I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Three

My earliest memory, the first sight I can recall as a little kid, was a gas mask sitting on a radiator on the first landing going up the stairs of the house on 69th Street. The gas mask belonged to my Uncle Ralph, one of my mother's seven brothers. He lived with us for a few years, and when he moved into our house, he brought all his worldly possessions, which included the gas mask he wore as a soldier in the First World War.

    Uncle Ralph and I shared a bedroom and a bed. That was all right with me, except for Uncle Ralph's cigarettes. He was a steady smoker, and our bedroom was blue from the fumes. That may help to explain why I stayed a life-long non-smoker.

    Uncle Ralph loved dancing at the Roseland before Anthony was old enough to even know about the place. Uncle Ralph danced all the steps-tango, jitterbug-but his specialty was one called the Peabody. It was a very fast fox trot with such long steps that in eight bars of music, a couple could glide practically two city blocks, which happened to be the length of the Roseland ballroom.

    Uncle Ralph was a sort of a man about town in his day. He knew a lot of people, and he picked up stories about all the celebrities. He once told me when I was old enough to know what he was talking about that Irving Berlin, who grew up in Manhattan's Lower East side, used to work as a teenaged singing waiter in a Chinatown restaurant in the years before the First War. Not only that, Uncle Ralph said, Berlin was in the habit of joining the Chinese guys at the end of the night in smoking a little opium.

    I carried around Uncle Ralph's story about Irving Berlin and the opium for years until a night in 1983 when I had a playing gig at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. That night, between sets, a man invited me to sit at his table for a few minutes. The guy said he was interested to hear I was from Brooklyn. He told me he was from New York himself, a Captain in the Narcotics Division of the New York City Police. His father had once held the same job. This, I thought, was my chance, and I asked the Narcotics Captain about Irving Berlin. Did Berlin smoke opium in Chinatown decades ago?

    The Narcotics Captain looked to one side, then to the other, leaned across the table, and spoke to me in a confidential voice, "What your uncle told you is all true. Irving Berlin smoked opium in the old days," he said, and after a pause, he added, "The worst thing is Irving Berlin's still smoking it today."

    By that time, in 1983, Berlin was ninety-five years old.

    "Whoa," I said to the Captain. "What do you do about that?"

    He went through the routine again, looking to either side, leaning across the table, talking confidentially. He said, "How the hell are we gonna bust the guy who wrote God Bless America?"

All of my mother's brothers seemed like colourful characters to me.

    Uncle Nicky started out as a newspaper boy selling papers on a street corner. Then he built up a delivery service with four horses and wagons. Uncle Nicky took what we would call today a hands-on approach to his business. He even slept with the horses. He got his big breakthrough when he won the job of handling all the deliveries for Gold Medal Flour. It was a big company owned by the father of the great Chicago Bears quarterback from Brooklyn, Sid Luckman, and he chose Uncle Nicky out of all the delivery companies that wanted the Gold Medal franchise.

    Uncle Nicky was so successful that a group of Mafia guys tried to muscle in on his operation. But Uncle Nicky, helped by his brother, Uncle Jimmy, out-muscled them. Then the Mafia guys went at Uncle Nicky from another angle, and they got better results.

    "They beat me with lawyers," Uncle Nicky used to say, more in sorrow than in anger. "They beat me with lawyers."

    Still, Uncle Nicky, who had graduated from horse-drawn wagons to a fleet of trucks, did much better financially than any of the other uncles.