"Just a Synopsis." With his present (and fourth) wife, pretty onetime show girl Lucille ("Brown Sugar") Wilson, Satchmo makes his "regular home" in a twelve-room house in a mixed white-and-colored neighborhood in Corona, borough of Queens, New York City.
No sophisticate, he shows signs of becoming a big-city hypochondriac, although he denies it. His dressing table is littered with a weird assortment of pills, salves, balms and medicines with which he experiments constantly. But the bigcity preoccupation with racial problems is not in his key. He says: "I know where the discrimination is, so I avoid those cities. Anyone who goes huntin' for discrimination is a glutton for punishment." A simple man whose main life is his music, he has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage, but usually he is gay, goodhumored and gabby about small things.
He is meticulously neat, and says, "Ever since I was a kid, I've spent my last nickels to keep my shirts clean. Musicians are lazy, don't seem to care how they look. Some of them are dirty. I don't hold with that." Last week in Vancouver, he had 16 $150-suits hanging in his hotelroom closet.
On the road, his schedule has long ago hardened into routine. After the show, which is usually over between 2 and 4 a.m., he goes out for a "snack," accompanied by Brown Sugar, his valet, "Doctor" Pugh, and whatever old friends and acquaintances want to join the party. The snack usually comes to a huge portion of ham & eggs, with potatoes, hot biscuits, hominy grits and coffee on the side. When complimented on his appetite, Satchmo replies: "Man, that's just a synopsis."
Louis likes his sleep, eight or nine hours of it, but he can do with four, "if I lay on my back." He once read that Heavyweight Max Baer recommended sleeping that way, earnestly agrees that "it's the only kind of sleep that eases you off." The first thing he does on arising is to turn on two or three radios, one in each room, and they stay on all day. Louis doesn't care what the program is ("I can get something out of any of them"). Apparently, sweet, slurred stuff is just as acceptable to him as hot jazz. His favorite "listening band" for years has been Guy Lombardo's--and Louis doesn't care how many jazz pedants faint when they hear it; "Guy Lombardo advertises the 'sweetest music this side of heaven' and that's what he plays."
Money doesn't worry Louis any more than his taste in music. He leaves all that to his manager and friend--a man Louis, with a kind of plantation politeness, still calls "Mister" Glaser. Joe Glaser, a tough, smart ex-fight manager, pays Louis' income tax, looks after his insurance, protects him from lawsuits and handles all the financial details of the band, including payment of the other men. Louis has never read his contract, never questioned Glaser's plans for him. Glaser says: "I'm Louis and Louis is me. There's nothing I wouldn't do for him." One thing he has done is to make sure that happy-go-lucky Louis Armstrong will never be in need. Should Satchmo have to lay down his gleaming horn tomorrow, Glaser says he would collect $864 a month for life.
But Louis is still mighty fit, and expects to keep fit for a long time. How
long does he think he can last? "Right until I get to the Pearly Gates, I hope." When he gets to those gates he is going to pay his respects, he says, to another famous trumpeter. Says Louis: "I'm gonna blow a kiss to Gabriel."
