The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  Comrade Mikhalkov’s first shot at the national anthem was in 1943, when he wrote it as a paean to his then mentor: “Great Stalin raised us to be loyal to the people / To labor and great exploits he inspired us.”

  But Stalin died, and Khrushchev had him airbrushed out of the people’s iconography. So Mikhalkov was told to write some new words. Wary of hymning any more here-today-gone-tomorrow dictators, the versatile comrade confined himself to rhapsodizing about the more general virtues of Communism:

  Sing to the Motherland, home of the free

  Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong

  O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people

  To Communism’s triumph lead us on!

  But times change more often than you think. So, when Vladimir Putin said Russia needed yet another rewrite, the eighty-seven-year-old Mikhalkov did his duty. After the “My kind of guy, Joe Stalin is” version and the “Commie, fly with me” version, Mikhalkov had no problem rustling up another set of verses for the “new” Russia. Let’s see: no passing strongmen, no explicit political philosophy, best to stick to the lie of the land. . . .

  Be glorious, our country!

  We are proud of you!

  From the southern seas to the polar north

  Our forests and fields spread

  You are unique in the world, inimitable. . . .

  I’ll tell you who’s uniquely inimitable: Comrade Sergei. What a survivor! He could do an entire “And then I wrote . . .” evening with just the one song: “And now Sergei Mikhalkov performs a medley of his hit.” Is there no subject he can’t set to that tune? Go on, give him a call. “Hey, Sergei, love that melody! But I’m opening in Vegas and I’d love a couple of topical verses about Hillary’s new book deal.”

  The wily old thing popped up on state television last week, and I thought we might get a little insight into his songwriting methods: “You know, when people ask, ‘What comes first? The words or the music?’ I always say: the regime!” But, instead, the Berlin of the Bolsheviks waxed philosophical: “The country is now different,” he shrugged. “Russia has moved along its own path.” He insisted he didn’t miss his earlier lyrics: This was one red who ain’t singing the blues. “What I have written now is very close to my heart. I wrote what I believe.” Really? Pinned to his lapel was one of his four Orders of Lenin.

  His first set of lyrics—the Stalin one—was dismissed by a famous Russian actor as “shit.”

  “So what?” said Mikhalkov. “When they play it, you’ll still have to stand up.”

  The second version—the post-Stalin one—was dismissed by the dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko as “feeble.”

  “Go home and learn it,” Mikhalkov said.

  And now we have the third version, a lyric for the ages: “Loyalty to the Fatherland gives us strength. . . .” I suppose so, if you’re as boundlessly flexible as Comrade Mikhalkov. . . . “Loyalty to the Fatherland gives us strength! / Thus it was, it is, and always shall be!”

  Well, at least for a year or two.

  MOON RIVER AND ME

  Maclean’s, November 23, 2009

  We’re after the same rainbow’s end

  Waiting round the bend

  My huckleberry friend

  Moon River and me . . .

  WHERE IS MOON RIVER? Everywhere and nowhere. But, if you had to pin it down, you’d find it meandering at least metaphorically somewhere in the neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. At one point, the town’s most celebrated musical emissary was Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah. But then the American Songbook’s huckleberry friend showed up: John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah one hundred years ago, November 18, 1909. The family home, the Mercer House, is the setting for the most famous book written about Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Clint Eastwood’s film made the connection even more explicit with an all-Mercer soundtrack: Kevin Spacey singing “That Old Black Magic,” k. d. lang “Skylark,” Diana Krall “Midnight Sun,” and Clint himself taking a respectable thwack at “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

  Johnny Mercer didn’t linger in Savannah—as a teenager he stowed away on a ship to New York and the bright lights—but a lot of Savannah lingered in him. To mark his centenary, Knopf has produced the latest in its series of lavish, handsome coffee-table Complete Lyrics. Mercer’s predecessors in the set are Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein—the Broadway guys who wrote songs for characters and plots. Insofar as there are famous lyric-writers, that’s who they are: Cole Porter “punishing the parquet” (in his words) as he paces his penthouse polishing the polysyllables for a sophisticated triple-rhymed sixth chorus in the second act name-dropping all his Park Avenue pals. Mercer never had a real Broadway hit, but he’s the link between New York’s songwriting royalty and a more rural tradition. Like Hart and Gershwin, he was a fan of W. S. Gilbert and the Savoy Operas. Unlike them, he also had an eye for the great American landscape west of the Hudson River:

  From Natchez to Mobile

  From Memphis to St. Joe

  Wherever the four winds blow

  I been in some big towns

  An’ heard me some big talk

  But there is one thing I know . . .

  “Blues in the Night” was written for some nothing film in 1941 that didn’t even know what it had. Harold Arlen’s tune is less a twelve-bar blues than a fifty-eight-bar blues aria, its harmony full of plaintive lonesome sevenths, and Mercer’s lyric eschews the blues device of repetition for a kind of lightly worn vernacular poetry:

  Now the rain’s a-fallin’

  Hear the train a-callin’

  Whoo-ee!

  (My mama done tol’ me)

  Hear that lonesome whistle

  Blowin’ cross the trestle

  Whoo-ee!

  (My mama done tol’ me. . . .)

  He loved trains, hated planes. So he wrote great train songs: “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”; “(I took a trip on a train and) I Thought about You”; “And you see Laura / On a train that is passing through. . . .” Ira Gershwin or Larry Hart would never have heard the music in that “lonesome whistle.” For one thing, it doesn’t even rhyme with “trestle.” It just fits in some strange organic way you can’t precisely define. That’s how he approached the job: music suggests a sound, a sound suggests certain syllables, and eventually a word or a thought will emerge and you’re in business.

  In the Forties, he founded Capitol Records and became a big pop singer with a lot of Top Ten records and a handful of number ones, not just of his songs but of other folks’ (“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”). It was famously said of Bing Crosby that he sang like every guy in America thought he sounded like when he sang in the shower. But, if anything, that description applies more to Mercer (he and Bing duetted together, lots, from the Thirties to the Seventies). There’s something about that Savannah drawl that gave him a warm mellow tone that sounds like a regular guy jes’ wandering from the living room to the backyard and maybe out onto the golf course and doing a little warbling along the way. And, in part because he sang himself, his songs have a singable ease. He liked to say that writing music took more talent, but writing lyrics took more courage. A tune can be beguiling and wistful and intoxicating and a bunch of other vagaries, but the lyricist has to sit down and get specific and put words on top of those notes. Stick an overripe adjective or an awkward image in there and a vaguely pleasant melody is suddenly precious or contrived or ridiculous. Not in “Fools Rush In” or “Jeepers Creepers.” With Mercer, you rarely hear the false tinkle of an over-clever word in a love ballad or an obtrusive rhyme in a rural charm song.

  That said, he gave the movie industry its theme song and summed it up in a single couplet:

  Hooray for Hollywood

  Where you’re terrific if you’re even good.

  And how about this rhyme? “Spring, Spring, Spring” is a catalogue song, a laundry list of the joys of the mating season when “the barnyard is busy
/ In a regular tizzy.” But, after getting through the various habits of the farm animals, the birds and the bees, the fish and the fowl, Mercer throws in this:

  To itself each amoeba

  Softly croons “Ach, du liebe. . . .

  A biological and bilingual rhyme: that’s positively Porteresque.

  Mercer wrote “Spring, Spring, Spring” and “Summer Wind” and always wanted to write a Christmas standard but never managed it (though his recording of “Jingle Bells” is marvelous). But what he really liked was autumn. Lyric-wise, he got old early, and intimations of mortality hang over a lot of his work from the late Forties on. Yes, the days grow short when you reach September and dwindle down to a precious few and so on, but Mercer chose to embrace (as one of his titles has it) an “Early Autumn.” Thereafter came “Autumn Leaves” and “When the World Was Young” and . . .

  The days of wine and roses

  Laugh and run away

  Like a child at play . . .

  The lonely night discloses

  Just a passing breeze

  Filled with memories . . .

  Memories that, as with “Laura,” “you can never quite recall.” Mercer became near obsessed with the elusiveness of memory, of love and youth. Along the way, there was a lot of wine at night, and roses the morning after. He was the nicest guy, and the nastiest—once the bottle got south of two inches from the bottom. The following day, he’d feel bad about being a mean drunk to a close friend or a casual acquaintance or the cocktail waitress, and many florists benefited from his guilt. But, as Jo Stafford said to him as he staggered up to her one evening, “Please, John. I don’t want any of your roses in the morning.” If he’d been sober, he’d have written that down as a potential title, the way he did with “Goody Goody” and “PS I Love You.” But he was sufficiently self-aware to get more than a few songs out of it:

  Drinking again

  And thinking of when

  You loved me

  Having a few

  And wishing that you

  Were here

  Making the rounds

  And buying the rounds

  For strangers . . .

  Sinatra liked that one, and he loved Mercer’s all-time great saloon song:

  It’s quarter to three

  There’s no one in the place except you and me

  So set ’em up, Joe

  I got a little story you oughtta know . . .

  Supposedly he wrote that as catharsis after a doomed affair with Judy Garland, but we only found that out years later. Like he said:

  Could tell you a lot

  But you’ve got

  To be true to your code

  Make it one for my baby

  And one more for the road . . .

  Thinking about Mercer songs for this column, I remembered an evening long ago when, a mere slip of a lad, I took a gal I adored to a country club dance I couldn’t really afford. Johnny Mercer saved the night for me: The master of ceremonies announced a competition. To win, you had to answer a simple question:

  “How wide is Moon River?”

  “Wider than a mile,” of course. We won a magnum of champagne, and the waiters treated us like royalty. A magical night. But the days of wine and roses laugh and run away toward a closing door, a door marked “Nevermore. . . .” Conjuring up that evening for the first time in years, I wondered about my lost love, and whether that country club was still there. But then I remembered Mercer had got to all that, too:

  There’s a dance pavilion in the rain

  All shuttered down

  A winding country lane

  All russet brown . . .

  Not long before his death in 1976, he said that in fifty years’ time the best of Porter and Hart and Gershwin will be “studied and taught in schools, and collected . . . and forgotten.” But we’re getting mighty near 2026, and we’re still singing Johnny Mercer. It’s quarter to three, and somewhere out there Willie Nelson’s promoting his new record of “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Michael Bublé’s doing his hugely successful if somewhat vulgar revival of Mercer and Mancini’s “Meglio Stasera” from The Pink Panther.

  Set ’em up, Joe . . . and drop another nickel in the machine.

  XI

  AFTER WORK

  THE ARISTOROCKRACY

  National Review, April 30, 2012

  MIDWAY THROUGH A Julie Burchill column in The Guardian bemoaning the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, I was startled to learn the following: Although fewer than 10 percent of British children attend private schools, their alumni make up over 60 percent of the acts on the UK pop charts. Twenty years ago, it was 1 percent.

  There’s always been a bit of this, of course: Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics and made more money singing the songs of hardscrabble Mississippi bluesmen than the gnarled old-timers who’d lived those lyrics could ever dream of. But he was “middle class” in what your average exquisitely attuned snob would regard as a very drearily provincial sense: Mick’s dad was a teacher in Kent and his mum was an Aussie hairdresser, and he went to the local grammar school. The new pop stars attended some of the most exclusive and expensive academies in the land: Chris Martin (of Coldplay and Gwyneth Paltrow) went to Sherborne, and Lily Allen to Bedales, and James Blunt to Harrow. The five lads from Radiohead got together at Abingdon, founded by Richard the Pedagogue in 1100 and where annual boarding fees are now just shy of fifty thousand dollars. So, to recreate the conditions that enabled Radiohead, you’d have to spend about one-and-three-quarter-million bucks. You could try it the Elvis way—drive a truck, blow $8.25 to make an acetate, and record your mama’s favorite Ink Spots song—but it’s not clear that works anymore. In the space of two generations, almost every traditional escape route out of England’s slums—from pop music to journalism—has become the preserve of the expensively credentialed. I say “almost,” because as far as I know no Old Abingdonian has yet won the heavyweight boxing championship.

  A couple of weeks earlier, another Guardianista, Zoe Williams, filed a column deploring the fashionable professions’ increasing reliance on unpaid interns. The first time I used the word “intern” on Fleet Street was fourteen years ago when the Monica story broke and my editor asked me to explain to British readers what it meant. Now they’re everywhere. “Most people could weather a fortnight of unpaid work,” writes Miss Williams, “but once you start talking about three or six months, you basically have to be living with your parents, they have to live in the same city—usually London for the desirable posts—and they have to be able to support you. So pretty soon the point arrives when there’s a middle-class stranglehold on the jobs that people want to do—notably in politics, the media and the third sector.”

  The “third sector” is what the British call all those non-profits the cool kids aspire to. If memory serves, Mr. Blair introduced to Her Majesty’s Government a department called the “Office of the Third Sector,” which sounds so bland it ought to be one of those covers for a ruthless wet-work operation the spooks want to keep off the books, but is instead just a way of “coordinating” “resources” between the public sector and the third sector—i.e., a colossal waste of the private sector’s money.

  The Internet wallah Tim Worstall thought that Miss Williams had sort of missed her own point with that bit about politics, media, and the third sector: “When the desirable jobs are spending other people’s money, reporting on spending other people’s money and lobbying to spend other people’s money then you know that the society is f***ed.”

  While the upper-middle-class corner the pop biz and the NGOs, what’s left for the masses? Back when Mick Jagger was at the LSE, the futuristic comic books were full of computer-brained robot maids whirring from room to room dusting the table, bringing our afternoon tea, and generally liberating humanity from menial labor. How’d that work out? In America, 40 percent of the population now do minimal-skill service jobs. Meanwhile, the robot maids are thin on the ground, but computers have replaced the
typing pool and the receptionist and the bookkeeping clerk—i.e., most of the entry-level jobs to the middle class. If you lack the schooling of a typical British pop star but you’ve mastered flipping tacos and the night shift at the KwikkiKrap, what’s there to move on to?

  Social mobility is already declining in the credential-crazed United States and the wider west, and will decline further. If you’re already on the right side of the great divide, the world emerging isn’t so different from the way it was back when Harrow was producing Winston Churchill rather than James Blunt: The less ambitious scions of great and well-to-do families amuse themselves with a leisurely varsity and then something not too onerous with a non-profit, in the way that the younger sons of Victorian toffs passed a couple of years in a minor post in a British legation in an agreeable capital.

  If you’re on the wrong side of the divide, it’s less like Downton Abbey and more like one of those Latin-American favelas the presidential motorcade makes a point of giving a wide berth to. Even Mick Jagger’s parentage—teacher and hairdresser—sounds a bit of an unlikely match in an age when the professionally credentialed prefer to marry within their caste. Perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of the love-across-the-classes plot beloved by Edwardian England, back when real-life showgirls (Connie Gilchrist) married real-life earls (the seventh Lord Orkney). But I wouldn’t bet on it: These days, at least on the British pop charts, the earl is his own showgirl.

  THE WASTE OF PEOPLE

  The Daily Telegraph, February 24, 2004

  THE OTHER DAY The Sun bestowed the title of “Britain’s Laziest Woman” on Susan Moore of Burythorpe, North Yorkshire. Miss Moore had come to the paper’s attention courtesy of its Shop-A-Sponger Hotline: as Alastair Taylor explained, “Super-sponger Susan, 34, has not done a day’s work since dropping out of college in 1988.”

  Despite receiving “Jobseeker’s Allowance” for sixteen years, she does not seek jobs, and never has. She was offered one by a supermarket, but it was five miles away so she wasn’t interested. Ryedale Jobcentre put her on a “New Deal” course and, to make sure she attended, sent a taxi for her every morning. But one day the cab didn’t show up, so Susan gave up the course. She lives with her divorced mum, who’s also on “Jobseeker’s Allowance,” though she hasn’t sought a job since giving birth to Susan in 1969.