Page 91 - Been There… Done That!

Been There... Done That!
Hill as aides to politicians. It didn’t hurt my feelings having to play music for a lot of women every night and they helped bring the men into the club. One young lady came to the stage and told me that her dad would love my group, but he wasn’t able to come to see us. She always had many men in suits with her, so we knew she was important, but we had no idea she was President Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird. The hardest part of working at the Gentleman II was that the place was always crowded with women and Michael always had a beauty queen on his arm. It was probably the first club of its kind catering to singles.
We had a wildly successful four-and-a-half-month run at O’Harro’s place, but perhaps the best part of that experience was that we opened on a Tuesday night and on Friday evening William Rice of The “Washington Post” came to see us. He was one of the most influential, yet critical reviewers ever. If he found anything wrong, he would let you have it. And then he gave us the best review he had ever given anybody. I still have a copy to this day and I found it amusing that one of the other groups was described as being “weakest in the vocal department.” Rice’s review in “The Post” sounded like we had written it ourselves. We were soon doing local television and things couldn’t have been any better. The club secretary told me that we had doubled their business and what a great feeling it was to know that. She told me in a meeting one day that the “Michael Douglas Show” (which was huge at the time) wanted me to appear on his show the third week of April 1968. It was set to go, but the whole thing came to a screeching halt in April 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Washington,
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