Conversation – 37

November 21, 1934. Harlem, New York.
A seventeen-year-old girl stood backstage at the Apollo Theater in clothes that hadn’t been washed in days, waiting for her name to be called.
Her name had been drawn at random for Amateur Night. She had planned to dance. But the act before her — the Edwards Sisters — had just brought the house down. HISTORY
“They were the dancingest sisters around,” she would later say. She felt her act could not compare. HISTORY
So when they called her name, she walked to the microphone and opened her mouth to sing instead.
The crowd at the Apollo was famously brutal. She looked out at all those people and froze. “What’s she gonna do?” came the murmurs from the balcony. HISTORY
Then she sang.
She sang “Judy,” a Hoagy Carmichael tune, in the style of her idol Connee Boswell. Then she sang “The Object of My Affection.” The audience — the same audience that had been murmuring and jeering moments before — went wild. Three encores later, the $25 first prize was hers. Legal Legacy
The Apollo didn’t give her the rest of her prize — a week performing on their stage. She was too disheveled, too unkempt. She didn’t look the part. Interlochen Public Radio
It didn’t matter. The audience had heard her.
She had come to dance. She left a singer.
Her name was Ella Fitzgerald — and to understand why that night at the Apollo was a miracle, you have to understand what her life looked like before it.
She was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia. Her father disappeared early. Her mother Temperance moved them to Yonkers, New York, where Ella grew up singing in church and dreaming of becoming a dancer. Biography
Then, in 1932, her mother died from injuries sustained in a car accident. Ella was fifteen. iHeart
Everything collapsed. She moved in with an aunt who couldn’t care for her. She stopped going to school. She earned pennies as a lookout for police outside a brothel. She was arrested, sent to a reform school in Hudson, New York, where she was regularly beaten by her caretakers. American Top 40
So she ran away.
This awkward, gawky girl with skinny legs and cast-off boots found herself alone on the streets of Harlem during the Great Depression — no money, sleeping where she could, singing and dancing on street corners for spare change. National Women’s History Museum
She was still a ward of the state when she walked into the Apollo that November night.
Within a year, Chick Webb — the legendary bandleader — had heard about the girl who won Amateur Night and gave her a chance. By 1935, she was singing with his orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom. By 1938, she had her first number-one hit: “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a song she co-wrote based on a nursery rhyme, selling a million copies. BiographyLegal Legacy
When Webb died in 1939, Ella took over his band. She was twenty-two years old. Biography
But even as her fame grew, the doors didn’t always open.
In the mid-1950s, Ella wanted to play the Mocambo — the glamorous Sunset Strip club where Hollywood’s biggest stars came to see and be seen. The owner wasn’t sure she had the image his clientele expected.
Then Marilyn Monroe called him.
Monroe had studied Ella’s recordings to improve her own singing. She told the owner she wanted Ella booked immediately — and if he did it, Monroe would sit at a front table every night. The press would go wild.
He said yes.
“She personally called the owner of the Mocambo,” Ella later said, “and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him — and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status — that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman — a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.” iHeart
From there, there was no ceiling.
She won 13 Grammy Awards — including the first Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award ever given to a woman. She sold over 40 million albums. She received the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was the first African American woman to win a Grammy. Her Songbook series for Verve Records — definitive recordings of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins — remain among the greatest vocal recordings ever made. Legal LegacyBiography
Through all of it, she almost never spoke about the reform school, or the beatings, or the months on the streets of Harlem.
She only ever offered this:
“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
Ella Fitzgerald died on June 15, 1996, at the age of seventy-nine. National Women’s History Museum
She had walked into the Apollo a homeless teenager who thought she would dance.
She walked out a singer.
And for the next sixty-two years, she never stopped proving that the two most dangerous things in the world are a microphone and someone who has nothing left to lose.