The Porcupine's Quill

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

In Love, and all that jazz, Laurie Lewis again shines the clear light of memory on a time of glorious beginnings and hard consequences. At the end of her previous memoir, Little Comrades, it’s the year 1952 and the young Laurie is newly married in New York City. But everything is about to change.

Laurie jumps into a wonderfully happy new life with the brilliant, Manhattan-cool, and dangerously charming Gary Lewis. Gary’s idealism and longing for poetry in art, life and love are inseparable from his passionate attachment to the jazz scene. It is the time of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Zoot Sims, among others. Gary’s days and nights become a sleepless, drug-and-alcohol-fuelled, nonstop celebration. Laurie is soon forced to run, escaping back to Canada with her child.

Laurie, now a single mother and creating a new life for herself in publishing, discovers the freedom and peace of mind that self-reliance can bring. Love, and all that jazz, can bring defeat. A declaration of independence, on the other hand, can build an exhilarating new existence. It may mean that love can persevere.

Table of contents

PART ONE

Conjuring Ira

Miss Brown to you

The sunny side of the street

Admitting impediments

Sugar and spice

Miles ahead

Manhattan melody

On the street of dreams

When you’re smiling

And Lassie comes on Sunday

Foolin’ myself

Afternoon, with Henry Allen

Wishing on the moon

A change in the weather

Nothin’ but the blues

Manhattan lullaby

PART TWO

Little girl blue

‘Doublenight, Singleday’

The night we called it a day

And my sugar melted away

Saying yes / saying no

Love it or leave it

Tipping point

Seeing is believing

Summertime

Thinking about change

Beginning to see the light

Come rain or come shine

Taking a chance on love

Improvisation

Review text

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.

—Monica Carter, Foreword Reviews

Review quote

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

Review quote

‘...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!

—Merilyn Simonds, Kingston Whig-Standard

Review quote

‘... 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

Excerpt from book

(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.)

Unpublished endorsement

‘You can look at this story several ways. In one way it is about a marriage between a husband who is a drug addict and a wife whose addiction is the love of her husband. I, however, prefer not to judge or analyze any of the behavior, but to let all labels fall by the wayside and look at the book as a real love story. It is about a woman who despite all the awful and unloving things her husband did, she never, over decades, gave up on him. They were always the love of one another’s life. That is a rare find these days. The writing is subtle and understated, yet the author manages to pack in an enormous amount of feeling.’

—Catherine Gildiner, author of Too Close to the Falls

Unpublished endorsement

‘Laurie Lewis writes with sophistication and simplicity about her precarious and abundant life. By the end of her vivid account, the sadness that flows from her innocence and experience is oddly beautiful.’

—Elizabeth Hay, author of Late Nights on Air and Alone in the Classroom

Unpublished endorsement

‘Laurie Lewis’s follow-up memoir deftly exposes the pill-popping, booze-swilling underbelly of Madmen-era New York and celebrates the determination of a young single mother to make a life for herself and her child.’

—Sheree-Lee Olson, author of Sailor Girl

Unpublished endorsement

‘Love, lovers, jazz and dope, the wild gaiety, glamour and danger of New York’s 1950s bohemia – Love, and all that jazz is an amazing tale of a gutsy and gorgeous Canadian prairie girl with resilience born of a childhood in a Communist family constantly on the run. She was an independent woman when the phrase was still an oxymoron. Laurie Lewis tells her intimate story with wit, panache and touching honesty.’

—Michele Landsberg, feminist author of Writing the Revolution, activist and former Toronto Star columnist