I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Nine

The audience waits while Red sketches for Will, 1993.

Everybody backstage was shouting at Red Skelton to hurry up. They warned him that the curtain was going to rise any second now. Red told them to hold their horses. He had something important to finish. He was drawing one of his famous caricatures of himself as a clown for a nine-year-old boy. The curtain could wait until he finished. He didn't want to disappoint the nine-year-old. Red was meticulous about the drawing, which he dated and inscribed for "My new old friend."

This was at Toronto's O'Keefe Centre on September 11, 1993, and the nine-year-old was my son William. I had been hired to put together a medium-sized big band, with me on piano, which Red's regular conductor, Frank Leone, led during the week when Red performed his one-man show at the O'Keefe. It wasn't exactly a heavy musical gig, but I enjoyed watching Red at work. He was close to eighty, and he needed a cart to drive him from backstage to the microphone. The cartilege in his knees had been worn away in the rough and tumble of physical comedy during his early days in vaudeville. He wore knee braces now, carried a cane and rode a cart. But once he got in front of the mic, he delivered two straight hours of comedy that had the audiences erupting in constant laughs. He was a consummate comedian, an entertainer whose tremendous talent knocked everybody out.

He also turned out to be a very nice guy. He took the time to make William feel welcome, even if the curtain was on the verge of going up, and he was generous company when I took him to lunch at Griffiths. Griffiths was a deli-type family restaurant on Queen Street in the east end (it later relocated to Main Street and took a new name, Grumbles). Its décor was a busy jumble of clocks, a fish tank and oil paintings of domestic scenes. I thought it looked like the kind of place where Errol Flynn as Robin Hood would stop to dine. I invited many musicians and other entertainers passing through Toronto to come out to Griffiths for lunch. Red in paricular was a natural fit among the usual clientele. He charmed the family who ran the restaurant, Ron and Fran and Denise, and he drew them a clown caricature. Red's artwork-oil paintings, sketches and doodles, almost all featuring clowns-earned him millions of dollars. Which made me think that the little sketch Red did for William was probably quite vauable. It's still featured among the photos and drawings and other décor in our house.

One other thing about Red was that he got me on stage at Carnegie Hall. After the gig at the O'Keefe Centre, Red felt so happy with the way things had gone that he invited me to work his Carnegie Hall show. It made a nice visit back to my old territory in Manhattan.

For various reasons, I was called on to hire bands the way I did for Red. Usually these were on projects where I'd been commissioned to write the scores for documentaries like Women at War and I Married the Klondike. When I did the hiring, one of the first guys I always thought of was the most amazingly versatile musician I ever met, Toronto's own Jack Zaza. Jack could play everything except the brass instruments. He could play all the saxophones. He went to a teacher in Buffalo specifically to learn the oboe. He was the best electric bass player in town. He could play the mandolin, the accordion, the harmonica and, last but not least, the spoons. When my friend the great piano player and composer Dick Hyman came up to Toronto from his home in New York to write and conduct the music for Norman Jewison's 1987 movie, Moonstruck, I tipped him off to Jack Zaza. Dick ended up giving Jack a bunch of different musical roles, meaning one remarkable guy did the jobs of at least a half dozen regular guys. When Jack retired, his pension was extra large because he played so many instruments

I took all kinds of non-jazz jobs when they were offered to me as long as they had some intrinsic interest. Red Skelton qualified as interesting. So, in an entirely different category, did a few short teaching jobs I accepted, though in the end they proved to be not entirely satisfying. I taught at Texas A&M and at Indiana University (Indiana was where Jim Campbell has taught for decades). My preference in teaching procedure was to play an informal concert, then answer questions. I did that at the university in Winnipeg where Dave Young's sister was on the faculty.