I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Three

It didn't make sense for Pat and me to keep on living in Los Angeles. The people I principally worked for, Lena and Lennie, made their home in New York City. That was where we rehearsed for the gigs. It was where all the action happened. It was where I needed to be. Besides all of that, Pat was pregnant. With me soon leaving on a four month European tour with Lena, it would be a whole lot more reassuring for Pat to be closer to her family and mine than in LA. Life was about to turn more complicated than usual in the DiNovi family. We packed up and drove the Thunderbird back across the country in early 1957.

On March 21, 1957, at New York Hospital, Pat gave birth to our first daughter Denise DiNovi. It was a thrilling event, and then, as expected, things got frantic. Pat and Denise settled in with my sister and brother-in-law, Marianne and Louie, at their house in a town called Centerport on Long Island, and I boarded the French ocean liner SS Liberte bound for Europe. The plan was for Pat and the baby to fly to Paris and catch up with me as soon as Denise was six or seven weeks old and sturdy enough to travel.

In the meantime, I sailed the Atlantic. Since I was part of the Lena Horne entourage and since Lena went only first class, it was for me, on my first trip to Europe, a luxurious experience. Men wore black tie to dinner. The meals were lavish. The other passengers included celebrities who couldn't resist hanging out with the gorgeous Lena and her crowd. I met all kinds of famous people. Otto Preminger, the movie producer who had most recently made The Man With the Golden Arm, was one of the big names on board, and another was S.N. Behrman, the sophisticated playwright, scriptwriter and contributor to The New Yorker.

Lennie was in his element in all the high living. He made a big deal out of getting me, the virtual teetoler, to taste the fine liqueurs. "Try this, Gene," he'd say. "You'll never sip a Calvados like this in the rest of your life." The liqueurs weren't really to my taste, but I took a sip of everything to make Lennie happy.

Actually, the time when I gave Lennie the most laughs came during a game of ping pong I played against Johnny Cresci. Just for the heck of it, I started to play as if I were Monsieur Hulot from Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, the Jacques Tati comedy. I moved the same way he did in the movie's famous tennis scene. He played in quick herky jerky movements, somewhere between a machine and a real person. I did the same thing at the ping pong table. I probably wasn't as tall as Tati, but I was slim like him and had the same control over my limbs. I did a whole Hulot imitation, and Lennie laughed so hard he just about had convulsions.

Lena loved Paris more than any place in the world. She often told us Paris was the only city where people didn't stare at her and Lennie, at the beautiful black woman arm in arm with the white guy.

The club we played was the famous Moulin Rouge, and the small hotel where the musicians and everyone else in Lena's support group were put up wasn't far from the club. It was called La Blanche Fontaine on a little street called rue Fontaine. The hotel had a marvelous dining room where the entire staff consisted of a waitress named Martha, her husband the chef, and Philippe the maitre d'. They turned the hotel into a home for us, especially after Pat and baby Denise arrived. We became family as far as the staff was concerned.

The chef cooked wonderful meals, which was something I had to keep pointing out to George Duvivier. George had a habit on the road of carrying a bottle of Tabasco sauce in his pocket to spice up the meals he was served. If our chef at La Blanche Fontaine had spotted George and the Tabasco, he would have been supremely insulted. At every meal, I positioned myself so that I blocked out the chef's view of George.

"George!" I whispered over and over. "This food doesn't need the sauce!"

At the Moulin Rouge, and at the Olympia Theatre, where Lena also gave some Paris concerts, celebrities visiting back stage came in a steady parade of glittering personalities. One night, after the show, I found myself sitting between Lena and Edith Piaf, two of the world's great entertainers. Piaf was an odd woman, very small, her dress covered in food stains, but, man, did she give off power. Porfirio Rubirosa sometimes showed up. This guy was a genuine playboy. Officially, he was the ambassador from the Dominican Republic, which meant he was bankrolled by the country's dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Unofficially, he was a ladies' man, the ex-husband of two American heiresses, Doris Duke (of the tobacco fortune) and Barbara Hutton (of the Woolworth department store millions). The story went that Rubirosa attracted the ladies with his sexual prowess. Parisian waiters thought so. They referred to the large pepper grinders in their restaurants as "Rubirosas." A nicer back stage visitor was a young and beautiful actress named Marpesa Dawn. She was American-born, but she made her reputation in the French movie that won an Oscar, Black Orpheus, which was set in Brazil. The movie was where most people first heard Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova music.

My favourite celebrity encounter when I was with Lena, now that I think about it, didn't happen in Paris but in Los Angeles at the Cocoanut Grove. That's where I met Anna Magnani, the great Italian star of The Rose Tattoo and a bunch of other movies.

"You're the greatest actress I ever saw," I said to her.

She answered in shaky English. "Noncha be too sure," she said.

In Paris, we took in the usual tourist sights, visited the Eiffel Tower, walked the Champs Elysses, toured the Louvre. But my favourite was a trip just outside Paris to a little town called Monfort l'Armoury to see the house where Maurice Ravel had lived when he composed much of his music. He was the great man who wrote Daphnis et Chloe and a lot of other music whose harmonies influenced Robert Farnon, Bill Evans and thousands of other people, including me. Ravel was a godsend to the guys who filled in the harmonies for many American songwriters of the 1930s and '40s. These were the songwriters who could write wonderful melodies but had no conception of the harmonies that went with the melodies. That meant other guys were hired to fill in the harmonies, and in many cases, the other guys borrowed harmonies straight from Maurice Ravel.

The Ravel house was preserved just the way it had been when he lived there from 1921 until his death in 1937. It stood at the edge of a beautiful little forest. The piano was in the upstairs room of the house, and the bedroom was downstairs. What I couldn't help noticing, the way the piano was positioned, was that, when Ravel was composing, his back would have been to the window that overlooked the woods. I figured the reason for this positioning was to keep the creator of such beautiful music away from the distraction of the natural beauty in the woods beyond his window.