I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Six

While I was still with Jamaica, Lennie Hayton came up with an idea that liberated me from some of the boredom of playing the same music night after night at the theatre. The story of how he happened to conceive the idea owed its origins to Lennie's drinking habits.

    He was a guy who really enjoyed drinking alcoholic beverages. He usually began his daily imbibing with martinis at five in the afternoon. No matter where we were, the five o'clock martinis were a ritual in which he'd usually be joined by some of his pals. In New York, that usually meant Arthur Laurents, the playwright, director and screenwriter (West Side Story was his), and other people at that high level. Neither George Duvivier nor I drank. In fact, both of us were pretty clueless about the nature of alcoholic beverages. But we learned somehow that a martini was made with gin and vermouth, and late one afternoon, as a surprise for our boss, we bought the ingredients and mixed Lennie a martini. He was surprised and pleased, and gave us a big thank you. Then he took his first sip.

    "Arghh!" he said, his face getting red and twisted as if he'd bitten into a lemon. "What's in this thing?"

    "You make a martini with vermouth and gin, right?" I said. "Seven parts vermouth to one part gin?"

    Lennie could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard at George and me.

    "No, you idiots," he said, "it's the other way around!"

    George and I looked at one another and shrugged.

    "Thanks you for the gesture, gentlemen," Lennie said "but leave the martinis to me."

   

Lennie, the drinker, was pretty much left on his own during the nights of Lena's run in Jamaica. Since she arrived at the theatre three hours before the curtain went up and headed straight home when the curtain dropped, Lennie passed the evenings hanging out in high end bars, shooting the breeze with like-minded barflies. He became drinking buddies with a guy named Morris Levy who owned Birdland and managed a bunch of bebop players. Nobody could help noticing that Levy made a ton more money out of his deals than anyone else. He was like a character from The Sopranos, except ahead of his time.

    Among Levy's enterprises, he started a record company in 1956 named Roulette Records with financing from the New York mafia. A couple of years later, Levy and Lennie made a deal in a bar one night calling for Lennie to record three Roulette albums a year. For his first album, Lennie recorded his own arrangements of the songs from Jamaica. On one of the tunes, Cocoanut Sweet, Lennie wrote a gorgeous ending that featured a New York violinist named Gene Orloff.

    Orloff was a guy I'd seen at least once on jobs around the city. That came on the day in September 1948 when I played with the Benny Goodman group at the opening of radio station WMGM. Harry Horlick's orchestra performed at the opening, a group that specialized in gypsy folk music. During the Goodman part of the show, playing Stealin' Apples, I noticed one of the young Harry Horlick violinists tapping his foot. What I couldn't help registering was that the guy was tapping in the correct time. That was rare with people who weren't jazz musicians. They usually mess up the beat, but not this guy. Harry Horlick's foot-tapping violinist, clearly a lover of jazz, was Gene Orloff.