Historian Pablo Capra tells a true tale from behind the scenes of the Topanga Beach Auto Court—also known as the Topanga Ranch Motel—located near the intersection of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, recently destroyed in the Palisades Fire. His characters are legendary jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, and Bessie Johnson, also known as Anita Gonzales, who had their start in New Orleans’ red-light district, Storyville.
With the royalties she received from her former husband, jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, Anita Gonzales bought the Topanga Beach Auto Court in January 1950. Jelly Roll had left her everything of worth on his deathbed in 1941. The will, which she had written herself for his signature, falsely stated that they were still married and failed to mention his current wife, Mabel Bertrand.
Jelly Roll and Anita’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. In 1908, she moved to Las Vegas to open her own brothel, the Arcade Saloon, disguising her African American ethnicity by taking the Mexican name Anita Gonzales. 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 Avenue and 12th Street 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 (1950)
Seeing opportunity in a rough new mining town, Gonzales went to Jerome, Arizona, in 1922, and built The Cuban Queen Boarding House, one of the grandest buildings in the town at the time. She soon met John Francis Ford, an Irish American who drove the train in the mine. Together, they ran the brothel successfully until 1927, when a Mexican prostitute was murdered. A client was found guilty, even though he’d been shot as well, twice. Gonzales and Ford abducted the woman’s orphaned four-year-old son, Henry Villalpando, and left for Canyonville, Oregon. They settled and started a campground with eight cabins, calling it Ford’s Auto Camp.
Jelly Roll 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 caused 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.
During her time in Oregon, Gonzales became friends with John P. Amacher and his wife Katherine, Swiss immigrants who operated a motel called Alpine Lodge in Canyonville. In 1937, the Amachers moved to California and bought the Topanga Beach Auto Court.
By the late 1940s, Jelly Roll’s music became popular again. Once Gonzales started collecting royalties, she and Ford took the Auto Court over from the Amachers in 1950. Henry, their “adopted” son, stayed in Oregon to manage Ford’s Auto Camp. Gonzales’ granddaughter Rose Mary Johns (who would eventually inherit Morton’s royalties with her sister Aleene) worked at the Topanga Beach motel during summer vacations. Gonzales insisted on maintaining her invented Mexican identity, even prohibiting Rose Mary from calling her “grandma” around customers, so people wouldn’t know they were related.
In September 1950, The Southern California Hot Jazz Society met with Gonzales and Ford 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 (2011)
[Gonzales] 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 (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 paying for it herself.
Gonzalez died from heart failure a year and a half after buying Morton’s headstone.
In an incident that happened several months after Gonzales’ death, written about by Phil Pastras in his 2001 book Dead Man Blues, two UCLA students, one of whom was a jazz enthusiast, were celebrating their graduation by watching a televised boxing match in a Santa Monica bar when they had an unusual encounter:
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 [offensive racial term]!” 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 “[offensive racial term].”
The man with the dirty mouth was John Ford. He assured the students that he wasn’t a racist. In fact, he continued, he had been married to the same woman as Jelly Roll Morton. He even pointed to Morton’s diamond, now set in his own tooth (extracting the diamond had disfigured Morton’s dead lips, necessitating a closed casket funeral).
Seeing their amazement, he led them to Morton’s black Cadillac with maroon seats outside in the parking lot, and then to the Auto Court, where he brought out a trunk of Morton’s papers.
Ford lived at the Auto Court until his death in 1956. During his last years, the space in front of the Auto Court was developed into the Rainbow Plaza. A rainbow-shaped sign was built 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.
Jelly Roll Morton’s royalties remain with Gonzales’ descendants. The trunk of Morton’s memorabilia is now in the Louisiana State Museum’s Jazz Collection.
By Pablo Capra
