We're a day away from Bastille Day, France's fête nationale, and so it seems appropriate to spend a little time with franco-Sinatra. He sang a lot of French songs over the years, most famously this:
Je me lève et je te bouscule
Tu n'te réveilles pas
Comme d'habitude...
Oh, no, wait. Frank sang the English lyric:
And now the end is near
And so I face
The final curtain...
We'll attend to "Comme d'habitude"/"My Way" a little later in this series, although I might as well confess now a preference for Gilles Thibault's French text over Paul Anka's English rewrite. The anglicization of Continental pop hits was a regular feature of the music business until the Seventies, and Sinatra recorded his fair share of the imports over the years - going all the way back to the Harry James band in July 1939 and "The Lamp Is Low", if you're willing to consider Maurice Ravel as a French pop songwriter. Between "The Lamp Is Low" and "My Way", among the French Franks to rattle on the tabac counter were the Edith Piaf hit "Les trois cloches", which Sinatra sang in 1948 as "While The Angelus Was Ringing", and a Bruno Coquatrix composition "Clopin-clopant", which was translated into English as, er, "Comme Ci, Comme Ça". In his mercifully brief Rod McKuen phase, Sinatra rendered Jacques Brel's "Ne me quitte pas" as Rod's "If You Go Away". After "My Way" Paul Anka Englished up another French tune, "Laisse moi le temps", into "Let Me Try Again", which fit the theme of Sinatra's Old Blue Eyes Is Back album. And "What Now, My Love?" - which the irrepressible Gilbert Bécaud wrote as "Et maintenant" - stayed in Sinatra's book for the last three decades of his career, right up to his 1990s duet remake with Aretha Franklin.
We should probably also include various French-perfumed entries by Cole Porter, who in the early days of his marriage lived in Paris, where they were known as les colporteurs ("the peddlers"). In the film Can-Can, Sinatra sang Porter's "C'est Magnifique" and "I Love Paris", which he did. On stage at the Olympia, run by the aforementioned M Coquatrix, for his first ever Paris concert in 1962, Frank amended the ending:
I Love Paris
Why, oh why do I Love Paris?
Because my love is here...She's here...
She's in room 522 at the Lancaster Hotel...
...which is a very nice joint on the rue de Berri, although I don't know what room 522 is like. Sinatra's other big Paris song, from Come Fly With Me, was "April In Paris", composed by Vernon Duke, who, under his pre-Tin Pan Alley name of Vladimir Dukelsky, had lived in the City of Light and while there written a ballet for Diaghilev. The lyricist of "April In Paris", the young Yip Harburg, had a tougher job, as at that time he'd never left New York. So he went to a travel agent and described the picture on the brochure:
April In Paris
Chestnuts in blossom
Holiday tables under the trees...
Close enough. And then there were all those other Frenchified songs, not by the grand names like Porter and Vernon Duke but just wacky curiosities that fell Frank's way and that he seemed to enjoy: "Mam'selle", "Monique", "Since Marie Has Left Paree", the "Paris blues" "Azure-Te", and my personal favorite:
If you turn me down once more I'll join the French Foreign Legion
Bet you they would welcome me with open arms
First you love me, yes; then you love me, no
I don't know where I stand
Do we march together down the aisle
Or do I march that desert sand?
That's a goofy novelty lyric by Aaron Schroeder, who, foreign-wise, made a lot more dough turning "O Sole Mio" into "It's Now Or Never". The music is by, of all people, Guy Wood, composer of that luminous Sinatra ballad "My One And Only Love". But "French Foreign Legion" got tricked out in a wild Nelson Riddle arrangement complete with swingin' soundbites from "La Marseillaise" and transformed into a zany single for Sinatra in 1958. It's hard to resist on Bastille Day or any other day.
But for something more evocatively Gallic we have to turn to Johnny Mercer, anglo author of two of Frank's greatest French songs - "Les feuilles mortes", which became "Autumn Leaves", and "Le Chevalier de Paris", which became today's Sinatra Century entry. They're both on the same favorite Johnny Mercer theme - the passage of time and the melancholic regrets that creep up as it draws down. But "Autumn Leaves" is more specifically attuned to the calendar and thus seems a bit odd for mid-July. So let us instead explore what Mercer did with "Le Chevalier de Paris".
As you'd expect for a celebration of France's national holiday, our story begins in São Paulo, Brazil. That's where Philippe Gérard Bloch was born in 1923. In another life, he might have stayed there and invented the bossa nova and written the tunes for Sinatra's albums with Antonio Carlos Jobim. But his parents were French and happened to be friends with Maurice Ravel, whose Pavane pour une infante défunte was, as noted above, the first Gallic composition Frank ever sang: A pavane is a slow processional dance and "pour une infante défunte" means "for a dead princess" - which, by the time Sinatra warbled it, had been turned into the rather less morbid smoocheroo "The Lamp Is Low". Ravel thought young Bloch had musical talent and recommended him to the Paris Conservatoire. And then Herr Hitler intervened, and the German occupation, and Bloch found himself a refugee in Geneva. And by the time the war was over Brazil was a long way away, and Bloch wound up an orchestra leader and writer of pop and film music under the pseudonym "M Philippe-Gérard". He had the great good fortune to be taken up by Edith Piaf, for whom he wrote "Pour moi toute seule". A few modest hits later, he chanced to be given some verses by the Breton poet Angèle Vannier:
Le grand chevalier du cœur de Paris
Se rappelait plus du goût des prairies
Il faisait la guerre avec ses amis
Dedans la fumée
Dedans les métros
Dedans les pavés
Dedans les bistrots
Il ne savait pas qu'il en était saoul
Il ne savait pas qu'il dormait debout
Paris le tenait par la peau du cou...
...which posits a grand knight of the heart of Paris at war with his friends - in the smog, in the Métro, in the streets, in the pubs:
He didn't know he was drunk
He didn't know he slept standing up
Paris holding him by the scruff of his neck...
After that came a chorus which Philippe-Gérard set to a beguiling waltz tune. It was made for Piaf's particular brand of down-at-heel storytelling, and in 1950 she had a hit with it. And eventually it came to the attention of Mickey Goldsen, the head of Capitol's music publishing division, far away in America. Goldsen loved the tune and asked Carl Sigman to write an English lyric. Aside from being the author of what I like to think of as my signature song, Sigman was very expert when it came to foreign-language material: he provided Sinatra with not only "What Now, My Love?" but also "The World We Knew" and "A Day In The Life Of A Fool". "Le Chevalier de Paris" is a long song. "It had three sixteen-bar verses and three eighteen-bar choruses," recalled Goldsen. "Carl wrote lyrics only to one eighteen-bar chorus. I was terribly disappointed in his work. He ignored the dramatic verses, ignored the original story of the song, and came up with a light, romantic, workmanlike Tin Pan Alley ballad. I called him up and said that his lyric did not make the song important. By ignoring the verses, he robbed it of its dramatic strength. I had to be frank with him or I did not deserve to call myself a publisher."
Sigman didn't care for the cut of his jib. "If you want an important song, get an important writer," he told Goldsen.
So Goldsen took it to Johnny Mercer. With "Les feuilles mortes", Mercer took months and months to transform one little section of the original into "Autumn Leaves". With "Le Chevalier de Paris", he took three days to write three verses and three choruses and then another three verses to enable it to be sung by persons of either sex. There wasn't a lot of Angèle Vannier left by the time he was through:
Ah! Les pommiers doux
Rondes et ritournelles
J'ai pas peur des loups
Chantonnait la belle
Ils ne sont pas méchants
Avec les enfants
Qu'ont le cœur fidèle
Et les genoux blancs...
The last seven-eighths of that is about children's "rondes et ritournelles" - rounds and refrains, nursery rhymes sung by les petits enfants with faithful hearts and white knees. Mercer had no interest in any of that, but he liked the opening ejaculation - "Ah!" - and the first image: "Les pommiers doux" - sweet apples. And that was all he needed:
Ah, the apple trees
Blossoms in the breeze
That we walked among
Lying in the hay
Games we used to play
While the rounds were sung
Only yesterday
When The World Was Young...
Oh, yeah, he kept the rounds, too. Notice, by the way, how Mercer changes the rhyme scheme. Angèle Vannier's is ABABCCDC. But Philippe-Gérard didn't set it right - because, as a general rule, composers are less sensitive to the contours of lyrics than lyricists are to the contours of tunes. So Mercer re-ordered the rhyme scheme to fit the stresses of Philippe-Gérard's tune: AABCCBCB - a great improvement.
Unlike his lyric for "Autumn Leaves", he kept the verses, and retained an echo of Mme Vannier's premise but moved up a notch or two socially - not a roughneck from the Métro and the tabac, but an old roué lost in nostalgia:
It isn't by chance I happen to be
A boulevardier, the toast of Paree
For over the noise, the talk and the smoke
I'm good for a laugh, a drink or a joke
I walk in a room, a party or ball
'Come sit over here,' somebody will call
'A drink for M'sieur, a drink for us all!'
But how many times I stop and recallAh, the apple trees...
Bing made the first record in 1951, with a hideously saccharine tweety-bird intro by John Scott Trotter's orchestra. And thereafter the male vocalists kept their distance, and it was the chanteuses who kept the song alive: Peggy Lee, Polly Bergen, Jane Morgan, June Christy, Eydie Gormé, Dinah Shore... Fortunately, Mercer had taken the precaution of feminizing the verses. Instead of an aging boulevardier, an aging coquette:
They call me coquette and mademoiselle
And I must admit I like it quite well
It's something to be the darling of all
La grande femme fatale, the belle of the ball
There's nothing as gay as life in Paree
There's no other person I'd rather be,
I love what I do, I love what I see
But where is the schoolgirl that used to be me?Ah, the apple trees...
Mercer was proud of the way he'd taken his familiar theme of autumnal regret and imbued it with a French flavor, even though he barely knew a word of French. "It seemed to me just my way of remembering how it was in the old days, because the song in French, as well as in English, talks about a man who has been to war, comes back disillusioned, or a girl who's been around the pool comes back disillusioned, and remembers how it was when she was young. Before the world got to her, and disappointment and everything":
Ah, the apple trees
Where at garden teas
Jack-o-lanterns swung
Fashions of the day
Vests of appliqué...
Mercer said he "remembered all these things that I remembered as a boy, you know. Not necessarily me, just things. Things that were ...little labels of an age like jack-o-lanterns and vests of appliqué, you know.." Very evocative, although "where at garden teas" is a bit clunky. "I've just come back from Paris," he reported in 1970, "and the Frenchmen over there tell me that the English lyric is far superior to the French lyric."
Well, up to a point. I know three francophone singers who agree, but all have told me over the years that, while they'd love to sing the English lyrics, French audiences would balk at:
Summers at Bordeaux
Rowing the bateau...
It's Bor-DEAUX but it's not ba-TEAU. The French say BA-teau, and Mercer rowed his a wee bit out of his depth there. Summers at Bordeaux/Eating your chapeau...
Overall, I would say the boulevardier lyric is superior to the coquette lyric, but after that initial foray by Bing male singers seemed happy to leave the number to the ladies - until, as he had done with other chick tunes (most memorably "The Man That Got Away"), Sinatra decided he'd like to take a crack at it. The occasion was not the most propitious. In 1961 Frank had left Capitol and started Reprise Records, but the former were demanding he fulfill every final sub-paragraph and codicil of their deal with him. And so it was that, at the behest of his lawyers, Frank went back to Capitol for one last contractual-obligation album, called Point Of No Return. There's no song by that name on the set, so whoever decided to plaster it over the front of the LP was certainly doing so pointedly.
For Sinatra, it was a real point of no return: he was burning bridges and disinclined to look back. Ahead lay a new world as pop music's first superstar cum impresario. For his conductor/arranger Axel Stordahl, it was also a point of no return. He was riddled with cancer, and it was his wife June Hutton, a former Pied Piper who like Stordahl went way back with Frank, who called the singer and begged him to give Axel one last project with his greatest collaborator. They had all known each other since the earliest days, and indeed up to 1953 Stordahl had conducted close to everything Frank ever sang.
Nevertheless, on Point Of No Return, the results are very uneven, seesawing between Sinatra's great affinity for Stordahl's arrangements and his loathing by that stage of practically everyone at Capitol Records. On "Memories Of You" and "I'll Remember April", Frank's vocal rises to the stellar heights of Axel's charts. On "September Song" and "These Foolish Things", he's just phoning it in - and the last is disfigured by a very crude edit where evidently he couldn't be bothered to do another whole take.
But the masterpiece on the album is "When The World Was Young". Sinatra didn't generally respond to verse-and-chorus songs: he was a master storyteller and a great actor, but he preferred something a little more oblique than a multi-verse narrative. It's one reason he never really taps into "Roses Of Picardy", recorded in London a couple of years after this. But something about "When The World Was Young" spoke to him. Stordhahl's string writing was better than ever and his intro to Philippe-Gérard's melody lets you know we're far away, not necessarily in France specifically, but in the land of memory, where the past is both elusive and blazingly vivid. And then, as both an actor and a musician at the peak of his powers, Sinatra starts to tell his tale, and finally gives Mercer's masculine lyric the treatment it had been waiting for:
It isn't by chance I happen to be
A boulevardier, the toast of Paree
For over the noise, the talk and the smoke
I'm good for a laugh, a drink or a joke...
Unusually for Sinatra he stuck with the conceit for a second verse:
Wherever I go they mention my name
And that in itself is some sort of fame
'Come by for a drink, we're having a game'
Wherever I go I'm glad that I came
The talk is quite gay, the company fine
There's laughter and lights, and glamour and wine
And beautiful girls and some of them mine
But often my eyes see a diff'rent shineAh, the apple trees...
Not quite a decade and a half ago I was noodling around early one Tuesday morning working on a little Sinatra project and looking up "When The World Was Young" and suddenly noticing that it had been recorded exactly 40 years ago that day: 1961, on September 11th. About 20 minutes later, the first plane sliced through the World Trade Center, and the world was no longer young.
Ah, the apple trees
Sunlit memories
Where the hammock swung
On our backs we'd lie
Looking at the sky
Till the stars were strung
Only last July
When The World Was Young...
At the end of the song, Sinatra's guitarist Al Viola remembers going over to June Hutton and finding her in tears. "You have no idea what this means to Axel," she sobbed. He would be dead of cancer within two years, aged only fifty. And this song was surely drenched in all kinds of emotions for him - about his life, his love, his work, and the boy singer he'd accompanied on his rise from band vocalist to the biggest star in popular music.
They were shrewd enough to make it Side One Track One. It's all there in the French music and the English lyric. I spent a lot of time in France as a child and this song is bittersweet for me - beautifully written but, as the years go by, an ever more poignant elegy for a lost world:
...where the willow hung
Just a dream ago
When the World Was Young.
~For an alternative Sinatra Hot 100, the Pundette has also launched a Frank countdown. She has another franco-Sinatra song at Number 73, Charles Trenet's "Que reste-t'il de nos amours?" - or "I Wish You Love". Bob Belvedere over at The Camp Of The Saints is counting down his own Sinatrapalooza, and he's putting the ultimate French Frank in the jukebox at Number 87, Claude François' "Comme d'Habitude", better known as "My Way". The Evil Blogger Lady has a little Maurice Jarre but a long way from the late Omar Sharif and Dr Zhivago.
~There's more Johnny Mercer and more Sinatra in Mark's two-part Mercer centenary podcast here and here. You can read the stories behind many more Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, while Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be foundin the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline
6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)
8) STARDUST
10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
11) CHICAGO
12) THE CONTINENTAL
13) ALL OF ME
15) NIGHT AND DAY
16) I WON'T DANCE
17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)
21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)
24) OUR LOVE
27) FOOLS RUSH IN
32) I'LL BE AROUND
36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY
37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
38) SOMETHIN' STUPID
40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)
41) SOLILOQUY
42) THE COFFEE SONG
44) HOW ABOUT YOU?
46) LUCK BE A LADY
