“We heard a sound so perfect,” said Miller. She chose “Judy” (1934), by the great singer and songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, and suddenly, as she later recalled to Previn, “everybody says, ‘Oh, that girl can sing.’” “We booed Ella Fitzgerald?”įitzgerald, who had never performed in public before, stepped forward and began not to dance but to sing. “We were a bunch of rowdy teenagers in the balcony ’cause they were introducing somebody we didn’t know,” she told me in 2018, when I was working on a documentary about Fitzgerald (“Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things,” which will be available to stream on Eventive starting June 26). The iconic dancer and choreographer Norma Miller, a contemporary of Fitzgerald’s who later made her name as a Lindy Hopper at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, was there for Ella’s debut. When I made it on that wall, I felt I had really made it, because the Apollo is the Apollo.” “In the lobby,” he said, “there’s a mural with people I had grown up hearing about: Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington - and Ella Fitzgerald, of course. Harlem was 70 percent black by then, and the Apollo, on 125th Street, now open to black performers and audiences, became “monumental,” as the legendary Motown singer, writer and producer Smokey Robinson described it to me. Designed by the American architect George Keister, the neo-Classical music hall was built for burlesque performances in 1914, when Harlem was largely white and African-Americans were not allowed in, but in 1933, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia cracked down on burlesque, and the following year the theater was transformed into a venue for variety revues. In a raggedy dress and workman’s boots, Fitzgerald, who was then homeless and living on the streets of Harlem, looked out at the 1,500-seat theater with its glittering chandeliers and glamorous crowd.
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