“Dear friends, good evening! And welcome to this, the second show of the fourth night of the seventh week of the second season of our 10th year here at the Café Carlyle …”
The baritone voice is clear tonight. But when it breaks, as it often does, it sounds—somebody said—like a strangled ostrich. All that urgent energy forcing all that sound through that throat for all those years—fortissimo is his working decibel range—with laryngitis a frequent companion. But no matter, they still come, the swells from New York and their kith from the hinterlands. “We have tickets to Chorus Line, and we’ll take the kids to the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and, naturally, we’ll see Bobby Short.”
Bobby was born 100 years ago—September 15, 1924. At 11 he was discovered and whisked off from Danville, Illinois, to become a star. Soon he was playing the best vaudeville houses and meeting the biggest names—Red Norvo, Mildred Bailey, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller. He was billed as the “Miniature King of Swing.” It was as if his first stop in show business was the penthouse. He couldn’t disappoint. “Sell it! Sell it! Sell it!,” Len Rosen, his agent, would chant as he watched Bobby every night from the wings. “Smile! Smile! Smile!”
So now he seems ready to bounce on the balls of his feet. “The piano is by Baldwin, the murals by Vertès, the waitstaff by Central Casting, and the color of the gel on the spot shedding that romantic glow over all you beautiful people is called … Surprise Pink!” The eyes pop—we’re in on the joke—the apple cheeks glow, the teeth shine.
Laughter fades to silence. Still standing at the keyboard, he rotates slowly through a 90-degree arc. The crowd is rapt; he’s flirting, milking it. Then, from Beverly Peer at the bass fiddle to his left, a line of single notes, slow, stalking, letting Bobby pick his moment.
I’ve got those four walls and one dirty window blues.
I’ve got those four walls and one dirty window blues.
If I’d saved my money when I was young and well,
I wouldn’t be up here sweatin’ in this cheap hotel.
I’ve got those four walls and one dirty window blues.
BEGIN THE BEGUINE
Bobby was one of 10 children of poor Black parents in mostly white Danville. Money was always scarce, but the trappings of poverty—“out in the backyard, near the coal shed, was the privy, ‘Mrs. Hoover,’ as we called it in the Depression, ‘Gotta go see Mrs. Hoover’”—were no match for Myrtle Short. She knew she had a princeling on her hands and, dammit, she was going to give him whatever it took to let him shine. She disciplined but indulged him. His clothes were the best. From ages 11 to 13, while other kids were tinkering with cars or mooning over movie magazines, Bobby was onstage in a white tuxedo.
Vaudeville was part Noah’s ark, part cage fight. There was some of everything—baggy-pants comedians, torch singers, tap dancers, dog acts—and the competition was fierce. Darwin with footlights. Survival of the flashiest. Which is why, throughout his nearly 70-year career, Bobby’s music was never background. Every single number was big, front and center, stentorian. Even a tender ballad was a grab-you-by-the-lapels “Listen to me!”
“Did you ever notice the way Bobby would cock his head just so?,” Loren Schoenberg, his close friend and the musical director at the Café Carlyle, asked me. “It’s something he learned as a kid in vaudeville. If you hold your head at exactly the right angle, your eyes catch the light and sparkle more. He used it his whole life.”
Bobby never learned to read music—he would quote Erroll Garner: “Shoot, man, nobody can hear you read!”—and was never trained as a pianist or a singer. He simply took what was inside, listened hard, played nonstop for years, and let it find its way out.
Schoenberg says of his playing, “You see his fingers on the keyboard, and you can see they’re kind of flat, and you know he really played piano like a classical concert pianist—it was ferocious.” And complex: “The way Bobby played, it was like Strayhorn or Ellington. We had great players in the band, and they would hear him, and their jaws would start to drop when they realized what this guy was doing—sometimes playing two or three levels of accompaniment at one time. The voicings were so full, they were perfection.”
His singing, like his piano playing, was completely self-taught—and amazed some of his most knowledgeable listeners. At a birthday party for him, celebrating his years at the Carlyle, the guest list included the opera singer Jessye Norman. Bobby asked her to stand so the audience could salute her. After the applause died, she pointed at Bobby and said, “I just want to say one thing. That man taught me more about singing than anybody else in my entire life.”
The jazz pianist Bill Charlap summed up the whole bundle. “Bobby epitomized elegance in his playing and his whole presentation. But he mixed it up. Everything about him was tux with chitlins on the side. He had the supreme sophistication of a Cole Porter, such as deep understanding of lyrics and how they and the music fit together. But there was always an element of ‘down in the depths on the 90th floor’ about his work. Mixing the high and low. He’d play a beautiful Cole Porter tune and follow it with ‘Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.’ And in the Porter there’d be some ‘Pigfoot,’ and in the ‘Pigfoot’ you could hear some Porter.”
NIGHT AND DAY
In the 70s, New York was a city at war with itself. Travelers arriving at local airports might get handed a pamphlet created by public-service unions in response to threatened budget cuts: the cover carried a death’s-head and the headline Welcome to Fear City. People fled to the suburbs, garbage piled up, and subway cars looked like dumpsters. Parts of downtown were a wasteland, and what entertainment there was conveyed disillusion. CBGB opened, and punk was born.
Meanwhile, on the Upper East Side, as if they hadn’t gotten the memo, an odd couple of midwives were ushering in a rambunctious rebirth of café society. He was regal, she was Rego Park, but Bobby Short and Elaine Kaufman—the proprietress of her namesake restaurant, Elaine’s—had become the doges of after dark. High-rolling New York hadn’t seen fun like this in years.
Bobby’s audience at the Café Carlyle ran from European royalty to movie stars to old New York society. On any night you might see Tony Bennett or Gloria Vanderbilt or Jack Lemmon or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Meanwhile, at Elaine’s, what had once been a sort of literary petting zoo—Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, and Gay Talese were early regulars—had morphed into a magnet for politicians, Wall Street big shots and music, TV and sports stars. The Saturday Night Live gang would be hanging out next to Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, George Steinbrenner. Bobby treated it like his after-work cafeteria, and Woody Allen, a regular at Elaine’s who also turned up frequently at the Café Carlyle, later blessed them both with cameos in his movies.
You went to the Carlyle to be cosseted, eat superior food, drink in moderation, listen to Bobby, and behave yourself. You went to Elaine’s to let it rip.
The unspoken rule at the Café Carlyle was to maintain a church-like silence while Bobby performed, and mostly it worked. Occasionally, though, a lone voice, overserved or underbred, would blurt out something loud during a song. Bobby had his sidemen trained. At the first offending syllable he and the band would freeze, sometimes mid-word, and he’d fix a stare at the perpetrator, unblinking, unwavering. He would hold it longer than felt natural, then hold it some more, and hold it, and hold it. Message conclusively received, he’d start the tune again precisely where he’d left off.
There was food at Elaine’s, but it was middling. The joint existed for drink and talk. Elaine herself divided her nights between periodic peregrinations around the room—sitting for a minute or two with pals, catching up, buying the occasional drink, listening to gossip, patting cheeks, squeezing arms—and long spells at the back end of the bar, half on and half off a stool, her upper body—one elbow and part of her enormous bosom—slumped on the mahogany. Somebody said her posture was as bad as her pasta.
A customer would approach, his bearing indicating his need. Before he could get the words out, Elaine would point back over her shoulder: “Turn right at Michael Caine.”
Usually slow-moving and jovial, Elaine, if provoked—“Never piss off a fat Jew,” she’d say—could turn into a one-woman prison riot. One night Norman Mailer’s female companion unscrewed the light bulb over their table. Elaine screwed it back in, and a brawl ensued. Elaine knocked the woman down. The woman got up and called Elaine a big, fat bully. “Listen, sweetheart,” Elaine exploded, “get your ass outta here. Him I have to take it from, but no half a hooker is going to fuck with my light bulbs.”
TV personality Bill Boggs says, “When I think of big nights out in the 70s—and the 80s and 90s, for that matter—I think about Bobby and Elaine and the Café Carlyle and that dump of hers over on Second Avenue. He came on like Fred Astaire, and she could make a Mainbocher look like a muumuu—but, my God, what a pair! That’s where the fun was. His music and her mouth. They ruled!”
LET’S MISBEHAVE
In the mid-70s, Revlon stoked the fire of Bobby’s popularity when it hired him for an ad campaign pushing its new perfume, Charlie. A yellow Rolls-Royce pulls to the curb; a young Shelley Hack gets out and sweeps into a posh club, tossing her hat to the doorman. There are no other girls in sight. Everyone seems to know her. She’s whirled around quickly by one man and throws herself onto a banquette with another. Bobby is heard throughout, and there’s a fast, high-energy shot of him playing and singing, “Kind of free, kind of wow, Charlie!” Three years later, it was the best-selling fragrance in the country, and Bobby, the headliner in a swank little New York saloon, hitherto known only to a tiny slice of the social stratosphere, found himself getting yelled at on the streets of midsize cities across America—“Hey, Charlie!”
The press always loved Bobby. When he played in Paris in the 50s, Art Buchwald and Dorothy Kilgallen raved about him. Then, later, the Charlie campaign, multiple engagements at the White House, best-dressed lists, and a rumored romance with Gloria Vanderbilt only heated things up. But they never knew quite how to slot him. He was more and bigger than a saloon singer. And to place him in the world of cabaret—think irony, double meanings, sniffings down the sleeve, Kander and Ebb, Joel Grey—did him an injustice.
Bobby never played down to his audience. His music was delivered straight, no chaser, to a sophisticated crowd who knew exactly who they were. And he blessed and sanctified that—much of his material bearing witness that he breathed the same rarefied air they did.
“Here’s a little-known Cole Porter tune, written for a revue in Paris at the club Les Ambassadeurs.” He’d begin the lyric in perfect French, quickly shifting to English so no one missed the point:
I’ve got an aeroplane, entirely new,
A cozy narrow plane, just built for two.
I’ll let you drive it dear, and when I do,
Up where the air is clear, we’ll bill and coo.
Pilot me, pilot me …
Proceeding in a typical Shortian cascade of accelerating tempi and pounding keyboard to the crashing sex-in-the-sky denouement:
So cast away your fears, strip my gears,
Let me carry you through,
And when afraid you are of going too far,
I will pilot you.
More than once a couple had to be separated post-show in one of the bathrooms across the hall from the Café Carlyle.
Every set was planned, but felt spontaneous, as if Bobby was reading the room and simply plunging in. His sidemen followed where he led. You never knew what you’d get. He might begin with an unfettered reading of a Cy Coleman tune:
Pardon me, miss,
But I’ve never done this
With a real live girl.
Straight off the farm
With an actual armful
Of real live girl.
All jazz and energy—zero to 60 in no time flat—from the first beat. He’d savor every word of the complex lyric:
Pardon me if
Your affectionate squeeze,
Fogs up my goggles
And buckles my knees.
And not a syllable would be lost or nuance missed. Then, in the instrumental break, with the fun overflowing and the tempo quickening, at the end of an occasional phrase he’d let loose a spontaneous, shouted “Yeah!”
And, finally, at the end of the second vocal chorus he’d suddenly slow to a crawl so the last “real live girl” was attenuated, the “live” held operatically long, before closing with the “girl” delivered much softer, almost tenderly. Rehearsed or not, it felt absolutely spur-of-the-moment.
After that, he’d get serious and heartbreaking with “Say It Isn’t So.” Then go low-down: “I’ve Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart to Give It Away).” Then another ballad, then pull out an unreconstructed vaudeville chestnut, “At the Moving Picture Ball.” Here he swooped through a catalogue of Old Hollywood names and imagined what they just might have gotten up to at a wild party:
Douglas Fairbanks shimmied on one hand—one hand!—
Like an acrobat,
Mary Pickford did a toe dance grand …
His voice would take on a cartoony, old-time sound, and from the piano would come silent-movie-house fare. In the lyrics he’d never stoop to the crowd, simply taking it for granted that they were hip enough to know their Adolph Zukors from their Blanche Sweets. And, in the instrumental chorus, he’d raise the stakes, staging a whole little play. The piano got even more ricky-ticky, his eyes bugged, and his head swiveled as he watched an imaginary movie unfold on an imaginary screen.
Bobby loved to find obscure lyrics, and sometimes he’d start a tune you knew with words you’d never heard so your attention, for a moment, could focus only on the masterly wordsmithing:
I’d like to laze with you,
To doze with you,
To learn the secret of sweet repose with you,
So give a gent a small
Percent of you …
And then you twigged. Now that he had your attention, back into the familiar “All of You”!
In the original sheet music of an obscure Porter tune, “I’m in Love Again,” the instruction at the top of the verse is “Slow.” Bobby took it hell-for-leather, the piano pounding in a percussive four-four beat, releasing his inner Jerry Lee Lewis in the first words of the lyric:
Why am I
Just as happy as a child?
Why am I
Like a racehorse running wild?
He sounded so urgent, so annunciatory, so damn loud, he could have been calling the feature at Saratoga, not launching into a tribute to re-discovered love. But then, a few bars later, at the chorus, the tempo dropped precipitously to half-time:
I’m in love again
And the spring is comin’
I’m in love again
Hear my heartstrings hummin’
He doled out the words carefully, stretching the pleasure like taffy. The voice went all guttural and bluesy, taking time to roll in the joy, not wanting it—all 16 bars of it—to end. He was having such a good time he’d take another chorus, humming and scatting, until finally letting the volume build again, ending the celebration at a near shout:
And I’m darn glad of it,
Good news!
ALL OF ME
I asked Bob Nahas, one of Bobby’s closest friends, why so little was known about the private life of such a public figure. Nahas put a finger to his lips. The “shh” was almost inaudible. “He was a very private man.”
Christina Wyeth, Bobby’s personal assistant for many years, recalled being recommended for the job, and going to meet up with Bobby for a drink to discuss. “The first question he asked was: ‘Do you know the meaning of the word discretion?’ Then, the next day, when I went for a real interview, he almost repeated himself. ‘Do you know what it means to be discreet?’” I asked her how discreet he was. She laughed. “You should have heard him in the morning!”
Everybody I talked to about Bobby used terms like “There was nobody like him,” “There’ll never be another,” “one of a kind,” and “You can’t put a label on him.” But this much is clear—he never left his beginnings behind.
For the last 36 years of his life, five nights a week, 20 or more weeks a year, Bobby would slip on a perfectly cut Savile Row dinner jacket, head up to the Café Carlyle, and deliver—30, 40, 50 years after the declared death of the form—a high-gloss, top-of-the-bill, socko, vaudeville turn. It was as if Len Rosen was still there in the wings—“Sell it! Sell it! Smile!” And he did. Each show, he went out and gave it everything he had and knocked ’em dead. His roots were always showing.
By 1996, all the years of playing and singing, alone up there but for a bass and drum, had started to wear on him. Bobby was getting tired and wanted to shake things up. His friend Peter Duchin suggested he put together more of a band to back him. It would be Bobby Short’s little big band. Loren Schoenberg assembled six of the best horn players in town—including himself—and Bobby took them on.
A lot of bandleaders treat their sidemen like mere appliances. Bobby made a family of his. His contract with the Carlyle only allowed for a trio, and when he approached management about the new configuration they balked, not willing to pay a penny more. “I have personal knowledge,” Schoenberg says, “that in the eight years we played the Café, he paid over a million dollars out of his own pocket to carry the guys.”
On some nights all the tumblers fell right—the crowd, his voice, the band, hell, the weather—and the proceedings took on an ecstatic air, like a fancy-dress revival meeting. It was as if Bobby had dropped a tab of musical psilocybin and the whole room hopped on board for the trip. The walls would melt, the ceiling and the upper floors, the roof of that elegant hotel, all vanishing while you floated, MGM on mushrooms, up and away, over the towers and twinkling lights—music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields.
Today I feel New York is really
My personal property,
Right down Broadway to City Hall.
Every supermarket, every five and ten,
All of Lincoln Center and the great U.N.,
They’re all my personal property.
Bobby died in March 2005. The prior December, in what turned out to be his last month at the Café, I went in one night and caught him waiting to go on. The band was doing a couple of warm-up numbers, and he was standing in his regular spot by the end of the bar, in the shadows. I’d heard he wasn’t well and saw he had a cane. I went over to say hello, and we listened for a minute. He turned to me and asked, “What do you think of the band, Scott?” “I think they’re terrific, Bobby.” A pause while we listened more. “They’re my raison d’être,” he said.
Scott Asen is a private investor and the founder and president of Turtle Bay Records, a New York–based jazz music label
