“SONGWRITERS and singers are always supposed to be full of rivalry and jealousy. Not my father,” says Margaret Whiting. He loved people, he loved working with other writers, having them come over to the house, he loved it when Kern or Harold Arlen or Harry Warren would come over with something new they’d written and he could be the first to appreciate it.”
By the time she was in her late teens, Dick Whiting’s daughter Margaret had begun her own musical career; now, twenty-five years after breaking into the business as a band singer with Freddy Slack, she’s still singing—not only the songs she grew up hearing in her living room, but the best of what’s going today. That ability to roll with the times is one of the lessons she learned from the late Dick Whiting. “He’d say, ‘Margaret, there’s all kinds of music in the world. I was raised to like popular music, but I love the classical too. And if you’re going to be a musician or a singer, you may not be able to create it all, but at least you’ve got to understand it all. There’s a whole spectrum of music, just as there are people, and you mustn’t shut any of it off. Be exposed to everything.’ That was the first thing he taught me,” she admits today, “and I’m sure that if he were still alive, he’d be listening to all the new people—the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Jim Webb, Carole King, any of them—trying to find out what each of them is doing, and being very excited by the good things he’d uncovered in each one.”
Today Margaret, an attractive brunette, sits in her Manhattan apartment, in a study whose shelves are stacked with bound copies of Dick Whiting’s evergreen song hits (most of which she has performed and recorded with affection), and talks about her father, the young man from the Midwest who achieved so much success at the complex art of pop songwriting for two decades, from 1918 on.
Richard Whiting
“My father was born in Peoria, Illinois, but he grew up in Detroit. His family took him out to school in California—the Harvard Military Academy—but he was always interested in music. He came back to Detroit and got himself a job working at the Jerome H. Remick Music Company. Remick was the only major music publisher to have his offices in Detroit. My father started in as a copy boy—this was about 1916. His job was to hand out sheet music to the various performers who’d come into Remick’s looking for new material for their acts.
“Eventually Mr. Remick elevated my father to the job of song-plugger. My father could play marvelous piano, and he was a great demonstrator; he’d go to meet all the stars as they came into Detroit. The big vaudeville theatre was the Temple. They all played it—Nora Bayes, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, Jolson. That’s where he met my mother, Eleanor. She was touring with Maggie, her sister. Maggie would go out and sing the songs— she was what they called a ‘coon-shouter.’ She’d come back into the wings, and my mother would be standing there, waiting for her with a glass of water. Out would go Maggie, do another encore, then come back for another drink.
“My mother knew everybody. I remember her telling me about the early days with the Marx Brothers. They’d be in some town on the same vaudeville bill, they’d all be living in the same boardinghouse, and my mother always did the cooking for everybody. Groucho would figure out a way to sneak the key to her rooms, and when she’d come back home to start the cooking, he and his brothers would all be there waiting for her in her bathtub, stark naked, just to drive her crazy!”
Young Dick Whiting wrote his first song hit in 1917. Called “When It’s Tulip Time in Holland,” it sold over a million copies of sheet music but Dick sold the song outright to the music publisher and used the money to buy himself a piano. “By that time people in the business had heard of this kid in Detroit, and when they came to town they’d look him up.”
A war-song contest was held at the Michigan Theatre. “Anybody, amateur or professional, could enter. My father had written a waltz. Raymond Egan, who lived in Detroit, had written a simple little lyric to fit the tune. My father, who was always a shy, gentle man, obviously thought this wasn’t the sort of song that was going to win, with all that competition. So without even pressing Egan to change the lyric, or playing the song for anybody’s opinion, he threw the thing into his wastebasket.
“This is really like a Doris Day picture,” Margaret comments wryly. “His secretary was dumping out the basket, saw the manuscript, read it through, and then she took it up to Mr. Remick himself. He played it over, and he said, ‘Let’s not tell Richard. Obviously he threw it away for some reason. If I know Richard, he didn’t believe in it.’ Remick entered the tune in the war-song contest. Well, it won, three nights in a row. Remick came in to see my father, and he said, ‘Richard, you have yourself a nice new hit song,’ and my father said, ‘But I haven’t written anything for quite a while.’ ‘Yes, you have,’ said Remick. He told him that the song had won the contest, that every day they were getting requests for five or six thousand copies. To date, that song has sold nearly seventeen million copies, and I can’t imagine how many recordings have been made of it. I suppose you could call it the World War I song. It was titled ‘Till We Meet Again’but was originally called ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ which of course, was not appropriate for that time!
“After my mother and father got married, they went to Chicago on their honeymoon. It’s always been a family joke with us—my father was so busy writing songs with Gus Kahn in those days that Kahn took a room at the same hotel, the Edgewater Beach. All through the honeymoon they kept on writing!
“He had tremendous hits all through the ’20s—‘Sleepy Time Gal,’ ‘Japanese Sandman,’ ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?,’ ‘Horses, Horses, Horses.’ It was my mother who finally got him to leave Detroit. By that time she was handling all his business affairs; she’s always been very bright about show business. Eleanor is very much like that woman in Gypsy—you remember when the guy tells Rose, ‘You’re a pioneer woman without a frontier.’ She knew what was happening with talking pictures, and she could see what was happening in New York, on Broadway, and she knew my father would have to go one way or the other. She said to him, ‘East or West, but you can’t stay here in Detroit, because it’s a rut.’ He and Neil Moret wrote a song together; a strange thing, because it was my father who did the lyric. It was a love song to Eleanor, back in Detroit, and he called it ‘She’s Funny That Way.’ If you read that lyric, you’ll see there’s a line at the end: ‘I’m only human, coward at best / I’m pretty certain she’d follow me west’…. You can see that he didn’t think she was going to leave him, but he loved her so much and he was using that as a reason for writing the song.”
Whiting was not to concentrate on writing for the Broadway musical theatre; he and Leo Robin were teamed by Max Dreyfus, the publisher, and sent to Hollywood to write songs for the early Chevalier musicals at Paramount. Later he worked with Buddy De Sylva, and tried his hand at one Broadway musical. “It was originally called Humpty Dumpty,” said Miss Whiting. “Ethel Merman, Jack Whiting, and Sid Silvers were in the cast. When it opened out of town, it was a tremendous bomb, but Buddy De Sylva swore he knew how to make it into a hit, so they closed the show, redid the whole thing, and reopened it with a new title, Take a Chance. But by that time my father was so nervous from all the rewrites and changes that he went back to Hollywood. They called him up from New York after opening night and said, ‘Congratulations, Dick—you have a smash!’1
“It’s ironic how many of my father’s songs became theme songs. For years Eddie Cantor used ‘One Hour with You.’ Fred Waring used ‘Breezing Along with the Breeze.’ How about ‘Hooray for Hollywood,’ Jack Benny’s theme for twenty years—can you ever see anything about the movies where they don’t strike up that song? For years Shirley Temple was associated with ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop,’ but he wrote that one for me; I always sat next to him at the piano, sucking a lollipop. And as for ‘Louise’ and ‘My Ideal,’ Chevalier loved those songs so much he used them every time he sang.”
Whiting’s last collaborator was to be the youthful Johnny Mercer, lately arrived in Hollywood from New York in the mid-’30s. They did several films at Warner Bros., and then Whiting died, only forty-six years old, in 1938. Shy, reticent, a very modest man, the fact of his considerable success as a composer never really changed him from the unassuming young song-plugger at Remick’s in Detroit. “His greatest pleasure was in finding out what other composers were doing,” says his daughter. “He was a very good musician, and he loved to take their new songs and play them. Always accepted the new, adored what was going on with his friends. Jerome Kern always insisted that my father listen to whatever new songs he’d written; he wanted his opinion. My father loved Cole Porter, considered him a real innovator. But his real joy was with Gershwin, whom he’d known in New York as a young man and whom he’d helped out in the early days. When Porgy and Bess opened in New York in 1935, he took the train from Los Angeles just to be at the opening. Sat through the whole thing side by side with Gershwin. And he almost died, as did Gershwin, because the reception to that first production was so half-hearted. He resented it so—Gershwin, his friend, his buddy, in whose work he took such pride!
“I was just a kid then,” she says. “I hardly knew what he was talking about when he’d say to me, ‘Don’t they understand what’s happened? Don’t they realize this is one of the greatest American composers? Don’t they see that he’s written a classic? What is wrong with these people? I always sat at the piano next to him. He worked every day, writing something. That was very important; he rarely let a day pass without trying to write something. I’d come home from school and ask to hear what he’d done that day. But after he came back from New York, all he wanted to play were the Gershwin songs—‘Summertime’ and all the rest.
“If I’m any good at all as a singer,” she says today, “a lot of it is due to something my father taught me. He once said, ‘Margaret, you have a good voice, you certainly know how to sing. Now, we spend years in perfecting our craft. I hate to think of it as a craft, it’s something I love to do, but it is a job, it is work, and we work very hard to write a song and make it work. You must sing this song with great affection and feeling. It takes the men who write the lyrics a long time, because we wrote them with much love and feeling. Just believe in their words, do them simply and honestly. That’s how a singer should interpret a song.’”