Apollo's Girl

At Harlem's 1,700-seat Apollo Theater, Wednesday nights are gala affairs, and seats go on sale a week in advance. By the time the last stage show is over the house is packed and noisy, waiting for Harlem's No. 1 amateur show. 'The fun really begins when bouncy, bright-eyed Stagehand Norman ("Puerto Rico") Miller appears, dressed up in one of a roomful of outlandish costumes, and brandishing the prop pistol he uses to chase unsuccessful amateurs offstage.

Last week, tricked out in a yellow and pink garden dress, picture hat and orange and magenta feather boa, Puerto Rico pursued a hapless, grinning amateur into the wings. Then he laid his pistol down. Out onto the stage stepped one of the most famed alumnae of the Apollo amateur hour: bosomy, nimble-voiced Ella Fitzgerald.*

Palm Fronds & Spotlight. Apollo patrons saw Ella for the first time 17 years ago. Billed as a dancer in the amateur show, she looked shyly down at her spindly legs, stammered out that she had changed her mind, would like to sing instead. The audience guffawed. But by the time 15-year-old Ella had slid smoothly into the second chorus of Judy they were shouting encouragement. Three encores later, she walked off the stage with the $25 first prize. No other contestant had come even close.

Plenty of Fitzgerald fans are passionately certain that no other girl singer has come even close to Ella since that night. In the basement world of jazz, where fashions can change as fast as a teenager's voice, Ella has filled the smoke-blurred spotlight for well over a "decade. She has filled it almost as long upstairs in the air-conditioned, palm-frond land of popular dance music. In 1938 she became a national hit when her record of her own song A-Tisket A-Tasket began the fad for swinging nursery rhymes. In 1946 she recorded a cold-blooded Calypso song, Stone Cold Dead in the Market, which became another national bestseller. Says her No. 1 fan, Bing Crosby: "Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest singer of them all."

Scat Mother Goose. Almost every year Ella manages to get back to the Apollo. Last week, Ella, now a strapping 31, gave the fans a hearty sampling of sweet ballads with a Fitzgerald edge, a few bopped-up old favorites, her latest raid on Mother Goose (a scat version of Old Mother Hubbard), and a couple of friendly imitations of her old pals Louis Armstrong and Rose ("Chichi") Murphy. As always, her gently rasping voice, halfway between jungle wail and jukebox jangle, brought the house down.

After her Apollo visit, Ella was heading downtown for her annual three-week session at the Paramount (at $3,250 a week), then out to the West Coast. Still at the top of the heap, Ella has a simple explanation for her success: "People like me."

* Others: Sarah Vaughan, Thelma Carpenter, Billy Eckstine.

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