San Francisco
Steyn's Song of the Week

This weekend's musical selection comes by way of request. With the media ructions over President Trump's proposal to move undocumented immigrants to "sanctuary cities" like Nancy Pelosi's district, longtime Jerusalem reader Israel Pickholtz emailed to suggest that there was only one possible choice for this week's Song of the Week:

San Francisco
Open your Golden Gate!
You'll let no stranger wait
Outside your door...

Funny, as is the sudden emergence of open-borders nimbyism. It had not, in fact, occurred to me until Mr Pickholtz's email that this grand rouser of a song is indeed an anthem to the city as sanctuary:

San Francisco
Here is your wand'ring one
Saying I'll wander no more...

It was not, as it happens, written to celebrate open borders as public policy, but open borders in the more literal sense that the garden wall just fell down - ie, the San Francisco earthquake of April 18th 1906. In the midst of the rubble you can always use a good rousing song. This one was introduced in the the classic 1936 MGM disaster musical about the quake. San Francisco starred Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy. Gable played Blackie Norton, a gambling-den operator on the rough'n'tough Barbary Coast, and Tracy played Father Tim, a rough'n'tough Barbary Coast priest, and Miss MacDonald, the Iron Butterfly, played Mary Blake, Blackie's chantoosie, who deserts his joint for a chance to sing opera to the swells on Nob Hill. She introduces the song at the annual Chicken Ball competition and wins 10,000 bucks, which Blackie contemptuously tosses to the floor.

At that point, a strange rumbling is heard. And then the earth moved for Clark and Jeanette.

San Francisco was one of the biggest money makers of the year, and it had a terrific tag line:

It started out like any other day!

Indeed. But by the time it ended the title song had been heard no fewer than six times in just under two hours:

Pardon the colorization. Not my bag, although it renders Miss MacDonald's hair a very pleasing hue. At any rate, after half-a-dozen outings, if you didn't know the title song by the time you left the theater, you were either asleep or getting a little too frisky at the back of the balcony. For everyone else, it was an inspirational song for a dark moment in the city's history.

So what are the home towns of the guys who wrote San Francisco's home-town song? Bronislau Kaper was born in Warsaw, Walter Jurmann in Vienna, and Gus Kahn in Koblenz, Germany. Kaper and Jurmann produced the tune: They were basically a couple of hardworking fellows in the MGM music department rather than songwriters, though Kaper had a big hit in the Fifties with "Hi Lili Hi Lo". Gus Kahn, who wrote the lyric, isn't any more of a household name than Kaper and Jurmann, but he is, by some calculations, the second most successful songwriter of all time, cranking out more hits than anyone other than Irving Berlin. They include "It Had To Be You", "Makin' Whoopee", "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", "Carolina in the Morning", "The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else)", and all the great baby songs of the Twenties – "Yes, Sir! That's My Baby", "My Baby Just Cares For Me", and on and on. His son Donald told me once that on the ship over from Germany little Gus had a toy drum and pounded the hell out of it on the voyage. The first thing the kid's dad did when they got to Ellis Island was to toss it in the ocean. But by then young Gus had a pretty good ear for a (drum) tune and in the years ahead he would give a lot of very different composers the biggest-earning songs in their catalogue. With Messrs Kaper and Jurmann, he kept it simple:

San Francisco
Open your Golden Gate
You'll let no stranger wait
Outside your door...

As you can hear above in that montage from young Jeanette, the trio wrote a verse, which has gone mostly unsung over the ensuing decades. Instead, years later, when Judy Garland decided to co-opt the song for her stage act, she had Roger Edens write a new verse of semi-parodic intent to remind us of the original context:

I never will forget Jeanette MacDonald
Just to think of her, it gives my heart a pang
I never will forget
How that brave Jeanette
Just stood there in the ruins and sang
A-a-a-and sang...

And she did. And so, in her very different way, did Judy:

The knowing laughter at the mere mention of Miss MacDonald's name always bothers me, but times change and a quarter-century after their heyday Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were as likely to provoke titters as much as anything else. In the case of this particular song, it was also true that, by the Sixties, Jeanette's pick-me-up was no longer the most famous number celebrating the city. It had been supplanted by "I Left My Heart In San Francisco", the Douglas Cross/George Cory ballad that Tony Bennett made his signature song. And in 1969, in something of a humiliation for the anthem of the conflagration, "I Left My Heart" became the city's official song. It was either that or "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair".

And there things might have rested had not Warren Hinckel of The San Francisco Chronicle decided to launch in the 1980s a vigorous campaign against "I Left My Heart..." Hinckel demanded the town sever its association with a sappy love ballad that reflected what he called only the Mayor's "drip-dry, plastic" view of one of the world's great cities.

I wound up writing a column about the controversy for The Times of London and I was amazed by the passions unleashed by the so-called song war. The drip-dry plastic mayor in question was Dianne Feinstein, now senator for California. She was a great fan of "I Left My Heart..." and was reluctant to toss it overboard as a political liability. Her argument was simple: wherever she traveled around the world, people knew the Tony Bennett ballad and associated it with the city.

That was just the problem, according to her political rival, Quentin Kopp. "It's a tourist song", he told me. "It appeals to visitors from Britain." All the little-cable-cars-climbing-halfway-to-the-stars stuff: It would be like London being represented by "A Foggy Day (In London Town)". It's also impossible for large numbers of people to sing the song, unless they happen to be melancholic drunks.

Mr Kopp, who thought it ridiculous to have a love ballad as official song, then introduced an amendment to the relevant ordinance to kick out the sentimental dirge once and for all. And, in a shock poll for Mayor Feinstein, more than 70 per cent of participants in a San Francisco Chronicle survey voted against the song - a chilling statistic. The archetypal it's-a-pleasure-to-be-back-in-your-wonderful-city number apparently afforded minimal pleasure to the wonderful city it was back in. "I Left My Heart..." had been dealt a fatal blow. Here's your heart and what's your hurry, said San Francisco.

Quentin Kopp & Co decided they wanted the city represented by Jeanette MacDonald's up-tempo earthquake number. "It's much more expressive of the city," he explained to me. "It's rousing, gutsy, robust, not sweet and saccharine like 'I Left My Heart'." It's a big thumping locker-room singalong, not some cloying girlie ballad. As the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus are wont to bellow:

Other places only make me love you best!
Tell me you're the heart of all the golden west!

Dianne Feinstein was unmoved, alleging that the song was unknown outside the United States. Mr Kopp told me he'd heard it sung in German, but the Mayor threatened to use her veto power. In the end, a typically political compromise was reached and "San Francisco" was named Official Song, with "I Left My Heart..." hanging on as Official Ballad.

Mr Kopp lost his run-off election against Mayor Feinstein, but I believe he has a freeway named after him, as I vaguely recall seeing his name flying by on the shoulder. His enthusiasm for "San Francisco" is entirely genuine, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, a few years back, when Stephen Sondheim named it on a list of songs he wished he'd written, I couldn't quite tell whether he meant it or was just indulging in a subtle leg-pull. On the other hand, Judy Garland's special-material lyrics, as sung above, make the song camper than it actually is:

There's Brooklyn Bridge
And London Bridge
And the bridge to San Jose
But the only bridge
That's a real gone bridge
Is the bridge across the baaaaaayyyyyyy

To San Francisco...

I was nineteen when I first visited San Francisco and I could see why you'd feel that way. The last time I was there was about six months ago. On the plane I was re-reading an old column of mine about the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board's proposal that surgical masks should be required on all pornographic movie shoots within the Golden State. When I landed at the airport, I came out of the terminal and noticed all the policemen telling the drivers you can't park there were indeed wearing surgical masks – and for a moment I thought I'd wandered onto the set of Debbie Does the SFO Arrivals Lounge. In fact, it was because of air pollution from all the forest fires. But it seemed metaphorically apt: I was absolutely astonished by the squalor on the streets, and the large numbers of people living thereon:

San Francisco!
Open your Golden Gate
You'll let no stranger wait
Outside your door...

It's a great song, but for a lost city.

~If you left your heart in San Francisco, you might just find it again on the second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise. We'll be sailing from Vancouver through Alaska's beautiful Inside Passage to Ketchikan and Glacier Bay this September, and, among the attractions, we can promise you a special live-music edition of our Song of the Week. But cabins are going spectacularly fast, and we're very nearly sold out. If your preferred accommodations are showing up online as unavailable, do call or email Cindy, our excellent cruise manager, and she might be able to pull a few strings: If you're dialing from beyond North America, it's +1 (770) 952-1959; if you're calling from Canada or the US, it's 1-800-707-1634. Or you can email your query here.

Mark's book A Song For The Season contains the stories behind many beloved songs from "Auld Lang Syne" to "White Christmas" - and don't forget, when you order through the SteynOnline bookstore, Mark will be happy to autograph it to your loved one. Also: if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, remember to enter your promotional code at checkout to receive special member pricing on that book and over forty other Steyn Store products.

The above-mentioned Mark Steyn Club is now approaching its second birthday. And, if you've got some kith or kin who might like the sound of it, we also have a special Gift Membership. More details here.