IT’S NOT A QUARTER to three, it’s a good deal earlier—ten A.M. And there’s no one in the place except Mercer and me. The place is a tiny, snug New York hideaway in the East Sixties that Mr. M and his wife retain as pied-à-terre for their frequent visits to town. In the mini-living room there’s hardly enough space for both a sofa and Mr. Mercer’s working equipment, an upright piano covered with sheet music. Hidden off a hallway are two Pullman-size bedrooms. In his pajamas, Mercer is prowling about, brewing instant coffee in a cubbyhole that would make the galley of a large cabin cruiser seem like the kitchen at the Waldorf. “We don’t pay the size of this place much mind,” he remarks. “Matter of fact, my wife Ginger once said the motto of this apartment has to be ‘I’ll be loving you sideways.’”
Very early in the morning to be making jokes, but somehow wit has always come naturally to Johnny Mercer, even after last night, which seems to have been strenuous. “I come to New York every so often on business, and it never fails to charge my batteries,” he admits. “New York was always The Place in my world. First came up here when I was nineteen. Been coming back ever since. Maybe it’s not as relaxed as it used to be, but I’m still hooked on the place.”
That first arrival would be in 1928, when young John Mercer migrated from Savannah, Georgia (birthplace also of the fabled “Hard-Hearted Hannah”), and since then he has indeed traveled more than a country mile, with most of his progress steadily forward. He’s made it big in New York and Hollywood, and yet the home ties are still strong; he has just returned from a municipal celebration down in Savannah, where he and another hometown boy who made good, Hal Kanter, the producer-writer, staged a show for the people. “Big doin’s,” he says. That familiar Georgia twang is still very much in evidence, even after all his years up North and out in those Beverly Hills. “Savannah’s still like it used to be, you know—hospitable, warm, friendly. Everybody goes around and sings songs, drinks, and loves one another.”
Mercer’s first few jobs in New York were as a tyro actor. But then he turned to singing and the writing of lyrics. “I guess I gradually just gravitated to songwriting,” he remembers. “I think I absorbed it. I don’t think I actually studied it consciously. But my aunt once said that when I was six months old she hummed to me and I hummed right back. Now, that’s pretty early. Three or four years old, I began to like songs and listen to ’em. Always listened to records—the old cylindrical ones, then the big thick Edison ones, and then when they got to the regular 78s, we had all those. By the time I was eleven or twelve I really knew most of the songs that came out, by heart. Knew the verses. We’d get around the piano and play hundreds of songs, the way folks did in those days. I’d always look at the writers, see who they were. Victor Herbert was one of my very favorites, and I can remember liking Kern’s ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’ when it came out. Couldn’t have been more than four or five then.
“When I got a little older, I remember asking my brother who was the greatest songwriter in America. He said Irving Berlin. I suppose Irving was getting a lot of publicity even at that time. That would be around the war, maybe right after it, 1919. Later on, when I worked for Paul Whiteman and began to meet all those guys, it was a big thrill. They liked me, and they were particularly surprised because I knew all their songs. And I didn’t do it to flatter them. I really knew them.”
The very first Mercer lyric appeared in a rather auspicious showcase, the third edition of The Garrick Gaieties, in 1930. In a collected revue, which also featured the burgeoning talents of E. Y. Harburg and the late Vernon Duke, Mercer contributed a song called “Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You).” It was in that same production that he met and married Ginger, who is at this moment minding their California house. Which is fortunate, because in this small apartment three would definitely be a crowd.
“Met lots of different writers after I had that song,” Mercer says. “Hoagy Carmichael, for one. Marvelous writer. The two of us had a great big hit called ‘Lazy Bones.’ After that, he quit what he was doing to earn a living and started writing songs exclusively, and I got the job working for Paul Whiteman. Wrote a song every week. Paul had the Kraft radio show then, with Al Jolson, and I wrote for his singers. One of them was Jack Teagarden, the trombonist. Brilliant horn player … a genius.”
Johnny Mercer
After those intensive days Mercer was hired to go to Hollywood to write songs and act in low-budget musicals at RKO. “Did two there,” he recalls. “Right after that they sent me back to the typewriter, and I’ve been there ever since. My first big song was ‘I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande,’ which Bing Crosby put into a picture called Rhythm on the Range, and then I did rhythm songs like ‘Bob White,’ made records like ‘Last Night on the Back Porch,’ with Jerry Colonna, ‘Jamboree Jones,’ and it just kept on going like that from there. Got to performing less and less and writing more and more.”
Mercer’s list of subsequent collaborators is formidable. It ranges from the late Richard Whiting through Harry Warren, the late Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Jimmy Van Heusen, Henry Mancini, Gene DePaul, Arthur Schwartz, the late Bobby Dolan, Michel LeGrand. And the resultant roster of hit songs is a remarkable thing to contemplate, one which extends from “Jeepers, Creepers” (Warren), “That Old Black Magic” (Arlen), “You Were Never Lovelier” (Kern), “Satin Doll” (Ellington), “Hooray for Hollywood” (Whiting), “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (again Warren), “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (Van Heusen), all the way up to “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” (Mancini), and even to “I Want to Be Around (to Pick Up the Pieces When You Break Your Heart),” which title was mailed in by a lady from Youngstown, Ohio. “That one was a natural,” he once said, with his customary modesty. “She did the title and I did everything else, but I figure that’s fifty-fifty. Because, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a hit title. The guy who has it is a lucky guy, because he’s got half the battle won if the general public already likes the title … which they did.”
Mercer always makes it sound easy. But anyone who’s ever sharpened a pencil and tried to write a lyric to a tune knows better. “Johnny studied,” said his good friend Bobby Dolan, with whom Mercer wrote two Broadway scores—Texas, Li’l Darlin’ and Foxy. “He listened, and he learned the basics. He absorbed everything, and then transformed it with his own style. Believe me, it’s no accident that he’s been able to work with so many great composers.”
What about this remarkable adaptability?
“It’s the secret of any success I’ve had,” admits Mercer. “There are certain writers who have a great feeling for tunes, no matter where they come from. I think I’m one of them. I don’t mean that in any egotistical way. I think Dorothy Fields is one, too. She’s written with a lot of guys and she’s always written well. She has a feel for the tune. I think Gus Kahn was a terrific tune-picker, had magnificent hit songs, probably because he recognized a great tune when he heard one. Today I think Paul Simon is probably going to be one of those. I think Jimmy Webb is one of them; of course, he writes his own tunes. Most of the young people of today do.
“But to get back to Dorothy—to me she’s like John O’Hara. He had such a terrific ear for dialogue; she’s got it for lyrics. For the way a thing should be said. You find it time after time in her lyrics.” Mercer begins to sing: “‘I know why I’ve waited, know why I’ve been blue … I know why my mother taught me to be true, she meant me for someone exactly like you.’ Now, that doesn’t rhyme or anything, it’s not difficult, but it just says what the melody says, and it’s wonderful. Listen to this one—it’s the start of a verse, and she writes, ‘Gee, but it’s tough to be broke, kid, but that’s oke, kid …,’ and then she goes, ‘I can’t give you anything but love, baby.’ Wow! What an idea for a poor boy and girl—every boy and girl, you know. Rich or poor, but especially if they’re poor. And later on, when she wrote with Kern, Dorothy did that beautifully, too. She rose right up to his melodies. Her lyrics enhanced his tunes—‘Lovely to Look At,’ ‘Remind Me.’ My God, what a good lyric that is!” Again Mercer sings, in that high, distinctive voice that was heard so many nights on the old Bing Crosby Kraft Music Hall shows in pre-World War II days. “‘Remind me not to find you so attractive.’ Marvelous! It just makes that tune!
“Oh, Bobby Dolan was right,” he concedes. “I did study them all, from the very beginning, to learn what made a good song. I’d always loved Walter Donaldson’s1 songs, and when I finally got to work with him, it was a big kick for me. He’d had lots of hits, and I knew them all, the lyrics, even the verses. He had the kind of hits that everybody sang on the street. ‘My Buddy,’ ‘Blue Heaven,’ ‘Little White Lies.’ Truck drivers would sing ’em. It’s a terrific thrill for me to write a song that truck drivers like and laborers like. Say, a ‘Strip Polka.’ You know, they all sing. ‘Take it off, take it off’— they love that, you know? I had one called ‘Goody, Goody,’ a big popular song. People love to sing it when it comes to the title. Well, Donaldson was that sort of writer. He impressed the hell out of me. There was a big difference in our ages—I was young and impressionable—but there was a nice twinkle in his eye, and he was kind to young people. He was kind of at the tag end of his career, this great, gifted songwriter. He was improvident, a spendthrift. He’d give away his ideas, just like his money. I’d sing him one of his songs like ‘My Best Girl,’ even the verse to it, and he would say, ‘Where’d you learn that?’ Because it hadn’t been a hit, but I knew the song.
“Later I found out that one of the vagaries of this business, if you can call it a business, is that you can make a big hit but you can also lose a big hit. Depends on the records you get, and the plugs you get, and everything else. But it’s very hard to hide a really great song, ‘cause it will eventually surface somewhere. Take ‘Begin the Beguine.’ I knew that was a hit the night I saw Porter’s show Jubilee. And yet it took two years for it to become a popular hit.
“Anyway, I got to work with Donaldson; we did a few songs that worked. One of them was ‘Mr. Meadowlark.’ That was sort of cute. Then Buddy Morris at Warners asked me who I’d like to write with, and I said, ‘I’d rather work with Dick Whiting than anybody.’ Another one of my idols. I had heard all his songs, I loved them. ‘Japanese Sandman,’ ‘Till We Meet Again,’ ‘My Ideal,’ ‘Sleepy Time Gal,’ and those songs he’d done with Leo Robin for Chevalier—‘Louise’ and ‘One Hour with You.’ He had a lot of quality, and he was an original. A dear fellow, too. Modest and sweet, and not at all pushy like a lot of New York writers are. He came from Detroit, and he was kind of a shy man. He wasn’t too well by that time, but we were really good friends. We went to work at Warners, did a couple of pictures together. They worked you pretty hard then, you were at it every day. We did Hollywood Hotel and Varsity Show, and a picture called Ready, Willing and Able.”
Mercer pauses, stares out the ground-floor window at the tiny garden outside, perhaps thinking back to the sunnier days of the ’30s when he and Whiting turned out songs in a Burbank office. ‘We did have one big hit together, a song called ‘Too Marvelous for Words.’”
Margaret Whiting recalls: “My father always said that the genius of Mercer really comes out in that lyric. They staged that number in a typical Busby Berkeley style—a huge typewriter with all the girls lying on their backs; their legs were the keys, and they tapped out the words on a huge roll of paper, can you believe it? But Mercer had written such an idea! The guy is trying to tell his girl how he feels about her, and he says, ‘You’re just too marvelous, too marvelous for words like glorious, glamorous, and that old stand-by, amorous.’ And then he gets to, ‘You’re just too much, you’re just too very, very, to ever be in Webster’s dictionary.’ Now, every word is supposed to be in Webster’s, and here’s Mercer having him say she’s so much that he can’t find the words. Just think about it in terms of the ’30s, as an enormously original approach to saying ‘I love you, honey.’ It was unique!”
That particular brand of wordsmithing, that special turn of phrase, Mercer has been coming up with all these years. Can he explain where it comes from?
He grins. “No. I get lyric ideas from anywhere. Maybe from a billboard on the street, or something I read. AN idea will hit me and I jot it down. I’m an inside-the-matchcover type of writer. They don’t always come fast, believe me. I remember once Hoagy Carmichael gave me two tunes to set. Well, I struggled over them for a long time. Must have been a year before I got one; I called it ‘Skylark.’ I called up Hoagy and I said, ‘Hey, I think I got a lyric for your tune.’ He said, ‘What tune is that?’ He’d forgotten it!”
After the death of his friend Whiting, Mercer began working with Harry Warren. “Probably one of the two or three best popular songwriters America’s ever had. And probably the best movie composer that we had. Don’t think there’s anybody else who’s had the record of writing for movies that Harry’s had. You realize that he had not only one but sometimes two, three hits in his pictures?” Quite a few of those Warren hits—“You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Jeepers, Creepers,” and “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” among others—were with Mercer.
Then came the immensely fruitful collaboration with Harold Arlen, one that was to continue sporadically from the late ’30s until now.
“Well, Harold and I have a good feeling about songs,” says Mercer. “I don’t know why that is, ‘cause we don’t come from the same neck of the woods or anything, but we really have a thing about jazz and blues, and creativity and originality, and structure. I appreciate his work so much that possibly he thinks I get the right words to it.”
Among those “right words” that Mercer has fitted to Arlen’s melodies would be the lyrics to “That Old Black Magic,” a lush ballad which the late Billy Daniels single-handedly made into a rhythm hit. “That one came from one of the early Cole Porter songs I heard when I first came to New York,” Mercer says. “It was a song called ‘You Do Something to Me,’ and it had a phrase in it—‘do do that voo-doo that you do so well.’ I’ve always loved Porter—those early songs of his were so clever, and later on his melodies became so rich and full. Anyway, that thing about voodoo must have stuck with me, because I paraphrased it in ‘Old Black Magic.’”
The Arlen-Mercer collaboration also produced “My Shining Hour,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Hit the Road to Dreamland,” and a song that is easily the great torch lament of our times, “One for My Baby.”
“Well, I have to tell you that those are luck,” explains Mercer. “When you get a tune like ‘Baby’ and you find the right mood for it, that is the luckiest thing that can happen to a lyric-writer. The thing about it is recognizing it when you think of it. You say, ‘That’s right for this tune. That conversational way to write this is gonna make this tune.’ And that’s the same thing that happened with ‘Come Rain or Come Shine.’ A really simple way of saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m unhappy’ the way a guy in a saloon would feel it. Pure luck. I don’t know, maybe it is some sort of gift. Somebody up there is writing it for you.”
Pure luck, or the meeting of talent, idea, and timing, all coming together at the same creative moment?
“Well, that’s so, too,” he admits. “Sort of like a baseball player getting a hit at the right time. He knows how to play ball, he knows how to hit. But he’s not always gonna get a hit, especially with two men on base and two guys out. Well, that’s the way it is with a song. Sometimes you get a little luckier than others. When I wrote ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ I could not get the words down fast enough. It was as if I was taking dictation! Not that it’s such a great lyric, but it just seemed to write itself. Of course, you know the title wasn’t mine, it was Ernest Dowson’s.”
But the fact remains that those lucky “accidents,” those fortuitous matings of music with Mercer’s appropriate words, have been happening with regularity for a long, long time. Mercer’s batting average is so consistently better than .400 that the word “lucky” has to be discarded.
Margaret Whiting vividly recalls the time she first heard “Blues in the Night.” “We always had a Saturday-night get-together at our house in those days. People came and went, songwriters dropped by, we were a show-business family, and everybody sort of hung together. All of us were Hollywood kids then. Mickey Rooney was there, and Judy Garland, Martha Raye, an old friend, and Mel Torme. And around nine thirty or ten Harold and Johnny came by, they’d just finished the song, and they went to our piano and did ‘Blues’ for the first time. Well, I want to tell you, it was like a Paramount Pictures finish—socko, boffo, wham! At one end of the room, Martha Raye almost passed out; for once, she didn’t have a funny line. Torme was so knocked out by the musicianship, he just sat there. Mickey Rooney kept saying, ‘My God, this is unbelievable!’ And Judy and I raced over to the piano to see which of us could learn the song first! You knew right away the song was so important. When they put it into the picture, they really murdered it. But the song had its own strength … that whole thing about the whistle blowing in the night, the associations that were built into Johnny’s lyric. And Harold had written that kind of steady blues refrain that kept on repeating itself. Trains are such a marvelous symbol. Somebody’s always coming in, or leaving on one, so it’s neither sadness nor happiness, but it’s the way you react to it, how you respond.”
“Took us about a week,” Mercer comments today. “We wrote a lot of songs pretty fast. I remember we wrote ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ in only one evening at Harold’s house. Harold’s a magnificently original writer, you know, and it’s something to write with him.”
Mercer joined with the late Jerome Kern to provide a trio of near-perfect ballads for the 1942 Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth musical You Were Never Lovelier. “Oh, I loved working with Kern,” he says. “He was everybody’s favorite composer. Dick Rodgers once said, ‘There’s nobody who hasn’t learned from Kern.’ Little short man, stood up very straight, took everything very seriously. He was interested in everything that had to do with the project—the scenery, the costumes, the props, everything. That was part of his meticulous craftsmanship. He was the best theatrical writer we’ve ever had. No seconds. Gershwin and Rodgers are great writers, but Kern’s my particular favorite.”
Besides the lovely title song for You Were Never Lovelier, that collaboration produced “I’m Old Fashioned” and “Dearly Beloved.” Carmichael, Donaldson, then Whiting, Warren, Arlen, and Kern. Six remarkably different composers; each man very much his own. Yet Mercer functioned supremely well with each of them. How so?
“Well, I never let personality get in the way of the work,” he says today. “The song is the main thing. And I find that if it’s getting a little, say, rough, personality-wise, I just clam up and sit in a corner, or I say, ‘Well, I’m gonna take this home and try to work on it.’ I never let anything bother me. It’s only when a guy tends to force his work in your department that it gets a little annoying, you know? It’s as if I were to tell Kern, ‘I don’t like that middle, why don’t you do it this way?’ Now, how the hell are you going to tell Jerome Kern or anybody else that? So I don’t do that. I just say, ‘Is that the way you like it?’ Or I say, ‘Maybe that middle sounds a little like something else,’ or ‘Don’t you think it’s a little bit long? Or short?’ That’s as far as my criticism goes.
“Composers don’t mind usually when I say I’m going to take something home to work on. As long as you come back with the lyric, it’s okay. I prefer having the music first, because I seem to catch the mood of the tune. If I have any gift at all, that’s it, being able to write the mood properly.”
Work habits? “I’m best when I get up. First hour, I feel good. I work maybe for half a morning or half a day. If I get tired, I quit. Don’t come back. Let my subconscious do the work; it’s a remarkable instrument. I have a study—always have had a room where people will leave me alone. I lie down, and Ginger will say, ‘Daddy’s working.’ And you can get ideas when you’re out drinking, or when you’re driving, or playing golf. You can’t ever tell when that idea’s going to come, but you’d better have a little something to put it down on. It’s liable to slip away. When I really start to work at it, I get a lot of paper and I go to the typewriter and I type dozens of alternative lines. Then I look at those lines, and I gradually weed out the poor ones until I think, ‘Now I’ve got the best.’ I guess it’s taking pains,” Mercer remarks. “Yip Harburg taught me about that. He’s a terrific writer. God, he’ll sit in a room all day and he’ll dig and he’ll dig and he’ll dig. And it shows, I think. He’s witty, he has inventive words. When Yip writes a comedy song for the stage, I think he’s almost without equal. Yip was a big influence in teaching me how hard to work. Sometimes we’d get a rhyming dictionary and Roget’s and we’d sweat.
“Oh, sure, I’d studied other people’s lyrics. De Sylva, Brown and Henderson2—they had great ideas. Berlin’s lyrics—such an economy of words. Cole Porter—such a fund of ideas, such rhyming and style. And Larry Hart was marvelous; he could write beautiful ballads and he’d turn right around and write a funny song, and a wry song, and a sardonic song…. Well, Yip can do that too. He can do practically everything.”
The fact remains that Mercer’s assessment of Harburg holds true for his own work. His “ideas” (“Something’s Gotta Give,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”), his ballads (“Laura,” “Autumn Leaves”), his patter lyrics (“Jubilation T. Cornpone,” “Legalize My Name”) demonstrate an astonishing versatility.
Mercer shrugs. “Well, I like to think I’m a well-rounded writer. They always used to say, ‘I’d like to write a college show with you,’ or a Southern show, and I thought, Oh, that’s a pain in the ass, because I can write those, sure I can, but I want to write something else, you know? I might be able to write Southern things a little better because I am a Southerner. But the Southern stuff got the attention first off because it was Southern in a different way. Nobody had brought in a song like ‘Pardon My Southern Accent’ or ‘Lazy Bones’ before. Up to then it had all been Tin Pan Alley Southern, you know? Stuff like ‘Is It True What They Say About Dixie?’ Sure, it was a big hit, even in the South, but it’s not Southern like, say, Roark Bradford would have written, or DuBose Heyward. It’s not Southern like ‘Moon River.’”
“Moon River,” which Mercer wrote with Henry Mancini as a song for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and which won one of his several Academy Awards (this one in 1961), contains that remarkable lyric phrase “my huckleberry friend.”
“I don’t know why I thought of it,” he says. “Probably stems from the days of my childhood, when we’d go out in the fields and pick wild berries; they were everywhere. I was free-associating about the South for that song. The heroine, Holly Golightly, was from down there. For a while I called that song ‘Red River,’ because all the rivers down there are so muddy. I figured, it’s springtime, she’s in New York, but she’s thinking of her home down there when she was a child. And when I thought ‘huckleberry,’ I said, ‘That’s the right word. I know it.’ It’s an odd word, but that’s why it’s so attractive.”
Mercer chuckles. “We had that song in the picture; Holly sat on the fire escape and sang it, remember? Well, we all went up to the first preview in the San Francisco, and afterwards we went back for the usual postmortem. The verdict was the picture was too long. First thing the producer said was, ‘Well, I know one thing we can cut—that song ‘Moon River.’ It can go.”
Still relishing that irony, he ducks into one of the small bedrooms and returns a few moments later dressed for the day in somewhat sober gray and a Brooks Brothers button-down. It’s nearing lunchtime, and he’s ready to move in that direction, but with those Ben Franklin spectacles he now wears, plus a short goatee, he might well be Professor J. Mercer on his way to conduct a seminar.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he says, most unacademically. “We can all make those mistakes. Couple of years ago they asked me to do the song for a picture called The Sandpiper. I worked up a lyric and brought it in, and the producer turned it down. He went and got another one—‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ Huge hit. That can be pretty depressing.”
Did Mercer like the replacement song?
He grins. “Well, it sort of sounded to me as if it were about a lady with a slight mustache….”
But such unhappy incidents are rare in Mercer’s career, are they not?
“Luckily,” he says. “The more you write, the easier it is. It’s like developing a muscle. You get to be an amateur golfer, and then when you get down to the seventies, you get better and better. And you don’t make that many mistakes. The same thing about writing songs. I know I’m much more skillful than I was when I was twenty. Maybe I don’t have as many original ideas as I had then, maybe they’re not as far out or as wildly imaginative. But I can write ’em. When I get ’em, I know what to do with ’em. Don’t waste any time fooling around, writing four or five versions. It’s knowing where to go with the words, to recognize the thought when it comes, to recognize the proper word. But there is something else to that,” he says most soberly. “If any young writer is going to pay attention to what I’m saying, he might learn a lesson. It’s the extra hour of work that does it. Kern taught that to Hammerstein—Oscar always admitted it. You go back in the room and say, ‘Now, that’s the way it is, but is there something I can improve here? Or something that can be a little more original than it is? I really think that’s the trouble with many kids today. I don’t think they work on the songs. Well, hell, I don’t think they have to. They get such a fast record. I get them coming up to me with things they’ve written. I had one a few days back. I heard this thing and I said, ‘Very nice, but why don’t you work on it a little bit longer? Why don’t you take out this part, because it sounds too much like some of the rest? Why don’t you improve these two lines? They could be so much better.’”
Mercer suddenly grins, and even behind that sober Brooks Brothers façade he’s the same impish chap who sang carefree duets with Crosby and Colonna in the Kraft Music Hall, always having himself a ball and letting everyone know it. “The kid looked at me kind of blankly, but I think maybe I got through to him. I sure hope so.”
As for the Mercer-Arlen collaboration, the two have remained extremely close over the years. It’s unique in that both men are first-rate performers of their own work. Both sang professionally and are more than capable of performing, in many cases superior to the phalanx of weepy torch singers who use “One for My Baby” as a sure tear-getter, or who wail “That Old Black Magic” for effect rather than for honesty. Arlen and Mercer are both vocal master of their own work. “Oh well, anybody can do that these days,” he says, passing it off far too lightly. “All the kids who’re around, they’re just hollerin’ and screamin’ and they’re just great, you know? Those groups like Blood, Sweat and Tears, and The Cream, and Credence Clearwater—they all write, and they’re damned good at performing what they write, too!”
And what about Mercer’s own tunes?
“Oh, I don’t think my stuff compares with Kern’s tunes, or Warren’s, or Harold’s. I think they write music a lot better than I can. I can do a song like ‘Dream’ or ‘Old Cowhand’ or ‘Something’s Gotta Give,’ but I’m not kidding myself. I’ve got a son-in-law who’s a pianist and he works with me. Before that, I’d get in an arranger and we’d work together. I’d sing it to him, or I’d try to play it with one finger. He’d play the chords and ask, ‘Do you mean that chord?’ and I’d say, ‘No, that’s not the right chord.’ Together, we’d find the chord, and he’d write them down for me.”3
It’s Park Avenue now, near lunchtime. We’re headed downtown. Mercer glances down an East Side block jammed with stalled traffic. “This town is so different from the old days,” he says sadly. “I dunno, maybe it’s just my imagination, but everything seemed so much more relaxed and pleasant back then. Nobody seems to have any fun here any more. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with music today, too. The kids don’t have any sense of humor. They’re worried, and they’re scared, and they’re competing fiercely with each other to get a foothold in a profession that’s overcrowded. Everybody plays the guitar, everybody makes records, everybody has his own group, his own company. And the competition is really fierce. It’s like a school of fighting fish.”
There is no hostility in his tone. Many of Mercer’s contemporaries have “tuned out” on the under-twenty-fives and react with Pavlovian distaste to anything played or sung by the emerging talents. “Johnny is one of the few composers of his age group who stay close to what’s happening today,” says Margaret Whiting. “He keeps the lines open. He pays attention, and he really digs what’s happening.”
“Out of competition come superior writers,” muses Mercer. “The more the competition, the better the writers will be. But there’s no humor. When things get back, if they ever do, to a more peaceful way…. You know, I think the scare technique in our society has stultified creativity a lot. The headlines every day, something horrible—war, or a threat of war, or violence, or racial tension, or some goddam thing. Well, we never had that back in the ’30s or the ’20s. We had a golden age of productivity. People had time to laugh then. You want to laugh now, but what’s there to laugh at? You try making a joke about somebody, see what happens. They take it personally, and they say it’s racial, or they say it’s ethnic, or they say, ‘You’re laughin’ at me because I’m a fag, or because I’m fat, or because I’m a woman.’ Hell, you don’t dare say anything about anybody!”
In the current atmosphere, one might not even dare to write a “Pardon My Southern Accent.”
“Nope, they wouldn’t like that. They didn’t like it then! Somebody, a lady from Atlanta, wrote and said, ‘Nobody but an ignorant Yankee would write that!’ She meant you don’t say ‘you-all’ to one person! Hell,” he snorts, “if I didn’t say ‘you-all,’ I wouldn’t have had a song! Oh, it’s a damn shame about the way things are now, because to make fun of the human weaknesses is what gives us, has given us, most of our laughter for centuries.”
Does he believe that the younger crop of songwriters, the Jim Webbs, the Harry Nilssons, the Bert Bacharachs, the Randy Newmans, will demonstrate the same span of accomplishment that is his? Are they merely this year’s talents, or will they be around for a while?
“Depends on the opportunities they get to write, more than on what they’re writing now,” he comments. “See, what they’re doing today is making up complete albums; it’s sort of like writing little short stories, all strung together and set to music. I think they’ll get fed up with this hard-rock stuff soon. I know I’m bored to death with it. They found all the old Elizabethan songs, and they’ve had a run at that. Now they’ve dug up the folk songs, the Tennessee mountain songs, and they’ve been doing that. Do you think maybe,” he asks somewhat wistfully, “they might come back and like some Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert?”
In the world of musical tastes, all things are possible, aren’t they?
“I sure hope so,” he says. “I miss them the most. And Gershwin. Melodic Gershwin, you know? And Youmans. That’s why I think No, No, Nanette has been such a smash. Lots of other people must miss that melody era too.”
A current manifestation of that desire for things past must be the publication of a documentation of Cole Porter’s life and works—the book Cole.
“Smash!” says Mercer happily. “And rightfully so. But I think there’s another reason for the Porter book being such a runaway. Cole Porter is definitive of an era. He is those years, you know? He is the style of all those shows, all that period. He represents it better than anybody else, better than even Kern or Berlin. Porter’s so … thirties! Jerry and Irving have had an enormous, probably a bigger, influence than Cole, but they didn’t have that particular sophistication or….” He pauses, again hunting in his mental Roget for the exact word. “Flair, I guess.”
Lower Fifties now, on Park, headed in the direction of what’s left of the once flourishing theatrical district. Where dozens of Broadway musicals once played to cheerfully packed houses, there are now only a handful of super-smashes, with $15-top seats separating the big spenders from the true appreciators. Over there, in the past three decades, Mercer has only sporadically tried his luck. He and Arlen did St. Louis Woman. The show failed, but the songs like “Come Rain or Come Shine” will survive. He and Bobby Dolan collaborated on Texas, Li’l Darlin’, which was a moderate success, and in the early ’50s Mercer and Gene DePaul provided Li’l Abner with a fine score. There was also the Phil Silvers starring vehicle Top Banana; a show called Foxy, which he and Dolan wrote for the late Bert Lahr and which contains some as-yet-undiscovered musical-comedy treasures, due someday for revival; and a show with Arlen called Saratoga, which collapsed beneath the weight of a soggy adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel.
Is Mercer masochistic enough to tackle that scene again?
“Yes, but I don’t want to do the wrong one. I want to do a show that’s really good, a show that’s a credit to myself and the composer. And you don’t know where those books are going to come from any more.
“What you do know, though, is, it’s got to be different. It can’t be just another damn show. There are so many of those. Almost all the shows that come into town are not original, they’re all like something else. And I— well, this will sound conceited to you, but I just don’t want to write Hello, Dolly! I think it’s a dreary show. West Side Story was a strong show, or King and I. That’d be the kind of show I’d like to write, one that has some substance, with a lot of original ideas and a lot of great songs.” He trudges on. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful to come in with—a show like that? But it’s tough as hell to come by one, I can tell you,” he says fervently.
Now it’s crosstown. He makes for a seafood restaurant in the Fifties, one which features delicacies notoriously absent from Southern California menus.
“So I’ll just keep on looking,” he says, “It’s the humor thing that’s so tough to get past. So damn little of it around these days. Or maybe we all get to a certain age and we’re past our time, you know? We can’t laugh at the things that tickled us so when we were young….”
It comes as something of a shock to consider that Mercer has reached the age where down in Savannah he’d probably be referred to as “spry.” Somehow, one refuses to accept middle age in this cheerful gentleman whose impish wit has brightened so many corners; maturity, perhaps, but Golden Age retirement, never.
Nor does he, happily. “You’ve got to be involved in something,” he insists as we approach the restaurant. “Damn it, you can’t just sit in a room and stare out the window in a catatonic state. You’ve got to do something. But you know, I’d rather keep busy traveling, or going to the supermarket, or driving in my car, than just sitting there. I certainly don’t get any kick out of writing things and putting them in a drawer. If I write a song today and I can’t get it recorded, it’s embarrassing. It really is. So if somebody calls me up and asks me will I write even a title song for a picture, I don’t care, I jump at the chance, as long as they pay money.
“But to write ’em, and take ’em around and have people say no, turn my stuff down—man, that’s demeaning. It would be as if Dick Rodgers were to go to Motown Records4 with some melodies and they said to him, ‘Oh, we don’t like those tunes, buddy.’”
As we enter the restaurant, the owner recognizes Mercer and has news for him. One of his old friends was in two nights before, enjoying seafood with the dean himself, Irving Berlin, who rarely goes out these days. “A big week for songwriters hereabouts,” says Mercer. “Maybe we are making a comeback, eh?”
He orders an immediate Dewar’s. “Strictly medicinal,” he explains. “Last night was a little … debilitating, and I’m still recovering from the effects.”
The true mark of a Georgia gentleman. Not once this morning has he betrayed any sign of morning mal de tête.
“No problem,” says Mercer, imbibing his therapeutic potation. “You had me talking about songwriters, which is always a pleasure. Did Bobby Dolan ever tell you the story about Irving Berlin when they were making White Christmas at Paramount? They were discussing a sequence in the picture, one that didn’t have an actual musical number in it but would be underscored with music. Bobby was the producer, and in the conference he said, ‘Now, at this point I’d like the background music to be one single note.’ And Berlin waved his finger and said, ‘My note!’
“I’ve always written what I think I want to do, and the way I want it to be,” says Mercer thoughtfully. “Berlin once said about me, ‘Mercer will always write what he wants to write, and then let the public find out about it.’ And that’s absolutely right.”
Absolutely, Mr. Mercer. Positively, Mr. Berlin.