Parkeology 009: Flatiron

My second first debt is to Stanley Crouch, friend and colleague, who has been working since 1982 on an exhaustive study of Parker’s life and art. In what was surely an unusual if not unprecedented act of scholarly comradeship, Stanley made all of his research available to me so that I could “get it right.“ His extensive interviews with Rebecca Parker Davis convinced me that she knew the story I wanted to tell. – Gary Giddins, acknowledgements, Celebrating Bird, 1987

I find it discouragingly ironic that Stanley Crouch’s Bird biography (Kansas City Lightning) so closely resembles Ross Russell’s (Bird Lives) in the degree of its dishonesty.

In theory, the two books should have been opposites. In Russell, we had a White record producer writing a poison pen letter to Bird, simultaneously absolving himself of all blame. In Crouch, we at last had a Black biographer, an intellectual well-equipped to put Bird’s story in its proper context. 

Instead, we got strange bedfellows, both besotted with novelistic aims, arrogantly granting themselves license to ascribe internal thoughts to Bird and everyone but the milkman. 

This isn’t a book review. Both books should be approached with caution, as should Giddins’ 1987 biography (Celebrating Bird), but my main concern is a story first told in Giddins’ book, about Bird putting a gun to the head of his first wife, Rebecca Ruffin (Parker Davis). If true, it’s a depraved act, the product of a sick mind. Before we condemn Bird for it, though, we should assess this story’s believability.

Crouch took forever and a day to write Kansas City Lightning, which he began in 1982 and published in 2013. It contains his version of the gun story, and it’s identical to the story published twenty-six years earlier, in Giddins’ book.

Therein lies the rub. Couch appears to be corroborating Giddins’ account, when in fact they both derived it from the same source, Rebecca, and she and Bird were the only people in the room. Since there were no other witnesses to this alleged episode, with the exception of a flatiron, it should have been treated as hearsay, and thus not fit for publication.

Here are the two accounts of the gun story.

At least Giddens, unlike Russell and Crouch, proceeds with journalistic integrity, refraining from ascribing internal thoughts and inventing dialog.

He [Bird] took up with another woman, whose identity Rebecca discovered when he left a couple of letters under a pillow. She read them and put them back. Yet they weren’t there when he looked for them the next day. He called her upstairs and told her to sit on the bed and look out the window. She heard a click. Charlie was holding a gun to her temple and demanding the letters. She told him to look in his bureau where he usually put mail, and there they were. As he descended the steps, Rebecca threw a flatiron at him, which crashed through the glass panes near the front door. Mrs. Parker walked to the banister and asked, “What is it, Dearie?”

Crouch’s account strains poetic license to its limits. This is the book that gave us the most ludicrous simile ever published: “For Charlie Parker, confronting Simpson’s death was like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades.”

Here is Crouch’s gun story.

A few weeks later, in early September, Rebecca was downstairs talking with Parkey [Bird’s mother] when Charlie called her from upstairs. She went to him – she always did – but this time she wondered, What will it be now? When she opened the door, Charlie stood before her, aloof, clearly full of that stuff [heroin]. He seemed as if he were all the way across the street, even though he was right in her face. His eyes empty, he spoke to her in a dark and imperial fashion.

“Go sit on the trunk and look out the window.”

She did. She heard a click; cold metal was pressed against her temple. Oh my God, she thought.

“Rebecca, where is the letter?” 

“Charlie, I don’t have the letter.”

“Rebecca, where is the letter?”

“Look in the drawer,” she answered, not knowing why.

As he removed what must have been Parkey’s pistol and turned away, Rebecca reached for a flatiron that was on the floor. Sensing something, Charlie slipped through the door just as she threw it, barely missing his head. The flatiron hit the door. She picked it up, pulled open the door, and threw it at him, missing his head again, and this time sending the iron through one of the long, slender windows flanking the front door.

At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie turned and stared up at her. 

“The next time you pull a gun on me,” Rebecca cried, “you best to kill me!” 

“What’s the matter, Dearie?“ Parkey asked from the parlor.

If you find the above acceptable as nonfiction, I highly recommend Bird Lives!

These two accounts often match word-for-word, raising the specter of plagiarism, except Crouch is plagiarizing himself. He has taken the outline he provided Giddins and fleshed it out with drivel, making it that much harder to believe.

I’m not necessarily calling Rebecca a liar. It’s certainly possible Bird put a gun to her head. More than one witness, including Bird’s own mother, report that he was physically abusive toward Rebecca in moments of anger. But the two behaviors differ by orders of magnitude, and the fact remains that Rebecca was recalling events that had taken place half a century before. Memory is notoriously pliable.

It’s easy to sympathize with her. She tells the gun story in the context of a disintegrating marriage and changes in Bird’s personality, both brought on by his heroin addiction. But Crouch seems to have taken her every word as gospel. How could he be certain she was telling the truth?

The problem here is that we’ll never know Bird’s side of the story. He did, however, speak very generally of his addiction during this period, in a 1947 interview with Leonard Feather, saying, “I don’t know how I made it through those years. I became bitter, hard, cold. I was always on a panic.” This speaks to his state of mind at the time of the gun story, marginally supporting it.

By the time Crouch got to Rebecca, she was in her late sixties. Interviews from her younger years are few, but the magazine Jet published an article in 1959, four years after Bird’s death, which quotes Rebecca as follows:

He [Bird] used to make me watch him take dope, would lock me in the room. I told his mother and she took a gun and started [threatened?] to kill him because she said she’d rather see him dead than on dope. He wasn’t a cruel man, though. We parted amicably, but I still loved him, he was such a nice man.

So here’s Rebecca, telling another story involving the two of them alone in a room, one which also features “Parkey’s pistol.” This would have been an opportune moment to bring up the gun story at issue here. Maybe she did and they declined to print it, or maybe she chose not to mention it. But it also suggests that it never happened. She speaks very fondly of Bird, and it doesn’t sound to me like she’s describing a man who put a gun to her head.

Stanley Crouch stands no chance of out-fabricating Ross Russell, who dreamed up events that never happened and characters who never existed. I’d like to believe that Crouch’s research methods were sound and his intentions pure, but choosing fictionalization has consequences, among them, as Russell discovered, sacrificing your credibility.

So where does the truth lie?

If only flatirons could talk.