On his radio show on Thursday, Hugh Hewitt asked me about the passing of Elaine Stritch. They dimmed the lights on Broadway - even though she wasn't really a star, not in the Ethel Merman/Gwen Verdon/Mary Martin standing-room-only sense. But the years passed and, (to invert Norma Desmond) as Broadway got small, Stritch loomed larger. A couple of years back, I took an old showbiz pal to see her marvelous one-woman act at the Carlyle, and at intermission my actress chum made the point I'd been about to make: Elaine Stritch behaved like a star, and, simply by doing it so well, had become one. She played various roles for Broadway bigshots from Noel Coward to Stephen Sondheim, but her greatest character was her own creation.
On Hugh's show, I discussed the first solo she ever had on the Great White Way. All together now:
Bongo bongo bongo
I don't wanna leave the Congo
Oh no no no no no
Bingo bangle bungle
I'm so happy in the jungle
I refuse to go…
She was so seemingly indestructible an old trouper I thought she would, indeed, refuse to go. But she finally left New York last year, and died far from the bright lights in Michigan. That first Broadway solo of hers was a showstopper back in 1947, and to this day gets quoted in many post-colonial studies journals for its neo-imperialist condescension:
Each morning, a missionary advertise on neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bamboo tree
That civilization is not for me to see…
Princess Margaret, I'm told, loved singing along with all the "bongo bongo bongos" and considered it one of the all-time great songs. It's officially called "Civilization" and comes from a show called Angels In The Wings, which opened at the Coronet on Broadway on December 11th 1947 and was a modest attempt to restore the tradition of intimate revue on the Great White Way. Paul and Grace Hartman had a sketch about a cookery class, in which the husband gets progressively more nauseous as the wife demonstrates how to fry snails in yogurt. In one of my favorite numbers, Hank Ladd wandered the stage wearing a rowing boat as he paddled the St Lawrence in search of Florence, a girl he misplaced on one of the Thousand Islands. But the hit of the evening was the moment when a 22-year-old Elaine Stritch stepped out to renounce modernity for the joys of the jungle:
Bongo bongo bongo
I don't wanna leave the Congo
Oh, no, no, no, no, no…
Stritch (as everyone called her) advanced from "Bongo bongo bongo" to Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams and a hit British sitcom. But at the dawn of the 21st century in her one-woman show she started singing "Civilization" again, and, as it had been five-and-a-half decades earlier, it was one of the best-loved numbers of the night. I don't know whether I had anything to do with that, but in November 2000 I found myself on Ned Sherrin's BBC show "Loose Ends", being broadcast live from New York. It was in the middle of the long post-election-night chad-dimpling phase of the Bush-Gore contest and tensions were running high. Everyone else on the show – Miss Stritch, Michael Feinstein – was pro-Gore, pro-abortion, anti-capital punishment, etc, and the political talk didn't go so well. But then Ned asked Elaine about her early days on Broadway and she mentioned that "Bongo bongo bongo" had been her first solo.
"Oh, that's a marvelous song," I enthused.
"Do you remember who wrote it, Mark?" Ned asked.
"Bob Hilliard and Carl Sigman," I said.
Stritch's jaw fell. "How do you know that?" she asked in wonder.
After the show we had a glass of wine and the talk turned to chads again and politics reared its ugly head. And eventually the post-show party began breaking up. At the door Miss Stritch fixed me with a penetrating eye. "You know, you're full of shit," she said. "But you know who wrote 'Bongo bongo bongo'."
Indeed I do. She was almost a parody of a tobacco-rasped salty-tongued tough old broad by then. But, in London or New York, she was always grand company in private, and in public an unforgettable stage presence. Rest in peace.