Quote of the day:
Money means nothing. It does not create inner happiness and peace in a man. Honor and honesty does.
—Desiderio Arnaz II explaining to his son Desiderio Arnaz III (better known as Desi) why he didn’t join the corrupt US-backed Machado regime in looting the gold reserves of Cuba in 1933. (Why does the US always back the corrupt regimes?)
I’m reading Todd Purdum’s Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.
In 1933 after the fall of the Machado regime, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha II, who had been mayor of the city of Santiago, was thrown into prison in Havana, and the family, which had been Cuban royalty, lost everything, including their home. Eventually when the Cuban authorities finally decided that Desiderio Arnaz II was not involved with the corrupt Machado regime, he and his sixteen-year-old son Desiderio III (or Desi) fled to Miami, Florida, in the hopes of finding a better life, leaving his wife Lolita behind for the time being. They lived in a rat-infested warehouse until Desi’s father found work, and Desi enrolled in a Catholic school where his best friend was Al Capone Jr., whose father was serving a federal prison sentence for tax evasion.
Eventually Desi bought a cheap guitar in a pawn shop and learned to play it well enough that he got a job with a band that needed a guitarist and a singer. Now he and his father had enough income to send for his mother to join them.
Then one day Xavier Cugat, the Spanish-born bandleader and the king of the rhumba, caught sight of Desi’s playing and invited the handsome young man (still in his teens) to join his band in New York City.
One evening, the club’s headwaiter asked Cugat if it would be acceptable for Desi to join an admiring guest at his table, a practice generally forbidden. The guest turned out to be Bing Crosby, the most important popular singer of the day, who had revolutionized vocal crooning with his novel use of the microphone, understated conversational style, and blue-eyed sex appeal. Crosby greeted Desi in more-than-passable Spanish, praised his performance, and after a couple of shots of Añejo Bacardí rum asked what Cugat was paying him.
Crosby took up the young man’s cause. “Listen, you cheap Spaniard, what do you mean paying this fine Cuban singer thirty a week?” he demanded of Cugat, in Desi’s later retelling. “Give him a raise. One of these days you are going to be asking him for a job.”
“Okay, okay,” Cugat replied, but then turned the tables. “How about singing a song with the band, Bing?”
Desi got a five dollar a week raise, which still wasn’t quite enough to make ends meet, so he left Cugat and headed back to Miami to form his own band and promptly got a gig before he had formed a band. He asked Cugat to send him some musicians, but the musicians weren’t up to playing Latin-flavored rhythms and didn’t have time to learn, so—
But the sound the ragtag ensemble produced was atrocious, and Bobby Kelly fired them after the first set. The musicians’ union rules, however, required that Kelly had to keep the band for at least two weeks, so they got a reprieve. […] The musicians had adequate skills; they just had no idea how to make a Latin sound. So before the last set of the night, Arnaz had an inspiration.
He remembered Santiago, and carnival, and the conga—the raucous, undulating dance that his father had tried to ban. His players had no plangent Chinese cornet to make the conga’s signature shrill wail, no wooden claves to clack together in its defining rhythm. But Desi had a conga drum, and the little club’s kitchen had a frying pan, spoons to beat it with, and a board to nail it to. So he borrowed a bottle of Bacardí from the bartender, gave his boys a few shots, and told them to follow him: “One-two-three-KICK! One-two-three-KICK!” Louis Nicoletti sprang onto the dance floor, shouting “Follow me, folks!” while Desi jumped atop the bar. Soon the whole crowd was snaking across the floor in a sinuous conga line. Desi would later call it “My Dance of Desperation.”
A dance craze that soon swept the nation was born!
Actually, as author Todd Purdum explains, while he wasn’t the first person to bring the conga into the States, Desi Arnaz did play a huge part in popularizing it.
The American nightclub audiences of 1937 did not need to be experts in ethnomusicology to learn the conga’s simple steps. Within a week, Bobby Kelly’s new little club was jammed, with nightly conga lines spilling out into the street and around the corner, then back onto the dance floor all over again. The local press took appreciative note of the club’s unique ambience and energy; one review noted, “The place is the only thing around that provides for those who like to devote themselves strictly to the rumba and tango and it’s easy to forgive Band Leader Desi Arnaz when he does slip into an occasional popular dance tune because you can’t keep doing those body shakers all night. Or can you?”
Dave Singer’s Park Avenue Restaurant adjoined Kelly’s club and provided food for patrons. “Bobby Kelly was ecstatic and told me to forget about the two weeks’ notice,” Desi would recall. But when Kelly suggested calling the club Desi’s Place, the young bandleader demurred.
“No,” he said. “Call it La Conga.”
Xavier Cugat caught wind of Desi’s success and offered him a contract at two hundred a week, but after showing it to friends and relatives, Desi decided the contract was too restrictive and turned it down. Instead, he set off to New York City and tried to make it there on his own. After all, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, right?
But after a few months of not making it, he returned for a second winter at La Conga. It’s just as well that he did. By this time it had become one of Miami Beach’s most popular nightspots, with celebrities like Joe E. Lewis and the Norwegian ics-skating star Sonja Henie stopping in to get into the conga line.
And then one night, in walked the lyricist Lorenz Hart.
To be continued…
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