Our Song of the Week department isn't really a request spot. However, following last week's selection, Steyn Clubber Raymond Kujawa wrote from Washington State:
My father was a weekend accordionist, and I went with him on a few of his gigs in the mid 70's in some of the social halls in the suburbs around Philadelphia. 'I'll Be Seeing You' is definitely end of the night material, but I'll always remember the tune my dad's group would play (tenor sax, accordion/Cordovox, drums) would play as the final number of the night, 'The Party's Over.' My dad really did love his standards. He and I shared that. Would love to hear any anecdotes on that song.
Well, oddly enough, I was thinking about that particular number just the other day - because I heard it on the radio for the first time in I don't know how many years. It was composed by Jule Styne, who died thirty years ago - September 1994. By then he was the last of the Broadway giants, the composer of Funny Girl, Peter Pan and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and perhaps the greatest of all American musicals Gypsy; the prodigious hitmaker of "Time After Time" and "People" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"; the guy who'd supplied all those sidewalk Santas and shopping malls with "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Indeed, the mandatory requirement that rockers in mid-life crisis crank out the inevitable standards album can be traced back to Linda Ronstadt's decision to ask Nelson Riddle to cook up an arrangement of Styne's "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" for her. I write about him in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, and you can hear him talking about one of his lovely wartime ballads on the accompanying Frank Loesser CD. He was one of the first bigtime songwriters I ever met, and it doesn't seem like three decades since he's been gone - in part because he was such a vivid presence in life, even at the end, aged eighty-eight, when he was in dialysis three days a week to crank him up to strength for the remaining four.
On a Styne show, the press agent would always assure you that all was calm, and then, from behind the door, you'd hear Jule yelling. "I like to yell," he'd say. "So what?" Yelling had helped make a diminutive if pugnacious man the most successful composer of the post-war era. He lived long enough to see Broadway, once American popular culture's central thruway, crumble away to a sleepy backroad, but he remained a last reminder of the days when theatre composers were also Hit Parade giants. When he yelled, he waved his arms around, and you noticed that he wore a gold bracelet. On the inside, the inscription read: "To Jule, who knew me when – Frankie" - a present from Sinatra, delivered by Cartier's the morning after the singer's first ever solo concert. He yelled at Sinatra, too. "Frank said in the papers that he didn't like my song 'People'. So he didn't like it. So it was top of the charts. So what does he know?"
Styne never suffered from false modesty - in the Seventies, he announced he was America's greatest living composer - but his ego was so lightly worn it was rather endearing. Besides, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world, and Styne never forgot which people composers need. "I've been very fortunate in having my songs sung by the greatest male singer and the greatest female singer," he told me, referring to his former flatmate (Sinatra) and a funny girl he helped make a star (Streisand).
So, three decades after he left us, here's two of Jule's favorite tunes from a second-tier Styne show. Before the iPhone, before voicemail, before the cellphone, before the answering machine, there was the "answering service". It was state-of-the-art: You dialed a telephone number and asked to speak to Mr Smith and the nice lady at the other end told you Mr Smith wasn't available but she'd write down a message with a pen on a piece of paper and relay it to him when next she communicated with him verbally. On my first proper extended business trip to New York, I got myself an "answering service", mainly because I liked to be able to tell people, "Call my service", which I'd heard in movies and seemed, to an out-of-town hick, a very cool line. The mobile telephone was in circulation by then, but it was the size of a brick and, if you shoved it in your pocket, it looked like you were packing extremely lumpy heat, and, after an hour or so padding up and down the streets of Manhattan you were walking with a limp. Besides, most of the showbiz types I was there to interview would still tell you, "Call my service." So it seemed like the thing to do. A while later, in London, I briefly used an answering service. But, like so many American ideas imported by the Old Country, it worked about a fifth as well and cost ten times as much. They didn't always answer, and sarcastic friends would suggest, "Maybe your answering service should get an answering service."
In New York, the service I really wanted was Belles Celebrity Answering Service, but, as the name suggests, they only catered to celebrities - and then only by referral. Leonard Bernstein had to be put up for membership by his pal Adolph Green, as if it were a gentlemen's club in St James's. But, if I never got to join the club, I certainly had occasion to call Belles over the years, although I'm not sure I ever spoke to its founder, Mary Printz. She died in 2009, plugged in to the end, still catering to a small group of fiercely loyal clients - Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Stephen Sondheim - celebs who preferred to say "Call my service" rather than "Fax me on my Wii", or whatever was au courant with the techno-chappies back then.
Mrs Printz founded the service in 1956, and shortly afterwards Adolph Green and his writing partner Betty Comden went round to see Jule Styne. "Here's our next show," Green told him. And then he dropped the phone book on the desk.
On the back was a picture of a girl surrounded by telephone wires: a young lady from an answering service. Styne liked the idea. So they called up their old chum Judy Holliday, with whom Comden and Green had once performed in a nightclub act called the Revuers. Miss Holliday was cast as a telephone gal not unlike Mary Printz - that's to say, she doesn't just pass on messages; she gets mixed up in the lives of the agency's clients. That was what Mrs Printz did, for Spencer Tracy, Shirley MacLaine, Al Pacino: If Noël Coward called up because Marlene Dietrich had chugged down all his Scotch and the stores were closed, a new bottle would shortly materialise in time for Marlene's refill. No matter how smart your smart phone gets, it won't do that for you.
Of course, being a musical comedy, Bells Are Ringing couldn't be about a telephone gal who merely helps out her clients. In the stage version, she also had to fall in love with one of them, which means she has to have some love songs to sing.
Which you don't always get when Comden & Green are your lyricists. They'd started out as revue performers, and thought like that almost to the end. In their stage act in the Eighties, they had a prescient number sung by two schoolchildren in a brave new world where everything has been "simplified", including the sexes. Instead of a penis or vagina, everyone now has a "penina". And as Betty and Adolph would then sing:
Oh, nothing could be finer
Than to play with my penina
If you will show me yours-a
Then I will show you mine-a...
"Simplified Language" is a great piece of material, but that's what everyone expects from Comden & Green: great material. Alan Jay Lerner once said to me how much he'd enjoyed their second show with Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town. He happened to mention to their mutual publisher, Max Dreyfus at Chappell, that he especially liked the lovely loping ballad:
Why-oh-why-oh-why-oh
Why did we ever leave Ohio?
Alan thought it might be a hit.
Dreyfus shook his head. "The public knows they don't mean it," he said.
That was the problem with Comden & Green. Funny, wacky, satirical ...but not so good when it comes to "meaning it". Except with Jule Styne. On Bells Are Ringing, Styne brought forth from them a pair of great lasting songs that indisputably "mean it". "They write with me like they write with nobody! Nobody!" Styne told me with his customary understatement. "Sure, they can write funny and all that, but all their best pop lyrics they wrote with me!" It's hard to argue.
The first of those songs is poignant and reflective. Ella – the Judy Holliday character – has decided that, although she's had a grand time in her new beau's sophisticated world, she'll never fit in. In the play, the song was sung at the end of a party scene, so, using that ingenious Broadway trick of turning the literal into something big and metaphorical, Betty and Adolph came up with the title: "The Party's Over". "Jule liked it," Betty Comden recalled, "and he sat straight down at the piano and set it. When we wrote with Leonard, he'd often be away across the country conducting, so you'd write the lyric and wait for him to get back, or send it to him and find out what he'd done with it a month later. But with Jule it was more what you'd call spontaneous combustion. We'd stand around the piano singing and he'd be playing and the song would sort of emerge."
It certainly worked in this case, producing a beautifully bittersweet ballad:
The Party's Over
It's time to call it a day
They've burst your pretty balloon
And taken the moon away...
Jule Styne figured Judy Holliday had what he called "a Charlie Chaplin quality" and the audience would be weeping along with her. Miss Holliday didn't see it that way. She disliked the balloon/moon couplet and refused to sing them.
"Judy was always very professional," said Betty Comden, "but she felt the balloon lines weren't right for Ella, her character. So we rewrote them for her":
No matter how you pretend
You knew it would end this way...
Which is kind of ordinary. The rest of the song motors along on pure imagery:
It's time to wind up
The masquerade
Just make your mind up
The piper must be paid
The Party's Over
The candles flicker and dim
You danced and dreamed through the night
It seemed to be right
Just being with him...
That internal rhyme – "dreamed through the night/seemed to be right" – is very deft. In fact, the entire song is marked by an unobtrusive professionalism – "flicker" is a lovely word set to those notes, yet you barely notice it. There are a lot of records on the song – Bobby Darin, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee, Marvin Gaye – but if I had to choose a couple of favorites I'd start with Nat Cole. Here's Nat using it to close out his short-lived TV show:
...oh, and Julie London's worth a spin:
"The Party's Over" is one of two take-home tunes in the score. And yet, as good as it is, the ballad seems to have faded a little over the decades, whereas thesecond has increased and enlarged itself. "We need a simple song here," Jule told Betty and Adolph. "Like 'Hello, good evening.' Easy."
"Hello, good evening" isn't as easy as it sounds. Styne had always been a big fan of Vincent Youmans, whose big hits – like "Tea for Two" – are built around deceptively simple two-note seesaws. Jule told his lyricists, "I'm going to write half-steps. A whole song on half-steps." And he sat down and played the thing all the way through.
And that's how it stayed for a while – just a tune that Betty and Adolph couldn't quite find the words for. So for months on end it was known only as "Da-Da-Da". In fact, Comden & Green took to performing it at parties around town as "Da-Da-Da":
Da-da-da
Da-da-da da-da-da...
And then eventually they came up with the perfect lyric:
Just In Time
I found you Just In Time
Before you came, my time
Was running low...
As Styne conceived it, it's a Youmansesque tune built on two seesawing notes only half a tone apart. Melodically, it could easily have been a total bore. But the chord changes underneath make it one of the most musically satisfying tunes in the catalogue. Having steered clear of any rhymes in that first phrase, it lets loose a little bit in the second:
I was lost
The losing dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed
Nowhere to go...
Usually, with that kind of three-note seesaw effect in the main phrase, you'd go for something broad and lyrical in the release. But Styne's confident enough to stick with his central idea and just tweak it a little:
Now you're here
And now I know just where I'm going
No more doubt or fear
I've found my way...
On stage it was very charmingly done by Sydney Chaplin (son of Charlie, in his first big musical role), and even more so when he was joined for the reprise by Miss Holliday with patter lyrics ("This act could play the Palladium/Or even the Yankee Stadium"). For the movie in 1960, they paired her with Dean Martin, who latched on to the song bigtime and did it with innumerable partners over the years:
And then there was Judy Garland, with an arrangement of complex key changes that makes the number sound rather unsettling:
Tony Bennett also took it up for the next six decades. Sinatra got to it, too, in a swingin' Billy May arrangement, but Styne told me he never cared much for Frank's record, mainly because Frank had said he didn't think much of the tune. Lots of other folks did, though. Cole Porter mentioned to Jule it was one of his all-time favorite songs, and it was the one the composer was always happy to hear the band strike up when he walked into a nightclub. He liked to compare it to Liszt - to Liebestraum, which isn't so far-fetched. "I had classical background," he said. "I played Bach for morning, noon and night, and that's the greatest bass line." So he took a little Bach, took a little Vincent Youmans, and came up with a song that's pure Jule Styne.
And all from a show based upon an answering service - Plaza 2-2232 - one of my all-time favourite numbers. Get back to me when the iPhone gives us anything this good:
For love came Just In Time
You found me Just In Time
And changed my lonely life
That lovely day!
~Mark writes about Jule Styne in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the Steyn store - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the promo code at checkout to enjoy special Steyn Club member pricing.
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