http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/palmbeachpost/photos/accent/pianoman/ By Dianna Smith
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006
"Oh, here she comes," Bruce Williams whispers, ready to take his seat behind an electric piano.
An elegantly dressed woman makes her way into the dining room. Her face brushed lightly with makeup. Faint lipstick covering her lips. Her tall, thin body clad in gold and tan, she looks like someone men once adored and women once envied.
s
Her name is Helen Persons. She's a young 93 years old. A walker helps her move what gentlemen once called Betty Grable legs. Eyes focus on the sparkling jewelry that dangles from her neck and droops from her earlobes.
This is a special night.
It is Williams' last night behind the piano at the Seagate Hotel and Beach Club in Delray Beach. Since 1994, he has sat with almost perfect posture in his chair, not far from the kitchen door that thrumps each time a waiter rushes through.
For 33 years, Williams has been the piano man in Delray Beach. For 15 of those years, he was the only entertainer on Atlantic Avenue. He played music in plush clubs like The Patio Delray, Erny's and the Spanish River Inn. All places old Delrayites like Williams fondly remember. All now are gone.
The Seagate is disappearing, too. Like the other places, it will be replaced by something bigger. Something, they say, better. Though the older generation wonders if that is really true.
The Seagate isn't closed for good yet, but management is slowly making cuts and Williams is one of the first to go.
"One woman said, 'You can't leave. You're an institution,' " Williams, 75, says, glancing around the regal dining room. He motions toward the people outside, sipping cold drinks while the setting sun's rays glimmer across the Atlantic Ocean.
"This is the oldest landmark on the beach," he says, shaking his head. "I don't know where I am anymore in Delray."
There are only five tables set at the Seagate this April night. Sundays are typically slow. But Williams expected that.
Though it is his final night performing here and possibly his last in the town, Williams didn't announce it to anyone. He wants to go quietly, without any parties or overwhelming fuss.
He just wants to play it again. One last time.
•
"This is her song," Williams says, squeezing his tall, lanky body behind the piano. He straightens his silk, raspberry-colored jacket, and scans the dining room through his gold-rimmed, wire glasses. The room suddenly fills with sounds from Annie.
"The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun... "
His long, slender fingers with perfectly trimmed nails dance wildly across the plastic piano keys. Most piano players can play eight keys apart, but Williams can play 10. His fingers bend, twist, tap and stretch like rubber bands, tumbling over one another.
A gold bracelet dangles and sways with each move of his right wrist and his thick gold diamond ring, inspired by the glamorous Liberace, bounces light like a sun catcher.
"Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!"
Williams makes piano playing look easy. For him, it is.
One day, he said, he just sat down and played. He doesn't know where the talent came from. It poured out of him as a teenager, like water from a spigot, and never, ever stopped.
An avid music lover, Mrs. Persons shuffles to the table closest to Williams and orders a scotch and soda, cottage cheese and a bowl of soup. She wants to hear every word, every tune. For 12 years, she's made this so. On the reservation book is a written reminder that Mrs. Persons must sit near the piano. Even if she is by herself, at the round table for 10, she pays what she has to to make it her table just for that night.
So she can hear her song.
"When I'm stuck a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And grin,
And say,
Oh!"
Most of Williams' fans throughout the years have had a song. A special song. Like a bartender ready with the right drinks, Williams was ready with the right songs. Though he could never remember names, he always remembered their songs. He'd see a familiar face on the street and think to himself, "Oh, there's Night and Day," or "Here comes Blue Moon."
He played their song when they walked through the door and again when they left tired and tipsy each night.
"I've got a couple of hundred songs in my head," he said. "It makes people feel good when you recognize them with a song."
Williams likes drinkers. They can usually perk up the gloomiest of gloom. Williams himself used to be one. Now he's 36 years sober and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's tonic water with a lime that serves as his favorite drink.
His audience over the years has been mostly well-to-do types. Some humble. Some not. Williams rubbed elbows with prominent socialites, such as members of the Vanderbilt family. He played for women with pursed lips, sporting manicured nails and freshly dyed hair, known to let loose after a drink or two.
If he wasn't in a bar, he was in a church.
As organist and choir director at the Unity of Delray Beach Church, on Wednesday nights he would rush to his night job after playing his last tune on the organ. On most of those nights, Williams said, members of the congregation would follow him to the bar.
And then there were the men in suits, some of whom often brought both their wives and girlfriends along to hear him play, at separate times of course. It was up to Williams to get the songs straight.
"Don't play my wife's song when I'm with my girlfriend and don't play my girlfriend's song when I'm with my wife," they would whisper discreetly into Williams' ear.
His tip jar filled quickly most nights.
•
The Spanish River Inn on East Atlantic Avenue was where Williams witnessed the first of many bar shenanigans in the city. A small dark lounge with the piano tucked in back, it catered to out-of-towners staying at the hotel, but served the locals as well.
Williams' name landed on the marquee in 1973, where the Residence Inn now stands. He recalled the night a wife had learned her prominent businessman husband and been fooling around. She broke a beer bottle on the bar and chased after him with the broken glass.
"I played through it all," Williams said, laughing. "And when they fell down drunk, I'd keep playing. Maybe Bye, Bye Blackbird or Show Me the Way to Go Home."
The Spanish River Inn was where Williams discovered his voice.
A drunk woman grabbed a microphone he had bought to amplify the piano music. He grabbed it from her hand before she could belt out a tune, and he began to sing.
"People started to applaud," he said. "That was the beginning of my singing career."
The hotel and lounge struggled financially. Williams remembers times he couldn't get paid because the checks were bad.
The Erny's gig came along just in time.
Just down the street from the Spanish River Inn, Erny's was a dark, windowless joint. But it was popular and classy.
Williams was the lead entertainer there from 1974 to 1980, and again from 1983 to 1994. Nicknamed Liver Lounge, the bar was elegant and the walls were decorated with stained glass and paintings of naked women. It moved throughout the years, but the most recent location is already gone at Atlantic Avenue and Venetian Drive.
Men and women were required to wear shirts with collars and shorts weren't allowed, which often upset the women. The dance floor was tiny and there was usually standing room only at the bar. Erny's didn't take dinner reservations so people hugged the bar waving dollar bills, hoping to drink their wait away until a table emptied.
When people left the bar at night, they were told to leave in pairs because Atlantic Avenue wasn't the safest place to be back then.
Williams was treated like a star at Erny's. He sat behind a grand piano and played among stagelights. It was at Erny's where he grew to hate playing Danny Boy more than he disliked Happy Birthday and where stars like Mickey Mantle and Christopher Reeve ate and drank.
Williams played the Superman theme song for Reeve. Reeve explained to Williams after that how important music was to the movie industry. Reeve said he thought Superman was going to be a flop until he heard the movie's theme song.
Mantle didn't speak to Williams. But Williams did see Mantle enjoying a drink.
"I played Take Me Out To The Ballgame and he raised his glass," he fondly said.
The Patio looked like the back yard of a Key West bed and breakfast. Tables were tucked beneath pretty greenery and there was a retractable roof for starry nights. In the courtyard was a fountain and a fish pond, which two women fell into once after one too many drinks and it was where Williams and his co-workers nicknamed customers. One was named Puddle because, after a long night of drinking, she peed on her bar stool.
The Patio, where he dazzled people from 1980 to 1983, is now where Northern Trust bank on Atlantic Avenue now sits.
Today, the Seagate is an exclusive club not just anyone can afford to join. But back in the day, Williams remembers when one paid just $300 a year to be a member. People brought their own slabs of meat on the weekends and the club provided vegetables. Everyone grilled along the beach.
Though the Seagate's crowd differed from the other places Williams worked, he still gathered stories. Like the time he played for a wedding and a drunk bride and groom jumped into the saltwater pool. Or the time a few years ago when he watched the owner and the manager push each other like angry teenage boys. Williams played on.
He rarely sang at the Seagate, where people sometimes spoke in whispers. Williams entertained the dinner crowd with what he playfully called background tinkle.
And though he no longer played among stagelights or behind a grand piano, he still loved to entertain.
And he still had fans.
Like Mrs. Persons.
She dances in her seat to his music, her fancy jewelry swaying back and forth while she shrugs her shoulders and moves her head side-to-side.
That's what she did on this April night.
Williams' fingers skip across the keys like a stone skipping on water. Bending, twisting, tapping, stretching. He plays I Just Called To Say I Love You while Mrs. Persons mouths the words and Williams can't help but hum along.
Then All That Jazz and New York, New York, while Mrs. Persons eats her butterscotch sundae, no whipped cream, no cherry.
The sun fades and darkness falls as the tables begin to empty. Mrs. Persons pushes her half-eaten dessert aside and pays her bill, while Williams prepares to end his night.
On this night, his last night, he leaves at a perfect time. When the dining room is just about empty. When no one is there to shed a tear.
Mrs. Persons pushes her walker toward Williams and reaches for his face.
"Love you," she says, gently kissing his cheek. "Best of luck."
Williams flips the cover of his electric piano, shielding the plastic keys. Carrying his glass of tonic and lime, he strolls through the kitchen to the back door, the way he's made his exit the past 12 years.
He listens to his ice cubes rattle against the glass and wonders if this is the last time he'll play in good ole' Delray Beach. If this is the last night he'll play Mrs. Persons' song. And wondering what he will do tomorrow.
"The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya' tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!"
[This message has been edited by Jerryghr (edited 05-29-2006).]
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