Looking for Johnny Flamingo

The plane going into Los Angeles banked and sank, and although I had never visited this city, I looked out the window and studied the phenomenal sprawl as if I might see something I could recognize. The young passenger next to me was named Dennis. I told him I was here to unearth a mystery about a singer named Johnny Flamingo.

“Wasn’t he one of those old-time guys?” Dennis said.

“That’s right,” I replied, “in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He lived here. He had some hits, he used to sing doo-wop.”

I told Dennis that I thought Johnny Flamingo was my father. “I’m not sure yet. I have to talk to some people to find out.”

“Well, I hope you do find out man,” Dennis said. “I wouldn’t like it if my kids didn’t know who I was.”

It was March of last year, a beautiful afternoon on the West Coast. In the terminal, the staff was frantic, cranked up by the war against terror.

My anxiety was altogether different. I’d traveled 6,000 miles on a hunch, hoping I might find the man I had been looking for since the day I was born. Why couldn’t he have had Dennis’ attitude? Instead, here I was, 47 years old, a graying boy still trying to find his dad, and now that I was feeling that he was somewhere close, I wondered if my nerve was failing.

I needed one last push, a piece of luck. Surely he couldn’t be so hard to find, not with a name like Johnny Flamingo.

Melvin Broxton. That was about all my mother could tell me. I first started learning parts of my story when I was 8, and was gradually told more. When I was about 30, she wrote the name on a slip of paper, along with this: Airman, RAF Molesworth. I kept the note in a small plastic crate amid a jumble of paraphernalia, and every time I relocated I would come across it and stare at the words for a few moments, imagining life at an American air base in Britain in 1955. I would wonder about the scene in a council house in a Huntingdonshire village on the day my white, teenage English mother could no longer hide the truth, and admitted to my grandmother that she was pregnant--to a black American airman. It always made me think of a novel. But here I was, real.

Then I would put the paper away again.

Betty Randall, like most young working-class women in Britain in the 1950s, wasn’t expected to attend college or have a career. A few carefree years working local jobs and living at home with your parents was the norm, then along came marriage and children. She worked at a Woolworth’s when a friend told her there was more fun and money to be had working at the nearby American air base, and as the friend’s dad did the hiring, she was in.

Betty had spent most of her young life being bombed or rationed. What a difference this was--these Americans from another world, the most glamorous one imaginable, and when they weren’t on duty all they wanted to do was enjoy themselves.

Melvin Broxton told Betty he came from Los Angeles. He was 19, a year older, and a handsome, charming, light-skinned black man. He noticed her at the base store. If she had been American he certainly wouldn’t have asked her for a date because he wouldn’t have risked a beating. Segregation had officially ended in the American military a couple of years prior, but racism persisted, and off duty the Jim Crow mentality was unchallengeable.

But this was England. When the U.S. entered World War II, it had asked Britain to enforce racial segregation in communities around the hastily built American bases. The request was refused. Churchill’s government wisely feared that it would cause outrage. Britons were mostly supportive of black servicemen.

Betty never considered her suitor a second-class citizen. He wasn’t her exotic catch either. He was just a nice guy--forever smiling--who treated her with respect. They would talk and share a soda on base. He would take her to the Hippodrome in Huntingdon to see a movie. Once they went to London--first class on the train--to see “Carmen Jones.” They went to raucous parties, and Melvin’s friends were always welcoming. On her birthday he threw a bash, and some guys in a vocal group in which he sang performed for her. He was the only man, she says, that she ever truly loved.

And then it all crashed and burned.

I was a big mistake. In 1955, coming home to a small village pregnant and unmarried at 19 was a scandal, perhaps survivable if the father did the right thing, or the child quietly went for adoption.

But to be carrying a black baby! And Melvin didn’t do the right thing. Some say the Air Force wouldn’t let him. The Draconian attitude of the U.S. toward miscegenation in that era gives the theory some credence. And even if Melvin had been able to marry my mother, how would they have fared in his black L.A. neighborhood? Wasn’t he simply exercising common sense by not trying to introduce a young, white English girl into that world?

Maybe, but probably not. When they were together, marriage had never been his stated aim--he was having too much fun.

Melvin’s vocal group had refined its act, won an Air Force talent contest and now regularly toured American military bases in the region. The relationship was over. The pressures of youth, culture, nationality, politics and race were too great.

Despite the neighbors’ twitching curtains, Betty fiercely wanted to keep her child. Her parents were hurt and angry, but they stood by her, saving me from disappearing behind the gates of an adoption home.

Then, a few weeks after I was born, Melvin chanced upon us when my mother visited the base on business. An infant wrapped up against a winter day, I was likely asleep. But perhaps I glanced his dark blur of a face and bright white teeth. I might have heard the lulling voice that would make him special, and felt his rough uniform as he held me for the one and only time.

But then he was gone.

In the spring of 2002 I sat at a computer screen, firing words into a search engine. For a couple of years I’d been making more concerted efforts to find out what became of Melvin Broxton. A peripatetic, sometimes feckless life lay behind me--including a disastrous stepfather (a white American serviceman), two marriages (and one daughter), myriad other relationships and a fleet of moving vans.

When I first pondered my intense interest in finding my father, I made no connection with my untethered past. I assumed it was simply recognizing that I was closer to the end of my life than the beginning--so why not find out about the dad who ran off and left me with nothing? “Not that I let it get to me,” I’d say when anybody asked.

I was kidding myself. I’d always needed Melvin Broxton.

I had researched organizations that help trace adopted children’s birth parents and sought out agencies dealing with children fathered by servicemen. I had scrolled through birth, death and marriage registers. I realized he could be anywhere in the world. On a web page for the Doo-Wop Society of Southern California, I finally saw his name. The rest of the world stopped. I clicked the link. It led to a tale of vocalists in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s who met a tenor who wanted to be their lead singer.

The group turned him down. A shame for them, the story said, “because Melvin Broxton went on to become Johnny Flamingo.” His name was highlighted--another link. I clicked again and his picture appeared. My stomach tightened. I knew the face but couldn’t quite place it. No, that wasn’t it. I knew parts of the face and could place them--it was an imperfect reflection of myself at about age 22.

Then up came a title: “Celebrating the life of a legend, Melvin James Moore, a.k.a. Johnny Flamingo, January 13, 1934 to December 24, 2000.”

Melvin Moore? Where did that name come from? And he had died? I had found him and lost him again?

I read the page slowly. He was born Melvin Moore but had a stepfather named Broxton. He later reverted to his birth name. In the late 1950s, when he left the Air Force, he became an acclaimed singer in L.A. and married another singer named Jeanette Baker. It all fit. Surely this was my father.

But nowhere did it say this man was in Europe at the crucial time. The picture wasn’t proof. And suppose I contacted his wife--suppose she told me it was all nonsense and put the phone down?

For a few frantic weeks I did more reading and phoned contacts in L.A. But the only answer was to go and find out.

The night I arrived on the West Coast, I phoned Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg--the L.A. deejay who first recorded Johnny Flamingo. I’d read that he had been close to Johnny and Jeanette. I told him I thought I was Johnny Flamingo’s son, but I wanted to make sure.

“You came all the way here for that?” he said.

“Well, yes,” I replied. “It’s important to me. What I really want to do is speak to Jeanette.”

“Well, why don’t you phone her?”

I explained the delicacy of the situation. He said: “I’ll talk to a friend who worked with ‘em for years. He can get to Jeanette. I’ll call in the morning.”

The next day I had a lunch date with Steve Propes and his wife, Sylvia. Propes, a big, friendly bear of a man, is an author and journalist, the oracle on vocal groups in Southern California during doo-wop’s late-’50s boom. Propes had known Johnny and Jeanette. We talked about the music, the shows Flamingo used to play with acts such as The Penguins, Little Richard, Sam Cooke and Richard Berry and the Pharaohs.

“Johnny most liked to sing in that kind of soft Nat King Cole style,” Propes said. “He had some West Coast hits, but he never made it to the very top because he never got the nationwide hit.”

That was because his producer kept giving him songs to cover that had already been big in the East--good local sellers but not much help to Flamingo’s career.

I had collected enough evidence to satisfy me that Johnny Flamingo was the same Melvin Broxton my mother had fallen in love with half a century ago. But if I was to finish the jigsaw, I had to go to the family. They could tell me about my father, the sort of man he had been.

Steve was hesitant. He said that Jeanette was protective of Johnny’s memory and he didn’t know how she would react. He said he didn’t know her well enough to be the go-between. But Sylvia stepped in. She had met Jeanette and was willing to call her. I was so grateful, though her husband was still uneasy.

“OK, honey,” he said, “but remember the guy’s only got one shot at this.”

Steve sent me to a nearby bookstore to buy a better map, in the hope that I’d need it to find my father’s house. As I browsed, my name was called over the store intercom.

It was Steve: “We just got home. Thank God you’re still in the store. You have to listen to this.”

There was a fumbling noise, then the Propes’ answering machine came on.

“Steve,” said a woman’s voice, sounding like she was half crying. “This is Jeanette Baker. I just got off the train from Canada this afternoon, and I got home and there was a message from Huggy saying that Tony Randall was in town. Steve, I have to speak to him. Tell him to call me; tell him I’m not going anywhere until I hear from him.”

I was thunderstruck, standing in the store staring like a half-wit with the phone stuck to my ear.

“I guess you better call her,” Steve said.

As I walked to the nearest phone booth, I was shaking. I had spent a long time imagining this moment, but now that it was here, my mind was blank. She wants to talk to you, I said to myself. I dialed and there was Jeanette’s voice. “Tony,” she sobbed. “I knew all about you. Melvin told me all about you.”

The wash of relief was overwhelming. I spoke haltingly with Jeanette. I told her how afraid I had been of upsetting her. She told me not to worry, and that I should come as quickly as I could.

Soon I was on the freeway heading for Eagle Rock, to the house on a ridge where Johnny Flamingo had lived until cancer took him on Christmas Eve in 2000. As I drove, the phone conversation with Jeanette replayed in my mind:

“You just don’t know,” she said. “You just don’t know how much your daddy would have wanted to be here to see you now.”

Two words kept coming back: Your daddy.

As I drove, my eyes filled up. I pulled off at the next exit and stopped the car for a while.

Jeanette had told me to meet her at a fast food lot on North Figueroa Street so she could guide me up the winding route to her home. As I stepped out of my car, a voice said: “Tony?” We walked to each other. She looked at me hard, then began to cry and held out her arms. “Mel sent you here,” Jeanette said. “Since he’s been gone I’ve been so low, and now here you are, a part of him.” And she cried some more.

That night was spent hearing stories, listening to Jeanette--a 65-year-old big-hearted, big-haired diva of doo-wop--play a medley of Johnny’s songs on her baby grand, and going through Melvin Broxton’s scrapbook from his time in the Air Force. I found a picture of my mother wearing pedal-pushers and smiling as she came out of my grandparents’ front door. Melvin had kept Betty’s picture, but there were plenty of other smiling young ladies in that album paying close attention to the handsome young man.

I was still worried about pressing Jeanette, but I wanted to know if my father had expressed interest in what happened to me. “Oh, he did,” she said, “and I would tell him that we should find out about you. I used to go to London to perform, and I could have found something out. But he didn’t have the details anymore, so we didn’t really know where to start.”

I had a feeling that Jeanette was sugar-coating the pill. While I’m sure that Melvin Broxton would have loved seeing me walk up to his front door, I’m not convinced he was the kind of man to go looking. Jeanette wanted to save my feelings, but she had no cause to fret. I was past that now.

My arrival had been a bombshell for his widow. Later she would explain how difficult it had been to decide what to do about me. Contrary to what I learned through the Internet, Jeanette was my father’s second wife, with whom he had one child. I had four other siblings from his first marriage. I was only going to be in town for two days. Should she phone them right away or break the news to them gently after I left? Jeanette chose the latter, reasoning that the rest of the family needed time to consider whether they wanted to meet me.

The next afternoon, Jeanette and I went to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. As we approached my father’s grave, Jeanette held my hand and pointed. “Johnny Flamingo,” read the plaque, and in smaller letters underneath: “Melvin James Moore.”

Jeanette left me on my own with him. It had been 47 years since we were this close. I didn’t know what to say, but I tried. I started with “Hello.”

Mmost people, if they’re lucky, have a north, south, east and west in their lives. It helps in navigating their way through. When I began to get closer to finding Johnny Flamingo, I realized how much my life had been lacking a crucial reference point.

Without it, I had cobbled together a half-baked credo of prickly self-sufficiency and an irritating need to be recognized. Now I was standing beside my own missing link, the person who was supposed to be my North Star, and I didn’t feel any resentment or frustration about him. I felt balanced and relieved. My only question was, what now?

The answer did not arrive immediately. But somewhere between leaving Los Angeles and turning the key in my front door in Britain, a voice had lodged in my head: “Now just get on with it. You’re OK. Stop worrying so much.”

POSTSCRIPT

Almost a year passed before I returned to California. During that time, more of my newly discovered family were in contact. They were as interested in knowing about me as I was in hearing about them, and gradually the portrait of Melvin and his life after Europe began to build.

I knew that my father had returned to California as soon as he left the Air Force in 1956, and I learned that he didn’t want any ordinary 9-to-5. He wanted to be a singer, and he wanted the good life that it could bring. Despite his leaning for supper club sounds, he took a head-first dive into the raucous world of doo-wop, the hottest pop music on the West Coast.

Melvin met Jeanette, who was forming a group called The Dots. He took on the male lead parts, and Jeanette at the same time. Then Dick Hugg offered to record them, and one day someone decided Melvin should have a hipper name. In time-honored pop tradition, stories conflict about who actually came up with the idea for his reinvention as Johnny Flamingo. But now he was part of the scene, one of the good-looking clutch of young blacks and Latinos cutting around in Los Angeles--partying, singing, recording and hoping that maybe they would be the next big thing. Melvin stayed with The Dots for a few records, then went solo.

Johnny Flamingo’s persona--the silken-voiced boy singing soulful sweet nothings into a breathless girl’s ear--was not a great deal different from that of Melvin Moore. But he had found in England that real life isn’t as easy to control as a song, and there would be a few more unexpected twists in my father’s story.

His first marriage was to a lovely young woman named Juanita, who happened to be a close friend of the equally alluring Jeanette. He stayed with Juanita for 10 years. When they parted, Melvin returned to Jeanette and they were married for almost 35 years.

As a result of those relationships, my immediate relatives were three half-brothers, Jimmy, Danny and Bobby, and two half-sisters, Nina and Gladys, all living in the Los Angeles area. (They all knew I existed, because my father had been open about having a child in England.) Between them they had produced seven children who could now call me uncle. Then there was my new aunt in Pasadena, Melvin Moore’s only sister, Jackie, and she had a daughter, my cousin.

Initially, the details were exchanged by e-mail, then came the phone calls--halting conversations at first, no one quite knowing whom we were speaking to and how we were supposed to feel. But you could hear the friendly curiosity. “When are you coming back?” they said. “We have to see you!” We all had to wait--last autumn my wife gave birth to our son, another grandchild for Johnny Flamingo, and for Betty Randall.

At first my mother, now 69, had not found it easy to deal with this painful rush of revelations. When I first told her I thought I knew what had happened to Melvin, she received the news in muted turmoil. She came to stay with me for a few days and finally spoke of their time together. Some of those stories had not been heard for 45 years. Now the person she had done so much to protect had wrenched open the door she had bolted shut.

But she was happy for me, and intrigued. The potted family history I was piecing together after my first trip to California piqued her interest. So it was gratifying when my new relatives in Los Angeles made their admiration for my mother plain. They marveled at her strength and told me how lucky I was to have been born to her. When I decided to revisit L.A., it seemed natural to invite her along. We would reach the end of the book together.

When we landed on a February day earlier this year, Jeanette Baker was there to meet us. We drove off to the other world that Melvin had created.

I have never known such a life-affirming week. One by one we siblings met, holding our breath as we first came through the door, hugging each other, dizzied by what this all meant, staring with astonishment at how alike we look. “Big brother,” said Jimmy one night at his house in Lancaster, “you favor daddy the most of all of us. When I see you standing over there like that, I think, That’s Melvin.”

While engrossed in conversation, I would look around and catch sight of Nina, the eldest, who had doted on our father the most, or Gladys, calm and watchful, looking at me intently, then smiling with a shake of her head. My mother was treated like a heroine, beckoned into the fold, and one day Juanita, Jeanette and Betty--the mothers of Melvin’s children--stood together while I aimed the video camera.

The day before my mother and I left town, the family gathered at Aunt Jackie’s. We sat at her long dining table, talking and laughing. Jimmy said a prayer for us, and more than a few tears fell.

I thought of a desolate day in the ‘80s at the U.S. consulate in Sydney, Australia. I was clutching my English adoption certificate as an officer told me why I couldn’t have the visa that would allow me to join my girlfriend, an Australian working in New York. “Blood or soil,” she kept saying. “Your certificate shows that the stepfather who adopted you was American, but it doesn’t prove that your natural father was American, and you weren’t born in the U.S. That’s what you need.”

And I said: “This is all I’ve got.”

“Blood or soil, sir,” she insisted. “You have to have proof.”

Twenty years later, at this table in Pasadena decked out like Thanksgiving, I had proof--real, living proof: This was my blood.

To hear samples of Johnny Flamingo’s music, go to: latimes.com/flamingo