Liquor, Lust and the Law Read online

  Joe (L.) and Sandy DeSantis smooch with Carmen Miranda.

  Thanks to developers, the Palomar would never become the busy nightspot the Filippones hoped it would be. And, thanks to the Vancouver police, Joe’s after-hours apartment nightspot almost didn’t get started. On July 26, 1947, a twenty-man police squad of uniformed officers and fedora and trench-coat- clad detectives pushed their way through the front door of the Eagle Time building. When they shouted “Vancouver police!”, the music on the record player stopped. Flashbulbs exploded light on to the blinded and squinting men and women seated at tables, trying to hide their gins and whiskies. The police confiscated bottles of booze hidden by those in attendance or stashed behind Philliponi’s apartment bar—forty-nine bottles of liquor and 467 bottles of beer. “The largest liquor seizure in a decade,” reported the Vancouver Sun. The Penthouse had been the target of its first police “dry squad” raid and Joe was charged with violating the Government Liquor Act.

  The squad asserted that the penthouse apartment, which was Joe’s home, was being operated as a public place and that the $1.75 donation was, in fact, an admission fee. Joe maintained that the fee went primarily to the boys athletic club, and helped cover the cost of soft drinks at the late night parties he was increasingly famous for hosting.

  Positively no liquor on the premises" at the Penthouse: Mickey (centre) with two friends.

  In a Vancouver Sun article from that same year, columnist Hal Straight painted a vivid picture of what it was like to visit Joe’s penthouse apartment. You can almost hear the laughter, glasses clinking, and Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine” on Joe’s record player.

  Visiting the plush penthouse is like wading through a slimy marsh and coming out on a beautiful emerald lake.You go from drab, dirty Seymour Street into a building and pass by a dispatching office which guides the Diamond Cabs and Eagle Time Transfer vehicles, up a flight of narrow stairs up to the third floor—just recently built—that stretches the whole length of the premises from the front to the lane.You go into a short entrance hall and into a bar that would compete with any of its size from here to New York, with its top red velvet under glass, the walls and ceilings mirrored.The stools are tall, with round leather seats, ship deck floors, and laid veneer and expensive drapes. It has a player piano in one corner and a record player set at the side of a modern fireplace. Off the bar is a spacious lounge, well appointed with expensive chesterfield sets and coffee tables. The lights are soft, and the rugs softer. After that there is a complete apartment suite, featuring twin beds, the colours of which are a long way from Seymour Street. The suite has the latest, most expensive luxury. This is Joe Philliponi’s home, he says.

  Lively Joe, a bachelor like his brothers, likes the name of BC’s number No. 1 Playboy, as evidenced by the number of autographed pictures of entertainers under the bar’s glass top. The usual inscription over lovely legs is “to my pal Joe.” Each evening, he holds forth in his castle instead of the Palomar or other nightclubs where he used to do his entertaining and “Hip Hips” as his guests drop in. According to Joe, each person has to write his name on their own bottle and put it behind the bar. He provides what he calls a promotion manager to serve out these bottles and supply mixers.

  Apparently, of late it has become a very popular after nightclub spot, especially with some leading business men and some high government officials. “I just love people,” says Joe. “I love to have them around me and someday, if we have cocktail bars, I’ll have a head start.”[13]

  Joe, 1947, sporting some of his famous fashion sense.

  Whether some of Philiponi’s well-to-do patrons discreetly did some backroom persuasion, or it was the result of the defense lawyer’s successful pleading, Police Magistrate Mackenzie Matheson threw the charges out of court. The incident did not deter either Joe or the rest of the Filippones. In fact, later that year, they enterprisingly took the free publicity from the raid and successful court decision and renamed their after-hours club “The Penthouse.”

  Police kept up the pressure and in 1948, Joe was found guilty of consuming liquor in a public place and fined $100. Mickey Filippone, then twenty-four years old, was convicted of keeping liquor for sale (a.k.a. bootlegging) and fined $500. Joe was given another fine of $300 for a liquor violation in 1949.

  Joe and Ross host a typical busy night at the Penthouse with members of the Mills Brothers band, restaurateur Big Frank Ross (back row, right), and Vancouver Sun columnist Jack Wasserman, third man to the left of Ross, in glasses. Note beer bottles and Vat 69 whiskey on table.

  However, on August 10, 1950, Vancouver City Council narrowly approved the Penthouse’s application for a business licence, despite the opposition of Police Chief Walter Mulligan who was run out of town five years later in a sensational scandal over police corruption. While the Penthouse could now advertise itself as a cabaret and nightclub, it still couldn’t sell liquor. After three months’ renovation, the club re-opened, but enjoyed only one night’s unfettered operation as a legal business to the public before the Vancouver Police paid another visit on December 3, 1950. Just two nights earlier, a special preview of the recently renovated premises, featuring a roving searchlight at the front door and a VIP dinner, was held for local reporters, well-wishers, and friends of the Filippone brothers. Doors opened to the public the next night at nine, with musician James Drew performing on the Hammond organ. The nightclub was already taking dinner reservations for “fine Italian foods and fried chicken” (the latter supplied from the Dixie Inn Chicken Shack next door). It billed itself as “Canada’s Most Intimate Night Club” and stayed open until a surprisingly late five a.m.

  The Dixie Inn Chicken Shack supplied food for guests of the Penthouse club in the 1940s until the early 1960s.

  Following a successful Saturday night’s business at around 3:45 Sunday morning, when the club was still packed with patrons, the police dry-squad again raided the club. This time, their haul would be just two bottles of liquor. Either the patrons had finished off most of what they’d brown-bagged or nobody bothered to look underneath the tablecloths to see the little ledges on the table legs that were just the perfect height and width to hold a bottle. Of course, when asked, Philliponi would innocently maintain that these were made to hold ladies’ purses.

  III. On with the Show

  The Penthouse in the 1950s began to distinguish itself from the rest of Vancouver ’s nightlife. Its reputation as a place where you could get a drink at a late hour helped—even the liquor raids acted as free promotion. But it became known as the spot where, after other nightclubs had closed, club owners, waitresses, barmen, dancers, musicians, probably a few off-duty police officers, and night-shift newspaper reporters ended the night. And it was known not just to the locals, but to a growing array of touring musicians and actors making appearances in Vancouver for film premieres or performing in shows.

  “Before the days of limousines, we used Diamond Cabs for our artists,” recalled pioneering concert promoter Hugh Pickett. “We always brought them to the Penthouse. In those days, it was the only place to get a decent meal—and a drink—after a concert. Practically anybody who came to Vancouver went there.”[14] Pickett escorted celebrities including Victor Borge, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, Robert Goulet, Ricardo Montalban, Myrna Loy, Pat Boone, and Jimmy Durante to the Penthouse.

  Ella Fitzgerald (centre, front) at the Penthouse, with Sandy DeSantis (third from left) and Joe (far right).

  Frank Sinatra himself announced from the stage at the end of his 1957 Orpheum show in Vancouver, “That’s it, everybody. See you all at the Penthouse!” The audience rushed out to the club, two blocks away, where a line-up quickly formed on Seymour Street. When Sinatra arrived, Ross and Mickey Filippone had to sneak him in the back door. “I just wish he’d done it on a slow night,” laughed Ross. “We were already busy that evening!”

  Joe, Harry Belafonte, Mickey, and Ross, 1961. Belafonte "officiated" at a mock wedding ceremony for Ross and Penny at th
e club after this photo was taken.

  “Everybody knew you went to the Penthouse after a show, so it seems like nobody got there before midnight or one a.m. If you were in the music business, you knew there was going to be a jam session [after a concert] at the Penthouse,” recalls eighty-four-year- old Edna Randle. Her memories bring a smile and youthful sparkle to her face as she recalls the many nights that seemed to end on Seymour Street. Born and raised in Vancouver, Edna was in her twenties when she began working as a record company publicist and wholesale representative for Columbia, Capitol, and RCA Records. “I knew everybody at the radio stations and newspapers. Musicians who were in town either recording or performing, I would … show around on behalf of the record label. So I was at the Penthouse just about every weekend,” Randle says.

  The Penthouse also became a favourite nightspot for local musicians to unwind with a drink after their gigs. “The musicians were often just playing big band standards at their paying gigs at the Hotel Vancouver ’s Panorama Roof or dances at the Commodore Ballroom,” recalls Edna. “But I’d often see them perform the music they personally wanted to play at the Penthouse, after-hours. There was always something happening there.”

  Billie Holiday (left) with Joe and his girlfriend (later fiancée) Shirley Meikle.

  Ross with bandleader Les Brown in the 1950s.

  L to R: Joe, his girlfriend Shirley, jazz singer Herb Jeffries, and Sandy DeSantis.

  One of Randle’s favourite memories is of the night in 1950 when the legendary Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson squared off at the piano with local pianist Chris Gage. A central figure in the early Vancouver jazz scene, Gage was considered to be one of the best musicians in Canada in the 1950s and ’60s. He performed frequently at the Cave nightclub, where his playing was often hailed as “genius,” but because he seldom toured, died young—only thirty-seven—from an overdose, and left very little recorded material, he never became a household name in international jazz circles.

  The Cave floorshow girls, c. 1950s, including Penny Marks, upper right.

  “Chris and his regular bassist Stan ‘Cuddles’ Johnson were in there darn near every night,” Edna says. “Every tour that came through tried to get Chris to join the band, and he never wanted to leave Vancouver. He was really the equivalent of Oscar Peterson in skill, so to see the two of them together at the upstairs piano at the Penthouse, with Oscar playing for a bit, then Chris playing for a bit—trading off, back and forth—the two of them laughing as they were playing was something I’ll never forget. Oscar said later that Chris Gage was the only pianist he feared.”

  Joe with the Deep River Boys, 1948.

  Edna also remembers the night trumpeter and bandleader Harry James came (without his wife, the actress Betty Grable) to the Penthouse. “James sat upstairs at a big table,” she remembers. “People kept coming over to the table and joining in—he didn’t know half of them, but was being social. At the end of the evening, he was presented with the bill. Oh! What a change in demeanour! All those people had left their drinks and meals on his tab. He didn’t say anything, but paid up and walked out. I thought, that wasn’t nice—I knew some of the people who went to that table and didn’t chip in and who easily could have.”

  Edna adds, “Joe Philliponi was a real friend to the musicians. I remember one very well-known Vancouver musician in the ’50s had been involved in a car accident that had caused a fatality. Behind the scenes, Joe helped get him a lawyer.”

  She also remembers the night Louis Armstrong came to the Penthouse with his band, including singer Velma Middleton and trombonist Jack Teagarden. “Louis didn’t play, he just went to the back with Joe. I thought Joe had a gentlemen’s club up there but figured it had nothing to do with gentlemen! But Jack hung around out front, talking with people and, God bless him, he wanted me to sit beside him.” In the same room upstairs where Peterson and Gage had played a couple of years earlier, Teagarden entertained his listeners with a song called “A Hundred Years from Today.” One might even imagine Teagarden adding a wink to his sleepy vocal delivery when he came to the line in the song that went, “Why crave a penthouse that’s fit for a Queen?”

  “Jack was a large guy,” Edna says, “and—I’ll always remember this—he sang the song sitting down, holding his trombone. He undid his belt and unzipped his pants because he wanted to breathe. I guess it was easier to sing with his pants undone. I thought if the cops walked in right then they would have wondered what the heck was going on!”

  While Randle was left to imagine Armstrong misbehaving upstairs that night, Ross recalled what actually happened. “Louis really loved Italian food. He came in hungry and went to our kitchen, put on an apron, even a chef’s hat, and started making his own spaghetti sauce, pushing our cook out of the way. It was really comical. The chef was standing there with nothing to do while Louis was busy stirring the sauce. What are you going to do, push Satchmo out of the way?”

  Louis Armstrong, Ross, and jazz vocalist Velma Middleton.

  The Filippones’ relationship with Armstrong went back to their Palomar days, when they’d also assisted with bookings on other Canadian dates. “We took Satchmo on a one-week tour,” said Ross. “We first had dates with him here in Vancouver and then one week on the road in the Northwest. We flew with Louis and his whole band to Trail, BC, where he played an arena there. There wasn’t even a proper runway, but it was a big deal, with the Mayor present. The only place we had a problem was Seattle, because blacks couldn’t stay in hotels there. But we had an advance man a few days ahead of us to smooth things out.”

  The Filippones’ Penthouse was one of the few venues in Vancouver to not only welcome African- American entertainers but to house and entertain them as well. Armstrong had once infamously not been permitted to stay at the Hotel Vancouver; it was then their policy not to allow “negroes.”[15]

  Joe with the Mills Brothers group and friends.

  Macy's Bowling Champions, 1950: Mickey Duina, Mickey Filippone, Jimmy Filippone, Frank Iaci (a cousin of the Filippones), and Joe Duina.

  Ross and Don Mills from the Mills Brothers. "We were bowling for two bottles of Seagram's for the winner."

  In the mid-1950s, Ross and Mickey brought the legendary black vocal group the Mills Brothers to Vancouver’s Commodore Lanes to bowl. “We were bowling for two bottles of Seagram’s for the winner,” recalled Ross.

  Afterward, we took the boys over to celebrate at the Quadra Club. When we came in to get seated, the owner, Gordon Towne, asked me, “Do you mind if I put you guys in the VIP room?” I didn’t think anything of it. I thought he figured we wanted some privacy.

  We sat there and had dinner and relaxed. But I felt kind of suspicious; there weren’t really a lot of people there that night.

  He came over later and said, “Ross, I’m gonna tell you the truth—my patrons in the club would be highly offended if they saw a black person sitting in the main room.”

  “Well,” I said, “Gordon, we’re not going to do any business anymore—this is embarrassing”—and we left.

  As with Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr ’s relationship with the Filippone brothers went back to the days at the Palomar club when he made $500 a week with the Will Mastin Trio. Davis hit it off with Joe and the rest of the brothers, and the trio stayed in spare rooms at the family house next door during their engagements, and Maria Rosa Filippone made enough food for them all.

  Sammy Davis Jr (fourth from right) and friends, including Joe and Ross (back row, right), and Mickey (seated, front).

  “Sammy Davis Jr never really smoked or drank much until he hooked up with the Rat Pack,” recalled Ross. “But [even then] he never drank as much as people thought—same with Sinatra. Those guys couldn’t do that and still perform. Mind you, they did a lot of other things that we wouldn’t do—like smoking pot. All the musicians did.”

  The photo of Davis’s trio and the Filippones captures not only the quality of their friendship but how colour blind the owners and regulars
of the Penthouse were compared to much of the rest of society at the time.

  In the photo Joe, Ross, and Mickey hold court while Davis Jr is seated with white women sitting around him and one on his lap. An Asian woman to Joe’s right holds hands with a white man. Even if the revelry is fuelled by a few bottles from Joe’s stash, this is one of far too few photos in this period of Vancouver ’s history that show the colour-line being broken with such good humour—on what appears to be a typical night at the Penthouse.

  Gary Cooper (star of the 1951 film High Noon) visited Vancouver a half dozen times over the years for film premieres, publicity tours, or just to visit friends such as Orpheum Theatre impresario Ivan Ackery. In May 1952, Ackery dutifully brought Cooper to the Penthouse one night along with boxer Max Baer, who also happened to be visiting the city.

  Boxer Max Baer, Joe, and actor Gary Cooper, 1952.

  Baer had been a one-time heavyweight champion of the world in 1934, and despite his aggressive strength as a boxer, he was known as a gentle giant out of the ring. Jimmy Filippone was delighted to meet Baer and, in turn, Joe entertained Cooper. On a copy of a photograph taken at the Penthouse that evening, the inscription reads, “To my pal Joe, I am happy Gary Cooper held you because you’re a killer with a right hand. Your pal, Max Baer.” Baer had earned a reputation as a “killer” in the ring after a notorious fight with Frankie Campbell, who died the next day from his injuries.