I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Five

When we arrived back home from Europe, Pat and I found the perfect apartment for a couple with a little kid. It was in a development called Parkway Village on thirty-seven acres just off Grand Central Parkway in Queens. Big-shot New York people like Robert Moses and John D. Rockefeller Jr. kicked in to build Parkway Village in 1947 as part of the pitch to bring the United Nations to New York City. The village was intended as the home for the foreign employees and their families who would pour into New York to staff their countries' delegations. And that was the way history unfolded when the UN voted in favour of setting up operations in New York. Architecturally, the village was in the style of post-war garden communities, and people of all races and colours from nations all over the globe soon arrived in Parkway Village.

    Somehow, though neither Pat nor I had any UN connections, we managed to score an apartment in the development and later move into a second and larger apartment. All the village's buildings were no more than two or three stories high, set among small parks and open spaces. It was both picturesque and safe for kids. Like most of the apartments, ours were on two levels, and outside, kids ran around having a great time without worries about traffic or other urban menaces. Denise loved it, and so did out second daughter Michelle who was born in New York Hospital on June 11, 1958. Our little family was complete.

At this point, Lena was up to something completely different for her. In early 1957, she signed to do a Broadway musical, which was eventually titled Jamaica. It bugged Lena that she'd never been given a weekly TV show of her own or a starring role in a movie (later, in 1969, she made a not bad western with Richard Widmark titled Death of a Gunfighter in which she played a saloonkeeper and the madam in a brothel). Since TV and movie opportunities never opened for her, Lena leaped at the chance to do a musical, even if it turned out not to be the best musical ever conceived.

    On paper, Jamaica looked promising. The famous Broadway impresario, David Merrick, was producing the show, and the songs were by two immortals of songwriting, Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (lyrics). These were the two guys who wrote all the songs in The Wizard of Oz. Harburg put together the words for hundreds of other songs by heavyweight composers like Vernon Duke, Julie Styne and Burton Lane. Arlen conceived so many unforgettable melodies that it sometimes seemed as if he wrote half the Great American Songbook. Blues in the Night, That Old Black Magic, Let's Fall in Love-they were all his. Not to mention the song Arlen wrote with Ted Koehler in 1933, which became identified with Lena after she sang it in the 1943 movie of the same title, Stormy Weather.

    The idea behind Jamaica was to capitalize on the craze at the time for calypso music. Harry Belafonte, Mr. Calypso himself, was supposed to play the lead. But after a lot of stalling around, Harry backed out. Merrick and the rest of the people involved in Jamaica approached Lena, promising to reshape the show's lead into a female character. Lena, who eagerly agreed to the offer, played a woman on a Caribbean Island who wanted to make a future for herself in New York City. That wasn't much of a plot, but everybody counted on the combination of Lena and the songs from Arlen and Harburg to make the show a hit. The expectation turned out to be half right.

I figured into Jamaica as a member of the show's pit band. Lena's regular trio had changed by one-third, Johnny Cresci being replaced on drums by Jimmy Crawford. Jimmy was a veteran guy who had played for fifteen years in the Jimmy Lunceford band and had accompanied everybody from Dizzy to Bing Crosby. Normally Jimmy, George Duvivier and I weren't the type of musicians who played in Broadway pit bands, but Lena wanted the reassurance of backup musicians she already felt comfortable with to give her support among the strangers of the show's regular pit band. The three of us accepted the job, and I stuck it out on Broadway for seven months.