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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

Love, and all that jazz

by (author) Laurie Lewis

Publisher
Porcupine's Quill
Initial publish date
Jun 2013
Category
Personal Memoirs, Women
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889843615
    Publish Date
    Jun 2013
    List Price
    $22.95

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Description

In Love, and all that jazz, Laurie Lewis again shines the clear light of memory on a time of glorious beginnings and hard consequences.

About the author

Laurie Lewis is a Fellow of the Graphic Designers of Canada and is Editor Emeritus of Vista, the publication of the Seniors Association in Kingston, Ontario, and director of Artful Codger Press.

Laurie began her career in publishing with Doubleday in New York in 1961. She returned to Canada in 1963 to join University of Toronto Press, where she worked in production and design of UTP publications, becoming Head of Design at U of T Press. During her thirty years in publishing, she also taught book design in Guyana, the Philippines and at Ryerson University in Toronto. She moved to Kingston, Ontario in 1991, where she founded Artful Codger Press.

Her written work has been featured on CBC and has been published around and about, including Contemporary Verse 2, Queen's Feminist Review and Kingston Poets' Gallery.

A chapter from an early draft of her first book Little Comrades was shortlisted for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards in Creative Non-Fiction.

Laurie Lewis' profile page

Excerpt: Love, and all that jazz (by (author) Laurie Lewis)

(from “Miles Ahead?)

When Blossom Dearie came back from France in 1956 or “57 she played at a ratty little club in New York in the East Fifties. Gary and I went to hear her one night, with Bill Brown. It was just a small place, banquettes in cracked red leatherette, Contact paper on the table tops. Probably not more than ten tables. The waiters all unemployed actors, I think. Certainly not professional waiters. The bar over on the right, mirrors, bottles. Blossom at the piano in the middle of the room on a tiny stage, a couple of guys for backup.

Who played with her” I have no memory of that, only of her. There she was at the piano, a bitty-little person with curly blonde hair and big horn-rimmed glasses, that tiny voice just floating out into our hearts, tender, funny. Funny! She sang “I'm always true to you, darling, in my fashion” with that little-girl sexy sly style of hers. Broke us up. Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker jazz critic, said she had such a tiny voice, “without a microphone it wouldn't reach the second floor of a doll's house.” When Blossom played there was absolute silence. Nobody moved (nobody even smoked in the club when she was singing!). What was it about her” There was something so pure and direct about her voice, so subtle in its tenderness. Her time in France had been very successful, and she brought back with her a couple of specials, of which I remember only “Comment allez-vous?” and the French lyrics to “It might as well be spring.” After that evening sitting at a table with Gary and Bill, listening to Blossom, with her enchanting, smart, sassy way with a song, her simplicity, I was a fan forever.

Only a month or so later, somewhere in the same general area of Manhattan, there was a party at a penthouse between Madison and Lexington. We were all outside on the big deck. One of the good New York parties, before the wrecking began, or before I began to notice it. When things were still good. Looked good, anyway:

Roscoe Brown's place. He's lounging on a chaise, a glass of wine and a plate nearby. BJ – Brownjohn – looks a bit strung out, but everyone else looks bright, clear-eyed, happy. Larry Storch has taken off his shirt and shoes and is sitting on a metal beach chair in the middle of a kid's wading pool, a bottle of wine at hand staying cool in the water. He paddles out of the pool swinging the bottle and comes to the head of the chaise, ready to refill Roscoe's glass. As Roscoe turns his head the shining brown bald spot reveals itself, in crisp black and white, to Gary's camera. His old Rollei, probably.

It's a summer afternoon. The sun is flat from the west, hitting the side of all the faces. Probably about four o'clock, maybe five.

The year is 1957, a detail I easily calculate by looking at my daughter Amanda – two and a half years old that summer. She is tipping up a juice glass and drinking as she walks past Brownjohn on her way to Miles. BJ is smiling into her face now, beaming at her. His wife, Donna, is newly pregnant and he has developed a tender love of young children. BJ is a graphic designer in a city full of talent. He is designing the Pepsi-Cola magazine for Gary, and is also doing advertising for I. Magnin, a fine clothing store, using drawings of shoes done by Andy Warhol, a talented and relatively unknown illustrator. I remember one of the shoe drawings push-pinned onto a wall at BJ's apartment a year or so later, after their baby, Eliza, was born, Eliza Brownjohn.

Miles has both hands on Amanda's waist as she moves toward him. He is sitting on the tile floor, his back against the brick wall that surrounds the big balcony. He has the stub of a cigarette in his mouth. There are a few big leafy plants nearby, unidentifiable. In the next shot Amanda is sitting in his lap and he has her empty glass in his hand. Amanda is looking at the glass, paying attention to what's going on. I am leaning over them, Miles and I having a few words. His head is tilted up toward my face. But all three of us seem focused on the empty glass. I may have offered to refill it. I may have offered to get a drink for Miles. Whatever is going on, it is clear that some action is being initiated, and that we are all comfortable together.

Amanda is wearing a dress of dimity or some such sprightly old-fashioned fabric. White with tiny blue flowers. Even looking at the black-and-white photos I know those flowers are blue. I made that dress for her – over fifty years ago. I'm wearing a shirtwaist dress in a gauzy fabric, something called voile. The colour is ivory, and it's from Lord & Taylor, my favourite clothing store. As I lean forward, the necklace that Gary's family gave me when we were married swings out into the warm air, the pearls gleaming. My hair is up in a loose chignon, a bit raggedy but sedate and classy. My left earlobe facing the camera shows a small pearl earring, the pair a present from Gary's father that Christmas before Amanda was born. I have about me the calm and classic kind of look that I liked, that Gary liked. I was happy.

The thing that strikes me is how light and innocent it all was, or seemed. Lovely, artsy New York in the mid-fifties. These people are writers, photographers, musicians, actors, enjoying the summer afternoon with some wine and a bit of food. There was in New York at the time a tender combination of discretion and paranoia. People were toking up in the bathroom, not openly. Four or five people crowded together in the tiny bathroom. Laughing. Inhaling. (?Conspiring?: breathing together.)

Editorial Reviews

Amid the chaos of drugs and jazz, Lewis finds insight into the way we recall the past.

"How hard to write about this, to sort out the memories. To make decisions about how much honesty, where, and when. I see things now so differently. And all I can say is the truth as it will come into my memory." This passage from Laurie Lewis's new book, Love, and All That Jazz, explains the core difficulty of writing a memoir: the mind is selective and subjective with memory, and those attributes change with life experience. Whether the memoirist has made peace with the past or not, there must be clarity in the narrative as to what she wishes to convey to the reader. Lewis's first memoir, Little Comrades, achieved this beautifully. Love, and All That Jazz, her follow-up, mines her years in New York City, through two marriages, co-dependency, becoming a mother, separation, her career in publishing, and her eventual move back to Canada.

As in the first memoir, Lewis, amid a chaotic atmosphere filled with interesting characters and intellectual stimulation, remains ambitious and enterprising, if a bit impulsive. After falling in love with her friend's husband, Gary, who lives above her and her husband in an apartment building, she and Gary divorce their spouses and move into an apartment together. Gary is tall, good-looking, and has a good job as a Pepsi-Cola advertising executive. But his real love is jazz, and they spend their nights listening to music, going to jazz clubs, and hanging out with other musicians. They spend time with Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Thelonious Monk, and others, all whom Gary seems to know well. While they are living this charmed bohemian life, they have a daughter, Amanda, and Gary slips into alcoholism and amphetamine addiction and forays into heroin. Much of the memoir focuses on Gary's addictions throughout their tumultuous marriage.

Lewis chooses to insert excerpts from Gary's letters and his own recollections of certain events. Although an interesting device that does provide contrast, Gary's voice is uneven, at times drug fueled and incomprehensible, which disrupts Lewis's fluidity. Lewis's perspective on these events in her life seems unresolved, which weakens the perspective and the narrative. Even though Gary and Lewis separate for nearly two decades, there is not much focus on Lewis's concern for Amanda's well-being or much personal reflection on what motivates her to stay married to Gary. This ambivalence makes it difficult for the reader to empathize with her journey toward freedom.

Memoirs are versions of our own truths, but we must be sure of what we believe our own truths to be. When Lewis recounts her personal dramas, she shows us that time does not always give us clarity and resolution. But Lewis is a person who has lived a fascinating life, and it's enjoyable to read her accounts of her relationships with famous musicians and the inhabitants of the publishing world.

Foreword Reviews

Laurie Lewis picks up on her fascinating life with her second memoir, Love, and all that jazz (The Porcupine's Quill). Married and living in the midst of New York City's 1950s jazz scene, Laurie meets Gary, the embodiment of New York cool, and with whom a relationship develops that will start a journey through divorce, remarriage, motherhood, a return to Canada and into publishing. It is a memoir of a marriage, but it is ultimately a story of independence.

Open Book Ontario

'... to describe the essence of Laurie's book, we need some adjectives--gripping, poignant, excruciatingly honest, heart-inspiring, heart-breaking, and courageous come to mind. We'd need to honor the colors and the moods of an era captured with Laurie's brush strokes ... In fact, her brushstrokes are breathtaking. Laurie Lewis carries the reader, as though on tangible breezes blowing into New York City apartments through small windows 60 years ago, into the heart of an era on the brink of something big--the compliance of the 1950s inundated by cultural groundswells and eddies of hipness and coolness. Oh, how she describes the anguish and drug culture for many of New York City's Jazz musicians ...'

Lise Goddard

'...this one is not a dirge. It is not a hard-luck story. If it could be sung, it would be a jazz tune, hard bop, a perfect tune for Shout Sister!

'Good. Gutsy. Real.'

Kingston Whig-Standard