Quotes of the Day
And the Oscar for Best Song went to... "Al otro lado del Rio" from "The Motorcycle Diaries"! Six Hispanics in the Kodak Theatre audience whooped and hollered, jubilant at the win of this ballad by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, while the other few thousand people at last night's Academy Awards clapped, politely but perplexed, at the victory of a song few had heard from a movie few had seen. If a question mark could applaud, that would be the sound of this baffled ovation.
Exactly 65 years ago, on Feb. 29, 1940, when the Best Song award was announced during the Academy Award banquet at the Cocoanut Grove, the Oscar audience didn't go "Hunh?" They went hummmmm. Or, rather, "Summmmmm ... where over the rainbow." The winning song had occupied a prominent, oft-played position in one of the previous year's most ballyhooed films, The Wizard of Oz, and was sung by one of Hollywood's rising stars, Judy Garland. The tune had placed four recorded versions at the top of the charts: Glenn Miller's #1, Bob Crosby's #2, Garland's #5 and Larry Clinton's #10. Everybody in the film business, and most people in the country, had heard and loved "Over the Rainbow," and their kin and grand-kinder would not be allowed to forget it.
Indeed, four years ago, when a panel of nabobs from the Recording Industry Association of America chose the 365 songs of the 20th century, "Rainbow" came in first. Yet the press release announcing the "Rainbow" triumph omitted the name of its composer, Harold Arlen, and its lyricist, E.Y. Harburg.
The slight was almost typical, for Arlen, born 100 years ago this month, is probably the most-sung unsung pop composer. He added dozens of standards to the American song book, and deserves automatic admission to the pop pantheon, alongside George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter. None of these songsmiths wrote "Over the Rainbow," or "Come Rain or Come Shine," or "Blues in the Night." Yet they are far more famous. In their own time, they were so renowned that each of them had a cheesy 1940s bio-pic made of his life. Why, then, oh why, didn't Arlen?
The runners-up for Song of the Century were Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," Otis Redding's "Respect" and Don McLean's "American Pie." (The press release didn't name Berlin and Redding either. The reason: the listing was by performer, not composer. So Garland got credit for "Rainbow.") FYI, two other Arlen songs made the list: the Lena Horne rendition of "Stormy Weather" (#26) and Louis Prima and Keely Smith's frenetic, musically astute take on "That Old Black Magic" (#265). That ties him with Berlin and Porter for highest number of individual songs among the classic pop composers. Gershwin's and Rodgers' tallies were diluted by inclusion of whole Broadway scores. (Overall winners, with five, were Burt Bacharach and the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.)
Anyway, our guy's song was #1. On whatever side of the rainbow Arlen now resides — he died on April 23, 1986 — his shade might have been pleased at the designation. And pleased again by the pretty noises raised in his honor for the celebration of his centenary. From last June through this November, from California to Cardiff, Wales, the music world is singing his praises. Two new CDs are out, one featuring big-band stylings with Arlen's son Sam on tenor sax. (Sam will be performing his dad's songs in a few weeks, March 22-26, at Feinstein's at the Regency in New York.) Yet all this attention only punctured, or maybe I mean punctuated, the genial obscurity of Arlen pere. He remains hardly known to the tens of millions who have been touched, warmed and lifted by his music.
GOOD LUCK, BAD LUCK
Here are ten songs from Harold's hit parade, all written between 1930 and 1935, the year he turned 30. Readers of a certain age will be familiar with them; most you will already have downloaded for life in your internal iPod. Savor the memories: "Get Happy," "Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea," "I Love A Parade," "I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues," "I've Got the World on a String," "It's Only a Paper Moon," "Happy as the Day Is Long," "Stormy Weather," "Let's Fall in Love" and the number Frank Sinatra thought so nice he recorded it twice, "Last Night When We Were Young."
Pretty impressive, eh, fellow geezers? It happens that the lyricist for all but two of these songs ("Paper Moon" and "Last Night," both by Harburg) was Ted Koehler, whose name is even less familiar than Arlen's; and that the two wrote many of these hits for revues staged at Harlem's famed Cotton Club, where everyone on stage was black and everyone in the audience was white. It must have pleased the songwriters to hear their numbers performed by the likes of Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters and Lena Horne and played by the house band: Duke Ellington's.
But while Koehler and Arlen were earning their uptown chic, Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira were winning a Pulitzer Prize for the show Of Thee I Sing. Four of Kern's Broadway shows were turned into Hollywood movies, which generated more fame and coin for his catalog with no expenditure of labor. Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had moved to California to write movie songs (like "Isn't It Romantic" and "Mimi" for Love Me Tonight) that were heard instantly in thousands of movie theaters. And Porter had The Gay Divorce on Broadway, with a number, "Night and Day," sung round the world and danced by Fred and Ginger in the film The Gay Divorcee. No Hollywood studio was going to make a movie of a Cotton Club revue. Arlen and Koehler had to be content with the royalties from recorded versions of their tunes.
Over the next decade, Arlen composed hits whose maturity and irresistibility that lodge them securely among the classics. "Over the Rainbow" achieved sustained prominence by the film's frequent network TV airings, as well as by Garland's making it her signature tune and singing it so often it became a joke. (In the 60s, each annual installment of Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievement Awards would keep the mounting tally: "Judy Garland has sung 'Over the Rainbow' 4,362 times.")
In the 40s, Arlen's collaboration with Johnny Mercer produced astonishments at a near-annual rate: "Blues in the Night" in 1941, "That Old Black Magic" in 1942, "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" in 1943, "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" in 1944, "Come Rain or Come Shine" in 1946. But the first four were in mediocre Hollywood musicals, and the last one ornamented the musical play St. Louis Woman, whose short run presaged the trouble Arlen would have writing hit Broadway shows. After that, only two Arlen songs — "Hooray for Love" (1948, lyrics by Leo Robin) and "The Man That Got Away" (1954, Ira Gershwin), both for movies — secured slots in the all-time juke box.
Chart position isn't the only or smartest argument for a composer's stature. Nor is the ratio of early hits to mature ones. Nor is the longevity of a Broadway show's run. But it is the case that Arlen wrote more evergreens — tunes that you (and I) can still hum — in his first five years as a professional songwriter than he did in his remaining 35; and that a composer's later songs are less likely to stick in the popular mind if the shows and movies he wrote them for aren't often revived.
Still, a lot of Arlen music did stick and, I suspect, will adhere forever.
ARLUCK
Q. What do Elvis Presley, Liberace and Harold Arlen have in common?
A. Each was a twin whose sibling died at birth.
From this haunted start, Hyman Arluck emerged into the world on February 15, 1905, in Buffalo, N.Y. His father Simon was cantor of the Pine Street synagogue, where Hyman sang in the choir. As Edward Jablonski tells the story in his excellent critical biography, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows and Blues, father wanted son to follow suit, but the boy dreamed of being a pop vocalist. The plot of The Jazz Singer could have been based on the Arlucks — especially when the grown-up Harold fell in love with a Russian Catholic showgirl, Anya Taranda, and married her. A home movie seen in the 1999 TV documentary Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Harold Arlen shows a smiling Anya and, next to her, the mother-in-law, positively glowering in disapproval.
In 1912 Simon and his wife Celia had another son, Julius; later known as Jerry, he would conduct some of his older brother's shows. In the documentary, Jerry's wife Rita said of the Arlucks: "They lived in a black community ... and they were very close to these people, and they were really a part of the family." If it's not literally true, as an early Arlen song says, that "I was born with the blues in my heart," then young Hyman certainly picked it up on the street. Anyway, he imbibed those two musical atmospheres, from the synagogue and the neighborhood, and would expertly fuse them in his music. To do that, for all the world hear him, he had to leave home. Which he planned to do in a hurry. As he later told Ben Bagley, who produced the 1970 LP Harold Arlen Revisited, "To commit suicide in Buffalo would be redundant."
At 15, the singer-pianist formed The Snappy Trio, which soon expanded to a quintet, The Southbound Shufflers. Later he joined the Yankee Six, which was also enlarged, to 11 members, and renamed the Buffalodians. This band toured the East, ending up at the Palace Theatre in New York City. By now Hyman had anglicized his name to Harold; and, taking a syllable from each parent's surname (Arluck, Orlin), he got Arlen.
He still wasn't writing many songs. Remember, he thought of himself as a jazz musician and crooner. "Harold sang like his father," Rita Arlen said, "in falsetto" — but with a southbound intonation. His tenor voice is thin, lacy; it wobbles as it warbles. That's not from timidity. Arlen, facing the mic, has the confidence of a showman who knows he can get an audience's attention by whispering, and can pour out a man's sorrows while sounding almost like a girl.
We know Arlen's vocal personality because he often performed in public, and in the early 30s recorded some of his own tunes. (There's one example on The Song Is Harold Arlen, the best Arlen compilation I've found.) And they were hits. Arlen's rendition of "Let's Fall in Love" went to #19, "You're a Builder Upper" to #6, "Ill Wind (You're Blowin' Me No Good") to #3 and "Stormy Weather" all the way to #1.
In those days, the phrase singer-songwriter was virtually an oxymoron. Kern, Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg all stayed behind the scenes. It's true that George M. Cohan, as the star, author and composer of his shows, enjoyed many hit records, by himself and others, a generation before Arlen. And in 1945, Mercer recorded two #1 songs for which he had written the lyrics: the Arlen collaboration "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" and "The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe," with music by Harry Warren. (At the same time, Hoagy Carmichael had a #1 song, "Huggin' and Chalkin'," but he didn't write it.) So far as I can tell, in the decades between Cohan and Mercer, only Arlen sang one of his own tunes to the top of the charts.
To sing his own hits, though, he would first have to write some.
GET HAPPY
The first 20 years of the last century saw a remarkable turnover in the ethnic background of pop composers. In the early 1900s many of the top ones were Irish (Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan) or black (Scott Joplin). By the 1920s, most were Jewish: Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Romberg. And most of these were interpolating Negro musical idioms into their tunes. Spirituals, the blues, ragtime — all got modified and transformed into pop. In turn, black singers, on stage and on records, would interpret the tunes. This collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes. It was pop's twilight of multiracial synergy.
Arlen got his chance to join the crowd in 1929, when he was working as a rehearsal pianist for a Broadway show. Harry Warren, who was already an established songwriter (and, by the way, an Italian-American), heard a vamp Arlen had confected for the dancers and suggested he work with Koehler to flesh it out into a full tune. The result was "Get Happy," which was performed in a Broadway musical called "The Nine Fifteen Revue." The show closed within a week, but the song became a hit — a cover by Nat Shilkret's band got to #6 — spawning both an Arlen-Koehler partnership and their employment at the Cotton Club.
"Get Happy" is a faux-Negro (or ofay) spiritual whose lyric encapsulates nearly every church-music bromide: "The sun is shinin', c'mon, get happy. / The Lord is waitin' to take your hand. / Shout Hallelujah, c'mon get happy, / We're goin' to the Promised Land." The music, though, is no slave to cliche. That vamp is an inversion of the race-track fanfare. (Arlen would use the real thing to lead off Act II of his orchestral Blues Suite in 1957.) The chorus has a sophisticated syncopation that's immediately memorable; and the second chorus, instead of simply repeating the first, kicks it up a third of an octave. After all that agitation, the bridge changes the mood with long. Long, ethereal notes seem to glide in slow motion as the lyrics go "headin' 'cross the river. / Gonna wash our sins in the tide. / It's all so peaceful / On the other side." The tune snaps back to the jazzy chorus and struts out.
LAND OF COTTON
Soon the lads were signed to write songs for the semi-annual stage shows at the Cotton Club, the province of a gangster named Owney Madden, who had served seven years in Sing Sing on a murder rap. Arlen enjoyed spending time with the Cotton Club cast, and they seem to have afforded him the same affection and respect. They were surely grateful for the wonderful songs he gave them to sing. But there had to be an acknowledgment of privilege, whether or not it was articulated. Arlen, as a Caucasian, could invite guests to the show, dine out front, use the patrons' toilets; the black performers could not. The stage was their cage — they were there to be stared at. And except for a couple of headliners (Calloway, Waters), the Cotton Club singers didn't get to record the hit versions of the songs they introduced.
There's nothing innately sinister in the white appropriation of black musical culture. Its richness and vitality have inspired composers from Stephen Foster in the mid-19th century to Leiber and Stoller in the mid-20th and Randy Newman (whose music is a blending of Foster's and Arlen's) in the late 20th. It's just that, for most of that time, the creative synergy was one-way. Gershwin had no trouble putting his black-cast "folk opera" Porgy and Bess on Broadway, but Joplin couldn't get a producer interested in his Treemonisha; it wasn't given a full performance until 1973. Similarly, Arlen could, as a tribute, call one of his extended pieces the Americanegro Suite, to which Koehler wrote lyrics about a "kinky head, inky head" child called the Ace of Spades, whose Pappy is occupied "rollin' de bones with de men folks." Even granting that no hostility was intended, it was always whites interpreting black culture for whites — and blacks. Too bad Ellington was never commissioned to write a "Slavemaster Suite."
The Arlen-Koehler songs were influenced not just by the tonal patterns and patois of African-American music, but by pop hits of the time. "Let's Fall in Love" (from Arlen's first movie score, in 1934) is a lovely, bouncy ballad, about that first romantic intoxication, with a bridge that swoops and preens in the finest Kern fashion. "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea," from their March 1931 show
There are bound to be similarities when dozens of composers are working with the 32-bar scheme of chorus, chorus, bridge and chorus, often with an identical chord sequence (three gusts of C, A-minor, F and G, ending on C, G, C). What's amazing is that they found so many rich variations within that tight format: "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," "I Got Rhythm," "We're in the Money," thousands more. "Stormy Weather" too, though with some of the notes flattened, a favorite device of the blues-influenced Arlen.
As Harry Warren was famous for songs about trains ("Chattanooga Choo Choo," "Atchison, Topeka"), so Arlen was for songs about rain and rainbows: "Stormy Weather," "Over the Rainbow" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," Not to mention "I've Got the World on a String" ("Sittin' on a rainbow") and the 1937 Arlen-Harburg ditty "Speaking of the Weather" ("Speaking of the thunder, speaking of the lightning./ It's frightening, dear, what your eyes can do").
"Stormy Weather" establishes its personality with its first three mournful notes ("Don't know why..."), which practically turns any voice into a cornet with a muffler (wah wah wah). In a way, the music contradicts the lyric; the singer does know why there's no sun up in the sky — because lost love clouds the vision and inundates the heart. "Keeps rainin' all the time."
But it's the bridge I love most. The lyric is another Koehler laundry list of Negro plaints, this time ascending to a prayer: "When she went away, the blues walked in and met me. / If she stays away, ol' rockin' chair will get me. / All I do is pray the Lord above will let me / Walk in the sun once more." The music suggests a Negro funeral march (I see a New Orleans band moving, with heavy feet and spirits, ahead of a horse-drawn casket), to which Arlen sets an achingly gorgeous phrase — played, with just a one-note variation, three times — that explodes (at "Walk in the sun once more") into a plangent phrase reminiscent of Foster's "Old Folks at Home." It's a song that summarizes a century of pop music, and sounds fresh and potent nearly three-quarters of a century later.
Now Arlen and Koehler needed a singer. They wrote it for Calloway, but he had left the Cotton Club. The Club's producer, Ted Healy, sought out Waters, who for a couple years had exiled herself to Chicago, where she sang in Al Capone's speakeasies. Now she was back. The songwriters played their new number for her, and she was sold. If a great song can lift spirits, it can also reshape careers. Jablonski quotes Waters' memory of her opening night: "When I got there in the middle of the Cotton Club floor, I was telling things I couldn't frame in words. I was singing the song of my misery and confusion.... [T]hat enabled me to do one hell of a job on 'Stormy Weather.'" The audience pressed her for 12 encores. Berlin, who saw Waters at the Club, cast her in his new show, As Thousands Cheer and wrote some terrific songs, including "Heat Wave" and "Harlem on My Mind."
After his success at the Cotton Club, Arlen was ready to move from Harlem to Hollywood. He should have been warned, by Rodgers and Hart and other transplanted songwriters, that though the weather and the pay were great in California, the working conditions were not. Composers for New York shows, uptown or midtown, were contractually guaranteed creative authority. In Hollywood they were just another bunch of employees, whose work could be used or discarded by the director or producer. Arlen and his lyricist partners (Koehler, Harburg, whoever) might write seven or eight songs for a movie, and count themselves lucky if two or three made the final cut. And any studio boss was tougher than Capone and Owney Madden put together. No murdering gangster could match a mogul for chromium cojones.
The songs of Arlen's first few years in Hollywood have a pleasant, familiar air. "Calabash Pipe" (lyrics by Lew Brown), a perky duet for Eddie Cantor and Ethel Merman in Strike Me Pink, has the sing-song first eight bars of "I Like to Do Things for You" sung by the Rhythm Boys (with Bing Crosby) for Paul Whiteman in 1929. For an uptempo Dick Powell number in Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of 1937, Arlen and Harburg wrote very much in the style of the studio's reigning song team, Warren and Al Dubin. Indeed, "Speaking of the Weather" takes its cue from the Warren-Dubin "Pettin' in the Park" (also sung by Powell) in the first Gold Diggers (of 1933).
Arlen and Harburg got together as a full-time songwriting team in 1934, with their revue Tonight at 8:40 (written with Ira Gershwin). Harburg, known as Yip (supposedly short for yipsel, which is squirrel in Yiddish), would become Arlen's most intense and simpatico collaborator — four Broadway shows and 10 films spanning 30 years. I'll consider Harburg in a separate column in April, when the Manhattan revival troupe known as Musicals in Mufti performs two of his later shows. But he deserves mention for his work with Arlen in the 1936-39 period, when they had their first movie stint.
One of their could-have-been standards of the period is "I Love to Sing-a," from Al Jolson's swan-song movie The Singing Kid. On a brisk Arlen melody with lots of cool flat notes, Harburg strung bright beads of romantic doggerel: "I love to sing-a / About the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a / I love to sing-a / About the sky of blue and the tea for two / Ev'ryone loves to sing-a with a I-love-you..." I never saw The Singing Kid; for me the song is immortalized in Tex Avery's 1936 Warner Bros. cartoon I Love to Sing-a, with a woodland critter named Owl Jolson who defies his old-world papa to fulfill his dream of becoming a radio crooner. The song, the cartoon and little Owl have personality plus.
Harburg's most enduring work with Arlen, pre-Wizard, is the 1935 song, "Last Night When We Were Young," which memorializes the loss of love's luster, over time or overnight. You've heard Sinatra do it. The music is serviceable, the lyric profound:
Last night when we were young,
Today the world is old.
Finally Arlen and Harburg got a real job in Hollywood: writing a full score, 11 songs, for a film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Arlen, writing a score for a children's book, didn't write down to the kiddies; most songs are in a major key, and the jazz inflections are muted, but his melodies are as intricate as ever. Harburg had free rein to exercise his pinwheeling word-play: a dozen rhymes for "witch" in "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" ("Which old witch? / The Wicked Witch!"). Bert Lahr, the vaudeville star for whom Arlen and Harburg wrote "Song of the Woodman" in 1935, got another piece of special material, "If I Were King of the Forest," to perform as the Cowardly Lion. The little song cycle in the early Oz scenes — "Munchkinland," "Lullaby League and Lollipop Guild," "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" and "We're Off to See the Wizard" — are story-telling songs of the highest order.
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."
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").
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.
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,
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.
STORMY WEATHER
HOLLYWOOD AND HARBURG
Love was a star, a song unsung.
Life was so new, so real, so bright,
Ages ago, last night.
You flew away and time grew cold.
Where is that star that shone so bright
Ages ago, last night?
RAINBOW
LAWD A-MERCER!
A FEW MORE FOR THE ROAD
SO LONG, BIG TIME!
Little words that rhyme
Make the mighty memories
And the dreams of time.
