Frank Sinatra sang show songs all his life - "Night And Day", "I Get A Kick Out Of You", "The Lady Is A Tramp", "The Song Is You", "My Funny Valentine"... But so did everybody. Until the mid-1960s Broadway was the biggest supplier of the most enduring standards ...and then gradually it all sputtered to a halt, and even hit shows didn't produce really popular songs. In recent decades, such popular music as the theatre has produced has come from Phantom Of The Opera (which Frank eschewed but Sammy Davis Jr didn't), Les Miz and the other Brit hits. So here is a rare popular song hit from the Broadway of the late 20th century, and we owe it to, of all people, Ingmar Bergman. In 1955, the Big Swede of art-house cinema made a film called Smiles Of A Summer Night, which over the years inspired a lot of other pieces, including Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. One further and musical result of the picture was that 18 years later Glynis Johns found herself on the stage of the Shubert Theatre in New York singing:
Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
You in mid-air
Send In The Clowns...
Sinatra was the first to record it, a few months after Miss Johns introduced it, on his post-retirement "comeback" LP, Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back. And a couple of years after that, Judy Collins made it a chart hit on both sides of the Atlantic and won the Grammy for Song of the Year. And a decade after that, Barbra Streisand made a memorable recording on a Number One album. And, between Lou Rawls and Kenny Rogers, Count Basie and Stan Kenton, Frida from Abba and Olivia Newton-John, the Tiger Lilies and Stars of the Lid, it's Stephen Sondheim's best-known song - as a composer, that is: as lyricist only, he co-wrote the hugely successful numbers from Gypsy and West Side Story, although only one number from those two scores was ever recorded by Sinatra (Gypsy's "All I Need Is The Girl" from his album with Duke Ellington). So this is Sondheim's big hit as a composer/lyricist. And we owe it to Ingmar Bergman.
The smile of a summer night is a tease, at least in Sweden, where in midsummer the sun never entirely goes down. In other words, night doesn't ever quite fall, which Bergman uses as an image of sexual frustration: you never quite close the deal. In adapting the film for the stage in 1973, Hugh Wheeler, Stephen Sondheim and their director Hal Prince retained the time and place - rural Sweden at the turn of the century - and the multiple intersecting romantic convolutions. Fredrik, a wealthy lawyer, has a new 18-year old wife, Anne, his marriage to whom remains unconsummated after a year. His boring son Henrik is also in love with his stepmother. Meanwhile, Fredrik's former mistress, the actress Desiree, is having an affair with a fanatically jealous soldier, Carl-Magnus. Desiree's mother is a once legendary grande horizontale. Etc.
Sondheim wrote the entire score in variations of three-quarter time, with the characters waltzing in and out of various plot complications. But "Send In The Clowns" was not part of that original unending schema. Instead, it was written, overnight, during rehearsals and for the oldest of rewrite reasons: they had a Second Act problem.
Hal Prince had cast in the role of Desiree the wonderful Glynis Johns. We all love Glynis, ever since Mary Poppins. She's pretty and charming and a wonderful light comedienne and was perfect for the role of the glamorous actress-mistress. But she doesn't have much in the way of a singing voice - or at least that's not the reason anyone hired her. And so Sondheim hadn't really given her much to do. In the big scene in Act Two between Desiree and Fredrik, it was the male lead who did all the talking, and the composer figured, well, if there's going to be a song, it'll be his. And he'd started to rough one out when Hal Prince said to him that he thought Miss Johns' character needed one. And Sondheim looked at the scene again and decided Prince was right: even though Fredrik's the one yakking, it's Desiree's reaction you're interested in. A great Broadway leading man, Len Cariou, had been cast as Fredrik, and in his one-man show he recounts very drolly, from the perspective of four decades, how he felt when Steve and Hal gave him the news that his big 11 o'clock number would now be her big 11 o'clock number.
So Sondheim composed something for what he calls Glynis Johns' "nice little silvery voice". "I wrote it for her voice," he said, "because she couldn't sustain notes. Wasn't that kind of singing voice. So I knew I had to write things in short phrases, and that led to questions." So he wrote the song as a series of four-syllable questions:
Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair..?Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve..?Don't you love farce..?
Isn't it queer..?
Irving Berlin wrote a famous song that was also a series of questions, questions that are answered by other questions. Which sounds like too clever a conceit for its own good. But it's not:
How much do I love you?
I'll tell you no lie.
How Deep Is The Ocean?
How high is the sky?
How many times a day do I think of you?
How many roses are sprinkled with dew?
The form doesn't seem tricksy because the basic premise of the song is so simple: How much do I love you? By contrast, for over 40 years, no one's been quite sure what exactly "Send In The Clowns" is about:
Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around
One who can't move
Where are the clowns?
Send In The Clowns...
Yes, but what does it mean? Well, in the show Desiree's an actress, so it could be a showbiz metaphor. She and Fredrik are obviously misalligned lovers: when he's hot, she's not, and vice-versa. It's like a circus trapeze act, with one half of the team wheeling through the air and the other lying flat on his back in the net. And in the circus, when something goes wrong, what do they do? They send in the clowns. Or maybe it's simpler than that: when love goes awry, it's like Cupid putting on a little red nose and giving you a squirt with the soda syphon. "The song could have been called 'Send In The Fools'," said Sondheim, years later. "I knew I was writing a song in which Desiree is saying, 'Aren't we foolish?' or 'Aren't we fools?' Well, a synonym for fools is clowns." And that's about as clear as he's ever been on the subject.
But gosh, that tune is beguiling. What's "Send In The Clowns" about? It's about three minutes long, and the music always sounds pretty. Sondheim is said (at least according to one rather dry conference on his work I attended) to favor "non-functional" harmony: in this song he doesn't go for chord changes but he does use harmony as a way of deepening the colors of the melody and drawing the ear to the progression of the tune. Why it became so uniquely popular for a Sondheim composition is something of a mystery: It's conventionally diatonic and, in contrast to the spiky lyric, almost a lullaby. And yet, without the words, it's also rather unvarying and dull.
Still, Sinatra must have liked it to add it to his "comeback" album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, an odd mix of unknown soft-rock-ish material scored by Gordon Jenkins. The disc-jockey Jonathan Schwartz is very snooty about Jenkins compared to Nelson Riddle, and it's true Jenkins doesn't have Riddle's harmonic textures. But he was a master storyteller: "(When I was seventeen) It Was A Very Good Year" is the famous example, but on that Blue Eyes Is Back set he did as compelling a job on "There Used To Be A Ballpark", Sinatra's elegy for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And the Sinatra-Jenkins "Lonely Town" more or less singlehandedly rescued from oblivion one of Leonard Bernstein's greatest songs after it had been cut from the film version of On The Town. The trouble on "Send In The Clowns" was that the master storyteller didn't have a clue what story he was supposed to be telling. "That arrangement of 'Send In The Clowns' was easy to play," Frank's trombonist Milt Bernhart told Frankologist Will Friedwald, "but it didn't do much for the song. It had some sort of a fanfare going on that just didn't do much, and I don't think Sinatra cared either. Eventually, Frank gave up on the arrangement." Gordon Jenkins, on the other hand, used to tell friends it was his all-time favorite of all the songs they'd done together, apparently impervious to the singer's abandonment of the chart.
I think Jenkins was in awe of the material. Not long before his death, he said that he considered "Send In The Clowns" "the best song in the last 25 years". Even if that were true, which it's not, it's not the best attitude with which to approach an arrangement. Jenkins' predisposition to stateliness and formality played up the most potentially perilous aspect of the song: its preciousness. Yet, that said, the album sold a ton of copies, and, for the first time on a Sondheim score, alerted singers to the possibility that his music could work as a stand-alone song. Two years later, Judy Collins recorded her version, and not only wound up with a Top 40 hit but also a Song of the Year Grammy - only the third showtune to win the award in its history (after "What Kind Of Fool Am I?" and "Hello, Dolly!"). Miss Collins has a pretty voice but, when she sings standards like "Bewitched" or "Funny Valentine", she seems to bland all the truth out of the number. Oddly enough, her "Send In The Clowns" made the liability a virtue: because it wasn't entirely clear what the truth of the song was, the fey folkie treatment left you with an impression of the thing as a pleasant blur. As Glynis Johns, who doesn't care for most of the pop versions, put it:
When it comes out of context of the play, it's acceptable when you have a lovely singer like Judy Collins doing it. She does it in the most acceptable way for me.
There's high praise: "acceptable". But Miss Johns is right: Judy Collins' singing is "lovely". It also has a simple directness, which (unlike the Gordon Jenkins arrangement) tones down that quality of Sondheim that most irritates non-fans: the way everything seems over-considered, and too pat, less an expression of love than an analysis of it. Needless to say, Barbra Streisand's recording a decade later embraced that particular aspect wholeheartedly, on a mostly Sondheim Broadway Album that plays like a Barbra-meets-Steve summit of self-congratulatory pretentiousness. For all that, Miss Streisand did coax a few extra lyrics out of the author. She told Sondheim she didn't get the emotional transition toward the end of the song, and he replied: "Well, it's because there is no emotional transition - there's a missing scene in there." As he explained, "In the show, something happens between the chorus and that reprise to give the character an entire change of attitude."
"I adored the melody of the bridge," said Streisand, reasonably enough: It's a beautiful broad legato contrast to those four-syllable questions in the main theme. So she decided that that's the part of the melody she wanted to repeat. "But I thought to myself, 'Do I dare ask him to write a new lyric for a song that was already standard?'" Well, amazingly enough, she did dare, and he obliged:
What a surprise!
Who could foresee?
I'd come to feel about you
What you felt about me
Why only now when I see
That you've drifted away
What a surprise
What a cliché...
As Streisand saw it, the song was already a standard. But was it? The pianist and composer Richard Rodney Bennett once made a very interesting point to me, more or less en passant. Sondheim may be the heir to Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hart and Gershwin and Kern and Jule Styne, but, unlike them, his songs are not really standards. A "standard" is a song that singers do as slow ballads and up-tempo swingers and bossa novas, as r'n'b and country and rock and jazz. And hardly anyone does that with Sondheim: 99 per cent of Sondheim recordings are done as an hommage to Sondheim, respecting the original arrangement of the song to a degree that would seem bizarrely restrictive with Cole Porter or Frank Loesser. Yet most of the overwrought cabaret darlings perform Sondheim identically: Send in the clones.
There is a significant exception to that rule, and it goes back to the very first pop recording by Sinatra. "The chart by Gordon Jenkins was crowded with the arranger's trademark weepy violins and romantic reeds and while it was expansive enough for Sinatra to move about in comfortably I have always felt it too busy," said Rod McKuen, the zillion-selling poet who wound up writing an entire album for Frank. "I'm not sure I'll ever confess to what I know about the epiphany that caused Sinatra to go into a studio three years later and record 'Send In The Clowns' a second time. It's quite a story and I'm sure FS wouldn't mind my sharing it but this is not the time or place."
Oh, well. What we do know is that in 1976 Frank went back in without Jenkins, without the orchestra and with only his longtime pianist Bill Miller. Sinatra actually puts a spoken intro on the song, which he never did in studio recordings. It's almost as if he's trying to clarify his own thinking on the number:
This is a song about a couple of adult people who have spent, oh, quite a long time together till one day one of them gets restless and decides to leave. Whether it's the man or woman who leaves isn't important. It's about a break-up.
Is it? In recent years, Sondheim has sounded kinda snottily condescending about Frank's view. "Somebody asked Sinatra what it was about," the composer recalled. "He said, 'Listen, you love a chick, she walks out, send in the clowns.' That was his explanation." But it works. He found a way into the song: Your chick splits. Pow! Right in the kisser. Egg all over your face. The yolk's on you. "This performance from February 5th 1976," said McKuen, "lays to waste his earlier version. It is one of the most stunning recordings this man, who cut thousands of sides in his seven plus decades as a recording artist, ever made." That's true. It's spare and raw and has a real punch. And, if Sondheim weren't such a snob, he'd realize that Sinatra is the first interpreter to really wring all the juice from those four-syllable questions he wrote to accommodate Glynis Johns' singing voice. It's not just that she couldn't sustain notes but that it's perverse in the extreme even to try to do so: Sinatra puts a real bite on the "ch" of "Isn't it rich?" and on "Don't you love farce?" tinges that last word with a palpable self-disgust. Unlike the Collins recording or the Jenkins arrangement, you feel there are real people feeling real pain. True, you can't really extend and sustain "rich", though I was once on a radio show with the cabaret singer Ann Hampton Callaway where she did a little musical joke previewing an album called Dylan Sings Sondheim and she gave it a jolly good try: "Eeeeesn't it reeeeeeech?"
"Steve Sondheim is, without doubt, a classy composer and lyricist," said Sinatra. "However, he could make me a lot happier if he'd write more songs for saloon singers like me." He had other fish to fry, and I think that will hurt his catalogue's prospects with posterity. It seems strange consciously to court unpopularity in a popular medium. In the satirical revue Forbidden Broadway a rueful bearded Sondheim figure trudges on with a lop-sided smile and sings "Send In The Crowds":
Though I keep writing my songs with my usual flair
After Act One
No-one is there...
The author Gerard Alessandrini had Sondheim's permission to parody the number, and why not? These are the jokes Sondheim makes about himself, wearing commercial unviability as a badge of honor. When Glynis Johns offered to make a single of "Send In The Clowns", Columbia Records scoffed, and then explained that this stuff was Cartier not Woolworth.
But it doesn't have to be. And, after that solo recording with Bill Miller, that's how Sinatra sang it almost to the end - just him and the sparest of accompaniments, usually from his longtime guitarist Tony Mottola. This song wiggled free of its straitjacket, and Sinatra's solo versions remind you of Jule Styne's great dictum: "Without the rendition, there is no song":
Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
And where are the clowns?
Quick, Send In The Clowns
Don't bother, they're here....
~For an alternative Frank Hot 100, the Pundette is also counting down her Sinatra hit parade, and is up to hit sound 11 - the concentrated blast of "I Concentrate On You". Bob Belvedere is celebrating Sinatra's Top Ten Albums, and at Number Four has what some Frank fans would consider an unusual choice, Gordon Jenkins and a set of fragrant waltzes from the mists of memory. The Evil Blogger Lady, meanwhile, celebrates Sinatra and a Jerome Kern masterpiece, "All The Things You Are".
~Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, while you can read the stories behind many other Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. 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
48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
49) I HAVE DREAMED
51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING
52) YOUNG AT HEART
54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING
57) THE TENDER TRAP
59) WITCHCRAFT
60) EBB TIDE
61) COME FLY WITH ME
62) ANGEL EYES
63) JUST IN TIME
65) NICE 'N' EASY
66) OL' MACDONALD
68) AUTUMN LEAVES
78) MOON LOVE
79) ME AND MY SHADOW
81) QUIET NIGHTS OF QUIET STARS
84) MY WAY
