SteynOnline

Johnny Mercer Song of the Day
by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

This week saw Johnny Mercer's one hundredth birthday, but we're continuing the celebrations to the end of the month here at SteynOnline. You can hear part one of our centenary podcast here, and read my anniversary appreciation here. Plus, as part of our Mercer Month on SteynOnline, you can get my take on Goody Goody, Blues In The Night, Hooray For Hollywood, Midnight Sun, and Autumn Leaves. And for news of non-Steyn anniversary observances, do check out the special Mercer centennial website. Today's Johnny Mercer standard is a classic:

For Frank Sinatra, it was the all-time great saloon song. And for Bill Miller, Frank's longtime accompanist, it was the number that defined the Sinatra style more than any other. Miller played it at Frank’s funeral in 1998, and a few months later, for a concert by Frank Jr, Miller made an unannounced return to the song. The lights were dimmed, the pianist took his seat in the dark, and began the bleary quarter-to-three opening of “One For My Baby”. “The audience let out a gasp,” said Frank Jr. “They were all Sinatra fans and they recognized Bill immediately.”

As well they should. Miller’s barroom piano intro has become part of the song. “One For My Baby” had been around a decade and a half before Bill and Frank claimed it definitively, but, until their version, it had never really broken out to top-rank standard. Fred Astaire introduced it in The Sky’s The Limit, a sluggish 1943 movie in which the star plays a Flying Tigers air ace in love with Joan Leslie. Things aren’t going well by the time he sings “One For My Baby”, in the inevitable barroom setting but with various maudlin flashbacks to happier times. And then, when the bartender refuses to top up the glass and walks out of the room with the bottle, Astaire goes into one of the most frenzied tap dances of his career: no grace, no wit, no playfulness, just driven energy, like a rage you’re trying to purge. And the bartender re-enters, ready to head home, and Astaire shrugs off the frenzied dance with a casual, “Well, that’s how it goes…

And Astaire wants him to know he’s fine for the road: 

Don’t let it be said
Little Fred-
-die can’t carry his load…

It’s not the greatest Astaire routine, but it’s the best thing in the picture. So naturally a theater owner in San Francisco wanted the scene cut because such “wanton description” of alcoholic imbibing during wartime was “extremely distasteful if not unpatriotic”.

Oh, well. Harold Arlen’s tune is what he called one of his tapeworms – not 32 bars, but 58: it has a kind of tipsily meandering unhurried quality just right for the situation. “One For My Baby” is one of those songs everybody thinks is all about the words. And it is a great lyric. What a marvelous conversational opening – “It’s quarter to three…” But it sounds great because Arlen’s deceptively simple piano and the intense chromatic writing show off the words to their very best.

The text is Johnny Mercer, of course. But did you know he wrote it about Judy Garland? They’d been having one of those affairs that are born doomed. And, just as Mercer had finally decided to ask his wife Ginger for a divorce, Walter Winchell came on the radio and announced that Judy had eloped to Vegas with the composer and bandleader David Rose.

You don’t need to know that to appreciate the song – the point of popular music is, as Goethe said, to take the specific and make it universal. But Mercer’s affair colors his approach to the lyric. Garland’s rising star would have been badly dented by revelations of an affair with an older married man, so Mercer was unable to talk about his great lost love - even in a song about getting a load off your chest. Instead, he wrote a song about talking about a lost love that never does actually talk about it:

Sinatra got to it in 1947, and it’s okay. You can tell he likes the song, but it’s like a lot of other stuff he was trying out in that period: he knows something’s in there, but he hasn’t found the key to the door. He knows it’s a guy, it’s a vignette, it's a little noir drama. Axel Stordahl gives him some rinky-dink saloon piano, and Frank whistles into the distance as the number ends. But he hasn’t cracked the code.

A decade later, he did. By then, he’d hooked up with Miller, and they were, musically, inseparable. For Only The Lonely, there were two “One For My Baby”s. On the first night, the band repaired to some little joint and asked Joe to set ’em up, and Bill and Frank stayed behind in the studio and blocked out a terrific intense take of the song. It’s not just Miller’s sensitivity to Sinatra’s phrasing, but the strong harmonic support he provides. The next night they redid it with the Nelson Riddle arrangement – a gossamer hint of strings plus Gus Bivona’s alto. That’s the take they put on the album. But the solo with Miller was the version insiders talked about, and over three decades later Capitol finally released it.

By then it had become a high point of the Sinatra act. He called himself a “saloon singer”, because that’s where he used to sing, in Jersey juke joints and road houses long ago. But, week after week through the Seventies, Eighties and into the Nineties, in some grim rock stadium on the edge of a strip mall in some nondescript suburb, the lights would dim and Sinatra would effortlessly shrink the place to the size of those poky smoky New Jersey saloons of his youth. There were the old props – the tumbler, the cigarette – and the banter about some emblematic long-lost loser whose “chick split, cleaned out his stash and left him with a room full o’ nuthin’ cryin’ into a gallon of Muscatel” – and underneath Bill Miller would begin the tinkly tipsy piano intro and Frank would invite us to “assume the position of the bartender” and listen to the old, old story:

It’s quarter to three
There’s no-one in the place
Except you and me…

The closest relationship of Sinatra’s life was not with any composer or arranger or (for Kitty Kelley fans) mob bosses or First Ladies but with Miller, “my partner at the piano”, as Frank called him. And when they had a falling out for a few years Sinatra closed the book on “One For My Baby”. There were other pianists – Vinnie Falcone – and some things didn’t swing quite like they used to, but they were good enough, and there was new stuff they could use. But “One For My Baby” was special, and so it stayed in the box till Miller returned in the mid-Eighties for “One For My Baby” and one more decade on the road.

THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW
EGGNOG AND TURKEY
Mark and Hugh on shows, show trials, and getting the bird from Giuliani

JOHNNY MERCER SONG OF THE DAY
ONE FOR MY BABY
...and one more for the road - plus: Mark's anniversary appreciation, Moon River and him, and our centenary podcast

IN THE CORNER
SHE'S SENDING, BUT HE AIN'T RECEIVIN'
David Frum on Sarah Palin - plus The puck stops here

Steyn This Week

An important advance for diverse policing:

National Review's The Corner, November 12th 2009

As readers may recall, a few weeks ago I was invited to testify at the House of Commons about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. While in Ottawa, I stayed at a certain local hostelry that shall be nameless (the Château Laurier). I don’t like to complain. Seriously. I do so much of it for a living that I resent giving it away for free in private. But my room was unsatisfactory in many basic respects, and, a few days after I drew them to the attention of the gal at the checkout desk, an email arrived from the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping, which I quote in full:

I’d forgotten all about my complaint by this time. But this response from the “Assistant Manager, Housekeeping” enraged me far more than my original dissatisfactions. I’m not saying I hurled my computer monitor through the window into the yard and shot up what was left of it while jumping up and down yelling, “You f****** a******! ‘It enables us to learn and grow from difficult experiences?’ What the hell kind of f****** f****** is so f****** f***** as to think the first thing a dissatisfied customer wants to hear is that he’s helped provide a personal growth experience for you, you ********?” Instead, I hurled the monitor through the window and shot it up while pondering two alternatives:

Either the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping is blameless, and this is some form letter cooked up as an auto-response for Cranky Customer Scenario #73 (b) by the Assistant Manager, Customer Relations Flim-Flam at corporate HQ. Which is a dispiriting enough thought.

Or the decay of human communication into a Mogadon-pumped blancmange of pseudo-therapeutic vacuities is so advanced that people now talk like this entirely naturally. “Such details are an important component of our mission and serve a company-wide standard of consistency”: what does that mean translated from the original bollocks?

A couple of weeks later, Jennifer Lynch, QC (Queen Censor) and Chief Commissar of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, came to the House of Commons to offer her own view of Section 13. Facing very specific allegations of abuse of power and conflict of interest, she took refuge, like the Château Laurier, in soothing generalities. Indeed, as with the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping, recent difficulties seemed to have provided a marvellous opportunity for a growth experience: “ . . . just to reassure myself as I can reassure you here today that Canadians can have pride in all of the employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the way we carry out our complex mandate.”

“Ms. Lynch, let me stop you there,” said Joe Comartin, the dogged Dipper on the Select Committee. “That’s not an answer to my question. Did you conduct a detailed investigation into these allegations?”

Since the “human rights” racket ran into its little public relations problem with the complaints against this magazine a couple of years back, Commissar Lynch’s technique has been to say at every opportunity how much she “welcomes the debate.” Indeed, she’s been so busy welcoming the debate that sadly she’s had no time to have one. Still, it came as a surprise to see her offer up the same flat bromides to the Parliament to which she is, supposedly, accountable. The Queen Censor spoke to the Select Committee with the same weirdly fixed smile on her face for the full hour. Presumably she fancies this makes her look friendly and reassuring, although movie buffs may find it alarmingly reminiscent of the guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers who tells you in the evenly modulated voice that the process is completely painless and you won’t feel a thing. Her response to specific questions was to freeze the smile and pause just a little too long before replying, as if the random Form Response Generator was running a bit slow.

Thus, replying to a query as to why she and her colleagues hadn’t sued me and Ezra Levant for making false and defamatory statements, she paused, smiled, and responded that “with a very broad mandate, with a lot of interesting, important and exciting work, we are leaders and catalysts in advancing equality in Canada and in fact internationally.” I believe that’s Form Response #29 (e). I suppose these soporific accumulations of modish banalities are intended to send the message: “Nothing to see here. All’s well. Celebrate diversity. Go back to sleep.” But the hogwash isn’t entirely benign:

But, having embraced this pseudo-right, she then claims no one right trumps any other and it is her job to “balance” competing rights. This “balancing act” is a favourite shtick of the thought enforcers. Haroon Siddiqui, a lonely defender of state-regulated speech even among his Toronto Star colleagues, was musing the other day about balancing “free speech vs. freedom from hate.”

One of those is a real right. The other is a statist con. As I said in my own testimony to Parliament:

I don’t want to live in state-regulated “harmony.” Not just because I have a low opinion of Jennifer Lynch, Haroon Siddiqui et al., and thus have no intention of singing harmony to their turgid tune. I don’t think they should have to harmonize with mine, either. As that incident in Norfolk suggests, when the heavy hand of government enforcers starts regulating you into harmony, all you’re allowed to sing is a crappy medley of We Are the World and the Barney the Dinosaur song. Language itself dies, until public communication is reduced to Commissar Lynch’s insipid banalities and the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping’s therapeutic platitudes. With respect to the latter, it’s not a growth experience. It’s a shrivelling experience.

To advance such pseudo-rights as “freedom from hate,” the very language is being neutered into compliance. Commissar Lynch’s performance is a preview of a world in which public discourse is conducted only in fraudulent abstractions and euphemistic evasions. Don’t buy it. When a government apparatchik tells you she’s busy creating a “harmonious society,” she’s not playing your song.

Maclean's, November 2009

Johnny Mercer Song of the Day
by Joseph Kosma, Jacques Prévert and Johnny Mercer

Yesterday was Johnny Mercer's one hundredth birthday, but we're continuing the celebrations all week, and to the end of the month here at SteynOnline. You can hear part one of our centenary podcast here, and read my anniversary appreciation here. Plus, as part of our Mercer Month on SteynOnline, you can get my take on Goody Goody, Blues In The Night, Hooray For Hollywood, and Midnight Sun. For news of non-Steyn anniversary observances, do check out the special Mercer centennial website. Today's Johnny Mercer Song is adapted from an essay in my book A Song For The Season:

A truly great song for the season isn’t about the calendar, or the weather. It’s about the seasons of life and love. In spring a young man’s fancy turns to… The things we did last summer I’ll remember all winter long… Of course, if you’re not a young man in love, spring fever may pass you by, and, if you’re in late middle age, the summer may be no more likelier a prompter of romance than mid-November.

But there is one great seasonal signifier that almost everyone responds to. You don’t have to be moonstruck or in love at all to feel a certain melancholy when autumn nips the air:

So what next for the trio? Well, Prévert and Kosma had an opera, Le Rendez-vous, and they thought it might make rather a good movie for Carné. So did he, and by the time it went into production in 1945 Les Portes de la Nuit was being ballyhooed as the most expensive film ever made in France. Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich were signed to star, which meant they’d have been the ones to introduce “Les feuilles mortes”. Alas, they and M Carné soon parted company, and it fell to Yves Montand to introduce Kosma and Prévert’s greatest song to the world. The budget-busting film was a flop with French moviegoers in 1945, and so its finest moment took a few years to come to American ears.

Across the Atlantic, a fellow called Michael Goldsen was running Capitol Records’ publishing division. He happened to love French songs, and he asked Serge Glickson, Capitol’s rep in Paris, to keep him up to speed on what was popular with Gallic music lovers. “He sent me a pile of records this high,” said Goldsen. “And I listened to them, and I heard one song, I think Edith Piaf had recorded, called ‘Les feuilles mortes’. And I listened a minute, and I said, ‘Oh, man, this is the greatest song I’ve ever heard.’”

Goldsen had his man in Paris track down the publisher, and they made a deal. Capitol would get the US rights to the song for $600. That seems a modest sum, but Goldsen still had to get authorization from the guy running the company, Jim Conkling. “If you think it’s good,” Conkling told him, “we’ll give him the money.” Aside from the 600 bucks, the French publisher also required Capitol to come up with an English lyric within four months.

No big deal. Mickey Goldsen took “Les feuilles mortes” to the president of Capitol Records – Johnny Mercer. “Johnny, I’ve got a killer song for you,” said Goldsen. And Mercer agreed: it was a good song and he’d be happy to come up with some words en anglais. And next thing the publishing exec notices the four months are almost up, and there’s still no lyric. “Hey, John,” he said. “I’ve only got three weeks to go and I lose the song.”

Goldsen couldn’t see what the big deal was. “It wasn’t a big song,” he said. “To me, it sounded like you could write that in 20 minutes, you know?” Mercer might have pointed out to his colleague that it took him a year to put a lyric to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark”. Instead, he told him he was going to New York on Friday and, if Goldsen would drive him to the station, he’d write the words on the train and mail ’em back to Los Angeles. Come the big morning, Goldsen got delayed en route and was running maybe ten minutes late. “So I drove up to his house, and I see him sitting on the steps of his house, and I walked up, and I said, ‘Gee, John, I’m awfully sorry I’m late.’”

And Mercer looked up and replied, “Well, you know, I didn’t know if something had happened, so while I was waiting, I wrote the lyric. Here it is.” And he handed him an envelope, on the back of which were some scribbled words beginning:

That first line is a nice conceit. The internalization of the landscape (as the literary critics say) is not always perfectly aligned: “The days grow short when you reach September” (as Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill observed), and they’re shorter still in October. But not if you’re lovesick, and they’re dragging by.

Mercer knew the imagery was strong enough that it didn’t need to be underpinned by a lot of rhymes, and the song concludes on an unrhymed word that underlines the season:

And that’s it. Yet, before we get too autumnal and melancholy, it’s worth recalling Ian Fleming’s aside in his 1956 James Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever. 007 is on assignment at a London hotel:

Most Americans got to know “Autumn Leaves” a year before James Bond went padding down the corridor of the Trafalgar Palace in Diamonds Are Forever – the fall of 1955. That October, Roger Williams’ version got to Number One and became one of the biggest-selling instrumental hits of all time, not bad for a fellow who only a couple of years earlier had been a lounge pianist at the Madison Hotel. One afternoon Dave Kapp of Kapp Records walked in, heard the background tinkling, and offered to sign the pianist on condition he change his name from Lou Weertz to “Roger Williams”, the founder of Rhode Island, and thus, to Kapp’s way of thinking, a name with broad appeal: Take a French surrealist poet, a Hungarian Jew, and a Nebraskan passing himself off as a New England settler, and you’ve got one coast-to-coast all-American hit. A year later, Autumn Leaves was the title of a Joan Crawford movie, and Nat “King” Cole’s peerless ballad treatment over the titles established the template for most singers.

Most of us feel autumnal at some point in our lives, most of us know what it’s like to sense in an October dusk a shiver in the breeze, a chill in the bones, and to connect it to something more than just the turn of the seasons. Today, “Les feuilles mortes” evokes among the French not only lost love but a broader loss, a nostalgia for France in the post-liberation years of the mid-Forties, a time when (in hindsight)…

Life was more beautiful, and the sun more brilliant than today. But, as Jacques Prévert acknowledged, the past is lost to us:

Dear Mark,
     I am not sure why but the media coverage of Fort Hood reminded me of a column you wrote about moderate Muslims - after a famous European writer (?) converted from Islam to Catholicism. Could you reprint it?

Nimmi Morton
Hong Kong

MARK SAYS: My pleasure. And he's actually a famous Italian journalist, Magdi Allam. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

The Mod Squad
from National Review, April 7th 2008

Last month, during the Vatican’s Easter vigil, Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, converted from Islam to Catholicism. And not for the first time I was reminded of an old joke I modified for America Alone:

A ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?

Answer: The radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.

Signor Allam is merely the latest mythical “moderate Muslim”. There are, to be sure, millions of Muslims who just want to get on with their lives, raise their families, do their jobs, get a nice house in the suburbs, and practice as much or as little Islam as they can get away with. But there is no “moderate Islam” to provide any institutional support for such individual Muslim moderation, and there is an acute shortage of western Muslims who can plausibly demonstrate to their coreligionists a viable balance between Islam and the western world, and who can act as a counterweight both to the explicitly jihadist radicals and to the lavishly endowed Muslim lobby groups who more discreetly share their aims. Magdi Allam was a key figure in the “Secular Islam” summit held in Florida a year ago, and one of several prominent signatories of the “St Petersburg Declaration” issued at its conclusion. He was by that point being reviled by Tariq Ramadan as a Copt – ie, a Christian – which wasn’t true: On the eve of his 40th birthday, he accompanied his mother on pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet he has now, and very publicly, found Christ, and so retrospectively confirmed Tariq Ramadan’s point – that Magdi Allam was never a credible model for 21st century Islam.

And so it goes. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a phenomenally brave woman but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is an atheist. Irshad Manji is a brilliant dissecter of Islam’s pathologies but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is a lesbian and, thus, to almost all her co-religionists, cannot be any kind of Muslim. Dr Wafa Sultan is the Californian psychiatrist who at huge personal risk intellectually clobbered an A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera, crushed every one of his arguments, and yet nevertheless lost. Why? Here’s the answer:

“I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew,” Dr Sultan told her interrogator. “I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…”

“If you are a heretic,” scoffed Dr Ibrahim al-Khouli, “there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran.”

In their debate, Wafa Sultan won every point but lost the match. Her innumerable aces only confirmed her opponent’s argument – that to embrace “modernity” (in the western sense) is to lose your faith: Dr Sultan is an incisive intelligent rational woman – and she is no longer Muslim. Signor Allam held out longer than most before concluding that the intellectual straddle required of a “moderate Muslim” is beyond even Larry Craig’s wide stance: “I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a ‘moderate Islam’,” he said, “ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.” The most “extraordinary and important encounter” in his decision to abandon Islam and embrace Christianity was the Pope’s address at Regensburg – the one that prompted Mr Allam’s (former) co-religionists to demonstrate outside Westminster Abbey calling for the Pontiff’s beheading. The newly baptized Christian knows that he will be targeted for murder, but he was already targeted for murder as a “moderate Muslim”, and, as he sees it, it is better to die for truth than for a tortured contradiction.

What the west calls “moderate Muslims”, Islam regards as apostates. Sometimes, as with Dr Sultan, they’re atheist apostates; sometimes, as with Miss Manji, they’re lesbian apostates; and sometimes, as with Magdi Allam, they’re Christian apostates. To Islam, it doesn’t matter which branch of apostasy you opt for: As the Prophet Mohammed puts it, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” All four principal schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree. So do the 36 per cent of young Muslims in Britain who believe apostasy should be punished by death. But, to the west, which branch of apostasy has most appeal to Muslims is an interesting question.

On the one hand, Magdi Allam’s conversion is bad news. It’s bad news for those who are pinning their hopes on a genuine “moderate Muslim” leadership that can provide an alternative to the Saudi-funded radicalization of European Islam. It’s also bad news because it means, in the absence of real “moderate Muslims”, western governments will continue to throw at money at those who merely pose as such – like the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, England, which the city council has deemed one of its approved “partnership organizations”, notwithstanding that at least one sermon preached therein advocated hurling homosexuals off mountaintops. Apparently that doesn’t disqualify you from government-funded “moderate Muslim” status.

But, on the other hand, it’s good news in that it suggests the most effective strategy against a resurgent, radicalized Islam may be the oldest of all – an evangelizing Christianity. A marketplace of ideas surely includes a marketplace of religions.

As I said, that’s the good news – if you’re so inclined. To the cowed accommodationist governments of a largely post-Christian Christendom, it no doubt sounds like the worst news of all.