Sammy Cahn was my neighbor for a few years in California, and he used to tell me, “Drop over for a cup of song sometime.” I sure did.
Sammy was a courtly gentleman who, with his writing partner and composer, Jimmy Van Heusen, was considered to be practically Frank Sinatra’s personal songwriter. If you start remembering great Sinatra songs in any group of people, it will soon become a recollection of great Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen songs, too. “Come Fly with Me,” “All the Way”—don’t you hear Frank’s way with those phrases in your head as you read the titles? And then there was “Three Coins in the Fountain,” which Sammy wrote with Jule Styne.
Sammy was another of the great New York songwriters who rolled out to Hollywood when movies were rolling out of the major studios and needed scores and songs done quickly. Sammy (who was born Sammy Cohen, but changed his name twice: to Kahn, to avoid being confused with an actor of the same name, and then to Cahn, because there was a lyricist named Gus Kahn) was a talented pianist and violinist. He formed a small band to tour the Catskills shortly after his bar mitzvah, which he told me displeased his mother. She had hoped he would become a dignified classical musician, in white tie and tails.
Sammy wound up playing music in vaudeville houses and said the experience ingrained in him a feeling for a strong finish that would bring an audience to its feet. Sammy pointed to the refrain at the end of “Three Coins in a Fountain”: “Make it mine, make it mine, make it mine!” and said, “Let people know they should applaud, and they will.”
“Three Coins in a Fountain” won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1954 (with Frank recording it, of course). Sammy teamed with Jimmy Van Heusen to follow with “Love and Marriage” in 1955, for a television production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (also sung by Frank, who played the Stage Manager). Frank helped them to another huge hit when he recorded “Come Fly with Me” in 1957. The song perfectly captures the poetic excitement of the great age of air travel, the first big jets and the feeling of being free and soaring above the world. It’s a romantic swing tune, but the stanzas soar from Bombay to Peru, and flying (“where the air is rarified”—a great internal rhyme) is half the fun of getting there. I particularly like the stanza, slightly racy, where Sammy wrote, “In llama land there’s a one-man band / And he’ll toot his flute for you.”
They wrote “All the Way” for Frank to sing for the 1957 film The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank gives a strong performance as Joe E. Lewis, a real-life Chicago nightclub performer (and one of Frank’s favorite drinking companions) who stood up to “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn of the Al Capone mob. “All the Way” has one of the smartest beginnings in popular song: “When somebody loves you / It’s no good unless he loves you . . .” Then there’s that slight pause in the roll of the words, a second of mystery and anticipation, before the end comes in: “. . . all the way!”
Sammy won four Oscars for “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “All the Way,” “High Hopes” (from the 1959 film A Hole in the Head—starring Frank Sinatra, too), and that beautiful ballad “Call Me Irresponsible” for the 1963 film Papa’s Delicate Condition (Frank made a hit of it, of course, but the song was actually first sung by Jackie Gleason).
Sammy Cahn was nominated for twenty-six Oscars for Best Original Song in a span over thirty-two years. That’s practically one a year. Almost any of the losers could have just as easily won, including “Come Blow Your Horn,” “Love Is the Tender Trap,” the piercing “The Second Time Around,” and “My Kind of Town,” the only part of the 1964 film Robin and the 7 Hoods that most anyone remembers. They were all Sinatra songs, too. Is there a pattern here?
Sammy was nominated for so many Oscars that songwriters wound up naming a songwriting award for movie songs “the Sammy Award.”
“All the Way,” “The Second Time Around,” “Time After Time,” and “My Kind of Town” are all standards in the music mix of how we live, and I sing them to this day. My old neighbor Sammy Cahn and his writing partners gave us all many beautiful “cups of song” to take through our lives.
Spring in Central Park