All the Old Songs

There’s gotta be 10,000 clubs in L.A. that offer entertainment.

Sometimes it’s just a guy at a piano looking distracted as he churns out tunes faintly similar to Muzak, other times it’s a vocalist or someone on an alto sax or a small band or magicians or comics or something.

Maybe 10,000’s an exaggeration but it seems that way.

I get calls from corners of the county where you’d never expect a club to be, saying come and hear the next Billie Holiday or Billy Crystal or see a nude dancer named Tiffany who’ll knock your socks off.

I don’t go most of the time because I’m not a nightclub writer and haven’t got time to be everywhere, and nudity on stage has yet to knock my socks off.

But a credible friend who used to write a column for the Houston Post said I just had to hear Totty Ames.

His name is David Westheimer. You know him as the guy who wrote “Von Ryan’s Express” and “Sweet Charlie” and a lot of other good things.

He hangs out at a restaurant in Venice called Casablanca along with Dan Seymour, one of the last remaining actors from the movie.

Recently, every time I’ve seen David he’s mentioned Totty Ames. The guy’s persistent. We’d be talking about his new book, a memoir of his years in a POW camp called “Sitting it Out,” and he’d slip Totty’s name into the conversation.

“What’s with this Totty?” I finally asked him one night.

He said, “She’s a 70-year-old singer who didn’t start singing until she was 66 and she’ll knock your socks off.”

So the other evening I took Cinelli to a club on the Westside with the unlikely name of Gardenia.

It was the day of the big rain in L.A. and street lights reflected in the wet pavement, casting the night in an amber glow, recalling rainy nights long ago.

Magic is afoot on those kinds of nights when a storm has swept through and stars emerge like diamonds on black velvet. Music can carry you back to times and places you haven’t been in a lifetime of forgetting.

Totty is like no septuagenarian you’ve ever seen. Up there in a gold lame pantsuit, she shines with an aura that defies age-labeling.

“She’s 70?” Cinelli said, stunned by the willowy presence that held the spotlight like she was born in it. “We should all look so good.”

Totty could have been in her early 40s, but looks weren’t the only thing.

It was the way she sang with strength and youth that impressed, as though she’d discovered a way around time and had returned from a secret place to baffle the aging.

I know 70-year-olds who can’t make it across a driveway without a walker and whose voices quaver with the infirmities of age; those who allow themselves to fall through time to eternity without so much as a struggle, like leaves carried away by an autumn wind.

And then there’s Totty behind a mike looking good and doing “Deep Purple” over a room with candle-lit tables until there isn’t another sound, only the hush of people remembering.

What makes it remarkable is this is a whole new career for her, one that began in this same club just four years ago.

She came to L.A. from Oklahoma when she was 21 for the same reason most kids come here, to be a part of the magic. She had $10 and a dream.

Totty loved music from the beginning, a little girl grabbing a broom and pretending it was a microphone, the way the pros did it. But for a lot of reasons the dream got lost in the hustle of trying to make it.

Make it she did, as an actress and a model, wending her way through marriages that didn’t work and stepchild-raising she could have done without.

She likes to say she got into film the old-fashioned way, by sleeping with the producer, then adds wryly, “I was married to him.”

On stage, she’s equally peppery, advising an audience she’s going to sing a mix of old tunes because “I’m 70 years old and I can damned well sing what I want.”

After one career ended, someone said to Totty she ought to be doing what she’s always wanted to do, singing on stage, and she said why not? “If not now, I asked myself, when?”

She began studying at age 64 and a year and a half later hit the stage at Gardenia. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she says now, “being 70 and doing exactly what I want to be doing?”

I was thinking as she walked us through the sleepy gardens of “Deep Purple” how great it would be if we could all find that way around time and reach down to where energy once burned like magnesium and become a Totty Ames.

I left the club still hearing music and drove home wrapped in the mist of a memory, thinking about time and a distant rain.