The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  At the very top of the food chain were Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had started this trend with Oklahoma! Berlin had a relatively successful musical in 1950, when he was sixty-two, with Call Me Madam. Two years later, for the movie White Christmas, he wrote his last great song, with the trademark Berlin mix of simplicity and honest emotion: “Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep).” But then his production halted until 1962, when Mr. President appeared on Broadway. It was a failure and marked the end of Berlin’s songwriting life. Porter, three years younger than Berlin, persisted with remarkable discipline, all the more noteworthy since a riding accident he had suffered in the thirties left him increasingly depressed and in pain. In 1956 he wrote the score for Silk Stockings, a Broadway musical based on the Garbo film Ninotchka. The show was moderately successful, but the still song-oriented craftsman found the new atmosphere difficult. “In today’s musical,” he observed with a note of frustration, “everything has to be married to something else.” Porter’s remaining efforts were in other media. For the 1957 film High Society, a musical adaptation of the Philip Barry play The Philadelphia Story, he wrote several new songs. One of them, “True Love,” a duet by stars Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, reached number three on the charts and inspired Porter’s old publisher and supporter, Max Dreyfus, to write him a letter. In his sixty-year career in the business, Dreyfus wrote, “nothing has given me more personal pleasure and gratification than the extraordinary success of your ‘True Love.’ It is truly a simple, beautiful, tasteful composition worthy of a Franz Schubert.” Porter had one more credit before his death, in 1964: a 1958 production of Aladdin, the last big television spectacular, for which he wrote his final song, “Wouldn’t It Be Fun?”

  Arlen, born in 1905, was the youngest of this group. He concentrated on Broadway during the fifties, first with the Haiti-set House of Flowers, a 1954 collaboration with Truman Capote. Wilfrid Sheed, a friend of Arlen’s in later years, wrote that House of Flowers was “the last musical he had really enjoyed and was still proud of.” The production ran for less than half a year and, Sheed wrote, “in a small way, this broke Harold’s heart.” But Arlen persisted, with another Caribbean-set show in 1957, Jamaica, a moderate success, and a 1959 collaboration with Johnny Mercer, Saratoga, an outright flop. Arlen was flown out to the West Coast in 1961 to write songs for an animated movie called Gay Purr-ee, but felt the assignment was an exception that proved the Hollywood rule. “At the moment, there’s nothing to be done for the songwriter here,” he told The New York Times. “And as for records, they’re turned out like waffles.” In 1965, Arlen’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated by a special edition of The Bell Telephone Hour on television and an all-star tribute at New York’s recently opened home of classical music, Lincoln Center. Interviewed again by the Times, he was again downbeat. “In the past four years, I’ve written six or seven songs,” he said. “But it does not mean anything. They don’t get the needed hearing.”

  The kings of Broadway, Rodgers and Hammerstein, followed two uncharacteristic mid-fifties failures (Pipe Dream and Me and Juliet) with a 1958 hit, Flower Drum Song, and an even bigger one the following year, The Sound of Music. Hammerstein died in 1960, while that Mary Martin production was in the first year of its run. One might expect that Rodgers, fifty-eight at the time, would step away from the fray. He certainly had no material needs. Each of his two collaborations—the first with Lorenz Hart, the second with Hammerstein—had produced more great music than any other songwriter’s entire output, with the possible exception of Porter and Berlin. But Rodgers was nowhere near ready to call it a day. He wrote both music and lyrics for a 1962 show called No Strings, winning the Tony Award for Best Score for a Musical; in 1965, he collaborated with Sondheim on Do I Hear a Waltz?

  The early sixties were the Indian summer of the post-Oklahoma! Broadway musical. You could still hear Rodgers, and Styne, and Frank Loesser, whose 1961 satire, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Meanwhile, the apprentices of the fifties were reaching their maturity and pairing up with the right partners. Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock had their own Pulitzer-winning show with Fiorello!, and Carolyn Leigh joined forces with composer Cy Coleman for the Lucille Ball vehicle Wildcat, and later the Sid Caesar vehicle Little Me.

  As he pursued his Broadway dreams, Charles Strouse had taken a job as Frank Loesser’s assistant. “I played for Frank because he couldn’t play piano,” Strouse said. “He used to call me his little colored boy”—a reference to the musical genius whom Irving Berlin, according to legend, kept behind closed doors. “We used to sit up till 2 or 3 in the morning at the piano and he would talk about his life and his feelings about himself,” Strouse said. “He always felt that his mother favored his brother [Arthur, a “serious” composer and musician]. He used to sit there saying, ‘I’m shit,’ and here I am this young kid, who was shit, saying, ‘Frank, you’re wonderful.’”

  Strouse, with his classical background, had never been much of a Brill Building guy. “I used to go around with my mother sometimes when I was very young,” he said. “We’d wait in the publishers’ offices and no one would see me. It was humiliating.” But he and lyricist Fred Tobias wrote a number-seven song in 1958 for the Poni-Tails, “Born Too Late,” a ballad in the four-chord “fifties progression” that had already become a cliché. Drawing on that experience, he hooked up with lyricist Lee Adams and librettist Michael Stewart—both of them friends and collaborators since Green Mansions days—and created a show about a creative soul, stuck writing moronic rock-and-roll songs like “Ugga Bugga Boo,” who falls deep into debt and needs to produce one more hit for an Elvis stand-in named Conrad Birdie. The score included a couple of first-rate songs from Green Mansions—“A Lotta Livin’ to Do” and “Put On a Happy Face”—and an ersatz rock-and-roller that wore the fifties progression on its sleeve, “One Last Kiss.” Loesser liked the score, Strouse recalls, and offered to have his name put on it—in exchange for “a cut of the action. But our producer couldn’t afford that.” Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway in April 1960 and ran for almost two years.

  Jerry Herman, who had auditioned for Loesser as a teenager, had his Broadway debut in 1961 as composer and lyricist for a show about the early days of Israel, Milk and Honey. (The show would be remembered not as a high artistic moment of musical theater but rather as an epochal success among suburban theater groups.) Sondheim had his first music-and-lyrics credit the following year with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Even the much-maligned Bob Merrill, composer of “Mambo Italiano” and “The Doggie in the Window” and famous for his xylophone, finally achieved some Broadway respect with shows like Take Me Along and Carnival!

  The supernova year, probably, was 1964. Merrill wrote the lyrics to Styne’s music for Funny Girl, which made Barbra Streisand a star. Bock and Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof not only bested Milk and Honey in theater group sales but was a masterpiece to boot. Herman’s Hello, Dolly! was another smash hit, and Louis Armstrong’s rendition of the title song knocked the Beatles off the top spot on the Billboard charts. But that exclamation point, with its air of trying too hard, perhaps signaled the beginning of the tradition’s end. The same creators would continue to put out new shows for some time, but the creative returns were visibly diminishing.

  In September 1967, a production called Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical opened off-Broadway at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. It created a sensation (not least because of its first-act closing number, in which the cast stood on stage in the nude) and began a long Broadway run the following spring. Richard Rodgers was presumably bemused by Hair, but certainly not enough to stop work on the new musical he was preparing, a retelling of the story of Noah, to be called Two by Two and to star Danny Kaye. In the summer of 1968, Rodgers happened to pay a visit to the offices of Columbia Records, which was financing the production. Not long before, Clive Davis, a youn
g Brooklyn native and Harvard Law School graduate, had been appointed head of the label. The reason for Davis’s appointment was simple. It had become clear that Columbia’s five-headed LP strategy—classical, jazz, country, original-cast recordings, and middle-of-the-road pop—was no longer viable. Rock and roll—now called, simply, “rock”—had conquered the album world, and Columbia finally had to get with the program or die. As one of his first big coups, Davis had just signed to the label a young white blues shouter named Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  Spotting Richard Rodgers in the hallway that day in 1968, Davis asked if he would mind listening to a Joplin track or two. He recalled in his autobiography, modestly titled Clive, that he wanted Rodgers “to hear this new music, to react to it. Perhaps he could make some of its magic known to Broadway. . . . I put on ‘Piece of My Heart,’” one of Joplin’s most stirring tracks. “After a minute and a half, he motioned me to stop. He said that he just didn’t ‘understand’ it.”

  After a few minutes, Davis writes, Rodgers “became upset. He shrugged his shoulders and his left arm flailed as he talked. ‘If this means I have to change my writing,’ he said, ‘or that the only way to write a Broadway musical is to write rock songs, then my career is over.’”

  Three years later, in 1971, eighteen years after Schwartz v. BMI had been filed, a federal judge dismissed the suit, with prejudice. No one took notice, but it was the last bit of punctuation in the last chapter of the Great American Songbook.

  VIII

  Fly Me to the Moon

  1939–1965

  The existence of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” did not in fact signal the end of Richard Rodgers’s career. Two by Two opened in 1970 and ran for ten months—decent for most people, but, by Rodgers and Hammerstein standards, a failure. In his later years Rodgers survived cancer of the jaw, a heart attack, and a laryngectomy, but did not put down his pen. In 1976 he teamed with Sheldon Harnick for a musical about Henry VIII called Rex, which barely stayed open a month; in 1979, working with Martin Charnin, he wrote the score for an adaptation of I Remember Mama. Despite the presence of film star Liv Ullmann in the cast, it had a short run, too. It had been a full sixty years since Rodgers and Larry Hart’s first song on Broadway, “Any Old Place with You.” Rodgers died soon after Mama closed, but so monumental was the force of his will, there’s no doubt that had he lived on, he would have written even more musicals.

  But the world he helped create and represented for so many years was gone and had been for some time. Interviewed by Max Wilk in 1971 and 1972 for his book They’re Playing Our Song, Rodgers’s surviving peers were uniformly retired (willingly or not) and uniformly gloomy about the music they heard around them.

  Ira Gershwin: “When you have this influx of country music and that sort of thing, I’m just not interested. Today it’s all protesters. Kids protesting against parents, and so forth. And they make a fortune, these protesters. My God, the money they can make!”

  Harold Arlen: “I don’t know. You can’t tell any more. Nobody wants melody. The kids are ignoring it so completely. This is such a percussive era, you know?”

  Leo Robin, the lyricist of “Thanks for the Memory,” “Easy Living,” and the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: “I don’t think the kids are writing for anyone except themselves. They don’t really want to reach anyone else. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘This is a music for us. This is our music.’”

  The cleffers’ gloom was sincere, legitimate, and justifiable. But all was not lost. Even as their professional world had come to an end over the preceding decades, a counternarrative was taking place, not always easy to discern, but present nonetheless. It was a story about the resilience of the standards, and of what they represented. This is no counterfactual history; there is no escaping Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and their aftermath. But certain events that took place in the quarter century before the arrival of the Fab Four led to the reinforcement and permanent establishment of the Great American Songbook.

  The rock-and-rollers themselves actually were a part of this story. Fats Domino, a black piano player from New Orleans, had successive hits in 1956 with “Blueberry Hill” (a big-band number from 1940), “When My Dreamboat Comes Home” (1937), and “My Blue Heaven” (1927). In the years that followed, doo-wop groups, taking a cue from Domino, repeatedly drew from the Tin Pan Alley well. Some examples:

  The Marcels: “Blue Moon” (1934), “Summertime” (1935), “You Are My Sunshine” (1939), “Heartaches” (1931), “My Melancholy Baby” (1912).

  The Platters: “Red Sails in the Sunset” (1935), “If I Didn’t Care” (written by Jack Lawrence in 1939 and an Ink Spots hit), “Twilight Time” (1944), “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1933), and Livingston and Evans’s first big hit from 1947, “To Each His Own.”

  Dion and the Belmonts: “In the Still of the Night” (1937), “When You Wish Upon a Star” (from Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio), “Where or When” (1937).

  The Beatles famously absorbed and transformed every conceivable musical influence, and the utility and potency of Tin Pan Alley standards was not lost on them. Among the staples of shows in their formative Liverpool and Hamburg years, besides Meredith Willson’s “Till There Was You,” were “The Sheik of Araby,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Moonlight Bay,” and “September in the Rain.”

  All that was a bit of a sideshow, however. The doo-woppers were in desperate need of songs to sing, and this immense body of work was there for the taking. In taking it, the groups and their producers usually leapfrogged the more melodically and harmonically complex works of the American Songbook’s later period, landing on simpler fare, chestnuts that were well suited to their lentissimo harmonizing approach. It was material, not much more. The fact that the Marcels had a hit with “Blue Moon” didn’t lead any of their listeners to explore Rodgers and Hart’s other works.

  But those works were indeed being explored. The first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary for “standard,” in the relevant sense, is from a 1937 article called “The Slang of Jazz” in the journal American Speech: “Standard, a number whose popularity has withstood the test of time.” Just two years after that, the Oklahoma-born female singer Lee Wiley recorded a series of record albums devoted to selected works of Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. These records may have been the first blip on the public’s consciousness that there was such a thing as a standard. Admittedly, this was a small slice of the public, as Wiley’s disks, produced and released under the auspices of the Liberty Music Shop in Manhattan, were heard only by a select few. In time, though, this idea of an evolving canon of the best American popular songs would prove to have an inescapable logic and power. It grew and persisted even as the annual output of first-rank songs diminished, and especially bore fruit in the careers of jazz-oriented vocalists, such as Wiley, who could interpret both the music and the lyrics of these great compositions. In the later thirties, Billie Holiday, another of John Hammond’s finds, recorded exquisitely swinging versions of standard songs for the Brunswick label. These and subsequent recordings, in which Holiday teamed with such jazz artists as Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Johnny Hodges, not only bolstered the standards but did much to establish and popularize the notion of small-group swing. Like Wiley’s work, they didn’t have a wide audience at the time, but their influence steadily grew, and today they hold places of honor in iTunes, Spotify, and the other universal jukeboxes on which music is heard.

  Less well known than Holiday but equally influential was Mabel Mercer, who was born in England in 1900, the daughter of an English showgirl and a black American musician whose identity she never knew. She performed in Paris in the thirties, came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II, and took up residence in the first of a series of New York supper clubs over which she reigned for the next thirty years. In 1942 she recorded her own album for the Liberty Record Shop, a sel
ection of songs from Porgy and Bess, accompanied by the pianist Cy Walter—whose precise and swinging renditions, in his own club dates and recordings, would also help keep the standards alive. Will Friedwald writes that Mercer and similar singers were “virtually the only artists to keep performing the great songs of the twenties and thirties into the forties and fifties, like monks hiding manuscripts in the Dark Ages.”

  Mercer was an astute curator, not only selecting the great songwriters’ better-known works but also resurrecting forgotten but deserving compositions. Thus she was known for singing Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” and “Little Girl Blue” and also the same team’s “Wait Till You See Her,” which, Alec Wilder felt, she made a standard. Mercer also sought out and performed new songs, usually wistful and bittersweet ones, by a group of writers that formed around her, including Wilder and Cy Walter, whose most enduring composition was “The End of a Love Affair.” Bart Howard, an Iowa boy who moved to New York in 1937, when he was twenty-three, eventually became Mercer’s accompanist and started writing songs in the manner of his idol, Cole Porter. The Howard ballads “Let Me Love You,” “It Was Worth It,” and “The First Warm Day in May” became part of Mercer’s repertoire. In 1954, in what he later described as a twenty-minute burst of creativity, Howard wrote a haunting song, worthy of Porter, that uncannily prefigured the Space Age. It opened, “Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars, / Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.” It was frequently recorded in the years ahead. Eventually, Peggy Lee, who had one of the more successful records, convinced Howard to officially change the title to what most people already thought it was called: “Fly Me to the Moon.”