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ANITA O'DAY at Fort Huachuca |
 ANITA O'DAY ...dead at 87 |
At the beck and call of
an immortal jazz singer
By MURRY FRYMER
of TheColumnists.com
The death of Anita O’Day recently at age 87 evoked a flood of memories for me. She was a jazz artist at the height of her fame when we crossed paths in 1957 at an Army base in Arizona where I had the rather curious title of entertainment director.
I was a draftee then at Fort Huachuca, a rather forlorn base where, during World War II, the segregated U.S. Army had trained “Negro” solders, including such famous people as boxer Joe Louis. In 1957 it was still mostly black and it was where I was stationed for about 18 months. Mainly it was home to an electronics program, staffed by mostly white engineers, while the troops provided the military residence.
A retired Broadway dancer, Phyllis Mayo, had been hired by Army Special Services as the base entertainment director in an effort to provide some morale for the troops in a part of the country that was still Jim Crow. But in those days, there was little to do. The troops would have liked dances at the base, but a black base in segregated Arizona offered no such outlet. The tiny base town, Sierra Vista (a name-change from Fry), had only a bowling alley for amusement and black soldiers were not welcome there.
I became Phyllis’ assistant and when she left, I got her job and her problem. How was I to provide entertainment? One idea was to bring various artists to the base for concerts, in lieu of dances. And I found, to my surprise, that this was do-able to a remarkable extent.
With a larger than normal entertainment budget, due to the size of the problem, we could coax passing acts to stop at our out-of-the-way base. Most of these performers were black, coming to entertain black troops. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played Fort Huachuca, making it seem that I was working magic, but those stars were interested in visiting as they traveled between places like Dallas and L.A.
Then an agent called to say that Anita O’Day was available. I had only limited familiarity with the name although I knew she was part of the jazz circuit that then included the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But Anita O’Day was white, sort of a unique performer in that venue. I wasn’t sure if the black troops would know her.
Miss O’Day arrived with a storm. While Louis Armstrong had been a modest gentleman, asking little of me but proper sleeping accommodations, Anita O’Day burst upon me with so many demands, I hardly knew how to respond. She needed various kinds of medications, various foods, drink, all sorts of facilities that were difficult to assemble at our dusty outpost. She was like the Queen of Sheba, ordering me to do this and that with such majesty, I began to tremble in her presence. But she always called me Murry and adopted a familiarity as if we had been buddies for years. Some of my various cohorts in the entertainment program who knew more of her than I did were in awe of the lady. I was told repeatedly that whatever the difficulty, if she wanted it, it was my duty to serve.
The biggest difficulty was providing the sound system she required. Her voice was soft and needed the proper effects at the mike. I did happen to know some people at the electronics school that I begged for assistance. And they did their job.
Anita O’Day at Fort Huachuca was immense. A packed house was mesmerized, showing great reverence while she sang, standing in approval when she took her ovation. And she treated the crowd in our Army gym as worthy of her finest efforts.
I actually was very sad as she was leaving the base. Unlike my experience with most performers, I felt I had somehow been intimately acquainted for one day, especially when she asked me to see her in New York or L.A. after I completed my Army duty.
Later, my buddies and I would sit around and tell Anita O’Day stories for weeks, amazed at the kind of performer we were somehow able to attract to the world of Sierra Vista.
I read later that when she appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival just months later, she was hailed as one of the great jazz performers of all time. “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” a film by Bert Stern, featured her.
I found out by reading her New York Times obituary (Nov. 24) that Miss O’Day had sung with the bands of Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton and that a few years before appearing at the base, she had been jailed for drug possession. In fact, she’d had considerable problems with drugs, though I do not know if that was so unusual for artists in her world. I further found out that she had sung with black performers at a time when such performances were considered off-limits.
She continued to perform to a ripe old age and maintained a huge coterie of fans at all the big clubs in all the big cities.
I was one of them and, perhaps, so were many of the entertainment-starved young soldiers who were so appreciative that night at Fort Huachuca.
©2006 by Murry Frymer. The Murry Frymer caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Dec. 4, 2006.
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