“Never treats me like a gentile …”
—Dean Martin, singing the opening line of Duke Ellington and Paul Francis Webster’s “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”
The most talked-about celebrity biography of 1992, Nick Tosches’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, didn’t even get mentioned that year in The New York Times Book Review. The Times somewhat atoned for that oversight by commissioning Tosches to write an “Arts and Leisure” think piece after Dean Martin’s death on Christmas Day 1995; it was fortuna that the ultimate party animal somehow checked out on a day when everybody was celebrating. However, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out why the paper of record saw fit to overlook Tosches’s full-length opus on Rat Pack existence. It wasn’t merely that too much of the book was in Italian or even, to use an archaic euphemism, the kind of “French” that generally has to be pardoned. What the Times probably objected to was the author’s attempt to tell Martin’s story from an interior point of view, his use of a stream of consciousness that purported to reflect what his subject was actually thinking at every stage of his life. The author’s outrageousness and his extremely thorough research combined to produce the kind of book that resists being put down, even if the copious sources listed in the appendix would seem to be at odds with the notion that Tosches had created some kind of a reality-inspired novel.
It’s also one of the most entertaining showbiz books I’ve ever read. Still, it concentrates on Martin’s personal life and his films, giving his musical career third priority at best. In reaching this conclusion as an author, Tosches is elaborating on what he concludes is the central tenet of Martin’s existence—that it was his lifestyle and personality that made him an icon, and that the actual work itself was merely secondary. Martin’s greatest achievement was not his body of work, it was himself.
The most quotable line Tosches extracts from Martin is “I hate guys that sing serious,” uttered during a nightclub appearance at the Riviera, Las Vegas, in December 1971, so to study Martin’s canon as if he were a “serious” singer may well be to miss the point. Yet there’s a lot to be said about his music. Despite the singer’s own attempts to dissuade everyone from taking his work the least bit seriously, he turns out to be, in retrospect, one of the major popular singers of his generation.
Bing Crosby once described Perry Como as “the man who invented casual,” although that term applies more accurately to Bing himself. Still, neither Crosby nor Como had anything on Martin in the casual department. Before Martin, pop singers may have been relaxed, but Martin brought “casual” to new heights of alcoholic insouciance. He blurred the distinction between the merely cool and the totally indifferent. Martin was casual almost to the point of unconsciousness, projecting the idea that he never had to put the least effort into his work; that he could just fall out of bed in his immaculately pressed tuxedo, roll toward the microphone, and open his mouth—and not even have to stay awake long enough to get through a whole chorus. Does it matter if this was actually true—that Martin really couldn’t care less—or if it was all carefully calculated showmanship? No more than it matters whether Martin really was as much of a lush as he wanted audiences to think. Tosches repeatedly invokes the Italian concept of menefreghista—of being simply incapable of giving a damn.
He was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio, a first-generation American. Steubenville was foremostly a steel mill town, but it was just as much in the business of entertaining its hardworking metal-helmet men with nightclubs, bars, gambling houses, and brothels. As a young man, Dino realized that there were ways to get by without having to follow the traditional route: hard work, first in the classroom, then on a job. Deciding he was smarter than his teacher, he quit school at the age of ten, and as a teenager worked in gambling halls and, briefly, as a professional boxer. He was singing professionally by 1934, with such local bandleaders as George Williams (at Craig Beach, Ohio), Ernie McKay (Columbus), and Sammy Watkins (Cleveland).
Later in life, Martin acknowledged that his two biggest influences were Bing Crosby and Harry Mills of the Mills Brothers, whose long legato lines anticipated Sinatra’s. In movies like Pennies from Heaven and Blue Skies, Crosby plays a carefree troubadour—a character directly in opposition to the role model of the typical American males of the Depression and war years, who were told that to beat the wolf at the door and the Nazis, they had to knuckle down and be responsible and hardworking. Crosby’s character is more like that described in the Italian folk song “The Happy Wanderer,” who travels around from town to town with a song in his throat, a smile on his lips, and not a care in the world. Dean Martin would take that idea several steps further: Not only couldn’t he be bothered to hold down a job, he wouldn’t even stay awake or get sober. He wouldn’t even put any effort into partying. He would make himself into the Antichrist of bourgeois respectability and responsibility.
The earliest recording by Dino Crocetti that’s known to exist is a demo of “I Surrender Dear” (not coincidentally, one of Crosby’s first hits), probably recorded in Ohio in the late thirties, done well before the singer changed his name or his nose. Martin sings the main melody à la Crosby, while behind him a four-part vocal group harmonizes the tune in an arrangement that owes much to the Millses. The backup singers sound as if they could be Martin himself, via overdubs, which was a rare practice before the advent of recording tape, but which was certainly technologically feasible.
In 1943, Martin hit New York, following Frank Sinatra at the Riobamba, but not quite cracking the big time. He sang all over town, landed a local radio show in the mid-forties, and screen-tested for MGM, but nothing much happened until he met Jerry Lewis. That was in 1946, when the twenty-nine-year-old Italian crooner and the younger Jewish comic happened to be booked on the same bill at the 500 Club in Atlantic City. The two started improvising bits together, and somehow they seemed to fit—before they knew it, they were a team. Inspired by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, who reached their zenith in the war years, Martin and Lewis reinvented the Crooner-and-Stooge duo for the Age of Anxiety.
Martin later said, “Two of the greatest turning points in my career were, one, meeting Jerry Lewis and two, leaving Jerry Lewis.” However, in the ten years they were together they became one of the biggest acts across the entire panorama of mass media—nightclubs and theaters, radio and TV (especially the latter), motion pictures and recordings.
Martin’s first commercial waxings were made for a series of independent labels, Diamond, Apollo, and Embassy, in 1946 and 1947. Then in 1948 he was signed to Capitol, not on the strength of his earlier recordings but because of the boffo business he was doing with Lewis, and his first session for the label was as half of Martin and Lewis. A year later, they made their first of sixteen movies, My Friend Irma; their longtime producer, Hal Wallis, later said that no one ever lost money on an Elvis Presley picture, but he could have just as easily said the same thing about Martin and Lewis.
Jerry Lewis has been extremely generous to his former partner in histories edited by others—not only to Tosches but to Bob Waldman, who wrote the excellent documentary on Martin for the A&E TV Biography series (and in his memoir, Dean and Me, written with James Kaplan). In both these accounts, Lewis all but gushes with praise—how Dean was the whole act, how Jerry would have been nothing without him, etc. But Lewis’s own compilations of highlights from the team’s Colgate Comedy Hour appearances tell quite a different tale. There are three video compilations of the team’s best television moments, all produced by Lewis and shown on the Disney Channel, and in all of them, Martin is even more marginalized than he was in the team’s original films and TV appearances. By way of example, in one of Lewis’s early post-Martin films, The Geisha Boy, his co-star is a rabbit named Harry Hare, and this rabbit gets considerably more to do than Martin does in most of their films together.
Martin later said that, out of necessity, the M&L films were 65 percent Lewis and 35 percent Martin, and that the only way he could grow as an actor was to get out of the partnership. Such a move was even more necessary to accelerate his growth as a vocalist. Nineteen fifty-six would seem an unlikely time for him to relaunch his career as a solo pop singer: He was pushing forty, and rock ’n’ roll had already taken over the singles market. Yet even as his number-one disciple, Elvis Presley, was increasingly gearing his music to teenagers, Martin, in distancing himself from the childlike idiot-savant Lewis, was establishing himself as the most adult-oriented of pop stars. As the fifties gave way to the sixties, he exemplified how the older generation let loose, with a martini in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other, never seen in anything less than a tuxedo; always slightly buzzed if not totally umbriago.
Martin remained somewhat relevant to the younger generation, however—some kids must have thought he was Elvis’s Italian uncle. Indeed, all three Rat Packers—Sinatra, Sammy Davis, and Martin—would consistently hit the charts in the age of flower power. Martin was gradually introducing a kiddie pop element to his music in such singles as “Let’s Be Friendly,” and 16th-note-based quasi-rock, as on “Just Kiss Me”—in fact, he did both at a single session in August 1956.
If you take Martin’s usual singing and apply a little more vibrato to it, you end up with something that sounds suspiciously like Elvis. Founding father Bing himself did this in a patter chorus on his 1950 hit “Sunshine Cake,” as did the Four Freshmen in their atrocious version of “Mood Indigo.” For much of his career, Martin also predicts Presley—and when his producers started giving him rock ’n’ rollish backgrounds after “Memories Are Made of This,” it was hardly surprising that he should appeal to the Presley market.
Presley admitted trying to copy Crosby in his most musically successful early ballad, “Love Me Tender,” and “It’s Now or Never,” based on the old Italian folk song “O Sole Mio” (which both Dean Martin and Tony Martin had sung as “There’s No Tomorrow”), marks Presley’s most Dinoesque performance. Martin would later spend most of the sixties in pseudo-Nashville, under the guidance of producer Jimmy Bowen, a onetime Elvis-inspired rockabilly singer who had graduated to producer and who would later make his mint in Christian rock. It’s worth noting that around the same time as the initial “Memories Are Made of This,” another hit maker of an earlier era, the somewhat-folky Mitch Millerite Guy Mitchell, landed an immediate post-Elvis hit in 1956’s “Singin’ the Blues.” Where rockers of the Nixon era (and later rappers) cursed and swore onstage, Tosches depicts Martin and company as uttering an unending stream of profanity whenever they’re off it. Where the rock ’n’ rollers wore leather jackets and tried to look like juvenile delinquents—and in more recent years evolved into gangsta rappers—Sinatra and Martin hung with real-life gangsters like Sam Giancana, who proved that not all menaces to society are hip-hoppers.
The Rat Pack experience has, on the whole, been greatly overstated. Although Martin and Sinatra were friends for forty years, the part of their career where they occasionally worked as a trio with Sammy Davis Jr. (and occasional hangers-on like Peter Lawford or Joey Bishop) was only a minor chapter in their careers. The collective is probably best remembered by their two films, Ocean’s Eleven and Robin and the 7 Hoods—both of which boast ingenious twist endings. Despite their ideal of spontaneity, the Pack came off best when sticking to a script. Even their most carefully edited best inperson moment, a five-minute segment released as “The Summit” on Sinatra’s 1965 A Man and His Music, is the only unlistenable portion of the Chairman’s career compilation album.
In the mid-nineties, around the time Martin and then Sinatra went to the big saloon in the sky (and the original Sands was razed), there was a revival of interest in the Rat Pack, along with what marketing geniuses chose to repackage as “lounge music” and retro swing. In retrospect, most of the Rat Pack’s surviving performances, when listened to in the sober light of history, are deadly dull. Like the Nixon tapes, the unedited reels of the Rat Pack tell the whole story. Two and a half hours of the Rat Pack in full flight, not in Vegas but at the Villa Venice in Chicago, at the height of the Kennedy era in 1962, were released in semi-under-the-counter fashion on the Jazz Hour label in 1993. Divided onto two discs, the first, which contains most of the music (and the least time of the threesome onstage simultaneously), is actually quite bearable—particularly Martin’s segment—but the second is devoted almost exclusively to lame drunk/sexual/ethnic jokes.
At least in “The Summit,” producer Sonny Burke deemed it more acceptable that Davis should be the one to deliver the ethnic (referring to Martin and Sinatra as “jolly Neapolitans”), religious (“They sing good for goyim, don’t they?”), and sexual (affecting a gay lithp) jokes. At the Villa Venice all three indulge in almost nothing but. (Martin’s “Do you know how to make a fruit cordial?” is the best of them!) It isn’t merely that you had to be there—I know people who were there who found the Rat Pack antics tire-some—you had to be drunk, too; in fact, the more you drank, the funnier the Rat Pack seemed. Perhaps their most noble accomplishment was increasing our admiration of Sinatra. He may not have been as funny as Martin or as animated as Davis, but as a singer he has them both beat by more than a mile—where Davis tries too hard and Martin not enough, Sinatra is the most keenly aware of when you should jump in an audience’s face and other moments when you should play it cool.
But Martin was by far the funniest member of the Rat Pack in a way that Sinatra obviously envied. As good he was with Davis and Sinatra or Lewis, Martin was truly at his best by himself—and he was virtually the only major traditional pop singer whose forte was not the Great American Songbook; he did much better with ephemeral novelties than he did with Cole Porter. He preferred to use the great works of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley as fodder for his parodies (such as the immortal “You made me love you/I didn’t want to do it/You woke me up to do it”). He was also, by and large, a much stronger singles singer than he was an album-oriented artist. Martin’s best “concept” LP in the traditional sense was more or less his first, the 1955 Swingin’ Down Yonder, a Dixieland set inspired by Bing and Bob Crosby.
This becomes obvious in the two most widely available compact disc anthologies of Martin’s Capitol work, both of which were part of the mistitled Capitol Collectors Series, a collection of hit singles, and the Spotlight on Dean Martin disc, which is all standards. Martin proves himself the instant opposite of, say, Doris Day: His goofy little jukebox songs are superior pop music, whereas when he sings Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin he seems well aware that he can’t compete with Frank or Ella. As mentioned above, he is much better in the smaller scale of the 45 rpm single, where he has to tell a whole story in three minutes, than on the more ambitious canvas of a full twelve-song, 12″ LP. Most of the Spotlight collection is, in fact, culled from two albums, Sleep Warm and This Time I’m Swingin’!, and even though the former is conducted by Sinatra and the latter is arranged by Nelson Riddle, I would rather hear Dean Martin sing “Tona Wonda Hoy” or “The Sailor’s Polka.” The same material that would bring out the best in a Jo Stafford or a Steve Lawrence doesn’t even begin to float Dean Martin’s boat. (“Is that a U-boat?” “That’s notta my boat!”) He doesn’t even sound perfunctorily romantic on many of these songs—he may be heading for the bedroom, but as album titles like Sleep Warm and Dream with Dean indicate, it’s only so he can sleep it off.
Martin’s number-one strength is Italian songs—both real and ersatz; in all of American pop, there’s no one who sings them better, with the exception of fellow paesano Louis Prima. His work with this material extends to a certain strain of American pop songs that depict foreign lands and cultures, though he doesn’t go quite so far afield as the Chinese and jungle exotica that Peggy Lee sang. Martin’s menefreghismo functions best when he stays closer to home with pseudo-Europeana—his songs of Italy spill over into similarly genuine and faux-songs from France (like “Relax-Ay-Voo”) and the Spanish-speaking (“Belle from Barcelona,” “The Peanut Vendor”) world as well.
Martin’s best music recalls the old joke about the drunk in an earthquake: The only time he can walk like a normal person is when the earth is shaking all around him. Martin is at his best in contexts that would make most straight-down-the-middle singers toss their tequila. For instance, Sinatra seems as if he’s stooping to something beneath him in his few recordings in Italian, which were over with very early in his career; in contrast, Martin’s Italianate items are the high points in his career. He’s more convincing in that medium—the same way that Marlene Dietrich can sing in tune in German but loses her intonation in English.
In the classic mob movie Donnie Brasco, the title character (played by Johnny Depp) uses the Italo-American slang term fugazi to distinguish between a real diamond and an artificial one. Some of Dean Martin’s Italian songs are the real thing, others are fugazi. Even so, when he sings a genuine Italian song, he often Americanizes it: One of his very earliest sides is “Oh, Marie,” done in 1947 for Apollo with a small band led by swing saxophonist Jerry Jerome. Surprisingly, this is mostly a swing version of the traditional Italian song, with a Goodmanesque clarinet solo by Johnny Mince. Even though both choruses are in Italian, the first is hot and lusty, and as close as Martin ever came to making a jazz record, and even though the second chorus is much straighter, he sings it robustly and convincingly. It doesn’t matter whether the songs are real or fugazi, or whether he sings them old-school or modernizes them in some way, it’s the spirit of Italy that inspires him, not the specifics.
No other form could so perfectly have accommodated the specifics of Martin’s chops. For a resonant baritone, Martin had a way of hitting high notes in something like falsetto, almost as if he were cracking through his range to emit endearingly squeaky sounds. In fact, on his second country album, Dean “Tex” Martin Rides Again, Marty Paich’s arrangements make him sound suspiciously like pop’s other great squeaker and rasper, Ray Charles, on the latter’s Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music album (also orchestrated by Paich). With Richard Rodgers such squeaks would sound inappropriate, although Martin makes them work on silly twenties and thirties baubles like “Who’s Your Little Who-Zis?” (not exactly a standard) as well as on “An Evening in Roma,” “Volare,” “Buona Sera,” and what sounds like a vocal flaw becomes a bona fide technique.
“That’s Amore,” a Hollywood hit (from M&L’s The Caddy) by the Italian-American Harry Warren, is quintessential Dean Martin. The song had a revival in his lifetime, when it was used over the main titles of the hit 1987 film Moonstruck, and it perfectly set the mood for that Italo-American-themed romantic comedy. “That’s Amore” has him bringing his massive sense of humor as well as all of his considerable charm to the fore, and his high-low voice never sounded righter. The very pasty, Americano-sounding chorus contributes, on some level, to the camp atmosphere, as does the concertina and all the men with those mandolinos. However, the climactic moment is breathtaking: just before the last chorus, Martin, in cahoots with the choir, relaxes, then ritards—like a pitcher winding up for a throw—and then just lunges into it.
Another Italo-American cocktail, “An Evening in Roma,” is equally good. If there were an Italian-English equivalent of franglais or spanglish this would be it. The lyric cleverly offers words in both languages, translating as it goes along: “Down each avenue or via/Street or stretta …” Martin hits precisely the right tone and character, part affectionate, part leering, part lecturing, part wishing to participate himself (“On each lover’s arm/A girl I wish I knew”), and how can you not love a text that rhymes “espresso” with “I guess so”? Both are exhilarating discs—and nothing less than classic American pop.
It’s surprising, then, that Martin recorded only one all-Italian album, the 1961 Dino: Italian Love Songs—and it’s particularly disappointing that he didn’t cut an Italian set for Reprise, especially as he would do Latin-style collections for both companies. (He switched to the Sinatra-owned label in 1962.) He was almost as good with mambos and other Pan-American rhythms: It was Martin’s recording of the Cuban “Sway” that inspired his younger Italianate disciples Peter Cincotti and Michael Bublé to sing the praises of those marimba rhythms more than forty years later.
Dino: Italian Style was, in fact, his farewell to the Italian format, his biggest and final statement in that medium. Yet it’s not nearly as good as the various Italianate singles he’d been recording—nearly two dozen of them—over the previous fourteen years, from the previously mentioned 1947 “Oh, Marie” onward. Tosches is right when he claims that these earlier singles are considerably more powerful than the later album, and of the several songs he remade in 1961, particularly “Sorrento” (rendered with a different set of English words on the remake), the originals are superior. Dino: Italian Style also makes a point of including only genuine Italian tunes, yet producer Dave Cavanaugh should have realized that with Martin the difference is strictly academic. In fact, with Martin the ersatz can have even more impact than the authentic; the fugazi are more meaningful than the real stones from Harry Winston.
Some of his ventures into other musical territories are equally rewarding. Martin’s best French song isn’t genuinely French at all, but “Relax-Ay-Voo,” a glorious piece of ersatz by Sammy Cahn with a melody by Arthur Schwartz (they made a fine team) from one of the final M&L pictures, You’re Never Too Young (1955). The movie version has Lewis, as usual, pulling focus with his spastic dancing, but the Capitol “Relax-Ay-Voo” is a Martin masterpiece, duetted with the charismatic French actress-singer Line Renaud. (Dino French Style should have been titled In the Oui Small Hours.)
The two Latin albums, Cha Cha de Amor (1961) and Dino Latino (1962), are also superior Martin, making the case that he’s better at South American songs than North American ones. He sounds especially fine on the Brazilian “Amor” and “Let Me Love You Tonight,” and there are also appealingly Latinized versions of American tunes. He also renders French songs, “I Wish You Love” and “Two Loves Have I,” very expressively here with a Latin background. The Cha Cha album climaxes with the Yiddish “I Love You Much Too Much,” which he puts over so convincingly and with so much chutzpah (not to mention nachus) that one wishes his next album had been Dino Hebrew Style.
Unfortunately, Martin had generally given up the Italian and other ethnic songs by the mid-sixties; by then his most consistently excellent and successful recorded work had a Nashville accent. His biggest songs of the sixties, like the simple and memorable “Houston” and the more complex “Little Ol’ Winedrinker Me” (kind of a country “One for My Baby” with a shitkicker sense of humor), are firstrate period pop. Producer Jimmy Bowen cast him as the first Spaghetti Western crooner and Gucci cowboy, crafting a pop sound for him that was equal parts Texas and Brill Building, which the two of them also applied successfully to such older songs as “In the Chapel in the Moonlight” and “Everybody Loves Somebody,” the latter generally regarded as his greatest hit and theme song. They don’t approach the level of “That’s Amore” and “An Evening in Roma,” yet they hold up better than a lot of other hits of the L. B. Johnson years.
Within a few years of Martin’s death, the German label Bear Family had begun producing a massive, four-box (thirty-two-disc) series covering his complete recordings. Memories Are Made of This contained all of his earliest work, including the Martin and Lewis years, while Return to Me covered the rest of his work for Capitol Records, 1955–62. (The first box is particularly valuable in that not only does it contain Martin’s ultrarare pre-Capitol singles, it also includes a fair amount of sound track, radio, and transcription material.) Two additional boxes, Everybody Loves Somebody and Lay Some Happiness on Me, finished off the Reprise years and beyond.
In addition to Bear’s complete studio recordings, several live recordings have been released since Martin’s passing, most valuably two shows: Live at the Sands in 1964 and 1967 (the latter issued as Live in Las Vegas by Capitol in 2005). The difference between Martin’s live and studio performances is overwhelming; it seems impossible that anyone could resist his personality and charm on these two live sets.
Martin’s contributions to American pop music were so idiosyncratic that they’re difficult to assess, and the comparison to his colleagues (like Sinatra), his influences (like Crosby), and his stylistic successors (like Presley) perhaps only adds to the confusion. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Dean Martin’s music as mere cocktail kitsch. Just because it ain’t serious doesn’t mean it ain’t art.
I find it ironic that Mary Martin’s original goal was to make it in the movies. When Martin, who was born and raised in Texas, originally left her native Weatherford, it was to travel west to Hollywood, not east to Broadway. When she did hit it big on Broadway in the 1938 Leave It to Me! she followed this up not with another musical comedy on the Great White Way but with a short but busy film career. She wouldn’t be seen on the stage again for another five years (and after starring roles in feature films). By that standard, her entire Broadway career was merely a consolation prize.
Yet by the time Mary Martin was finished, she had become perhaps the most exclusively theatrical of all Great American Divas. Even more than was true of the Mighty Merman, the magic Martin created on a stage was never reproduced elsewhere, certainly not in films. At least we have one movie—Call Me Madam—of La Merm at her best and in one of her classic vehicles, and through other appearances we can get at least a vague idea of what she must have been like in a theater. Martin goes down in history for creating the two most important female roles in Rodgers and Hammerstein—Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music—yet you’ll have to take the word of the critics (and listen to the cast albums) to realize how good she was. I don’t say this merely to rave about Mary Martin, I say it because I cannot tell a lie.
The most valuable visual documents of Martin come from television. Merman wisely used the small screen merely as a vehicle for her considerable talents as a comedienne—she never had the chance to attempt anything as finely nuanced as her Mama Rose characterization in front of a camera of any kind. Martin, on the other hand, utilized television as the perfect balance between Broadway and Hollywood, combining the intimacy of the one with the immediacy of the other. She took her Peter Pan repeatedly to television, and did it so successfully that even though James M. Barrie’s character has been played in every medium from Barrie’s original children’s play to his print adaptation to silent films to animation, the character is permanently identified with Martin. Very nearly as valuable, if less widely seen, is Martin’s 1957 television production of Annie Get Your Gun. She was one of the greatest of all Annies, easily outshooting the MGM Annie played by Betty Hutton (Judy Garland would have proven tougher competition), or Bernadette Peters or any of the Broadway-revival Annies of recent years.
Martin’s career was all about bridging extremes, starting with her voice—a comfortable low soprano or high alto, roughly in the precise midpoint of the female range. Likewise, few other performers seem as ageless—as simultaneously young and mature—as Mary Martin. That may be because she never got to finish her childhood: She was an adult by age sixteen, the year when she married for the first time (she gave birth to her only son, actor Larry Hagman, two years later). She was equally ageless at the other end of her career: Not only did she keep working into her late seventies, especially on television, but she never quite seemed like anybody’s grandmother.
Her finest achievement may well have been reinventing the classic character of Peter Pan for the postwar world. She played him with a warmth and believability that made both the character and the play more than just a simple exercise in nostalgia and nonsense for the Age of Anxiety. It seems almost beside the point that she first played the most famous boy in literature as a forty-one-year-old woman (who was just four years away from her first grandchild). Thanks in no small part to Martin, Peter Pan became the symbol of eternal youth, the boy who won’t grow up (not he). Likewise, the name of the character Peter Pan has come to exemplify a state of pan-sexual ambiguity, not quite boy, not quite man, and never more successfully played than by a grown-up woman. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that her other best-remembered roles—Nellie Forbush and Annie Oakley—are also sexually ambivalent, tomboyish women who do a man’s job. No wonder no one could out-Pan Mary Martin—even down to her alliterative name: Who else could be male and female, young and old, alto and soprano, even Mary and Martin, at the same time? As Peter Pan puts it, “It’s just that I am what I am, and I’m me.”
She was born on December 1, 1913, in Weatherford, Texas; her mom taught violin and her dad practiced the law; her first husband (Larry’s father) was a district attorney. She studied singing and dancing as a youngster, but (like Lena Horne) she interrupted her career to get married and start a family at a very young age. At the time that Larry was old enough to go to school, she began making the rounds in Hollywood, getting some work in clubs and on radio and doing screen tests and auditions for the various studios. Eventually she came to the attention of producer Vinton Freedley in New York, who’d discovered Ethel Merman (and put her in Girl Crazy). And again paralleling Merman in that Gershwin hit, Martin was given the big number in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me! and wound up stealing the show. After the success of Leave It to Me! Martin spent the next five years in Hollywood, where she starred in eight films.
In this first phase of her career, Martin was presented as something of a love goddess (not in the least bit androgynous), which is literally what she played in the 1943 One Touch of Venus (her second show and her first starring role). In Leave It to Me! she made her impact by singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” the Cole Porter classic whose modulations between major and minor paralleled Martin’s fluctuations between Virgin and Venus. She sings “Daddy” in what accounts describe as a “mock” striptease, lascivious and innocent at the same time. “When I first sang ‘Daddy,’ ” she later wrote, “it never entered my mind that it was a risqué song.” Yeah, right! She reprised the innocent striptease bit in the 1941 movie Kiss the Boys Goodbye, in which she gradually sheds her clothing down to a bathing suit. Despite the title, the movie has nothing to do with the war in Europe or the draft. Rather, it’s a song by director Victor Schertzinger (music) and Frank Loesser (lyrics), which is a pretty neat sequel to “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Addressing her main squeeze as “Daddy,” she explains that the other “boys” she’s been seeing don’t mean a thing to her, she’s just kissing them goodbye before she marries Sugar Dad. Yes, she’s always true to Daddy in her fashion. “My Start” (aka “That’s How I Got My Start”) is another mock striptease, with Martin sarcastically describing her fall from virtue in such a squeaky-clean way that the Hays Office couldn’t possibly complain.
During her Hollywood years, Martin also established herself as a recording artist, if not quite a record star. She cut her first session, her two main songs from Leave It to Me!—“Daddy” and “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” (which she had performed with a bunch of other goils onstage, although she had the vocal all to herself on record)—accompanied by pianist and bandleader Eddy Duchin. From 1939 to the end of the war, she would record sporadically but exclusively for Decca, including the cast albums for One Touch of Venus, Lute Song, and her participation in a cast album of On the Town, although she wasn’t in the original show. (The bulk of her 78-era waxings are included on the Columbia 16 Most Requested Songs and The Decca Years: 1938–1946, reissued on Koch.)
For her first dates on Decca, producer Jack Kapp tried an interesting though unsuccessful idea: Kapp was a great one for diversity and unusual team-ups, and his first thought was to combine Martin with young bandleader Woody Herman. (Unfortunately, the only thing that they had in common was that they were both twenty-six.) Kapp tried to take advantage of her gender—and genre—ambiguity not only by combining with her the Band That Plays the Blues but by having her swing the classics, somewhat in the way Maxine Sullivan had done the previous year with “Loch Lomond.” Martin and Herman used traditional and classical material—two oldish parlor songs, “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and “Who’ll Buy My Violets,” and two lite classics, “Il Bacio” and “Les Filles de Cadiz,” rendering them first straight and then in swing time. The problem is that Martin doesn’t do either of those things particularly well, being neither a swing jazz singer nor an opera singer. (However, “Les Filles” would be successfully brought into jazz by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, while “Il Bacio” would become the Spike Jones canine classic “Il Barkio.”) None of these four cuts (which manage to be ersatz-jazz and ersatz-classical at the same time) was included on the Decca Years compilation, even though there was plenty of room for them.
In Hollywood, Martin was pleasantly paired with strong and mellow leading men like Bing Crosby (Rhythm on the River, Birth of the Blues), Dick Powell (Happy Go Lucky, True to Life, Star Spangled Rhythm), Fred MacMurray (New York Town), Don Ameche (as Lloyd Lloyd, in Kiss the Boys Goodbye), and even Jack Benny (Love Thy Neighbor). She was a perfect Crosby leading lady in their two films together: Like most of his female co-stars, she’s a civilizing influence. He wants to wear mismatched socks and go fishin’, she wants him to knuckle down and straighten up and fly right. Hilarity ensues.
In late 1942 Broadway beckoned, and she had two good offers on the table to return to the stage in musical shows written by veterans Vernon Duke and Richard Rodgers. For whatever reason, she chose Duke’s Dancing in the Street, which closed out of town, over Away We Go, which became Oklahoma! However, she had a major hit of her own in her thirtieth year with One Touch of Venus, in which she was paired with tenor Kenny Baker, another singer known more for his work in radio and movies than on the stage.
At the time, Baker was best known for predating (and outsinging) Dennis Day as the star tenor on the Jack Benny Program (he later resurfaced as the juvenile tenor in The Harvey Girls). One Touch of Venus was one of two very successful Broadway musicals written by the German composer Kurt Weill, who, at different points in his career, was both the most experimental of European avant-gardists and the most melodic of Broadway tunesmiths. By the 1960s, with the posthumous revival of his Berlin-written Threepenny Opera, Weill’s name itself be came a selling point, but during the composer’s short lifetime, he achieved his greatest success by writing for two legendary name-above-the-title divas, Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark and Martin in One Touch of Venus.
Originally the producers wanted Marlene Dietrich, who would have made a more characteristic Goddess of Love than Martin, as well as fitting in with Weill’s Weimar background. Dietrich would never make it to Broadway (her inability to sing in English and in tune at the same time was undoubtedly a factor) except in her own one-woman shows. Martin, however, was a sensation as a statue that becomes inhabited by a mythological muse and comes to life. She introduced three well-remembered standards: “Speak Low,” which became an instant jazz perennial, soon to be recorded by everyone from Glenn Miller to John Coltrane, and “That’s Him” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” which were kept alive by the cabaret intelligentsia. (She also sang a lovely Weill waltz, “Foolish Heart,” a song eventually overtaken by the superior Victor Young–Ned Washington “My Foolish Heart.”) “That’s Him” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” are particularly striking pieces of musical acting, hitting the same emotional notes Martin would later refine in her South Pacific triumphs, “A Wonderful Guy” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair.”
One Touch of Venus ran until 1945, and Martin’s next Broadway success was not until South Pacific in 1949. But she was far from idle throughout the early postwar era. A year after One Touch of Venus closed, she was back on Broadway with the ill-fated Lute Song. This was a decidedly odd book show out of the post-Oklahoma! land rush for integrated story shows. Somehow producer Michael Meyerberg and director John Houseman were convinced that the next Broadway bonanza was this unlikely Chinese fable, which, from the descriptions, sounds as embarrassing as Katharine Hepburn wearing slant-eye makeup and trying to portray a Manchurian peasant girl in the dreadful film Dragon Seed. Lute Song had two saving graces, though: Mary Martin and the very capable score by two songwriters who neither before nor after came anywhere near Broadway, Raymond Scott, the bandleader and composer of offbeat, cartoony instrumentais (and, in the eyes of many, a genuine musical visionary), and record producer-lyricist Bernie Hanighen, who’d collaborated on several standards with Johnny Mercer and Thelonious Monk.
“Ah so!” Apart from all the chinoiserie, Lute Song was unusual in other key aspects, beginning with the show’s very long three-act format. Rather than sporting a full cast of singing actors, virtually all the singing seems to have been done by Martin—who was occasionally joined by her own discovery, the future King of Siam himself, Yul Brynner, playing opposite her as “Tsai-Yong, The Husband.” There was also a lot of orchestral music, but Decca only recorded six tracks from the show, two of which were instrumentals. Martin did a lovely job with the only song to survive the show, “Mountain High, Valley Low,” whose strong minor key melody transcends faux-Asiana. The song turns up instrumentally on many a late fifties LP of so-called hi-fi exotica.
Later in 1946, the thirty-two-year-old Martin was called upon to relive her own past, reprising “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Night and Day, Warner Bros.’ highly fictionalized biopic of composer Cole Porter. More often, however, she would be called upon to re-create other people’s careers for various purposes. In 1943, Decca decided to do an album of the music for the hit show On the Town, but instead of doing a proper cast recording, they brought in the three comedy leads from the show—Nancy Walker and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green—and had Martin sing the two major “serious” songs, “Lucky to Be Me” and “Lonely Town.” She’s very strong on both, though “Lucky to Be Me” is particularly non-Broadwayish, done in a chart that goes from medium fast into swing time. In the fifties, Martin would appear in other studio cast albums for shows she’d never otherwise had anything to do with, including Girl Crazy (in which she’s convincingly laconic on “Bidin’ My Time” and rousing on “I Got Rhythm”) and The Band Wagon.
In late 1946 and early 1947, Martin ran for three months in another unsuccessful show, this one in London: Noel Coward’s semioperetta “musical romance,” Pacific 1860, which inserted her into another exotic setting. Neither side of the Coward-Martin equation (Coward’s partner, Graham Payn, played Martin’s leading man) was happy with the outcome, but she and the future Sir Noel would get together a decade later for a very successful TV special. That 1955 TV show, Together with Music, included Martin’s last attempt at classical music, in a straightforward reading of one of the most famous of all operatic arias, the “Un Bel Di” from Madama Butterfly, during which Sir Noel rather ungallantly interjected disapproving commentary from the sidelines.
In October 1947, she got into costume for a third occasion in two years, but this time with considerably more success, in what would turn out to be her most famous secondhand role, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Dallas turned out to be a doubly appropriate spot for her to launch her association with that role: Not only was this her home state, but it perfectly suited the show’s wild Western setting. (Irving Berlin even wrote a special chorus of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” for Martin to sing in Texas.) She toured into 1948 in the American road company production, even as Ethel Merman continued to play Annie on Broadway, and was so well received in the part that she and Annie would be reunited even more meaningfully a decade later. This was also the first time she worked with Rodgers and Hammerstein serving as the producers, rather than the composers, of Annie Get Your Gun. In the long run, Dick and Oscar were actually delighted that she had turned down Oklahoma!, because her presence would have compelled them to rewrite it into a star vehicle for her.
Between 1949 and 1959, Martin would create the three central roles of her career—Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, the title character in Peter Pan, and Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Ensign Forbush has the distinction of being virtually the only Rodgers and Hammerstein leading lady who’s a career gal, or something other than a wife and homemaker. (Aha! I hear you say, But don’t both Anna in The King and I and Maria in The Sound of Music work outside the home? Yes, says I, but their jobs are, in fact, taking care of children.) Perhaps because they were trying to create a believable working woman, a female executive type, they deliberately wanted a leading lady who was in touch with her masculine side, a tactic that came to a head in the cross-dressing number “Honey Bun,” in which Martin pranced in male sailor drag. Surely no other Rodgers and Hammerstein leading lady (such as Jan Clayton, Shirley Jones, or Barbara Cook) could have pulled that off successfully, although Martin’s Broadway replacement was the more conventional glamourpuss Janet Blair, who must have made a very different knucklehead Nellie (as was Mitzi Gaynor in the 1959 film). Likewise, the male romantic lead was the “cultured Frenchman” Emile de Becque (opera basso Ezio Pinza), a very different, less conventionally physical type than Curley in Oklahoma! or Billy Bigelow in Carousel. In fact, de Becque is the sort who would hire Curley or Billy Bigelow to do his heavy lifting for him while he sat around drinking French wine and reading Proust (and teaching his mulatto offspring to sing “Dîtes-Moi”).
Coincidentally, as was true with Kurt Weill, Mary Martin and Gertrude Lawrence were the only name-above-the-title headliners to loom large in the Rodgers and Hammerstein universe. In fact, after their seven classic shows had been established on Broadway, none of the many revivals has been dependent on star power; the name recognition of the shows has been more powerful than that of anyone in the cast. Yet they provided both South Pacific leads, Martin and Pinza, with a generous supply of showstoppers, particularly for Martin: “A Wonderful Guy,” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair,” in which she actually dumped water and shampoo through her tresses for six nights a week plus matinees—a bit of stagecraft that was as celebrated in its day as Peter Pan’s magical flight.
Rodgers and orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett supplied some musical stage magic as well: Because Martin’s voice was lower than most R&H sopranos, she was afraid that between herself and Pinza the show would be stuck with “two bassos” for leads. Thus there’s no classic boy-girl duet like “People Will Say We’re in Love” or “If I Loved You”; when Nellie and de Becque do get together musically, they don’t so much sing together as sing around each other, in “Twin Soliloquies.” Nellie is introduced with “A Cockeyed Optimist,” in which Hammerstein employs whimsical metaphors more in the style of Johnny Burke or Yip Harburg.
South Pacific was Martin’s greatest triumph yet (“Hers is a completely irresistible performance,” the New York Post raved, summarizing the opinion of most critics). There were more minor successes in the next few years, such as a well-received nonmusical comedy on Broadway, Kind Sir (1953), in which she played opposite Charles Boyer. In the studio, Columbia’s Goddard Lieberson had her record four albums of four classic show scores of the thirties: Anything Goes, Babes in Arms, The Band Wagon, and Girl Crazy. With On the Town a few years earlier, Martin had already shown how a single performer could do a substitute cast album all by herself—perhaps Lieberson thought that Martin was androgynous enough to be equally believable in songs written for both male and female characters. She was far from absent from the public eye—but her biggest blockbuster of all was just ahead of her, second star to the right.
Peter Pan is the central role of Martin’s career, and as noted, over the last hundred years, Martin has faced a lot of stiff competition. The character, created by Scottish playwright Sir James M. Barrie, and known as “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” was already immortal. Peter Pan made his Broadway debut in 1905, with the universally adored Maude Adams, and there were many revivals going up to 1928, as well as one of the most elaborate of all silent film fantasies, in 1924. Pan seems to have been forgotten in the rough years of the thirties and forties, but returned just as the baby boomers were old enough to appreciate him in the mid-fifties. Pan and his colleagues were revived with a vengeance in the postwar era, when three very different treatments were produced within a few years—and the only thing the three had in common was that, for the first time, the Barrie story was now serving as the basis for a musical.
In 1950–51, a partial-musical version (with songs by Leonard Bernstein) made it to Broadway with Jean Arthur (then pushing fifty) in the lead and none other than Boris Karloff in the dual role of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. (The show is a Freudian bonanza: Pan and the lost boys worship the very concept of “Mother,” but Barrie, from the beginning, envisioned the father and the principal villain as one and the same role—a concept that predates the morphing of the farmhands into fantasy characters in the movie versions of The Wizard of Oz.) The Arthur-Karloff adaptation of Peter Pan had only about five songs, which also marked one of the rare attempts by Bernstein to write lyrics to his own music. Then, in 1953, Walt Disney unveiled his animated version, with a decidedly more masculine boy as Pan (not voiced or acted by a grown woman, as had been the custom since 1905) and a fine, full score by two multiple Oscar winners named Sammy: Sammy Fain and Sammy Cahn.
At roughly the same time the Disney studio was finishing its feature cartoon treatment, a pair of virtually unknown songwriters named Mark “Moose” Charlap and Carolyn Leigh—both of whom would have tragically short lives—were working on a full musical theater production of the play. This incarnation had its tryout in California, the land where people fly, and where director-choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on beefing up the score by bringing in more practiced hands: composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green. As a result, each songwriting team—Leigh-Charlap and Styne-Comden-Green—wrote about half the score. And if that wasn’t enough, Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein was recruited to supply “incidental music.”
It turned out to be more than worth the effort: Between Martin’s performance, the magical stage effects, and the efforts of the five songwriters, this is the best remembered of all Peter Pans, the definitive musicalization of Barrie (you’ll note that no one has come along and written another one in the last halfcentury). When people talk about Peter Pan, this is the incarnation they mean. The characters and the story are inseparably identified with such songs as “I Won’t Grow Up,” “I’m Flying,” and “Never-Never Land,” just as the characters and the story of The Wizard of Oz are inseparably identified with “Over the Rainbow” and “If I Only Had a Brain.”
In 1905, Maude Adams created such an impression that she was still identified with the character fifty years later. Even before Martin and company started, Peter Pan was already an amalgam of British and American stage traditions, which Charlap, Leigh, Comden, Green, and Styne elaborated upon by setting the score in a wonderful variety of moods and tempos—mimicking Gilbert and Sullivan in the pirate songs, while Hook himself (Cyril Ritchard, the swishiest pirate in all pop culture before Johnny Depp) cavorts in tangos, tarantellas, and waltz time. “Ugg-a-Wugg” holds the record as the most gloriously politically incorrect of Native American love calls. “Mysterious Lady” is a surprise; cast roughly as a Spanish pasodoble (à la “Granada”), it allows Martin to parody a classical coloratura. Pan himself/herself fluctuates between playing Peck’s Bad Boy and father and teacher to the lovable little scamps whom he induces to fly away with him/her to Never-Never Land.
CQ: This insert doesn’t seem appropriately here
As Pan, Martin embodies the very essence of self-esteem and human empowerment in “I’ve Gotta Crow” and “I’m Flying.” No one could better personify the soul and spirit of Peter Pan than Martin in “I Won’t Grow Up,” refusing to put away childish things and clinging to bad grammar, and making the notes rise and surge on the words “never grow uh-up,” thereby stretching the humble “up” into two ascending notes—notes that literally “grow up” before our ears. Her Pan still strikes resonant chords in audiences, not because of the man-woman or even mother-child thing, but by continually appealing to that little bit of Peter Pan in each of us.
In its first run on Broadway, Peter Pan played only 152 performances but, again like The Wizard of Oz, Martin-as-Pan became a television phenomenon. Martin and the original cast performed it live on NBC on March 7, 1955; five years later, she donned Pan’s hose and fly-wires once again for the production that most of us know, which was made in full color and on videotape and was rebroadcast regularly from 1960 on. Between Pan’s two TV incarnations, Martin enjoyed still another teletriumph with Annie Get Your Gun in 1957. Having done the road company production a decade earlier, Martin, playing opposite one of the all-time most imposing Broadway leading men—John Raitt as Frank Butler—now took Annie to every medium between (but not including) Broadway and the movies: a sixteen-week run on the West Coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco), an NBC TV production, and an outstanding hi-fi Capitol album. Martin’s Annie Oakley—“Peter Pannie Oakley”—like Nellie and Pan, also moved beyond traditional gender roles: She’s the woman who can outshoot a man but eventually throws a match and accepts second-best position to marry him. (I personally prefer the revised nineties ending, in which the shooting match ends in a draw.) In either case, Annie thus breaks the jinx she had delineated in her opening scene: She can indeed get a man with a gun, but only when she suppresses her own talents with it.
It’s been said that Martin is a more feminine Annie than Ethel Merman—which is kind of unfair. La Merm, blustery and brassy as she was, never struck me as butch. Could there be a more extreme way for a woman to prove her heterosexuality than to marry Ernest Borgnine? It would be more appropriate to say that Martin was both a more vulnerable Annie—“I Got Lost in His Arms” is probably the most tender song Irving Berlin ever wrote—and a more subtle one. Martin finds all the nuances Berlin wrote into “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” which might be his cleverest piece of wordplay, proving that he was fully the equal of such specialists in tricky wordage as Noel Coward, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter.
In “I’m an Indian Too,” Martin ran afoul of future Native American antidefamation leagues for the second time in three years. But though it may be politically indefensible, here Berlin and Martin rattle off the names of several dozen American Indian tribes in a manner every bit as clever as the way Ira Gershwin and Danny Kaye utilized the names of Russkie composers in “Tchaikovsky (And Other Russians),” employing the names of “Chippewa, Iroquois, Omaha” for their sonic value, the tongue-twisting novelty of the way these names sound. (Blane, Edens, and Martin utilized the same idea around the same time for “Pass That Peace Pipe” in the MGM version of Good News.) Martin doesn’t sing the verse to “I Got the Sun in the Morning” but uses the chorus like a verse, first slow like a ballad, then taking the second chorus in a rousing dance tempo. (The orchestrator isn’t credited, but whoever he is, he supplies some jazzy big band dissonances in the brass voicings here.)
As Annie Oakley-as-an-Indian, Martin sings of having “three papooses on the way.” The third papoose would arrive in 1959 (after Martin had appeared in a limited-run revival of The Skin of Our Teeth in summer 1955; this also was televised) and be titled The Sound of Music. This was the third project in a row in which she toted around a bunch of toddlers, following after the lost boys in Peter Pan and the brood of little brothers and sisters who help her do what comes naturally in Annie. It would also be the final blockbuster megahit for Martin, as well as for Oscar Hammerstein (who died shortly after it opened) and, surprisingly, also for Richard Rodgers. There are those who feel that history robbed Martin of this triumph by casting Julie Andrews in the 1965 movie version, but Andrews was not only younger and more European but more believable as a twenty-something Austrian novice-turned-nanny. In the vast scheme of things, the part of Maria does seem to belong more to Andrews than to Martin. The show cast the Jewish folksinger Theodore Bikel (an Austrian refugee like Von Trapp) as her lead, whereas the movie cast a Brit and a Canadian, Andrews and Christopher Plummer, as Teutonics.
The Sound of Music was fundamentally different from the six other widely successful R&H productions in the way it has been received by its audiences. The other six seem more like classic Broadway shows that were eventually filmed, and though these movies are loved by millions, they seem like after-thoughts—the stage productions are the meat of the matter, and are constantly revived, both on Broadway and regionally. However, The Sound of Music, in the eyes of the zillions of people who love it, seems more like a classic movie musical that went through an intermediate step on Broadway before arriving on celluloid. The film of The Sound of Music was so overwhelmingly successful that people essentially forgot the show ever existed and that someone else had actually created the role of Maria. It’s seen relatively little attention on the revival circuit—there wasn’t even a full-dress Broadway revival until 1998: It’s as if no one wants to compete with the movie.
Yet Martin was by all accounts (and on the evidence of the Columbia cast album) marvelous as Maria, helping establish the story of the Von Trapp family singers, complete with nuns and Nazis, as one of Broadway’s great musical vehicles. Her opening number, cavorting on an Austrian Alp, was, if not quite a Dionysian dance of ecstasy, certainly an exuberant celebration that instantly grabbed the audience and set the tone for the piece. The Sound of Music presented Martin with her greatest kids’ songs, the solfeggioistic “Do-Re-Mi” (in which she teaches children to sing in a musical universe bereft of accidentals) and the story-song “The Lonely Goatherd.” She also introduced what may be the most enduring jazz standard associated with her (along with “Speak Low” and “Never-Never Land”), Rodgers’s evocative, minor key waltz “My Favorite Things.” Andrews gained a few choice songs in the film production, “I Have Confidence” and “Something Good,” for which Rodgers later wrote both words and music, but “An Ordinary Couple” and “No Way to Stop It,” which were not used in the film, remains the property of Martin and Theodore Bikel.
It seems unfair that Martin’s last triumph should be taken from her—especially since a few months earlier the film version of South Pacific had been released, with the more hubba-hubba Mitzi Gaynor as a suddenly sexy Nurse Nellie. Following The Sound of Music, Martin returned to Broadway in Jennie (1963) and I Do! I Do! Jennie was a quick flop, illustrating the failure of composers Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz to move from revues (like the classic The Band Wagon and Inside U.S.A.) to book shows (The Gay Life, with Barbara Cook, was another, but at least that had one great song in “Magic Moment”). I Do! I Do! was a two-character exploration into the magical world of marriage. It ran for more than a year and a half, but didn’t present Martin with any of her great songs or moments, and it would be hard to include I Do! I Do! in a list of Martin’s major career highlights.
Mary Martin was never regarded as one of the theater’s great voices—unlike her friend Ethel Merman—but it was a combination of charm and chops that made her an essential presence. In the sixties and seventies, she enjoyed some reunions: There was a television special with her old Paramount co-star Bing Crosby, and a well-received joint benefit concert with fellow Annie Oakley Ethel Merman (their names were dropped together to humorous effect in the “Rin-Tin-Tin” number in Bells Are Ringing) in 1977. A year later she appeared briefly in a shortlived romantic comedy entitled Do You Turn Somersaults? She kept going, even after the death of her second husband and occasional producer, Richard Halliday, in 1973 and a dreadful taxi accident (in San Francisco) a decade later that all but incapacitated her. There were more TV appearances, including, as Martin neared seventy in 1981, a special that was announced as the farewell performance for soprano Beverly Sills. But Mary Martin herself never gave anything like a farewell performance: She remained a powerful presence on TV (even as her son, Larry Hagman, found a genie and later became the most famously “shot” actor on the tube) and elsewhere until her death in 1990, as befitting a career that was always straight-ahead, second star to the right and straight on till morning.
“Hi, it’s Susannah.” As if she had to say the name. Like Blossom Dearie, Sarah Vaughan, even Tony Bennett, Susannah McCorkle not only had one of the most distinctive voices of any singer, but a trademark sound that carried over into her speaking voice. You knew who it was with the first word—like Tony and Louis Armstrong, she had a slight rasp to her voice, a catch to it (sometimes even a cry that could be heard on an up-tempo number like “It’s All Right with Me”) that gave her immediate distinction. McCorkle would have made a terrible undercover agent—there was no way she could hide who she was. Or so I used to think. After she died, those of us who knew her found out that she was more adept at hiding things than we had ever imagined.
When the phone rang on the morning of Saturday, May 19, 2001, it wasn’t Susannah herself, but rather news about her. When I learned that a few hours earlier she had jumped out of her sixteenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, I, like most of her friends and fans, immediately started playing all my Susannah CDs. My immediate assumption was that her songs of love and loss would assume greater significance with her death—that now every song of goodbye, every “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” every “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” and every “You Will Remember Me” would seem that much more poignant. How naive of me—and how unfair to McCorkle’s memory. She was enough of an artist not to need the boost of this extramusical circumstance to make her sad songs so effective. Besides which, she dealt in honest emotion, not sentimental excesses, and she’d have been the first to insist that maudlin mourning—even that inspired by her own demise—would have compromised her singing, not enhanced it.
The issue of Susannah’s voice is part and parcel of who she was and where she came from. Once, after a show at the Oak Room, I cornered her about her accent, explaining that I was no Henry Higgins but I thought that I could at least tell North from South, or New England from merry old England, yet when she spoke I hadn’t a clue as to what region could possibly claim her as its own. Now the Algonquin lobby, postshow, is no time to do this—it’s a moment when a performer needs to meet and greet, and to autograph, and more important, to sell product (CDs). However, she took pity on me and resignedly raced through a two-minute summary of all the places she had lived in as a child and an adult, and how her speaking voice was an amalgam of all of them. Within about ten seconds she had completely lost me, covering so much geography I couldn’t even begin to keep up. “And that,” she concluded, “is why I talk funny.”
In his obituary, The New York Times’ Stephen Holden appropriately used the word “peripatetic” to describe her childhood. She came from an academic family—her father was a professor who went wherever the higher-education grass was greener. In a certain sense this constant travel had its impact on her career. Firstly, in that having seen every university in America by the time she was a teenager, she decided to go to college in Europe when the time came. Secondly, in that her career as a singer likewise took her all over the musical map while remaining roughly in the area of jazz and the Great American Songbook. The titles of her albums tell it: From Bessie to Brazil, From Broadway to Bebop, From Broken Hearts to Blue Skies.
Because of her upbringing, and because she did happen to be a child of the sixties, McCorkle did get caught up in the movement that renounced traditional American values. For a lot of young people of that era, this was a kind of collective and extreme self-deprecation: The culture that produced me can’t possibly be of any value. Thus it seems perfectly fitting that she discovered jazz and the American songbook in Europe, where such art forms were not taken for granted the way they are here. McCorkle later identified Billie Holiday’s treatment of Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” as the record that did it for her, the one that turned her around and made her love the music. She was not only hooked by the jazziness of it all and the blues feeling of the song and the performance but by the profound sadness that Holiday had in her voice. As she once later told me, it took her considerably longer to appreciate Ella Fitzgerald, since Fitzgerald never exhibited that same kind of innate melancholy.
McCorkle had originally aspired to a literary life (an ambition she at least partially fulfilled), but on hearing this music she became determined to sing it. Her first gig of note was with trumpeter John Chilton, who, prophetically enough, is himself a musician and scholar-historian who specialized in both performing and documenting the older styles. She said that it was while hanging out with musicians, particularly those who specialized in the great songs, that for the first time in her life she felt a sense of community. London was where she met her first husband, the British pianist and arranger Keith Ingham (who, for some reason, was excluded from most of her obituaries). Ingham served as musical director for her early albums, which began with The Music of Harry Warren (1976) and The Songs of Johnny Mercer (1977), both taped in London.
At that point, it seemed as if Susannah McCorkle was virtually the only singer—particularly the only young singer—on the planet who made a practice of singing the Great American Songbook. (Even the great Carmen McRae, who employed that very phrase, was at the time recording Stevie Wonder songs with electric pianos.) McCorkle was so unusual in those days that her Harry Warren album was released on the World Records label, a subsidiary of EMI that specialized in reissues of thirties dance bands. The idea of old was new and radical then.
I first met Susannah around 1980, when she and Keith had relocated to New York from London; both she and I had lots of hair then. She was being interviewed by a friend of mine who did a show tunes program on WNYU, our college radio station, and I vaguely remember that the three of us drove to Harlem for dinner afterward. The inevitable question then, and for years to come, was, Why sing these songs? Why bring back the music of her mother’s generation? Why revive 4/4 time and swing-style 8th-note triplets? Why revive the AABA form and the 16-bar verse? Yes, she evoked the idiom, singing wonderful songs in a swinging fashion, but she was never merely retro. She never performed in period drag or acted as if she was trying to re-create the past. Instead, she made it live and breathe again in the present.
In her first American recordings, McCorkle continued her songbook series with two underanthologized lyricists, E. Y. Harburg (Over the Rainbow, 1980) and Leo Robin (Thanks for the Memory, 1983–84). She also made several albums consisting largely of newer songs in the standard tradition, The People That You Never Get to Love (1981) and How Do You Keep the Music Playing? (1985).
In 1988, she taped the first of what would be eleven albums for Concord Jazz, No More Blues, and that song (which she had earlier recorded in 1981) and her next album, Sabia (1990), consummated her love for Brazilian music. This often seemed to be the only material written after 1950 that excited her. She spoke fluent Portuguese and loved the bossa nova. Two albums and three years later (on From Bessie to Brazil, 1993) she recorded Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Waters of March,” which became a kind of signature song for her. She could be doing a whole program of Cole Porter or Irving Berlin at the Algonquin, yet her encore was always “The Waters of March.” Jonathan Schwartz once described “The Waters of March” as “the greatest song ever written”; it was a typical slice of Schwartzian hyperbole, but Susannah certainly brought the “Waters” into circulation among jazz and cabaret singers, and is responsible for Rosemary Clooney, Cassandra Wilson, Paula West, and others singing it.
“Waters of March” became so closely associated with her that, like a pop star endlessly reprising his biggest hit, she must have certainly grown tired of it. It was as if it was the only thing of hers that people wanted to hear—they wouldn’t leave until she sang it. The lyrics to the song are cryptic, even in the English translation, and according to Mark Murphy, Jobim wrote the song about the murder of a friend of his in Rio. When listened to with that in mind, the abstract, fragmented text (“a stick, a stone” … “a life, a death”) becomes somewhat more concrete. In the light of McCorkle’s suicide, it makes one wonder if future generations will treat her performance of “Waters of March” in the way we regard Bobby Darin’s “Artificial Flowers,” a song that directly foreshadows the singer’s own tragically early death.
From Broadway to Bebop from 1994 is probably my favorite McCorkle album. She’s got a little bit of everything on there, and even when some things don’t work as well as others, you still applaud the effort. There are classic tunes by the canonical show writers, all done with a little bit of a twist: an unusual treatment of Cole Porter’s atypical “Don’t Fence Me In,” Frank Loesser’s title song from “Guys and Dolls” done in flat-out swing and with the unusual “female” lyric (rare but not completely unprecedented), Rodgers and Hart’s “It’s Easy to Remember.” There’s also some exotica: a French song by Legrand and the Bergmans I’ve never heard anyone else do, “Once You’ve Been in Love”; a Broadway calypso, “I Don’t Think I’ll End It All Today” (about which more later); and “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” a forties Hollywood approximation of a Brazilian song from the Carmen Miranda songbook, which she makes swingingly authentic. “One of the Good Guys” (feminized as “girls”) had struck me as whiny and obnoxious in the off-Broadway revue Closer Than Ever, yet McCorkle made me love it; “Friend Like Me” was then a new Disney song in the classic Broadway tradition that she made work in the classic swing tradition. The only two tracks that don’t quite work are the two direct odes to the jazz heritage, “Moody’s Mood for Love” and Don Sebesky’s maudlin “I Remember Bill” (a soppy homage to Evans in the approximate style of “I Remember Clifford”). However, her vocalese homage to Chet Baker on “My Buddy” is winningly hip—so much so that she repeated the compliment in 1999 on “Look for the Silver Lining” on Hearts and Minds.
In 1995, McCorkle, who hadn’t made a songbook album in a decade, returned to the format. Having already tackled three songwriters who were almost never given the songbook treatment—Warren, Robin, and Harburg (Ella Fitzgerald ignored them all, songbook-album-wise)—she turned to the three most celebrated composers of the golden era: Porter, Berlin, and Gershwin. (If anyone cares, the Berlin album marks the only time I ever did liner notes for Susannah—I’m grateful she gave me that opportunity.) These albums are examples of how to make even much-sung writers sound new and exciting. All three sets contained little-known songs by these big boys that hadn’t been heard in eons. No one had sung Berlin’s “Love and the Weather,” “Everybody Knew but Me,” and “When You Walked Out Somebody Else Walked Right In” since the Eisenhower administration at least. Porter’s 1929 “Why Don’t We Try Staying Home” anticipates Dave Frishberg, and Gershwin’s “Will You Remember Me” (which McCorkle combined in a haunting medley with the little-known “Drifting Along with the Tide”) had never previously been published or recorded.
She also made very familiar songs sound as if we’d never heard them before, usually by means of rhythm: Berlin’s terpsichorean tunes “Easy to Dance With” (not all that familiar, actually) and “Cheek to Cheek” now became Latin dances, making you wonder what set of cheeks were being referenced. “Suppertime” is reborn as a blues, a feeling that also permeates “It Ain’t Necessarily So”—which McCorkle opens with one of the lesser-known verses, just to throw us off guard. “Anything Goes” is treated as a jazz waltz, and the national anthem of Broadway, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” here becomes slow and melancholy. “You Do Something to Me” contains echoes of “Miles Ahead,” while the Gershwin album is laced with hints of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” She worked out these arrangements with pianist Allen Farnham and drummer Rich DeRosa, but certain touches are distinctly her own, as on “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” wherein she takes part of the choral episode (“Porgy changed …”) and works it into an extra patter section in the middle of the song.
McCorkle, who wrote articles on Bessie Smith and others for American Heritage, was enough of a scholar of American culture to work a few of these albums into cabaret shows at the Algonquin, where for a decade she headlined annually. Her performances there were equal parts cabaret and jazz; in fact, the major difference, it seemed to me, was not in the music itself, but in the talking between the songs—most jazz singers, particularly younger ones, tend to say as little as possible, whereas cabaret singers prepare an elaborate script and concept. In the nineties, McCorkle was one of three star-singer-scholars who regularly worked the Oak Room, the others being Andrea Marcovicci and Mary Cleere Haran. All three of them would blend anecdotes and music into a seamless tapestry; still, I always felt that Marcovicci and Haran were somewhat better at that particular approach. McCorkle, however, had a much more substantial recording career, since her overall effectiveness was not predicated on patter and the in-person experience.
As devoted a researcher as McCorkle was, she was much better at talking about herself—strangely enough. Some cabaret artists are so self-centered that the last thing you want to hear them do is talk about themselves, and doing a historical show gets them away from that. With McCorkle just the opposite was true: She was so caught up in pop music history that it was a welcome stretch for her to get up and talk about her experiences. This she did very movingly in her final two shows for the Algonquin, the songs from which were captured on her two final albums, From Broken Hearts to Blue Skies (1999) and Hearts and Minds (2000). Both shows were lighthearted looks at contemporary life, about losing one love and finding another, which had recently happened to McCorkle, who had separated from her second husband. She set both shows in the second person (“Then you try something else”), but they were clearly autobiographical. These last two albums were among her very best, and McCorkle was never more effectively emotional than when singing Fran Landesman’s “Scars” (“Don’t be ashamed/Everybody’s got scars”)—both in person and on the CD, she really made you feel it. Even though the songs were old, she made them contemporary, and in general they reminded me of the romantic comedies of the nineties starring Meg Ryan and written by Nora Ephron in that old-fashioned romantic sentiment suddenly seemed relevant.
“Did you know Susannah?” many people asked me in the weeks after she died. I’m sure all her friends had the same answer, “Not as well as I thought.” I knew she’d had a bout with cancer about the time she turned fifty, and had gone through her second marriage and divorce. Only those closest to her knew that she suffered from chronic depression.
There were professional setbacks: After thirteen years, Concord decided not to make a new album with her in 2001. Likewise, the Algonquin had decided not to book her that year. She had been on medication for her psychological condition, which it seems she thought she could stop taking—apparently she was off it before the bad news arrived. This was hardly the end of the world professionally—plenty of former Concordites had found homes at other labels, and I can’t imagine that Telarc, Arbors Jazz, Fantasy, or Nagel-Hayer wouldn’t have been interested. Nor was the Algonquin the only game in town—she could have almost certainly gotten a booking at Feinstein’s, the Café Carlyle, or one of the upscale jazz clubs, like the Blue Note.
She wasn’t as well known as Bobby Short or Michael Feinstein, but she was indeed a superstar in the little world of jazz singing and cabaret. Like a lot of people, she saw only her failures—it infuriated her when she sensed that other singers were doing better than she—even though most of them weren’t. In fact, Susannah was the envy of most other singers of her generation—for her talent, for her identifiable voice, for the range and depth of her knowledge of music, for what she had achieved: a discography of eighteen albums and a total of a year’s worth of nights at the Oak Room. She seemingly had it all together and was so amazingly organized. Her gigs were always well publicized and well attended; she seemed to know what she was doing on every level. She even carried a note advising that in case anything happened to her, she had two cats who needed to be fed.
Again, in the light of what happened in May 2001, it’s difficult to listen to those two final albums and resist the temptation to find new meaning in songs like “Something to Live For” and “Down,” another recent Fran Landesman offering that could well achieve standard status, particularly thanks to McCorkle’s rendition of lines like “There’s something irresistible in down.” The major song that does take on a new meaning is “I Don’t Think I’ll End It All Today,” a little-known Arlen and Harburg comedy calypso that McCorkle exhumed from the 1957 Jamaica for From Broadway to Bebop, which, as the title suggests, is about not committing suicide. The day before Susannah died, I happened to run into Yip Harburg’s son, Ernie. We were both being interviewed by the BBC for a documentary about Lena Horne and, since Horne had starred in Jamaica on Broadway, we started talking about “End It All”—how Susannah was apparently the only contemporary artist who had been hip enough to sing it. Harburg’s lyric specifically mentions the “fall from the building tall” as one of the ways in which the protagonist is not going to take her own life. How we wish she’d taken those words to heart.
Audra McDonald is something of a paradox: She is, by general consensus, the best singer-actress Broadway has produced in the last four decades or so, since the great years when Julie Andrews and Barbara Cook trod the boards; yet she has, as of this writing, somehow failed to have a major hit in a major new show or create a role on the level of Annie Oakley, Liza Doolittle, or Marian the Librarian. McDonald has thus far won three Tony Awards, including one for what was regarded as a brilliant revival of Carousel, and another for Master Class, essentially a nonmusical play that required her to sing. Her most important Tony may have been for Ragtime.
At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, McDonald has moved on to a successful career as a TV actress, and her years as a Broadway leading lady may be behind her. But the main reason I’ve given her more space in this volume than other musical theater stars of her generation has less to do with her succession of Tonys than because between 1998 and 2006, she released four thoroughly brilliant albums of both standards and new show tunes more or less in the classic tradition; this is an achievement matched by none of her contemporaries. (And there are many excellent Broadway leads, such as Christine Ebersole, Kelli O’Hara, Christine Andreas, Melissa Errico.)
McDonald has ceaselessly championed the cause of young musical theater composers—Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Ricky Ian Gordon—with the sound logic that unless living writers are supported, the art form as a whole will eventually die out. Naturally, our heads approve of this course of action, yet our hearts and our feet respond more fully to McDonald when she sings the great standards. Her three solo albums of 1998–2002 (Way Back to Paradise, How Glory Goes, and Happy Songs) offer a clear-cut trajectory: The first is all contemporary songs, the second is roughly half old and half new, and the third is all standards. Although McDonald’s desire to support emerging composers is commendable, it must be admitted that the more frequently she violates this policy and sings the Old Masters, the more listenable her albums become.
That was my reaction when these albums were new, yet listening again years later (and listening to the four albums as a coherent whole), I note that the then new songs sound better now than they did at the time and some of them have even become somewhat familiar on the cabaret and songbook circuit (especially “I Won’t Mind”). The second album, How Glory Goes, is particularly well organized in that the new and the old songs complement each other: “I Won’t Mind” is an intriguing musical monologue that is well placed a few tracks after “Bill” (from Show Boat), while “Come Down from the Tree” is a catchy item by Ragtime writers Ahrens and Flaherty from their previous show, Once on This Island.
The 2002 Happy Songs, which consists of twelve classic and two new numbers—which do not suffer at all by comparison—consistently entertains. Perhaps it’s all a matter of how one defines art: If one wishes to see the envelope pushed by doing—or singing something—that’s never been sung before, then the first album, Way Back to Paradise (the title presumably refers to a new golden age of popular songwriting), is the most successful. If one’s idea of art is music that you can listen to for unadulterated pleasure, to hear songs you already know by heart in interpretations worthy of comparison with the great vocalists of a bygone era, then Happy Songs is the McDonald album to choose.
Broadway’s most acclaimed new talent of the nineties was raised in Fresno, California. She came to New York to study classical singing at Juilliard at Lincoln Center, and not long out of college she landed the role of the secondary female lead (the one who sings of “Mister Snow”) in the revival of Carousel at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Over the course of the next decade she was a smash success in Master Class (playing opposite Greek singer-actress Patti LuPone as the great Maria Callas) and Ragtime, in which she made an indelible impression with her solo lullaby, “Your Daddy’s Son.”
The same can’t be said for Marie Christine—Medea in black Broadway drag—which was a flop with the critics, the public, and the theatrical community as well. It was notable not only as the first attempt to build a major role and a great show around McDonald, but also as her first big Broadway venture not to win a Tony. Apart from the Broadway stage, she has chiefly appeared in new productions of classic works: Wonderful Town (an RCA cast album), Sweeney Todd (a concert version at Lincoln Center, also with LuPone), The Cradle Will Rock (a threatrical film about the show), Annie (the 1999Disney-ABC TV movie of the Charnin-Strouse show), the successful 2007 revival of 110 in the Shade (also recorded), and the classic African American drama A Raisin in the Sun. She has also done a number of TV musical specials and some nonsinging dramatic TV and theater roles.
Everything about Way Back to Paradise screams ambition: Clearly, McDonald and producer Tommy Krasker were determined not to do anything the easy way. As noted, this set is nearly all premieres, including a few selections from the as-yet-unopened shows Parade and Marie Christine. More important, despite the variety of genres (including some attractive settings for the poetry of Langston Hughes and Thackeray), each selection here tells a very specific story, or at least is full of ideas, both philosophical (addressing issues from politics to theology to “Mistress of the Senator”) and musical. That McDonald’s voice is an incredibly rich, not to mention stunning, soprano seems less important than her determination to fully inhabit these song stories, and to transform each into a moving slice of reality set to notes. At the time, I noted that it was a remarkable album, yet it’s pretty much remained in its jewel case ever since.
The 2000 How Glory Goes offers a lot more pureentertainment value, and kibitzers on both sides of the argument could hardly complain that there weren’t enough standards or enough premieres—it contains plenty of both. In this approach, familiar songs, among them no fewer than five Harold Arlen classics, gain a new freshness, while contempo works like Adam Guettel’s title track get a little of the old-fashioned stardust rubbed off on them. Where Paradise has a few tracks that were somewhat experimental (a kinder way of saying “tuneless”), some of the new material on Glory is almost as captivatingly melodic as the standards. As alluded to earlier, by so thoroughly investing herself in “I Won’t Mind,” an intriguing ode sung by a doting aunt to a young baby, McDonald makes us hungry to hear the entire work it came from, the little-known The Other Franklin.
If Glory is a marked improvement over Paradise, Happy Songs is the payoff. This is the record that those of us who loved Audra McDonald’s voice but wanted to hear her address the standard repertoire were waiting for, the album that was as listenable as the previous two were commendable. She doesn’t just sing any old standards here, the focus is appropriately on songs from the African American theater of the twenties to the fifties. As usual, that expression means specifically one thing: Harold Arlen, the man who composed virtually every black show of the era. One could easily gather the nine Arlen songs from Glory and Happy into a very delightful nine-song minialbum (which, at thirty-five minutes of music, would actually be longer than many Peggy Lee LPs). Other such songs and productions represented are “I Must Have That Man” (Blackbirds of 1928), “More Than You Know” (Great Day), and “Suppertime” (Ethel Waters’s standout from As Thousands Cheer).
On Happy Songs, McDonald’s coloratura chops are lusher and more lavish than ever, making it even clearer that she has one of the richest and most glorious voices currently being applied to the popular song. The orchestrations (which one assumes were written by Ted Sperling, credited as conductor) are equally sumptuous, with an authentically art deco feeling to them. The only inauthentic note is a modulation between choruses of the opener, “Ain’t It the Truth,” the kind of device one would not likely hear in a thirties or forties arrangement—yet, this minor cavil aside, the key change does, in fact, make the track even more exciting. Otherwise, McDonald, Sperling, and pianist Lee Musiker were fastidious enough to replicate the two-piano accompaniment originally played by Eadie & Rack on Judy Garland’s 1947 Decca disc of “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”
As for the two newer items, “Beat My Dog” (the wittiest of bassist-songwriter Jay Leonhart’s originals and one he’s been doing for decades) and Michael John LaChiusa’s “See What I Wanna See”—all I can say is if Marie Christine were anywhere near this much fun and swinging, I can’t imagine why it wasn’t a smash. Even the apparent departures from the format work perfectly, such as the traditional Afro-Brazilian “Bambalele,” which is certainly happy. The only tune that doesn’t fit the bill is “Suppertime,” one of the grimmest of all protest songs; doubtless it is included here to remind the listener that the black experience in the thirties wasn’t all Happy Songs.
Even though it has no lyrics, Duke Ellington’s “On a Turquoise Cloud” is every bit as artful and ambitious as any of the art songs on Way Back to Paradise. This wordless piece, which combines Sugar Hill with Rachmaninoff (in the sense of “Vocalise,” his wordless art song of 1912) was originally written for Kay Davis’s soprano, and McDonald doesn’t need lyrics to interpret it even more sensually and soulfully than any of the tunes with texts here. Sometimes one can say more, especially in this area, without words. Larry Hochman’s orchestration, which must be the first time this lesser-known Ellington work has been rendered with strings, is extremely beautiful. Talk about ambition: No other piece I’ve ever heard merges the worlds of jazz and classical music as artfully as this one simultaneously blends the dual aspirations of vocal and instrumental music.
In the last ten years, McDonald was brilliant in revivals of both A Raisin in the Sun (2004, in which she was handicapped by having to play opposite Puff Daddy, the nonacting, nonsinging rap star making his Broadway debut) and 110 in the Shade (2007). In 2006, she released her fourth album, Build a Bridge, an entirely appealing amalgam of mostly newish material. The bridge being built would seem to be connecting current generation musical theater com posers, like old friend Adam Guettel (“Dividing Day”), to folk-oriented singer-songwriters, old (Laura Nyro’s “Tom Cat Goodbye”) and new (Rufus Wainwright’s “Damned Ladies” done as an evocative tango). The virtues of eclecticism are worthwhile in that the most entertaining show-tune-type song is by the uncategorizable Nellie McKay, “I Wanna Get Married,” a contemporary song witty and ironic enough to share the title of Gertrude Niesen’s classic showstopper (from the 1944 Follow the Girls). McDonald is especially excellent on the opener, Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach’s “God Give Me Strength,” soaring with her considerable chops over mountainous high notes in a love song she transforms into a prayer. Between pop songwriters of disparate continents and time periods, and McDonald’s own Broadway–opera house hybrid singing style, a bridge has indeed been built.
The year after Build a Bridge, McDonald began work on the TV series Private Practice, a medical soap opera so entirely preoccupied with matters gynecological that I can’t refer to it as anything other than Private Parts. As a result, many more people know her as a soap star than as a Broadway leading lady and recording artist. Yet these four albums, as noted, constitute a unique body of work, unmatched by anyone else in the contemporary era.
A gross oversimplication: Louis Armstrong is the wellspring, the primary source of all jazz singing, and the two greatest prodigies of the next generation, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, amplified contrasting components of Armstrong’s genius. Holiday picked up on his emotional and dramatic side, while Fitzgerald elaborated upon his musical and improvisational side. This is a bit too pat, since Holiday was also a great musician and Fitzgerald also a brilliant interpreter, but we’ll continue the conceit to say that it wasn’t until the forties and fifties that singers began to put both halves of the Armstrong equation together again. Among the great ladies of jazz, no one was better able to do both things at the same time than Carmen McRae. An arresting stylist, McRae is at once stunningly musical and lyrically emotional, her sound biting, sharp, and astoundingly clear, full of pure jazz variations and brilliant melodic paraphrases that never undercut her masterfully dramatic, interpretive style.
When one considers the career of Carmen McRae, two facts immediately present themselves, and the more one tries to make sense of them, the more they continue to contradict each other. The first: Carmen McRae is indisputably one of the very finest vocalists the idiom known as jazz has ever produced. The second: She was also one of the oldest singers to gain a major reputation. It wasn’t until she was in her early thirties that she sang in major clubs and recorded, a good ten years older than such peers as Holiday, Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington. How can this be? Was she that unlucky? Were the gatekeepers of talent, the producers and agents, so tone-deaf? Was the jazz world, which knew about McRae years before the larger public, so greedy that it wanted to keep this major revelation all to itself?
It’s also easy to divine what side of the fence she lands in: Where Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan had “round,” full voices, Billie Holiday (her earliest influence), Dinah Washington, and Carmen McRae had “sharp,” precise voices that place them closer to the blues than pop or opera. McRae was also in Fitzgerald’s and Vaughan’s class as a pure musician, with a larger gift for melodic invention and improvisation than the other great ladies of the jazz pantheon share. Like Vaughan, she was an expert pianist (as one can tell from “Perdido,” one of the rare instances when she documented her instrumental ability in the recording studio), and was thoroughly immersed in the workings of harmony that are the jazz singer’s prerequisite. Mel Tormé once singled her out as one of the all-time great scat singers, which is surprising since she didn’t do it very often. (The 1981 Live at Bubba’s, taped in Fort Lauderdale, includes one of her most brilliant scat episodes on “I Concentrate on You.”)
Along with Holiday (who could turn any song into autobiography), McRae had a gift for putting over a lyric and making it believable which far exceeds that of most of her sister singers—how many of her colleagues even sing a single song (other than “Mad About the Boy”), much less a whole album’s worth of material, by Noel Coward, and make it completely consistent with her overall musical character? She once, famously, declared that “lyrics are more important than melody.” Which makes it all the more baffling that she was the oldest of the big six pantheon (Holiday, Fitzgerald, Vaughan, Washington, and O’Day) to make it; as with her contemporary, Joe Williams, it took her a long time to be heard.
In truth, we don’t know exactly how long it took. At the time of her first notable recording, in 1954, she was thirty-two, thirty-four, or thirty-six, depending on what date you believe. The year of her birth has generally been given as 1922, but she told friend and interviewer James Gavin that the year was actually 1918 (at the time of her death, she was “older than the Pope,” as she memorably put it). In any case, she was raised at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and came of age musically in the swing era. McRae learned piano as a child and her parents encouraged her to study the classics, but the world of jazz and what would later be called the Great American Songbook was beckoning. For a time she also wrote songs, and as a teenager she came to the attention of one of the power couples of the jazz world, keyboard star Teddy Wilson and composer Irene Kitchings Wilson. Thanks to the influence of the Wilsons, one of McRae’s early songs, “Dream of Life,” was recorded by the pianist’s longtime collaborator Billie Holiday. It became kind of a mantra in McRae’s own career; she herself occasionally sang and recorded it over the decades.
Unfortunately, this early breakthrough did not lead to a career as writer or performer, and McRae spent most of the forties scrabbling as a pianistsinger. She achieved her next public notice in 1946 as girl singer with the orchestra briefly led by Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer. Around this time she married drummer Kenny Clarke, who was then playing with Ellington the Younger and was himself one of the founding fathers of bebop; she later told Gavin that she was never in love with him.
As Carmen Clarke, she cut her first disc with this particular Ellington orchestra: the ballad “Pass Me By,” for the start-up label Musicraft. By the late forties McRae was well known among the cutting-edge musicians who gathered at Minton’s, Harlem’s most famous after-hours joint, as well as at the Onyx, another mecca for swing-style jam sessions on the city’s famed Fifty-second Street. She even sat in with Charlie Parker, whom she doubtless met through Clarke, and he taught her a song he had written some years previously known as “Yardbird Suite” or, with the lyric, “What Price Love.” (After her death, four fragments of McRae performing the song with Parker at the Onyx in 1948, as recorded by Birdmaniac Dean Benedetti, were issued on Mosaic’s Parker-Benedetti collection.) By 1953 McRae was no longer playing and singing but was working as a fully fledged “stand-up” singer. The late pianist Dick Katz has described what it was like to play for her in her earliest stand-up engagements at Minton’s. According to Dick, McRae already was mature and polished (an observation supported even by her earliest recordings), and playing for her, even then, was “a crash course in professionalism.”
It was, however, neither her regular engagement at Minton’s nor her sitting in at the Onyx that would turn the tide for her, but a gig in Brooklyn. There, she happened to come to the attention of the record producer, songwriter, and publisher Chuck Darwin. The exact circumstances (and dates) of what they did together remain vague, but some tracks were issued on singles on the Stardust label and others were first released as an LP, titled simply Carmen McRae, on Bethlehem.
The effort and the confusion were justified by the results. Unlike the first recordings of a lot of artists, these cuts are not mere embryonic samples of a future great: At age thirty-three (or near), McRae’s development is nearly complete. The various Darwin sessions are a worthy sample of the singer at an early peak. Nearly all the fifteen songs involved are composed by either him or the participating musicians, including one title, “Last Time for Love,” by McRae herself. The loveliest of the originals is “If I’m Lucky,” credited to Darwin, and a worthy song. While it may or may not be considered a standard, two other superlative standards do stand out among the Darwin material, “Old Devil Moon” and “Easy to Love.” McRae’s voice is lighter and clearer here—it would get considerably heavier and darker by the nineties—but essentially she sounds fully formed.
The Bethlehem titles are indisputably jazz—unusual jazz at that, featuring accordion, flute, and clarinet. When the venerated producer Milt Gabler brought her to Decca at the end of 1954, he had her record pop as well as jazz, and her first session included a memorable pop treatment of the Gershwin standard “They All Laughed,” backing her with big band and mixed chorus. She is remarkably accomplished here, tart and swinging, full of rhythm and personality that already put her in a class with major pop divas such as Doris Day and Jo Stafford. In fact it’s hard to imagine even Ella Fitzgerald doing better. When Jack Pleis’s chart calls for her to be irreverently cheeky in a series of asides (Ira Gershwin’s famous line about Mr. Whitney and his cotton gin is followed by “but nobody laughed when they found they couldn’t drink it”), she’s more than up to the task. This was probably the first recording of McRae’s to be heard widely by the general public.
For five years, McRae recorded steadily and consistently for Gabler in an outstanding series of albums released first on Decca and then on Kapp (and today all owned by Universal Music). Making up for lost time, she recorded frequently and prolifically, launching a forty-year career that would prove one of the richest in the history of jazz. Virtually every other jazz or pop singer of her approximate generation was doing his or her best work in the late fifties, from Sinatra to Tormé to Vaughan to Fitzgerald to O’Day to Connor to Christy to Cole to Stafford. What is surprising is that a virtual unknown could come out of the woodwork and compete with all these established heavyweights—overnight, McRae went from dark horse to contender.
The first of her twelve albums in the Decca-Kapp series, By Special Request, was a purely jazz project. Fortunately, the twelve standards included here are considerably better than most of the songs from the Darwin dates. Better still, By Special Request includes two selections, one of them them a standout “Suppertime,” which are among the very few occasions when McRae recorded accompanied by her own piano.
By Special Request, essentially a first album, is an amazing effort: McRae is accomplished, poised, and in control. One track in particular showed that she already had the support of the mainstream jazz community: “Something to Live For,” one of Billy Strayhorn’s major compositions, is accompanied by the composer himself. In “I Can’t Get Started,” she sings “Frank Sinatra had me to tea,” and you can’t help thinking that she was already worthy of such an invitation.
Like most singers of the era, McRae and her producers, from Gabler on, followed the Sinatra example of using the LP medium for what Capitol president Alan Livingston called “standard product”; at the same time, she cut a series of 45 rpm singles that utilized more contemporary songs which the A&R staff had earmarked as potential hits. With McRae, however, even the tritest of jukebox ephemera sounds positively sterling. While neither Decca nor its corporate heirs, MCA and Universal, have shown much interest in reissuing her singles, in 1989, the Danish label Official released Invitation, which contains the bulk of her fifties 45s.
These one-off tracks include a few dogs, but in the main consist of respectable if lesser known items. There’s “I Guess I’ll Dress Up for the Blues” and Livingston and Evans’s neglected “As I Love You,” as well as a few numbers that eventually caught on, such as Bronislau Kaper’s film theme “Invitation,” and a terrific reading of the Artie Shaw semistandard “Moon Ray.” The two biggest surprises are “You Don’t Know Me,” a mainstream pop version of the Eddy Arnold country song later immortalized by Ray Charles, and “It’s Like Getting a Donkey to Gallop,” which, despite a beastly title, turns out to be a swinging, witty novelty by Johnny Burke with a suitably brassy orchestration by Jack Pleis.
McRae’s five-year association with Decca (and its brother label, Kapp) served to make her a bona fide singing star as well as to yield what time may prove to be the most consistently excellent series of recordings of her entire career. These twelve 12″ LPs, indeed, rank among the best of all vocal records. It’s tempting to discuss McRae’s work in terms of record labels, especially in that Pleis, who wrote many of McRae’s orchestrations in these years, also did the same for Decca’s two other leading African American artists of the period, Sammy Davis Jr. and Al Hibbler. Yet as with Chris Connor at Atlantic, Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day at Verve, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington at Mercury, June Christy at Capitol, and Mel Tormé at Bethlehem, the excellence of McCrae’s work in this period isn’t so much due to the label or even the producer. To take a longer view, this was simply an amazing era for jazz and intelligent pop music, in which the confluence of technological, artistic, and economic imperatives made it the only time in history when conditions encouraged the recording of great albums—and lots of them—by major pop artists. Suffice it to say that the dozen McRae albums from the 1955–59 period take a back seat to no one.
On the Decca-Kapp series, McRae puts across all kinds of material in all kinds of settings. The legacy of By Special Request was extended in various ways. For instance, another small group album, After Glow with the Ray Bryant Trio, and Carmen for Cool Ones, utilized unusual instruments and combinations even further out than the accordion-flute combination. Yet in these years, McRae was also wisely teamed with four of the finest jazz vocal orchestrators involved in full-length projects: Jimmy Mundy and Tadd Dameron on Blue Moon, Ralph Burns on Torchy and Birds of a Feather, and Ernie Wilkins on Something to Swing About. She also utilized a full-sized string orchestra on Book of Ballads (conducted by Frank Hunter) and When You’re Away (Luther Henderson). Two of the more mainstream pop projects involved concepts rarely addressed by anyone from either the pop or jazz spectrum: Mad About the Man collects the songs of Noel Coward and Birds of a Feather spotlights tunes about our feathered friends.
The series is loaded with so many superb moments that it’s frustrating to concentrate on just a couple of highlights. Each of the albums balances well-known standards with excellent songs just bubbling under: On Book of Ballads, her stunning reading of the verse to “How Long Has This Been Going On” (the chorus has been done a million times and the verse maybe half that, but this still has to be the loveliest it’s ever been sung), which is followed immediately by “Do You Know Why?” a lament to lost love by Burke and Van Heusen. Blue Moon includes the title track as well as “My Foolish Heart,” and such worthy obscurities as Joe Mooney’s “Nowhere” and Jack Segal’s “Laughing Boy.” Blue Moon also contains Peter DeRose’s rare and beautiful “Lilacs in the Rain,” which could have been a key track in a collection of songs about either flowers or different atmospheric conditions.
The two packages with Ralph Burns are singularly outstanding: Torchy is just that, and the Birds collection is both swinging and sentimental, put together with a sense of humor that was rare in jazz even then. There’s a major instrumental guest star here, in the person of tenor great Ben Webster (billed pseudonymously as “A. Tenorman”), who appears as well on “Georgia Rose,” a single from the same sessions. The latter is a song from the African American vaudeville tradition that both McRae and friend Tony Bennett (who learned it from her) reinterpreted as a black-is-beautiful anthem.
The concept of Mad About the Man is also out of left field, but the record itself is marvelous, although it took me years to fully appreciate it. After McRae, you don’t want anyone else even to try to sink his teeth into the line “Play me some barbaric tune” in Sir Noel’s mock-Gypsy waltz, “Zigeuner.” Carmen for Cool Ones, arranged by cellist and contemporary classical composer Fred Katz, is perhaps a touch arch, or at least that’s true of “All the Things You Are.” She also addresses “Any Old Time,” which Artie Shaw had written and which Billie Holiday had recorded while she was with his band—a worthy song rarely included in Holiday tribute sets. For the most part, both the charts and the songs here are refreshingly straight-ahead, and McRae’s singing is up to its usual high standard.
Something to Swing About is another extraordinary release. Ernie Wilkins, best known for his arrangements for Basie and Joe Williams and for Dinah Washington’s Fats Waller album, was, surprisingly, only rarely given the chance to show what he could do with a top-flight swing singer, and this is one of his finest efforts. Nearly every cut here is worth singling out. “Sleepin’ Bee,” with an exceptional piano solo by Dick Katz, is a high-powered romp through a tune that’s usually treated more sedately; neither the insect nor anyone else is likely to get much sleep with all this excitement going on.
The only note of discord arrives with “So Nice to Be Wrong,” a 1957 single that contains the briefest hint of the 16th-note rock ’n’ roll beat that had already conquered the 45 rpm singles market. The boom falls with a one-shot singles date for Mercury, masterminded by producer Clyde Otis and arranger Belford Hendricks. This was the same dreaded team that was then sabotaging Dinah Washington (all the way to the bank) and they brought the same formula to McRae, combining a top singer with top songs but absolutely subputrid pseudo-R&B arrangements. Who would have believed that Carmen McRae singing “The Very Thought of You” and “Oh Look at Me Now” could be so dreadful? The intrusion of rock-pop-soul elements in her work, from this point on, would be a recurring theme almost until the end of her life.
Luckily, this issue would not surface in the next major phase of her career, though it lurked in the background, like a cobra waiting to strike. Between 1960 and 1962, McRae made four albums (three and a half, actually) for Columbia. Much of the Columbia work is highly jazz-oriented, starting with her most famous album of the period, Carmen McRae Sings Lover Man and Other Billie Holiday Classics, and including parts of three projects with Dave Brubeck: all of Take Five, parts of Tonight Only, and a couple of tracks of The Real Ambassadors. The Holiday album in particular has McRae, obviously inspired by Lady Day, liberally reshaping the melodies in a far jazzier fashion than anything she recorded in the fifties. Done with her own rhythm section at the time (Norman Simmons, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Walter Perkins, drums) plus three guests (Nat Adderley, cornet; Lockjaw Davis, tenor; Mundell Lowe, guitar), this tribute collection to her late mentor (who had died only three years earlier) is a pinnacle in an outstanding career, in which McRae literally wrestles Lady Day’s signature songs into her own image. “Billie Holiday is the greatest influence in my life,” McRae often said, usually adding that if Lady Day “had never existed, I probably wouldn’t have either.”
Her other album from this association, Something Wonderful, goes to the opposite extreme: This is a purely pop project—pop of the show tunes variety, that is. An album of Broadway music with a vengeance, orchestrator (and apparently producer) Buddy Bregman conceived the package as a tribute to various Great White Way leading ladies, and it lays out, for the most part, in a series of medleys. On the minus side, the idea of McRae singing a tribute medley to Ethel Merman seems bizarre, and nearly all the tracks are frustratingly brief (as is the set as a whole); what’s more, the Bregman charts are serviceable but uninspired. Still, McRae’s singing doesn’t disappoint, and any concept that gives her the chance to sing such excellent songs as “Long Before I Knew You” (from Bells Are Ringing) is to be enjoyed. When the set was reissued in 2001, several singles were added, and these, at least, give McRae a chance to do a few songs at proper length, as opposed to the medleys, which are not very adroitly arranged and feel unnecessarily truncated. Show buffs will take delight in hearing rare songs from flop productions with terrific scores: All-American, Nowhere to Go but Up, and, best of all, “How Does the Wine Taste?” from We Take the Town, which McRae sings with so much vivacity you can practically taste the wine yourself.
McRae’s work from later in the sixties is a mixed bag: She made several sets of chintzy, backbeat-driven arrangements, particularly during her association with Atlantic, as well as some wonderful, straight-ahead packages on both that label and Mainstream. Without a doubt, the best release of these years—indeed, possibly her finest ballad album of all—is a 1964 Mainstream well titled as Second to None. Arranged and conducted by Peter Matz, Second to None consists largely of new songs—proving that they were still writing ’em at the dawn of Beatlemania (in fact, McRae was among the first American stars to record a Lennon-McCartney tune: “And I Love Her,” heard here), such as “The Music That Makes Me Dance” (from Funny Girl) and “Where Did It Go?,” an early English lyric for the 1959 Brazilian theme “Manha de Carnival” (from Black Orpheus) that later became known in the U.S.A. as “A Day in the Life of a Fool.” Her singing is no less jazzy than usual, while Matz’s orchestrations (reminiscent of Don Costa at his very best) are lush and yet superbly subtle and tasteful.
There isn’t a wrong move on the entire package, and it’s a sheer delight to hear her sink her teeth into Marvin Fisher’s “Cloudy Morning” and Michel Legrand’s first American crossover, “Once Upon a Summertime,” the Frenchman’s only significant song with Johnny Mercer. There are also superlative readings of “My Reverie” and “Blame It on My Youth.” “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” is a special treat: I’ve heard it performed by pop singers (Buddy Clark) and also by jazz musicians (Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz), but for some reason it was largely overlooked by the upper pantheon of heavy-duty jazz divas. McRae’s reading is the rendition that I always want to hear.
Subsequent sixties and seventies projects were both dreams and nightmares. Most of the Mainstream works fall into the first category, particularly a series of about four live albums taped mostly in San Francisco (In Person/San Francisco, Live and Doin’ It, Live and Wailing, Woman Talk). These were all made with her regular accompanist, Norman Simmons, and her regular rhythm section, as was the studio package Bittersweet. Haven’t We Met? is another lush orchestral album, this time arranged by Don Sebesky, which comes in second to Second to None.
Her work for Atlantic Records is decidedly uneven: There are several albums with fine orchestrators and worthy material, specifically For Once in My Life, done in London with Johnny Keating in 1967, and Portrait of Carmen, done later that year on the West Coast with charts by Gene DiNovi, Shorty Rogers, and Oliver Nelson. McRae also recorded live with small group accompaniments, as was the custom at the time: Live at Century Plaza (taped in 1968 but not released for another seven years) with Simmons, and the double-length The Great American Songbook, done at Donte’s in Los Angeles in 1971, with the outstanding Jimmy Rowles.
The studio albums were increasingly oriented toward pop-rock material, but gems surface here and there: Portrait of Carmen contains one of her all-time best ironic torch songs, “I Haven’t Got Anything Better to Do,” which surely provided the template for Natalie Cole’s 2002 treatment (also a wonderful performance, but clearly based on McRae). McRae’s 1968 The Sound of Silence and 1970 Just a Little Lovin’ are hardly a waste of time, especially the first. There contain a few contemporary chart items, like the Paul Simon title song and Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park,” yet though I might rather hear her sing Cole Porter, she certainly does an outstanding job with these and I’m pleased to hear her sing them. There are other surprises: “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” has more of a rockish backbeat than I’d like, whereas Della Reese’s Italian import “And That Reminds Me” is done in much more of a traditional swinging four than we might expect. And there are lots of worthy standards here, notably a moving “Stardust” and a harrowing “Gloomy Sunday.”
Oddly, McRae had not recorded live at all before 1961 when she taped a set in England released as Carmen McRae in London, a rare LP that subsequently became an equally rare CD, but from that point on she made up for lost time, beginning with two of the Brubeck collaborations on Columbia. From the Mainstream and Atlantic periods onward, she rivals Ella Fitzgerald as one of the major singers who recorded most frequently in concert. The title of the Atlantic live album The Great American Songbook: Live at Donte’s (which is not to be confused with At the Great American Music Hall, another live album, from five years later, released by Blue Note), is indicative of the times. By putting the songbook in the title of her albums, she was precisely telegraphing her intentions to her traditional audience, and distinguishing her live albums from her increasingly contempo studio projects. (Atlantic recorded hours and hours of McRae singing live at the Century Plaza in Japan that will seemingly never be heard.)
As she got deeper into the seventies, she continued to do her best work in live albums. Live at the Dug, also from Japan, is a complete surprise, and not merely in its curious title (which refers to a club in Tokyo). This was the only time McRae recorded an entire set working with just her own piano accompaniment, and the highlight is her killer treatment of “As Time Goes By” (the album was also released under that title). Apart from this once-in-a-lifetime event, she also recorded for the last time with her ex-husband Kenny Clarke on November Girl: This excellent package, taped in London in 1970, is a set of offbeat, interesting songs with the first-rate European-based big band Clarke co-led with French pianist Francy Boland.
In 1975 and 1976, McRae recorded a series of albums for Blue Note, the once venerable jazz label that was then entering into a state of corporate limbo and trying to conquer the as-yet-unnamed smooth jazz field. There were two largely forgettable studio projects, Can’t Hide Love and I Am Music, which drew heavily on synthesizers and Stevie Wonder (not necessairly a terrible thing), but there also was still another excellent live album, Carmen McRae at the Great American Music Hall (1976). (She also guest-starred on two all-star projects for the label, Live at the Roxy, 1976, and Blue Note Meets the L.A. Philharmonic—who knew they even had one?) In 1995, Blue Note issued The Best of Carmen McRae, which, as promised, collates most of the good stuff for that label, including an outstanding Bill Holman arrangement of “Star Eyes,” which makes one yearn to hear the live material, at least, in complete form.
McRae sounds completely convincing on the likes of “The Man I Love” (consistently credited by Blue Note to Cole Porter). “Miss Otis Regrets,” with a muted trumpet obbligato by no less than Dizzy Gillespie, marks one of the few times that any major singer since Ethel Waters had taken this authentic 1934 Cole Porter classic completely seriously. The Roxy album contains the amazing sound of 1976 Los Angelinos cheering wildly as McRae explains why it’s her feminist right to get beaten up by her papa should she so desire on the Bessie Smith classic “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”
By the seventies and eighties, McRae’s voice had lost some of its youthful freshness, and much of the time she seemed to be singing with what could only be described as a bitchy, Miss Thing attitude. Like Lena Horne’s attempts to “sound black” during this period, McRae occasionally overuses gospel and soul effects. Her last widely heard recordings were a series for Concord Jazz and then BMG (the label formerly known as RCA Victor). All of these were projects in which she shared billing with another performer, either living or dead. Two for the Road (1980) was a long-awaited teaming with George Shearing, just voice and piano, highlighted by two first-rate songs from their friend Marvin Fisher, “Cloudy Morning”and “My Gentleman Friend,” while Heat Wave (1982) auspiciously teamed her with Latin jazz giant Cal Tjader.
The best of the tribute albums was the first, the outstanding You’re Lookin’ at Me (A Collection of Nat King Cole Songs) (1983). She went on through the curious Carmen Sings Monk (1988) and her final album, Sarah—Dedicated to You (1992). The Cole set is wonderfully lively and animated, the Vaughan tribute is oddly lifeless. The Monk set is a mixed blessing. McRae still sounds great, as does the backup band, but most of these pieces are instrumentals that were not meant to be sung, and—with the exception of the vocalese standard “ ’Round Midnight” and several texts by Jon Hendricks—especially not with these lame lyrics.
She had done the same thing much better nearly thirty years earlier with the delightful Take Five and Tonight Only with Dave Brubeck and his quartet. The McRae-Brubeck collaborations were far more enjoyable, largely because the pianist-composer and his lyricist wife, Iola, were active participants, and also because Brubeck’s melodies were more conventionally lighter and more singable. One doesn’t feel that anybody was defiling masterpieces on the Brubeck-McRae tracks the way that the after-the-fact lyricists on Monk are. Further, McRae’s voice itself was lighter and friskier in the early sixties, and she was better able to capture Brubeck’s whimsy and capriciousness, whereas in 1988 she only seems to get Monk’s heaviness and not his antic wit.
The Monk and Sarah albums were hardly ideal notes to end on, which is a shame, since she was generally sounding fine in these years, was being managed by the resourceful Larry Clothier, and overall was in good shape. Luckily, since McRae’s death in 1994 there have been numerous releases of live performances, generally from the eighties with her at the top of her form. Quincy Jones released Dream of Life, an outstanding live concert from 1989 with the WDR Radio Big Band of Cologne. She returned to her roots with For Lady Day, two volumes of Billie Holiday songs taped at New York’s Blue Note with guest Zoot Sims. There are a lot of songs not on Lover Man, and those that are repeated here are considerably darker, deeper, and more moving than on the 1962 album. McRae had by now come full circle.
Few singers, even among the upper reaches of the pantheon in whose company she walked, were more consistently excellent than Carmen McRae.
It took me a long time to “get” Mabel Mercer. For years, I went with my first impression: that she understood a lyric better than anyone, but that she interpreted the words to the detriment of the music and was completely unmusical. The lyric was everything to her—all other considerations, melody, rhythm, harmony, tempo, time signature, were strictly secondary. Yet I’ve come to see that there are indeed musical values in her singing.
For years, Mabel Mercer seemed more of a monologuist—as they used to be called—rather than a vocalist. She told stories with music but never much concerned herself with carrying a tune. Before I really listened to her, I sort of assumed she was a kind of Margaret Dumont—or maybe even Eleanor Roosevelt—with musical accompaniment.
I was wrong. And I first began to realize that there was more to Mercer than had previously met my ears when I began listening to a set of live recordings from the sixties (released on Harbinger Records as The Legendary Performers). It immediately became apparent that a great many of her numbers were done in waltz time. Why, I wondered? I couldn’t think of any performer in cabaret, jazz, pop, musical theater, or even opera or lieder, who did so many songs in three-quarter time (not even Patti Page). That she was paying so much attention to the time signature indicated that there must be something going on in the musical department.
It’s quite odd to conclude that the singing of Mabel Mercer is actually driven by rhythm. After all, swing time isn’t the only valid rhythm in American music, and Mercer may not swing like Ella Fitzgerald, but she’s nonetheless well aware of where the beat is; she doesn’t parade it up and down and sideways and crossways, or turn the beat back around on itself like Anita O’Day, but she’s far from ignorant in the ways of time. It should be obvious that, perhaps even more craftily than Sinatra and Holiday, Mabel Mercer is the master of subjugating her musical strengths to the narrative. For example, on “Everybody’s Looking” and “Trouble Comes” (both included in the Harbinger live set), she employs repetitive rhythmic phrasing to underscore a repeated dramatic concept in the text. Unlike Holiday and Sinatra, she doesn’t drop the tempo entirely for rubato or stop time effects. She keeps the tempo going—you don’t think of her as performing for dancers, but she certainly could have. Surely she would have never attempted “From This Moment On” (which, in a sense, was Cole Porter’s answer to “I Got Rhythm”) if she didn’t know where the beat was. (Her “Moment” includes what must be a rare instance of the great lady addressing someone as “Babe!”)
The lady herself and everyone around her insisted that her work couldn’t possibly be appreciated by the great masses. Everyone in her immediate circle took it as gospel that her music would only be popular with a small crowd of cognoscenti. God knows how that rumor got started: She has about the fruitiest English accent you can imagine, and her enunciation is even more so, but her work is more about passion than pretension; she never gets so sophisticated that anyone capable of understanding the English language couldn’t understand exactly what she’s doing—and enjoy it.
To me, Mercer is not so much an elitist artist as a universal one. Even when she was born, in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, England, on February 3,1900, she was many things at once: English and American, black and white. Her parents were of different nationalities and races, but they had showbiz in common: Her mother was a singer of English-Welsh stock who worked in music halls and her father was an African American tumbler visiting from the States.
A valid point of comparison might be with Billie Holiday. The circumstances that Holiday was raised under undoubtedly pointed her to the blues and her becoming enmeshed in a self-destructive pattern that led to drugs and an early death. The privations of Mabel Mercer’s life were every bit as devastating and demoralizing as those of the young Eleanora Fagan, yet she grew up singing “Just One of Those Things” and lived into her eighties. As was true of Holiday, Mercer’s parents had not enjoyed the benefit of clergy.
Mabel never met her father, Benjamin Mercer, and her mother was only in her life until she was seven, at which point Mom took to the boards and the road once again and was gone. She did, though, give Mabel some singing lessons in church, in which, it’s said, she stressed volume and clarity and volume again: “All right, sing! And I want to understand every word!” Until the age of fourteen, the girl was known as Mabel Alice Wadham; at that point, she learned her father’s real name, and claimed it for herself. As she later said, it was the only thing she ever got from her father, and even then it wasn’t freely given.
Holiday later talked and wrote (or rather, her ghostwriter William Dufty wrote) about encountering rampant racism and sexism in both the North and South. One can only imagine how much worse the young Wadham-Mercer’s life was, who, growing up in England at the turn of the century, probably never came into contact with another person of color. Raised by her mother’s parents, Mabel was constantly ridiculed by the white English children around her for the tone of her skin, the “Negro” quality of her hair, her illegitimacy, and even for being left-handed.
Like her mother, she was determined to make it as a singer. None of her jobs lasted particularly long in the teens and twenties, because she would be fired the instant the theater managers realized that she wasn’t entirely Caucasian. She gained her most valuable early stage experience thanks to an aunt, who led a traveling music hall troupe that, billed as the Five Romanies, passed themselves off as Gypsies. She also teamed up with a “cockney” song and dance girl named Kay and worked across Europe, entertaining Allied troops during the First World War.
It was during this period and immediately after it that Mercer began to benefit from the vogue for “colored” entertainers on both sides of the Atlantic. Though never a star like Josephine Baker, she finally began to reap some of the benefits of her Afro-European status. She appeared with such troupes and shows as the Chocolate Kiddies, Coloured Society, and eventually in the London production of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1926. It was while working in these shows that, for the first time, she came into contact with other black people. Up until this time, she had only been exposed to music hall songs and other varieties of turn-of-the-century and Edwardian Britpop. Now she gained familiarity with the entire spectrum of American and African American musics—spirituals, pop, blues, and eventually jazz; the Coloured Society show even featured black performers doing arias from Italian opera.
By the end of the twenties, however, Mercer had found her niche: Singing the great American show tunes in small nightclubs in London, Paris (where she sang at Bricktop’s, a cross-racial, multinational gathering place for Lost Generation expatriates), and, eventually, New York. At this early stage, she sang softly, employing a megaphone when necessary (before electric microphones and sound systems began to be installed in clubs), making her, in a sense, a pioneering crooner along the lines of Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee.
By the thirties, Mercer was beginning to be recognized as a vocalist of uncommon sensitivity: This, incidentally, at a time, when singer-actors in Broadway and West End musicals were more prized for their ability to project (like Ethel Merman) than to animate a lyric. (The Mabel Mercer Web site also proclaims, “Unjudgmental depths of understanding won her a devoted following, especially among homosexuals.”)
In 1938, surprisingly, Mercer made contact with her mother again, and moved to New York to be closer to her. However, Ms. Wadham, who lived upstate, was reluctant to introduce Mabel—now a full-grown black woman—to her white neighbors as her daughter. So Mabel settled in Harlem, and began singing at Le Ruban Bleu at 4 East 56th Street.
Around this time, two events occurred that changed her life. First, she underwent a tonsillectomy, which lowered her voice to the deeper mezzo-soprano register, and gave her a unique, throaty sound. Second: World War II. Mercer happened to be working in the Bahamas at the end of 1941 when war was declared, and was temporarily trapped there by immigration restrictions until Kelsey Pharr of the Delta Rhythm Boys offered to facilitate her permanent settlement in the United States by marrying her. Throughout the forties her home base was Tony’s on West Fifty-second Street, proving that there was more than swing on Swing Street. There, Mercer was discovered by a generation of homecoming New Yorker GIs. When Tony’s was razed at the end of the decade, she traveled a few blocks east to the Byline Room; by then, she was a favorite of reporters and other media insiders.
Her visibility increased when, in 1950, she appeared in The Consul, a new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera by contemporary classical composer Gian-Carlo Menotti; she didn’t herself sing any opera here, but performed a traditional French street song called “Tu Reviendras.” Mercer’s stock also ascended when, not long afterward, she began recording for Atlantic, then a label that concentrated almost exclusively on R&B and black pop. Ahmet Ertegun himself produced her sessions for the label, this being long before his brother, Nesuhi, returned east from Los Angeles to run Atlantic’s jazz division. The relationship began promisingly with Mabel Mercer Sings, originally released as a 45 rpm extended play disc, which was soon expanded into the 10″ LP Songs by Mabel Mercer.
In 1954, Mercer recorded her definitive studio album, Mabel Mercer Sings Cole Porter (also first heard as a series of 45 rpm EP discs, and two years later collected onto a 12″ LP, the same year that Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook was recorded). This was indeed a fortuitous combination of singer and material: Mercer’s singing was a juxtaposition of rolled R formality (“in love with the night mysteRRRRious …”) and casual intimacy; like Porter’s lyrics, Mercer’s singing combined straightforward sex with suave sophistication. On Porter songs that were both famous (the then brand-new “It’s All Right with Me,” from Silk Stockings) and obscure (“Looking at You” and “Experiment”), she’s constantly meeting the songwriter halfway and finding the midpoint where the intentions of performer and composer dovetail perfectly.
The accompaniment of the twin-piano team of Stan Freeman and Cy Walter helped immeasurably; at this time, they were probably better known to most record buyers than Mercer, having starred on their own radio series (Piano Playhouse) and long worked as an act in their own right across Manhattan. Other Atlantic albums also used suitably minimal backgrounds: The Art of Mabel Mercer, Midnight at Mabel Mercer’s, Once in a Blue Moon, and Merely Marvleous. She also made an album for Decca, Mabel Mercer Sings, in which her characteristic intimacy was not compromised by the use of a small orchestra. (Nor is it by the string section on her later Atlantic album Once in a Blue Moon.)
Mercer was probably the most emblematic figure of the golden age of the New York cabaret scene, and is justifiably celebrated as such in the history of that epoch, James Gavin’s Intimate Nights (she’s also the subject of two biographies, notably Midnight at Mabel’s by Margaret Cheney). Her friend and agent, the remarkably coiffed Donald Smith, has, for the last quarter century, run a foundation in her name that produces what has become an annual institution he calls the Cabaret Convention. Every year every kind of chanteuse and chanteur (not to mention chantootsies and chanteusettes), the famous and the infamous, the good and the great, the bad and the lousy, all gather in her memory.
Mabel Mercer is a role model for cabaret singers not only for her singing itself, but for her persistence, weathering the gradual closing of the once lively cabaret scene. As one club after another shut its doors, Mercer fell on tough times but kept on working: In 1968 and 1969, she co-headlined with fellow cabaret star Bobby Short in a pair of legendary concerts at Town Hall produced by Newport Jazz impresario George Wein. She semiretired to a farm (near Chatham, New York) and seemed contented to charm the birds off the trees. In the seventies, Smith helped resuscitate her career by booking her in plush rooms and concert halls across the country, and she was able to spend her last decade as a grand dame of American music, her seventy-fifth birthday in 1975 cause for celebration: The St. Regis hotel named a cabaret room after her, Stereo Review commenced an annual award in her name, and in 1983 President Reagan bestowed upon her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died on April 20, 1984, and was buried beside her longtime lover and manager, Harry Beard.
About all that most people know about Mabel Mercer is that, as with Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra regularly named her as one of his favorite singers and key influences. McCall’s magazine quoted him as saying, “Mabel Mercer taught me everything I know.” It’s occurred to me that one way to introduce Mercer to Sinatra listeners is by invoking the 1965 album September of My Years, which is the Sinatra project that comes closest in spirit to Mercer’s musical ethos. Not that Mercer ever sang in these painfully slow crawl tempos, or worked with a tymphonysized string orchestra constantly going in and out of major and minor, but the feeling of the songs on September is close to much of Mercer’s material.
Put another way, virtually all of Mercer’s most poignant performances could be described as fitting into one of two patterns: first, songs of introspective reminiscence on past loves and lovers (“It Was a Very Good Year”) and second, advice to romantic young hopefuls (“Hello, Young Lovers”). If her songs aren’t strictly one or the other, chances are they’re some combination of the two. “Everybody’s Looking,” “Trouble Comes,” and “More I Cannot Wish You” all find La Mercer in the position of the romantic guru dispensing not mere Ann Landers–style “advice” but true wisdom to the lovelorn.
On the other hand, “When the Family Is Home,” “When the World Was Young,” “While We’re Young,” “They Were You,” “Mira” (a beautiful song from Carnival, a show with a Bob Merrill score sadly neglected by singers), “Days Gone By,” and “Once upon a Time” all have the singer gazing inward and reflecting on episodes in her own life.
Which brings us to the central irony of Mercer’s work: She’s generally regarded as the Queen of Cabaret Singers, and therefore, by extension, one of the most sophisticated individuals ever to prance upon the planet. She’s the very type for whom Cole Porter wrote such highfalutin arias as the perennial bittersweet farewell song “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Yet at the same time, her most memorable performances are the ones in which she retrogresses to young girlhood, all those songs listed above with the word “Young” in the title. She sets up all this sophistication and urbanity expressly so she can cut through it and dispense with it: Suddenly it’s not about how she rolls her Rs or whether she says “to-may-toe” or “to-mah-toe” but how she transports us back to another time, another place, and makes us all feel young and foolish.
And this explains the preponderance of songs in 3/4 time. The waltz is the time signature of the fair and the merry-go-round, saturating these songs with a feeling of innocence and naïveté by harking back to a time when the world was so much younger than we and merry as a 3/4 carousel. These contradictions are what give her work layers, what provide it with texture. Mabel Mercer is, like Holiday, Sinatra, or Edith Piaf, one of the primary colors of twentieth-century music. A Mercer performance is like the blues in that everything is distilled down to its purest essence—there’s no wasted motion, no unnecessary frills or extravagances. She doesn’t embellish a tune the way Sarah Vaughan does because that’s not her way of telling a story. In the highly musical art of Mabel Mercer, everything is exactly where it should be.
“The parts I played upon the stage
Were cast in a similar mold
Brassy and classy and tough as nails,
But always with a heart of gold.”
—From special material written for Merman’s nightclub act by Roger Edens, included on Mermania!, Volume 2
There’s no business like show business. On October 14, 1930, a musical called Girl Crazy, with songs by George and Ira Gershwin, opened at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre, and a miracle was born. Near the end of the first act, a twenty-four-year-old virtually unknown singer, who until very recently had been known as Ethel Agnes Zimmermann, came out and sang “Sam and Delilah.” “The audience yelped with surprise and pleasure,” she later recalled. “To be honest, I thought my garter had snapped or something.” A few minutes later, she lunged into “I Got Rhythm,” and the crowd’s mood shifted from mere “surprise and pleasure” to total hysteria. It wasn’t only their delight at their first exposure to the song that would become a national anthem of American pop and jazz, it was the earthquake level of intensity that the singer projected. When she finished the first chorus, instead of reprising the melody for a second time through, she simply belted a single high C for an entire 32-bar chorus. The show was officially stopped. Even by the end of “Sam and Delilah,” the audience knew that a star had been born. By the time the first act concluded with “Rhythm,” the crowd realized they were in the presence of something even bigger than a star: a bona fide showbiz legend. (It’s actually a matter of conjecture among contemporary scholars as to whether Merman really held that legendary single note in “I Got Rhythm” for a whole 32 bars. And in any case, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal—“Rhythm” is a rather fast song, and one chorus of it could easily fly by in thirty-forty seconds.)
Ethel Merman possessed the biggest and most powerful sound ever to emit from a Broadway theater, and she had charm, chutzpah, and emotional warmth to match. Those chops were even more powerful than Mother Nature herself: When “Iron Lungs Merman” (as she referred to herself) played Panama Hattie, she projected with a force strong enough to flatten Central America like a tropical hurricane. Her chops were so overwhelming that, in the plots of her shows, they became an engine of transformation and social change, powerful enough to vanquish all kinds of class distinctions: In Anything Goes, Reno Sweeney is a former evangelist turned nightclub headliner; in Call Me Madam, Merman is Sally Adams, a dirt-poor farm girl turned society hostess turned diplomat; in Annie Get Your Gun, Annie Oakley is an illiterate backwoodswoman who rises to the top of American showbiz and hobnobs with royalty merely by “Doin’ What Comes Naturally.”
Even time itself bends to the will of the Mermforce: In Du Barry Was a Lady, when she played a thirties showgirl who morphs into the legendary eighteenth-century courtesan, you really believed that her vocal powers enabled her to traverse the generations. Which, of course, they have; Merman’s singing made her immortal, and her recorded performances seem as fresh and vital in the twenty-first century as they did during the Golden Age of Broadway more than half a century ago. Merman’s greatness consistently transcends genre and generation; in 2000, the contemporary jazz singer Dianne Reeves (who has more chops than anyone else singing today) acknowledged that she studied Merman’s singing “for projection.”
Projection was only the beginning: There was her amazing enunciation, and the miraculous clarity of her voice—she did more than project to the back of a theater; even in the cheap seats you could easily comprehend every nuance and every gesture. Merman has been compared to the greatest of Wagner sopranos, the similarly iron-lunged (not to mention iron-helmeted) Kirsten Flagstad; neither icon had to do anything other than remain motionless onstage, and stand and deliver.
It’s rightfully asserted that no one introduced more of the great American standards than Fred Astaire, but Merman came closest. Indeed, she premiered far more Cole Porter classics than any other artist and she did the same for Broadway’s other great composer-lyricist, Irving Berlin: Hard as it may be to believe, the great man only had two major hits in the age of modern book musicals, Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam, and Merman was the force behind both of those. She also originated more of the great musical comedy heroines than any actress or singer, not only the aforementioned Reno Sweeney, Sally Adams, Annie Oakley, Panama Hattie, and Madame Du Barry, but her favorite and most revived role, Mama Rose in Gypsy.
The sum of Merman’s achievements is much higher than if she had been merely a “belter”—as she often described herself—and nothing else. Her voice had the power and volume, but she also had a tender and vulnerable side. When she sang “Down in the Depths (On the 90th Floor)” in Red, Hot and Blue or “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please” in Panama Hattie, she displayed pathos as well as power. She characterized her characters as “invulnerable dames” or “tough brassy broads,” but all of them, from the hard-edged Hattie to the Medea-like Mama Rose, who will stop at nothing short of eating her young, had a sentimental side. Merman both acted and sang them all with total believability and conviction. And from the beginning, she had an ear for timing that served her both as a musician and a comic, and an uproarious sense of humor. In fact, the reviews that pleased her the most were the ones that implied she could have succeeded as a comedienne and actress even without those miraculous pipes.
The young Ethel Agnes Zimmermann first began to realize her power while entertaining at army camps during the First World War. Singing a sentimental song about her mother, she discovered that “an awful lot of those big tough fighting men had mysteriously got something in their eyes.” She had been born in Astoria, Queens, on January 16—that much is agreed upon. She later said the year was 1912; most sources say 1908 or 1909; her most recent biographer, Geoffrey Mark, has established the year as 1906. While Merman was frequently taken for Jewish (and was discriminated against because of it), she was actually a devout Episcopalian. She grew up hooked on vaudeville, sneaking into shows in local theaters as often as she could get away from school, and she soon began to enter that world by winning a series of amateur contests.
Meanwhile she was also studying to be a secretary, learning to type and take dictation, and she later spoke more proudly of these achievements than she ever did of her considerably less formal musical education. Her father played a little piano, and constantly encouraged her to sing out “Louise” as he pounded the Steinway. George Gershwin himself later concurred: “Never go near a singing teacher,” he told the young singer, “and never forget your shorthand.” She went to work as a stenographer, but after business hours, she continued to haunt theaters for singing work. While still holding her day job, she sang at parties and restaurants and met her lifelong pal Jimmy Durante when working for the singer-pianist-comic at his famous club, Les Ambassadeurs. By 1930, she and pianist Al Siegel were performing at the top houses in vaudeville, such as the Brooklyn Paramount, and while still in the outer boroughs, appeared in a few very early talking picture short subjects filmed in Astoria.
Around this time, another rising young star—Virginia Katherine McMath, already known as Ginger Rogers—caught Ethel Zimmermann’s act in White Plains, New York. “She strode forcefully to the front of the stage and began to sing,” Rogers later wrote. “She was sensational. Her voice was clear and brilliant and every word could be heard in the far reaches of the theatre.” A few months later, Rogers was signed to play the ingenue in the Gershwins’ forthcoming Girl Crazy, and producer Vinton Freedley needed a girl singer for a secondary lead who would be responsible for putting over three key songs. Rogers and her mother suggested that they go and listen to “the girl from White Plains.” And that was it.
It was to Merman’s great regret that, as close as she became to the Gershwins, circumstances prevented her from doing another show with them. After Girl Crazy ran for nearly a year (which constituted a major hit in those days), she moved on to the most celebrated edition of George White’s Scandals. With Rudy Vallee, Ray Bolger, and such songs as Merman’s standout “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” that show was also a winner. She followed it in 1932 with another success, Take a Chance (titled Humpty Dumpty out of town), in which she introduced “Eadie Was a Lady.”
In 1934, Merman made a major breakthrough, creating the first of the many characters that established her as an actress and comic as well as a pair of tonsils. This was Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, who, thanks to Merman, quickly entered the collective consciousness. She made instant standards out of “I Get a Kick out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow Gabriel Blow,” and the title song.
For the next ten years, the Cole Porter–Ethel Merman collaboration continued unabated over five successive and successful shows: Anything Goes was followed by Red, Hot and Blue (1936, which yielded “It’s De-Lovely”) with Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope, Du Barry Was a Lady (1939) with Bert Lahr, Panama Hattie (1940, in which “I’ve Still Got My Health” and the torchy “Another Old-Fashioned, Please” were the standouts), and Something for the Boys (1943). (The pattern was interrupted only for a 1939 flop called Stars in Your Eyes, with songs by Arthur Schwartz and her dear friend Dorothy Fields.)
Apart from Broadway, where the hits far outnumbered the flops, she didn’t score highly; Hollywood, where they liked girls with big eyes and small voices, had no idea what to do with her. Merman made her earliest feature, a cameo in the deadly dull Follow the Leader, back in 1930, and also starred in two pictures each with Bing Crosby and Eddie Cantor. She apparently wasn’t ever considered glamorous enough to play a romantic female lead, although Strike Me Pink with Cantor actually cast her as a femme fatale. Twentieth Century Fox put her in two big musicals, but was equally clueless,although Alexander’s Ragtime Band gave her all the best songs and the first chance to work with her postwar savior, Irving Berlin.
Merman reigned unchallenged as the supreme voice of Broadway in two distinct eras of that great street’s history. Most musicals in the thirties, including the five classic Merman-Porter shows, were built around songs; the plots of these were mere devices upon which to string a series of potential Hit Parade entries. It’s telling that the last of these productions, Something for the Boys, opened two months before Oklahoma! heralded a new kind of musical comedy, one in which song and story were more integrated.
Merman created three of the great musical comedy roles in the modern era. It turned out to be prophetic that she and Porter had earlier described “a Berlin ballad” as “the top,” because her postwar career got under way with Irving Berlin’s two greatest heroines, the lead characters of Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Call Me Madam (1950). The two shows created an endless list of hits: “I Got the Sun in the Morning,” “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” “Anything You Can Do,” “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in the first, and “The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Ball” and “You’re Just in Love,” among others, in the second.
She also starred in Berlin’s last top film, the beguiling and delightful There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), which didn’t quite compensate for her not being asked to re-create her role as Annie in the 1949 MGM film of Annie. Show-wise, Merman was next sidetracked by a minor undertaking called Happy Hunting (1956), which, although described by its star as “a jeep among limousines,” actually ran 412 performances (and produced the immodest and memorable “Mutual Admiration Society”). She rightfully admitted, “Most critics attributed the fact that so many people were willing to shove $8.05 under the ticket wicket to my efforts.”
Finally, La Merm climaxed her career in 1959 playing Mama Rose in the “Musical Fable” Gypsy, perhaps the greatest female role in all of musical comedy. Based rather loosely on the story of stripper and monologuist Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy may have been the title character, but the star turn was actually Lee’s mother, who overshadowed her both in real life and in the show. More than any other vehicle, Gypsy gave Merman the chance to show everything she could do, both as an actress and a singer. As the most ambitious stage mother of all time, Merman was by Rose’s turns domineering, romantic, tender, and savagely aggressive. Her Mama Rose was one of the supreme characterizations of the American stage.
As always, she did much of her best acting in song, particularly with Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s exuberant “Some People” and the double meaning of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Most meaningfully, Merman’s musical soliloquy “Rose’s Turn” exhibited a hitherto unrevealed reflective side. Subsequent Mamas Rose—Rosalind Russell (in the Warner Bros. film), Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, and many others have played the character in revivals, foreign casts, films, and TV productions—have grown increasingly carnivorous, but none displayed the sensitivity and depth that Merman brought to Mama Rose when she created her for the stage. The widow of German playwright Bertolt Brecht even tried to get her to play the title role in Mother Courage.
Merman had already forfeited many a movie role to a Hollywood regular (Hattie to Ann Sothern, Du Barry to Lucille Ball, and Annie to Betty Hutton), but she came closest to being bitter when producer Freddy Brisson snatched up the movie rights to Gypsy as a vehicle for his wife, Roz Russell. Merman had every right to be upset, not least for the way Russell actually plays the part in the film, which is like a high-class dame gone slumming. (Russell was even more out of place in Gypsy than Merman would have been in Auntie Mame.) Indeed, the 1936 film of Anything Goes (even with its truncated score) and the excellent 1953 film of Call Me Madam are, regrettably, the only two cinematic records we have of Merman preserving her great roles for posterity. (There’s also a live TV production of Anything Goes from 1954, which is a mere footnote but a much better visual record of the classic 1954 show than either of the two films of it. Frank Sinatra and Bert Lahr co-star as Merman’s romantic-musical and comic leading men, respectively.) Hollywood only discovered her late in life as a brilliant, nonsinging comedienne in the slapstick spectacular It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and The Art of Love (1965). She also made self-parodying appearances on TV’s Batman, The Muppet Show, and in the 1980 spoof movie Airplane!
After Gypsy, Merman more or less considered herself retired from the eight-shows-a-week grind of Broadway. Still, she deigned to appear in two revivals, starting with a 1966 revamping of Annie Get Your Gun done at Lincoln Center complete with a new Berlin ballad about an old-fashionied wedding. In 1970, she essayed the role of Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, a vehicle she had turned down in 1963—which technically wasn’t a revival, as the show had been running continually since Carol Channing opened it in 1964.
It’s difficult to fully assess the achievements of Ethel Merman, who more than two dozen years after her death on February 15, 1984, remains the single most dynamic icon in the history of musical theater. Not long ago, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a large chorus is shown belting out “There’s NO business like SHOW business” and they’re billed as—what else—“The Ethel Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” At least two New York cabarets were named after Merman characters, Reno Sweeney’s and Rose’s Turn.
Merman is perhaps the only major twentieth-century popular vocalist who emerged at the dawn of mass media—electric recording, radio, and talkies—whose career was largely unrelated to any of these technical developments. She was a natural for Broadway with her outsize voice and personality; yet the fact that she could reach the upper rafters without benefit of amplification didn’t mean that her voice didn’t record well. She could and did: Her voice rings pure and true on all her studio records, from the first sides of 1931 to the dread—but well-sung—disco album of the seventies.
Recording-wise, one wishes that she’d come along either earlier or later. If she could have caught the recording boom of the twenties, she probably would have made dozens of discs of all kinds of tunes. If she’d started during the war or later, then all her important roles would have been documented on original cast albums (as indeed all her postwar parts are). But she made it right at the start of the Depression, and her 78 rpm activity is embarrassingly scattershot. The record business was in such a depressed state in the very early thirties that, sadly, she did not make any recordings of the songs from Girl Crazy—what I wouldn’t give to have a disc of her doing “I Got Rhythm” with Gershwin on piano (as he had done for Fred Astaire)! In 1931, she test-recorded seven songs (including three from George White’s Scandals) for three different labels, but these have yet to be unearthed and issued.
Her earliest issued session, done for Victor, consists of four songs none of which, oddly, are from any of her shows, although she did document “Eadie Was a Lady” from Take a Chance. Yes, she did two songs from Anything Goes and all four of her biggies from Red, Hot and Blue, but nothing from Du Barry Was a Lady. Yes to Stars in Your Eyes and Panama Hattie, but no, strangely, to Something for the Boys. It wasn’t until 1947 that Decca invited Merman to document the eight biggest song hits of her prewar shows on a 78 album called Songs She Made Famous. What was the record business looking for? A bigger star? A bigger voice? Ha! Not bloody likely.
For a very brief while around 1950, Decca—with Annie already a top-selling album and Madam on the horizon—treated her like a bona fide recording artist, and actually let her do a few singles of songs that she didn’t introduce on Broadway. No one was more surprised than Merman herself when she landed a hit record with “Dearie” (from the Copacabana Show of 1950). Done as a duet with the old Scarecrow, Ray Bolger, her former Scandals co-star, the disc sold 200,000 copies in a month. A follow-up with Bolger, “(If I Knew You Were Comin’) I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” a cover of Eileen Barton’s hit, also dented the charts. She and such colleagues as Bolger and Durante could create memorable moments out of every kind of triviality—songs that made “Baked a Cake” (by Bob Merrill, then in his novelty phase) look like Rodgers and Hart, things like “The Lake Song” and “A Husband, a Wife.” A few years later, Merman became the only artist after Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby to record a Musical Autobiography for Decca. Like Armstrong for jazz and Crosby for pop, she was the industry leader in her own field, yet she had never been the colossus that her talent warranted in the world of recording. (In recent years, Universal Music collected these 45 rpm tracks on a welcome package titled The World Is Your Balloon: The Decca Singles 1950–1951.)
The irony is that Decca was by far the most supportive label of her career, and even they failed to do what they should have done, which was to have her in the studio day and night—or at least fairly regularly. She should have recorded every show tune that ever was, every big song from every Rodgers and Hammerstein or Hart hit, every song ever written by Jerry Herman, Jule Styne, Bob Merrill, Comden and Green, every song from Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, even The Wiz, or any other musical comedy you can think of. Merman starred on a short-lived national radio series in 1949, and surviving airchecks have her singing such unexpected songs as “Some Enchanted Evening.” It sounds exactly the way you would expect.
In 1961, Merman taped a bunch of staples with zingy, Sinatra-age arrangements by Billy May for the Chairman’s own label, Reprise (Merman … Her Greatest!), and ten years later she re-re-created them with a disastrous contemporary sound on The Ethel Merman Disco Album (released in 1979 on A&M). There was also Merman Sings Merman, a beautifully recorded set of oft-sung Merman perennials taped in London in the late sixties. As an illustration of what a cockeyed (not at all optimistic) world this is, the wonderful Merman … Her Greatest! has yet to be reissued on CD while the ghastly Merman Disco Album is readily available. The message is clear: Merman fans are not permitted to have taste of any kind.
Two collections contain the bulk of the recordings that she did make. Doin’ What Comes Naturally! (on the British Jasmine) has most of the prewar sides, and There’s No Business Like Show Business: The Ethel Merman Collection (Razor & Tie, licensed from Decca and Columbia) has all of her big numbers from the postwar shows (although for some reason the Annie masters have artificial stereo echo). Both are generally recommended. More recently, Harbinger Records has released two CDs of material from her private holdings. It’s almost as if the great lady has come back from beyond the grave to make sure that some of her best music is available.
Mermania!, Volume 1 is a combination of demos and private tapings of songs she never recorded elsewhere, while Volume 2 is a full-length document of her 1964 nightclub act, recorded live in an undisclosed location. (The only thing they tell us is that it’s not Las Vegas.) Volume 1 is principally for collectors, but Volume 2 is the live album that one of the majors should have released forty years ago. This is a very stirring performance indeed, very nearly in a class with the great Carnegie Hall albums by Judy Garland (1961) and Tony Bennett (1962). There’s a particularly poignant reading of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” here, in which one can almost discern something of a Jolson-like tear in her voice, as if all this in-your-face brassiness is just a façade to hide a sentimental and vulnerable soul—or that she wants you to think it is. Yet, enjoyable as the Mermania! series is, we still feel as if we’re rooting around in the closet looking for scraps, looking for something to fill in the gap, anything to take the place of the “real” records that she should have made.
In all of show business, only Jolson and Judy Garland had chops comparable to Merman’s, and neither of them intruded on her territory: Jolson dwelt in Broadway’s prehistory, and would have found it inconceivable to play any role other than himself. Garland was exclusively a creature of Hollywood and blew her chance to play the musical theater’s great heroines (beginning with Merman’s own Annie Oakley).
Call her Madam. Call her Zimmermann or Merman. Call her Episcopalian, or, if you must, Jewish. Call her a singer, an actress, a comic, a diva, or an American icon. Call her whatever you wish, but precious few performers beyond Merman can accurately be described as a genuine force of nature.