The Hipster’s Legacy

A memoir by Lorraine Gibson Cohen

HARRY THE HIPSTER GIBSON

A zany jazz pianist and entertainer who burst on to the music scene in the 1940s and headlined in nightclubs on New York City’s famous 52nd Street before moving to Hollywood where he didn’t quite become a movie star.

When I was twenty-two years old, I started writing in a old gray looseleaf notebook while I was living temporarily with my older sister, her three little children and my younger brother in a small beach town in Southern California.

I wrote down things as they happened. All the funny things and the not so funny. There were short stories, character studies of people and things, even a song or two. Sixty years later I found the notebook and started writing again. Before I knew it I was writing a book.

The Book

Born into a musical family and raised on dreams of fame and glory, twenty-two-year-old Lorraine is finding it tough going on her own when she moves to Hollywood in the early 1960s. Her Associate of Art’s degree from the local junior college does not help her get a job in the art field. And if that isn’t enough, her longtime boyfriend has broken up with her. The job she does have as a receptionist is also a disaster, so when she comes down with severe laryngitis, she is ready to call it quits. Accepting defeat, she takes the twenty-mile ride home to Hermosa Beach.

But home isn’t quite the same at 230 Culper Court. In her absence, her mother has moved out to live “in sin” with a used car salesman named Bob. Replacing her at the cottage is Lorraine’s older sister, Arlene, her three children, and Lorraine’s younger brother, Jeff. Arlene is an artist—of what kind, she is not always sure. She is talented but erratic and seems almost mystified by the fact that she has three small children to raise. Jeff is a budding jazz saxophonist, a shy boy who somehow draws people around him.

Lorraine’s life takes a different turn as she learns to fit in with her re-arranged family and with all the quirky friends, exotic oddballs, hapless misfits, and other flotsam and jetsam of strange and talented people who pass through the little red cottage by the sea.

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About the Author

Lorraine Gibson Cohen is an an artist turned writer. Raised in Southern California a stones throw from Hollywood. After studying art at El Camino College she returned to her birth place in New York City to become a package designer for JCPenny.

Her first Novel THE HIPSTER’S LEGACY—A Story about a Family is a memoir based on her life growing up with her father, a mad-cap jazz musician better known as Harry the Hipster Gibson who raised his family on dreams of fame and glory only to abandon them in their teenage years.

Lorraine lives in New York City with her husband on the upper West side with a view of Central Park if she leans far out the window and looks east.

We lived in a ramshackle cottage next to a landfill with two oilwells pumping all day and railroad tracks that lead to nowhere yet the Pacific ocean was just a few steps away.

Meet the Gibson family

Arlene, Jeff and the kids in a formal portrait

I lived with my older sister, her three little children and my younger brother. in a small beach town in Southern California.

Laurie, Donnie, Linde

Three bubbles of pot-bellied energy bounding and crashing—dragging sand and bugs through the house.

Florence

The hard working and serious mother who just missed being a saint.

Jeff

The little brother who knows he is going to be a musician. Fame isn’t important, he just wants to play jazz.

Arlene

The peripatetic older sister, an incurable idealist who flutters hysterically through life.

Lorraine

The younger sister, quiet and passive who secretly dreams of adventure.

Bill

The older brother who drifts away from the family when he joins the Navy.

Harry

The mad-cap father and entertainer who taught his family to dream..

A story of disaster:

When Jeff met Betty White

It all started sometime in 1950 or 51 when my father, better known to the world as Harry the Hipster Gibson, the wild and crazy jazz entertainer, decided that he was going to write a novelty Christmas song. It would make big bucks for him in perpetuity because if it became a hit like what happened to Gene Autry when he recorded “Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” it would be played every Christmas. Just imagine the royalties he would get for both writing and performing in it.

Harry eventually came up with a tune entitled, “I Hope My Mother-in-law Don’t Come for Christmas.” It was about a man who dreads that his mother-in-law will move in permanently with his family if she comes on that one fateful holiday. I must admit it was a clever song. Harry, thinking of all the angles, decided that if he included his own family in the recording, it would be a nice touch and get a kind of “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” that would counteract the bad press of his being named “The Cause of Juvenile Delinquency” a few years before.

Illustrations From The Book

Vera the Exotic Dancer

Arlene with Cigarette

"Yoo hoo" Rita called out

Donnie and the Day of Destruction

Laundry Day in Culper St.

Livingroom/ Music Room

Rehearsing with Howard K. Small

Coffee in Rita's Kitchen

Spaghetti Dinner

More illustrations and photos on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LorraineGibsonCohen/

When Jeff Met Betty White Continued…

In 1950, I was a shy nine year old and my extremely introverted younger brother, Jeff, was just seven. As the two youngest, we were the quiet ones. My older brother, Bill, at eleven, was already honing his musical skills on the drums and perfecting his comic timing with stories and skits that he performed regularly for the family while my older sister, Arlene, who at the mature age of thirteen had set her sights on becoming a famous singer and movie star like Betty Hutton or Judy Garland.

Yet with even that going for us kids, we had never been part of show business in any way before this new undertaking of Harry’s, unless you count the time when Arlene went on a radio talent contest and sang “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis. She didn’t win. She was beat out by a soft shoe dancer doing “Me and My Shadow.” You may ask how you could ever present a soft shoe dancer on a radio show, much less have him win the contest with it, but I don’t want to get distracted about that enigma right now.

One afternoon after Harry had gotten together the musical backing of a guitar and a drummer who would play alongside his piano, we all hauled off to a recording studio in downtown L.A. and spent a long afternoon cranking out the mother-in-law song. The kids’ part, our part, started off the record singing “Jingle Bells.” After the first bar, there is a knock at the door. The mother and we kids think it is our grandma. Harry breaks in and stops us and starts his own song of complaint about the mother-in-law that won’t go home. The song lists all the different holidays she stays through. Our part after this was to make background noise like singing or laughing or, when the father sings “She’s there to scare the kids on Halloween,” we kids all screamed really loud.

We did the song over and over until Harry and the man in the glass booth were satisfied with how it turned out. On the flip side of the record, Arlene got to sing a song all by herself called “The Worm Song.” It was the old song kids used to sing on the playground, and Harry wrote new lyrics for it. Finally everyone was satisfied with both sides of the record. It was a wrap or a cut or print or whatever people said back then, and we got to go eat lunch.

After all that, we thought we were done with the project, but it was just beginning. When the record came out, Harry started taking us around to the local television studios to plug the song. At that time, TV still was pretty new and except for a few cowboy shows and old movies, everything was live. I remember going to the little studios and onto funny painted sets. We would have to have thick orange makeup applied to our faces so that we would show up on the screen looking normal.

One by one, we covered as many studios and shows as we could. Usually they were daytime shows with a host that would introduce Harry and us and the song. One show was called The Al Jarvis Show. Al Jarvis was a pudgy, old (to us) guy who used to be a disc jockey on the radio but had moved over to TV when it started. He had a sidekick sitting next to him at his desk. This “Girl Friday” was thirty-year-old Betty White. She had medium short brown hair and as I remember was not at all glamorous. Al Jarvis’s looks were at best on the froggy side and he did not have much of a personality either, so I guess Betty was there to supply the femininity, wit, and cheer to the show.

We were introduced to the American public by the duo at the desk and then went directly into our routine. Maybe we kids, not being real professionals, were getting a little overconfident or lax in our part of the song, because right when all of us were suppose to scream out after the line “She’s there to scare the kids on Halloween,” we all forgot to scream except Jeff. He didn’t forget. He yelled out all alone and that turned out to be his downfall.

You have to know that at seven years old, Jeff, or Jeffery as we called him then, was still deep into his introverted self. He would get embarrassed if anyone even looked at him. Mostly, he looked down so he wouldn’t have to make eye contact with people, but he loved Harry, so he didn’t balk when he was required to go on stage. He didn’t mind as long as he didn’t stick out too much. He thought if he could blend in with the rest of the Gibson bunch, it wasn’t going to be so bad.

But when Jeff rang out all alone with his Halloween scream, he did draw attention to himself. He was horrified when he realized that he was the only one making noise. He promptly turned a bright red and ducked down as much as he could. He looked like he was trying to drop through the floor or become invisible. The rest of us were feeling our own chagrin. We had missed our cue, and Harry would ball us out when we left the studio.

The Al Jarvis Show was a kind of variety/music/talk/interview show—pretty low budget, no rehearsals, no scripts. They had to wing it and be spontaneous. I don’t know whose idea it was, maybe it was Betty’s, but a short time after we finished the song, someone came over and took Jeff over to Al and Betty sitting at the desk.

We kids were still huddled together where we had done our number. Arlene hissed, “They got Jeffery! Oh no, they’re going to interview him!” We all knew Arlene would have aced an interview and now it was going to be a disaster. We almost felt sorry for Mr. Jarvis and his Girl Friday. They didn’t know that Jeff didn’t talk even in the best of circumstances. They didn’t know, but they found out soon enough now that he was being broadcast out to all of the Los Angeles area and beyond.

We watched with a feeling of doomed fatality. Poor Al Jarvis and Betty White, they probably thought that if they took the cute little show-biz kid out of the pack and interviewed him, he might come up with some adorable childish remark about his wild and semi-famous father, but all that Jeff could do was look down and mumble something unintelligible whenever they asked him anything. Finally after several tries, they gave up and just talked all around him or to each other. By this time, Jeff just sat there frozen in a kind of stoic panic. At the end, they presented him with a genuine badge (I think it was cardboard) that said he was now a full-time member of the Al Jarvis fan club and then finally let him stumble away back to us.

In later years, I saw an interview with Betty White. She was talking about her early days in television, and she stressed the fact that it was all live and you never knew what was going to happen, especially with an interview. I almost expected her to tell of the time she had to interview a mute child, but she didn’t. Maybe she just wanted to forget the whole thing.