“We flew to New York from Washington,” Captain Landry recalls, “and went straight to the New Yorker Hotel, where they always put the Senator in a suite on the thirty-second floor. We got there on August 29. I remember that because the next day, a Friday, was his birthday, and Ralph Hitz, the owner of the hotel, sent up a big birthday cake. Lila Lee, a New Orleans girl who was vocalist for Nick Lucas’ band that was playing the New Yorker’s supper room, came up to the suite with the cake to sing Happy-birthday-dear-Huey. After the cake had been cut and we all had a taste of it, he gave the rest to Miss Lee.
“About that time Lou Irwin came up to take us out to dinner. I think the Senator had talked to him on the phone about finding someone to publish his book, and that Lou had said this was out of his line, since he was a theatrical agent, but he would inquire around and see what could be done. Earle Christenberry wasn’t with us. He had remained in Washington to gather up all the things the Senator might need in Louisiana, papers and so on, and he was going to take his time driving home with them while we went on to Oklahoma City.
“Anyway, Lou Irwin said he had just booked a show into some place uptown. I have forgotten the name of it; all I remember is it was quite a ways uptown, and Lou told us they had just imported from France some chef that made the best onion soup in the world.
“So we went there to eat, and we had hardly sat down when who should come over to our table but Phil Baker, the radio star. He said: ‘Senator, I want you to meet the two most beautiful girls in New York, my wife Peggy and her niece.’ I don’t remember the niece’s name, but she was a young girl that looked to be about eighteen, and she was very pretty. Baker was all excited, talking about having just signed a contract that very day with the Gulf Refining people to take over their radio show, the one Will Rogers, who got killed in a plane crash with Wiley Post up in Alaska a couple of weeks before that, used to do.”
The name of the niece was Cleanthe Carr. Her father, Gene Carr, was one of the best-known cartoonists and comic-strip originators in the country. His work was widely syndicated.
“The Senator got up to dance with Mrs. Baker,” the Landry account continues, “and she must have told him, while they were dancing, about this niece being an artist, because when they came back to the table he picked up a napkin and gave it to this girl, saying: ‘Young lady, I understand you’re quite a cartoonist. Let’s see you sketch me here on this napkin!’ Well, she made a perfect sketch of him, with his arms out and his hair flying, as though he were making a hell-fire speech. He thought the sketch was fine, but Phil Baker said we ought to see some of her serious work, and we all should come up to his apartment, where he had quite a few of the paintings she had done.
“So we left. I don’t think Lou Irwin came with us. But anyway, after we had been quite a long while at the Baker apartment, Senator Long said the niece would have to do the pictures for his book that he had written about how he was already elected president and what he did in the White House to redistribute the wealth after he was inaugurated. By the time we got back to the hotel it was three o’clock in the morning.
“The Senator went over to the newsstand to look at the headlines in the morning papers, and a gentleman who had been in the lobby when we came in got up and came over to me and asked if my name was Captain Landry. I told him yes, that was right, and he said he wanted to talk to Mr. Long. I said: ‘Man, don’t you see what time it is? You haven’t got a chance to see him now. You better come back tomorrow.’
“So he said it was very important for him to talk to the Senator right away, that he had been sent up from Washington by Earle Christenberry, and that was how he knew what my name was. He also said he represented the Harrisburg Telegraph Publishing Company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they were anxious to publish the Senator’s book about his first days in the White House. Naturally, that made a difference, because that was one of the things Senator Long had come to New York for, so I went across the lobby to the newsstand and told him what the story was.
“At first he said he wasn’t about to talk to anybody that time of night, but when I told him how Earle had sent the man up special because the Harrisburg Telegraph people wanted to publish the book, and how the man said he had just missed us when we went out to supper, and had been waiting in the lobby ever since, the Senator said: ‘Well, all right, then. Tell him to come up to 3200 in about ten minutes, but make him understand he’ll have to talk damn fast when he gets there.’ So I did, and the man—I have forgotten his name; that’s if I ever knew it—didn’t have to talk so fast after all, because the meeting didn’t break up till after five o’clock, when we all just about barely had time to get packed and catch the first train for Harrisburg.