Lie One

Lie number one was that beboppers wore wild clothes and dark glasses at night. Watch the fashions of the forties on the late show, long coats, almost down to your knees, and full trousers, I wore drape suits like everyone else and dressed no differently form the average leading man of the day. It was beautiful. I became pretty dandified, I guess, later during the bebop era when my pants were pegged slightly at the bottom, but not unlike the modestly flared bottoms on the slacks of the smart set today.

We had costumes for the stage - uniforms with wide lapels and belts- given to us by a tailor in Chicago who designed them, but we didn’t wear them offstage. Later, we removed the wide lapels and sported little tan cashmere jackets with no lapels. This was a trendsetting innovation because it made no sense at all to pay for a wide lapel. Esquire magazine, 1943, America’s leading influence on men’s fashions, considered us elegant, though bold, and printed our photographs.

Perhaps I remembered France and started wearing the beret. But I used it as headgear I could stuff into my pocket and keep moving. I used to lose my hat a lot. I liked to wear a hat like most of the guys then, and the hats I kept losing cost five dollars apiece. At a few recording sessions when I couldn’t lay my hands on a mute, I covered the bell of the trumpet with the beret. Since I’d been designated their "leader," cats just picked up the style.

My first pair of eyeglasses, some rimless eyeglasses, came from Maurice Guilden, an optometrist at the Theresa Hotel, but they’d get broken all the time, so I picked up a pair of horn rims. I never wore glasses until 1940. As a child, I had some minor problems with vision. When I’d wake up in the morning, I couldn’t open my eyelids ? they’d stick together. My mother gave me a piece of cotton: someone told her that urine would help. Every time I urinated, I took a piece of cotton and dabbed my eyes with it. It cured me. I read now without glasses and only use glasses for distance. Someone coming from the night who saw me wearing dark glasses onstage to shield my eyes from the glare of the spotlights might misinterpret their meaning. Wearing dark glasses at night could only worsen my eyesight. I never wore dark glasses at night. I had to be careful about my eyes because I needed them to see music.