Success Story

Fifteen years ago, Joe Bushkin was the kind of talented kid who could sit in at the piano in any jazz joint in town and earn himself $10 a night. He couldn't read music very well, but he could climb all over the piano with a solid, hard-riffing style that earned him a lot of respect from people like Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and others of "the mob."

His first big job was playing piano for Trumpeter "Bunny" Berrigan in a hole in the wall in Manhattan's "Jazz Street" (West 52nd) called The Famous Door. In 1938, Tommy Dorsey, who then had a couple of staff singers named Jo Stafford and Frank Sinatra, picked Bushkin up from Berrigan. Dorsey hired him as a pianist even before he heard him play a piano; he liked his musicianship on the trumpet--an instrument Joe had taken up in high school. One of Joe's songs, Oh, Look at Me Now, was Sinatra's first solo hit. Joe just kept on playing that good piano.

Last week, the talented kid had outgrown pure piano and was as big as they come. Well-married, he had graduated from a West Side hotel to the East Side's expensive River House. Convinced by his new personal manager, Ernie Anderson (who is also Louis Armstrong's press-agent), that he could be a "stellar nightclub attraction," Joe had "gone visual": even though he stutters slightly, he was booked for a 22-week television show.

For his opening last week in Greenwich Village's cavernous Cafe Society, the joint was jammed--but not with the intellectuals who used to lounge at the bar and dig the jazz. With Tallulah Bankhead to help lead the cheering, Joe Bushkin had become a darling of the Cadillac-convertible set.

As a glib master of ceremonies, he gave them everything they came for and more. When he settled down to the piano, with clarinet, drums, bass fiddle and a "pleasant" string quartet behind him ("You can die in a cocktail lounge with a trio"), he showed he could just about play the pants off any pianist in town. He was a hit, all right. Like many another jazz musician, Joe, whose face has gotten harder at 33, finds that good playing is no longer enough for tapping the big money. But he says, "Playing the piano is very important to me. While I'm playing I have less trouble making up my mind whether I'm happy or not."

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