A short extract from MILES, CHET, RALPH, AND CHARLIE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ANDOVER SHOP Edited by Constantine A Valhouli
Cornelius Hamelberg
A short extract (pages 98 - 100) from the immensely readable
MILES, CHET, RALPH, AND CHARLIE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ANDOVER SHOP Edited by Constantine A Valhouli. Featuring interviews with G. Bruce Boyer, Alan Flusser, and Richard Press. With an Introduction by G. Bruce Boyer
The whole book ( 307 pages with notes) consists in a series of interviews, narrations, and extended conversations.
There are five narrators here ,and the main persons this short extract is about:
Constantine A. Valhouli : Charlie and I were once listening to an album of Juliette Gréco and he told me the story of the romance between her and Miles Davies. They’d met in Paris, and Miles felt more at home there than in America with its racist, narrow-minded attitudes. For Miles, the Parisians loved jazz and treated him the way he had hoped to be treated in the United States.
Mor Sene : Juliette Gréco met Miles at his first concert in Paris, and was just struck by his beauty. I remember reading an interview where she described him as “ a real Giacometti” and talked about the extraordinary harmony between Miles, his style, and his sound.
JOHN SZWED : This would have been ‘49 or so, and Miles didn’t connect with Charlie and the Andover Shop until 1954. So this was likely still his Brooks Brothers phase.
Juliette Gréco ; Sartre said to Miles ,” Why don’t you and Juliette get married? “ Miles said, “Because I love her too much to make her unhappy” You'd be seen as a “ Negro’s whore” in the U,S., he told me, and that would destroy your career.
Mor Sene: Several years later was an important event in Miles’s life. Juliette Gréco was staying at the Waldorf in New York, and she invited him to dinner in her suite. I don’t think she had truly grasped the racial dynamics in the United States until that evening.
Before then, they had met in Paris, she saw Miles as Miles, as a talented and charismatic man. Not first and foremost as a Black man. His skin color did not define him in France. There’s a reason why so many American soldiers settled there after the Second World War. It was a more integrated society.
G. Bruce Boyer: You have to remember, at this time Black performers could not stay at the same hotels or even dine with their white bandmates. Black performers then had to enter venues through the back door - the service entrance -and were often limited to playing small venues because the larger ones excluded them. Ella Fitzgerald wasn’t booked in larger venues until Marilyn Monroe promised the owner of Mocambo in Los Angeles that if he booked Fitzgerald ,then she would take a front-row table every night for a week. This was 1955.The owner well understood that Marilyn’s star power would sell out the room. It did, and it catapulted Fitzgerald's career.
Frank Sinatra broke the color barrier in Las Vegas, when he invited Nat King Cole to join him in the whites-only dining room. Sinatra was a complicated man, but he pushed for equal treatment of Black performers at a time when very few did. Having Sammy Davis, Jr.as an equal member of the Rat Pack, with their on-stage banter and off-stage antics was a high-profile way to normalise interracial friendships at a time when it was far from common. Or accepted.
Mor Sene: Miles joined Julitte at the Waldorf, and they ordered dinner to be sent to the room. But when the maitre d’hotel saw Miles, a Blackman visiting the hotel during segregation, they made them wait for two hours. Probably hoping that he would just get frustrated and leave.
Now, Miles would have known why it was taking so long, and he must have been furious. Furious at the treatment , and furious that this woman whom he adored was seeing him treated this way merely because of the color of his skin. When the dinner finally arrived ,let’s just say that it was served without ceremony. It was probably more accurate to say that it was basically thrown in their faces.
Their romantic reunion had turned into a very awkward, very painful evening. Miles left, perhaps needing space to calm down, and I think promising to return.
But when he tried to go back upstairs to Juliette's suite ,the hotel staff would not let him back into the building unaccompanied by a white person.
Miles called Juliette in tears. He told her he never wanted to see her again in the United States. Their relationship was impossible in the country, given the laws at the time.
That moment was, I believe, a pivotal one for Miles.