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By Miriam Raftery
December 12, 2023 (San Diego)—Anat Tour, host of the East County Magazine Radio Show’s Bookshelf, recently interviewed Cherie Kerr on her award-winning book, Charlie’s Notes. This moving memoir of her father, jazz musician Carluchi (Charlie) DePietro, chronicles his struggles from his roots in a New York immigrant family to his experiences in Hollywood performing alongside some of the top celebrities in the music and the film industries.
Kerr is an award-winning filmmaker, director, and producer as well as author. She is a founding member of the renown L.A. Groundlings theatre and school as well as the Orange County Crazies improv comedy troupe. Her indie mockumentary film, The Show Can’t Go On, received nine wins at film festivals including best feature film and best director.
“My father was going to write his own biography. He had worked with a lot of celebrities and had a lot of very interesting things happen to him as a jazz musician,” Kerr told ECM. “Then he was stricken with dementia.” Fortunately, he had kept a notebook with records of his gigs and the people he worked with. Kerr decided to write the book as a tribute to her father, with encouragement from Gus Lee, author of the New York bestseller China Boy.
She says it was “very therapeutic” during the eight years she spent writing the book while dealing with the grief of losing her father, after earlier losing her mother to cancer. “I want my kids and my grandkids and their kids to know where they came from.”
She interviewed family members, flying to Niagara Falls to speak with her aunt, who had a photographic memory, and also speaking with her uncles to learn more of her father’s early days growing up in what she describes as a “very interesting, wacky, traditional Italian family.”
She also drew on her own memories, such as her father speaking of working with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and other famous musicians. He collaborated in movies starring artists such as Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Sophia Loren, also playing private gigs.
Charlie DePietro began playing the violin at age four, after his father, a tailor, traded making suits for a violin teacher to teach two of his children.
Several major Italian studio musicians in Los Angeles mid-century came from Niagara Falls,from similarly humble origins. “You could sit out on your porch on a warm summer night in Niagara Falls and you could hear all these young musicians playing their instruments,” says Kerr.;
Growing up as music styles were changing, he and his brother would sneak a radio into their bedroom and listen to New Orleans jazz, which their father initially prohibited.
As a teen, he suffered the heartbreak of prejudice when he arrived to take his date, Virginia,to the prom. “Her father wouldn’t let her got because he considered my father a lowlife Italian...and then he ended up going back home with a corsage and his brother’s shoes that were too tight and his tuxedo...and he didn’t get to go to that dance,” says Kerr, who said the story brought tears to her eyes.
When World War II broke out, a childhood friend invited him to come to Ohio to work at Curtis Wright Airplane Factory on the assembly line, an opportunity “instead of going into the service, where he didn’t want to break his hands,” Kerry says.
In Ohio, he did gigs at night on his guitar. One night, while Charlie was playing in a bar at age 27, Jack Teagarden and Bobby Hackett heard him perform and called his talent “amazing.” Teagarden invited Charlie to join his band, so Charlie and his wife packed up everything and moved to L.A. – only to discover that the band had disbanded.
“My Dad knew that everything was happening now in L.A.” So the couple got a job in a camera factory and saved up money to bring Kerr and her sister to California eight months later. “He just fell in love with the jazz scene.” While playing bass, he met a man in a club who worked on films. He introduced Charlie to a studio product manager, which led to him being hired repeatedly.
He also opened a music store worked side gigs known as casuals at private parties. “Those were the most fascinating stories” says Kerr, citing a party hosted by Judy Garland as an example .”He was just fascinated by her.”
Initially, Charlie DePietro didn’t like Elvis Presley or rock and roll, but “adored” Sinatra. But after meeting Presley on a movie set, his perspective changed. He found Presley to be “humble and kind” while Sinatra “had a lot of swag and a lot of women around him; he’d snap his fingers,`Get me a drink, or a cigarette.....he wasn’t as friendly or as fun as it was working with Elvis or Danny Kaye or some of the others.”
“Elizabeth Taylor had, from what I was told, a real crush on my dad.,” said Kerr, who recalled her father as “a very handsome man, and very charming, very magnetic.”
New York was the “jazz capital of the world” in her father’s youth, when he went to New York City on his honeymoon to watch Joe Marsala and other musical greats. By the mid-40s, when he had moved to Los Angles, clubs were emerging and “it got to be thehip happening. L.A. really became the jazz scene in the mid to late ‘40s and early ‘50s..”
Kerr’s mother was also a musician who sang in a band with Charlie. “There was always music playing and my mother was dancing and singing, and my father would turn on the radio and he would play.” Only jazz and classical were allowed in the household. “We couldn’t have pop. We couldn’t have country.” Later in life, however, her father “began to appreciate a lot of the jazz influence in the rock bands,” such as Chicago and Earth, Wind and Fire that were orchestrally accomplished, she adds.
But along the way, Charlie made a major career sacrifice for his family.
“When my parents opened for Les Brown in his band, which was very famous and popular at the time...Les Brown asked my folks to go on the road with him.” After the offer from the famed big band leader, Kerr says, her parents “drove around so that Heather, my sister, and I wouldn’t see them crying, because they knew they had to turn it down. They weren’t going to leave us again....I think he always longed for that, but yet he would always tell me, ‘As long as I can do my art, whatever it is or wherever it is, I’m happy.”
She adds, ”My father was an ordinary person and an ordinary musician, who just happened to be brilliantly gifted, but yet didn’t make the big time, and I think that makes it an even better story. You know, he had a great life and he was able to play up until his memory wouldn’t connect him to the music anymore. I think he was a great success in that way.”
He always kept in mind the advice of his music teacher, who told him his goal in life should not be to become famous. “You want to be the best,” the teacher advised, “and when you’re the best, you’ll be playing with the best. Anyone could be famous, but not everyone that’s famous is the best.”
Her father, Kerr says, “was among the best.” She bears that advice in mind. “Just think about having a lot of integrity in your work, whatever it is, and always do your best performance.”
Her father wrote “ a lot of incredible arrangements that people really enjoyed.”
His last gig was at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, in San Diego’s North County. “He played with a band called the Gold Tones or something, and they were a big band...all people who had been with big bands and got together to jam.”
Writing the book, she always had jazz playing for inspiration.
She also developed greater empathy for immigrant families. Her grandfather’s tailor shop had a dirt floor swept daily, because the family couldn’t afford flooring. “I always try to have a lot of compassion for anyone who’s here and doesn’t know the language or doesn’t have the means to live well or have enough food to eat,” Kerr noted. “.I began to be far more appreciative of what we have here in the United States of America.”
One aunt, however, stopped talking to Kerr after she wrote the book. “Her mother was a very difficult character....I went by the information I was given by all the siblings...and she was a very unhappy person.” She said other memoir authors have shared similar experiences. So she advises others considering writing a memoir to “be really careful. You have to assess that. Is it really worth it to write a book that might upset somebody in your family if you’re including them as characters.”
She considers herself lucky to have grown up in a household where she developed an and ear and sense of timing that has aided her in her comedy career and in filmmaking.
As for Charlie’s Notes, she confirmed she is glad she wrote it. “It won some awards and I’m hoping it will go to a film, because I think it’s a wonderful story.”
Next up, she hopes to see Charlie’s Notes made into a movie, but says it will take several million dollars to make that happen. “If there’s anybody out there who wants to join me in producing the film, I’m all ears.”
You can learn more about Cherie Kerr and Charlie’s Notes at the author’s website: https://execuprov.com/books-2/ or on her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cherie.kerr.58/.
You can buy the book at https://www.amazon.com/Charlies-Notes-Memoir-Cherie-Kerr/dp/0964888270
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