Autumn Leaves
Steyn's Song of the Week

An early autumn has come to Steyn's corner of New Hampshire. This essay is adapted from Mark's 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:

Spring Is Here
Why doesn't my heart go dancing?

But then:

The Things We Did Last Summer
I'll remember all winter long...

Of course, if you're not a young man whose fancy turns to 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. Yet 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:

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The Autumn Leaves
Of red and gold...

It's an image that reminds you of the cruel remorselessness of time, even in my part of the world - northern New England - where the foliage blazes brightest, red and gold and orange, just before it falls and dies:

A lovely performance that, save for one lyrical blemish in the first chorus - "sun-burned kisses" rather than "summer kisses". The summer sun is for romance; autumn leaves are a reminder of mortality, and decline, and loss:

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Et le vent du nord les emporte
Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli...

Which means, more or less:

Dead leaves are collected by the shovelful
Memories and regrets, too
And the north wind carries them
Into the cold night of the forgotten...

Jacques Prévert wrote those words, in French, as a poem. Born in 1900, raised in Paris, he flirted in early life with surrealism, with the rue du Château group and Marcel Duchamp. But he was too talented to be confined to fads and fashions, and his best poetry stands on its own. Somewhere along the way, he ran into Joseph Kosma, a Hungarian émigré who'd washed up in France in 1933 as part of the great tide of European Jews trying to stay one step ahead of the Third Reich. Prévert introduced Kosma to Jean Renoir and the composer wound up scoring, among other pictures, La Grande Illusion and Les Règles du Jeu. Then came the war and the Nazi occupation, and Kosma found himself under house arrest and banned from composition. Nonetheless, Prévert discreetly arranged some movie work for his friend, with suitably non-Semitic composers fronting for the forbidden Jew. With the director Marcel Carné, Prévert and Kosma made the classic Les Enfants du Paradis.

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 - with the aid of his mouth-organist. This is what the marketing chappies call a "soft launch":

Unfortunately, the budget-busting film was a flop with French moviegoers in 1945, and so its finest moment, musically speaking, 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 ...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 rep 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:

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The Autumn Leaves
Of red and gold
I see your lips
The summer kisses
The sunburned hands
I used to hold...

"As I'm driving, he read it to me," recalled Goldsen, "and tears came to my eyes. It was such a great lyric... Everything about that lyric was just so, so Mercerish."

True, but it was still very Prévertish. Mercer had softened the brute title of "The Dead Leaves" ("Les feuilles mortes") to more beguilingly autumnal ones, but he'd retained the central image and its attendant memories and regrets. He did, though, make one fairly major adjustment. In Prévert's original, the moldering leaves and the lost sunshine are all in the two verses:

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Mais mon amour silencieux et fidèle
Sourit toujours et remercie la vie...

Or in English:

Dead leaves are collected by the shovelful
Memories and regrets, too
But my love, silent and faithful,
Still smiles and is grateful to life...

Whereas the chorus – the part the English-speaking world knows today as "Autumn Leaves" – is much more general:

C'est une chanson
Qui nous ressemble
Toi, tu m'aimais
Et je t'aimais...

Which boils down to:

This is a song
That resembles us
You, you loved me
And I loved you...

In effect, Mercer took the idea of Prévert's verse and transferred it to the chorus. He made another change, too. The French chorus is heavily rhymed:

C'est une chanson
Qui nous ressemble...
Et nous vivions
Tous deux ensemble...

Chanson/vivions. Ressemble/ensemble. Mercer, by contrast, uses just two rhymes in the whole lyric: the leaves of "red and gold" are paired with the hands "I used to hold", and then in the song's release:

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song...

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:

But I miss you most of all, my darling
When Autumn Leaves start to fall.

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:

As Bond neared the end of the corridor he could hear a piano swinging a rather sad tune. At the door of 350 he knew the music came from behind it. He recognized the tune. It was 'Feuilles mortes'. He knocked.

That's quite a sharp musicological observation from Fleming. "Feuilles mortes" was still barely known in the English-speaking world in 1956, but already it was clear that instrumentally this "rather sad tune" was going to swing. A decade earlier, when Joseph Kosma set Jacques Prévert's words to music, he matched it to a tune of deceptive simplicity. The chord progression builds on the circle of fifths but in a highly original way. Yet, because it's assumed to be relatively "simple", it's one of the first jazz standards novice instrumentalists are encouraged to take a whack at – and, because it swings so effortlessly, it's very appealing as an up-tempo instrumental for musicians who couldn't care less about moony lovers and falling foliage. My friend Dorothée Berryman, who plays the much put-upon wife in Denys Arcand's Oscar-winning Barbarian Invasions and its predecessor The Decline Of The American Empire, does a terrific crawl-tempo version of "Autumn Leaves" using both Prévert's French verse and Mercer's English chorus. It's intense, dramatic, beautifully poised, and so confident that, when she does it live, Mme Berryman comes to a complete halt and the crowd sits completely still waiting for her to resume: You could hear a pin drop, or an autumn leaf:

After seeing her at the Montréal jazz festival, I found myself chit-chatting with one of her musicians, who said he enjoyed doing "Autumn Leaves" that way because everyone else did it up-tempo. He was thinking instrumentally:

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 cocktail pianist passing himself off as a New England settler, and you've got one coast-to-coast all-American Number One hit. If the harmonica player in that French cafe was the soft launch, this version announces itself:

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.

That said, if you're under a certain age with a mainstream hit inclination, the standard treatment of the song may be that laid down by a young singer in a Georgetown nightclub in January 1996. Eva Cassidy was barely known outside the District of Columbia when she gave the performance below. A few weeks after the release of the album, she was diagnosed with cancer and given three-to-five months to live. She made it to November 1996, dying at the age of 33. Two years later, her records came to the attention of Terry Wogan at BBC Radio 2, and he made her a star, with three posthumous Number One albums, a Number One single, and Top Ten records from Australia to Norway. Miss Cassidy's "Autumn Leaves" was one Sir Terry played a lot, and for a generation of listeners this is how they think of the song:

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)...

...la vie était plus belle
Et le soleil plus brûlant qu'aujourd'hui.

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

Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s'aiment
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit
Et la mer efface sur le sable
Les pas des amants désunis.

Which translates to:

But life separates those who love
Very gently, without a sound
And the sea washes away on the sand
The footprints of lovers parted...

And love leaves no trace, except a dull ache on an October morn:

And I miss you most of all, my darling
When Autumn Leaves start to fall.

~The above is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season. Order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the Steyn Store. And, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter your coupon code at checkout to receive the special member's discount.

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