“In 1947, we worked the Capitol Theatre in New York. We both had a three-week engagement. We were inseparable. Oh how Uncle Frank would woo those girls with his sultry love songs. Trace Face, girls were screaming from that electric aura that was Sinatra, swooning in lines for autographs.”
“What was your role in the Tommy Dorsey show, Pop?”
“I featured impressions of celebrity singers in the opening act. Uncle Frank always encouraged me to sing in my own voice. He was right, in the long run. After the Michigan Theatre, Uncle Frank became a lifelong soul mate and best man at my wedding to your mother,” Pop said.
“Mom must have taken your breath away in that beautiful wedding dress!” I said.
“My heart jumped out of its rib cage every time I cast my eyes on your mom. Everyone said, ‘May Britt had a face chiseled like a Swedish goddess.’ Her beauty, her grace, that ‘interracial’ wedding, now that’s a story for another day! But as for Uncle Frank, he did stand up as my best man, was and always will be the best friend I ever had, truly.”
I could tell all the reminiscing had sucked the wind out of Pop. His eyes were starting to droop. I handed him a throw blanket and said, “Here, Pop, why don’t you catch yourself a little nap.”
“You’ll be here when I wake, Trace Face?”
“Perhaps in the powder room, baby is sitting on my bladder.”
Pop smiled, closed his eyes, and nodded off in his sacred outdoor sanctuary. I made my pregnancy stop to the powder room, returned to sit by Pop, and watch him sleep, so at peace.
As I gazed out at his lavish Beverly Hills estate, I was beaming with pride at all my father had accomplished in life. I wondered if I would ever be that successful. Flashes of stories my father had shared when he first started making money consumed my mind.
One story that always made me smile was at the Roadhouse in Waterford, Connecticut, in the early 1940s. Pop and Burt and Jane Boyar wrote about it in his autobiography, Yes I Can. A half-dollar flew toward Pop, a teenager, onstage. He danced to it, picked it up, flipped it in the air, caught it, and put it in his pocket without losing a beat. The audience cheered, and suddenly it started to rain money. Dad was so weighted down by coins in his pocket he could barely dance through the closing act. He was living his dream.
But money didn’t always buy happiness. Pop was a fish out of water with kids his own age. He was the oddball, the misfit, didn’t know the first thing about real life.
My mom had a glamorous career in movies before she met my dad. She was touted as a “new” Swedish goddess in the style of Greta Garbo.
One time he was in a candy store in Harlem in the 1940s. Some of his peers were trading baseball cards. Pop didn’t have a clue what a baseball card was since he was on the stage since the age of three, performing vaudeville instead of going to school. The kids started taunting Pop, humiliating him. My father tried to impress his peers by buying ten packs of baseball cards, a hundred in all. But the kids continued to laugh at him when he traded away his top players. That day, Pop ran home to Mama, and cried himself to sleep.
Years later, after all of Harlem knew he was a rising star, my father bumped into those same peers at the same candy shop. This time they all wanted his autograph. Just like Pop, he never held a grudge. He smiled, signed their autographs, and killed ‘em with kindness. Pop had style and class. He also had the attitude of “You think I can’t do this? Done. And watch out, folks, because one day I will buy and sell your sorry butts.”
My grandfather and Uncle Will always tried to shield Pop, at least in his early years, from any form of hatred from his peers or the public. His father would explain away slights and snubs as sheer jealousy. They were determined to free Pop from the limitations of prejudice, particularly the racial ignorance heavily prevalent back in the day.
Pop’s first real taste of racial injustice was at El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas in the 1940s. It’s torn down now but it opened big on April 3, 1941, on the southwest corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara. For a time it was the largest hotel in Las Vegas, with 110 rooms.
The Will Mastin Trio was pulling in $500 a week for their act, but the hotel would not allow “colored” entertainers to book a room, or even use the dressing rooms. The Mastin Trio had to wait out by the swimming pool between acts. Colored people could not gamble in the casinos, dine, or drink in the hotel restaurants and bars. House rules always sent the trio to the west side of Vegas to a colored boarding house.
The “colored” boarding house was a shack made of wooden crates run by a landlady named Ms. Cartwright. Ms. Cartwright capitalized on the fact that her boarding house was the only place in town colored entertainers could stay in Vegas. She charged a fortune for a room, twice as much as a room at El Rancho Hotel, with one perk—she would press your clothes.