NEW YORK — The things he lost come back to him in glimpses, a photograph from the old days, the notebook crammed with 50 years of phone numbers, the 78-r.p.m. records he cut with Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong.
Lionel Hampton’s face lifted for a moment yesterday morning, as his valet spoke of the videotape a fan had sent from Sweden. It was taken from a show sometime in the early ’50s, when the jazz legend’s big band included Quincy Jones, Art Farmer and Al Grey. There was Hampton jumping from the vibraphone to the drums, then back to the vibes and into the arms of some ladies in the crowd.
“Oh, man!” Hampton said of the tape he used to play for dinner guests in his Manhattan apartment. Then he sank back into the chair in the hotel suite across the street from his burned apartment, realizing that that tape, too, was gone. “Ain’t that a shame.”
The 88-year-old band leader spoke yesterday about the week in which he lost nearly all of his possessions and was then honored at the White House in a donated suit.
You could see the blackened windows of his apartment building from his rooms at the Radisson Empire Hotel. But Hampton was looking forward, not back, wondering how to replace some of his instruments and vowing to return to stage stronger than ever.
He was making out his payroll in his pajamas, 28 floors above Lincoln Center, when he smelled the smoke. His housekeeper realized it was coming from the bedroom. A halogen lamp had toppled. The bed was on fire.
There was no time to decide what to take: the vibraphone, the baby grand, two drum sets, the records, his big-band arrangements, the pictures and handwritten notes from seven presidents, starting with Harry S. Truman, the portraits of his late wife and the grandmother who reared him.
His secretary grabbed him under one arm, his housekeeper grabbed him under the other. Without even stopping for his wheelchair, they dragged him out of the apartment and onto the elevator, his slippers scuffing the carpet along the way.
“God allowed us to forget everything,” said his housekeeper, Daphne Reid, “because if we had stopped to think, the smoke would have got us.”
Yesterday, Hampton took time to remember. “I’ve had a good feeling,” he said, drumming his long fingers against the smooth wooden crook of his walking stick. “People have been good to me.”
He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt and red tie that his friend Rep. Charles B. Rangel picked out for him so he would have some proper clothes. Though his speech has been thickened by two strokes, which make walking difficult, his command of details is keen.
While he carried insurance, most of the things from his storied jazz life cannot be replaced.
After the Jan. 7 fire, he asked his valet, Rubin Cox, to return to the seven-room apartment where he’d lived since his wife’s death in 1972.
All that was left of the vibraphone – the instrument that Hampton made famous – were the pedal and some tubing. It was his practice vibes – he still worked out new ideas on it each day, he said. While only a few years old, the instrument had been promised to the Smithsonian Institution.
Two sets of Ludwig drums were also destroyed, as was a Yamaha baby grand – the instruments he grew up playing in Chicago. He’ll call the factory for more, he said.
There’s no way to replace his “gangs of records,” 78s from the Goodman group – with Hampton, Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson – that pushed the color line in 1936. He had the original pressing of himself playing drums on “a dear record of Louis Armstrong’s” called Memories of You (1930) – now gone, along with about 400 other pieces of music.
He lost his current big-band arrangements: His 15-piece group last played New Year’s Eve. He lost diplomas for 21 honorary degrees. And he lost “the bear,” as he called it – the dark-blue, mink-lined overcoat so heavy his secretary could never lift it.
His walls had been lined with personal notes from presidents. “Wish you were here,” a vacationing George Bush wrote. There were pictures and greetings from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Truman, who first invited the Republican jazz player to the White House. Bill Clinton, who Thursday draped a National Medal of the Arts around Hampton’s neck, also wrote him. So did Jimmy Carter.
“I lost everything,” Hampton said. More than anything, he feels the absence of a portrait of his wife, Gladys, who came east with him while he was still in Goodman’s band. A musician’s wife had painted it. His staff hated it. To him, it was a masterpiece.
He grew quiet and his eyes shifted, as if he were scanning the place that had been filled with these things. It had been an intense morning. Television reporters had come and gone, pressing him about the halogen light and whether he’s angry. Will he sue the manufacturer? How does he feel now?
He placed no blame.
A man from a Harlem arts group had arrived, bearing gifts: paisley socks and Tuscany cologne, a tweed sweater-vest, red tie and suspenders. “We love you and want to do whatever we can to get you back in the limelight,” said the man, Greg Mills.
“Santa Claus comes in January,” Hampton mused.
While Rangel persuaded Syms department store to donate a tuxedo, topcoat, white silk scarf, hat, gloves, two suits and assorted undergarments, Hampton says he still needs clothing. He also would appreciate hearing from anyone who has old pictures of him.
Several hours after the fire, Hampton had his people return to the building, where 27 people had been hurt.
“Lionel insisted that they go back, that there had to be something to be rescued,” said Virginia Wicks, his press agent in Los Angeles. “But it was all mush. There weren’t even walls.”
He’d promised most of his instruments and music collection to the University of Idaho, home of the Lionel Hampton School of Music and a successful jazz festival in his name.
“I was just getting all of my goodies together to send them to a museum that we have in Moscow, Idaho,” he said.
He shook his head slowly. “I never figured I’d have a fire,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to prophesize.”
Someone did, however.
A couple of days after the blaze, Hampton took a call from the fire department. They’d found something: a box. One of his staff had thought to enclose all his classic band arrangements in a protected box. They all survived.
He’s got a month before he’s to head for Idaho for this year’s festival. Meanwhile, he’s heard that Donald Trump has a place for him to live.
“I’m coming back stronger,” said the man praised last week by his President as “a lion of American music.”
“I’m coming back.”
By Daniel Rubin, Staff Writer. Posted January 14, 1997
Daniel Rubin 