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Arlen wanted a ballad to start things off, to build a bridge between young Dorothy's restlessness in Kansas and the wonders she meets in her fantasy land. One day, as his wife Anya was driving him through Los Angeles, he asked her to pull over. With the car idling, he jotted down a musical idea that would become "Over the Rainbow." Talk about dramatic: there's a full-octave jump from the first note ("Some") to the second ("where"), instantly expressing a vaulting emotion and challenging the singer. Simple yet sophisticated, the tune seemed a gift from above. As Arlen later recalled: "It was as if the Lord said, 'Well, here it is. Now stop worrying about it.'"
His worries had just begun. First, Harburg resisted the idea. He had to be persuaded by Ira Gershwin, who also suggested the song's kicker, which repeats the first two musical phrases of the bridge ("If happy little bluebirds fly / Beyond the rainbow..."), then soars into ethereal yearning ("Why, oh why, can't I?"). Granted, once Yip got in the mood, he responded brilliantly ("There's a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby"). Arlen and associate producer Arthur Freed also had to overcome the resistance of MGM brass, who balked at filming the segment, then cut the song three times during the editing process.
I don't doubt the truth of these stories, yet they seem odd, since "Rainbow" had a precedent in the Walt Disney cartoon feature whose popularity had helped nudge The Wizard into production. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" begins with the heroine singing "Someday My Prince Will Come" — the blueprint for all "I Want" songs in Disney's animated musicals, from Pinocchio's "When You Wish Upon a Star" (which picks up on the "Rainbow" bridge, "Some day I'll wish upon a star...") to the heroine's ballads in The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas.. Harburg simply transposed Snow White's yearning for love into Dorothy Gale's wanderlust, her belief that any place has to be better than Kansas.
In its initial run, The Wizard of Oz was a financial failure. But in reissues every seven years, then in annual showings on network television, it became the hardiest of Hollywood perennials — largely because of the hope-against-hope power of the tune that Arlen had jotted down in his car. Three generations of viewers could join him in saying, "Thank you, Lord."
LAWD A-MERCER!
Johnny Mercer, the gap-toothed kid from Savannah, was just 23 when he first worked (with Harburg) on an Arlen tune, "Satan's Li'l Lamb." In the late 30s he was at Warner Bros., making hits with Warren ("Jeepers Creepers," "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby") and Richard Whiting ("Hooray for Hollywood," "Too Marvelous for Words"). When Warren decamped to 20th Century Fox, Mercer was paired with Arlen. It was a serendipitous marriage — of a musical style and a lyrical one, both rooted in the blues — that gave birth to six scores for the movies and two for Broadway.
Mercer put his mastery of the loose-limbed jive lyric to nifty use in one of his first songs with Arlen, "Hang on to Your Lids, Kids" — a vigorous 2/4 tune, solidly sold by Priscilla Lane and a band of musicians (including Jack Carson and the young Elia Kazan) riding in a freight car: "Hi-diddlee dum-dum-dum, / So what if we're busted, chum? / Hang on to your lids, kids, / Here we go again." Arlen's peppy scheme allowed Mercer to spin out the cheerleading imperatives ("Hang on to you hopes, dopes ... Hang on to your tops, pops ... Hang on to your cappies, chappies ... Hang on to your derb, Herb") and give voice to a who-cares communal spirit: "Ben Franklin, he said it all: / Divided we gotta fall; / United we'll have a ball / .... Here we go again." The same score had a croonable ballad, "This Time the Dream's on Me," which had hit versions by Woody Herman (#8) and Glenn Miller (#11).
The movie, then titled Hot Nocturne, was about a piano player (Richard Whorf) determined to form a jazz band. In jail with his buddies, he hears a black convict moanin' a blues number and is inspired to... well, to rip it off. Arlen had composed a complex 12-bar blues with a potent opening vamp — ba-DA-da da-DA-DA (whomp!) — and Mercer had written several verses, but none had the declarative strength to open the song. Then the composer saw a quatrain Mercer had discarded, and suggested it be moved up to the first verse: "My mama done tol' me / When I was in knee pants, / My mama done tol' me, / 'Son...'" A few more lines of nimble misogyny ("A woman's a two-face, / A worrisome thing / Who'll leave you to sing / The blues in the night"), and the what-the-hell brilliance in Mercer's onomatopoeic blast of train whistle ("Da-hooey da-hooey"), and the writers had a song that was an immediate smash. The movie was given the title of the song, "Blues in the Night," which produced five Top-10 recordings, including the Herman band's #1.
Then Arlen and Mercer went to Paramount, which drafted most of its contract talent (Hope, Crosby, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, dozens more) as support to the backstage shenanigans of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken in the war-effort musical Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). For me the star (billed 24th) was Dona Drake, who six years before had enlivened a wan Lew Brown lyric to a jazzy Arlen tune, "The Lady Dances," in Strike Me Pink. Mocking the strict Production Code, Drake did a hooch dance with so much top-body spin, she made her sinuous shoulders seem like a pelvis. In Rhythm, wearing a striped, spangled two-piece outfit with a saucy hat, Drake gives hip service, physical and vocal, to "On the Swing Shift," one of Arlen's hotter uptempo novelties with a jivey Mercer lyric that sounds like premature Little Richard: "Blow my topper and button my socks, / When the cats start jumping, the dance hall rocks."
Mercer performs other verbal handsprings in Rhythm. In the zoot-suit song "Sharp as a Tack (With a Belt in the Back)," Katherine Dunham compliments Eddie Anderson: "You ain't only classy, you are Heile Selassie." The movie's hit song (#1 for the Miller band) was "That Old Black Magic," danced by sexy ballerina Vera Zorina to a dreamy tempo that emphasized the melody's hypnotic power while shorting the pumping syncopation of Mercer's internal rhyming ("Your the mate that fate had me created for") and the palpitating thrill of the lyric ("Aflame with such a burning desire / That only your kiss could put out the fire... / Down and down I go, / Round and round I go, / In a spin, / Lovin' the spin I'm in, / Under that old black magic called love").
A FEW MORE FOR THE ROAD
For the Fred Astaire movie The Sky's the Limit, Arlen and Mercer wrote a big hit, the war-themed inspirational "My Shining Hour," about which the composer and music historian Alec Wilder, a famous fan of Arlen's work, wrote, "I admit to being so admiring as almost to lose my critical sense." "My Shining Hour" went to #4, in a Glen Gray version. But it is their solo number for Astaire that lives today in the soul of anyone who's had too much to drink and a romantic grudge to nurse: "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" is the ultimate saloon song, with its stark intro ("It's quarter to three..."), a daringly conversational tone ("You'd never know it, / But, buddy, I'm a kind of poet") and an elegiac melancholy that made it an ideal setting for Bette Midler's farewell tribute to Johnny Carson.
For Crosby, in Here Come the Waves (another chummy propaganda effort), Mercer contrived a jaunty, faux-gospel lyric to Arlen's "Dry Bones" tune: "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive." (You know the rest: "E-lim-inate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mr. In-between.") It's unfortunate, not to say unforgivably racist, that Crosby and Sonny Tufts perform the number in blackface. But what a superb rendition Crosby gives! Extending his supple baritone down toward the bass range, he sings the tune four times, each one more vocally ornate, more swingin' and scatting, than the one before. It's much preferable to the version Bing recorded with the Andrews Sisters; so rent the movie, close your eyes to Crosby in his Rastus makeup, open your ears, and savor.
After all their movie hits, Mercer and Arlen certainly thought themselves ready to take Broadway. Arlen had already had a 19-month run with a Harburg collaboration, Bloomer Girl, in 1944. St. Louis Woman seemed made for Mercer and Arlen: a black-cast musical, starring Pearl Bailey, with chances galore for the blues. It closed after three months, but it did gift American music with another standard: "Come Rain or Come Shine." Mercer's lyric is a string of cliches (High as a mountain, deep as a river; happy together, unhappy together). The Arlen tune begins with one note played 13 times ("I'm-gon-na-love-you-like-no-bo-dy's-loved-you-come-rain"). Yet the verbal banality and the musical repetition somehow merged into a deathless song. I can't explain it. But when I listen to Ray Charles' rendition, I hear a declaration of love beyond all reason.
SO LONG, BIG TIME!
The box office failure of St. Louis Woman didn't finish Arlen off. He wrote the scores for nine more movies; he put three more shows on Broadway. His theater music has its admirers, particularly at Encores!, the New York revival series that has unearthed Bloomer Girl, St. Louis Woman and House of Flowers, a collaboration with Truman Capote. Arlen's Broadway work took on a Caribbean inflection, with House of Flowers, again starring Pearl Bailey, and Jamaica with Lena Horne (who had made "Stormy Weather" her signature song).
After the war Arlen had endured a run of lousy movies with forgettable scores. The streak was broken in 1954, with two biggies, both using Ira Gershwin as lyricist: The Country Girl, for Crosby, and A Star Is Born, for Garland. That film had a memorable tune and performance: "The Man That Got Away," in what with Mercer became the identifiable mature-Arlen mode. (Wilder: "try to think of anyone else who might have written it.") In fact, the tune was written for in the mid-40s for Mercer, possibly to appear in St. Louis Woman, but Mercer's lyric didn't suit, so the song went into trunk, waiting for Ira. He knew that the repetitive notes of the first four lines required a litany of snowballing miseries. And he delivered: "The night is bitter, / The stars have lost their glitter. / The wind grows colder, / And suddenly you're older, / And all because of the man that got away." A beautiful job by the veteran.
It's sadly apposite that both of these backstage showbiz films were semi-musicals about alcoholics. Arlen's wife Anya, feeling isolated in Hollywood — deserted, actually, by a husband who loved golf almost as much as work — had been drifting into a private world. Harold would have his brother Jerry cart Anya off to a sanatorium, while he went binge-drinking. According to Jablonski, there were morning when he'd be found a sleep on a neighbor's lawn in Beverly Hills. They had their own demons; they weren't right for each other; maybe Mama Arluck had been right. But friends talk of Harold and Anya as a great love affair, with bright periods of gaiety to leaven the years of anguish, that lasted until her death, of a brain tumor, in 1970.
He kept writing through Anya's illness and beyond her death: He teamed again with Mercer (the 1959 Saratoga) and Harburg (the animated feature Gay Purr-ee in 1962). Both were flops. In the 60s he found new lyricists, often women: Peggy Lee, Carolyn Leigh, Dory Langdon Previn. None of these partnerships produced a hit song. He collaborated in 1966 with Martin Charnin on a Broadway show, Softly, and in 1973 with playwright Leonard Melfi on a TV musical, Clippety Clop and Clementine. Both went unproduced.
Arlen's music, with its long lines and innovative assonances, wasn't likely to coexist in the Age of Rock. His songs didn't have fluke reappearances on the hit parade (as Berlin had with "Puttin' on the Ritz" in a techno version in the 80s). His shows didn't get grand Broadway revivals (as Warren's songs did in 42nd Street). I think it's because his later songs and most of his show tunes had a complexity that didn't lend them to instant understanding. And since they weren't hits, they didn't get sufficient radio play (they didn't get any) to lodge in the popular ear. With Gay Purr-ee, he tried writing tunes simple enough for a children's movie, but the old Wizard sorcery was gone. Harburg seemed lost from the first song's first line, sung by Judy Garland in the voice of the cat Mewsette: "Take my hand, Paree." Hand? Cats have paws.
Yet in Gay Purr-ee there's another Harburg lyric — to one last Arlen rain song, "Little Drops of Rain" — that sums up, in the simplest terms, the achievement of the best pop songwriters. Attend:
Little notes that sing,
Little words that rhyme
Make the mighty memories
And the dreams of time.
That's one way to express our gratitude to Arlen. He may not be so very well-known, but when we sing the most eloquent blues, or the most poignant dreams in 4/4 time, his name is all over them.