If I had mastered the clever things that can be done with photo-shop, I probably would have plastered Bricktop's feather boa with a montage of photo-clips. Amongst them would be logos of the numerous nightclubs she either owned or operated in Paris, Rome, New York, Mexico Ciy, or Biarritz. A triple headshot of Scott & Zelda & ELLA Fitzgerald would be included, along with double shots of Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton, Humphrey Bogart & Ava Gardner, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor...
I would collage together Josephine Baker, Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King, Cantinflas, Langston Hughes, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Orson Welles (but no Billy Holiday), Danny Kaye, Duke Ellington...
The largest photo-insert would have to be Cole Porter.
To draw an analogy, I could have made Bricktop's feather boa look like the background assemblage on the cover of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band with one major difference. There would be no questions as to the identities of the assembled Bricktoppers.
Dating back to the Roaring Twenties, virtually all of the montaged people were her friends, patrons and–occasionally–performers at Bricktop's nightclubs. A non-patron was the guy with the Roman Numerals after his name. Pope John was the only person she ever knelt down for.
In middle age, she converted to Catholicism and celibacy but that never stopped her from entertaining people. Nor did it prevent her from keeping a fine eye on the cash register but it did successfully increase her need to do charity work.
If I can imagine photo-shopping the portrait of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, I can just as well imagine her response–albeit with a great laugh.
"You ruined my feather boa and you forgot Fred Astaire and Mabel Mercer!"
Her feather boas were custom-made and there are–at least–one dozen A-list names not mentioned above. Some of which were mentioned on a previous post or the sequential "CpB" posts. But...
Page 266 of BRICKTOP by Bricktop is a name-dropper's dream:
My Rome clients like to kid me, saying "Brick is the only entertainer in the world who's made a career of singing seventeen songs."
Someone was playing Cole Porter's It's All Right with Me somewhere in Italy.
I spoke to him about the tempo–I didn't think Cole had meant it to be played like that. He shrugged his shoulders. "That's how they're doing it in Can-Can." I pulled down the tempo, sang it slow, and Frank Sinatra later recorded it that way.
And, of course there was "Miss Otis Regrets," my signature song. Peter O'Toole wanted me to do it forty times a night.
Gershwin's Embraceable You was always John Steinbeck's favorite. He once wrote "When Brick sings Embraceable You, she takes twenty years off a man's life."
I didn't know Johnny Mercer was in the club one night when I sang One for My Baby. He told me it was a man's song, something I hadn't thought about, but he liked it the way I did it, and that was the main thing.
If you want confirmation of anything written here, either link to this site
or, for the superior experience, read the book!
However, you may have noticed that no personal names,
including Ms. Bricktop's, have been hyperlinked–until now.
James Haskins is the co-author of BRICKTOP by Bricktop.
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