Tom Nolan’s Artie Shaw, Reviewed

Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw
By Tom Nolan
W. W. Norton, New York, 2010; 430 pp.; $29.95 hardcover

I was wrong about Artie Shaw. I thought, since I heard that he stormed off the stage at the peak of his career over a fan’s umpteenth request for (fill in the blank) “Begin the Beguine,” “Star Dust” or “Frenesi,” that the music business had made Shaw curmudgeonly. After reading Tom Nolan’s eminently readable bio, I now understand that Shaw was born a curmudgeon, both on and off the bandstand, with his wives and fans.

Three Chords For Beauty’s Sake flows through Shaw’s lives — musical and personal — and his women, legendary and otherwise. Shaw was married eight times; Dick Johnson, a former sideman turned leader, once told me that Shaw might have neglected to divorce one wife to marry the next one. “Luckily, she died,” he quipped. (No names, please).

Nolan dwells at length on the dueling relationship between Shaw and Benny Goodman. Shaw and Goodman’s brother-in-law John Hammond have confirmed a dinner conversation related by Nolan between the two when Goodman argued, “It’s about the clarinet, Artie.” “No, it’s about the music,” Shaw replied. And so it went for decades.

There are other surprises in Three Chords. (The title stems from what bands would present to their audiences: Three of their own, one for the rent, preferably a hit.) Shaw was a pioneer in integrating bands with the likes of Lena Horne, Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge. The usual black/white idiocies apply here. When Billie Holiday was in the band, Artie vacillated and in the end caved. Nolan relates how the band once checked into a swanky hotel surrounding Lady. However, when he was told that she had to leave the bandstand after her numbers or forego a lucrative concert, he told her, “It’s not me, but….” Lady split soon thereafter. It was much later that her sides with the band were released. Notable among them was “Any Old Time” which the band re-recorded with Helen Forrest, who all but impersonated Lady’s inflections. Forrest eventually left Shaw for Goodman for less money. Contrarily, on another occasion Shaw had a doorman fired for not allowing Eldridge to enter by the front door.

Nolan’s style is often dramatic. Sportscaster Bill Stern loved to tell a story about some event or other, then conclude: “And that one-legged first baseman was none other than….” Nolan tells of an incident then announces — I paraphrase here — “and that blond airhead was….” The difference is that Stern’s stories were fictitious.

On the subject of honesty: I was once a book finder for DaCapo Press, then a reissue house. I “found” Shaw’s first autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella. Don’t ask me where I got the chutzpah to call, or even where I got his home number, but call I did. I told him of my plan. His reply: “Why do you want to reissue that novel?” Pregnant pause. Was he telling me Cinderella was fiction? As Nolan points out about Shaw’s ego, it got the better of him and the book was subsequently reissued. That was 30-odd years ago; Shaw and I remained “friendly” — a term Nolan states Shaw loved to abuse — till his death in 2004. (Perhaps Cinderella might have less to do with fairy tale than with a club in Cleveland where Shaw got a big leg up in the early going.)

In 1928 Shaw had met and played with Bix Beiderbecke alums in a band called “Sons of Bix.” The pianist was Hoagy Carmichael and “Star Dust” was in the band’s book. Shaw didn’t pay it much notice until a decade later when he was asked to cover the tune as it was making some noise by other bands. Shaw didn’t want to use a vocalist — Tommy Dorsey recorded it as a vehicle for his “boy singer” Frank Sinatra whom Shaw had spurned — so he had an instrumental arrangement written for his band, which had become an orchestra with the addition of a string section. Among all the thousands of recordings of “Star Dust,” the Shaw version sold millions and remains a swing hallmark. According to Carmichael’s son Bix, Shaw’s was the composer’s favorite. Nolan: “It was a just a well-known song; Artie made it a standard.”

Shaw’s boudoir events became legendary. Between Mickey Rooney, Tommy Manville (a mid-20^th century playboy) and Shaw there weren’t many other Hollywood women to go around. This obsession carried over into Shaw’s creativity. He formed a small group named for his telephone exchange in New York, the Gramercy Five. The first hit was a blues named after his new California address, “Summit Ridge Drive.” It featured Italian string manufacturer scion Johnny Guarnieri on harpsichord. (Other G-5 incarnations featured pianist Hank Jones on the more traditional piano bench as well as Dodo Marmarosa and Billy Taylor.)

There is so much more that Nolan tells of Arthur Arshawsky from the Lower East Side: his near-fatal naval career, his chamber and orchestra music, his often abusive treatment of his ever-more glamorous wives and girlfriends (including an infatuated teenage Judy Garland), his foot-in-mouth disease which caused him to lose drummer Buddy Rich to Dorsey, the rock star-like adulation, his estrangement from his son, his hatred of his father and his ambivalence towards his mother.

All of which contributed to the prominent desire to see his style of unrelenting musical brilliance outlive him. In the end he said, “The clarinet saved my life.”