Autumn Leaves
Sinatra Song of the Century #68

A truly great song for the season isn't about the calendar, or the weather. It's about the seasons of life and love. In the Sinatra songbook:

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

But then:

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

You bet:

The autumn wind and the winter wind
Have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days
Go on and on...

Of course, if you're not a young man in 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, as it does this very week:

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. 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. The budget-busting film was a flop with French moviegoers in 1945, and so its finest moment 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, I think Edith Piaf had recorded, 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 lyric and Mercer's English adaptation. It's intense, dramatic, beautifully poised, and so confident that, when she does it live, Miss 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 a couple of years back, 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 passing himself off as a New England settler, and you've got one coast-to-coast all-American hit. A year later, Autumn Leaves was the title of a Joan Crawford movie, and Nat "King" Cole's ballad treatment over the titles established the template for most singers.

On April 10th 1957 Sinatra walked into Capitol's studios to make his own recording for the album Where Are You? Two days earlier, Sinatra had been there in his capacity as a conductor - conducting Peggy Lee for her wonderful album The Man I Love. Miss Lee's arrangements were by Nelson Riddle. For Where Are You? Sinatra had opted for charts by Gordon Jenkins. So in the space of 48 hours he conducted Nelson Riddle arrangements but sang Gordon Jenkins arrangements. Many Sinatra fans have serious reservations about Jenkins, but Frank never did - and in this case he had an understandable reason for looking beyond Nelson: Nat Cole's definitive ballad arrangement was by Riddle, and Sinatra maybe sensed that giving him a second bite at the foliage was asking lightning to strike the same tree twice.

Where Are You? is a great album that represents Gordon Jenkins' string writing at its very best, but insofar as a few queasier moments creep in they do manifest themselves on Frank's otherwise very beautiful record of "Autumn Leaves". Jenkins' instrumental intro - which makes up a full 25 per cent of the track - is a beautiful and haunting tone poem: you feel the chill in this man's bones before he's sung a word. And then Sinatra enters:

The falling leaves...

It's a more formal reading than Cole's, evening out the syllables, with Frank doing (for him) a very unconversational "the" that seems to attach so much weight you feel the burden of lost love right from the first word.

The blemishes? Jenkins, a lyricist himself, could get a wee bit literal in his orchestrations. If the text mentioned waves, the strings would ripple. For wind, they'd shiver. So, in all the years I've loved this record, I've never been quite sure about the orchestral fills between Frank's lines:

The falling leaves...
[JENKINS MIMICS THE SOUND OF LEAVES GETTING BLOWN ALL OVER THE YARD]
...drift by the window...
[JENKINS' LEAVES RESUME THEIR WINDBLOWN STATE UNTIL FRANK COMES BACK IN]
The autumn leaves...
[LEAVES START DANCING IN THE AUTUMNAL WIND YET AGAIN, ONLY TO FALL SILENT ONCE MORE]
...of red and gold...
[MORE FURIOUS DANCING FOLIAGE]

Etc.

On the next section - "I feel your lips" - Jenkins finally gives up on the old leaf choreography. The dancing leaves come back right at the end but somewhat less obviously and Sinatra's voice melts into them so seamlessly that you don't care. This is a much bleaker, more harrowing account than Nat Cole's. If you want the difference in a single line, compare both singers' approach to "old winter's song": Nat's is almost jaunty, philosophical; Frank's winter lasts forever - "old wiiiiiiiiiinter's song". Nat knows there'll be other loves, Frank has no such expectations.

It's a very short record: 2 minutes and 19 seconds, of which over 45 seconds is intro and outro, leaving barely a minute and a half for one chorus. But it's all you need: as Artie Shaw once said to me in any other context, any more would be less. Sinatra tells his story - and then takes his, er, leave.

Five years later Sinatra was on a world tour for children's charities and "Autumn Leaves" drifted fitfully in and out of the running order. He didn't do it in Paris, perhaps because not all Frenchmen care for Johnny Mercer's anglicization. But he did do it in London, in a version the Pundette favors above the studio record. You can understand why: Jenkins' vast orchestra is replaced by two men - Al Viola on guitar and Harry Klee on flute. And, although Klee attempts to replicate all those dancing leaves, the wind machine is dialed back from eleven to about three. It's a very tender performance, with Sinatra a little more conversational than on the record. As Frank himself once said:

A Johnny Mercer lyric is all the wit you wish you had and all the love you ever lost.

In that Festival Hall performance - especially on the close ("Autumn Leaves start to fall") - he certainly lives up to the latter half of that assessment.

It would be another two decades before the logic of the Jenkins arrangement was taken to its ultimate conclusion. In 1983 Sinatra came to Radio City Music Hall to raise money for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He had a funny man as his opening act: the great Dane, Victor Borge. But Borge was a musical comedian, and Sinatra was a great fan, and someone figured it would be great if they could do a bit together. And, when you're looking for big laughs, what's funnier than "Autumn Leaves", right?

So Borge sat at the piano and Sinatra stood at the microphone, and off they went with the Jenkins chart. And on that first shivery fill after "The falling leaves" ...a leaf started to fall. And another on "drift by the window". And more on "The autumn leaves". Most of them on top of Borge at the keyboard.

And through it all, as Victor's getting buried behind him, Sinatra's the perfect straight man, singing with deadly seriousness - until right at the end, when Borge pushes his piano away from the leaves and cowers underneath it, at which point Frank cracks up.

Gordon Jenkins' windswept arrangement had finally found its perfect interpreter.

You don't have to be literally buried by falling leaves to know what it's like to feel an autumnal melancholy. Most of us at one point or another have felt in an October dusk a shiver in the breeze, a chill in the bones, and connected it to something more than just the turn of the seasons. Of all the songs on his Sinatra tribute album Shadows In The Night, "Autumn Leaves" is the first to show up in Bob Dylan's stage act. You feel it's a commentary not just on age and foliage, but on musical losses, too. Al Schmitt, Dylan's engineer, described how, at the start of each song, the band would assemble in the studio and listen to Sinatra's record:

The thing is he would listen to the song over and over again and get Sinatra's kind of intentions on what he was doing with the song and then he would go in — he would only do two or three takes on each tune — but he would make it his own. And nothing to do with Sinatra. He just learned what the song was about.

To the point where, like Frank, you're not just singing it, you're living it.

Johnny Mercer said that "Autumn Leaves" brought him more money than any other song in his catalogue. Today it fulfills a similar function for Paul McCartney, whose MPL Communications owns the publishing rights, ensuring that, should everything else dry up, Sir Paul will still be reasonably comfortable when he's 64 ...er, 94. But across the Channel "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 essay includes material from Mark's book A Song For The Season, which can be yours in personally autographed print format direct from SteynOnline, or in the new expanded eBook edition, which you can be reading within minutes in Kindle, Nook or Kobo - from Barnes & Noble in the US, from Indigo-Chapters in Canada, and from Amazon outlets worldwide. You can read the stories behind more Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, and Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.

~For an alternative Sinatra Hot 100, the Pundette is also counting down her Frank hit parade, and she puts the stripped-down Royal Festival Hall version of "Autumn Leaves" at Number 78. Bob Belvedere over at The Camp Of The Saints is offering his own 100 hits and places the studio "Leaves" at Number 38. And it's all-autumn all the time over at the Evil Blogger Lady's pad.

SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline

1) IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR

2) THE SONG IS YOU

3) HOME ON THE RANGE

4) AFTER YOU'VE GONE

5) IT HAD TO BE YOU

6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)

7) LOVE'S BEEN GOOD TO ME

8) STARDUST

9) MY FUNNY VALENTINE

10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?

11) CHICAGO

12) THE CONTINENTAL

13) ALL OF ME

14) WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE

15) NIGHT AND DAY

16) I WON'T DANCE

17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN

18) SOUTH OF THE BORDER

19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)

20) ON THE ROAD TO MANDALAY

21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)

22) I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU

23) I'M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

24) OUR LOVE

25) ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL

26) I'LL NEVER SMILE AGAIN

27) FOOLS RUSH IN

28) MY ONE AND ONLY LOVE

29) EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME

30) I'LL BE SEEING YOU

31) THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT

32) I'LL BE AROUND

33) THE NEARNESS OF YOU

34) PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

35) BLUES IN THE NIGHT

36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY

37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)

38) SOMETHIN' STUPID

39) YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO YOUNG

40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)

41) SOLILOQUY

42) THE COFFEE SONG

43) I CONCENTRATE ON YOU

44) HOW ABOUT YOU?

45) THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

46) LUCK BE A LADY

47) WE'LL BE TOGETHER AGAIN

48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG

49) I HAVE DREAMED

50) WHY TRY TO CHANGE ME NOW?

51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING

52) YOUNG AT HEART

53) THE GAL THAT GOT AWAY

54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS

55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

56) LEARNIN' THE BLUES

57) THE TENDER TRAP

58) STARS FELL ON ALABAMA

59) WITCHCRAFT

60) EBB TIDE

61) COME FLY WITH ME

62) ANGEL EYES

63) JUST IN TIME

64) I COVER THE WATERFRONT

65) NICE 'N' EASY

66) OL' MACDONALD

67) FLY ME TO THE MOON