Remake "The Cotton Club" Movie

Prior to seeing Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club in 1984, I had interviewed several people who had either worked at the nightclub or knew someone who did. The interviews were for a syndicated article I was writing about the upcoming movie.

Like the film critic Rex Reed, in his Guide to Movies on TV & Video, 1992-1993 Edition (Warner Books, 1992), I had heard a lot about this "Harlem bastion of glamour, sequins, and jazz that characterized the Roaring Twenties in New York night life."

So when I went to see the film I was full of excitement and high expectations. For the first time I would be seeing the fabled night spot on the big screen, and see an exploration of the lives and working conditions of the black performers who worked there in a Jim Crow environment, in, of all places, Harlem.

And, like Reed, I was disappointed. "[W]here," he asked, "is the Cotton Club? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor."

The movie was more focused on the white gangsters who owned the place than it was on the black performers who were its backbone. This was a missed opportunity to explore the racial and socio-economic aspects of the period. Instead of watching this movie, "You [will] learn more about the Cotton Club," wrote Reed, "and the people who made it famous just by listening to old records by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters." Amen.

In the hands of Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons, Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, or another capable black director the movie would have been more riveting, more incisive, and more thoughtful. It certainly would have been more black-centered.

If there is one movie that deserves a remake, The Cotton Club is it.

Note: I wrote a similar blog post in February 2015.

The 1984 article I wrote was published in this blog as "Exotic Negroes at the Cotton Club " on February 12, 2013.

Three Projects Harlem Pride Should Consider Doing

Here are three projects Harlem Pride should consider getting involved in:

1. Establishing a gay and lesbian community center. (One location to consider is the former site of the Mount Morris Baths on Madison Avenue at 125th Street. The site has been vacant for several years.)

2. The erection of a statue or monument honoring the late novelist/essayist James Baldwin, a native son of Harlem.

3. The resumption of Gay Night at the Cotton Club, hosted by Harlem Pride. (I wrote an article for the New York Native about this weekly Friday night event in 1984.)

Exotic Negroes At The Cotton Club

In 1923, Owney Madden, a powerful and feared New York gangster with ties to "Dutch" Schultz, opened the Cotton Club on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. It served two functions: first, Madden needed a place to sell the beer he illegally made for his Prohibition-era customers. And second, he wanted to take advantage of the newfound white interest in black artistic achievement.

In the days before the Great Depression, writes black playwright Loften Mitchell, "Harlem was seen by outsiders as a showplace, a center of nightlife, a place for discovering 'exotic Negroes' and new art." It was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, when black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston were, in the words of Hughes, "express[ing] our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." It was also the time when whites from downtown and abroad came to Harlem to hobnob with struggling young black writers and artists in the salon of A'Lelia Walker, the daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, the black woman who became a millionaire by creating a hair-straightening process for blacks.

Carl Van Vechten, a white journalist and critic, is considered the primary catalyst for this influx of whites to Harlem. "As an influential critic, he helped launch the careers of numerous talented blacks," writes historian  Eric Garber of San Francisco, who's working on a study of the gay scene in Harlem in the 1920s. "But he is most notorious for his 1926 novel, naively titled 'Nigger Heaven', [which] told the story of the tragic love between a young black writer and his Harlem girlfriend and was intended to impart a sympathetic understanding of  Harlem and its people. Some of Van Vechten's black friends appreciated it, but the majority of Harlem was outraged."

"The white reading public," continues Garber, "had the opposite reaction, and the novel quickly became a best seller. After reading the novel, many whites hurried to Harlem to see the real thing."

And many of them hurried to the Cotton Club, which catered exclusively to a white clientele. "The low class of whites didn't come to the Cotton Club," recalls 81-year-old Joe Attles, a black former nightclub singer and dancer, "because they couldn't pay the money. All the young Vanderbilts and the This-and-Thats, they came to Harlem. They were young  and they had money. The rest of them who came to Harlem were gangsters. They came to visit the other gangs."

No blacks were allowed as customers--"unless you were a celebrity, like [dancer Bill]Bojangles [Robinson]," writes Langston Hughes in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. "So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community"--a community that by 1930 was 200,000 strong.

The only other blacks allowed in the club were those hired as entertainers, waiters, or kitchen help. But despite its discriminatory admission policy, the Cotton Club launched many show business careers. Included among its alumni are Lena Horne (who in 1933, at the age of 16, joined the chorus line), Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and the dancing Nicholas Brothers.

This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (via syndication by the Los Angeles Times) on December 23, 1984.

Gay Night At The Cotton Club

It was during the summer of 1983 when I first heard about Gay Night at the Cotton Club, which is every Friday night. The information came from a social worker friend of mine who heard about it from a fellow member of a gay men's Christian group. I made a mental note to one day check the place out. However, for me, visiting such a place is more fun when you're around people you know and like and so I waited for the opportunity to go there with a friend or in a group. Such an opportunity finally came when it was announced in the newsletter of Black and White Men Together that they were planning to visit the club following a consciousness-raising session at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Greenwich Village.

Instead of meeting the group in the Village, I went directly to the Cotton Club in a radio cab. I stepped from the cab and into the plushness of the Cotton Club, which sits on 125th Street, in the shadow of the Broadway El, around 11:45. (The club opens for business at 11 p.m.)

As I checked my coat in, disco music greeted my ears. I paid the seven-dollar admission price and at the suggestion of the guy who collected the money, I signed my name and address to the mailing list. He asked me if I had ever been to the Cotton Club before. I replied no. He then began to tell me that the little yellow disc he had handed me was good for one free beer or glass of wine (however, Heineken beer, with the yellow disc, is $1.50, a dollar off the regular price.) Another employee, a waiter I assumed, came over to tell me where the restrooms and bars were. He led me to a group of tables and chairs, near the dance floor. I expected to see a crowd, instead there were only a handful of people present. My coat ticket might have been number 406, but there were obviously not 405 other people in the place. Oh, well, the night was still young and promising.

After the waiter, dressed in black trousers, black tie, and a white shirt took my order--a Heineken--I saw a couple of familiar faces seated at one of the tables--Lidell and his lover Mitchell from BWMT. Sitting at an adjoining table was a bearded, sandy-haired man who was introduced as Michael, a member of the D.C. chapter of BWMT. The four of us decided to head for the lounge on the second floor which we reached via a spiral staircase.

I came dressed for the occasion in a blue sport jacket, blue slacks, and a blue tie over a yellow shirt. The newsletter item stated: "No jeans or sneakers, please." But Lidell, Mitchell, and their guest were casually dressed, as were most of the patrons. Apparently they found out that the Cotton Club is not dress-code conscious.

We four sat at one of a cluster of little tables covered by a lavender tablecloth and topped by a pink rose in a short glass. The lighting there was subdued, the music, loud--super loud, really (you have to shout in order to be heard)--and the mood, romantic. The walls are burgundy-colored. On one wall were the stained glass likenesses of Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, a pictorial salute to the golden days of Harlem and the club's namesake (located at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in the 1920s). The bar, shaped almost like a horseshoe, and made of polished wood, was surrounded by people either sitting or standing.

For about a half-hour, the four of us chatted about my work in journalism (Michael, I learned, is a computer programmer at the Washington Post), gay life in D.C., and music. I wanted to stretch my legs a bit so decided to take a tour of the club. The Cotton Club, unlike some other Harlem nightspots, is quite tame: no arguments, no cussing, no fistfights, not even the faint smell of marijuana. These patrons came out for a good time, not trouble. This was their opportunity to be among other black gay men in a hassle-free environment.

And although the club does not have a policy of discriminating against whites, one BWMT member, whose idea it was to come up to the club, sadly told me that no one he asked wanted to dance with him. (He eventually ended up being the only white person in the club. He said he didn't mind that but what hurt him were the numerous rejections. The other BWMT members--the few who bothered to come uptown--left about 2 a.m. Michael had a 9 a.m. train to catch back to D.C.; Mitchell, a lawyer, had some work to catch up on the next day.)

A few steps below the lounge , and about ten feet above the dance floor, is a narrow mezzanine lined with a single row of tables and chairs against a wall. I sat down at a table populated by an ash-flecked glass ashtray, a small round table lamp, and an empty glass. The lavender tablecloth was dotted by about three or four small cigarette burns.

Looking down at the crowded dance floor, vibrating with the bumping, grinding, and wildly gyrating bodies, I saw one guy take off his shirt, baring a smooth, muscular brown torso. He stuck the shirt in the front of his waistband and began to rotate his hips. The overhead strobe lights flashed red, then white, then returned us to the semi-dark. He stretched his arms vertically, dipped down, and slowly came up for air, while his hips continued to swivel seductively. For a second, my attention left him and focused on another dancer nearby. When I looked for the bare chested one, I was unable to locate him. I must say, he was quite a dancer.

I decided to go downstairs to get a better view of the action. I went up the four or five steps to the second-floor lounge, past the bar on the left and the tables on the right, and down the winding stairs. I walked across the edge of the dance floor to the sidelines where, on a long white vinyl couch sat some of the BWMT members, and others, resting from their terpsichorean acrobatics.

Above us rotated the stardust ball, fracturing a shaft of green light. Periodically an almost blinding cascade of white light appeared from a distant wall, producing a flickered image of those dancing. One dancer, in loose-fitting trousers with his white shirt open down to his navel, moved from side to side. he threw his head back while he hugged both thighs. He turned around once very quickly and threw out both arms in swimmer-like strokes. A few feet away, a couple, one wearing a red and white knit sweater, the other in what appeared to be a white sweater of a synthetic material, both in black leather pants, swiveled and swayed to the pulsating reggae beat. A blue light from the wall near the staircase leading up flashed instantly and intensively, bathing those in its path with a bright glow as if from a UFO in a science-fiction movie. For several minutes, the leather-panted duo moved toward each other, then backed away. They circled and faced each other, doing quick two steps. They too sat down on the couch. As they did so, a curl of bluish-white cigarette smoke drifted past me like a cloud.

All hell broke loose during the playing of George Kranz's "Din Daa Daa." both on the dance floor and on the sidelines. The dancers from BWMT, both black, rubbed up against each other, in simulation of what looked like sexual moves. The smaller of the two draped himself over his stocky partner who later threw a leg over the other's back. They took turns gripping each other by the thighs from behind, while doing a bumping gesture. It was all totally, and refreshingly, out of hand. Those on the sidelines raised their arms while hooting and hollering, as the music drove them to a heightened state of ecstasy.

About 3:30 a.m., I headed upstairs to the bar and ordered another Heineken, my second and last of the night. (I have a low tolerance for alcohol.) The room was nearly deserted. I walked over to an open exit door that looked out onto Broadway which at that hour was as dark and deserted as the room I stood in. I walked gingerly down the staircase, carrying the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other. I excused myself as I walked through a small group of spectators and then between two gyrating couples on the dance floor. I sat down near an Hispanic-looking guy on the white vinyl couch; i resumed watching the "show."

One guy, who also sat on the couch beside me, told me that the crowd that night was smaller than usual. I found out from him that the club began attracting a gay clientele about a year ago when it came under new management. He pointed out the owner to me, a tall, slender young black man dancing on the floor. I stifled any desire to approach him since he, a few weeks earlier, in a telephone conversation with me, rejected my offer to interview him. I am researching a piece about the original Cotton Club in connection with the forthcoming movie and I wanted to compare and/or contrast the two clubs bearing the same name. The piece is for a straight news organization, and I assumed that the owner--or manager, as he was identified to me--turned me down because he was fearful of homophobic reactions.

My watch read 4:45. Fifteen minutes to closing. The house lights came on, the music stopped (leaving a stuffed feeling in my ears), and the crowd thinned out. The waiters came by and collected all of the ashtrays, bottles, and glasses.

Although I didn't do an ounce of dancing the whole night, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I looked forward to coming back. And when I do, I hope the place is shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow with magnificent bodies dancing the night away.

This article was originally published in the New York Native (1984).