“Topanga Storyville”
by Pablo Capra
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| The Topanga Beach Auto Court, 1939. Photo c/o Topanga Historical Society. |
With the royalties of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), his ex-wife Anita Gonzales (1883-1952) bought the Topanga Beach Auto Court in January 1950. He’d left her everything of worth on his deathbed. The will, which she’d written for his signature, falsely stated that they were still married, ignored his current wife, and misspelled the name of one of his sisters.
In September 1950, The Southern California Hot Jazz Society met with Gonzales and her current husband, John Francis Ford (1892-1956), at the motel.
We sat comfortably on the plush red velvet sofa in the living room. The room was filled with art and expensive furnishings. It looked remarkably like a parlor in a bordello.
—The Ghost of the Cuban Queen Bordello by Peggy Hicks (Arizona Discoveries, 2011)
[She] spoke in warm tones with an accent reflecting her New Orleans heritage. A portable record player and several albums stood on a bookcase near the door; I wondered if the stack included any of Morton’s rare old records. A large theatrical blowup of a nearly nude girl hung on one wall. Noticing my interest, Gonzales said: “That’s my [granddaughter]. Her name is Aleene. She’s a striptease dancer at the Follies Theater.”
—Classic Jazz by Floyd Levin (University of California Press, 2002)
The Society was fundraising to buy a headstone for Morton’s still unmarked grave. Embarrassed, Gonzales told them, “I cannot allow strangers to buy the marker for my beloved,” and committed to finally paying for it herself.
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| Anita Gonzales and Jelly Roll Morton in Los Angeles, circa 1917. Dead Man Blues (2001) |
Morton and Gonzales’s connection went back to Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans where many early jazz musicians started out. She was Bessie Johnson then, a sex worker with a daughter named Hattie Seymour (1904-1992). In 1908, she moved to Las Vegas to open her own brothel, the Arcade Saloon, disguising her African American ethnicity with a Mexican name. Her brothers Bill and Dink Johnson founded The Original Creole Orchestra, the first jazz band to leave the South on a tour that she financed in 1912.
Piano player Ferdinand Morton began entertaining in Storyville when he was only 14, playing “jass” when it was still a dirty word. He took a stage name that was equally naughty, and published the first ever jazz song in 1915, “Jelly Roll Blues.”
Gonzales and Morton reconnected in 1917 in Los Angeles. The pair enjoyed showing off with fancy cars, clothes, and especially diamonds, like the one that Morton set in his tooth as a symbol of their love. She became the madam of the Anita Hotel on Central Ave. and 12th St. in Los Angeles, and he bought a gambling club next door. They later ran The Jupiter, a jazz club in San Francisco, before jealousy broke them up. Morton wrote two happy songs about Gonzales, “Sweet Anita Mine” and “Mama Nita,” and remained sentimental about their relationship.
Anita was a very beautiful woman and she dressed very handsomely with plenty of diamonds to elaborate the condition. I couldn’t wish for a finer woman than Anita. In fact, I don’t believe there was ever one born finer than Anita and I know I’ve missed an awful lot by leaving her. It was all a mistake, but nevertheless it happened….
—Mister Jelly Roll by Alan Lomax (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950)
Seeing opportunity in a new mining town, Gonzales built The Cuban Queen Boarding House, one of the grandest buildings in Jerome, Arizona, in 1922. She soon met Ford, an Irish American who drove the train in the mine. Together, they ran the brothel successfully until 1927, when a Mexican prostitute was mysteriously murdered there. A client was found guilty, even though he’d been shot as well, twice. Gonzales and Ford abducted the woman’s four-year-old son, Enrique “Henry” Villalpando (1923-1996), and left for Canyonville, Oregon, where they bought a campground with eight cabins and opened Ford’s Auto Camp.
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| Jelly Roll Morton, 1920s. Publicity photo. |
Morton had remarried and was at the height of his fame during the 1920s Jazz Age with his band The Red Hot Peppers (whose name inspired the present-day Red Hot Chili Peppers). By 1930, “Hot Jazz” had evolved into the “Big Band” sound, which focused less on improvisation and shady characters. Morton felt he had to start his own Big Band to keep up, but needed legal help first to collect his royalties. In 1938, he was stabbed in a bar, sustaining respiratory and heart injuries that led to his decline. In 1940, he asked Gonzales for a loan. She gave him the money on condition that he make her a partner in all future recordings. When he died in 1941 before making a comeback, she felt that her investment entitled her to his estate.
Gonzales’s friends John P. Amacher (1895-1978) and his wife Katherine (1901-1990) operated a motel called Alpine Lodge in Canyonville. In 1937, the Swiss immigrants moved to California and bought the Topanga Beach Auto Court. Gonzales and Ford took it over from them in 1950, as Morton’s music became popular again, and the royalties started coming in. Henry stayed in Oregon to manage Ford’s Auto Camp. Hattie’s daughter Rose Mary Johns (who would eventually inherit Morton’s royalties with her sister Aleene) worked at the Topanga Beach motel during summer vacations. Gonzales prohibited the Black girl from calling her “grandma” so customers wouldn’t know they were related. A year and a half after buying Morton’s headstone, she died from heart failure.
In 1952, two UCLA students celebrated their graduation by watching a televised boxing match in a Santa Monica bar.
Alone in the next booth sat a rather loudmouthed older man who was also watching the fight, which involved a black and a white boxer. “Hit that nigger!” he shouted; “Kill the black sonofabitch.” Finally, Joe, the jazz fan, got tired of listening to the man’s mouth and complained to him about his use of the word “nigger.”
—Dead Man Blues by Phil Pastras (University of California Press, 2001)
The man with the dirty mouth was Ford. He assured the students that he wasn’t a racist by telling them he’d been married to the same woman as Jelly Roll Morton. He even pointed to Morton’s diamond, now set in his own tooth. (Morton’s casket had remained closed at his funeral because extracting the diamond had disfigured his mouth). Seeing their amazement, he led them to Morton’s black Cadillac with maroon seats in the parking lot, and finally to the Auto Court, where he brought out a trunk of Morton’s papers.
Ford saw the space in front of his Auto Court get developed into the Rainbow Plaza in 1952, with a rainbow-shaped sign that echoed the motel’s entrance arch. The strip mall included the Rainbow Plaza Grill (later, The Chicken Coop), a Thrift-D-Lux Cleaners, and a Los Angeles Athletic Club office. It was renamed George’s Market around 1958.
He continued living at the motel until his death from a heart attack four years later. Morton’s royalties remain with Gonzales’s descendants. The trunk of Morton’s memorabilia is now in the Louisiana State Museum’s Jazz Collection.
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Pablo Capra is the Archivist for the Topanga Historical Society and author of Topanga Beach: A History (2020).
