Straight Life - Art Pepper [120]
Withal, the deadly "circumstances" found their mark. Pepper became more depressed at the lack of recording calls, and at the repeated attempts to launch his own group in a town of clubowners ready to buy music for clowns. And so he withdrew from music, retreating into a personal shell that was made a little less lonely by his wife, Diane.
Today Pepper can say, without undue display of emotion, "Diane's understanding saved me; I owe so much to her." And it is true that in Pepper's darkest hours, when making a living in music seemed nothing more than a bad joke, Diane stiffened his will to endure and, finally, to return to jazz more eloquent than ever. down beat, April 14, 1960. Copyright 1960 by down beat. Reprinted by special permission.
THINGS were getting good. I bought a dog for Christmas for Diane. Actually, I bought it for myself. It cost three hundred dollars, a little champagne poodle, and we named her Bijou. I got more and more work. I got a call from Andre Previn at MGM to do the soundtrack on The Subterraneans, and I got to play a lot of solos. Then I got a call from Mickey Whalen, the music director at MGM, and I did Bells Are Ringing. I was drinking the Cosanyl, which is very fattening, and I was steadily putting on weight. I went from a hundred and fifty up to a hundred and ninety-five. People would see me and say, "Boy, you really look great!" And, "It's great to see you clean!" Between the two of us Diane and I were drinking three pints of this stuff a day and I was juicing heavy, but all our bills were paid; there was money in the bank; and 1 still had the Lincoln.
I had gone through a crisis and survived. Now I had a tenor, an alto, a clarinet, and a bunch of suits. I had just about everything I wanted, but I wasn't happy with Diane, you know, because I never had loved her. I married her because-I don't even know why now-I felt I owed it to her and I thought maybe, maybe I could just learn to love her, but it never happened. Right at this time Les wanted to do another album so he got another Miles Davis rhythm section: Wynton Kelly on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Paul Chambers, the only holdover, on bass. I was really prepared for this album, Gettin' Together, and it was excellent. I played great, and I wrote some of the arrangements. I wrote a tune that I recorded for Diane. Well, I wrote a tune and named it "Diane." It was a dream of somebody I would have liked to have had, and I called it "Diane" because I figured it would make her happy, and it did. The tune was way too beautiful for her, but what was a name?
I had the world by the tail. There was no end to what could have happened for me at that time. One night I had a record date-I forget who it was with, a singer-and after the session I was riding home on the freeway from Hollywood to Studio City, which is a very short distance; I was riding in my Lincoln, and I had the radio on, and I remember Ray Charles was singing "The Outskirts of Town," and all of a sudden I got very sad, I just got very sad, and I thought, "This isn't it. Something is wrong." I took my turnoff on Whitsett and turned left under the freeway and, without even thinking, I just made another left turn back onto the freeway; now I was headed toward Hollywood to the Hollywood freeway, which goes to the Santa Ana freeway, which goes to East Los Angeles, which is where all my old connections were, all my friends from my heroin days.
I turned the radio up and drove. I took the cutoff on Brooklyn Avenue, and there I was. I drove to this broad's pad that I used to know, Rachel. She and her brother, Boy, still lived