I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-Eight

In the autumn of 1971, Carmen McRae asked me to come along as her accompanist on a short tour that covered a lot of miles. Carmen was a huge admirer of Lena Horne, and since I had been with Lena for so many years, Carmen rated me pretty high on her scale of accompanists.

The first two stops on our mini-tour were in Alaska, the cities of Nome and Fairbanks where we played at American military bases. It was a stripped-down kind of tour, just Carmen and me, which meant we had to pick up a bass player and a drummer from the military bands. At one stop, the kid on bass was terrible, and Carmen got upset.

"This kid can't play!" she said in her lusty Carmen way. "Get me another bass player!"

Carmen seemed to have forgotten we were in the middle of snowy Alaska where bass players were in very short supply. Maybe in non-existent supply.

"We'll call Ray Brown," I joked. "He'll come in by dog sled."

Since that was out of the question, Carmen had to get by with whatever talent we found on the base.

Alaska wasn't a great triumph, apart from being the place where I ate my first Alaska king crab. Man, that was so delicious I had a love affair with Alaska. But soon enough we flew on to our next stop, which was much more rewarding in every way, not counting the Alaska king crab.

The next stop was Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I had played Toronto once before years earlier. It was with Tony Bennett in the early 1950s, and we played a theatre on Queen Street called the Casino. I remember only a little about the Tony Bennett date. I remember that a man named Little who owned the Casino had the good fortune to book Johnny Ray into the theatre for two weeks at just the moment when Ray and Cry became a monster attraction. The theatre was packed for every Johnny Ray performance, and Mr. Little earned enough money from those two weeks to pay his son Barry's way through medical school. Beyond that, I had no particular memories of Toronto or feelings for the city from my visit there with Tony

With Carmen, my experience was entirely different (for one thing, the Casino had been torn down along with the other buildings on the south side of Queen, all replaced by the Sheraton Hotel, across the street from the spectacular new City Hall,). The weather that greeted Carmen and me was Indian summer in all its glory. We hired great local musicians to work with us, Michel Donato on bass and Jerry Fuller on drums. I stayed at the King Edward Hotel on King Street with Carmen picking up my tab, which was very generous of her. And each day, I went out and got to know the city.

To my surprise, Toronto seemed to have a lot in common with New York City. In Los Angeles, by contrast, you had to drive practically fifty miles just to have a cup of coffee with a friend. Toronto and New York were far more accessible. In Toronto, I hung around the Lothian Mews, a small collection of shops and a coffee house near Bay and Bloor. It was a little area that had sophistication to it. In fact, the whole city seemed to have it. People everywhere in Toronto seemed to dress really well, and the city was very clean. One other thing that impressed me about Canada in general and Toronto in particular was how many accomplished and well-known novelists lived and worked in Toronto; Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and a bunch of other equally talented people. I found Toronto amazing for many reasons, and during my week at the Colonial, I felt totally comfortable during my time on and off the job.

As events unfolded in my working life, I was back in Toronto a couple of months after the Carmen gig. First it was with Meredith MacRae, the daughter of the singers Gordon and Sheila MacRae. Meredith was very popular at the time as the star of the hit TV show of the late 1960s, Petticoat Junction. I first met her when she was a guest on Joey Bishop's show, and later on, she hired me to write arrangements for a nightclub act she was putting together. Kidding her, I said, why don't you get a gig in Toronto? She took me seriously and booked two weeks in the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel. The Imperial Room was the place where the big-time acts all played-Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Myron Cohen-and by a couple more pieces of good luck, I spent six straight weeks in Toronto, two weeks with Meredith, two weeks on my own in the city, then two weeks accompanying Meredith's mother Sheila, again at the Imperial Room.

During those weeks, I made a lot of friends and really got the city in my blood. Not surprisingly, many of the new friends were musicians. I met a woman named Marilyn Scott who played piano in the Royal York's lounge, and she and her husband, Bill, a financial advisor, took me under their wing, guiding me through Toronto's sights and sounds and restaurants. They remained forever in my life, and so did Paul Grosney, who was a trumpet player and the guy who booked the musicians at Bourbon Street, the great Toronto jazz club of the 1970s. With them and others, I looked into every aspect of the city that I could manage. In all of these experiences, there wasn't anything that didn't resonate positively with me. Toronto made sense as the next place for the DiNovis to settle in.

I talked about my feelings with Pat, and by the late winter of 1972, I had taken two crucial steps. One, I got landed immigrant status in Canada, meaning I could take any employment I found there, and, two, I rented an apartment at 40 Alexander Street close to the centre of the city. The apartment was particularly close to a very popular restaurant called Carmen's. The house specialty at Carmen's was steaks, and the smell of garlic seemed to linger forever in the air. I always associated our first home in Toronto with the not unwelcome scent of the garlic.

Michelle probably associated the apartment on Alexander with cold weather. She and Pat moved up with me late that winter, and especially compared to California, the air felt absolutely frigid in Toronto. Michelle started school at Jarvis Collegiate a couple of blocks away, and my early memory of her in Toronto was of this teenaged kid bundling herself in many layers of clothing for the quick walk to school. But there was an upside in education for Michelle. In California, she had been attending an institution in Laguna Beach that called itself Top of the World. The place was overly relaxed in its approach to education, and my impression was that Michelle was learning next to nothing of value. At Jarvis, it was the opposite; she needed to work very hard at academic subjects, and she became a terrific student. In addition, in her very Michelle way, she was the only kid in her class who befriended an East Indian girl whom everybody was ignoring. Michelle always had a big heart.

Denise, meanwhile, remained in California. She lived with friends while she finished her high school studies, and she had the benefit of getting around in the Porsche 356B, which I left behind especially for her. Denise was a very happy girl with that convertible. When she graduated from high school, she enrolled in Simmons College in the heart of Boston. Simmons was a private undergraduate school for women, very prestigious, very demanding on the students. Denise got a degree in journalism, and was on her way, in a roundabout fashion, to what turned out to be a magnificent career in movie production.