I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lena's tour took us to other parts of France and beyond its borders to neighbouring European countries. We worked a date in Juan Les Pins on the gorgeous French Cote d'Azur, then into Italy for a gig in the lovely little city of San Remo.

    When we traveled further south to Rome, the plan was to record with an Italian orchestra. The studio was located in a Roman ruin that dated back an unknown number of centuries.  George Duvivier and I had already cut a record back in Paris with a local drummer and the popular French guitarist and singer Sasha Distel. He was a tremendously romantic figure, a guy who had a big love affair with Brigitte Bardot. The record session concentrated on music that suited the romantic side of Distel's personality, but the unexpected bonus was that Sasha knew his jazz. Duvivier and I smiled through the whole session.

    Nobody was smiling during the recording date in the Roman ruin. None of the Italian musicians could understand what they were supposed to play with the visiting Americans. Our charts baffled them. Finally an Italian tenor saxophonist stood up and said, "I can't do these," he said, pointing at the arrangements, "but I can do this." And he proceeded to play an excerpt from an opera. The recording date fell apart shortly after the tenor saxophonist's display.

Worse came in England. We were booked into the major club in London, the Talk of the Town, which was in Leicester Square and was formerly known as the Hippodrome. But the English musicians' union was carrying on a fight with American musicians who were booked for concerts or club dates or any other kind of work in England. The immediate result of the squabble was that Americans were temporarily barred from performing anywhere in the UK. Later, on an entirely different tour with Lena, we played the Talk of the Town, which was as classy as we were told to expect. But on that first trip to England, we were confined to a month of sightseeing,

    Those latter gigs in London left me with some great memories. I met an English pianist named Alan Clare. He had a great touch on the piano, and he worked with Stephane Grappelli and took all sorts of jazz jobs around the city. He and his wife lived in the basement apartment at 86A Holland Park. The apartment became the gathering place for visiting musicians. Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson dropped by every time they were in London.

    One time when I was there with Lena, Lou Levy was also in town accompanying Ella Fitzgerald, and Sanford Gold was there with Eatha Kitt. We all got together at Alan's place. To my surprise, English comic performers made up another category of visitors to 86A Holland Park. One of Alan's gigs was as a member of the Nitwits, a group of musicians who played on the most popular comedy program on BBC Radio, none other than The Goon Show. Inevitably, Goon people like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan regularly came by Alan's place. Alan himself was a very funny guy, a very sweet guy, and I later recorded a song of his, titled simply Alan's Song, as a tribute to a wonderful pianist and a great person.

Meanwhile, on that first European tour with Lena, from England we headed to Scandinavia for a gig in Stockholm. On the way, the Swedish trip almost came unglued in Denmark's train station in Copenhagen. While we were on our train in the station waiting to get moving, a bunch of us caught the irresistible smell of cooking steaks. We all told one another we had to get ourselves some of that delicious meat. So we jumped off-Lennie, Duvivier, Johnny Cresci, Lena's maid and her two pug dogs, everybody except Lena-and we scrambled over to the restaurant to order take-out steaks. By the time we took our steaks back to the train, it had disappeared. No train and no Lena. We'd lost our star.

    Panic set in. Everybody raced around searching for Lena. It was so madcap that it felt as if we were all part of a Mack Sennett comedy. After more rushing about, we learned that Lena's train had been diverted to a yard for some repairs, then put aboard a boat for the crossing into Sweden.

    We asked an official where Lena's train left from.

    "The Kattagat."

    We asked another official.

    "The Skagarac."

    In the end, after more Keystone Kops dashing around, it didn't matter where the train left from because all routes to Sweden headed first to the Swedish port city of Malmo. That was where we finally reunited with Lena. By then, we'd devoured the luscious steaks, but that was a subject we decided not to bring up in Lena's presence.

Something great and odd began to happen to me as the train made its way through the Swedish countryside toward Stockholm. A woman who was part of the train crew came through our car, tidying and cleaning, wiping down all the surfaces, meticulous about her job. There was something about the woman's orderliness that appealed deeply to my orchestrating soul. It turned out to be the beginning of my love affair with Sweden.

  

Lena was booked for the month of June in Stockholm's China Theatre, which was in the heart of the city across from the beautiful Berzelli Park. The park dated back more than a century and was named after a famous scientist of the day named Jons Jacob Berzelius. The park, the theatre and the neighbourhood mesmerized me. I had an incredible sense of déjà vu, though what exactly the scene stirred from my past I couldn't tell. All I knew was that Stockholm was putting its mark on me. It was a feeling that deepened each day of the month we spent in the city.

Pat, baby Denise and I rented an apartment near the theatre for the month from a Swedish family of the same size as ours who were going away on their summer vacation. The only blip in my romance with Sweden and all things Swedish came when I sat down for a lunch with the husband in our host Swedish family. Johnny Cresci was with me, a guy with a crazy sense of humour who could talk in pig Latin or in his own made-up versions of French or Italian or the language of any country we visited. He was kidding around with the Swedish apartment owner until the subject of the Second War came up.

    "Like a lot of my fellow Swedes," the guy said in perfectly clear English, "I favoured the Germans in the recent war."

    Cresci and I looked at one another. This guy supported the Nazis?! From that moment on, Cresci made no more jokes and spoke in no more pig Latin. We wound up the conversation as soon as we could, and when the bigoted landlord left, I resumed my romance with everything about Sweden except this guy's politics. For the rest of the month in Stockholm, I never encountered another person who had such repugnant views as my landlord. All the rest of the Swedes were as beautiful as Berzelli Park and the China Theatre and everything else I loved about the city and the people and the country.

It was an incredible month. When the show ended at the China Theatre each night, we'd go out for something to eat in the neighbourhood. It was a busy area and included a place called the Berns Restaurant and Theatre where Earth Kitt performed while we were in town. Each night, as we finished eating our late supper, about one-thirty or two in the morning, the mid-summer sun would be just coming up. At the sight of the rising sun and of the maypoles in Berzelli Park, the most surreal feeling came over us all. Those nights of almost perpetuaI light weaved their magic, filling me with a whole new set of emotions I didn't recognize in myself.