The Mad Mab: the Life and Times of Charlie Barnet, Part 1 - the Early Years

Charles Daly Barnet, more popularly known in the jazz world as Charlie Barnet, was born in New York City on October 26, 1913. While not necessarily my favorite big band leader, he was certainly one of them — at least from a musical standpoint. For me, the most romping versions of his band were in what I thought was its heyday during the late 1940s.
 
He never became as well-known as some of his other leading counterparts of the era. I think this was probably due to the fact that he seldom let his music get in the way of having a good time, and so he wasn’t as driven and focused on personal success as an Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, or a Tommy Dorsey. And for me, that’s a large part of his appeal. Here was a guy who ran a string of successful bands from 1928 through 1965, was known for his ability to consume a fifth of scotch a night in his prime, traveled with a personal valet and two monkeys — Herman and Rebop, and was married at least eleven times, — with some biographers contending it was really thirteen.1

 
Barnet readily admits his good fortune in life in which money, or lack thereof, was never an issue. He came from a prominent family in New York. His grandfather at the time was an executive vice-president of the New York Central Railroad in-charge of its passenger traffic department. Charles Daly Barnet had such a meteoric rise and stunning reputation in the industry that newspaper accounts in 1908 openly speculated that he was poised to succeed William E. Newman as president of the New York Central.2
 
Charlie contended in his autobiography that it was his grandfather who had the idea for the 20th Century Limited operating between New York and Chicago on its initial schedule of 20 hours.3  That may well have been true, but if it was, it’s a fact that has seemingly been lost to history, save for Charlie’s recollection.

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Rail historians generally credit George H. Daniels, general passenger agent for the New York Central, as the man who, “…conceived, fought for, and christened,” the 20th Century Limited, which had its inaugural run on June 15, 1902.4
 
In fairness to Mr. Barnet’s recollection, and having worked in the railroad business for half a century, I can attest that it’s not really that uncommon to come up with an idea and have someone else appropriate it and run with it. Charles Daly didn’t get promoted to vice president of traffic until 1906 — four years after the inaugural run of the train. Prior to that he worked as a passenger agent for various New York Central affiliated lines, which would certainly put him in a position to come up with the idea. So, I think we can’t really fully assess the validity of Charlie’s claim without further research, which is beyond the scope of this post.
 
In his autobiography, Barnet recounts that his mother divorced his father when he was only two years old. He indicated that both of his parents had an innate musical sense and could play the piano. His mother had told him that, when coming home from a musical show,  his father could, “…go to the piano and play the whole score,” by ear.5 He indicated that his mother never had a bad thing to say about his father, and that he thought his mother was still in love with him. His grandfather, Charles Frederick Daly, “was [apparently] so incensed by something that he did that he forced the issue of the divorce.”6 He claims he never saw his father again after the separation and divorce — which is probably true.7

Charline Daly Barnet   1889-1963
Charlie Barnet's mother, probably at the time of her engagement and marraige to Willard Barnet.

However, we do know a bit more about Charlie Barnet’s father than he was able, or willing, to tell us in his autobiography. His name was Willard Raymond Barnet, who married Charlie’s mother Charline in 1909 on June 16, 1909 at her parents’ home in the Ormonde residence apartments on 70th Street at Broadway in Manhattan. Willard Barnet himself also worked for the New York Central as assistant general passenger agent for a period of time — probably thanks to his father-in-law. He resigned from the position and the railroad in December 1915 as the marriage began falling apart.

Willard Raymond Barnet   1888-1933
Barnet's father who divorced his mother when he was age 2 and, despite a bitter custody battle throughout 1916, Charlie never saw him again.

Charlie’s parents separated in March 1916 and ultimately divorced. But throughout 1916, the family was prominent enough for the New York Times and Sun to carry ongoing stories regarding the custody battle for Charlie between his mother and father. The newspaper reports indicated that during this period, Willard Barnet made repeated attempts to reconcile with his wife. Remembering that at this time, Charlie would still have been less than three years old, it is not surprising that he would have not recollected, nor have any knowledge of this.
 
Charlie’s mother Charline had to sue her ex-husband after he refused to release his son — and his nurse! — after a scheduled visitation.8 After Charlie had finally been returned to his mother, Willard Barnet then sued Charles Daly for $500,000 in a continued effort to reconcile with his wife and to regain custody of young Charlie, citing Daly as causing the alienation of his wife’s affections.9  His petition was ultimately denied by the judge after determining that Charlie, either being held somewhere in the Adirondacks, or in the state of Maine (there were conflicting contemporary newspaper reports), could not be brought back to New York City without undue risk to his health — ostensibly due to a polio epidemic in New York at the time.10
 
Once Willard Barnet ultimately lost any custody of his son, he apparently drifted out of Charlie’s life and died in the Tampa Bay area in Florida on November 7, 1933 at age 44. He remarried in 1932 in Florida to one Ola Belle Knott and died the following year.11  There’s one final irony to the story regarding Charlie Barnet’s father.
 
In his autobiography, Charlie recollects, “As executive vice president of the New York Central Railroad, he [Charles Daly] was entitled to a private car to travel around the country for business and pleasure. I vaguely remember making a trip in it to Florida with my mother and grandmother.”12 As it turns out, that trip was, among other things, reported in the press. The arrival of Charlie and his mother, along with his grandparents “in a private car of the New York Central,” was reported on February 10, 1917 [arrived] into the village of Belleair Heights — no doubt for a stay at the Belleview Hotel, which was coincident with the celebration of Gasparilla Week in the Tampa Bay area.13
 
The private car would have arrived on a regularly scheduled train at the Clearwater rail station over the Seaboard Air Line railroad. By early 1917 of course, Willard would have been completely out of Charlie’s life — the Daly family having endured and resolved all of the custody litigation from the previous fall. It’s a remarkable coincidence that his father would ultimately be buried in a cemetery less than a mile away from that train station, 16 years after his young son made a trip as a 3-year-old to Clearwater and Belleair Heights on a New York Central business car with his family. Willard Barnet never got to see the fame (and notoriety) his son ultimately achieved.

After her separation and divorce from Willard Barnet, Charlene and young Charlie lived with her parents. By his own account, Charlie felt that he was given a stable, comfortable and loving upbringing, and expressed gratitude for that in his autobiography.
 
Charlie’s grandfather ultimately resigned from the New York Central out of disdain for the manner in which the federal government had nationalized and managed America’s railroads under the auspices of the United States Railroad Administration during and after World War I. He went on to become president of Liberty Bank and a vice president of Durant Motors, a company founded by Buick and General Motors founder William Durant. The company produced cars for 10 years, from 1921 through 1931, before going defunct. Charles Daly ultimately died at his home in Manhattan in 1928 at Bretton Hall from heart disease, after suffering a heart attack while traveling through Europe.

Charlie Barnet played his first saxophone while enrolled at Riverdale Country School, a college preparatory school located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. It was a soprano saxophone because, to hear him tell it — all of the other chairs in the band were filled. At the time, he wasn’t too enamored with the idea of playing saxophone, principally because it wasn’t a well-established musical instrument in popular music. But he credits Riverdale Country School with giving him a good musical grounding, because he studied piano for two years there.14
 
He claims he originally wanted to take up drums, but his mother gave him a C-melody saxophone for Christmas in 1924 instead, and that’s apparently what got him on his way. He began taking lessons from a local vaudevillian named Harry Voltaire, and was soon admonished by Voltaire for learning to play tunes by ear (a talent of his father) because he thought it would impede Charlie’s study of music.

Lillian Roth's handwritten note to Barnet from 1919 providing her contact information in New York.

It was also around this time that Charlie had developed his first crush — on singer and actress Lillian Roth, whom he had first seen performing at Keith’s Theater on 81st Street in a vaudeville act where she sang, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” He claims he would wait by the stage door to see her walk by, and — in true Barnet fashion — became friendly enough with her to get invited to her apartment.15  She was 18 years old at the time; he was only 16. He kept the handwritten note she had given him with her address and telephone number for the rest of his life.

He got to see her again — this time in Los Angeles, when he traveled to California with his mother and grandmother for an extended trip, staying at the Ambassador Hotel. When they decided to take a side trip to San Francisco, he elected to remain at the Ambassador when he no doubt saw that Lillian Roth was performing at the Metropolitan Theatre on the same bill as the Ritz Brothers, He went backstage to see her, which is how he also got to know the Ritz Brothers personally who, as it turned out, were also staying at the Ambassador Hotel. He threw an elaborate party for all of them at the Ambassador’s Cocoanut Grove, charging the tab to his mother’s suite — which she of course had to settle when she returned from San Francisco.16

Barnet also recounted that, during this stay, and through a schoolfriend he met while attending the Berkeley-Irving School in New York City, whose father was playwright Vincent Lawrence, got him a part as an extra in the 1930 Paramount Pictures’ production of “Playboy of Paris,” starring Maurice Chevalier and Frances Dee (her film debut). Barnet claims he played three uncredited parts in the film: a barber, a man on a bicycle, and a patron sitting at a table in a club.17  It’s incredible to me how Barnet always found ways to get these kinds of opportunities for himself. This would be an ongoing theme throughout his life and career.
 
I’ve also always been amazed at the speed with which Charlie Barnet got himself established in the music business, formed his own bands, and even began recording — especially given the slowness with which he ultimately began to credibly read music, as his propensity was virtually always to work his playing of tunes out by ear. He picked up his practical musical experience by playing random dance jobs, through which he met another musician, who had a regular gig as the Golden Pheasant restaurant on 23rd Street at Union Square. Through this musician, Charlie was able to land a regular job with the band that played the Golden Pheasant.18
 
It wasn’t long at all during his stint playing Chinese restaurants in Manhattan that Charlie got the urge to start his own group and get himself booked on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner. In his words, he began haunting, “…the fly-by-night offices that handled such matters.”19 In July 1929, he signed a contract with Louis’ Booking Office in the Gaiety Theater building at 46th Street and Broadway for a five-piece band on the SS Republic, a United States Line vessel, between Hoboken, New Jersey and Bremerhaven, Germany.

Given, by his own admission, his inexperience and marginal musical capabilities at the time — not to mention that he had no band, his moxie in pulling this off was remarkable. There’s a lesson in this for all of us in terms of just moving forward and not overthinking anything. And, he ultimately pulled together a band: George Tully on trumpet; George Cates (who ultimately became music director for Lawrence Welk) on saxophone; George Howard [Buzz] Meredith (actor Burgess Meredith’s brother) on drums; and some poor, unremembered guy named, “Fred” on piano, who Charlie Barnet recalled, “…his capacity for whiskey was only surpassed by his ability to play the wrong chords to anything he attempted."20  Upon returning to the United States, Charlie determined he was finished with any further schooling, and joined Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians on February 13, 1930.  He ended up making a total of 22 ocean crossings between 1929 and 1932.21

The SS Republic, the first of a number of ships in which Charlie Barnet made 22 separate trans-Atlantic crossings with his own band — starting at age 16.

With union membership came the ability to get better gigs, and Barnet ended up with a band known as Frank Winegar and his Pennsylvania Boys which had a number of recordings during the late 1920s. It was not a jazz band in any sense, and the bassline was played using a sousaphone — which is pretty much everything you need to know. But it was his stint in this band where he finally began learning how to read music in earnest.
 
Charlie left the Winegar band in early 1932 and decided to head south, then west, freelancing (a very charitable use of the term here) with guitarist Scoop Tomson, picking-up additional musicians along the way — most notably Jack Purvis, in Louisiana. The exploits recounted by Barnet during this trek through the Deep South, Texas, Mexico, Arizona, and finally ending up in Los Angeles, defy belief, and I would refer the reader to Barnet’s autobiography for those interested in the details.

After gigging around Los Angeles for a short period of time, Barnet was getting the desire to lead his own band, and because he wasn’t an accredited member of the musicians’ union in Los Angeles, he determined that he needed to return to New York in which to do it.
 
Upon arrival in New York, he was able to acquire an entire trunk of old Jan Garber arrangements for twenty dollars through his acquaintance with the Garber orchestra’s drummer. Garber was moving in a different direction musically (wanting to sound more like Guy Lombardo!) and no longer needed the arrangements.
 
That was the genesis of Charlie Barnet’s band book. He assembled a group of musicians and began rehearsals for an audition at the Brooklyn Roseland Ballroom on Fulton Street at Flatbush Avenue. Unfortunately, according to Barnet, his first trumpet player showed up completely stoned and ruined the audition.

Seeking some help to get his band launched, he reached out to his uncle, Edwin K. Gordon who was an executive with the Knott hotel chain. His uncle introduced him to Roy Wilson, an executive with CBS who, by Barnet’s account, was most encouraging. Wilson introduced Barnet to Charles Gaines of World Transcriptions, who facilitated the band making an audition recording.26

But in the end, it was Barnet’s uncle, Edwin Gordon, who gave him the big break. His company, the Knott hotel chain, operated the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street. The Grill Room was the hotel’s principal dining and entertainment facility, and it was leased to a syndicate to operate separately. The syndicate was having difficulty making the rent, and the hotel was threatening to take back the room.

Sensing an opportunity, Gordon pre-arranged to have his nephew’s band ready to take to the bandstand on behalf of the hotel in the event the negotiations between the syndicate and hotel collapsed — and indeed they did. For two nights Barnet and his band waited upstairs in a hotel suite, fully dressed, waiting to be called to the bandstand and finally on the third night, they got the call to come downstairs to the Grill Room and play a set.27

                                       EDITORIAL NOTE

Jack Purvis was an enigmatic legend of sorts. A brilliant trumpeter and trombonist, his mental stability nonetheless always seemed to be in question. A serial kleptomaniac, even as a child, musical abilities first became evident while he was in a reformatory. He kicked around with numerous dance bands and jazzmen in the 1920s and 30s, including Hal Kemp, Fred Waring, Frank Froeba, Joe Haymes, the Dorsey Brothers, J. C. Higganbotham, Adrian Rollini, and Fletcher Henderson. He even briefly played trumpet for the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra soloing in “The Carnival of Venice,” when he walked out on the orchestra to travel with Charlie Barnet to California.22
 
He stayed in California, where he became successful with radio broadcasting work and even reportedly became a music arranger for Warner Brothers — before moving to San Francisco to become a chef and began drifting into obscurity.23
 
By the 1940s —his musical activities had come to an end. He was incarcerated at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville for his involvement in a robbery in El Paso, where he organized a prison band that broadcast regularly on radio station WBAP in Fort Worth. 24
 
After his release from prison in 1946, he reportedly worked as a cook (including on a freighter), a busker, an aviator in Florida (allegedly involved in Mexican smuggling activities), a carpenter, a radio repairman in San Francisco, on a street corner in Honolulu playing "Flight of the Bumble Bee" on his trumpet, and even a mercenary in South America. He died in San Francisco in 1962 from conflicting causes — one that he committed suicide by turning the gas on in his apartment; the other that he died from liver disease.25  Certainly enigmatic until the end.

The very first venue played by Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra, complete with nightly coast-to-coast radio broaadcast over the CBS network.

Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra were underway. In addition, thanks to his uncle connecting him with Roy Wilson, Barnet and his band were broadcasting coast-to-coast, over the CBS radio network.
 
So, from its very first performance, Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra were not only playing at a prestigious Manhattan hotel on Broadway, they were being broadcast several nights a week over a national radio network — all after botching a debut audition over in Brooklyn! It’s inconceivable that something like that could happen today. And it shows the power of business connections and knowing the right people — and not dwelling in self-doubt.
 
Barnet and his band played the Paramount Hotel from March 2, 1933 through May 31st before going out on the road. And from this point onward, with only a couple rare exceptions, he never worked as a sideman again.

Both the Paramount Hotel and the Grill Room survive to this day. Though the Grill Room is now known as Sony Hall, it still retains much of its original architectural integrity.

In the follow-up post, we'll briefly review the work of subsequent versions of this orchestra and listen to some of its music to hopefully instill an appreciation for the leader's musical tastes and style.

T O     B E      C O N T I N U E D

N O T E S

1  George T. Simon, “The Swing Era 1944-1945: The Golden Age of Network Radio,” (Time, Inc., 1970)  34

2  Associated Press, (1908, October 5). “Daly Says He is Not to Succeed Newman.” The Buffalo Times  3

3  Charlie Barnet, “Those Swinging Years: The Autobiography of Charlie Barnet,” (Louisiana State University Press, 1984; DaCapo Press Edition, 1992),  1-2

4  Arthur D. Dubin, “Some Classic Trains,” (Kalmbach Publishing Co., 1964),  58

5  Charlie Barnet, “Those Swinging Years: The Autobiography of Charlie Barnet,” (Louisiana State University Press, 1984; DaCapo Press Edition, 1992),  1-2

6  Ibid.,  2

7  Ibid.,  2

8  (1916, May 20) “Wife Sues Barnet: Declares Her Husband ‘Unfit’ to Have the Care of a 2-Year-Old Son,” The New York Times
  20

9  (1916, September 7) “Cause of $500,000 Suit: Husband Sues Her Father, Vice President of New York Central Lines, for Alienation of Affections,” Chicago Tribune  7

10  (1916, September 7) “Court Says Barnet Cannot See Child: ‘Safety First,’ Asserts Judge, Who Fears Boy Will Catch Paralysis,”New York Sun  5

11  Find a Grave - William Raymond Barnet, Clearwater Municipal Cemetery, Pinellas County, Florida, USA   (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24860728/willard-raymond-barnet)

12  Barnet, loc. cit.

13  (1917, February 11) “Patriotism at Belleair,” Brooklyn (NY) Eagle  42

14  Barnet, op. cit.  5

15  Ibid.  6

16 I bid.  7

17  Barnet, op. cit.  42, 43

18  Ibid.  10

19  Ibid.  10

20  Dan Mather, “Charlie Barnet: An Illustrated Biography and Discography,” (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002)  2

21  Ibid.  3, 4

22  “Jack Purvis,” Wikipedia, last modified on 11 November 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Purvis

23  Ibid.

24  Ibid.

25  Ibid.

26  Mather, op. cit.  8

27  Ibid.