26 SERENADE IN BLUE: THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK

Look at George Gershwin. Why, his music’s as good as Beethoven or Bach. Better, maybe. Best of all, it’s American!

Mickey Rooney, Strike Up the Band

The ‘Great American Songbook’ is the unofficial term for a collection of standards that began with Jerome Kern’s ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’ and ended at some point in the early 1950s. It’s an era that would only be set in amber many years later. Ella Fitzgerald’s Song Book albums of the 1950s would focus on individual writers and help to firm up the parameters of a golden age, but the phrase itself doesn’t seem to have been used before Carmen McRae’s 1972 album The Great American Songbook. The age may have ended abruptly in 1950 for historians like Alec Wilder – whose American Popular Song, also from 1972, was the first academic study of the era – but some writers, like Johnny Mercer (‘Moon River’, 1961), were still capable of writing a rare new entry some years later. Another way of measuring the Songbook’s boundaries is to look at its writers: Kern was born in 1885, Jimmy Van Heusen in 1913, and no one born before or after is really considered a Songbook writer by its adherents. The likes of Stephen Sondheim were already writing with a reverence for the near past in the late 1950s. But Sondheim knew the gates had already closed. You can understand why people look at these songs and their writers with such awe: they aren’t just songs, they are components of the twentieth century. When push comes to shove, collectively they are America’s greatest cultural achievement.

So you’d think the Songbook’s contributors would all be the subjects of biopics starring Gary Cooper or Tom Hanks – or at least of airport biographies – or that there would be long essays about them by Gore Vidal; certainly they’d be household names. And these assumptions lead to another: everyone assumes that all the great hits in the American Songbook were written by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, by Rodgers and Hart, Hoagy Carmichael or, maybe, Johnny Mercer. That’s about it for the A-listers; even Harold Arlen’s name can get a quizzical look. But beyond the half-dozen big names of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, plenty of other songwriters were scrapping who occasionally struck gold, but sadly for them, people still think their nugget was written by Cole Porter.

Let’s look at a handful of Frank Sinatra-recorded standards. Who wrote ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’? Answer: David Mann and Bob Hilliard. Then there’s ‘Young at Heart’ (Johnny Richards and Carolyn Leigh), ‘Angel Eyes’ (Matt Dennis and Earl Brent) and ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ (Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon).^I

Look at bandleader Isham Jones, forgotten to all but the hardcore, who – with lyricist Gus Kahn – wrote an incredible run of hits in the mid-1920s that dried up as quickly as it had begun: ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Swinging Down the Lane’, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’, ‘The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else)’.^II Or take a song like ‘As Time Goes By’. It was written by thirty-seven-year-old Herman Hupfeld of Montclair, New Jersey, for the 1931 Broadway musical Everybody’s Welcome. In the original show it was sung by Frances Williams; later that year it would be recorded by Rudy Vallee, giving him a modest hit. When the song was revived in 1942 in Casablanca, it became a huge hit, though not for Dooley Wilson, who sang it in the film (Wilson could justifiably curse the musicians’ strike that prevented him from recording it). Instead, Victor reissued Vallee’s 1931 recording, giving him a number-one hit eleven years on. As for Hupfeld, he lived at home with his mother, until dying from a stroke in 1951, aged fifty-seven. What else did he write? The charming post-party piece ‘Let’s Put Out the Lights (And Go to Sleep)’, which Dean Martin recorded for his Sleep Warm album; ‘Sing Something Simple’, which became a simpering theme tune for the Cliff Adams Singers’ long-running (1959 to, implausibly, 2001) Radio 2 programme of the same name, mostly remembered now as the epitome of slow-witted, un-pop BBC mediocrity that preceded the Top 20 chart show on a Sunday; and a nutty effort called ‘Goopy Geer (He Plays Piano and He Plays by Ear)’, which Carroll Gibbons and Jack Hylton recorded in Britain. Knowing that the agoraphobic Hupfeld rarely left his Montclair home and – war duties aside – never travelled further than New York City in his entire life makes ‘Let’s Put Out the Lights’ and ‘As Time Goes By’ feel rather claustrophobic.

Berlin, Kern and the Gershwins had been the first wave, but in their wake came dozens more like Hupfeld: artful, mostly Jewish, often middle class. Unlike Hupfeld, they were almost always New Yorkers, and they often liked to work in teams: Richard Rodgers with Lorenz Hart and later Oscar Hammerstein; Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz; Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. Some, but not all.

Cole Porter couldn’t have lived a more different life to ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime’’s openly communist lyricist Yip Harburg or the hard-living, perpetually single Lorenz Hart. He wasn’t just comfortably off like the Gershwins, either; instead, he was, as he liked to say, ‘rich-rich’. At the age of forty he owned sixteen – sixteen! – dressing gowns; this was in 1932, when most Americans didn’t have $16 to hand. With the Depression and Prohibition peaking, he was an insight into other, different, glamorous ways of life (after all, he had spent much of the previous ten years abroad, absorbing sounds and feels as varied as Moroccan music, which found its way into ‘Night and Day’, and the dance rhythms of the Dutch East Indies that informed ‘Begin the Beguine’). He was easily bored, rarely said ‘no’ to anything and composed lyrics while pacing on a zebra-skin rug. With deadpan, dead-on self-awareness he called ‘You’re the Top’ ‘the tinpantithesis of poetry’. He had a sturdy faith in his own intelligence. In the darkest of times, he seemed to radiate light.

‘As Time Goes By’ wasn’t written by Porter, but he should worry. He was an extravagant man. He was wealthy, always, and given the amount of travelling, partying, horse-riding, polo and poker he got up to, it is astonishing that he had any time to write songs. Two of his best known are ‘Let’s Misbehave’ and ‘Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)’; hardly hiding his light under a bushel, Porter had Crowley-like openness to indulgence in whatever guise it came. While his contemporaries wrote about love – eternal, unattainable – Porter wrote about sex. He was the funniest writer of his age, but he wasn’t a romantic. This made him a very modern writer. Before the Jazz Age, love had gone hand in hand with the briefest possible courtship followed by inevitable marriage, which, of course, lasted for ever. Porter didn’t see it that way. For a start, he was enthusiastically homosexual. He loved the company of his wife, Linda, who was some eight years older, but their relationship was more like brother and sister than red-hot lovers. ‘Always true to you,’ he wrote, ‘in my fashion.’ He also wrote about his dalliances quite graphically, most memorably on ‘All of You’: ‘I’d love to make a tour of you, the eyes, the arms, the mouth of you, the east, west, north and the south of you.’ In New York, his liaisons had been discreet; on moving to Hollywood in 1934, surrounded by the country’s most beautiful beings, his sex life became prodigious. Linda Porter played the part of a beard, not just in terms of his sexuality, but also his workload: whether he was in Venice or on the Riviera, if he needed to get some writing done, he could claim, ‘Sorry, boys, gotta go, the wife’ll kill me.’ She was an excuse for everything and, unsurprisingly, Linda eventually got tired of this humiliating existence. By 1937 their lavender marriage was on the rocks, and Linda had moved to their Paris home when Cole fell from a horse; the horse also fell, rolling over his legs and crushing them. Linda moved back in and became his nurse as well as his wife; he would never walk again without a stick.

Now approaching fifty, Porter kept working, mostly with diminishing returns. Still, even his less successful musicals contained the occasional elegant smoke ring: ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, Ella Fitzgerald’s best-remembered song, initially appeared in a 1944 bomb called Seven Lively Arts,^III and he scored hits right up to 1956, when he wrote the very simple, very truthful ‘True Love’ for High Society. The week that movie opened, Elvis Presley scored his second US number one with ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’ – the world seemed to be turning faster. Almost haiku-like, and gently philosophical, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly’s recording of ‘True Love’ would be Porter’s last major triumph and almost his last word. There had been thirty or so operations before surgeons finally decided to amputate his right leg in 1958; his mother had died in 1952, and the long-suffering Linda had been taken by emphysema in 1954. Noël Coward visited him in hospital and wrote that Porter was free from pain for the first time in twenty years, but the light had gone out. He lived for another six years, watching the rise of both Elvis and the Beatles, but he never wrote another song.

In 1937, though, it must have felt like Cole Porter and his acolytes in New York and Hollywood had reached some kind of pop-culture peak. Of the year’s biggest-selling 78s, three were big-band instrumentals: Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, Count Basie’s pump-a-tronic ‘One O’Clock Jump’ and Duke Ellington’s delicate, sinuous ‘Caravan’. In Britain, Noel Gay’s musical Me and My Gal debuted ‘The Lambeth Walk’ and ‘Leaning on a Lamp Post’; Porter gave us ‘In the Still of the Night’ and ‘Rosalie’; and in Hollywood, Harry Warren and Al Dubin had another gold-plated year, providing the seductive chill of ‘September in the Rain’ for the easily forgotten Melody for Two (if you include shorts and Porky Pig cartoons, Warren contributed songs to seventy-eight different films that year alone).

And yet, and still, anyone suspicious of these cosmopolitan dandies, fearful of the future, could fall back on Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml (both only slightly older than Porter) and the sureties of old Vienna. The duo of baritone Nelson Eddy and former chorus girl Jeanette MacDonald were at their towering commercial peak in 1937, purveying old-time melodies in lacy outfits, with voices to bring down the balcony. Part of the pop dynamic, a counter-balance to Porter’s metal-frame-window modernism, was conservative revivalism, and the Bohemian/Viennese strand had had an unexpected revival in 1935, when Eddy and MacDonald were teamed up for the first time in surprise Hollywood hit Naughty Marietta (its hit song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ had earned Eddy his first gold disc). Eddy was already a successful opera singer who had performed Strauss at Carnegie Hall, but he was also handsome enough for Hollywood to come knocking and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Maytime was the duo’s 1937 hit, wherein MGM managed to attach an old Romberg operetta from 1917 to Noël Coward’s storyline from Bitter Sweet.^IV Coward thought the film ‘vulgar’, with MGM bulking out his story with chunks of Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Rossini. It climaxed with Nelson’s ghost coming to take the ageing Jeanette up to heaven. They sang Romberg’s ‘Sweetheart, Will You Remember’, surrounded by an angelic choir and white rose petals, and hit the inevitable long-held high note just before the credits rolled.

You knew exactly what you were getting with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald movies: Viennese comfort food, schnitzel and potatoes, with your tears plopping into your gravy after precisely ninety minutes. Their private lives were far more interesting and genuinely more heartbreaking than their movies. Though they had been secretly dating, they were forbidden to marry by the heartless Louis B. Mayer; instead, they made do with a mock wedding ceremony at Lake Tahoe while they were filming Rudolf Friml’s Rose Marie in 1936. They continued to see each other on the sly – although both were married – until MacDonald died of heart failure in 1965.

From Animal Crackers (1930) onwards, the Marx Brothers’ movies provided a necessary Hollywood palate-cleanser. Their comic foil Margaret Dumont, as the society woman who didn’t seem to get the jokes, played the living embodiment of Romberg’s and Friml’s musicals. In 1937 the Marx Brothers’ The Big Store featured Tony Martin’s ‘Tenement Symphony’, with its Kellys and Vermicellis ‘living cheek by jowl’ – a hat-tip to the city where all of Hollywood’s writers had started, and where few of them now remained. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were exceptions, back after their miserable time in Hollywood, and they had a ridiculously good 1937: ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘Where or When’, ‘Have You Met Miss Jones’, ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again’, ‘Johnny One Note’. It was hard to imagine that their final collaboration would be just five years away.

Though no one had been expecting another ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ of him in the 1930s, George Gershwin still worried that the songs he was writing for throwaway shows and movies might be seen as equally disposable. With songs like ‘I Got Rhythm’ and ‘Embraceable You’ (both from 1930’s Girl Crazy) he really didn’t need to worry, but he still hankered to write more symphonic works.

In 1926 Gershwin had been intrigued by Porgy, a novel by DuBose Heyward set among poor blacks in and around Heyward’s native Charleston. When in 1932 its run as a play was set to finish, Gershwin wrote to Heyward, and the pair decided to work on an opera. They made a trip to the sea islands off South Carolina to get an understanding of the local Gullah population, descended from slaves, most of whom never left the islands. Sitting around a fire, Gershwin listened to them singing spirituals. He was inspired, and by mid-1935 the opera was ready.

Gershwin had started writing his own spirituals with ‘Summertime’ in late 1933, while Ira provided the lyrical urban sass of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’. The correspondence between Gershwin and Heyward shows they were agreed on the necessity of an all-black cast, although Al Jolson, true to form, tried to cut in with a blackface version. The show was a hit in Boston: ‘When the cries of genius subside, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess will take its place indubitably as the first American opera,’ read the Boston American review. But the three-hour performance had been heavily cut by the time it reached New York and less sympathetic critics. The New York Times feigned confusion, casting shade over the show before anyone had seen it: ‘Porgy and Bess opens this evening at the Alvin Theatre, throwing the entire Broadway amusement field into confusion; is it drama or opera? George Gershwin, who has written the score, calls it a “folk opera”.’ The paper may just as well have added, ‘Well, hark at Mr La-Dee-Dah!’ More worrying for Gershwin was the reaction from Virgil Thomson, a modern classical composer and critic. He found it racially objectionable, saying, ‘Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.’ Duke Ellington was also cross with Gershwin for treading on territory that wasn’t his to claim. When Samuel Goldwyn’s film version was made in the late 1950s, black actors would shy away, with Harry Belafonte saying, ‘DuBose Heyward wrote a very racist story. What makes Porgy and Bess work is the remarkable music. But the images were highly distasteful.’^V

The remarkable music alone wasn’t enough to save Porgy and Bess in 1935, and it closed after just over three months, losing all of its investment. Gershwin took it hard. Critics shrugged; it had been a highbrow miscalculation, as they’d known all along. Singer Margaret Whiting had read the lukewarm reviews and remembered her father Richard coming home after seeing it. He was sad and angry: ‘What’s wrong with these people? This man is the genius of American music. He’s written something that none of us could ever write.’

Two years later, in 1937, Richard Whiting would co-write the beloved ‘Too Marvellous for Words’ (‘like glorious, glamorous, and that old standby amorous’) with Johnny Mercer, a hit for Bing Crosby. That same year a reluctant George Gershwin was back in Hollywood, back writing movie songs instead of operas. This time, Hollywood didn’t treat him like the golden boy. ‘I had to live for this,’ Gershwin complained, ‘that Sam Goldwyn should say to me, “Why don’t you write hits like Irving Berlin?”’ It wasn’t as if he’d lost the knack. That spring Fred Astaire starred in Shall We Dance, with a jazz-ballet score by the Gershwins and songs which included ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’, ‘They All Laughed (At Christopher Columbus)’ and the magical ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’. It’s hard to believe Goldwyn wasn’t thrilled skinny.^VI

Aside from Shall We Dance, George Gershwin didn’t write many other hits in 1937. He had been complaining of headaches for some time, and by the spring he was living at his brother Ira’s house, mostly in darkness because the light was painful. He could hardly play piano – that gave him a headache too. Doctors could find nothing wrong and suggested psychiatric help. Ira’s wife Leonore was frightened by George’s mood swings, so he moved into Yip Harburg’s vacant house nearby. He was working on the score for Samuel Goldwyn’s first Technicolor film, The Goldwyn Follies, when he collapsed and fell into a coma. He died of a brain haemorrhage two days later on 11 July, aged thirty-eight.^VII The only people with him were a nurse and his valet, Paul Mueller, whose job had once been to guard the great hope of the Jazz Age from the crowds outside.

I. Matt Dennis also wrote the music for ‘Let’s Get Away from It All’; Bob Hilliard went on to be Burt Bacharach’s first primary lyricist, writing ‘Any Day Now’, ‘Tower of Strength’ and ‘Please Stay’; and Mack Gordon co-wrote ‘At Last’ with Harry Warren. But still, none of these writers was Cole Porter. Coming up with a couple of big hits and then disappearing from view was just as possible in 1940 as it would be in 1980 and 2020.
II. Jones had extraordinarily unkind eyes and was not popular with his players. According to Benny Green, he made musicians walk on stage in line, like prisoners, and banned them from drinking, even on days off. The result was a band that had some of the heaviest boozers in the business.
III. This was also the title of a 1923 book, of which Porter was certainly aware, by pioneer jazz critic/enthusiast Gilbert Seldes that extolled the virtues of American ‘vulgar’ culture.
IV. Not one to miss a trick, MGM’s boss Louis B. Mayer made a film of Bitter Sweet itself in 1940, but changed the story enough that most would never have noticed its similarities to Maytime.
V. Porgy and Bess would be rescued and redeemed by Miles Davis and Gil Evans in 1959, as part of their modal recasting of jazz and light classical music.
VI. Astaire and Rogers knew it couldn’t get any better. They split, with Ginger wanting to do more dramatic roles, it was said. Gossip columnists talked about feuds and enmity; only one, the Leeds-born Hollywood Today writer Sheilah Graham, was perceptive enough to note that ‘the combination was terrific, Fred was never as good with anyone else. So, being a smart person – he’s not an idiot – I doubt if he would allow himself to dislike Ginger.’
VII. The film was lucky to get ‘Love Is Here to Stay’, with its beautifully definite opening line ‘It’s very clear, our love is here to stay’, which became a bigger hit when Gene Kelly sang it to Leslie Caron in the far better An American in Paris in 1951. Frank Sinatra would give it the gold seal on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers five years later.