Читать книгу They're Playing Our Song - Max Wilk - Страница 15

VINCENT YOUMANS’ career, his success on Broadway, even, alas, his life span flashed by at top speed. He was to die young, only forty-seven, in 1946. His creative years were to be equally brief. His first song was published in 1920, after he’d served a World War I hitch in the Navy. One of his biggest hits, “Hallelujah!,” was written while he wore Navy blue, but did not find a place in a Broadway show until 1927, when it electrified audiences at Hit the Deck. Youmans’ last published works were the songs he contributed to the film Flying Down to Rio in 1933, only thirteen years later.

But in that brief period young Youmans wrote music for ten other shows. He had his first production, Two Little Girls in Blue, in 1921, when he was a mere twenty-three. (His lyricist, Ira Gershwin, who was still writing as “Arthur Francis,” was twenty-four.)

These days audiences flock to No, No, Nanette, and Mr. Youmans is enjoying a justified renaissance. His other shows may be temporarily forgotten, but his music has a remarkable strength. You may not remember the book of Wildflower or Hit the Deck or Great Day, but the Youmans songs that enlivened them have lasted. Measured against the output of his contemporaries—say, the work of his good friend George Gershwin, or of Berlin and Kern and others who were writing in the 1920s—the volume of Youmans’ published catalogue is slender indeed. In the ASCAP Biographical Dictionary the list of his titles runs to a mere forty-odd. But assess him in terms of quality, and Youmans moves right up to front rank. It’s not only the excitement of his “Hallelujah!” and “Great Day” and “Drums in My Heart,” nor is it the score for Nanette or that deceptively gentle melodic strength he demonstrated in “Without a Song,” “Time on My Hands,” “More Than You Know,” and “Sometimes I’m Happy.” Rather, it is response from the listener. His songs are not only popular, they seem to be permanent. Examine the one film score he wrote, in 1933, for RKO—the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical, Flying Down to Rio. Despite the surrealistic madness of rows of chorus girls dancing thousands of feet above South America, clutching ropes on the wing of a huge flying boat, you cannot fault Youmans’ music. The picture may be a “camp” hoot today, but there’s absolutely nothing antiquated about Youmans’ title song, or “The Carioca,” or that lovely tango “Orchids in the Moonlight.”

If Youmans’ music had that strength, unfortunately he himself did not. Tuberculosis sapped his vitality; after 1932 the years he had left were filled with a downhill physical struggle. But he continued to write. When he died, he left behind a stack of unpublished manuscripts in a trunk.

Edward Eliscu, a trim, graying man who wrote the lyrics for the Great Day and Flying Down to Rio scores, can still call back memories of his talented friend.

“In the early days I took to hanging around Harms, the music publishers, picking up assignments on Broadway shows. At that time, the late ’20s, Harms was a marketplace. A Broadway producer would come in with a property—he would have a musical-comedy libretto and he’d raised the money to produce it. He’d come into Harms and say, ‘I need a composer and a lyricist to do the score for this show.’ And then Max Dreyfus, the boss, would assign the proper team or the proper individual.

“One of my fans was an agent named Dick LaMarr, who later became agent for Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Once my lyrics began to be talked about, he called me one day and said, in his excitable way, ‘Listen, kid, I’ve got a great thing for you! I want you to meet me at three at Vincent Youmans’ house!’

“This was a big surprise for me. I mean, I knew Youmans was a great composer; I knew all the things from Wildflower, Nanette, and Hit the Deck, and I had the greatest respect for his work. The possibility that I might work with him was just astounding.

“LaMarr brought me up there and introduced me. After a while I got to know Vincent very well. He was not a very warm person. Extremely talented, but he always seemed somewhat defensive. What that was due to, I don’t know … it was like a person who feels there’s something lacking in his background. You know, there are some people who’ve never been to college and they never get over it. It certainly wasn’t Youmans’ social position—his family were Youmans the hatters, and he wasn’t a poor boy. It was more an intellectual self-consciousness. One day he and I were having a discussion about something and he remarked that someone had been very vehement. And then I realized that he had read, but hadn’t spoken, or listened….

Vincent Youmans

“After a bit, that afternoon, Oscar Hammerstein came in. A large, craggy-faced man, a wonderful charger. He was working on two shows at the time, and he had committed himself to do this one—a third—with Youmans. It was to be called Rainbow [1928]. Apparently, he and Youmans had decided that if they could find an acceptable substitute writer for the lyrics, Oscar could relinquish that part of the job. So Oscar sat on the couch and I stood four feet away from him, without any music, singing and reciting my ‘repertoire.’

“Fortunately, Hammerstein was a very kind-hearted and sympathetic person, and he had confidence in the stuff I’d done, so he decided to engage me. It was a bonanza! Suddenly, I was to be the collaborator of Vincent Youmans, Oscar Hammerstein, and Laurence Stallings! On a big Broadway show—one that was going into rehearsal in three weeks! All the work had to be done instantly, so I picked up where Oscar had left off, and I worked very hard to get the score finished.

“The very first day of rehearsals, a man walked down the aisle and asked me if I were Edward Eliscu, and when I said yes, he presented me with a paper. A subpoena, or a restraining order, or whatever, served on me at the instigation of Max Dreyfus!

“It seems that sometime in the past, from some previous show I’d done at Harms, I owed an advance of $57; and because of that advance, which hadn’t been repaid, I was to be prevented from working on this show!

“Youmans said, ‘You never told me you were tied to Harms!’ I told him I wasn’t—but apparently my contract on that show had provided that I couldn’t work on any other show unless the advance was completely repaid.

“So I ran up to Harms instantly. I was kept waiting, as you can well imagine, and finally I was ushered into the august presence. Dreyfus was a rather small man. I pleaded with him. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is an opportunity for you. I haven’t been worth anything to you up till now. If Rainbow is any good, I’ll be worth that much more to you!¹ Let me do the show; I’ll give you back the $57!’

“Well, it wasn’t the $57. This was the crux of the matter: Youmans had been with Harms for eight years. Without notifying Max Dreyfus, without consulting him or saying anything, Youmans had decided that he was going to publish on his own, and when Rainbow came up, he made the condition that he was to be his own publisher. So I’d become the innocent victim of Dreyfus’ wrath, justifiable or not, and nothing could budge Dreyfus from that position! So far as publishable numbers were concerned, I was taken out of Rainbow. The rest of my things—openings, or endings, or ensemble numbers and choruses—they remained, but that was all.

“I guess I must have repaid Dreyfus the $57, because there was no problem when I went to work with Youmans on his next show, in 1929— Great Day.² And then, later, when I was out in California and he came out to do Flying Down to Rio, I worked on that with him.

“Youmans was a great composer, but the public doesn’t really know him because he never publicized himself. He never was a public party-figure, like so many other composers. Very often people sing songs, without ever knowing who was the author—although, actually, it’s the lyricist who suffers more from this anonymity. Everyone knows that Hoagy Carmichael wrote ‘Stardust,’ but I defy you to find one person out of twenty who knows that Mitchell Parrish wrote the lyric.

“Vincent always looked like a hayseed, if I can use that old-time expression. In the summer he wore a stiff straw hat; his clothes weren’t fashionable. He certainly looked anything but a Broadway songwriter; he didn’t talk like one, he didn’t act like one.

“But he loved people. He loved night life. At midnight his life would begin. Midnight—Ring Lardner, or Joe Kennedy long before he became an ambassador, people like that would troop into his apartment. Even when he worked, he liked to work at night, and he would keep poor little Max Steiner³ up all night working on orchestration. Max would be half blind, with his bad eyes and sheer exhaustion.

“Max had to be there because when Youmans composed, he would play the bass chords and whistle the melody. He was a very good and strong whistler. He’d had a good musical education—he’d gotten it in the church. His music had some kind of leaning to a Spanish strain; I don’t know where that came from. Just as Kern leaned toward the German and the Austrian, and Gershwin’s toward the black idiom, the Spanish was Youmans’.

“He wasn’t jazz-oriented, but he had tremendous vitality and drive in his music, and I think a melodic gift unequaled by anybody. People say that Kern had a great melodic gift; I think that’s so, but I think that Youmans was unequaled for a sustained line of melody. It’s like a theme that works out to a perfectly correct, and yet unexpected, conclusion.

“The score that he and Billy Rose and I wrote for Great Day was, I think, a magnificent one, but it wasn’t popular when it first came out. The show was a failure, and the songs didn’t get a proper play until after a long time. ‘More Than You Know’ became a hit only after Benny Goodman made a record and popularized it.

“Youmans was a person who could not be influenced. I’ve worked with composers who are willing to do anything you want, and it makes you nervous. They’re too accommodating, and you very often have to restrain them from ruining their own melodic line by making a smooth transition, say, merely to accommodate the odd syllable in your lyric. But Youmans changed his melodies only once, so far as I know. That was when we were doing Great Day out of town, with a wonderful singer named Marion Harris—she sang ‘More Than You Know.’ The ending of that song, as he had written it, was a nice, beautiful, original ending. But Marion Harris, being a pop singer of those times, wanted to end it with a very corny, wavering climax. When she did, it was so effective that Youmans let her keep it that way … and that was the only time I ever remember his doing that.

“When he first played me ‘Without a Song,’ he said, ‘Of course, I haven’t finished the verse.’ I said, ‘But this is complete in itself’—it’s a long song, I think it’s sixty-four bars—‘why do you need a verse?’ ‘No, gotta have a verse, gotta have a verse,’ he kept saying. But we never got around to it, and eventually we went into rehearsal, and he accepted ‘Without a Song’ without a verse. But otherwise, the way Vincent saw and heard his things, that was the way they had to be transcribed.

“His downfall, if you can call it that, was because he neglected his health. He had no self-discipline about his body. Stayed up all hours, drank, with total disregard of any rules of health.”

*

“I first came across Youmans in the early ’30s,” says Bernard Herrmann, the composer and conductor (Citizen Kane, Jane Eyre, Psycho). “Hans Spialek, the great arranger up at Harms, told me that Youmans was looking for someone to write some ballet music for Take a Chance. So I got to know Youmans. He had sort of sketched out the ballet, but I had to put it all together for him and orchestrate it. His way of working was altogether unique. He would sit by the hour at the piano and play a vamp—

Um ta da da, de-dah

Um ta da da, de-dah—

he’d play that for hours and hours. And then he’d start to whistle. When he liked what he’d whistled as a melody, he’d call for Dr. Albert Sirmay to come over. Sirmay was a great orchestrator who was connected with Harms, and old Sirmay would come and write down the whistling part. Youmans was a great intuitive composer; he had music in him, but not at his fingertips. He could only whistle, and play the vamp for himself.

“I once went with Youmans to a concert where they played Debussy’s Iberia, and he became very upset when he heard it. He said, ‘I hear music like that inside myself, but I can’t get it out.’ Perhaps that was one of the reasons he drank a lot. I think he was troubled by his own inadequacy all the time. He was Irish, and he was much taken by that melancholia of the Irish, as well as the good spirits.

“There was no pretense about him. Never went after publicity. When I knew him, he had only one mania—he loved driving beautiful cars. Cars like Isotta-Fraschinis, Duesenbergs. He had a big Stutz convertible, and this was in the midst of the Depression, too.

“Youmans may have been the most gifted of all the composers of his time, but he was the most inarticulate. His fast music has a flair that none of the others had, excepting maybe Gershwin. None of the others were capable of writing a tune like ‘Rise and Shine’ or ‘Flying Down to Rio’ or “Hallelujah!’—that was a great rhythmic gift. But Gershwin was a sophisticated musician. Look at the way he developed his talents with Porgy and Bess. Youmans couldn’t develop that way—he didn’t have the equipment that George had.”

“I was just a young struggling songwriter,” says Burton Lane (Finian’s Rainbow, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), “and I’d been sent out to California with Harold Adamson, who was then writing lyrics with me. Youmans was living at the Garden of Allah, writing a picture for RKO which turned out to be Flying Down to Rio. We’d met him in New York. In fact, we’d auditioned some songs for him—by then he had his own publishing company—so in California we saw Youmans socially on a couple of nights. I’d written a new tune, which I’d played for him, and he liked it very much.

“One night, at a Hollywood party, I was in one room and he was at the piano in another room, and suddenly I heard what sounded very familiar to me—except it was Youmans playing it! It’s my tune and he’s whistling it! I went into the room. People were gathered around the piano, and somebody said, ‘Jesus, doesn’t Youmans write gorgeous tunes? This is his new one!’

“Youmans finished playing it, and then he looked up, shook his head, and quietly said, ‘This is Burt’s tune.’

“Never mind how beautifully he played it—I can’t forget that gesture he made.”

From 1932 until his death in 1946, Youmans was absent from the Broadway scene. His songs were being played and sung, there were stage and film versions of No, No, Nanette, but he had withdrawn from active work. His health was bad, and progressively worsened. Unable to write for Broadway, Youmans kept very busy studying. In New Orleans he studied composition and counterpoint with Ferdinand Dunkley at the Loyola School of Music. While there, Youmans was introduced to a young writer, Ray Samuel, who remembers him well after a quarter of a century.

“He was a tired, thin little man then,” says Samuel, “very nervous, who somewhat resembled Fred Astaire or Hoagy Carmichael. He had been sweated out for his alcoholism, and was only drinking ale. That was all he’d take, wherever we went.

“Perhaps earlier he wasn’t a great piano player, but Professor Guy Bernard, who was also at Loyola with Dunkley, says he saw and heard Youmans play as well as anybody. He remembers vividly that when Youmans came and played his songs for the other students, he played ‘The Carioca’ and at one point he would use his entire forearm for the bass accompaniment. Bernard said it was great!

“Youmans used to drop into my little office at the Hotel Roosevelt, where I worked, and when I’d get to a pleasant stopping place, we would get into my convertible and go out for long drives around New Orleans. He liked the lake front, and we’d get out there and sit on the sea wall and talk. I wish I could remember all or even some of the interesting things he said back then, but the one that stands out in my recall is his statement that he had lots of beautiful music to write but didn’t feel the world was ready for it now. ‘Now,’ of course, was the very late ’30s, when we knew that the war in Europe was imminent.

“Incidentally, the man he was studying with, Professor Dunkley, was a giant in the music world down here. Indestructible. On his eightieth birthday he gave an organ recital in Temple Sinai.

“Youmans made several trips down here to study with Dunkley. The last one was during the war. One night I arranged with the band that was appearing in the Blue Room at the Roosevelt to do an evening of Youmans tunes. It was advertised in the papers, and people crowded in to hear all those songs, and it was a big success. Youmans sat in a corner, drinking ale, occasionally smiling at what he heard. But he wouldn’t be introduced to the crowd. HE stayed off in the shadows and listened.”