September 11. The phone had been ringing all morning as friends and family checked in, commiserating. Ralph had been one of the first. A transplanted New Yorker, he’d quickly reported that everyone he knew there was all right, “thank God.” Now, later the same morning, he was calling back. His voice, full of a melodrama not unusual for him, was weighted with an extra dollop of emotion. “Do you know what they’ve done?” he queried, horrified. “They have shut down Broadway. They are closing the shows for the night!” After a timed pause, his voice lowered. “Do you know what this is going to do to the cabaret scene?”
A cabaret act, by necessity, becomes “something that you do in between all the other things that you have to do for a living. Listen, you don’t do this for the money–unless you have 155 people in your family and they’re going to come to every show for ten years. People do it because they love the focus on the hour show. You have to have a love of the field, a passion for the music and for communicating what the songs are saying to the audiences that want to hear this style.”
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Betty Jane Rothschild was 30 in 1955, living on the upper west side of Manhattan. Indulged by her wealthy parents, she spent her time going to the theater, hanging out at Harlem’s many jazz clubs, and partying with her friends. She’d taken a sales job at Saks to help her “kind of figure out how it was to work in the world,” says Lampkin, but her father didn’t push it. One night she was warming a booth at Turks Bar on 119th Street, sipping her scotch and soda, when she was introduced to the club’s manager, Ralph Lampkin Sr. Ralph Sr., then 37, had been an entertainer, a triple threat who played piano, sang, and danced all through his 20s and early 30s. But he had left performing when he realized that he would never be as famous as the man he was repeatedly told he sounded like: Nat King Cole. Ralph and Betty started dating, and within a year she brought him home to meet her parents. The Rothschilds were Russian-German-Jewish and white. The Lampkins were English and African-American. The meeting did not go well. “My grandfather had a tantrum,” says Ralph Jr. “He threatened my mother, saying, ‘You’ll never get a penny’ and ‘How could you do that’ and yak yak yak yak, and my mother basically told him to go screw himself. It was a pretty big deal at the time, but when my mother said, ‘That’s the way it’s going to be, get used to it,’ that was it. She’s a very strong woman.”
He yearned to attend the School of Performing Arts. “My father said, ‘No, you’re going to a school where you can study a trade. I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s not a business for you. You’re too soft-hearted. You’re a sissy.’ I decided to go to the NY School of Printing and Journalism because I could at least learn how to write about music, and it was in Manhattan so I would be closer to the theater district.”
Every person Lampkin has ever met, worked with, or bumped into on the subway is grist for his showbiz story mill. Everyone in his life is attached in his mind by their connection, no matter how tenuous, to someone or something in the Business. Sooner or later, no matter what he’s talking about, he’ll get to a name or a song that you’ll recognize. As in: “Jeannie Napoli, whose career was paid for by her husband, was an OK singer but a great songwriter. She introduced me to her songwriting partner, Doug Frank, who wrote ‘After You,’ which was recorded by Cissy Houston’s sister, Dionne Warwick, who is, of course, the aunt of Whitney Houston.” These digressions appear to be unconscious, like a speech impediment or a facial tic; he doesn’t seem to hear himself.
