H/T to the keeper of the flame Ricky Riccardi
Photo by John Loengard, summer of 1965. Here’s Louis in Ebony’s “The Reluctant Millionaire” profile from 1964:
“Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. I’ve been making my share of the dough ever since I was a teen-ager playing with Fate Marable on the riverboats. So even if I start making a million bucks a day it won’t make me try to be something different from what I feel in my heart and from what makes me happy in my way.”
“What’s money anyhow? You make it and you might eat a little better than the next cat. You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is. So what’s the difference between me and some cat that’s making it at the Salvation Army Lodge? All I got was a little better roll of the dice.”
“Now you take my wife, Lucille. She’s got everything she thinks she wants. She buys all them clothes from Paris and Rome and places. But them minks she wraps her fine self up in don’t keep her no warmer than some old lady wrapped in gunny sacks and dirty rags.”
“And you take this neighborhood we live in. We’re right out here with the rest of the colored folk and the Puerto Ricans and Italians and the Hebrew cats. We don’t need to move out in the suburbs to some big mansion with lots of servants and yardmen and things. What for? What the hell I care about living in a ‘fashionable’ neighborhood? Ain’t nobody cutting off the lights and gas here ‘cause we didn’t pay the bills. The Frigidaire is full of food, what more do we need?”
manwithoutqualities 