by Ben Yagoda
As usual, Drake careered from the ridiculous to the sublime, this time drawing from his own life. He had been dating a showgirl named Edith Bein and fell deeply in love with her. But she began to be courted by “all these Wall Street types,” Drake told Will Friedwald in 2009. “I felt like I couldn’t compete, so I just withdrew from her life.” In the midst of his subsequent depression, he heard a haunting melody by Irene Higginbotham. “It hit me—smack!” he said in the Friedwald interview. “This is exactly what I felt when Edith left me. So in about 20 minutes I wrote the whole lyric to ‘Good Morning Heartache.’” A couple of months later, Billie Holiday made an immortal recording of the song, and it has since become a blues standard.
When I talked to Drake in his Great Neck, New York, home in 2010, sitting in on the conversation was his wife. She was none other than the former Edith Bein. The two had reunited in 1975, after their respective spouses had died.
• • •
Soon after Pearl Harbor, Jay Livingston was inducted into the Army, but Ray Evans was kept out of the service because of an old football injury. In ’43, from his post at Fort Ontario, New York, Jay was so surprised at hearing a Syracuse radio station play their song “Hello There”—a follow-up to “G’Bye Now” that hadn’t come close to matching its success—that he was inspired to put pen to paper. “These small stations play a lot of BMI music all day, and that explains where our performance royalties are coming from,” Livingston wrote his partner. “The last check wasn’t bad.” (He added, “You better drown your troubles in sex as long as you have that place to yourself.”)
Jay was out of the service by 1944. Songwriting prospects were sufficiently thin for the team that they took Ole Olsen up on an offer: If they would drive his car from Chicago to Los Angeles, they could stay at his house on the West Coast for a while. At first, amazingly and depressingly enough, L.A. felt like a reprise of their worst New York days, albeit with sunnier skies and some positive interactions with top Hollywood songwriters. Ray wrote in his diary about meeting the composer Burton Lane (“He was very nice”) and the veteran lyricist Al Dubin, who “told us many anecdotes of old timers and lore of Hollywood. When he first heard [Lorenz] Hart’s lyrics and it was the only time he felt discouraged—then Hart asks Mr. Dubin if they were okay.”
Not so encouraging was their interview with Nat Finston, the head of music at the most prestigious studio of all, MGM. First, Finston kept them waiting for an hour. “Almost went crazy sitting there,” Ray wrote that night in his diary. “But, finally he came and turned out to be good-natured but eccentric. He seemed to be surprised that we weren’t members of Ascap, if we were ‘amateurs,’ what were we looking for etc.” Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t get it at MGM.
Ultimately, however, a chain of events led inexorably (or so it seems in retrospect) to the success they’d been pursuing for so long. The medley went something like this:
After months of scrounging and living in a five-dollar-a-week room in the Hollywood Hills, Ray and Jay were hired by a low-rent movie studio, Producers Releasing Corporation, or PRC, to write songs for some low-rent pictures: Secrets of a Co-Ed; I Accuse My Parents; Crime, Inc.; Swing Hostess; and Why Girls Leave Home (“The violent, unvarnished truth about the scores of thousands of young girls who recklessly toss away home ties for a life of dangerous thrills!”). The star of a couple of the movies was the former Benny Goodman singer Martha Tilton, who . . .
Recorded for Johnny Mercer’s Capitol Records. Through Tilton (as Ray wrote in his diary), “we went to see Mercer. Surprise of surprises, we saw him and he was very enthusiastic about [the song] ‘Cat and Canary.’ It won’t mean anything except his getting to know us a little better. But, it sure buoyed us up to have something favorable on the horizon.” Mercer did in fact like “The Cat and the Canary” . . .
And ended up singing it, as well as some other Livingston and Evans tunes, on his radio show, The Johnny Mercer Chesterfield Music Shop—mentioning their names each time. A few months later . . .
Capitol called Jay and Ray asking if they had any songs for a new Betty Hutton record. The label took one, a swinging tune called “Stuff Like That There.” Billboard said of the disk, in characteristic lingo, “Here’s a cinch for jukes. It’s lady Hutton at her best. . . . It’s definitely big-time. Once it catches on, it should go like a house-a-fire.” The song reached number four on the charts. . . .
On the basis of the song and their past work, Livingston and Evans were finally elected to membership in ASCAP, the sign of having arrived as an establishment songwriter. Better than that, as ASCAP president Deems Taylor wrote to Jay, “the Writers’ Classification Committee at its meeting held on December 7th, 1945, placed you in Class 3. . . . Ordinarily, new members are started in Class 4, but the Committee felt that the value of your contribution to the Society warranted their placing you in a more advanced class.”
When Hutton was making a Paramount picture called The Stork Club, Mercer recommended Jay and Ray as songwriters. They auditioned for Louis Lipstone and Buddy DeSylva (a film producer as well as a Capitol Records co-owner), who took one of their songs, “A Square in the Social Circle.”
About two weeks later . . . And here Ray Evans picks up the story (he’s quoted in Gene Lees’s biography of Mercer, Portrait of Johnny):
We got a call from Louis Lipstone. He said, “I’d like to see you in my office. We need someone to write songs for the shorts and things like that. We can’t pay you very much, two hundred a week. But if you like it, it’s a nine-to-five job.” We said, “Of course!” He said, “Okay, we’ll give you a contract.” On our way out of his office, Jay said, “Is it two hundred each or two hundred for both of us?” It was two hundred each.
The boys placed songs in a couple of Paramount films, notably Bob Hope’s Monsieur Beaucaire. But their careers were not going “like a house-a-fire,” and they were painfully aware that their contract had an option, which Paramount could renew—or not—at its pleasure. Not long before the telltale date, the studio’s publicity department had the bright idea to create a song called “To Each His Own,” the title of one of its forthcoming movies. The song wouldn’t be in the film, which was already in the can. The hope was that it would get recorded, receive airplay, and thus provide free advertising for the picture. The flacks started at the top of the songwriting pecking order and went down the line. Everybody turned them down. Evans later recalled that “Victor Young, who had written the movie’s score, said, ‘I won’t write a song with that dumb title.’” But Ray and Jay, at the very bottom, couldn’t afford to say no.
Nearly seven decades after its creation, “To Each His Own” does not impress. Its melody is singsongy (though not entirely uncatchy), its lyrics sentimental and just this side of banal: “Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed / Or they’ll never know what love can do.” The year after its release, George Frazier wrote in Variety, “It was not, as one realizes in retrospect, an especially good record, but it presented a personality and, what is as important, it was part of the postwar trend toward sweeter music.” For whatever reason, it struck a nerve, especially in sweet singer and bandleader Eddy Howard’s version. (Howard recorded the tune on the same day as Ervin Drake’s “The Rickety Rickshaw Man.”) The song hit at a moment when, due to increasing competition among labels, cover versions of top tunes were rampant. In 1946, “To Each His Own” battled it out for preeminence with another bit of treacle, “The Gypsy,” which had two number-one versions, one by Dinah Shore and one by the Ink Spots, the latter topping the charts for a remarkable thirteen straight weeks. But Howard’s “Each” was number one for eight weeks, and versions by Freddy Martin and (again) the Ink Spots also reached the top spot; close to a dozen singers and sweet bands ended up recording the song. By the following March—according to a Los Angeles Daily News article Ray saved—“To Each His Own” had sold four million records and a million pieces of sheet music, and had earn
ed its writers $30,000. The article did not specify if that was $30,000 each or $30,000 for both of them.
Better yet was a brief item in the trades: “Jay Livingstone [sic] and Ray Evans, songwriters, options lifted, Paramount.”
“To Each His Own” would have a profound effect on Hollywood music. In the words of a 1946 Billboard headline, “TO EACH” CLICK MAY CUE MORE TITLE TUNES. Translation: All the studios started taking a page from Paramount’s book and commissioning songs to play under the credits of their films; if it had the same title as the picture, so much the better, but there was definitely no need for it to have anything to do with the picture. Ray and Jay became the go-to guys for this subgenre. Over the next five years they wrote title songs for the films Golden Earrings; Easy Come, Easy Go; The Big Clock; Beyond Glory; Copper Canyon; Song of Surrender; and When Worlds Collide (“When worlds collide and mountains tumble, I’ll stop loving you”). Ray later said that the only title song assignment they ever turned down was Desert Fury. One wonders why.
One day in 1948 at Paramount, a producer on a forthcoming Bob Hope film came to their office, ordered up a song, and, wonder of wonders, left the title up to them. In an interview years later, Ray remembered that the producer said, “Why don’t you write a song about Bob being a tenderfoot in the Wild West, way out of his element? And he wishes he were back East where life is civilized.” Out of that came “Buttons and Bows,” a small gem of a character song and another example—in the tradition of Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In,” Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and Frank Loesser’s “Jingle Jangle Jingle (I Got Spurs)”—of East Coast tenderfeet writing cowboy numbers. Dinah Shore got hold of the sheet music and made a record that shot to the top of the charts in September 1948 and stayed there for ten weeks. Sensing a potential waste of good publicity, Paramount speeded up the release of the Hope picture, The Paleface, and featured “Buttons and Bows” in every bit of advertising. Reviewing the movie in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote:
The historic thing about “The Paleface” is that in it is tucked away, as though it were a thing of no consequence, the sensational “Buttons and Bows.” This song, which, our seasoned sources tell us, is now the all-time all-time hit, is brushed off in one casual chorus by—of all people!—Mr. Hope. Twiddling a concertina and comically mouthing the words, Mr. Hope tosses off the number and indifferently leaves it lie. Nobody picks it up later. That’s all they originally thought of it when “The Paleface” was put together more than a year ago.
The great things in human progress—and in art—usually happen this way. “The Paleface” deserves primarily a marker as the birthplace of “Buttons and Bows.”
Three months later, “Buttons and Bows” earned Livingston and Evans the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Their jobs at Paramount were secure and their career was set.
• • •
However, Hollywood was not doing so well by other songwriters. As a 1947 Billboard article reported, “Only four studios today have a cleffer team apiece on a yearly contract basis as opposed to the golden era of movie musicals when some flicker factories boasted as many as 30 scribes per studio” (“cleffer,” “scribe” = songwriter; “flicker factory” = movie studio). A 1948 Associated Press article called Livingston and Evans “probably the only successful songwriters with steady jobs.”
The Billboard piece went on to explain that the main reason for the change was that studios were drastically cutting back on musicals. One “pic company exec” was quoted as saying that his company, which had once produced twenty musicals in a year, was now down to two or three. “While in the past,” the article explained, “movie makers could grind out a series of n.s.g.* pix held together by a couple of tunes, moviegoers today expect lavish, Technicolor productions with top-name thesps and top tunes. Hence, rather than produce a number of second-rate musicals, studios will concentrate . . . on a few first-class productions. Average cost of a Class musical is $2,500,000.”
Starting in the late forties, when Hollywood did make a “class musical,” less and less frequently did it contain original songs. Instead, it was usually either a vehicle for old songs (An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon) or a film version of a Broadway hit.
A 1947 Detroit News article assessing the Oscar-nominated songs termed them “comparatively second rate. . . . In past years it has been a mad scamper because Broadway had drawn all the top Tin Pan Alley boys into the fold. Now, with the gradual decline of musicals, they appear to be heading back to Broadway.” Appearances in this case were not deceiving. In 1943, Richard Rodgers had joined with a new lyricist partner, Oscar Hammerstein II, and the Broadway show they wrote together that year, Oklahoma!, was a monumental hit that reinvented the American musical. They followed that with the equally splendid Carousel (1945) and South Pacific (1949), which cumulatively staked Broadway’s renewed claim as the center of great American popular music. (All three were adapted by Hollywood.) Rodgers’s work with Hammerstein was just as good as that with Lorenz Hart (who died just months after the opening of Oklahoma!), but it was very different in flavor. Rodgers–Hart songs are jazz-inflected and New York to the core. A Rodgers and Hammerstein score generally breaks down into three categories:
Lyrical love songs, redolent more of operetta than nightclub, like “People Will Say We’re in Love,” “If I Loved You,” “Younger Than Springtime,” and “Some Enchanted Evening.”
Comic or character-based set pieces, like “I Cain’t Say No,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right outa My Hair.”
Ensemble or inspirational numbers. In the team’s early shows, these songs tended to be rousing, with a strong regional flavor, as in “Oklahoma!,” “This Was a Real Nice Clambake,” and “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” As time progressed, they became more overtly didactic or sentimental: “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” and the culmination in the following decade, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”
The other surviving titans of popular song, the words-and-music men Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, went back and forth between the coasts, doing superlative work on both of them. Each of them scored 1948 films—Porter’s The Pirate and Berlin’s Easter Parade—for the Arthur Freed Unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. MGM was the last holdout, continuing to produce “class” musicals until the stream finally trickled out with Gigi in 1958. The only other producer who made a significant number of original musicals in the fifties was Walt Disney, with such animated films as Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), and Lady and the Tramp (1955).
Berlin and Porter each wrote their greatest Broadway show in the late forties: Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me, Kate, respectively. (Berlin took over Annie from Jerome Kern, who died as he was about to begin work on the score.) The post-Oklahoma! 1940s musical was an impressive cultural object. The esteemed émigré composer Kurt Weill had made Broadway his home base, and high-art figures like Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, and Marc Blitzstein wrote shows during the decade. A new team, composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, had a brilliant debut in 1947 with Brigadoon. Broadway work offered the prospect of a level of creative control that would have been a pipe dream in Hollywood. So why wouldn’t the top movie songwriters decide to reverse the westward trip they made about a decade earlier? We have already seen that Arthur Schwartz came back to New York. So did Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer with St. Louis Woman (1946); Burton Lane and Yip Harburg with Finian’s Rainbow (1947); Jule Styne with High Button Shoes (1947; lyrics by Sammy Cahn) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949; lyrics by Leo Robin); and Frank Loesser with Where’s Charley? (1948).
Interviewed by Max Wilk for his 1973 book They’re Playing Our Song, Jule Styne recalled, “I began to hate California. . . . I saw fellows around me who were big when I came to California and in just a short span of three or four years they were getting less and less. Fellas lik
e Harry Warren. I saw them dismissing him.”
Styne got hold of a Dramatists Guild of America standard contract for Broadway writers and composers and was gobsmacked by the idea, so counter to the Hollywood ethos, “that what I write has to be played unless I decide to rewrite it.” After High Button Shoes, he said, he realized that the Hollywood pattern of writing a song for a particular performer in a particular picture was limiting. “It took me a long time to break away, but finally I said, ‘When Dick Rodgers writes a song, he doesn’t know who’s going to sing it yet. Somebody along the way, but it’s for everybody.’” Styne, along with Loesser and Rodgers and Hammerstein, would eventually become a producer as well as a writer of musicals.
In comparison with the frothy confections that predominated before the war, Broadway was producing a higher-quality product in which songs, script, and character were integrated. That had implications for music. Now hits would occasionally emerge, but generally speaking, songs that were tailored for the characters who sang them at a particular moment had no life outside the show. Some years later an aspiring lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, was talking to Styne about trying to find spots for songs that could become popular and still make sense in the larger piece. “Jule, to my surprise, said, ‘Forget it,’” Harnick recalled. “‘That day is past. We don’t write now hoping that they’ll be pop songs. Write for the show, write for the character and the situation.’”
