Astor and the Creole Thrush
On Thursday, 28 December 1933, Latin America's most famous popular singer arrived in New York from France on board the SS Champlain. Carlos Gardel(1890—1935) was modern Argentina's—in fact, modern Latin America's—first genuine superstar. El zorzal criollo, "the Creole Thrush," as he was known, had helped create the tango song as a distinct genre. He was the greatest of all tango singers, the idol of Buenos Aires, and a recent star of cabaret and theater in Paris. His first movies, made in France by Paramount, were being shown all over Latin America. He had come to New York for a series of radio programs on NBC. He also hoped to convince Paramount to make more films. The corporation was persuaded. In 1934 and 1935, at the Astoria studios on Long Island, Gardel made four movies, all of them sensational box office hits around Latin America.
Like so many Argentines, Vicente was a devoted Gardel fan. He put his woodcarving talent to good use, cutting the figure of a gaucho playing a guitar. He inscribed it and instructed Astor to deliver the carving to the apartment where Gardel was living with his musical adviser Alberto Castellano, and Alfredo Le Pera, his lyricist and scriptwriter. So it was that on a bright spring morning in1934 Astor found himself at the entrance to the tall Beaux Arts buildings on East44th Street. Here he ran into a bald-headed man holding a milk bottle and looking lost. Astor addressed him in English and got a reply in Spanish. It was Alberto Castellano, who had mislaid his key. He asked the nimble boy to climb the fire escape and enter the penthouse apartment through a window. "Gardel is the one in the pajamas with the white spots," he explained. The first person Astor woke up was Alfredo Le Pera, who was bad-tempered about the sudden intrusion. The great man himself, by contrast, proved extremely friendly. He opened the package, contemplated the little figure, offered Astor breakfast, and gave him two signed photographs, one for Vicente.
Astor was to see much of the star over the next year. Gardel found the boy's English particularly useful on shopping expeditions. He was trying to learn English himself, without much success. There were numerous excursions to buy clothes and shoes at Gimbels, Macy's, Florsheim, and Saks. On one occasion recalled by Astor, Gardel was desperate to renew his supply of the striped shirt she wore in his films. "We went around till we found them, one afternoon, I think it was at Saks ... and he bought twenty or thirty shirts." It did not take long for Astor to reveal that he played the bandoneon. Gardel liked his versions of classical pieces but was unimpressed by his tangos. He put it to him in impeccable lunfardo, the street Spanish favored by porteños, the inhabitants of Buenos Aires."Mirá pibe, el fueye lo tocás fenómeno, pero el tango lo tocás como un gallego"("Look, lad, you're top-notch at playing the squeezebox, but you play the tango like a gringo!"). Gardel allowed him—how often we cannot say—to accompany his singing, most likely in private, unless, as the adult Astor occasionally claimed, he was sometimes permitted to join the orchestra that backed Gardel's songs. He certainly accompanied Gardel at a dinner party held at the Astoria studios, and evidently there were parties at Gardel's apartment when Astor played his bandoneon to substitute for the piano, which was usually out of tune. Vicente and Asunta were obviously flattered by the star's interest in their son. They must have relished the one occasion when Astor brought him to eat with them at East 9thStreet.
Early in 1935 Gardel gave Astor the tiniest of parts in the third and best of his New York movies, El día que me quieras. Astor's pay was $25, and he played a newspaper boy. "The role is just right for a loafer like you," said Gardel. For the rest of his life, Astor was to treasure a still of the fleeting and barely noticeable scene in the movie in which he appears with Gardel and actor Tito Lusiardo. At the end of March, with his fourth and last film completed, Gardel set out on a tour of the countries around the Caribbean. It was the fateful journey that took him to his death on the airfield at Medellín, Colombia, on 24 June. Astor played his bandoneon at one of several farewell parties for the star. Gardel wanted Astorto go with him on the tour, as some kind of factotum or general assistant. Vicente put his foot down; Astor was only fourteen. Another young New York Argentine, José Corpas Moreno, went in Astor's place and so became a victim of the fatal accident in Colombia. Such are the terrible twists of fate. If Astor had gone, as he wrote later, "I would now be playing the harp, not the bandoneon."
There is a slightly eerie postscript to the encounters of Gardel and Astor in the Manhattan of 1934-35. The adult Piazzolla told the story many times, perhaps best in his extended interview with Alberto Speratti in 1968:
In 1956 or 1957 ... Andrés D'Aquila came to see me in Buenos Aires, and he said, "Astor, I'm going to tell you something that will stand your hair on end. Just recently, while walking round Greenwich Village, I saw, in a basement store, a little wooden figure—all scorched and burned—with a label underneath that said FIGURE THAT BELONGED TO AN ARGENTINE SINGER. I go in and ask how much it costs. The assistant says twenty dollars. I only have ten with me, so I tell her I'll come back next day. When I go back next day with the cash, the figure had gone. They'd sold it." It's spine-chilling to think of the travels of that little figure. I'd given it to Gardel, it had been in the crash with him at Medellin and had got partly burned, and someone stole it there. Heaven knows how it got from Colombia to New York, to a business only a block or two away from the house where my father carved it. It's almost as if the figure had wanted to go back for a moment to 9th Street.
Astor always hoped that someone might find the carving and send it to him. Nobody ever did.
