getting adjusted in and will enjoy their school-life out there in California. I found the people very congenial and always ready to give aid and welcome to others, most especially to strangers. When I was out there in 1941, they seemed particularly proud of the Movie industry - people, studios and homes and would show one around with great pride. We had a nice card from Virgil & Inez and a box of very delicious Wisconsin cheeses for our Xmas. They are doing fine, except for the fact that it is as cold as can be in Iowa. My regards to Mrs.Clotworthy - it's is our hope she is much improved. Tell my little Bruce I got his lovely card and am saving it because of the Xmas message which he wrote on it - "Grandpa, I love you very much" to me that was one of the sweetest message any one could wish to get and it made me think of and remember all the nice walks and good times we had together while he was here. We had a visitor from Richmond Va. last week, a Mr. John H. Westray, who is valet and coachman for the man who owns the biggest Aluminium works in the country - Reynolds. If you can't remember Westray is married to Julien Jackson's sister and he was driving his Boss' big car up from Miami to Richmond. He spent the night here with us and I got a chance to ride in that big baby. He thinks our home is beautiful and I told him of the help which came from you. Of course he knew all about you he has a very beautiful (I think she is from her picture) daughter who went to NYC one time and visited a nightclub where you were at work and during the program you announced her presence; and she has never stopped talking about it. I am sure you have forgotten it, and her, because you meet so darn many women, you could never remember them all. But Westray says she is still your fan and talks about that yet. I note what you say about calling to see us and we shall live in hope; but with your busy schedule it will seem like a miracle to me should you be able to work us in. We had a letter from Virgil some time ago, telling of his plan to get into his new Buick, with his family, drive to Long Branch and pick up old Bernard and his family and buzz on down here to see us sometime real soon and I believe he said you knew about the plan and would run up from Miami, so you must know about it? Well in keeping with that plan, I have had the room which faces the north-east (we always call it Bernard's room) beautifully papered and painted. We have an old couple (white) a man and his wife, who does all our paper hanging, they are very nice people and always seem to like to do our hanging and they do it so well. Bernard wont know the old room. Well, we have been host to "Captain" Virgil A.D. and his wife and 3 children. I am anxious for you to see what an excellent job of painting he has done on the walls downstairs. The lad is a master with a paint-brush - there is no question about it - he may fly air-planes for his Uncle Sam, but when he drops by at 1371 Evergreen, I buy the paint and put a brush in his hand, because I know he learned exactly what to do with it at St. Emma. I have repaired the roof above the front porch upstairs where you always like to sleep now. Thanks to you the house has been greatly improved and is comfortable and fortunately for us we don't owe anybody a dime. I'm still under the impression that the best step for me to take now in regard to the house, is to paint just the front, where the sun has simply baked off the paint, which will give it a far better appearance from the street and later probably by spring I will be able to give the whole building a going over. And if my physical condition will hold up a little longer as it is now, I feel sure I can paint all the porch floors as I did before. At last, I am having a French door put in between the living and dining rooms; then I plan to put down a tiled floor of some material on those floors; its too difficult to keep them waxed properly - too much traffic. I believe that a good way for a fellow to stick around, is to keep busy doing something all the time. Keeps his mind off his troubles and ailments. Of course, I shall take it in easy stages and not overtax my strength. And while on the subject of my health I think it wise for me to inform you of a few things - not with the intention of alarming you, but to acquaint you with conditions as will prevail when the call comes for me and thereafter. This is as it should be between a father and his eldest son. The nature of the disease, with which I am afflicted - "Arteriosclerosis" - is such that if, and when the summons comes for me, it will have to be answered quick and fast. Now I imagine that your lovely mother will want to continue to live here in the home "under her own vine and fig tree" It will therefore be up to her children to get together and to decide as to who could, or would be able or willing to move in with her and to look after her, if need be. Now I'm happy to say that she will never be a financial burden to anyone because I have - through the years - made and carried out plans to see to it that she would never be in want, financially, after I'm gone. All my insurances are in apple-pie order and she, of course, is the beneficiary in each one. The deeds to the house are recorded in the names "Augustus William Daniels and wife Hattie Mae Boone Daniels" so that she will take over full possession of the premises without any fanfare and with no need for any court order, or Judge's decision. In fact she is already and has always been co-owner of the place and as I told Virgil, it will be up to her to say who will get custody after her days are done. And so, you see, my boy, that I have tried to provide for the care and comfort and well-being of my lovely and faithful wife and yet I have no fear that she will give me some rough-on-rats in order to get her hands on the money, as some of your wives have tried to do to you. Few men have been blessed with the good fortune to get (as I did) brains and beauty and sweetness plus goodness, all wrapped up in one package. I don't know what I've ever done to deserve it, but I am truly thankful. And I am also thankful to have a loving son like you who is always thinking of his Mother and old Dad and doing all he possibly can to make them happy and comfortable. It may well be that you will some day, find a real charming companion, one who will be both beautiful and sweet and also real good and kind hearted. If you are lucky enough to find her and to win her then treat her like a queen, for that is just what such a woman is. Mamma joins me in love and so do all your friends. We saw you on the Gleason Show and the folks all phone us whenever and whatever news they see or read about your activities, even the manager of the Theater, Mr. Rothschild and also Mr Beibleman from the bank. Mr Rothschild still asks about you any time he sees us and always asks to be remembered. I believe he still has the idea of some kind of a big demonstration here in Jax. for an old home boy who has made good. He is good at that sort of thing, you know, and he has honoured several Jax. young Theatrical people, as well as some in other fields who have made good. Mr. Rothschild really thinks Mr.Wolfson was in earnest when he offered to back you financially in any enterprise you should wish to go after or enter for yourself. I hope you will give serious thought to it, because they are calling Wolfson a millionaire around here. He seems very much interested in sports, owns the Jacksonville Sally League Baseball team outright; has blocks of stock in the Gator Bowl here and is in the course of constructing a large Baseball and Football Park, out near the Gator Bowl. We all keep up with your every move and seem to see your mug on screens often, and down here, on our lovely TV set there is always some one imitating Billy Daniels - which is quite a compliment. The Jackie Gleason show always comes in real good and it is usually a must for us on Saturday night, so you know we would not have missed it for the world after we got news that you might be on it. It is a fact that there is no television I've seen anywhere here in Jax. which brings in all the pictures as clear and as perfect as this RCA Victor of ours. And believe me I have seen a good many. Earl Cumbo (you know him) has a TV set - but he is always my guest whenever there is a prize-fight, or something real interesting which he wants to see in full, without missing anything or any part of the sound or picture reception. We have enjoyed our Air-conditioner all during the hot weather but are now looking toward the cold-weather season and I am getting our stoves into good shape for Winter. Your sister Hattie Mae has received word to be ready to leave here for Germany by the first of February at long last, her husband is preparing for their reception, our boys are doing a fine job over there. They have a 3- year-old boy and a charming pretty little girl and I hate like the dickens to see these children taken so far away and especially under such uncertain circumstances. My opinion is that there is no way to avoid a war between our country and Russia; and when it comes there is going to be hell. But there is nothing you or I can do to avoid it, so we shall have to see it through as we've done before. I am still hearing about Mammas, Gwen and Ralph's lovely trip to Miami Beach and of course how you did yourself proud and spread out the welcome mat for them. Also about how wild the guests are about my son. Makes me feel real good. Take care of yourself, Thanks for the letter; write whenever you can spare the time. Love and kisses from Mamma

Your Loving Dad. (Thanks again for the Contour Lounge Chair.)

I reflected for a moment and absorbed my discovery. My grandpa was oblivious of my existence. He sounds like he was a nice guy and to begin another chronological pile I flipped his letter over and revealed a note, handwritten in a butchers pencil on the white of the back page. It looked impossible to decipher and while gazing at the note without reading I was propelled to lift the stack of papers from my lap and wander out of the garage to examine the writing in the sunshine, where I read the flowery hand that had scribbled with secretarial efficiency -

I am telling Daddy about Sunday Colgate Hour. We'll be looking for you Sat. nights on The Show of Shows - Gleason's hour etc. We are all fine. Love, Mother.

I have searched for information on my father to try and get to know him. I have traced Perri, his wife of 33 years, to ask her for details and she has lovingly opened the lid on a capsule packed with treasures. I'm engulfed in an avalanche of information and my quest has transported me to precisely to where I wanted to be, in a time machine -

Billy Daniels to Replace Lanza LAS VEGAS, Nev, April 6 1955 (UP) - Billy Daniels, the singer, has been signed to replace Mario Lanza at the New Frontier Hotel here beginning tomorrow night. Mr. Daniels was caught en-route to a vacation in Mexico and was persuaded to change his plans. Mr. Lanza, reported to be sick and nervous, failed to show up for his $50,000-a-week engagement Monday night.

I examined the stacks of documents in a dizzying spin of enlightenment, I caught an airmail letter in mid-air and speed-read the contents -

Associated Booking Corporation, Joseph G. Glaser, President, 9477 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90210 Special delivery Airmail to - Mr Billy Daniels, Hotel Siam Intercontinental, Rama 1 Road, Bangkok 5, Thailand. Dear Billy: Albert Stein of the Thunderbird in Jacksonville Florida wants to know if you will play the new room August 10th thru 16th instead of June 22nd thru June 28th. He told Freddie Williamson that the contractors have goofed him up and he'll have to set the date back at least five or six weeks in order to be sure that the room will be open. Please let me know about this so that I can advise Freddie accordingly. With Kindest Regards, Bob Phillips, Vice President

My Floridian Grandmother after an evening's television 50 years ago was moved to send her son a telegram -

Western Union - 1952 Nov 9 PM 10.25 to Billy Daniels CopaCabana Night Club = New York

YOUR TV SHOW WAS WONDERFUL YOU WERE AT YOUR BEST I AM SO SENTIMENTAL LOVE = MOM

On my knees in his garage examining my father's life in documents like a detective, I had to be careful with the fragile papers, because it was hard not to rummage wildly through the time capsule to scrutinise the life captured on the glossy photographs for an instant fix. Now I can clearly imagine how totally different my life would have been, had things between my mother and my father turned out differently. I was also acutely aware of my father, buried within me. Even though it was a father that I’ve never known and never been hurt, by a longing to see him again. My thoughts on what might have been were not a wish for an alternative life. I felt powerfully objective and amazed by how strange the twists and turns of life can be. And feeling more alive than ever before I knew I had to examine all the evidence and not just the photographic gloss, attached to his stardom.

Fame often has nothing at all to do with achievement and it always attracts attention from all quarters and I was not surprised to find that he had kept for posterity, possibly for amusement, a poison-pen letter. It was an alien object that comprised of a clipping carefully, probably fanatically, cut from a scandal sheet and pasted onto a piece of cardboard which unfolded origami style to reveal the yellowing newsprint -

Showdown IN LAS VEGAS!

No Medal for Billy Daniels - RUMOURED ROMANCE OF BELLY DANCER - NEJLA ATES - AND CROONER BILLY DANIELS ALMOST SPARKED RIOT

The real story of Las Vegas is yet to be told! Insiders know that behind its glittering facade there's an ugly crisis brewing that will soon explode into nationwide headlines! The Negro stars refused to knuckle under the local customs of segregation. So when Billy Daniels or Lena Horne or Sammy Davis Jr. headline a show on the strip, the hotel furnishes accommodations, but does not encourage them to socialise in the club or casino. But insiders know that BEHIND THE SCENES, tension has stretched to breaking point. Already, there have been several hushed-up incidents that have threatened to spark an open conflict. BILLY AND BELLY DANCER!

One such incident involved crooner Billy Daniels, who, because of his tremendous popularity rates at least two appearances a year at El Rancho Vegas. It was rumoured around Las Vegas that the sexy song stylist had a hot romance going with Turkish belly dancer, Nejla Ates, who once was the object of wealthy Texas playboy Shep King's affections. The mere idea that the rumour might be true - that the shapely Nejla and the fair-complexioned Negro singer were indeed a torrid two-some - so upset a tourist from Dallas that he strapped on his .45 and went gunning for the "curly-headed upstart!" Fortunately, security police of the hotel at which the irate Texan was a guest, calmed him down and disarmed him before the trouble started.

On the blank card reverse of the above a hand-pencilled note was addressed to Perri, my father's wife. It was written at weird box-flap angles as the present was opened and complete with spelling mistakes it read -

If you're interested in keeping up with your husband's career on sex and sinful life, keep up with these scandle books, in which you'll find that he's their greatest "COVER BOY". Best well known transalation "GO DOWN BOY" as millions of women have known him most delightfully and unscrupulously. These stories are all thoroughly investigated and proven before printed due to possible libel-suits for slander. Mr. Daniels has never sued, contridicted, nor bothered to deny any of them. They'll be a real wopper soon. It may interest you to know that he most unexpectedly and surprisingly married you on Nov.9th exactly two days after the most discusting story ever printed about any one in show-business, or any living SOUL anywhere published in "LOWDOWN MAGAZINE" Nov 7th. P.S. The answer to the $64,000.00 question and which all of America is wondering, in astonishment and discust, remains unanswered but not yet explained for. Why did he not marry you merely one month sooner, when he was totally free, and could have given you a decent wedding and honeymoon, instead of just two days before an opening? You merely happened to be the nearest skirt for him to hide his FILTHY shame behind.

In the box below this demonic item, lay a complete newspaper, so fragile it almost disintegrated as I opened it - The Miami Life - the front page on Saturday August 27 1955 when that day's headline covered the full width of the paper - Famous Negro Star barged into wrong table at Beachcomber! and below in huge compressed capitals as if war had been declared -

WHITE GIRL'S ESCORT SLUGS BILLY DANIELS!

We have stated on innumerable occasions that the personal conduct and attitude of Billy Daniels, famed Negro entertainer at Miami Beach's Beachcomber night club, toward white women outrages Southern custom and tradition of which this area is an essential part. That it just doesn't "belong" here. This was borne out at the Beachcomber night club, Miami Beach, Saturday night when the Negro's barging in on a table occupied by two white couples almost caused a riot. It seems that Daniels' roving eye - while he was finishing a repertoire of very sexy and suggestive songs - encountered two gorgeous white girls sitting with their escorts and he cockily joined the party at the first opportunity. One escort, we understand, then spoke up."Who the hell invited you over here?" now just what Daniels said or did after that is not clear. But he got a punch in the face immediately. Daniels' piano accompanist, also a Negro, jumped into the affray. Likewise, the other white man at the table. A general uproar followed. Someone called the police. But this was something the club did NOT want. They want no publicity. And therefore, by the time the police arrived, the participants had been hustled out. (All this took place in an "intimate" room where the club entertains guests who want a taste of later-than-late night-life after the show in the big room is over) The Beachcomber, we think, is fortunate that this near-riot took place on its closing night. It doesn't reopen until the next winter season and by that time - if they don't bring back Billy Daniels or someone else of his un-savory reputation with white women - there may be no repercussions.. But the incident should be a warning to those greedy nightclub owners who seemingly believe that they can get away with brazenly flaunting this red flag (race-mixing on a social, sexual level) in the faces of that considerable part of our population who by tradition and custom must resent it. We hope we've seen the last of Billy Daniels in our Gold Coast - or any more like him. Here is a Negro whose "love-life" with white women has become notorious from coast-to-coast. He gets his kicks out of seducing white women and flaunting it before the world. Billy reputedly is getting ready to marry the pretty, white governess of his children, blonde Pat Cameron - but that report wasn't circulated until her non-governess association with him (he exhibited her on the late watches in nightclubs) had scandalised even blase Hollywood. Before that Ronnie Quillan, Hollywood white beauty, reputedly tried to carve his face. And why? Because Billy was two-timing her - with still more white women! Daniels at present lives with his children - and the white Pat Cameron - in the former 'Madman Muntz' mansion on Beech Knoll Drive in Hollywood. Oh, yes - there's something else to the latest Daniels escapade. Eighteen-year-old boys and 17-year- old girls were served HARD LIQUOR that same evening at the Beachcomber. After telling us about it, these young people (one of whom was a former Daniels fan - a boy of 18) had some more pertinent comments to make. "We thought you were wrong in what you've been writing about Billy Daniels. But the way he made up to the white women through his songs while on stage was SICKENING!" - (SEE Page Two for COMPLETE - and "Negroes Play Golf At Miami Beach - Whites QUIT!" - STORY!)

A black faded scrap-book contained carefully pasted newspaper-clippings of his triumphant first visit to England in March 1952 ; photographs of my father enjoying his voyage on the Cunard Atlantic Liner, The Queen Mary steaming with his wife Martha and an entourage of management, dining from a-la-carte menus enveloped in one of the finest craftsman-built interiors of all time. On the following page, centrally mounted, a letter typed on Queen Mary headed notepaper, another yellowing fragment from history and a contrast to the demons in his life -

Dear Mr.Daniels,

I feel I cannot let you leave the ship without expressing my appreciation of your kindness in singing for us the other evening. So many people have been to me to say how much they enjoyed your songs and have remarked that occasions such as that on which you entertained us provide highlights by which one remembers, more clearly, the pleasure of an Atlantic crossing. My Cabin Purser has also asked me to thank you for allowing his passengers the pleasure of hearing you last night. I am presuming to send your wife this small gift as an expression of our thanks for your contribution to the success of the crossing and I shall be grateful if she will accept this together with our sincerest wish for your continued success and happiness.

Sincerely Yours PURSER

My father had boxed a random collection of papers and I was enthralled by every fragment because each illuminated another shred of the life I had journeyed to expose. He came alive in my hands and I lost all track of time as I read through every scrap, because each was another piece of the jig-saw puzzle and another step on my journey -

New York Medical College, Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospitals December 11th 1952

Dear Billy, I got a tremendously deep kick out of your flowers.

Sincerely Ed Sullivan

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Western Union Telegram To -: Billy Daniels - Copacabana Club, New York Our wish is that you repeat your former success and may it continue throughout the year. This opening means as much to us as it does to you. Best Wishes = Negro Actors Guild of America. Noble Sissle, President

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Inter-Department Communication HOTEL EL RANCHO LAS VEGAS, Monday March 2nd 1953 TO - BILLY DANIELS & BENNY PAYNE FROM - DOROTHY GUNN , Publicity Arrangements have been made for the El Rancho Show to be presented in its entirety to troops at Desert Rock on Sunday March 8th. Busses will be here at 12: 30 SHARP to pick up everyone in the show. There will be a military escort to the base and the entire set-up has been cleared with various Unions concerned. Because of the number of troops involved it is possible the show will be outdoors - weather permitting. PLEASE leave a wakeup call and be on time. DG

I travelled through the blizzard of papers convinced that it was my destiny to read every shred of the evidence in order to unravel for myself, the story of his life -

THE PITTSBURGH COURIER Jan 2nd 1954 Mrs. Daniels Says She's DIVORCING BILLY! Tells Why She Quit Singer! By Hazel Garland (Courier Staff Writer)

PITTSBURGH - "Why did we break-up? Well, a number of reasons might be given, but race had nothing to do with my plans to divorce Billy" These were the words of Mrs.Martha Braun Daniels, white socialite wife of the popular "Old Black Magic" singer, Billy Daniels, as she launched her own career in the entertainment field here last week. The pretty young wife of one of the nation's top entertainers was wearing a stylish grey Adrian suit when interviewed in her hotel room at the William Penn here. She tenderly fondled her pet Pekinese dog, Phoeey, as she graciously answered questions put to her by this enquiring reporter. She stressed the fact that race had nothing to do with their.....(cont. on Page 2,Col.1) Tells Why She Quit Singer (continued from Page 1)...... break-up. She emphasised that point many times during the interview. "We're still the best of friends" Mrs.Daniels stated "and I think my husband is one of the greatest. I only hope I can be one half the artist he is. But after a topsy-turvy marriage of almost four years, we finally came to the end of the road" "Somehow, it seems as though our marriage was ill-fated from the beginning. But race had nothing to do with it, please understand that point. You see.... I believe in only one race. The human race. I believe in accepting an individual on his own merits" "Among the reasons why we couldn't enjoy a happy married life might have been the difference in our ages" the attractive socialite went on to say. "You see, there is quite a difference in our ages I am much younger than my husband. (Editors note : Billy Daniels now lists his age as 39, we are informed. Mrs.Daniels had "no comment" on a question asked about this fact.) Then too, we were often forced to be separated for long periods of time due to his singing engagements which took him to all parts of the country and overseas. I very seldom accompanied him preferring to remain at our New York apartments which we called home. THE MAIN reason we broke up, I guess was because of the women. It seems they were always chasing him. That's something I never did, though I guess that is why he married me" she added. Mrs Daniels said she was just nineteen when she met her husband and was just out of finishing school in Boston. The man who was later to become her husband was headlining a show at The Club Ebony (now Birdland) on Broadway at the time.... and she met him when she was attending the club with a group of friends. After he had finished singing "I Concentrate On You" a friend brought the entertainer to her table. "I complimented him on his singing. That's how we met" Mrs Daniels asserted. "Most people think it was Billy's singing of That Old Black Magic that started it, that made me fall in love with him but that wasn't it. Like everyone else I liked his rendition of that number but I much preferred "Concentrating On You" and that is the song we have always called our song." CONTINUING HER STORY Mrs.Daniels said: "We met quite often after that and a courtship of about two years followed before our marriage in January of 1950. He was only making a little over $100 a week then, but he is earning over $10,000 per week now" When asked if a reconciliation were impossible or if there was someone new in her life, Mrs Daniels explained; "Nothing is impossible, but I doubt whether anything will prevent a divorce between us. We have already signed separation papers and I plan to file a suit for divorce in Mexico next month, unless an engagement prevents me from doing so." "To your second question" Mrs. Daniels added, "There is no one else with whom I'm romantically interested in. That is one of the reasons I am entering show-business. I don't want to live on alimony and since I have done a little singing. I thought I might try to become an entertainer" THE 25-YEAR-OLD, five-feet eight socialite made her debut before a packed house at the Copa here in Pittsburgh Monday night Dec 21st 1954. She wore for the opening a twenty-four-carat gold cloth leotard gown designed especially for her. It fitted as snugly as a bathing suit around the hips and mid-riff. The bodice was encrusted with jewels. She was a glamourous sight to behold. Teamed with former Larry Steele Dancer Barbara Velasco, the two of them hope to tour the country with their act. Saying her hobby is travelling and concocting "Italiana" dishes Mrs Daniels says that cooking relaxes her. Although Billy used to enjoy my cooking she says "I will be cooking only for myself now."

That newspaper-cutting from 'The Pittsburgh Courier' was buried in a box jam-packed full of papers from 1954, the year I was born. It was carefully folded inside a tiny white envelope with the words 'The Fairmount Hotel, Nob Hill, San Fransisco' pre-printed on the unstuck flap and perhaps he had kept it as a reminder of their time together. The next item out of the box of memories was a typed itinerary of his 1954 tour of England and naturally anything close to the time of my birth was of special significance, especially immediately after I had found a duplicate original of my birth certificate. It was a poignant moment -

Billy Daniels' Proposed Route for 1954 In England

May 19th Glasgow Empire 31st Edinburgh Empire June 7th Liverpool Empire (Holiday Week) 14th Manchester Palace 21st Birmingham Hippodrome 28th Newcastle Empire July 5th Brighton Hippodrome 12th Bristol Hippodrome 19th Leeds Empire 26th Sheffield Empire August 2nd Sunderland Empire (Holiday Week) Sept 6th Chiswick Empire 13th Nottingham Empire 20th Finsbury Park Empire 27th Manchester Hippodrome

Notes: All the above are Moss Empire Theatres with the exception of Bristol Hippodrome, Chiswick Empire and Manchester Hippodrome which are on the Stoll Tour. The capacity of Nottingham is identical to Leeds where Billy has already played and Sheffield is rather more. Sunderland has a larger capacity than Newcastle where Billy has already played and Finsbury Park has a considerably larger capacity than Leeds. The Chiswick capacity is about the same as Newcastle.

I was born on June 23rd 1954 in Brighton, on this list he was scheduled to play Birmingham on the 21st June, Newcastle on 28th June and Brighton on July 5th - around that date is when he must have visited my mother with my Grandad and my Uncle Alan at her bedside as he walked in with London gangland figure Jack 'Spot' Comer. The list was clipped to a letter from an attorney in New York dated Dec 17th 1953 and addressed to my father in Jacksonville. My mother had toured Britain with him that year and at that time he lived in New York when not touring, so he must have returned to Jacksonville to spend Christmas with his 'folks'.

He had seperated from Martha Braun and her name must have been a topic of conversation around the festive table. I wondered what Christmas 1953 was like for my mother, at home with her parents in Barnoldswick, three months pregnant and speculating on what the future held for her. I wonder if she was discussed in Jacksonville during the Daniels family Christmas? The very next item out of the box was a review of a performance, with Larry Adler and Alma Cogan, in a charity show at The Hippodrome, Brighton, dated nearly a week before his scheduled engagement. The dates on the proposed itinerary must have been changed and he may have visited my mother and me, before this supercharged appearance -

The Record Mirror Thursday July 1st 1954 by R.M.A.R.

The'Old Black Magic' Of Billy Daniels Cast Spell On Brighton Audience INSPIRED PERFORMANCE at Charity Show for Palestine Appeal

Now I've seen Billy perform at the London Palladium and in several provincial theatres and I've always rated him among the tip-top best who have come over from America to entertain British audiences; I've seen him take curtain call after curtain call and I thought I had already seen him at his best - until tonight. And tonight Billy Daniels must have been inspired. He gave a performance which for sheer artistry and entertainment must have eclipsed anything he has ever done before. Seldom have I witnessed an artist put so much feeling, such intensity and such perfect timing into his work. What could it have been - the Brighton air or the cause for which he was giving his services? Whatever it was, I repeat Billy was like a man inspired. I don't know how many songs this American artist has in his repertoire but he seemed to have gone through the lot in his magnificent performance which went on for over an hour (I am assured though, that there are still well over 200 songs Billy has left but didn't sing tonight!) From start to finish the magic of Billy Daniels held the packed house spellbound. Songs, grave and gay, were rendered with that inimitable artistry and sincerity which can only come from the genuine star entertainer. Every number was a triumph of delivery and impact. How many songs did Billy sing this night? I lost count but I vividly remember such numbers as: September Song; Bye Bye Blackbird; He's Funny That Way; Momele; My Yiddisha Mama; I Get A Kick Out Of You; How Deep Is The Ocean and of course That Old Black Magic. Yes it was a tour de force, a veritable triumph of show-business. The audience rose to him and would have been content to stay throughout the night listening to him - and, if I know my Billy, if the circumstances permitted, he would have been willing to carry on till dawn. Benny Payne, Billy's pianist and his 'right hand' rendered wonderful service. "There can't be a Billy without a Benny" is the American artist's tribute.

The next item was another Western Union Telegram to an ex-pupil now a show-biz star. -

NA246 PD= RICHMOND VIR. TO BILLY DANIELS = GUEST TOAST OF THE TOWN PROGRAM ED SULLIVAN PROGRAM CBS TV =

THROUGH THE YEARS AS YOU CLIMB THE LADDER TO SUCCESS WE HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR CAREER WITH INTEREST AS FELLOW GRADUATES OF ST EMMA MILITARY ACADEMY WE WATCH YOU TONIGHT WITH ADMIRATION AND PRIDE AS YOU PERFORM ON THE NATIONS TOP VARIETY PROGRAM TOAST OF THE TOWN. WITH BEST WISHES AND FOR CONTINUED SUCCESS FOR "OUR BOONE" WE ARE = RICHMOND CHAPTER - WASHINGTON CHAPTER - NEW YORK CHAPTER OF ST EMMA MILITARY ACADEMY ALUMNI ASSN FATHER CHARLES J COFFEY MODERATOR ERNEST SAVOY =

And then I found it, the photograph that I once saw as a child, the portrait of him my discovery of which had upset my mother, back in the mist of childhood. I choked back tears as I re-lived a moment from my past and I felt his presence. The myriad of photographs were simply movie stills of a life that I knew nothing about, but now I had brought him back into my life with this image that had re-connected us in an instant with a power that was shocking. This man was the father who had been kept a total secret from me and the reason I am here, at the epicentre of my quest leafing through his personal possessions, is to reclaim him, to make him mine again.

And so I climbed his mountain of memorabilia, explored articles and reviews and found hundreds of direct quotes. I watched him spellbound, preserved on film as a young man at the height of his career and I observed a video of a television interview by Anassa Briggs in the sunset of his 72nd year that illuminated his entire life. Thanks to Perri my dream had come true and at the pinnacle of my quest I had discussed him for hours with his family and friends. And with the oxygen of knowledge now I can hear my father's voice in my mind as if it were my own and by symbiosis I have found him and now he can tell me all about his life, himself.

17

You've Got A Nice Voice Kid

I was born at 1371 Evergreen Avenue on the East Side of Jacksonville, a typical southern black community, on September 12th 1915. It has often been assumed that I had a deprived childhood because I grew up during a time in the deep south when the circumstances often lead to pathos. Too many entertainers started life that way, but my parents gave me a fine youth. America has always been a melting pot, regardless of what some would have you believe, one grandfather was a Portuguese sea captain sailing out of Savannah, Georgia.

He knew that he'd fathered a child and that child was my mother and he wanted to take my grandmother back home to Portugal but she wouldn't leave so he sailed away and was never seen again, the south is full of stories like that. My other grandfather was a minister in the Negro Methodist-Episcopal Church and he spent his life travelling all over Georgia, to wherever there was a need for a minister. My maternal Great-grandmother was a full-blooded Choctaw, who were the original inhabitants of Georgia and Florida after all.

My parents were devout church-goers, my mother Hattie Mae Boone Knight, graduated from Chaney State College and she became a schoolteacher, she was the church organist and a fine piano player and she taught and directed the programs of music at St. Athanasius Church and School in Brunswick, Georgia. My parents married in 1913 in Brunswick and soon after moved to Jacksonville and became members of St. Phillips Episcopal Church. They had six children, four boys, I was the eldest, born in 1915. Joel Bernard who was born in 1917, Virgil in 1919 and Ed in 1923, were my brothers and I had two sisters, Gwen born in 1921 and Hattie born in 1926.

My father, Augustus William Daniels, was a mailman who had a PhD in Education, well he completed 3 years college and was a fine student but he spent a year in bed with 'the fever' and when he recovered he never returned to his last year at college, because for health reasons he needed fresh- air work. So he got a job as a Mail-Carrier, delivering the mail by horse and carriage. He was quite a small man and very gentle but a man of tremendous stature and authority and extremely well respected in the neighbourhood. The neighbours would come to him with all of their problems and he could be counted on to solve them and he usually did. My mother just wanted me to be happy and safe and I loved her dearly for that, she taught all her kids to love music with her piano playing and endowed us all with a great sense of pride and compassion. My mother was the kindest person I've ever known and the house I grew up in had a wonderful feeling around it.

I attended St. Emma’s Catholic Academy in Virginia, a boys boarding school because my father thought that the discipline there would be good for me. When I was very young I was a little wild and he thought that St. Emma’s would straighten me out and it did. When I first arrived I got into trouble often and was sent to bed early as a punishment and this happened a few times until I saw sense. I used to lie awake at night and listen to the boys in the other room laughing and having fun late into the night and they were allowed to do this because their good behaviour had given them status and privilege and I thought 'That's where I want to be' so I tried to keep out of trouble from then on.

My parents had Victorian Church values, my father didn't want me to be in show-business no way, he was far too respectable for that. He had strong hopes that I would become a lawyer, my father didn't even take a drink or use tobacco until later when I got him to enjoy a cigar now and then. When I first made it big I drove down from New York to see them in a brand new Pontiac but he blew a fuse and told me that he wasn't impressed and he questioned me closely on just what exactly, I had done to make that kind of money.

I had to sing my act for him in the living room and when I was finished he said 'They pay you all that money for that!' I would leave Jacksonville many times after seeing my folks and be dumbfounded by the things my father had said. In fact it was this that kept me on track because I always thought how what-ever I did would affect my father and mother. I was always very close to my father and like most he gave me a hard time in my youth but late in his life he was man enough to tell me he had been wrong and I was right to pursue my career in music.

When I was 13, I remember an incident that made me realise the kind of man my father was. Back in those days a mailman sold stamps and Dad travelled the district in a horse and carriage with a large leather pouch which he wore on his belt. This was stuffed full of money, fistfuls of nickels, dimes and quarters. Well, I saw that and I figured that Dad would not miss a few cents here and there, so I started helping myself. That resource made me big with my increasing circle of chums when I became a supplier of candy and ice cream for my buddies.

It was the summer of 1928, I was 13 and at that age a bicycle was a very important item. I wanted one badly and I went through that summer and autumn letting my bicycle needs be known with an eye towards Christmas. I was the eldest and when the eve finally came my father who in the spirit of Christmas, had hidden all the presents in a neighbour's shed and after the others had been packed off to bed, he asked me to help him collect the gifts. It was the first time that he had asked me to do this and I felt real good as I went with him and we carried the presents home and put them under the tree and my eyes had searched for that bike all evening but it wasn't there. I was one disappointed kid, heading for my bed when my father stopped me on the stairs and said "Here Son, Merry Christmas" and he handed me an envelope. I remember kissing him good night and my sadness at not getting my bike.

I took the envelope and lay on my bed before opening it, I couldn't think what could possibly be in there. When I opened the envelope my world crashed in on me, inside were dozens of small pieces of paper, on each was a date and an amount; July 23rd - 18cents ; August 17th - 37cents ; September 7th - 12cents. He had known about me all along! I had been introduced to my first taste of devastation and I was filled with guilt and pain. I'm not sure if I slept at all that night, I remember the morning, hearing the noises downstairs as my brothers and sisters opened their presents. But no way could I go down there, I had thought that I was so smart but I had been caught. The foolishness of my stealing had cost me my first bicycle and what else besides?

The happy noises continued for an eternity and everyone got what they wanted but I just wanted to die. I heard calls for me to come downstairs, I tried not to hear. I was humbled and shamed, I had my present already, it was here on these pieces of paper. They kept calling me and their words penetrated my gloom. After a silence I heard Joel finally shout "Come see your bike!" I raced down and there it was, a brand new maroon Schwin, with a chromed headlight and a reflector on the tail fender and... did I cry. I went across the room and buried my face in my father's chest and I cried like hell. My brothers and sisters couldn't figure it out and they never did because that moment, that big lesson, was between my Dad and me. He was a wonderful man.

I became a captain at St.Emmas and had responsibilities and I won awards for singing, oratory and all of that and I became really involved in the choir and the glee club, the church was a way of life and practically the whole world in the south in those days. My mother would often listen to me sing at home, she taught me how to push the air up through my chest and get a proper tone and to sing the words clearly all the time, she would yell 'I can't hear you William! I can't hear the words, believe the words!' and she would make me start all over again. I was also a member of the band, I learned how to play the clarinet a little because the band played at the Girls School you see and I always wanted to get close to those girls!

I LEFT HOME AT 15 and headed for New York. My grandmother lived there and she kept inviting me to go so I had her there to visit. Roy, a buddy from my neighbourhood talked me into going with him as a stowaway. It was the summer of 1930, back then the Clyde-Mallory Line ran a car-ferry between Miami and New York with stops in Charleston and Jacksonville, they carried 60 or 70 automobiles and about 400 passengers, Jacksonville was a very busy port then and there was heavy traffic up and down the coast and a lot of Caribbean trade.

We must have been crazy to stowaway but New York was the place to be and I was lucky I had my grandmother there I could head for. We picked the S.S. Shawnee which sailed from the dock at Bay Street at 5am. It would move out the St.Johns River to Maryport where it would drop the pilot. The city of New York was over a 1,000 miles north and we were on an adventure so we didn't think it through we just did it, but we knew enough to know that we had to stay hidden until after the pilot had been taken off because once at sea, the ship would not turn back to port just to return a couple of stowaways.

Roy and I hid in the anchor hole, which was a stupid place to hide, it wasn't that big and almost filled with the powered capstan and when that anchor chain started coming up all hell broke loose, eels, crabs, and seaweed poured into the compartment. It was lethal, if we had tangled in those huge chain links, forget it! We were both scared to death and when that anchor was finally up the only thing still shaking was me and Roy and we were ready to throw in the towel there and then but we rolled up tight and held out until we knew the pilot had been dropped off.

We opened the hatch and climbed out of that hell-hole and a deck-hand appeared out of the sun and grabbed our hair and marched us off to the Deck Officer. We told our pre-arranged story, how I had to get to New York because my Grandmother was sick. The officer laughed, we must have been a pathetic sight covered in the crud from the anchor hole. He un-capped a tube and shouted down to the kitchen. 'Hey Cookie, I got a couple of dishwashers for ya' When we heard his reply 'OK find some place for them to bunk and put 'em to work!' we were thrilled, we knew that we'd get to New York.

The kitchen was busy getting ready for the passengers dinner and we hung around feeling sorry for ourselves until one of the waiters got us settled in. Roy got a blanket to sleep on some crates in the pantry and I was put in a small aft deck fo'c'sle. I had the floor because the bunk was taken by a man who was lying there when I was led in, for some reason he was called '64'. I knew he was different but at 15 I didn't know what a fag was, he was much older than me and big and strong. He kidded me about being caught so quickly after the ship was at sea 'Now they'll work your ass off, for free' he thought that was really funny.

That kitchen on the Shawnee was something else, a noisy boiling hell but the food must have been good because this was an expensive ferry bringing wealthy people from the north with their cars down to Florida for some sun. That first night I was trying to roll with the ship, washing enormous piles of dishes and by the time it got to 10.30 with the noise and stink from the kitchen and the heat and the swell I was tired and feeling really seasick. I was very relieved when I was finally able to get to my bed. I was gasping for air on the floor of this tiny cabin trying to hold back the sea-sickness when in came '64'. He saw that I was sick and he was very nice.

He told me that my sickness wouldn't last forever and he patted my head and asked me if I would be his special friend, then he left and got me some ice-cream to settle my stomach. I didn't know much about life. I had messed around with girls the way that young boys do and I had heard about homosexuals but what did I know? I was sea-sick and that's all I could think about. He was a big dude and when he started taking off his boots and his trousers and getting under the blanket with me I realised I was in trouble.

He went to work on me and started trying to pull down my pants, I was panic-stricken and bolted for the hatch but he grabbed my leg and started shouting and we got into a terrible fight. It was pitch black and it was confusion and pain as we flailed around amongst the gear on deck. I was in fear of my life and I fought like crazy. We ended up on the rail and he banged his knee hard and fell over the side. I heard the splash as he hit the water. He was still shouting at me when I ran in a panic, to the galley steward who whisked me up to the night-watch officer.

The steward said. "One of the stowaways wants to report a man overboard. Sir" The officer looked up from his chart and asked "Who?" he looked like 'So what, who cares' "64 sir" and he acted like we had lost a can of tomatoes over the side, he just shrugged. I was panic-stricken we were steaming away! The officer shook his head and then he yelled in my face "Hell, boy we have niggers falling overboard all the time" and he went back to his chart as if nothing had happened. The cook told me later that he would probably make it to the shore as we weren't that far out and I just hoped that I wouldn't bump into him again. It felt like my welcome to the real world.

I was frightened of New York for a while, with the tall buildings and the bustle and noise of all the people it was so different to Jacksonville. I'll never forget when I got off the ship and they said just take that train and it will take you to 125th Street and you will be right close to where you are going and so I went down into the subway, the doors opened and closed so fast and I was so green I never got on and the guy beside me said 'Where are you going son?'

I stayed with my Grandmother in Harlem for that summer vacation and she took me to the Theatres and I remember singing on the street with her in the storefront church choirs. Then I had to go home to college, Florida Memorial College in St. Augustine which was 100% Negro then of course. I remember the principal there Nathan W. Collier, he used to say to me 'Billy the only way you can prove you are as good as anybody else is to be better than anybody else'. It was the sort of college where you learned trades like brick-laying and decorating, that sort of thing but I was on a liberal arts course and there weren't many of those! Those were rough days in St. Augustine, we were never really accepted in the town. The Klan practically used the open streets for pistol practice. I always kept contact with my friends at Florida Memorial College and I did charity concerts throughout my career in aid of the college foundation.

I sang in church as far back as I can remember, I liked to sing because it was fun and at college I began to do some serious music. I would travel around the state, from church to church, singing with the choir and with that kind of practice I got pretty good. I also learned how to store songs in my head which is fundamental for a singer and I got the solo spots in the choir and I sang on the radio in Jacksonville on WJAX and WMBR with a choir quartet, we called ourselves 'The Radio Four', not exactly catchy. That was around the time I dropped out of college because my family, even though my parents both worked in reasonably well-paid jobs, couldn't afford to keep me there, I was the eldest of six kids remember.

The principal Mr.Collier practically built that place up single-handed. He understood why I had to leave and he wrote me all sorts of letters of recommendation that got me a start at Columbia in New York. My father had dreams of me becoming a lawyer and I left home with the intention of working through my studies and I had to look for work immediately. I'd received a taste of the music business with the choir and my father knew that I'd try and earn through singing, so he had given me a letter to Duke Ellington, he knew his father in Washington DC.

Edward Kennedy Ellington my father said 'Might be able to help you, he is a butler's son and is a fine cultured gentleman' He also had the most famous band in the country at that time so as soon as I got to New York I looked for the Duke in Harlem and eventually I found him at the Apollo Theatre. I went back-stage and sent in the letter and he allowed me to see him in his dressing room. It was March and a freezing cold night, I had walked all around Harlem from one pot-bellied stove to another, I was from Florida and I just didn't know it could be that cold in New York. He took one look at me and said "Son you need a coat" and he sent someone out and he bought me a new coat. He was a graphic artist as well as a musical genius and he told me that while he was up and coming in Washington he had painted billboards during the day, he said I had to keep singing, keep working and learning and you'll get a break. He gave me a few dollars and so from that first meeting I was a Duke Ellington fan and I was always with him every chance I got.

My maternal grandmother, Virginia Knight, had left Orlando years before leaving her daughters, my mother and her sister Lilia, to be raised in Brunswick, Georgia with a church family called Dent. My Grandma was big in the choir and wouldn't sail east with the Portuguese because she wouldn't leave her friends, but later on even she headed north to New York. My Grandmother had tremendous powers of concentration, ‘If you can concentrate you can succeed’, she often told me that. She was a seamstress for Brooks Brothers, making the costumes for The Cotton Club revues and for the big shows, sometimes for the Ziegfeld's Follies.

The follies always wore extraordinary costumes with exotic head dresses, she took me to work with her sometimes and as a special treat we’d go to see the shows her handiwork had contributed to. I can remember the original Porgy and Bess. I grew up in Harlem with my Grandmother, she loved show-business and always encouraged me to sing. Later on when I dropped out of college she was co-conspirator with me for a while when my father believed I was still attending. My grandmother had a friend, Carrie Wells whose son Dickie Wells had an after-hours spot that was famous.

AND HE GAVE ME a job there to help wherever it was needed and one night I was singing, washing dishes and Dickie said 'You've got a nice voice kid, why don't you sing around the tables?' It was more an order than a question, they didn't have a stage or anything and I became a singing waiter, many places did that in those days, some had over 100 tables all waiting to be fed and entertained. I had always enjoyed singing gospel but now I had to learn some new songs daily because you couldn't sing the same songs all the time. My favourites were 'Melancholy Baby' and 'If I Had My Life To Live Over Again' which was a laugh for a young waiter to sing.

The customers were a mixture of entertainers, mob-guys and wealthy whites looking for a good time in Harlem and straightaway I began to meet famous people. Joe E Lewis and Laurel & Hardy, Dutch Schultz who was a beer baron from the Bronx came in with a mob carrying violin cases and that was just the first night. I used to take groups of white folks around the clubs sometimes as a kind of guide and I would take orders and run across the alley for some fried chicken. I bought extra food with my tips to throw to people who lived on the street as I ran by, those were hard times but New York was a fantastic place to be and the centre of everything.

I remember in one night I met Tallulah Bankhead, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. I asked Miss Bankhead 'Who's the little man they're all fussing over' and she said in that deep voice of hers 'His name is Irving Berlin and he writes songs, dear boy' I found out later just who he was. He writes songs Ha! Tallulah became a special person in my life, we hit it off pretty good and we became an item in the gossip columns, that is, we started to go around together. Tallulah was the first 'famous' person I knew and she'd take me to the mid-town bistros and Broadway musicals and she was a real stayer, it could be 8am and she'd nudge me and ask 'OK! Where are we going now Billy boy?'

Dickie Wells was my first job in the business, the place where I really began to try and be an entertainer, every night was an experience singing around the tables to different people. I became a favourite of Dutch Schultz who was quite a rough feller, he gave me a $100 tip one night just to sing a song he liked and I thought 'I'm going to put this waiters tray down for good and sing for my supper' Pretty soon I was offered a singing-spot in a new place called The Ubangi Club, it was a brand-new club because a rival mob had moved the old club out into the street.

I worked at the Ubangi Club for about 18 months, I had just done a spot with The Willie Bryant Band, who had a driving swing sound, some of their arrangements were by Benny Carter. I was being paid $35 a week to sing with any band that came along and Erskine Hawkins approached me and offered $50 a week to tour with his orchestra so I leapt at the chance. The band were playing the Harlem Opera House and I think Joe Glaser had just got them on a tour. We left New York the next week and we travelled all over the country and I had to learn how to sing with a band which was very important. We did 185 one-nighters almost non-stop, you had to get to the next place as fast as possible and that was a tremendous amount of road travel by bus on bumpy roads and often through the night. It was hard work and you couldn't really sing very well under those pressures but singing with that band was great experience.

They were all southern boys from Birmingham, Alabama and like many of the swing bands then the nucleus was a group of music students from a Negro College in the south, Haywood Henry on baritone sax and the Bascomb brothers. In fact many colleges sponsored dance orchestras and if a band made any money the college could raise funds that way. If they made it big the band paid back the sponsorship, bought new instruments, re-cycled the old ones back to the college and hit the road and that's exactly what Erskine had done. We travelled around on the old T.O.B.A. circuit, the Theater Owners Booking Association which was the circuit all the black bands and shows followed that everyone used to call Tough On Black Asses! The main hotels were closed to us and the rooming houses that would have us were often crawling with vermin with terrible food and so we would stay with a network of black families that would rent out rooms, so the band was spread out all around town and it got very complicated sometimes.

Most of the time we got good home-cooking and when we travelled some guys in the band would carry pots and pans around with their instruments. Those people in the boarding houses were mainly hard-working, church-going people with houses full of sofas. They were usually musical homes and were pleased to have musicians around and I remember many nights singing along to Aeolian player pianos. Those road tours wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for those people and that carried on right up until the late 1940's when finally some of the lily-white hotels began to admit black entertainers and I was the first to stay in many of them.

The Erskine Hawkins Band travelled from New York to the centres of black populations, Chicago, Kansas City, Washington and Baltimore, with a whole lot of country in between. From New Orleans the riverboats could go north-east up the Mississippi towards Chicago or turn west up the Missouri River to Kansas City which was a vibrant place then, a real jazz city and Kansas had a big place to play, The El Tarion Ballroom which was mostly white but we also played the black places after hours. On one-nighters we played Toledo, all through Ohio and on to Pittsburgh, sometimes you lost track of where you were. In the South it was a little different, you always knew exactly where you were then. There was a saying that if you looked sideways at a white man in the south you'd better head north and fa-yast!

I learned to sing in tempo with Erskine and I worked on learning songs quickly so I could pick a new song up and perform it within the hour almost. I also saw a great deal of the country and I was a little bemused at times because I was frequently mistaken for white in southern towns and abruptly ordered to 'get out of nigger town' and I had to explain many times that I was a negro. It was a nonsense but that was the era, I remember we played in a warehouse once that had a rope down the middle with whites on one side and negroes on the other. Other places had white dances first and negroes sat on the balcony and watched and then we'd do exactly the same show the other way around.

We played 'Two-way Picnics' open-air concerts that were segregated but shared the same music. The townsfolk would set-up a bandstand and the white population danced on one side and black on the other and they all kept their distance from each other. That was the way it was, it was seperate and you couldn't buck the system. It was rare when we played for coloured people only in the south and the reason was economic, 'They didn't have nothing to hire us with' as the saying goes. In those days there was even a law in some places that said it was legal to punch a Negro in the face as long as you paid the county a small fine afterwards!

In some areas the Klan killed almost at will and the murder rate was also high between black people, if you were a good worker you could kill anyone down there as long as they were black too and not a good worker. But the south is a very beautiful place and the people are wonderful, the weather is awesome and their heritage has been shaped by those forces in a melting pot of the people of the world. America fought its only civil war on that soil and thousands of black soldiers died too, fighting for freedom. It gave a whole generation in the south the experience that extreme violence was the norm and for some the aftershock of slavery and the civil war induced a state of rootlessness and self-destructive habits, an echo that can still be heard today.

It is the reason that many black people don't like to even think about the past because of the often painful memories. Whenever there is conflict it takes people a long time to get over it, no one likes pain and so things that should be talked about aren't and the folk memories linger on and behaviour is endlessly repeated until someone breaks the chain. History is usually brutal and I suppose Americans like to look for something new all the time but many people don't even acknowledge the often simple achievements of their own forefathers. We can always learn from the past, no matter how bleak the story is.

It was a totally different world back then compared to today and so long ago we are talking evolution Music does not have a racial barrier and many people were able to overcome the terrible prejudice that was around in those days. As entertainers we liked to give everyone a good time, life in the south was very different and much harder compared to the north. I knew the scene, the frequent lynchings, the fear in the air on those hot nights, life was sometimes dangerous which was one of the reasons I had left Florida and headed north like thousands of others. When bands got back to New York or wherever they would often display a sign 'After a Triumphal Tour of the South' like they had been to a war but also because we nearly all came from the south and most still had relatives there and family news travelled around that way.

I loved Harlem and for a long time after I left Erskine I was just happy to be working the clubs singing for my supper with trios or a piano player. I still sang with Erskine's band occasionally, they practically had a residence at the Savoy Ballroom, Jimmie Mitchell who played alto-sax took over the singing duties when I wanted to sing on my own and I knew that was the future but back then I had no style but I had a good voice and in those years when I came up I was lucky because a high tenor voice was very popular. I was at Smalls Paradise when clubs downtown became interested in me because we used to bring white people uptown to Smalls and any club that wanted white people, who were the big spenders, tended to hire performers that could attract them.

THERE WERE CLUBS ALL over Manhattan then and I was around at the beginning of what became famous as 52nd Street because 52nd Street had the most clubs clustered in one area so a new club would always open very close to another and so on. Harlem in those days was a sanctuary of fun, it was a terrific time when everyone seemed to be happy. There was no drug problem and most of all, which was relevant to me, entertainers were always given the chance to display their talents. Seventh Avenue was really glamorous in those days, people walked in the evenings dressed in their finery and there were cafes and nightclubs everywhere with classy well-dressed people who would come in from all over the city to be entertained.

I met people like Harry Richmond and Ann Pennington and I made pretty good money for that kind of situation and then we had WPA at the Lafayette Theatre on 7th Avenue and I met Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Joe Cotton, Mercedes McCambridge, Jose and Mel Ferrer, they were all working for $250 a week at the Work Progress Administration theatre, the WPA on Roosevelt. And it was a smaller world, I knew singers like Morton Downey, Mabel Mercer, Sophie Tucker and Robert Merrill, great musicians Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington and people in the news like Walter Winchell, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Damon Runyon and Nick Kenny.

Before the war on 52nd Street between 5th and 8th Avenue there must have been around 20 clubs, which meant you could go from one to another all night. All kinds of places, Jimmy Ryans, Tony's Wife, The Onyx, The Spotlite, Connie's Inn, The Three Deuces. It was a fluke period in history, there had been Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, many great musicians at the turn of the century and lots of blues solo performers, the soul searchers. Then after the great war, from about 1920 a tremendous amount of black music came about, it was like a tidal wave and Harlem was at the centre of all Negro culture. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement of writers and poets too, like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and James Baldwin, it was a freak period, a freak of history.

It was so busy everywhere, I was playing so many clubs back then and when I was hot sometimes I played both sides of the street in the same night. In lots of the places I had no idea who owned what, some were managed for owners you never met, or groups of people and no one knew which group exactly. You might have a lawyer say, with a former liquor salesman, or combinations of groups and part owners, they changed hands often because some of the clubs were very lucrative. I remember John Kirby a bass-playing band-leader, I worked The Onyx with him. The guy who owned that club lost all his money gambling in one night and wound up as the bar-tender. And then you had family run places, or run by a relative of someone that used to own the place. Of course clubs opened and closed all the time, well no club ever closed it 'shuttered' that was the expression you heard then, a club was said to be 'near shuttering' when it was struggling.

I met guys who were crime-figures, it was impossible not to, bootlegging had been a multi-million dollar business and their tentacles were still everywhere. The top nightclub in New York, The Copacabana itself at one time was partly supported by Frank Costello, boss of one of the New York families. It was impossible to work around the clubs of New York and later the Vegas hotels without being friendly with some mafiosi. They were not convicted, they were not in jail, not under house- arrest and they were always charming to the entertainers.

In my early days in New York I knew 'Pretty Boy' Amberg, he was one of a type who would wave me over to his table, full of his henchmen and ask me to sing his favourite songs, sometimes he would call from a hotel and ask me to sing down the telephone to his girlfriends. One night Pretty Boy argued with a waiter over a plate and shot out every light-bulb in the place! The night there was over, everyone had cleared out and listened to the shooting going on from the street outside. The next week I heard that he returned and paid the owner for the damage. He died in a gang shooting on Brooklyn Bridge, his car was machine-gunned and then set on fire. The New York Times ran the news every week that some hoodlum, whose table I had sung to, had been found shot dead!

The mob owned many of the clubs so you had no idea who you were talking to sometimes and there was no way you would ever turn down a simple request for a song, that was your job as an entertainer. At the least you might never work again and because some of those guys would go nuts over the slightest insult, it could be dangerous to argue. So whenever I was asked a request I'd smile and sing the song and wink at the people at the table thinking 'OK Don't shoot me I'm only the singer!' Ha! There's truth in that cliche and some nights I really needed to have that line ready.

One of those nights I had my wife Martha with me, I turned from the stage to see a guy tickle her under the chin and lick her ear so I walked over and playfully kicked his ass and when no-one laughed I knew I'd made a big mistake. He stared at me like a wild animal and left the room, after the show someone told me who he was and I had to go and see Frank Costello myself and tell him what had happened to clear the air. I was scared that he would come after me simply so he could save face and I figured that if his boss told him 'no way' that would save me, which it did. The guy got his own back a few weeks later when I found myself surrounded in the john one night, the lights went out and someone cracked a gun-butt over my head. I figured it was him and I was scared to hell and back but otherwise OK, I just had to sing with a bloody collar that night.

IN ANY LARGE CITY there are some very rough characters and a perpetual power struggle, an underworld war going on, but usually they only kill their own. In fact I remember when Dutch Schultz was murdered after he had publicly threatened to kill Manhattan DA Tom Dewey. The mob feared the fall-out from such a thing, so they had him killed. After my performance I was always introduced to the owners and their friends and asked to have a drink with them. It was a kind of prestige, for the hoodlums to make it appear that they had a singer on tap, it was good for their image and I met many people that held a peculiar fascination, character-wise. But I was never exactly sure what anyone did for a living.

I never knew the details, because that of course was dangerous. What you don't know can't hurt you, so you don't ask questions, or you could find work hard to find and someone could get the wrong idea, many people carried guns and most had permits to do so. I had a friend, Oscar Rubin who was a mob guy, he always carried a gun and he had a piece of the Stable Club - the checkroom and that's all he told me. His job appeared to be to shake down the customers, search them to see who was carrying. It was a fight to survive in the competitive world of the after-hours spots and club-land, bottles would come flying onto the bandstand sometimes and there was often brawls and cursing. It could be rough and any entertainer from that era would say the same.

In those days it was a case of literally singing for my supper, they paid me off in pig foot! There were plenty of places to work back then, everybody went out for live entertainment and it was usually a whole heap of fun and there was plenty of money floating around. I sang somewhere every- night and my sole interest was in my music, my performance. I used to see every performer I could and I studied the songs and taught myself the lyrics because you had to be able to deliver as many songs as a juke-box, it was what being a professional entertainer was all about. I studied songs like it was a religion and I watched and learned from Russ Colombo and I liked the sound of Bing Crosby, Frank Parker, all of them.

Before the war New York had a hustle and bustle with people cooking on the street, the street sellers sold anything and the city vibrated with music. Harlem had all-night clubs and restaurants where you could eat pig tails, fried chicken and biscuits, pig-ears and greens, red beans and rice, all that wholesome southern home-cooking. The Harlem after-hours clubs, you could not get a drink legally after 2am in New York City, were always the most successful because it was easier to control everything there than in the white part of town, so they were actually the safest and it sounds unimaginable now but crime was rare.

In the main everyone did 'what the man said' so the boozing was out in the open but firmly controlled and after all, in some places there were 20 waitresses and a uniformed doorman so if there was a raid, you just couldn't hide everything. Those places were a very influential meeting place between blacks and whites and it was the music that brought people together and of course the booze which was usually served out of tea-cups. I remember a baaad bourbon called ‘Chicken Cock’ it was eye- watering stuff but there was rarely any trouble, because trouble meant big problems.

I played The Cotton Club in a show with Duke Ellington and Bill Robinson and decades later if I met anyone that was there I felt like embracing them, not because they saw the show but because they were in Harlem at the same time. The Cotton Club, that place had some history, I believe it opened around 1926 as the Club De Luxe owned by Jack Johnson the former World Heavyweight Champion, some would say the greatest boxer of all time. He sold it to a syndicate in 1929, the front man was a nice guy called Herman Stark but it was owned by bootleggers.

It was the second floor of a typical two-storey building right in the heart of Harlem and when I arrived in New York, the first time I walked up the stairs into The Cotton Club I could barely believe it. The bandstand was a replica of a Southern Mansion with columns and weeping willows. It had the backdrop and the walls painted with slave quarters out in the fields with log-cabin bits and pieces everywhere, even the street frontage had a log-cabin effect. The stage was the veranda, behind the band that played on the steps to the mansion. The dancers wore string costumes, very brief and all the waiters dressed in red tuxedos, as if butlers in the big house.

It was a big room too, lit with crystal chandeliers with red gingham cloths on the tables. It was sleepy-time down south, so the whites would feel as though they were being entertained and fussed over by their slaves. The name says it all, that's what The Cotton Club was all about and it wasn't the first, Al Capone had a Cotton Club in Cicero, Illinois until the police closed it in 1930, there were places called the Cotton Club all over the north, for the obvious reason. The white audience respected us and our music, but it was very much an-us-and-them situation in those days.

It wasn't a case of social awareness, the situation existed and everywhere reflected the values of the time. I worked with Bojangles Robinson who was born in the 1890's and people from that period were extremely polite and often servile to the white folks. He grew up that way and when a white guy asked him to dance, no matter how he was asked he would dance away until someone threw him a dime and he'd flick the coin into his pocket with a shuffle and many negro entertainers started their careers on the streets doing just that.

Bill Robinson was a very sharp dresser, he wore high-fashioned expensive clothes and when on stage he wasn’t a minstrel, in joke clothes like the cut-off pants and tails and whitened lips. He was always smart and he told me often 'Don't be that nigger for 'em Billy' He billed himself as 'The World's Greatest Tap-Dancer' and he probably was because he was a very rich man when I knew him. I remember walking into the Cotton Club with Bojangles, he was wearing a camel-hair coat and when we got to the dressing room he emptied his coat pockets and he had a bank-roll in one pocket and a gold-plated revolver in the other.

The Cotton Club was the most popular club in Harlem among whites and could hold an audience of 500 plus, but except for black celebrities and there were very few of those, no black person could get a table there. The locals weren't allowed in and it wasn't just their colour, it was very expensive. In fact the entire time that prohibition had existed there wasn't any black clientele allowed in any of the major clubs in New York, except for a few small after-hours joints where whites could also go after leaving The Cotton Club, The Ubangi Club or Smalls Paradise, those were the fun places that stayed open till daybreak and of so course, going to a club in Harlem for anyone, was quite an adventure in those years.

The music was the finest in The Cotton Club and every important Negro entertainer played there. Duke Ellington started his rise to the big time when it had a radio link, he replaced King Oliver and his band, who had come up from New Orleans with Louis Armstrong. After Duke, Cab Calloway really built the place up and the club became known nation-wide because of its popular radio show, it had a live-wire once a week. It was the premier negro venue in the country for a long time and you had to be very good to play there because the pay was the tops. My style and colour was enough to get me on the stage performing and also enough to bar me from being a patron, so in fact the only way I could get into many places was by singing on stage.

The Cotton Club was so successful a rival got ready to open after a tremendous amount of publicity - The Plantation Club - but it was torn apart the night before opening. The fancy mirrored walls and the bar were demolished and thrown out into the street, The Cotton Club owners didn't like competition 'The Beer Wars' the musicians called it. But I had no compunction about playing The Cotton Club, it was a very good job and there was good money. The 'cream' of society were entertained there and that probably helped to broaden some minds. I once saw Walter Winchell there with Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson and the G-Men. Jesse Owens, the Olympic Champ was there resplendent in white-tails complete with a white top hat. We may not have had our days back then but we all showed off and we sure as hell had our nights!

It was terrific entertainment and because it was one of those periods when everything was new, crazes started there and swept the country. The new dances like 'Doing The Truckin' 'The Suzy-Q' and 'The Shorty George', you can see traces of those dances in musical shows even now. It was racist yes and black entertainers performed in racist shows but I've always believed that you have to change the system from within, to move gradually, not a few people doing everything suddenly but by most people doing just a little bit, slowly. If you try using violence and that sort of pressure you're back to the French Revolution. And we are talking about the 1930's when there was just nowhere else to perform that was as important as The Cotton Club.

THE MUSIC OF THAT period was innovative and many of the people you met in the clubs then were only there for the music, in fact there were places that never sold any booze, the musicians were the sole attraction. I was the only straight singer that the jazzmen would listen to and in those days I was singing like Morton Downey a very high tenor. I sang 'Trees' and 'The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise'. I worked with Stuff Smith and Thelma Washington, one week I was singing at Kelly's Stable with Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins and the Nat Cole Trio, imagine that line-up, those were really the days. I played the Stable often, they had sawdust on the floor and a mural of a trotter on a racetrack behind the band with coach-lamps everywhere, those rooms had character.

I was lucky to be around at Minton’s where bop began with Charlie Parker, I heard him announce 'suddenly my fingers can play what's in my head' that was his joke, he worked hard for years on his sax playing. He was what musicians used to call a 'sender' a 'follow this if you dare' type, a really good one like he was, is a kind of prophet. Henry Minton was a numbers operator and like many his club was a front, but it was where all the hot-jazz people hung out. There was a resident guitarist, Charlie Christian who practically lived there. I remember one morning over breakfast he played thirty improvised choruses of St. Louis Blues, people were counting them off between mouthfuls as he played a strange electrified guitar he had made himself.

In those days pioneering musicians were all over the place and many played for food and drink just because they loved to play together. That could sometimes be a problem, some club-owners and Mintons was one of those places, would 'hire' a group of musicians who would jam together all night and get a good crowd at the bar but be paid nothing, just a few drinks. Mintons was a converted china warehouse on West 118th Street in Harlem, places were often packed to the rafters with money flowing over the bar and nowhere else. That was how the Musicians Union started, but we all used to learn the business in clubs like that, I learned the game that way.

When I wasn't performing I used to watch people like Sophie Tucker and I would arrange to meet them and they would always try and help. Tommy Lyman told me once, I had asked him, I said 'Tommy how do I get a break? What is a break, really, for a singer?' Back then I had a little following you know, and he said 'Billy keep singing, because one of these days you'll sing the right song for the right person at the right time; and that's a break!' Well my first break was on the radio and the first song I had that was any kind of hit was ‘Diane’

I named my daughter after that song which was my favourite for a long time. I was on the radio 5 Days a week for a whole year before the war and 'Diane' was my theme song. I was the boy singer and Dinah Shore was the girl singer, WHN in New York with ‘Merle Pitt and his Commanders’ and that's where I first started making fans, on the radio. While I was on the other wavelengths were carrying the racing results, so for the folk who weren't horse-players it was me or nothing.

The impressionists started imitating my passionate rendition of 'Diane' even in those days and I made a hit record out of it for Victor. That was the first time I realised that people would get to know my name when a guy said to me one day 'Billy Daniels? Hey! Are you the singer that's on the radio?' I was making my mark as an entertainer and meeting more and more people in the business. I started getting invited to parties and at one of Elsa Maxwell's I met Lana Turner whilst I was appearing at Kelly's Stable and we hit it off Lana and me and that night we ended up at her hotel room at the Carlton on Central Park.

I met a few more times and then she turned up one night at The Red Rooster with Howard Hughes, she played it very cool and we danced together. Howard never danced he just watched and listened, like he always did and he didn't know anything about Lana and me. When they left during the ride downtown Lana asked Howard to give me a break and a few days later I found myself under contract to the Hughes Tool Company of Hollywood making $300 a week. I then had to go out to Hollywood which also meant that Lana and I could be together quietly, she told me that Howard figured that he might be able to sell my contract on someday.

The only place Lana and I could be seen in public in Hollywood was a small club called 'Brothers' on Central Avenue, even then Lana would be with her maid and I would have to pretend to bump into them there. I never saw the inside of a film studio but I was being paid by Howard Hughes, he was paying me a retainer for doing nothing. It was crazy and I knew it couldn't last. The studios were very powerful organisations and were capable of some heavy things and of course eventually somebody told somebody about Lana and me.

One morning I was woken by a phone call from her manager Ben Cole, he said 'I'd like to meet you downstairs' I met him over breakfast and he told me that the studio couldn't permit a scandal developing around Lana and a black guy and he was deadly serious, so I headed back to New York fast! I kept up my friendship with Howard Hughes though and for years he would call me anytime day or night and ask me to sing his favourite song ‘Laura’ down the phone to him. I could never figure out how he kept track of me, but Howard Hughes did remarkable things, he once flew himself around the world in four days and in his own plane.

I was playing the big night-spots all over America and Canada by then but sure as fate the phone would ring sometime or other, no matter where I was, or what time of night or day and it would be Howard wanting me to sing him something. I know he passed the phone to his girl mostly, then it was easier for me to sing a love song. I remember once joining some friends at their table in a New York club. It was very late and we were in the middle of drinks and telling a few stories when the waiter brought the telephone over to me, 'Billy' said the voice on the other end 'Sing 'Laura' would you?' It was Howard calling from Los Angeles.

'Laura' was always his favourite, I hate to think what I sounded like over 3,000 miles of crackling telephone lines with the background of a noisy club. But I always obliged, he was still sending me the cheque and Howard was happy and I never questioned him about the arrangement. It was a truly lucrative and unusual sideline that lasted for about seven years. I got to sing to Hughes on the telephone more that I got to talk to him. I saw him now and then just by chance, at the odd times when our paths crossed and I once asked him just how rich he was. He looked at his watch took a deep breath and said 'I get richer every second' and then he stared into my eyes with his famous death ray look that said the subject was closed.

THE WAR INTERRUPTED MY career of course, like it did everyone else's but I was one of the lucky ones simply because I survived. I knew there would be a war sooner or later, American sailors were dying in the Atlantic from U-Boat attacks long before Pearl Harbour and they were mostly black. I joined the Merchant Marine and earned my able-bodied seaman ticket in 1943, first I was a wiper on tankers going to a Trinidad rendezvous, then a steward and a cook third-class when later on I was on convoys along with what seemed like every other sailor in the world. I first sailed across the Atlantic to the middle east on a ship named Felix H Tossic that was the flag of a 95 ship fleet, all carrying airplane bombs and ammunition.

The convoy commander Captain Cyrus Fiekson was a hell of a guy, 32 of his ships were lost on that trip and you could have read a book on deck every night something was always burning up real close but he just ploughed on full steam ahead. It was terrible and I think a generation that goes through a war tends to see things very differently once it's over and life takes on a whole new intensity. I was proud that I had made my contribution and I was lucky enough to be able to perform between trips, so I kept my hand in. It was a very busy period for entertainers during the war, everywhere was full of service people looking for fun, workers in defence plants were making big money, men and women and they all went out looking for a good time.

'That Old Black Magic' was a song I just picked up off the piano. I played in Atlantic City, at Club Harlem, for several summers with Larry Steele, a brilliant producer who had been putting together exciting bills and I used to emcee his shows and do my own spot and close with an all cast finale. I had been the resident singing master of ceremonies at Leroy 'Pops' Williams summer shows since 1937 when there was a two-block stretch that was hopping 24 hours a day all summer, between Atlantic and Baltic Avenues, Kentucky Avenue was the street and Club Harlem was the place.

I was back in town after a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf and in rehearsal for the Club Harlem opening. I had to follow an exciting set of dancers from Trinidad, who shook the room Boom! Boom! Boom! Caribbean music was very popular like the Andrews Sisters hit ‘Rum And Coca-Cola’ it always had a great beat. Those dancers used bongos, clappers and even flaming torches to really build a rhythm and grab the audience, pretty gals under limbo bars with fire licking at their chests who would go under and then light a cigar from the flames!

Then as they exited to stage right I was to come on stage left and pick up the audience. How can you follow an act like that? In rehearsal for the show I knew I would let the audience down and I felt like I was watching the preparation for the biggest flop in the history of a place that was packed every week and I was down because I had recently lost my wife, Adreinne and I was way out of it at the time. I had even been thinking of staying at sea and leaving the business completely and here I was facing certain extinction following these Caribbean dancers.

I knew I had to find a song that would retain the tempo and the atmosphere so I talked to Coleridge Davis the resident pianist at the club. I remember he was playing finger exercises on 'Pennies From Heaven' when I found That Old Black Magic in a whole pile of music lying on the piano. It was written for a movie called 'Star Spangled Rhythm' starring Vera Zerina, a War Morale picture set in the Caribbean with music by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, later they told me that they had completed all the songs when right at the end of film-making the producer George Marshall called and requested another number to cover the dancing finale.

He called their office in New York from the set, Arlen had already left to catch a train back home to Pennsylvania, so Mercer jumped into a cab and caught Arlen before the train left Grand Central Station and they wrote the song in a cab riding back up Park Avenue. Well, there are hundreds of Tin Pan Alley stories like that, all are charming and all are as improbable as hell! Harold Arlen wrote some great music, in fact he wrote the revue shows at The Cotton Club in the 30's. they paid him $50 a week and all he could eat. In the film 'Star Spangled Rhythm' the song was sung by Johnny Johnson and it added to the film but the song had never really amounted to anything much.

The title immediately attracted me 'That Old Black Magic!' so I took the sheet music out onto the beach and I studied it and figured how could I do it differently. I had a summer-house in Atlantic City, I had the kids with me and my mother-in-law Mary the kids granny, lived with us. We walked the boardwalks and then we were on the beach for the afternoon, the kids were playing in the sand and I was reading the music. It was written as a ballad but I thought it might work with a different beat. The next morning Coleridge polished it and then we tried it in rehearsal and it was a natural. When the dance team bongoed their way off I ran on with the same tempo That old black magic has me in its spell. That old black magic that you weave so well and I was so tickled that the number was so perfect I forgot the words so I jumped off the stage and out into the audience and up onto the tables! Down and down I go, all around I go I was all over, up and down the stage, leading the band and maintaining the excitement and it went over big!

In those days nobody did that, nobody moved around, this was the Bing Crosby era, standing at the mike crooning and people immediately noticed me when I did it differently. Al Jolson, years earlier had got down on his knees as he sang but he was in costume playing a minstrel. ‘That Old Black Magic’ was one song that changed my entire life. It must have made several fortunes for Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and if you had told me on that first night I sang it that this song is going to take you to Hollywood and right around the world I would have felt like throwing a net over you! That song just wouldn't leave me alone in fact it became a part of me, people asked me all that summer and for decades after to 'Sing that song, you know, the one where you bounce around Billy'

The show that summer was such a hit Mercury Records in Chicago sent Art Talmage to Atlantic City and he signed me to a record deal before he had even heard me sing, and I recorded it in New York at the end of the season at The Club Harlem and it was instantly popular. The flip side was ‘I Concentrate On You’ a song that Mercury owned and pulled out of the files for me to try, it was a ballad that was more like the songs I usually sang. I had always tried hard to put the emotions of a song on show because I realised that I could capture audiences that way and when I combined the emotional rendition with dancing, things began to happen.

18

Performance Beyond Promise

Before Benny Payne my first regular pianist was a jazz player called Kenny Wyatt, in late 1945 we played a month on 52nd Street at The Spotlite Club, it became the Famous Door later on, with Charlie Parker and his combo. Charlie had Miles Davis on trumpet and Dexter Gordon on tenor and a white guy Stan Levy on drums, and I sang with Kenny at the piano alternating between sets with Charlie and the place was packed every night, like I said those were the days. Before that I sang with many different pianists, in fact in 1939-40 for a while it was Nat Cole. Nat didn't sing at all then, he was a wonderful jazz player known as the king of the ivories.

Benny Payne was a little older than me, he was Cab Calloway's pianist for years, and worked with Fats Waller before that. Benny was in the fabulous Blackbirds revues at the Cotton Club in the late twenties. Benny played with Cab when he started out as Cab Calloway and his Missourians and then in the Calloway Crew he toured England in 1934 and played the London Palladium. It's funny how things seem to tie up, Benny was in England with Cab in '34, the great Adelaide Hall sang with them on that trip and years later he played the same theatres with me. Benny was always a wonderful asset to me and it was a treat working with such a talent.

Benny played piano with some of the greatest, in fact he recorded duets with Fats Waller in 1928 'Benny Payne and Fats Waller on Two Pianos' they did ‘St Louis Blues’ and ‘After You've Gone’ and it was a marvellous recording, which is now a collectors piece. In his time with Cab's band Benny worked with Chu Berry, Illinois Jacquet, Ben Webster, Hilton Jefferson, wonderful sax players, Cab always had a great horn section in fact Dizzy Gillespie started in Cab's band. He had Milt Hilton on bass and Cozy Cole was the swing drummer. Benny was with Cab longer than anyone else because he was Cab's right hand and Benny could hold it all together on the piano and arrange music with the best of them.

Those band arrangers are the unsung heroes of the swing era, people like Don Redman and Sy Oliver could shape the sound a band produced more than the band leader himself. When they built those horn sections playing in harmony with the rest in syncopated rhythm and wove those jazz solos into all the popular tunes they were very influential and Benny knew all about that. Those swing bands battled with each other musically and Benny spent years with Cab working out new arrangements just to be different, everyone tried for a unique sound and the Calloway Crew were one of the most successful bands of the era. Benny was a terrific musician to have as an accompanist and on that piano could he play! He sang pretty good too, for my break sometimes he would imitate Fats Waller and sing ‘Ain't Misbehavin’ or sentimental ballads he often sang with Cab like ‘Sylvia’.

We always enjoyed performing at unexpected moments the glorious old spiritual ‘Nobody Knows The Trouble I Seen’ we would play that whenever the lights blew! ‘Old Man River’ was another good standby and that was actually the first song we tried together, we liked songs with a big finish. We quickly became very close and it was soon unthinkable for me to perform anywhere without Benny. Although we often rehearsed we could improvise on the spot and Benny remembered everything so if they clicked we kept them in.

I met Benny's father who was a Baptist Minister and he told me that he always knew that his son had outstanding musical talent, from an early age so he sent him for full-time music lessons when he was 12 saying 'If he must be a musician he should be the best there is' which was a very common attitude in those days, so Benny had received a strict musical training and he was actually a virtuoso pianist in the classics. It took a while for him to swing but he managed it, big time!

We first met in Harlem before the war and he would play for me every time he could, even when he was still working for Cab. After the war I asked Benny about working together. I said "What do you think?" because to my mind music is all rhythm and that was Benny's forte but I wasn't too hot on all of that and he said "We can do it, there's nothing to it. The arrangements will all be written for you and we can work everything out together. All you gotta do is sing"

And I did learn how to sing in rhythm and know the difference between various time signatures and keys and all of that. I really learned with Benny, he taught me the trade. When he came out of the Air Force, he didn't want to go back to Cab and we were great friends and I was doing pretty good at that point so I said "I've got a good booking coming up on the west side so come on Benny, come with me" and he did and we went right to the very top together, he was great.

I never thought that I would do well and become any sort of figure in the business at all, until I found Black Magic and then when I started to perform with Benny and we clicked it began to move along pretty quick. What really started our rise was a spot at The Park Avenue Restaurant, of course it was a premier spot in midtown Manhattan and a world away from Harlem. Benny and I took that on as a gamble, the owner Arnold Michaelman was teetering on the brink of a financial disaster and his friends suggested that he hire us to play, they had seen us getting it together and bringing in a white crowd at The Three Deuces on 52nd Street. We played our version of ‘Summertime’ and that was the trick with Benny, we played the standards but we always played our own arrangements. We entertained because you never knew exactly what you were going to hear, it was always our version of a song.

I sang ‘That Old Black Magic’ every night at The Park Avenue and it zoomed business, it was such a fabulous song and Benny could play that tune a hundred different ways. We had been booked at The Park Avenue, which was swanky, for two weeks and we stayed for six! And that was the beginning really for Benny and me, it was the spring of 1948. I still had the job to go to at Club Harlem in Atlantic City, which had been my regular job every summer. Most performers in those days had what they called an ace in the hole, a job you could fall back on if you needed a place to work, a place that you could call up at any time and say 'I'm available'.

Club Harlem was mine and Benny went to Watertown in New York for that summer and in the fall we got back together and we stayed together from then on. Then we got to The Riviera, The Copacabana, The Mocambo and The Paramount, big clubs and theatres east and west and I thought 'You know there is something' but I never dreamed it would last because why? Why would you think it could last? I had been singing for quite a while before I found Black Magic and it was a big success but even years later, when I went to London and opened the Palladium and sang for Her Majesty and Mountbatten and all of that, I still thought that they are going to get tired of me soon because there is always a feeling that this may be the last big number whenever you perform, sometimes you can feel lonely on stage believe me.

I FOUND THAT CERTAIN kinds of showmanship got the best audience reaction so almost unconsciously I came to use them more and more in my act. Back in the Ubangi Club days and at places like The Black Cat and Spivy's some of the Saturday night crowd would be so noisy they'd keep time with beer bottles, if they were paying any attention at all and an element of showmanship was always expected by a black audience. If you just stood there behind the mike like a dummy, they booed you off, so I'd beat out the rhythm with my body and pull facial expressions and dance, just to put a song over above the pandemonium. It was great experience and I learned that its no use just singing louder because you have a lousy audience, they simply shout at each other to compensate.

From the start I wanted to give my best, to perform and I got known for my gyrations and people started doing impressions of me and that gave me more exposure. They imitated the movement but it was the emotion I displayed that had inspired them. To me the lyrics of the song are everything and the reason for singing at all. I become the person the writer was talking about and I live the song like a dramatic actor because you cannot get so involved in the story that you develop a lump in your throat, then you can't sing. A good song will last forever and a great popular ballad is a high art that demands a total presentation like an opera.

When you hit that right the song almost performs itself and you have stepped aside and can enjoy the story along with the audience. The singer, the room and the audience become one and when that happens, well its intimate and you've really got them! I always try to sing inside a great melody and sing the rhythm of the story and have a good time, sometimes I use the lighting to alter the mood of the room and place a blue spotlight to bring out the colour of the red roses on the piano. The tricks of the trade, a good show is produced down to the last sigh but the art is to pretend that it's the first time every night.

There have been plenty of imitators of my style and I've never resented them in fact I've always been flattered. I suppose the most accurate was by my friend Sammy Davis Jnr, he even had a hit himself with 'Black Magic' and in England there was Dickie Valentine and Frankie Vaughn, I worked with all three and we sounded great together. To perform a good impression of other performers was a way a singer could be both humorous and versatile at the same time, you don't see too much of that today, its all a very serious business.

Sammy Davis had an impish sense of humour, I had some difficult songs to perform with him in Golden Boy a show we did on Broadway in '64-5. Typically one night, a split-second before my dramatic high note climax of ‘While The City Sleeps’ he whispered that my flies were undone and I lost my breath at the vital moment. Whenever Sammy was in the audience I would always introduce Black Magic as 'My best impression of Mr. Sammy Davis Jnr.' and he would usually come up and joke around on stage with us and we'd dance together.

He was an incredible dancer, very light on his feet and that was his talent. He grew up a kid in vaudeville in a family minstrel troupe and like me he had been in the business for a long time before he had any kind of success. It can be a stressful life sometimes and that running joke of his 'I open the refrigerator door, see the light and I automatically do twenty minutes' was based on truth, I know Sammy had trouble relaxing at times and he got into devil-worship for a period and crazy things, he had an enormous gun collection and his management was a complete mystery to me, he would never talk about that area and like many people in the business, he had his demons.

If you are careful any kind of success usually brings more, but you must always be well prepared and give your best performance because you just never know who might be out there listening. I was singing late one night in The Mocambo, in Hollywood, a club that was owned by one of the most wonderful people in the business, Charlie Morrison. I played there many times but on this particular night Benny and I did a few new songs and we sat at Charlie's table for a drink after the last show. We often worked on new arrangements with whisky and a smoke at 4am to relax. There was a guy sitting at the table and he said 'Charlie, Billy could sing that song of mine at the Oscar night'.

The song he had heard us perform was 'Be My Love', Mario Lanza had recorded it and made it famous and I thought surely Lanza will do it at the Oscars because I had only been fooling around with it. But this feller Nick Brosky had written the lyric and he said 'No, Billy the way you sing it, that's what I want to hear' So from that late-night meeting, I didn't know he was in the audience, I soon had Bob Hope telling me before I went on that 60 million people will hear you tonight, which was his idea of settling my nerves with his wry smile. That was the 1953 Oscars Ceremony at The Pantages Theatre, a proud night for me.

The TV Series I made for ABC was sponsored by 'The Vitamin Corporation of America' and I can't think why! It was on Sunday nights at 6.30 followed by a weekly news round-up hosted by Walter Winchell. It felt like an experiment at the time, TV was full of radio people in the early days and those huge cameras were cumbersome of course and very static. I was a club act all through, and before that a table singer so I was used to speaking to an audience close up so it was easy for me and I really wanted to be on television with a voice that was pure and strong by then, I could sing to the world.

We tried different things with room-sets and so on, walking out of doors under artificial snow and they even tried some camera tricks. It was primitive but then it had never been done before. It was broadcast peak-time Sunday nights, which later became the traditional spot for variety shows and it was very well received. Then of course we were really hot and in demand everywhere and Benny and I worked non-stop like crazy all over the country and in Canada, we went to Cuba, which was a gambling place like Las Vegas in those days and there were some beautiful outdoor night-clubs there and the dancing was wonderful. It was the premier dance spot in the world at that time. We played the Tropicana in Havana in early 1956, Maurice Chevalier and Nat Cole were playing in town the same week and we got together, we were all frantically busy and had bookings for months ahead.

The night-clubs were a far more important factor in the American entertainment set-up than they ever were in Britain. Apart from the biggest cities, the theatres in the States concentrated on the movies from a very early period and offered very little in the way of live entertainment. When Jolson said in the first sound picture 'You ain't heard nothing yet' it killed off vaudeville at a stroke and the movies became the show in every town. In the cities big-name acts would appear in front of the curtain before the movie and that continued for a while, but in England the theatre and the music halls were a tradition that lasted right up until commercial television in the late 1950's. The few theatres that still had stage shows in the States usually had 5 shows a day from morning till midnight, very different from England's twice a night schedules. I once worked The Seville in Montreal six shows a day for a week which was tough to say the least.

MY OUTSTANDING LUCKY BREAK was when 'Black Magic' really hit the tops and I got my first big offer from a number one club and from making between $500 and $800 a week, playing a 200-seater club, I found myself appearing in clubs big enough to accommodate as many as 1,500 people at a figure which rapidly increased from $2,500 to $5,000 a week. The first time Benny and I appeared at a large club was at Bill Miller's The Riviera across the Hudson River in New Jersey. It was one of my most important bookings ever, that was in 1950 the place was jammed and I saw all the stars in the audience night after night.

It seemed like the whole of Manhattan had crossed the George Washington Bridge to see us and they kept retaining me for another week, then another and in the end I played the whole season and believe it or not the club did $83,000 worth of business while I was there. That seems to have been another turning point and from then on everything started to happen at once. I played the famous Roxy Theatre and after many ups and downs I could finally convince the bookers and the managements that I was a paying proposition and in the 1950's I was the top draw in clubs in New York City, on a par with Milton Berle and Jimmy Durante and they were both comedians.

'Black Magic' was the opener because it was a hit that was played at one time on all of the juke- boxes in New York and that was hundreds of juke-boxes and everyone heard that song. Then I had hits with 'Lady Of The Evening' 'I Get A Kick Out Of You' and 'Too Marvellous For Words'. Black Magic sold millions eventually, it is very hard to know exactly how many copies of a record are sold and I think there was about a million bootleg copies peddled in the days when bootleg pressings of hits would be sold from the trunk of a car cruising the neighbourhood.

In those days records were sold anywhere, barbers shops and five-and-dimes often had speakers out to the street which was a quick way of telling whether you had a hit by the number of people the song walked in the door. I kept a copy decorating the wall in the bar at Beech Knoll of a record company cheque for $34,000, which was a years proceeds from my disc sales, remember a single sold for 79 cents then. The date on the cheque was October 6th 1948. I did that so I could remind folks that at one time I too had records that made a few bucks!

I did so well out of that song I ended up making movies for Columbia with Frankie Laine and Harry Cohn hired me for 6 weeks to teach Marilyn Monroe 'That Old Black Magic'. They wanted the whole song with all the movements but of course if you saw Bus Stop Monroe sings Black Magic for about 8 seconds and that broke my heart! but I was paid to spend six weeks with her and she was wonderful, she wore her heart on her sleeve and appeared delicate at times but minutes later her language could be as salty as you ever heard and she could be very funny. By then I was with the William Morris Agency in Hollywood and meeting all of the stars and only then I could say to myself 'Well it looks like it's going to be all right. It looks like I'll be OK' because you know, one thing usually brings another.

THE MOVIES I MADE with Frankie Laine and Dick Haymes were pretty much part of a trend, a type of film that was around in the early fifties, kind of a light confection. ‘Cruisin' Down The River’ with Dick Haymes, Audrey Totter and Cecil Kellaway was in Technicolor, which was unusual in 1953. It was released in Britain to co-incide with my second appearance at the Palladium and it drew quite a crowd. I remember the review in the Daily Mail was very brief and said something like 'A very routine story of how we turned the old riverboat into a floating nightclub and put on the show of the century despite the guy with the injunction' It was simple well produced fun, Blake Edwards wrote it and he did OK later on.

I could only appear alongside a white singer for all the reasons of the period but I had made it to Hollywood. I made plenty of movies that no one has ever heard of apart from the big studio movies with Frankie and Dick. My favourite film is one I made in 1959 called ‘Night of the Quarter Moon’ one of three films I did with MGM. It had a controversial racial theme, patterned after the Kip Rhinelander case, of a socialite who falls in love with a girl of mixed race. They marry in secret and he takes her home to his family in San Francisco. His mother played by Agnes Moorhead, persuades him to divorce the girl and go into a mental home, a topical story at the time.

John Barrymore Jnr. was the boy, I played a night club owner and Nat Cole played the girl's father and nobody sang. Julie London and Anna Kashfi were also in the film, Anna was going through her divorce from Marlon Brando at the time. The film was great to make, but unfortunately the best of it was probably left on the cutting room floor. I did bit parts in various TV shows ‘Run For Your Life’ with Ben Gazzara and ‘I Spy’ with Robert Culp. But I never went as far as I wanted to go in dramatic acting, Arthur Penn who directed me ‘Golden Boy’ was very enthusiastic about my ability which was flattering, but it never really came off.

I had a singing style that I didn't realise I had for a long time and what I had was an ability to sing a song in such a way that the people would think I was singing it just for them. It isn't how you look it's how you come over. Ella Fitzgerald for instance and Sarah Vaughn are great story-tellers, you must tell the story and the night-club was the perfect stage for story-telling. The clubs at their peak was my era, but times change and in the late 1950's most of the night-clubs began to fade away and it was a decline from glitter to gloom for most of them.

In the early 1960's especially in Los Angeles there was a live entertainment slump and virtually all the clubs closed and re-opened as discotheques or restaurants. I guess it was caused by a combination of the dominance of TV, the difficulties of staying out late and the terrific increase in traffic. Then in a spiral due to the lack of business the cost of live entertainment began to be prohibitive for all concerned and like the decline of the swing bands, a night-club was a very expensive business to run. I was one of the lucky ones, I had a big success in that era and I spent many a New Year's Eve working at The Mocambo entertaining the movie stars in Hollywood.

Because I had a song of my own and I made it in a style of my own, I remained a regular target for the impressionists which kept me in the public eye. After Black Magic was a hit I borrowed one of Sophie Tucker's songs ‘My Yiddisha Momma’. It was a ballad that could blow the roof off a bar mitzvah and when that record sold a million copies I was running out of places to play after the TV series and looking for something new. Val Parnell saw me perform at The Friars Club in Miami Beach and he asked me to open The London Palladium and play his theatre chain in England.

We travelled across on The Queen Mary which was a great ship, she was faster than a U-Boat yet she was a grand hotel with a cinema and a ballroom. It wasn't the first time I'd been at sea and what a contrast, the surroundings were fabulous, the Veranda Restaurant was all blue and peach glass and very opulent. I believe she made over a 1,000 crossings in total and like all great ships she really had a soul. I remember Martha and I waved to The Queen Elizabeth going the other way in the sunset, if the weather was good they got pretty close to each other which was a great tradition.

I sang in the main lounge that night un-accompanied and I went down very well, they rolled the carpet back to dance. We were met from the boat-train in London by a hoard of teenagers carrying banners from St.Annes Youth Club in Vauxhall. I did a charity show in their club-house for them, you saw much more of the people in those days, they would set an autograph table up in the foyer and you could sit there signing autograph books and getting to know people. It was a fantastic experience to open at The Palladium for my first appearance in Europe, that first night was better than Benny and I had dreamed possible and 'Black Magic' was a sensation. A disc-jockey on the B.B.C. in London, Jack Jackson, had been raving for weeks about 'That Old Black Magic' and he had a lot to do with my success in England.

I'll never forget that first week, we really didn't know how we'd go but the place was buzzing every night and the theatre was packed solid with people standing in the aisles, something that can't happen now. One night just after I was announced something had broken in the street outside and all the lights failed, then the Emergency Lights flickered on and I walked on, in almost total darkness you could hardly see and the audience was mumbling. I was wearing a white tux and I cupped my lips and hollered like some of the shows with Erskine in the early days, but I could see jewellery glittering on the front row! 'Folks...... Our act is so hot!...... We just blew out all the lights!'

That broke the ice, then the spots came back on, one after the other and Benny and I put on a great performance, the reception was fantastic, we did encore after encore when they wouldn't let us leave. I think we did double our time and it was only after the band played 'The National Anthem' the audience stopped clamouring for more. We had trouble getting out of the stage door and that night I fell in love with London and Benny and I could stay where-ever we wanted to and everyone treated us like kings, what more could a man ask!

To become known then you had to 'tread the boards' as they say in Britain and we did work hard at those tours. We played all over the British Isles, Scotland, Cardiff, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, I remember working in Blackpool and Morecambe, the resorts were always very busy. It was 2 shows every day except Sunday, usually 6 Days a spot, a show at 6.15 and 8.30 and a matinee on Saturday afternoons at 2.30 and the theatres were always full. We would travel by train on the Sunday or Monday and during the day I did everything from crowning a Liverpool beauty queen to opening an Edinburgh tailors, Connells on Leith Street, to mock sparring with Sugar Ray Robinson, World Middleweight Champion, who had turned to dancing by then, he had some fancy footwork having won the World Championship five times.

We did anything to get the show in the papers and it paid off, when we went back to the Palladium the year after in 1953 it was even bigger than the first time and we set record-busting attendance marks. It was definitely a high-point in my career, I felt that I had paid my dues and had finally made it to the top as an entertainer. After that Benny and I travelled the world in style, it just took a little longer then. That first trip to Europe we crossed on The Queen Mary a ship that had everything except a road you could go for a drive on. Then I travelled by plane later of course, we must have flown on every kind of plane there was. We would fly in hops to London from Idlewild in New York or from New York to Los Angeles on Boeing Stratocruisers, those were the fat 4-prop double deckers with a cocktail lounge below and sleeping berths above, like a pullman car but faster and louder and in the clouds.

In the 40's and early 50's we mostly travelled from New York to California by train, on 'The Santa Fe Super Chief'. There was a special train called 'The City of Los Angeles' that you boarded in Chicago, there wasn't a line that ran all the way to the west coast from New York so you changed trains in Chicago and a limo would collect you and take you to the other station. The City of Los Angeles was painted bright yellow like a giant caterpillar, it even had a swimming pool, a little narrow of course and a nightclub car called The Golden Nugget and the very last car was the observation lounge so you could relax in armchairs watching the marvellous country you had just left. I'll never forget my first trip to the west coast when I woke up smelling oranges, we must have travelled through hundreds of miles of orange groves during breakfast. It was a marvellous travelling with every facility, but Benny and I played poker most of the time.

LAS VEGAS HAS GROWN from literally nothing. The strip was originally a little out of town to say the least and it was quite a trip in the 1940's before regular air travel, to just a tiny little place out in the desert on the long drive from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. And when that desert wind blew you needed a hat and a mask and all of that. The Flamingo opened in 1946, usually comes to mind as the first hotel casino but it wasn't, I played The El Rancho Vegas for a season in 1948 and I got to know the town. The El Rancho was built in 1941 as America's finest Western Hotel and in true cowboy style they named the theatre adjoining the casino The Opera House.

Las Vegas was a 'Howdy Partner' place in those days and that is still there at its heart. 'The El Rancho' had a farmer's windmill, an 'Aermotor' as their sign and the numerous painted billboards along the Los Angeles Highway leading in, said Stop At The Sign Of The Windmill. Then soon after came The Last Frontier which was a monster-sized hotel for the period and was a nod to the future. It had several tennis courts, a stable block and a huge swimming pool and in comparison to the El Rancho it was a complete town. The entrance hall, built of highly polished logs, was huge and fully dressed with souvenirs from the old-west, covered wagons hung from the ceiling, the walls dripped with animal skins, stuffed bears in the corners and revolvers and rifles everywhere. The biggest plus was that every room was air-conditioned which soon became an essential.

It was the war that had boosted Vegas and there was a lot of military activity out there afterwards. The Army had a gunnery school way out in the desert and I remember the occasional unexpected bang and the flash of the big ones. There were huge numbers of service personnel who all had families who would visit and party with their boys, so there was already a regular audience there for the taking. What was new about The Flamingo was the extravagant Beverly Hills style transported out to the frontier wilderness of Las Vegas. I played The Flamingo well after Benny Siegel, I had met him in clubs New York a couple of times, his death made Vegas famous practically overnight, even though he was shot at his girlfriend's place in Beverly Hills because the mob never killed anyone in Vegas they assumed that it would be very bad for business! I played The Flamingo right after Pearl Bailey after she told me 'Billy you gotta play The Flamingo' and I said 'Well where do you stay?' because Vegas didn't like the dark side of the moon at that time.

Early Las Vegas was prejudiced in exactly the same way as the cities in the south and black entertainers had to stay in their dressing rooms and use the back door. No black, or rather 'negroes' or 'coloureds' as we were called then, a title that included all Indians and Orientals, none were allowed to enter the casino or the restaurants and had to stay in hotels on the west side, the black side of town. At that period the casinos didn't want to disturb the gamblers in any way so a black person couldn't gamble except in the small number of places that existed on their side of town.

In my case, because I'm light, the restaurant manager of The Flamingo said on our first night 'You can come in here and have dinner in the dining room Billy but your piano player and your bass player are not allowed' so I said 'Well then, I'll just stay on the other side of town with them' It bothered me and then it didn't, because that was how it was then, there was no choice, I was doing well by just being there. It wasn't unusual in those days, Benny and I stayed in seperate hotels many times. What did bother me was that my people couldn't come to see me, that was really a rub because I wanted to be known as a black performer, that was always important to me.

Later, in the mid-fifties white people began to rent their houses to the top black entertainers, when they saw how much money they could make. In fact around that time a blacks-only hotel opened on the strip The Moulin Rouge. Benny Carter, a great musician who played with everybody, had the resident band there when it opened and thankfully it closed after less than six months and many were glad when it did. A terrible attitude and a crazy idea, who on earth would travel all the way out there and be unable to visit any other place? Although the Moulin Rouge was the first integrated casino Vegas thankfully never became like 'Sun City' in South Africa, a place I never played.

I soon understood how different Vegas was to New York because when I was young Harlem was an inspirational place to be, you could see the stars performing and be near them on the street in their fancy clothes and cars and their money was circulating in the community so everyone had a share in the success and it felt mutual. Out in Vegas and all the other places that were very prejudiced in those days, you were completely on your own and I'm glad that by the time I played The Stardust, that had all finished. I played many, many times in Vegas at just about all the places and I always liked it. In fact I signed the very first long-term contract on the strip when I became the resident attraction at The Stardust, but unfortunately I never had a share of the take!

And in time I had moved from practically hiding in the dressing room to when I could walk in and out of the front door of the biggest casino in town and the doorman would hold the door open for me! I was the first black artist to do that in Vegas and I'm proud of that. I resided at The Sahara, where they had a theatre-dining set-up in The Congo Room and I played The Sands which had a stage that was viewed through a giant circular bar. Vegas really took off in the early 1950's when Jack Entratter arrived from New York where he'd managed the Copacabana to take charge of entertainment at The Sands, which was the mob's casino, everyone in the business knew that. There were some very colourful characters around Vegas then, The Sands president Jake Friedman would hustle around the casino in his western togs wearing a giant sombrero and betting with $100,000 chips!

It was always in the contract for the performers to gamble at some point in the evening, usually after the show, because that would attract more people to the tables. That was OK for me, I enjoyed meeting people and fortunately I never got the gambling bug. That wasn't true for some of the entertainers I worked with. Sophie Tucker to name just one, liked to be paid in gambling chips and would sometimes gamble her pay away to nothing. When The Stardust opened it was the largest hotel in the world, the first with over a 1,000 rooms and the casino was the first really big one. It was a complex that spread out over 40 acres of buildings all with manicured gardens, that was in the days when Vegas had a Palm Springs atmosphere, with gardens and fountains with parking in front of the casinos, before the accountants had begun to maximise every square inch.

The Stardust billed everything it had as 'The Largest In the World' and their sign on the strip was a fantastic construction and was of course the biggest. - The planet Saturn in a starfield of 11,000 lightbulbs, 7,000 feet of neon tube and visible from three miles away - That was printed on the back of the The Stardust's first postcard, it had my name on the sign, a card I must have posted a hundred times. I played there for almost three years in The Showplace of the West in The Worlds Largest Night-Club Revue. The first season opened with the Lido Girls from the Lido de Paris, billed as direct from Europe in all their glory. I had worked with them in Paris and we repeated a gimmick that had worked there, as my surprise entrance the girls would drag me out of the front row of the audience.

The Vegas shows always appeared to be spontaneous but they were timed to the second. The act had to last exactly an hour and fifteen minutes or whatever the allocated time was that particular season. The purpose was to change the audience very quickly so that the customers were back in the casino as soon as possible and as they left the theatre staff quickly fill the place to bursting point with the next audience. Vegas has the most efficient theatres in the world and I became very good at that routine, I could work to the clock but I still managed to vary the act and enjoy the challenge of the discipline every night.

I was living in the Stardust which was like a zoo some nights, so I bought a ranch out there but that was much later, in the early days there was a lot of permanent people in Vegas from the Army and Air Force bases so that made it very different, more of a small-town atmosphere unlike today when the hotels are torn down and replaced like changing card-decks. It's a city packed with a population of tourists flying in and out every hour, but before the regular flights we always used to go there on the train. They would have the club cars with champagne furnished by The Flamingo and you would have a party and by the time you got there you were ready to roll and in the mood 'OK! Where are we? Where the hell is it?'

EARLY IN 1950 I married Martha Braun...... Martha was an exceptionally beautiful girl who wanted to be in show-business no matter what and that was her problem, she was from outside of Boston and her family were very well off and all of that and I wouldn't say that they objected to me so much but they objected to her being with my element, show-business, but she was a showgirl. We had a lot of fun together but I can't tell you why I married her, it was just one of those things. I suppose I hadn't really got over the death of Adrienne and I was due to go on a cruise and I couldn't take Martha with me unless we were married, so we had a champagne party and we got married. The press made a great big thing out of it but her friends had all accepted me and my way of life. Martha loved my music, she loved Harlem, she loved everything that we did but none of that was mentioned in the press, I had stolen her!

It wasn't until I was invited to her parent's house that I realised there might be a problem. The first thing her father said to me was "You don't look like a black man. Why are they saying all these things about you in the papers?" Martha and I parted after only a short period together but we remained friends. And I was called a Ladies man in the papers from then on and I thought 'Why shouldn't I want to be called a Ladies Man?' I've never tried to hurt anyone, maybe I've been in a few places I shouldn't have been but I've always been good to anyone I was with. I suppose I was demonised in the press and it got worse not long after when Ronnie Quillan...... she was someone that I had met and I had a few drinks with her you know, actually she was in motion pictures she was a starlet, a very pretty girl and she knew some people that I knew but I hadn't seen her in a while, in fact I had gotten married to Martha since I saw her last.

She came by to see the show and left me a note 'I must see you, just for a moment' so I had my chauffeur bring me by her house and I soon found out why she must see me, she told me that she needed $5,000 immediately! So I said 'Well I'm really in a hurry' Ha! and as I turned to pick up my raincoat, she hit me with the knife, a butcher knife, just flicked me across the neck! I didn't think I was hurt too badly and as I was backing out holding my hands up to defend myself I remember saying 'I don't know why you want to be this way. I don't owe you anything' then my chauffeur walked in with the police, she had actually called the police before I had even got there, she had told them that there was going to be an accident. She planned it, knew it would be in the papers and that was the scary part. It did my career no good at all because I had picked up a reputation for scandal. I still don't understand that night, it felt like a set-up.

THE ONLY OTHER TIME I was hurt was a long time after that at The Latin Quarter in New York and I was on stage when it happened. I was working for Hubert Humphrey, it was presidential election night 1968. Humphrey, Democrat, lost his chance of the Presidency by less than 1% to Nixon and everyone knew on the night that it would be close. It was a big event and unknown to me a guy had walked in early and said 'Can I sit up next to the stage?' they didn't usually let the single guys sit close to the stage but for some reason they thought he might be a friend of mine or a reporter of some sort. Perri was at home attending an election party at Richard (Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) Basehart's. Ava Gardner was in the audience and the place was solid. I had told the head waiter 'Gigi. If it looks like Humphrey is going to win, bring me on a note so that I can announce it'.

I believe that saved my life because I was expecting him right through my act and when I heard foot steps behind me I turned to receive his note at the moment the guy swung his switchblade. I found out later that he'd bought it that morning and had already attacked a woman in the subway, he was a nut. The knife skidded all down my shoulder and my arm and it bled like you wouldn't believe. I hit the deck bleeding like hell and the police were all over the stage in seconds, but I had the presence of mind to shout 'Don't shoot him! Don't shoot, my wife will never believe me if you shoot him, she'll think it was over a woman!' Ha!

Of course the press wrote about it sensationally as if it was someone who was bearing a grudge against me for some reason, the fact that he was a confirmed psycho wasn't reported anywhere. This is the negative side of being in the public eye, you just never know what anyone will do or say about you next. For one trip to Europe I was on bail for a shooting incident in Harlem and I had to find a judge to release me to leave the country to fly to England, another little problem I had. It happened in a tiny club called the Seven-O-Ten, 8.30 in the morning New Years Day 1956 and I'd gone over there after my show at the Copacabana to celebrate the New Year and there was about a dozen of us still at the bar.

The Seven-O-Ten was an after hours place, open all the time and not the kind of place you would take your wife to. We were livening it up and there was some horse-play and all of a sudden there was a shot. I looked around and there was this fellow 'Chink' Johnson, a boxing trainer who used to work with Sugar Ray Robinson, holding his shoulder. It seemed that he'd received a bullet somehow, I never saw a gun and it wasn't as bad as they made out in the papers, in fact he took off his shirt and the small calibre bullet dropped to the floor.

We all went home and I went to bed and in the afternoon the law called me down to the station and I was booked as a suspect. That Johnson! I couldn't believe he didn't know who had shot him, two or three other people were held as witnesses and the only person they could all remember seeing there was me! The District Attorney raised hell, he didn't want me to leave the country but we went to the judge and he fixed bail at £1,000. He took me to one side as I left the court and told me to enjoy my trip to Europe, I got permission to leave at 2.45 and I was on the 5 pm plane. I had bookings and I didn't want to let anyone down, Billy Eckstine filled-in for me at The Palladium until I got there and I got a great reception.

I remember the theatres in England in the 1950's very well, there was always a running order on the wall which told everyone exactly to the minute when you had to be on stage. I would refer to them so often I memorised the running order like a song. I did a two week pop show at The London Palladium in April 1956 that was a great success. Tommy Trinder hosted the usual two shows per night and there was in this order; The Carden Dancers, Eddie Ash, The Kaye Sisters, Dennis Lotis, Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, Cinq Peres, Lita Rosa, The Nitwits. Then after a nine-minute interval, Jones & Arnold, Eve Boswell, Channing Pollock and I did 15 minutes top of the bill walking on stage at 8.04 and 10.34 and a 4.29pm Saturday matinee. London was always a good town for me, I was billed as the 'Greatest Singer Since Al Jolson' and he must have been well-liked in England because they always loved me!

AFTER A SHOW IN London there was always someone around to ask and if I was in the mood I would be met at the stage door and taken in a Jaguar to perform in an East End out of hours club such as The Kentucky, run by those charming twins, the Krays. You have to believe me when I say I never looked for trouble! It was a normal event, those kind of guys were in the bodyguard business, they said that they wanted to 'protect' you from any harm and you would be be invited to a place where you could get a late night drink and a meal away from the fans in perfect safety and after the high of performing that was always a bonus.

The Krays were very friendly with entertainers, they thrived on the glamour of show-biz names especially from America and celebrities and sportspeople were always welcome. I met Rocky Marciano at their Kentucky Club and Judy Garland was a regular whenever in London. The Krays were friendly with a bear of a man called Eddie Pucci who was Frank Sinatra's minder at one time, I knew him and of course they enjoyed my tales of New York. The Kentucky Club was their version of The Winchester Theatre in New Jersey a place that was owned by the Gambino's, I played at The Winchester and so too did Sinatra, Shirley Bassey and many other entertainers.

Of course I had worked in New York during the time when most of the big clubs were run by the mafia. Frank Costello who was a sleeping partner at The Copacabana was the head of one of the New York families and that period at the Copa was a very intense part of my life. I had made it to the big time but Martha and I used to argue like hell about the women I'd made eyes at during my show. The owners of all the rooms in those days demanded that the entertainers mix with the patrons, it was in the contract but Martha just couldn't understand that to 'make those eyes' was a part of my act!

We lived wherever I was performing and we stayed in an apartment above the Copa for a spell and one night after my spot we argued and Martha started throwing plates around and smashing the place up. I lost my temper and threw a lamp at the wall and then my minder, a giant called Vini Teresa got so angry he picked me up and threw me out of the window! It was a stained glass panel that burst into little pieces around the lead, we were only on the first floor and I landed on my butt on the hood of a convertible. Vini had snapped and stopped the argument the only way he knew how. He just didn't know his own strength. I was lucky and I simply walked back upstairs and we all cleaned up the room laughing. Then I had to go to Frank Costello and apologise for the breakages and the flattened hood of his car, he laughed it off with me but he docked the cost of all the repairs from my pay!

My first time in Europe, my very first week at The London Palladium, a guy called Sammy Ledderman appeared in my dressing room. He was an East End, Kosher butcher but he also worked for Albert Dimes whose real name was Dimino or Dimeo, I never did find out. Sammy wanted to stay with me as my valet, he told me that Albert was the London contact of Frank Costello and he said that he would help me 'get along'. All I had to do was play their game because you can never refuse protection and we soon became friends. In the early 1950's the main man in London was Jack 'Spot' Comer, I met him one day at Sandown Park races and we wound up drinking at his place, The Highball Club in Bayswater. A few years later there was a knife fight on the streets of Soho between Dimes and Comer that went to court but they both got off the charges scot free. The papers dubbed it in a blaze of publicity 'The fight that never was'.

The tight security around the stars in the hotels or theatres didn't exist then and the crime scene always had free access to any part of a city so those people always offered protection to performers and in Britain especially with Americans, they felt that it was their function. I was given a guy called Hymie Rosen who was my minder when I was in London in those days. He was a friend of a guy who had spent most of his life in prison but still managed to make a name for himself, Frankie Fraser. I believe Frankie's thing was one-arm-bandits, which was a typical operation on both sides of the Atlantic, apply pressure on a place to only have your slot machines and eventually it becomes a legitimate business. The licensing laws are a recent invention and anyone could open a club or even a casino in London until quite recently, you only needed a license if you sold liquor. Later on, quite a few years later, the king had toppled as they always do and Sammy introduced me to his new friends, the Kray twins.

Ronnie and Reggie loved the fact that I had met Bugsy Siegel and Frank Costello and many other mob guys in New York and Vegas. I became friends with Ronnie and Reggie, they were very entertaining people and charming hosts. I knew all those people as an entertainer because my act was to walk the room, a way of performing that doesn't exist now. I would introduce many a song with a walk-around and say something like 'This is the best saloon bar song ever written' and then sing 'You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You' if you sang that to the most notorious person in the room it would always go down well. They were all the same those guys, utterly charming and in-offensive fun to be with in that situation and of course they enjoyed having the company of a celebrity. I always had a smile for everyone, otherwise you never knew if you would be 'locked-out' of club appearance somewhere because you had offended someone, somehow.

When the New York 'Seven-O-Ten' case eventually came up in court, I was cleared. The judge ruled that the evidence had failed to even establish that I had a gun, but again I had a mountain of bad publicity. The New York Telegram & Sun ran a picture of me, a very unflattering picture of course, with a caption that said something like 'Daniels arrives at the court without his pearly smile to face charges from a three-shot brawl in a New York bottle-club' That was in February when the case came up, no mention that it was a wild New Years Eve party one-shot accident. On the very same day next to me in that paper, was a piece on Billie Holiday who had been arrested in Philadelphia for possession of narcotics. I knew Billie and she had a real problem, I couldn't understand why she needed that junk so much.

MY HIGH WAS ALWAYS on stage, one of my most thrilling moments was on The Ed Sullivan Show on my mother's 84th birthday and I knew that she would be watching at home with friends, so I said to Ed in rehearsal 'I'd like to dedicate a song to my mother tonight because it's her birthday' and he said 'Billy we'll see'. I didn't realise what a gentleman he was, I found out later that he went over to Benny and asked 'What's her name and where is she?' and lo and behold he said on the air 'And now Mr. Black Magic will sing for his momma in Jacksonville Florida, on her 84th birthday, his version of a song called My Yiddisha Momma'. The show was live of course and I was over the moon, she was quite frail by then and couldn't get to see me perform, so just to know that she would be with friends in the house I grew up in, watching me singing to her from New York on the top TV show. That was a memorable night, TV was quite a novelty once.

If you can do something to make your family proud of you, money doesn't seem important and that is very rewarding. And on stage you can reach special moments that go far beyond career considerations, experiences that crystalise the combination of talent and hard work. The audience can sometimes create amazing atmospheres and on those nights music can be tremendously powerful. In cabaret you can reach people and get very close to their emotions and really sing for them. If I can help someone enjoy themselves I can make them forget momentarily about what may be troubling them and sometimes that was everyone in the whole room, it's a tremendously satisfying feeling and it makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile and not just being a ham!

I never thought that show-business was a business that you could call a career until you had some success in it. A whole lot of people spend all their lives trying to be stars and it never happens and that can be very devastating sometimes. I never expected it to happen to me but I enjoyed my period of stardom and I would like to let people know that there is an agony to success because there is a certain discipline that it requires. In the beginning I didn't realise that people that cared for me would be watching and not wanting me to be doing anything wrong, but we are all prone to mistakes and when you are making top money there are always plenty of people around dreaming up schemes to fool you, there are people coming out of the woodwork eager to help you make all kinds of mistakes, but you must always try to be courteous and stay in control.

The responsibility in being a performer is to give your best performance every time you go out there, if you don't you're wasting your time and cheating the audience. I know giving your best every time is difficult, you feel like being short with the fans sometimes when all they want is an autograph or just to make you smile. People want to say that they had a drink with you and sometimes its late and you're dog-tired and you really can't be bothered, but you must make that extra effort and never forget that as an entertainer the public owns you. 'Performance Beyond Promise' was a phrase my father used like a mantra and I picked that up from him. I went 25 years without being late for a rehearsal and I never missed a performance. When I was in the theatre I felt sorry for my understudies because they never got on!

Perhaps longevity is in your genes because some of the friends I've lost were very young and very talented people and that puzzled me until I realised that it in most cases longevity depends on what you do to yourself! I was very friendly with and very fond of Fats Waller and he seemed to have been fond of me, every time I saw Fats he was eating, when he wasn't tickling that piano he was eating from a paper bag of fried chicken or cookies. I didn't have a name at the time he was around, but he used to always say to me 'Come on kid, sing me a song!'

In 1936 at The Howard Theatre in Washington, which was the only theatre in Washington we could play then, we followed Fats Waller and after his applause he announced us 'Now you're gonna have Erskine Hawkins Band with a young singer called Billy Daniels and I want you to remember that name, Billy Daniels!' I nearly died on the spot with stage fright but Fats did and very suddenly at only 39 years old. He was returning to New York from Hollywood where he had just completed a scene in 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne. It was 1943 and he died on the train journey home. Lena was a film star then, only ten years before she was a chorus girl at the Cotton Club.

Charlie Parker made me realise that I was lucky that I didn't have an addictive personality. Charlie was a fantastic musician but he couldn't get off the drink and the dope, all his friends tried to get him off but he just couldn't say no to himself. Actually we were top of the tree around the same period 1948 to, well Charlie died in 1955 and people who create a new music go down in history and Charlie Parker was certainly one of those people. He was a Jazz player not a popular musician because you couldn't dance to him, he was improvising on the structure of a tune not on the melody, the be-bop he helped to create was musician's music because popular music is nearly always dance music.

If you must categorise popular music there was Ragtime then Dixieland after the First War and then the Swing Era of the 1930's. That was actually a unique period when the popular taste was Jazz. Swing merged into the sometimes military Big Band era during the war and then it was the ballad singers like yours truly and be-bop Jazz for a while or doo-wop singing groups of musicians who couldn't afford instruments! Then suddenly Rock'n Roll was sold as the answer to every teenagers prayer, but it was mostly Rhythm and Blues that had crossed over. It was a youth revolution in the late fifties and by then thankfully whether the performers were white or black it no longer made any difference.

Towards the end of the 1950's it was time for a new crop of young performers, I was one of the old faithful by then. Rock'n Roll is powerful music for a big place like a ball park where the sound can get out. In rock music today I can still hear a mixture of blues and boogie-woogie, I hear Louis Jordan riffs from the 40's on the radio every day, there are strands in music that all interconnect, there has always been. There's Folk music and Country and Western and Hillbilly, the names chop and change but all great recordings reverberate with the time they were made, the times that have gone by and that's why the best music is always nostalgic and soulful. Louis Armstrong would always say whenever somebody talked to him about different kinds of music 'All music's folk music, man. I never heard a horse sing a song!'

I sang love songs to diners in a plushy cabaret in those beautiful rooms with the ladies in mink-stoles and pearls, so close I could tell what perfume they were wearing. My clientele in supper clubs preferred an easy sophisticated performance, romantic couples came to the midnight show and I made that mood my style. I always featured ballads with stories that would move people. I was a fore-runner in the presentation of songs, the swivelling and general body-movements added a little humour into the act, you try to make people leave happy because you can't sing about a broken heart all the time.

Elvis Presley came along and he changed everything, he moved very explicitly for the time, which gave him a rebel gimmick which his manager exploited. He could sing with joy and he sang great blues because he spent time on the other side of the tracks in Memphis. It was ironic to black people that Elvis came from Memphis, a city famous for its devotion to segregation. But Elvis moved many people to listen to the black music he was singing and he was a famous looking guy. His manager did all sorts of things that kept his 'boy' in the news and he sold him like a product which was a new idea then. When Elvis first appeared in Vegas in early '56 Parker hired a truck to pretend to breakdown and hold up the traffic and he paid runners to walk the strip to explain to drivers that the town had come to a halt just because Elvis Presley was appearing. Actually he bombed with the Vegas audience, it was too old for him then but that's the direction Parker, an old fairground show-man, always pointed him in and in time Elvis became Mr. Las Vegas.

I never set out to be any kind of star, I just wanted to be good enough to work 52 weeks a year and I worked through many changes in the entertainment business and along the way I enjoyed some stardom of my own. As Benny used to say 'Popularity won't pay the milkman' and we were happy as long as we were working somewhere. I sold a few records too, I rarely play my own recordings but when I do the first on the turn-table is always ‘Lady Of The Evening’ there is a verse when Benny and I duet in close harmony, we could harmonise without thinking and that recording seems to sum up the times we experienced together.

WE HAD FUN AND made a good living. Perri and I had a house in Hollywood which I loved and a ranch in Vegas. I lived in Vegas on and off for years, I was once 49 weeks on the trot at The Stardust and it got too much sometimes. We had a house out in Palm Springs way out in the desert. I bought it from Sandra Dee in 1959 a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with a pool. It was our hide-away and it was very quiet in the wilderness, except when our neighbour was around, Steve McQueen, then it was a little nerve-racking! He had a heap of motorcycles that he would start up and race around at 6am! He was a loner, a wonderful guy though, he was a good carpenter and worked in his own workshop. I made kit furniture and tried cabinets and things, actually if you owned a home around that area you had to learn to how to do something because you could never get anybody to come out there and do anything. It was so far out in the desert and things seemed to just fall apart, nothing lasted long in that harsh climate and in the end I was glad when we sold the place.

I enjoyed fishing and I played golf, I used to look great at the tee but not on the green! I had a Beach House in San Diego County and a sail-boat. I loved to fish I caught a 230 pound Marlin once that took an hour and forty five minutes to bring in, these days they're caught on special non-barbed hooks and released which is good but that wasn't the practice then. I took it home to show off and buried it in the garden but our dog Othello dug it up in the middle of the night and it stank out the neighbourhood! I knew I was lucky that I could enjoy the good life, I worked hard for it and right from the beginning I always felt it was important to look smart on and off stage. When I came second at the Apollo to Ella I went straight out and bought myself a zoot suit with the prize money, later on I had smooth tuxedos made up to my own design, one time I had dinner jackets made without pockets of any kind and I introduced those in Hollywood and it really took the conventional men there by surprise.

When I could afford it I would buy 10 or 12 suits at a time but then not buy anything for a while. I had shirts made with initials on the cuffs, by Whitehouse and Hardy, Italian shoes, the whole bit. I think money should be spent, I told my attorney to draw up a new will for me but I didn't tell the family anything about it. I told him 'When I'm gone to my reward and I'm laid out and all the amenities are over and the crocodile tears have been shed. I want you to get all the family together in one room and read my will; 'I Billy Daniels being of sound mind and body...... spent it all!' Ha! I've known many people who were fantastic talents but never made a dime, Fats Waller never made any money with his music and he was a tremendous musical talent.

I was never consciously influenced by anyone, I admired all good performers. I was impressed with Al Jolson's voice when I first heard him on record. I met him once and we talked about voice projection. One of my closest friends was one of the greatest singers, Nat Cole, his was a very relaxed style. We remained friends until he died, Perri was close to Maria his wife and Bill Jnr. dated their daughter Natalie when they were teenagers. When Nat made it big he bought a house in Hancock Park, LA a sort of 'top executive' type of area and boy did he have trouble when he moved in there!

He had 'Nigger' burned on the lawn and a petition and threats against him, the whole shameful business. He even had the tax people chasing him during that period, claiming he was behind with tax when he wasn't and he almost had his house re-possessed. He answered that one by making a couple more million-sellers! He told me a local dignitary and a few side-kicks knocked on his door one evening not long after his family had moved in. He invited them in and gave them a drink, then they said to his face in front of his wife and children 'We don't want any niggers like you in our neighbourhood' 'Neither do I' said Nat! What else could he have said? without a fight?

He was very hip with a sly humour, a very cool dude and I never once saw or heard of him losing his marbles and I saw him provoked many times. He was once beaten up on stage by some extremists because he was playing to a mixed audience and it was headline news, the beating not the playing. Miami Beach was very prejudiced in the early 50's and Nat refused to play there until they would let him and his musicians stay in the same hotel where he was appearing. He quietly said no without making a song and dance about it and then he never complained when some called him an Uncle Tom because he had the dignity of a dozen men.

Nat was smooth and that was his appeal to men and women who had dirtied their hands at work all day, he was clean. And in those days he wasn't the stereotypical black performer like the blues singer in overalls or a way-out jazzer, we agreed that we both wanted to have the widest appeal possible and we made it right to the limit. Nats rise from the jazz world to a huge popular recording success was a real advance, not just in race but musically. He was a wonderful musician but it wasn't seen like that by many at the time, he was seen as a puppet or a token which I know wasn't true.

Apart from Nat topping the list of my all-time favourite singers are Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, the other singing waiters! Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday but if you force me to name just one out of the dozens I could think of I would have to say Billie because she was just wonderful. Although I believe she was the greatest, Billie Holiday never had big popular success in her lifetime, she never played in the large theatres I played in, The Capitol, The Strand or The Paramount on Broadway. The Paramount, now that was a big theatre and very elegant at Forty-Fourth and Broadway, Times Square. There was a famous theatrical restaurant next door called Sardi's. The Paramount held almost 5,000, that was where Sinatra made his name, during the war.

I remember the night, it was Paramount's New Year Show in 1942, he sang with a top band Benny Goodman 'The King of Swing'. I was on the other side of town swinging with the black guys! Ha! You know early on I once had the chance to change my identity into a South American, you actually could do that and I often wondered whether anything would have been different. It would have involved a total identity change, false papers, learn a new history, like a spy! but I couldn't do it. I didn't want to do it to my family, it would have devastated my father.

I WAS WALKING THROUGH the airport in Sydney in 1968 and the very first thing a reporter asked me was 'Why do you call yourself coloured?' and I replied 'What sort of question is that? Because I am, to you' All that changed a great deal in my lifetime and I was thrilled to be involved with some of the changes and I always tried to cheekily push as many barriers as I could, I used to upset Benny with that sometimes and he was from Philadelphia and very street-wise. My father wasn't black in colour, but he was a negro. My mother was white, to all of the yardsticks we use now but she was called an octaroon, because in the south from birth you had to be aware of how much negro blood you had in your veins. I asked my mother once 'Just how black am I?' she said 'I really don't know, you have a mixture, a Portuguese great Grandfather and my Grandmother's mother was a Choctaw Indian and your father claims ancestry from Daniel Boone but I don't know what proportion of negro we have' and if she didn't know, I don't know who could.

So I knew that I was some mixture! one-eighth Choctaw Indian, a little Portuguese, Daniel Boone and African but in those days when anyone asked I simply called myself an octaroon the same as my mother because it was simpler. I had to always have an answer to that question ready, for both sides of the racial divide and I felt sometimes like a man without a race. I looked 'light' to blacks and 'dark' to whites. I mean black is beautiful and I simply wasn't but among white people I was always a negro singer. I suppose I had a foot in both worlds but it would have helped sometimes if I were typical, if I were darker. I know I lost several parts, because I didn't look the image, I wasn't dark enough. I loved to sing Gershwin and I got very close to playing 'Sportin' Life' in the movie version of 'Porgy & Bess' but I was simply too light. I pressed for an answer on that and that was the reason why I lost a part which would have been a big breakthrough for me, Sammy Davis got the role. I felt invisible at times but heck you can't have everything and to spend your whole life thinking what could-have and should-have been, is a direct route to the nut-house.

I used to try and ignore the whole race question, but I also have to say that early on my light colour was an advantage, I was more socially acceptable to whites and I could do things that a dark-skinned man could never even have attempted. I remember going into a Park Avenue restaurant with Lena Horne, the waiter said that he could serve me but he couldn't serve her. He said the usual thing 'We don't serve Negroes here, sir' I thought the 'sir' was cute and I said so and then we walked out. That was the idea, if we got a seat then great let's enjoy the food! You could never tell exactly what would happen and it was dangerous fun to push it sometimes. My father was light, he was one of the first black mail-carriers in Jacksonville in 1914. Cab Calloway was light and he was the first to break through the network colour barrier on the radio, though invisible on radio there was still a barrier against any cultural cross-over. Cab's father was light-skinned too, he was the first black insurance salesman to work for a major white insurance company and that was back in 1920.

They were not in the public eye, that took a little longer but they did the same routine as Jackie Robinson in Baseball or whatever. My brother was one of the first black Air Force pilots, his squadron fought a legal battle to get themselves into a situation where they could be killed fighting for their country! It was evolutionary and like everything else, it took many people a step at a time to change. My light colour put me right on the fence in some eyes, even though I was always labelled a 'Negro' entertainer some blacks would never accept me. I was called all kinds of names by people that were supposed to be mine and that hurt sometimes but I could be proud of my achievements.

It's the old story, just hold the back of your hand to your eyes, you can do nothing about that skin colour and many misguided souls black and white can not see beyond that surface layer and look beyond physical appearance at the person inside. I consider myself a little note in history as the first black entertainer to be really accepted by the white mainstream, but all that is a pointless exercise because you could go on and on, so-and-so was the first really black person to whatever. You would need a colour shade card to work it all out and you're in that sickening trap, that disgraceful misguided attitude when a belief in superiority is encouraged. The majority in any situation tend to feel superior. But thankfully that's all part of a history which is still changing all the time and it sounds crazy now, how it once was. Johnson's 1965 Civil Rights Act was a law that stopped places being off limits, laws are to protect people from abuse and politicians can and do change things around.

I'm not saying you should disown your heritage. My children don't disown their black heritage, you don't tell a child what they are. You tell a child exactly what your background is and if the child loves you, the child tells itself what it is, if he or she feels the need. I have always thought that you should be proud of your ancestry. There is always the constant desire to categorise everything, including people. In the 1960's especially people would always ask me where I stood on civil rights 'which side are you on' and I always said the same thing. I am an American, my children are Americans and I'm from a black background and I was raised in segregation that was changing since the day I was born. I liked to use James Baldwins' phrase "I'm black as long as you think you're white"

I have become successful in my business over the years within the fabric of our society, as shaky and as full of holes as it is. I was suspicious of people who say they are black first and American second. Your country, your community, your home and family, your own personal history is your identity not your skin colour. We are the human race, so we all have to get on and no matter what happens to you personally, as King said the only weapon is love and he meant love in the sense of the love of everything, a powerful love that grows and dares to try new things and is not afraid to make mistakes, not simply just being happy all the time.

There is an old saying in Hollywood that money makes stars and it was certainly easier for a white singer to make it when I started out but nobody ever got to the top without any talent, take Sinatra, he certainly created his own style. I got on well with him, we had the same attorney, we were the same age and both spent a long time singing in New York, on different sides of the street though in the early days. Frank's career low of the early fifties was my career high but in 1953 when he did the movie 'From Here To Eternity' he became the biggest star in the entertainment world. When Frank was in town he took over Las Vegas like nobody else could, there was a buzz in the air when he was around. He was a master of that relaxed end-of-the-bar kind of style which sounds easy but is actually very hard to do well.

I was never in the clan, like Sammy, who was a very up-front in your face kind of a guy and a clown sometimes and like Bill Robinson before him in the 30's, I suppose the visibility helped. I was always interested in political changes and the 1960's were very energetic days, it felt like we were living in a mad-house at times. I went out to Vietnam to entertain because most of the boys out there had no choice, they had to go and I tried to entertain them. I met Martin Luther King right around that time, at various benefits and of course with his church background he loved music, in fact Benny knew him through his church. Benny was a religious man, he always said that making music was an expression of the soul of a community and King agreed with that. King had Indian ancestors, as well as white, after centuries of combination we are all a heady brew of ingredients. What Martin Luther King achieved politically, changed everything for everybody.

My life was music first and second and I was very lucky to meet people who seemed to be born highly musical, Billie Holiday had music inside her like you wouldn't believe, she had a vivid soul sound built into everything she did so that anybody who heard her in person, well she was just unforgettable. I worked with her in 1935 in a club on 7th Avenue called the Hot-Cha Bar & Grill. It was a rough place that was a gin-mill front with the entertainment at the rear in a back room. That was when she started out and from there she worked the Apollo for the first time. In fact Billie was one of the first people I met in New York, her father Clarence was a guitarist in Don Redman's band. I will never forget the first time I heard her sing, she sang 'If The Moon Turned Green' and only then did I realise just what a singer could do to an audience, she had everyone in the room spellbound and I suppose I always admired her for that reason.

Whenever Billie sang anywhere, if she saw me come in she would always sing that song for me. I got to know her very well and it was tragic to see what she did to herself, but she had a terrible childhood and that has to be part of the reason. When she passed away it was like something had gone that would never come back. Nobody could sing with such emotion and sheer pain sometimes and that was before she had her drug problem. To me she was the last of a long line of natural musicians and she made me wonder whether certain people are born with something that helps others on their way through life. That is why to be idolised by fans is not something for anyone to be egotistical about, I always felt very lucky that I had broken into the mainstream and I could work in places that many hadn't managed to. And so whatever you are doing it only becomes worthwhile if you are determined to be best you can be and if you do reach the top of the tree, the only thing you can do is just do it! and don't be cocky about it, because not everybody can get there.

I could hear my father speak to me, but I couldn't ask him anything.

19

Blood Brothers

My first thing in the morning Florida orange juice tasted great, "Why don't you come to San Francisco for the day?" I was on the phone to Bill Daniels, William Boone Daniels II to give him his full name. I was standing at Perri's kitchen window squinting at the lawn through the early morning sun that streaked through the venetian blind, listening to my new older brother speaking from Northern California. "It takes me an hour and a half to get to the airport in 'Frisco and then I've got to drive to you from San Diego airport, which is another hour. But I could meet you at the airport in 'Frisco and that way we'll get to spend more time together. It'll cost you 50 bucks! Wouldn't you like to see San Francisco?" I didn't need much persuasion.

When we took off from San Diego the place almost felt like home as we climbed above the wonderful city by the bay with 'Americas Finest' emblazoned on the door of the Police cars and made a steep right turn into the blinding sun over the deep blue Pacific and headed north. The plane was due to land at Oakland, not San Francisco International because that was fog-bound. Perri had frantically pressed the Southwest desk to page a message at SF International to re-direct Bill to Oakland and now sitting between Jane and I Perri fretted over whether Bill will get the message, "or maybe he won't and the whole thing will be a waste of time". I tried to reassure her but Perri seemed to be anxious about our meeting Bill today and I wondered why.

Bill wasn't at the gate so Perri and Jane immediately headed for the Information Desk to check they had completed her instructions and deep in thought I wandered around at the end of the crowded terminal lounge to intercept him on arrival. Will I recognise my brother? the one I wanted to meet most of all, the brother that I had thought did not want to meet me. I knew that Perri and her daughters had talked to Bill frequently since our arrival and I must have been deemed to be interesting enough to meet, or something. He said to me on the phone yesterday "I think it's important that we meet, don't you?"

I spotted him at over 50 yards, through a flock of travellers at the other end of the terminal and that must be his wife Karen, striding purposefully toward the gate we had left earlier. They were far away through the crowd so I stayed put, to wait for Jane and Perri as agreed and I knew that I would catch them on the way back. The pressure had almost got to Jane, we had barely had the time to talk to each other, our 'holiday' had been spent almost totally with the Daniels family, our new relations, a sudden new dimension in our lives and we were exhausted and running out of time, in two days we would be flying home.

Of course Jane had encouraged me in my quest and since the beginning she understood that I had become possessed by a mission and we both knew this was a once in a lifetime trip, all we needed now was a holiday to recover. What can I say to this man? Will he be friendly? I turned around and there he was looking me straight in the eye, we had both recognised each other on sight. I had that strangely familiar feeling again as we exchanged a slow handshake, yes this is my brother, same stock, this family is getting bigger. We chatted about the "typical 'Frisco weather for November" and waited for Perri and Jane to return.

We were so short of time we couldn't decide what to do, the choice was too much. "Well what does San Francisco mean to you guys? What do you want to see in 'Frisco, most of all?" "Cable Cars" said Jane. "Let's get some lunch first Bill" "OK Perri we can go to a place not far from here on the way that's always pretty good, a fish restaurant that'll be open"

We drove in Bill's car the short distance to the parking lot of a large restaurant. We were in Oakland across the bay from San Francisco and we had come here just for an afternoon, what a wild extravagance. We had flown 800 miles north this morning to meet this guy, now holding the door for everyone, my new brother. I have two brothers at home and now a third here, I've never had a big brother before. "I'm used to being the eldest" I say as we grin in each others faces in the doorway. The restaurant interior was a scene from a hundred movies, lobsterish murals, potted palms and along each wall banquette seating in great circular slabs of voluptuous upholstery in ribbed green leather with waitresses scudding around in frenzied activity. The place was exceptionally busy, it must be good.

"We had a horrible childhood" I was seated next to Bill and it was obvious that he took my sudden appearance as being important. He opened his heart to me as if we were alone and ignoring everyone else he engaged my attention. "I hardly saw Pop at all, myself Bruce and Diane were packed away to boarding schools in Switzerland, separate schools. He was always away, so even at holiday times we had people hired to look after us, can you imagine how that felt?" I looked at Perri and although we were all tucking into a tasty seafood platter I could see she was upset by that remark when she glared at Bill, after all it was her that Pop had hired.

'Pop' felt correct, I couldn't think of him as my Dad, that was very confusing. I felt tense when I thought of my parents, but convinced I was doing the right thing by being here, as if a spiritual ordeal had to be endured in order to find my Pop or Dad which is it? and where am I? What on earth am I doing here? My Dad told me not to get myself upset over this so hold yourself together. My Dad is at home now in England and he is also inside me all the time because I am his son. And my biological 'Pop' is here inside me too, hidden until recently and as I discover him a new side of me is revealing itself. I have found my 'Pop' and I'm hearing all about him now from Bill his eldest son, my brother.

"When I was a kid if I was with him, which was rare, he was never alone. He always had a crowd and whenever I said anything he would make some wisecrack for his audience and always he made me feel like shit. I didn't really get close to him until he was an old man" "Jack maybe doesn't need to hear all this about his father now Bill dear" He glared at Perri. "He wasn't Jesus Christ Perri!" turned to me and continued, as if having dealt with a minor distraction. Jane and Karen at the other end of the table were talking about how I look like my father and inherited medical conditions.

"He could be violent, because he mixed with violent men sometimes. He wasn't a gangster but he sang for gangsters from time to time and it took me a long time to learn that his sometimes ferocious temper would never be directed towards me. He liked colourful characters and he would pretend, act as if he was a gangster himself sometimes. If somebody said the wrong thing to him, insulted him more than once, he'd slap them!" Bill chuckled.

"In Vegas" I was about to tell Bill about Charlie Myerson in Vegas but Perri butted in, "No Bill, your father worked for the sons of gangsters" Bill threw his head back and laughed. "I met Charlie Myerson in Vegas" "Yeah right, he's an accountant" said Bill still laughing and we laughed together until Perri said tersely. "Joe Glaser represented your father, no one else, you know that Bill" "Yeah...... So you liked Vegas...... Vegas is great, but Vegas was later on, he made it in New York, Vegas was much later. The only way I could handle him Jack was to be the quiet kid in the corner. Bruce couldn't and he went from being a juvenile delinquent to a drunk stealing liquor. He has never hurt anyone in his life, but he just couldn't stay out of trouble and inevitably he became institutionalised. His life has gone now, he's locked up California style, three strikes and you're out, three federal offences and its a mandatory life sentence and we'll be old men by the time he gets out of prison"

I wondered what had happened to Bruce to make him that way? I imagined him behind prison bars in orange coveralls thinking about me his new English brother. Perri told me that Bill had talked to Bruce the other day on the phone and told him that I was here, right here in California! No doubt Bill will soon be telling Bruce that we met, and I wondered what he will say about me to our brother in jail? I have a brother that is imprisoned for the rest of his life.

It was as if Bill had been waiting years to talk to me and he couldn't wait any longer to tell me as much as he possibly could. "When we were kids we lived in New York and our sister Diane lives in New York now but she may as well be living on Mars. She married someone with an obscure European title and now she calls herself a Baroness and she plays it to the hilt and I love her dearly for that. But I haven't seen her for quite a while, she's bitter about something and for the life of me I haven't had the time to try and fix the problem"

Bill had obviously been a surrogate parent to the other members of the family when Pop had gone and as if he could read my mind he continued, "When Pop died I decided to give up on all parenting except to my own two children. I do care about Bruce and Diane but I think their problems stem from Pop and not from me. It was clear to me that Pop was the glue that held us all together while he was alive, what with everyone vying for his attention. Then it all ended.....and in the end, because he had been very ill, I was relieved"

"My own success became an embarrassment to me when I was with Bruce and Diane. What with Bruce always dragging me into the criminal courts and Diane, well, I have somehow pissed her off for all time. I've never figured out why and it's too late now. I just didn't get the chance to spend much time with Pop until he was quite old and then it was OK. We spent time alone together and then we really got to know each other" There was a clatter of cutlery as waiters cleared the table in seconds.

"I took him upstate to see the giant redwoods once, just him and me for a week. It was a memorable trip, Pop was sometimes a quiet guy but wherever he was, he always tuned in and enjoyed himself. I remember we got out of the car under the big trees and there wasn't a sound. He said that he was in a natural cathedral" I imagined the brilliant rays of the sun split by the high branches, "Was Pop an artist?" Bill chewed on that for a full minute. "He could be many things, he was a very intelligent guy, he read all the time and he had friends in all kinds of fields. He could be different things to different people, he had a habit of being mysterious and he kept most things very close to himself"

Bill caught me looking distant, I was still in the trees. "He was an incredible character, a lion of a man with a life that was so full of people and events it's easy to see why he had so little time for a family, what with everyone competing for his attention. He loved his talent and the adulation that went with it and he took it for granted almost. Most of the time I was with him I was very much the observer, but later on when we got face to face as two men together he was without equal as a friend. He had humour, great insight and common sense and you were never afraid of anything with him around" I laughed, I was relieved that Bill had not told me that our father was an asshole. We had finished the meal and were now drinking coffee. I laughed again with relief and noticed that Bill kept his eyes on me.

"At the end when he was dying, I felt a compassion beyond my experience before or since, everyone had a place somewhere in his life if they were at all connected to him in any way. For a few that wasn't enough and that was too bad. He wanted most to be accepted for exactly what he was, an entertainer and if you couldn't do that you were in for a miserable time with him...... What did your mother think about you coming over here?"

He fixed me eye to eye, it was the first question he had asked and after hearing such eloquence I felt flustered to find the right words, of course Bill is a lawyer so the use of language is a skill he has honed and he kept eye contact, a lawman and a hell of an interviewer. I was still reeling from meeting him and unaware of anything Bill knew about me I told him my story from the very beginning and as in all good conversations I found myself saying things that had not occurred to me before. I told him that once I discovered that my mother's relationship with my father had been more than a one night stand or a one week fling, because they had a serious relationship, I had to find out what the man was like for myself and discover what, if anything, my father had thought about me.

"I can appreciate that, once your mother opened that window you had to jump through it" But I hadn't answered his question and he knew it was because I actually didn't know what my mother thought. "She knows I'm here, I will talk to her when I get back" We were silent for another minute, but it didn't feel awkward. "Maybe your folks did the right thing protecting you from all the show-business nonsense. It's a strange life, just being around Pop was a challenge for all his kids which we shared. When I first heard about you I thought perhaps you coming over meant that you had felt abandoned or felt as though you had missed out on a part of your life or something"

"No that's not it, I wanted more than a mysterious half memory of having his name once. I knew nothing about him until recently and when my Grandmother told me that she liked him I was amazed because I didn't even know he had known my grandparents until then or even that he knew I existed. I instantly wanted to find out as much as I could about him and I realised that in the process I might discover things about myself." "Yeah, I can understand that" "I have never cared about my own father Bill, can you believe that and I feel as though I ought to spend at least a part of my life thinking about him because even if it was only for a short time, he cared about me" "He cared about everyone! that was one of his problems. Ha! He would have had families running all over the place if he could!" I could see that Perri, looking distant now was thinking that maybe she should have given this trip a miss.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE in Las Vegas, my sister Domi had explained that Bill and Diane's mother committed suicide, in 1945 the day after Bruce was born. "She had been acting peculiar but no one at the hospital took any notice when she walked into Bill Jnr. who was sleeping in the next room and said 'I'm just going out to get your new school uniform' and then she returned to her room opened the window, stepped up to the edge and fell out of the hospital window in Manhattan. That's true but hard to imagine because today she would be treated for post-natal depression, a hormonal imbalance that could easily have been corrected"

Domi said, as a matter of fact. What an horrific event! I had not discovered that fact in the newspaper archives. It was from an age when a personal tragedy could remain private, when reporters did not act like thought police digging for secrets. I wondered what kind of hideous trauma that could have induced on Bill in his formative years. But I was now facing a man who was fully in control of his world and I was thinking that Bill is the most relaxed and focused person that I have ever met. But whichever way you looked at it, it was a horror story and no wonder my mother had recalled that he never talked about Adrienne, Pop's first wife and Bill's mother.

"Diane wanted to be an Opera singer" Bill continued, we had taken a Cable Car and had rattled to the top of an impossibly steep hill and were now sitting in the lounge on the top floor of the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental Hotel in central San Francisco. The view of another Californian 'city by the bay' would be fabulous from here on a clear day and Bill pointed out exactly where the Golden Gate would be visible, without the dense fog. "They say if you visit 'Frisco without seeing the Golden Gate bridge it means that you will return" It was still a terrific view of a spectacular city as we enjoyed a cup of 'English Afternoon' tea and Jane, Karen and Perri stood at the panoramic window with the foggy white-out beyond and left Bill and I deep in conversation at the table.

"When I finally went to hear Diane sing at a rehearsal it was very moving because I could see that she was talented and she could have done anything with her life, but Diane is sometimes temperamental and her singing career floundered. I was worried at the time in case she would try to act out our mother's death in an opera or something" He knew that I was aware of that fact, the way this family picks up the telephone and talks is extraordinary. I realised that any remarks are not made in isolation and we had been tracked around California and Nevada by a series of phone calls and the details of our conversations were exchanged daily.

The fog in San Francisco is unique, a ghostly diaphanous mist that drifts in from the ocean and envelops the city and on this afternoon it had concealed the buildings opposite in an eerie hit-and- miss pattern that gave the impression we stood inside the clouds thousands of feet above the ground. I could see a large 'Hotel Huntington' sign hanging in mid-air and down below through another ghostly hole the sweeping steps of a Cathedral which looked very familiar, from some movie or TV show. And then I remembered, I had seen the steps many times on 'The Streets of San Francisco' with Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, our time here in 'Frisco was almost as short as an episode and just as intensely packed with detail. Perri had gone to the phone to change our flight to a later departure and Jane and Karen were locked in conversation about family and Bill and I were still engrossed.

"Everyone thought he was from New York, because he spent so much time there he spoke like a New Yorker. He met my mother in Harlem in the 1930's, he was up from the south, she was also on her own, she was Irish and Jewish from the Bronx and so you had these two people, kind of runaways who had run into each other. He once told me that he never really got it together with another woman after she did what she did...... " I wondered if that drove his womanising and perhaps he thought of her when he sang those heartbreaking ballads that communicated his emotion so intensely. "No one knows for sure the real story" Bill continued "there was a tale which circulated at the time that she had been diagnosed with cancer and that's why she ended it. I consider I'm lucky because I can remember her. I often felt that I just had to survive all the things that happened to me from the day my mother died in 1945 and I spent a long time looking for self-respect"

"I think that is why I'm here Bill, to find self-respect. I've carried the secret, about having a real father somewhere and when I know the truth maybe I can stop constantly wondering about him" We were not strangers, facing each other across this table, we are brothers and were compressing a lifetime of conversations into the few hours we had because we realised that we might not get another chance, or at best not for a long time. "Jack, he was a special guy, almost wizard like in many ways. He always made you feel that you were special just because you were around him and that he was special in intriguing ways that captivated you. He could spin a web on many levels, he usually spoke cryptically and could act in extraordinarily covert ways sometimes. The key to my relationship with him was the process of getting over the negative feelings towards him that I had developed over a long period of time. In our own way we managed to work it out through the friendship we shared which didn't happen until I became a successful lawyer and he was an old man"

"Bruce can't settle like that, he's been mixed up since day one and his die was cast the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But he had choices like the rest of us, we went to school with Princes and the sons of billionaires, he had his chance and nobody has ever forced him into anything. Bruce would probably be dead by now if that hadn't happened so he's in the best place for him and I know you will agree with me once you get to know him. You will have to write to him, he'll enjoy that because you're fresh meat! I think both Bruce and Diane cut themselves off from me because of what they saw in me of Pop. And Diane has always been very protective of her Popa, she loved him dearly. She knows about you, Bruce calls her and she will be interested to hear from you, I'm sure. When Perri told me about your letter I was apprehensive because I thought you would bring out in me another set of negative feelings, even anger towards him and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go through all that again. But you haven't and I can see him in you...... so that's OK!"

We both felt relieved and to 'lighten-up' we talked about what we did for a living. I told him about my art college, interior design background and how that evolved into a store construction business. Bill explained he had built-up a law practice over the years "My career in law started in '72 and eventually I had guys working for me with a fancy office and a huge overhead to find, now I've ditched all that and gone back to being on my own and technology helps you to do that. I've now got it down to a computer, a mobile phone and a pad and a pencil and that's all I need essentially"

It was time to head back to the airport and we descended in the elevator and in the closeness Bill and I looked at each other and grinned insanely. In a jokey mood we took photos standing by the Christmas tree in the foyer with the fairy lights, pink velvet drapes and crystal chandeliers. We bought postcards of our foggy afternoon in San Francisco in the lobby souvenir shop. It was dark now and raining hard as we climbed into a yellow taxi. In the beam of the floodlights, that lit the entire building, the rain looked like snow falling against the giant flags that flapped outside The Fairmont Hotel. "Pop played here Perri a few times, yeah?" "Many times Bill, this was one of his favourites, I often drove him home from here" Bill said he had completely re-arranged today so that he could meet me and he couldn't wait until he saw people tomorrow. "Because at some point in the day someone is sure to ask 'What did you do yesterday Bill?' and I can't wait because I'll say 'Well, guess what my brother showed up, after 40 years!' and they'll say 'No Shit!'"

We drove over the Oakland Bay bridge in the rush hour traffic and a row of monstrous skyscrapers outlined in yellow neon beckoned across the water like the fingers of a giant hand and I was sad that Bill lived so far from home. As we walked across the car park at Oakland Airport my brother said, "The topic of you was mentioned back in 1956. I spent two weeks of that summer touring England with Pop, Benny and Sammy Ledderman and one afternoon you were mentioned. We were on the Stockton to Darlington railway, the first passenger line in the world. Yeah, I remember that day, Pop would take me with him to see interesting things if he had the chance. The next thing I knew I was on a plane back to school in Switzerland, where I spent the next four years solid"

HE HAD KNOWN ABOUT me all along and I asked Bill if he remembered the luggage set Pop had given him and I told him that my mother was there that day and that I was there too, a baby in a blanket. "Heck, Really! No I can't remember that. I'm sorry it's too far back, but I still have those cases and funnily enough I looked at them only the other day thinking Why do I keep these old things? I know my father gave them to me but I can't even remember when" I asked if Sammy Leddermann was ever Pop's manager, a man that my mother said was always around.

"No, Sammy was Pops dresser, an odd-job kind of guy, he had been a butcher and a gambler, he had connections but he was a harmless funny guy. Bill Rockwell was Pops agent who acted as his manager. I think 'Rock' as Pop called him, cost Pop plenty of money along the way but I don't know the details. That's usually the way of those things. He had some strange people around him sometimes, he had a publicist who called himself Rasputin at one point. No, Joe Glaser, the one and only was Pop's main man, his booking agent in effect in those days, his manager and I'm pretty sure that Rockwell worked for him. He called himself ABC, The Associated Booking Corporation that ran out of an expensive office in Manhattan but Glaser started in Chicago in the 30's, he was a Jewish guy running a club owned by Capone and then he got into the music business, back when it began to be a business"

"He started way before Pop, he had Andy Kirk and his 'Clouds of Joy' and other swing bands and Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and many others, he was the main black artists agency, well not all black I think a lot of the other jazzers were with him, the integrated bands as they used to call them back then, Dave Brubeck and people like that. Joe Glaser was as rough as they come and people said that he flogged many of his acts to death but most of his artists loved him, so work that one out" I was thinking about the mob, fixated on the horse's head in The Godfather, "I've read several times Bill...... Pop has an entry in music encyclopedias that says he was known for his association with the underworld, they always seem to have to mention that, but I've never read anything directly that said he was owned by them"

"Not like Frank Sinatra you mean, well the industry was not like it is today, when Pop started the whole business practically ran out of one or two buildings in New York and they all knew each other. Joe Glaser was a huge figure in the business then and there was always speculation that he had strong connections to the mob and he probably had because regardless, he would have been engulfed by them in those days. I don't suppose anyone will ever know what the deal between them was exactly. Pop never talked about Joe to me and I spent some time with Joe Glaser and he never talked directly about Pop, they just experienced each other. Joe Glaser died in '69 and maybe Pop was finally out of his clutches, he already gone through quite a lean time in the early '60's and Joe couldn't help him through that. I think that's when Perri took over and they did it all themselves to the end but he was way past his prime by then. Pop did OK and he always climbed out of trouble, he was in a tough business for a long time and he survived it all which was quite an achievement"

"What happened to Benny Payne?" "He had a stroke and they couldn't work together anymore that's what happened to him, he got old. Benny was always a part of Pop while he was around and when he was ill and he had to disappear from circulation but Pop kept in touch and visited Ben as he called him and Alice his wife all the time and then Benny died, mid '80's sometime. There were hundreds of people that Pop kept up a seemingly close and intense relationship and over years, the relationships never ended. He had a web of lifetime associations and so what if some of them were the mob? Those hoodlums were benefactors to many black performers in the early days and they might have been a part of his life but he was not exclusively a part of theirs. I was with Pop when he sang with Frank Sinatra at a club in London that George Raft was opening and all the talk was in the papers about organised crime and show-business and I made a remark about an article to Pop and Frank and that one time was only thing he ever said to me on the subject 'Those bad guys are often more interesting, Bill' and we all laughed, that was typical of him"

"The difference between Pop and Sinatra was that Frank Sinatra had a percentage in The Sands, he owned his own record label, the Cal-Neva Casino on Lake Tahoe was part owned by Frank, he had the connections. Pop played for his pay and that's all he ever got, he sang for his supper. Pop always wanted me to become a lawyer, the same way that his father wanted him to be a lawyer...... I'm just sorry that you never knew him Jack" It was cold as we walked across the sodium yellow expanse of the car park towards the terminal and the sky was now crystal clear, the fog had swept clean away and we turned reflective, we had a goodbye coming up soon. "Pop often used to say 'That's where I'm going' and nod at the stars. He could star-gaze from the Hollywood Hills when they really were hills way-out in the country. He had this ship's telescope mounted by the pool at one point, people must have thought he was some kind of peeper!" When we arrived at the gate the plane was waiting for us, engines running, we had talked so much we had almost missed the flight, then there were hugs all round except Perri who was anxious to board and was soon half-way down the ramp.

"Hey Perri. What's the rush?" yelled Bill over the muted whine of the Rolls Royce jets, she turned and Bill waved her back and whilst the gate steward carefully examined his watch they hugged each other for a long time. I know that between them they share many memories. I haven't any memories of this family but I don't feel as though I have missed out on anything. I have gained a great deal from them, they have brought my father to life for me and I have been able to exorcise his ghost and transform him into the father I now know. I felt an inner contentment which Bill had helped me to attain. He knew what he was doing when he filled me up with all of those facts and was so immediately open to me. I agreed wholeheartedly when he said."When you have no facts all you’ve got is bewilderment and that's no way to live"

When we left Bill and Karen at the gate all of us knew that it wasn't a goodbye. I watched the buildings streak past as we accelerated down the runway and it felt like a life-time not a year since I questioned myself on whether to make contact with my American relatives. But they have welcomed me with open arms and immediately treated me as their own. It was Perri who had been the key, her kindness has enabled me to know my father and I will be grateful to her for the rest of my life. I feel more relaxed now than at any point before, a kind of fog in my mind had cleared. And meeting my father's eldest son was the closest I could get to my father and I was glad that Bill was bright enough to understand that.

20

He Knew I Wouldn't Let Him Down

In the bright California sunshine under an orange tree in Perris'garden. I flicked through a stack of photograph albums, page after page of Pop which gave the impression that his life's work was simply to be photographed with celebrities. On most he wears a fixed smile that looks synchronised with the camera shutter. There were dozens of family snaps too, holidays on 'The Royal Caribbean Cruise Line' where he looked to be enjoying himself but still he had that same switched on smile. They reminded me of every photograph that exists of my Grandfather. He also wore a fixed grin whenever a camera was around and there is little emotion discernible because it is simply a polite pose. Perhaps it's generational, a throwback to the days when you had to keep perfectly still for a second to have your photograph 'taken'.

Many pictures merited a longer look or a surprise double take, my father at various events ever- smiling with his arm around Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr. or enjoying an after show drink with Paul Newman. The great Muhammad Ali beamed from another and a young Elizabeth Taylor made me linger somewhat on the details. A life in show-business surrounded by fellow celebrities is always fascinating, but the most striking images of all were the pictures of my father as young boy, one in particular I kept returning to, a sepia photograph of a school band. A 'band photograph' with a marching bass drum at centre with the circular inscription of St Emmas Institute. I immediately recognised my father at around 14 years old, in the centre row holding a clarinet with a determined look on his face. It was remarkable how alike we were at the same age, it was me in another life and also a model image of Jonas, his grandson and my nephew who was 12 months old when his grandfather died.

A lens flare from the blazing sun of Virginia radiates across the top of an exposure taken in the mid- 1920s. The St Emma’s Institute Band stands proud in their toy-soldier uniform of crossed sashes and peaked caps. His contemporaries shade from coal black to white and could be individuals from any part of the world and here they all were, locked in their time in a ghetto. In the world of over 70 years ago my father and the whole band stares into the future with confidence. The image crystallised my conviction that the whole concept of 'white' and 'black' has no relevance. It is a delusion, the ultimate truth is that we are all the same family and as I stared into the past, into a history that belongs to everyone, it was that one photograph out of hundreds that had struck a chord. I felt at last that I knew him and that he is now a part of me.

What were extraordinary were the pictures of my relations growing up and again I could see myself in their faces. My sisters playing in the sun-drenched swimming pool at their home in Laurel Canyon up high in the Hollywood Hills. I waded through decades in minutes, snapshots of holidays, graduation days, weddings, memorable events that occurred whilst I was thousands of miles away living my life totally separated from this half of my family until now. To see these old photographs of my relatives, the visual diary of a previously unknown family history, was a unique experience. That afternoon I lived through an alternative life in images frozen at 1/25th of a second and as the years rolled by I stared wide-eyed through a bright kaleidoscopic window of a strange but hauntingly familiar parallel universe.

In the heat of the California sun I could imagine a new background store of alternative childhood memories that I never experienced in real time, via these pictures of children's birthdays I could fantasize my father at mine, in 1960's America and instead of 'The Morecambe and Wise Show' and 'Match of the Day' I could picture myself watching Pop on 'The Dean Martin Show' followed by the 'ball game'. A lifetime of alternative food, of course by now I could imagine I was my father and at any age, a childhood of pecan nuts and jelly beans, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Brer Rabbit molasses and enjoying Italian ice cream in Central Park, fried chicken in Harlem or sipping a 'Jack Daniels' or a 'Bud' by the pool at Beech Knoll.

A two page Western Union Telegram was tucked inside a photograph album of Perri and my father's wedding day -

DE SHA046 NL PD=SH DETROIT MICH 9= TO MRS BILLY DANIELS = BARBIZON PLAZA HOTEL CENTRAL PARK WEST RM 1937 NYK=

DARLING YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE MY HEART HAS EVER KNOWN - YOURS ARE NOT THE ONLY LIPS THAT EVER KISSED MY OWN - YOURS ARE NOT THE ONLY EYES THAT WHISPERED TENDERLY AND YOURS ARE NOT THE ONLY ARMS THAT HELD ME LOVINGLY - BUT NO ONE ELSE IN ALL MY LIFE HAS EVER MEANT SO MUCH - AND NO ONE ELSE COULD EVER HAVE YOUR SOFT ENDEARING TOUCH - NO ONE ELSE COULD EVER MATCH THE MAGIC IN YOUR EYES - YOUR CHARACTER AND ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH YOU ARE SO WISE - THE OTHERS ARE FORGOTTEN AND WITHOUT THE LEAST REGRET - I ONLY WISH THAT YOU HAD BEEN THE FIRST I EVER MET - YOU ARE MY ONLY ONE FOREVER WITH ALL MY HEART

In an album of photographs of Bill Jnr. Diane and Bruce as children, an old piece of paper once crumpled but now flattened, lay over a studio portrait photograph of Bruce in his early teens posing, looking happy in his Military Academy uniform. I turned the paper over and read a letter that Bruce wrote to his father when he was 10 years old in a spidery hand on a page torn from a school exercise book -:

11/23/55

Dear Papa, How is the singeing (sic) coming along, today the school is getting off for the thanksgiving holiday. And it is a good feeling for the borders to know that you are going home. I am sorry that I didn't write to you sooner but I just had to do tests all day. Oh! I almost forgot I received your letter. And was very happy. I love you very much and I love Perri too. By the way how is Perri. did she go to Canada yet. I miss both of you very very much. You know you are getting old Pop. Pretty soon you will be ritiring (sic) and I will be taking over. You know you just have to look forward to those things Pop. But don't worry Pop I'll give you some money. Your loving Son. Bruce.

It was a letter that revealed a great deal about Bruce but I have no reason to feel smug. I have never experienced the problem of being the child of someone famous, someone you would naturally look up to and could also assume that you would repeat their role in adulthood. My father spent his life as an entertainer and his performances were often documented and in that sense he is immortal and I’m lucky I can meet him from this distance. But I didn't live through my childhood with him, I never experienced the pain of his absence at birthdays or Christmas. In another life I may have handled the situation is much the same way as Bruce, it could have been me in prison. I watched transfixed, a professionally shot video of my father's funeral, Perri could not bear to see or even hear it but she insisted I had to see it. And I saw all the family that day grief stricken at his funeral and I could clearly imagine I'd been there myself. Tom Jones, who I had once dreamt of contacting was interviewed on the steps of the pink-walled Beverly Hills church with the backdrop of palm trees and he spoke of how Billy had helped him with his act when he first performed in Las Vegas. I had guessed correctly that they had become friends. That afternoon Domi took us to see Beech Knoll, the house in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood which his success had bought him in 1955, in particular his contracts with Columbia and MGM Pictures. Domi said "Popa wasn't particularly proud of his films, they were at the end of the 'darkie' era"

But proud of them or not, the pay cheque must have been considerable. Beech Knoll is a green and white rancher high in the Hollywood Hills with a swimming-pool and a view of the city below to die for. I gazed at a porthole window with the "it’s still there!" 'BD' motif in the green stained-glass. It was a visit to a psychic museum for me, to the place he lived in when I was a boy. "He loved this house, he wanted to come home and die here, but in the end he was too ill to be moved" Domi said as we stood on the knoll in the dusk and I could see why, it was a beautiful, tranquil place. His career had sped him around the world with this house 'Beech Knoll' his base for over 30 years.

We couldn't go inside, Domi didn't know the people so instead we wandered around the vicinity. The house is perched at the top of a narrow twisting unpaved lane on a ridge of lush greenery, it was Hollywood country living, the better the address the rougher the country road. It must have been even more out of town in the mid 1950's when you would have struggled to even drive up there. "The house was originally built by 'Madman Muntz' who made a fortune when TV took-off in the late 1940's selling television sets by mail order. He was a well-known business tycoon"

"After dinner Popa would light a cigar, he loved his 'stogies' and walk his dog Othello, all around here. When I was a girl, the panorama of the city with the Pacific on the horizon was an incredible sight, day and night"

In the dusk Domi fondly remembered gazing at the night-sky of her childhood, with her father the singing tycoon. "The stars seemed so close, Popa would sit me on his knee and we'd look up at the stars and he'd say 'Which one do you want me to catch sweetheart?'" Now decades later the view is mostly a haze of orange smog. I suppose I had hoped somehow that his haunts would still be the same, but except in your imagination you can never go back. We stood and absorbed the view through the haze at the ocean sunset and I felt convinced that he must have thought about me once or twice while looking at the same view.

In the evening rush-hour Perri drove Jane and I around Hollywood with a thousand other cars past the site of the Crescendo Club on Sunset Boulevard which back in 1956 had been on the very outskirts of a smaller city. The magnificent view - a million lights twinkling through the huge picture windows. It was way down the canyon from Beech Knoll on a road leading out into the country which in a previous age really had been a 'Sunset' Boulevard. It was a totally different area now and Perri had trouble remembering which block The Crescendo had once occupied. "There, I think, that block... there"

It was just a fleeting moment on a car ride through the fringe of any city, a blur of car-dealerships and fast-food outlets, but it still felt good to drive past the actual site where the 'live' album I remembered from my childhood, that I had only recently heard, was recorded. Perri recalled that she was in the audience that night at the Crescendo and how important the recording was to him. I knew through meeting me that Perri has journeyed down a memory lane and exorcised herself of a few ghosts too.

The fact the Hollywood Crescendo has disappeared was a disappointment, but I should not have expected anything to be even remotely like it was almost half a century ago. The clubs on New York's 52nd Street where in the 1940's Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Coleman Hawkins all played 'Swing Street' at the same time have vanished, replaced with shiny glass office blocks in the now much larger business heart of the city.

The site of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem is now a supermarket and The Paramount Theatre, scene of some of the finest musical performances of the 20th century was demolished to make way for a shopping-mall car park. The Hippodromes, Empires and Palace Theatres that once dotted the pre- television era map of Britain are used as amusement arcades or discount supermarkets, with the exception of a hand-full of preserved jewels still presenting theatrical shows in their traditional gilt and crimson jewellery box.

DOMI LIVED IN LONDON for a while with her parents, “When my father was appearing in Bubbling Brown Sugar in London in 1978. I saw Popa perform many times and I always loved it, he always sang so well the audience just exploded when he finished and I was proud of him and I understood why he was away from home so much, because he was such a gifted performer" While in London they rented a house in Henniker Mews in Chelsea, Domi told me that he turned to her very late one night, after an after-show drink and said, "You know Dominique, you have an older brother here, somewhere in England"

Domi was naturally curious and asked him why he didn't get in touch and he replied, "He has his own family and I respected his mother’s wish to be left alone with her new husband, so I had to forget about him. But my name is up in lights here, if he wanted to, he could find me" Domi could not believe it was that simple and pestered him for the story and he told her that my mother did not want to leave England. "I was walking in Manhattan to breakfast and I bumped into a Champion lady ice-skater called Toni who was his mother's best friend. I hadn't seen her for 10 years, since Jack’s christening in fact. I was on my way to my audition for Golden Boy and I just bumped into her along Broadway early that morning, she had been skating at Rockerfeller and was leaving New York that very day so we had breakfast together. She told me he was a good boy and that he looked very like me and how happy his mother and father are and how they loved him dearly. That was in 1964 and Jack would have been 10 years old, so I knew Jack would be OK"

I had discovered for certain that he HAD thought about me. Domi said all this within seconds of our first meeting and I burst into tears at the breakfast table at The Barbary Coast in Las Vegas, shattered by the thought of him saying 'I knew Jack would be OK' and it wasn't in any way embarrassing, sudden tearful outbursts are not uncommon in Las Vegas. Margo, Perri's sister said at that point. "We are all sharing these emotions with you Jack" My tears were from the joy of relief, it was a cathartic moment of clarity, I understood why I have always denied exploring my father's existence.

I hadn't wanted to press my mother on her past because from my earliest memories I knew that it was painful for her and it would have been a betrayal of her love for me to deliberately ask her again about the man the photograph and upset her. And so I'd followed her unspoken wish to forget and worn a mask over the subject because I knew that was what she wanted and my father had done precisely the same, he had respected her wish to forget.

When my mother said "Your Father came from there Jack" she changed my life and activated a quest that has propelled me to this moment and now with my new American family I have completed a spiritual healing process. I was thinking about my mother beyond the smiles around me in Las Vegas that morning and I wished that she could have been with me so that I could tell her that everything is OK now and that I loved her. My life has altered, everything is still the same but also completely different, the angle at which I view life has been modified and I felt a new calmness inside.

My new sisters are the most home-loving down to earth types you could hope to meet, my father's powerful personality with Perri as the anchor at home must have been the stability in their lives. The relations I have seen have accepted me, apart from Bruce, incarcerated in prison and Diane, 'lost' in New York, but I can now contact and hopefully one day visit them and we can also become family. I have asked all the questions I had about my father, the link with him is ever-present but we have also become friends and I'm proud to have them as relations. It was something that I hadn't anticipated, Jane and I have acquired a new family and I have received much more than a list of facts, I have re- connected a broken link.

My sister Domi described herself as the un-official family historian, she has the Daniels family bible with the American custom of the family tree handwritten inside the front cover. The Daniels family originates from Savannah, Georgia, just up the coast from Jacksonville and many relatives still live in the region. Pop had a brother who Domi believes is still alive, who worked until retirement for the postal service in Jacksonville, the same as their father before them. "Another brother Uncle Dan, who has passed on now, was one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen" The Second World War air force squadron which after a race-relations battle for the right to die for their country, eventually flew in combat in their Thunderbolts defending the Flying Fortresses high above Hitler's Germany. Lena Horne who "Pop knew very well" Domi said "and often worked with her in New York before the war, was the squadron pin-up, she was the 'Queen of the 99th'".

"Uncle Dan" said Domi looking serious "and Pop always enjoyed themselves when they were together, he was great fun" Domi recalled how in her teens she experienced a kind of racial trauma, being a white mulatto was how she described it and she often talked to Pop about her feelings. He told her to treat her ancestry as a gift from the past. "You must never disown your heritage but you have a special insight that you can use to be able to see what makes some people tick. You will discover that racism is based on fear, a racist sees not the individual but a nightmare of their own creation, just don't step inside their hell".

"And so" continued Domi "like a secret agent I was present sometimes when horrible racist remarks were made and then I would distance myself from people like that, without comment usually. Black and white have always been integrated in America but in the past it was kept a big secret. Today people often discover they have black ancestors and I always think of the people in our country who would swear that they are white, but everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents and so on and in the past someone in their family once jumped the fence and integrated fully. I laugh at racism now, there are black racists too and many who have white blood if only they realised, so its all a nonsense. We're all a mixture, we are all the same people!"

We agreed that when you travel far enough back, everyone is related and everyone can find in their family tree somewhere an ancestor that was famous, or infamous. If you are different in appearance from the majority, its possible to spend a lifetime steeped in the race issues of the day, a very unhealthy state to be in. And unfortunately some still have that need to have someone to blame for all their problems and even someone to hate. Domi recalled how Pop once exclaimed after a phone call when his first offer to buy his retirement home had been turned down, "'Maybe it's because I'm black!' and I was amazed that even after all his success he still believed that people could be prejudiced against him, then he just laughed, it was one of his jokes. I never could tell when he was joking. I had a boyfriend once of African and Japanese descent, Pop would take his phone messages and tell me 'The Niggernese just called. Ha!' He joked about race all the time which was always shocking to me"

I have never been able to joke about race and now I realise that because of my ignorance, I once had a chip on my shoulder about my background but I have no confusion at all now. I'm not black and I'm not white, I'm just me. As Harlem novelist James Baldwin once famously remarked "I'm black as long as you think you're white" I believe the reverse is just as applicable. Our genetic inheritance is a chain that links us all, our past is ever present, but our background does not define us. At the end of my journey I have discovered that my father lived the life of a truly free person because he transcended others narrow definitions and managed to express himself.

The past travels into the future too, driving the evolution of the world into a home where there are no oppressors and no dispossessed. If we are to have a safe freedom, where all can be accepted as themselves, we will one day have to live as one and divisive forces will dissolve into history. Our very existence is a paradox, we are alone in our consciousness and connected to everyone else simultaneously and to ensure our survival we must all learn to love others as if ourselves, it is an inevitable truth.

On Sept 17th 1956 on the notepaper of The Midland Hotel, Manchester, England Billy Daniels wrote this to his loving wife Perri -

Monday AM Darling, Evening, My lady of the evening I hear you calling me. You have no idea how lonely I am tonight for just the feel and the sight of you. However, don't misunderstand my mood I am extremely happy because my son is fitted out like a Prince and looks like one and what's more important acts like one. He makes me so proud that I could just break down doors for him. He must stand, however on his own feet. I live for you with every breath I take. You must believe me when I tell you that I am the luckiest and proudest man in the whole wide world. When our baby is born you just won't be able to hold me for nothing. He will grow like your Bill, tall and straight and full of his Dad. You will be a happy woman when he is born you will see. He will be a good round healthy boy and full of vigour. The time goes slowly for you I know. I also feel that you are piqued now and again what with my being away and all but never fear I am so anxious to be with you that I would leave here tomorrow if I could but you know I can't. I must wait until I hear the right word. It is reasonable to assume that I will be with you the latter part of October, there will be two weeks rest for me at least before I plunge in again. I have requested this time to re-juvenate. I have also asked that I be told a long time before, just what time I am to work and where. I will plan every move so don't worry. I am very tired tonight so I'm going to close this. I have bought Bill new luggage a beautiful cow-hide set. New clothes, all requirements, sports equipment etc. the lot. He is radiantly happy, I got everything wholesale. Be a sweet doll and don't be upset. I promise I'll never stay away from you this long again. All my love, kisses and hugs. Love to Brucie, please hug the boy for me. (I live for you) Bill

That must have been written on the very day when, with my 'memory-less' baby eyes, I gazed at my father's face for the last time. A cycle of the moon later on October 17th 1956 he posted another letter to Perri, his expectant wife -

Park West Hotel Marble Arch London W2 Telephone Ambassador 7733

Sunday A.M. Hi! Sweetest one, Well! Another week was finished last night. Closed with a bang to a packed house. A wonderful crowd who seemed to love my every move, guess Papa hasn't lost his touch after all, huh? Your letter written Tuesday came Sat a.m. just as I was leaving for a Turkish bath with Sam and Harry so I'm answering it in the quiet of the Sunday am. Went to Stork tonight and found it very dull since I'm not boozing, I can't take that place. The feature attraction left me cold - a Rock n Roller called Tommy Steele, he may do something, but not Rock n Roll. I am not travelling with Benny, darling, I thought I told you that he and Rock & Helen leave next Sunday evening at 8:15pm for New York. I must remain in the country until the following Thursday the 25th in order to file my tax-form. I then leave on the 26th for Geneva and on the 29th from Copenhagen home. Benny will arrive in LA. on the 23rd. I am going to the schools alone, I would take Sam because he wants to see Billy but I don't think I'll have the extra dough. However, Sam threatens to borrow the dough. We'll see. I want to try and make the best impression possible at the schools. It is so important for the children's sake. I hope the kids will be proud of their ol'man. The other kids will be giving me the "glad eye". Wish you were with me, Mama, to help me. Diane promises to help me with the French. Strangely enough Bill doesn't seem to be bothered with his French. I always ask him this and he swears that he's learning it faster than any of the others and when I said on the phone to him"Bon Jour mon fil" he started to laugh. Is my French that bad. Yeah! huh? Glad you are happy with Diane's letter. She does seem to have settled into the routine rather well. I have some lovely things to take to her. I am bringing a camera to Billy. Can't afford to bring you anything this time, me no money. Glad you see what I mean about Vegas. Of course, we can get an apartment. With your help all will be well never fear, love, you are going to be with me. The budget will be a necessity. Joe Glaser is in perfect accord with my plan and understands just what it is that I want. Just to put your precious mind at ease, dear one, I'm enclosing part of my last letter to Joe written Oct.9th which speaks for itself. Also a copy of my itinerary. I don't wish you to have any worries at this time just relax and have our beautiful son in perfect tranquillity. If you only know how much I'd give to spare you any anxiety you would never believe it. I told you before I have never loved anyone like this. A good solid mature man's love is a wonderful thing. It has wrought many changes in me, you will see a much different husband when I return. I have had many months to fathom things out and I've come to the turning point in both my life and my career. You are with me all the way and we will go a long way together. There are many unseen obstacles in our way in the future but with you to stand by me and keep me strong nothing will stand against us. I will try to be as careful as I can in every possible way and I will certainly try not to cause you any anxiety. Perhaps my period of ill-luck is at an end. My records are out, one of them is "I Need Your Love" I won't forget to bring them with me. People seem to like it everywhere. The motor show is here next week so the hotels are full and the town is full so I think we will do better this next week than last. Funny you should suggest that I write to Harry. I already had. Our minds are beginning to work together. Got a wire signed Charlie Morrison asking if I could open Oct 30th at the Mo. This is impossible as you know but I'll think of something to wire back. Have they been doing any good? How is Cab doing in Ciro's? Did you go to Louis's party? Must close this now, as I am going to Mass this a.m. I'll pray for our happiness. All my love and kisses. Love to all, Bill

He wanted Perri to have a bouncing baby boy, like the two-year old son he already had in England. But it was Andrea and then Dominique and one of life's rich ironies that instead of a son they both enjoyed the experience of raising two wonderful daughters. He did have a boy that was full of his father but they never saw each other again. On TWA In Flight notepaper my father wrote this to Perri over 30 years later, still travelling to perform but almost at the end of the road -

My Darling I don't know why when I'm leaving the love of my life I can only think to say 'look after yourself'. I tried to call you to say I love you and goodbye again as the plane was delayed but I missed you. Hope the trash got away OK I'm sure the $20 will please them. Be careful that you don't do too much work around there. My pain is still persisting in my chest and I think it was my lifting the water- cooler into the garage, it weighed a ton. I'll see a Doctor if it persists. I am going down to 155lbs for the show as I want to be thin and tanned, if I just watch the food I can do it. As you say this must be the 'last hurrah' don't worry I'll make it a good one. I only wish I could do something really great for you to be proud of me. I seem to have so little time left sometimes so let's make the most of it. All the frustrations and disappointments one day we will be able to look back and laugh at. Life is full of things we might have done or could have done or should have done! The important thing is - We loved and enjoyed the life we had together! Nothing else matters. We tried!! I guess I looked pretty foolish and stupid at times but I'd always pick myself up and try over again to be what you wanted me to be. You see, I love you! Bill

He never mailed this note because the trip ended in almost total disaster, he suffered a heart attack In Flight and was rushed to a Newark hospital immediately on arrival. And that night from his intensive-care bed he wheezily tape-recorded this message to Perri, in pain with the hiss of an oxygen mask in the background and the hesitant click of his finger on the record button at every pause

I don't know how this will affect things Perri...... if it gets out that I've had a heart incident. I know they'll want to drop me so I'm trying to keep everybody from talking. I said it was a case of food poisoning. I don't know whether it will work or not..... I've noticed this last few days going up and down the steps at home, I felt weak and tired. I thought it was the heat I knew something was wrong but I couldn't figure it out...... I thought maybe it was just fatigue and that it would go away but yesterday on the plane it really hit me. I knew what was happening then......

Of course by the time I got here and I saw the cardiogram...... the doctor here will need all of the old cardiograms you can find to compare. But its not a heart attack, I think its just insufficiency in one of the ventricles and of course my pressure was way up, 190 over 110... I have quite a bit of pain but I think I might beat it and the thing is...... I must.... leave on the 20th...... I don't know how fast I can pull out of this...... when you're under stress and strain, you never know which part of you is gonna give in...... Funny if this thing does end here in this strange hospital in Newark...... I kind of half-way thought it would be this way one day, either in a weird motel or in some out of the way place. That's why in the last couple of years I was always so thankful to get back home and always so reluctant to leave, I never knew if I would come back....

I sort of had a premonition but I thought you might be too frightened if I didn't get on the plane. After you left me at the airport it began to really hurt and I almost changed my mind about going. I wish I had now...... maybe it would have been better...but that's OK..... I went to bed early the night before and I got up early.....I still felt tired....I just couldn't be sure what it was but after the real intense pain started I knew...... and so did the captain...... he knew. He was very nice, I forget his name but TWA was right on the ball...when we landed I was over here inside five minutes and you can't ask for more than that......

I never felt such intense pain in my life.....I couldn't even move but they gave me some oxygen which helped and I figured if I made it off the plane I would be OK...... I had an agonising time but I had a wonderful group of people...... the crew weren't kids and they knew it was close and they were keeping me jolly...... 'Heart Attack at 35,000 Feet' Ha! They were doing imitations of Black Magic and one of the girls slipped me a nice slug which didn't help...... but it made me feel good....then they got me the oxygen and of course when we got to the airport the ambulance was right there...... My doctor's Korean, I think he knows what he's doing. He says I'm in great shape and if I can pull down the pressure I'll be all right. But I don't want to trust this thing so that's why I wanted you to come...... I know we can't afford it but I want you to be with me....

If nothing gets out and the show people don't find out about it, I can make it I think... Don't worry too much about things...... Its not worth it...... in the end you'll find it doesn't take that much to make you happy...... I was always wanting to try too hard I guess but I always seemed to want to.... I'm not going to give up. I do love you with all my heart...... stress is what knocks off more people than anything else, because you really don't know what's happening to you ...... This of course will change my life...... they always say if you can beat the first one you've got it made.....but I'm going to work very hard and I'll show you what kind of man I'm made of.....

This is the toughest point now but it'll work out you'll see.....We never quite see the forest for the trees. I knew I was cracking, I knew I was pressing too hard but I just couldn't stop it I guess.... I think maybe I put too much emphasis on trying to make money and not enough on trying to make you happy. Funny when you do that, you wind up all worn out and then it doesn't seem that important anymore...... Old Ben warned me that I was going to feel it if I kept on going like this. I guess he could see more than I thought...... getting on these planes and going back and forth...... But we all learn our lessons.

I have to stay here for a while but God willing I'll get up.....let's hang on to the show as long as we can. I won't let them know until I find out I can't make it. I'll know every day how I'm doing.....Our grandchildren...... they've got a lot to live for, a lot to be thankful for...... Of course you can figure things out lying here, waiting to see if another attack is coming. It kind of changes your perspective on things. Ha!...... It'll be easier from now on because I've gone through this...... Life can be so lonely, I never felt how lonely one can be...... What a day! I will never forget that...... I wanted to talk to you, to see you so bad. I kept saying 'I hope I'll see her again just to tell her one more time how much I love her' ....There's a letter in my pocket for you which I didn't mail......

Al came up to see me, he was very nice. He said when I get out of here I could come up to his place. He said I looked good, colour was good...... [CLICK]

...... Been another one...... it hurts...... It's definitely some insufficiency someplace...... and when it comes on it really comes on...... I feel like I'm dying here...... Remember that I loved you Perri... like I never loved anybody, all I wanted was for you to be happy...... It's been a great life honey and you've been a great wife, much better than I deserved and I probably would not have gotten this far without you... But you must go on, you know...... life will go on for you..... you know... it will...... Watch what you do with the pennies, if you work it right you'll have a good life...... You'll have enough money, just make sure you do everything right, don't let them rob you....

If I can't beat this you should make it OK...... and the children I love them.... At times they didn't understand me but I wasn't around that much you know...... And I always wanted the best for them and of course they probably hated me for it sometimes. Diane will make it all right, she has enough moxie...... Diane really loves you, she's funny sometimes but she really admires you...... Bruce I think is coming around, he just needs a little tender loving care that's all.... He thinks nobody loves him, if he could ever find out that everybody loves him he'd have it made. And Bill....has just been unbelievable, I'm very proud of the way he handles himself. He'll be the cool headed one to look after everything...... and I know Andrea and Domi will be all right......

I'm feeling a little bit better but I had an attack again so I don't know what's going to happen now.....when the doctor sees the score..... We'll give up all these frustrations, give up all the anxieties, that's what does it..... Find a writer Perri...... you must find a writer Perri, with the clippings and everything you've got, if you get the right writer there's an interesting book about me...... I guess at least I'll have time to write to everybody laid up here, they don't let me move a muscle, but they're very nice...... My brother's coming to see me tomorrow, poor guy he's not well...... I'm so tired but I don't want to sleep...... Goodnight my love. I hope we make it in the morning...... I've just got to see you, one more time......

PS If you sell the house get it fixed up first and then ask a big price, you can always come down...... There's going to be all kinds of reasons people are going to give for this. But I know, I know exactly what it is.... It's the stress and strain and its sneaky, you don't know its happening to you...I could feel those times when I was just completely drained, I had no power in my legs...... That damned cooler, I picked that thing up, it weighed a ton..... Jesus it seemed like the blood went down to my feet, I just made it...... Well, maybe I can sleep a little now...... See you in the morning darling...... Goodnight...... [CLICK]

I KNEW THAT VISITING my father's grave was a possibility before we left home. I felt that it was an essential part of the trip but I didn't know how Perri would react to the suggestion so I avoided the subject. But over breakfast we discussed plans for the last day of our visit and we had finally decided on a walk along the beach of the Pacific when out of the blue Perri turned to me and said "I thought you might like to visit your father's grave, then we can go to the ocean for some air"

Perri had thought of everything and introduced me to all the family, I met her elderly mother Helen Cameron at Gennaro's Restaurant who held her hand to her mouth in astonishment when she saw me walk in, she called me last night at Perri's and spoke in a hoarse whisper with a gentility from another age. "I know that you are going home to England tomorrow and I wanted to wish you both Bon Voyage. I am so glad that you made the effort to meet us Jack and I was so very pleased to meet you" I was touched and wanted to return to America soon, I have a new family on the other side of the Atlantic.

It was our last afternoon in California I was thinking as we drove slowly through the memorial garden gates out of the heated traffic and into a profound silence. I had an overwhelming urge to leave something on my father's grave. As I stood surveying the vast choice in the florists at the memorial garden I felt like a ghostly late arrival, but not an impostor. I simply missed out on knowing my father through understandable circumstances which sadly I discovered after he had died. The raging thirst to uncover his story inspired me to become the writer he once urged Perri to find. My brother Bill said to me that afternoon in San Francisco. "Even if you had met him, he could be different from one day to the next. He was like a chameleon"

It is impossible to get inside another mind and definitively describe someone, we each create our own version of others from their behaviour. We are, all of us, complex individuals and yet similar, like a shoal of fish alive in the ocean of our time, we all have a contribution to make and a story to tell. I have a new sense of identity and feel an inner satisfaction that I had persevered with my quest and found my personal history my heritage inheritance, the internal universe genetic that connects us to all alive and all that have lived before.

I reached out to the multi-faceted character that was my father in the only way possible, by placing flowers on his grave. When I remembered my mother's favourite colour there was no other choice; I picked peach roses and walked back to Perri and Jane waiting by the car with a dry throat. "It's this way" said Perri and I looked at Jane, "I'll stay here and wait for you" she said.

The love of my life was tearful, she was wearing the gold wedding band I had given her the night we returned to our hotel after visiting Perri's for the first time. Until then I had been carrying the ring that my father had given to my mother in 1953 in my pocket as a token, Jane understood my quest completely. "Go on" she said "I'll wait here for you".

I followed Perri across a rolling field dotted with specimen trees. It was a graveyard with no headstones, instead within a perimeter of evergreens, engraved flagstones lay inset in an acre of beautifully manicured lawns with bouquets of flowers every ten feet or so, a splash of vivid nature sprouting magically from the ground. We paused by an elaborate flower arrangement that had a fluttering Stars and Stripes beside a framed photograph of a young woman in uniform and under an un-characteristically grey sky I was beginning to feel intense.

"It's just over here" and a few yards on she stopped and my heart was pounding, unlike most his stone is plain and has the most basic inscription -

WILLIAM BOONE DANIELS - SEPTEMBER 12TH 1915 - OCTOBER 7TH 1988

I was struck by the span of history from the second of his birth in 1915 to the second of his death in 1988. The times he lived through, the memories that were lost with him, the performances he gave, the life he enjoyed, the stories he could have told me but we never knew each other, I didn’t even meet him and I began to cry. My head spun when I realised with a jolt that I was standing on his bones, lost in a cloud of grief, I wanted to embrace him and I felt a wave of anguish as I sobbed and pointed at the ground,

"That's my Dad ...... down there"

I sank to my knees crying, I was a little boy again, when I was strong in my father's memory.

"Thanks Perri"

"He knew I wouldn't let him down"

I felt a new sense of balance as I walked away. I have finally connected with the man whose blood flows through my veins and for the first time in my life I feel complete. My journey is over, I have found my emotional legs and walk away with confidence leaving the mystery and bewilderment behind me forever.

I can believe in myself, free at last!

THE END