(January 30, 2005)
Harold Who?
Peter D. Kramer/The Journal News
Frank Sinatra sings his "I've Got the World on a String," written in 1932, in a current credit-card commercial.
As television reported the death of Johnny Carson, nearly every story included a clip of Bette Midler singing "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)." Arlen wrote it in 1943.
But for every hundred people who can sing Harold Arlen's music by heart, there are likely 99 people who don't know that he's responsible for "Over the Rainbow" or "The Man That Got Away" or "Come Rain or Come Shine."
That will change, if the organizers of the Harold Arlen Centennial have anything to say about it. For the next year, there will be concerts and CDs and tributes to Arlen - born Hyman Arluck on Feb. 15, 1905, the son of a Buffalo cantor - whose infectious melodies still demonstrate a musical mastery and range that put him right up there with Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.
Except when it comes to name recognition.
After Arlen's death in 1986, Irving Berlin wrote of him: "He wasn't as well known as some of us, but he was a better songwriter than most of us, and he will be missed by all of us."
Over the course of his career - from his first song, "Get Happy" with Ted Koehler in 1929, to "Promise Me Not To Love Me" with E.Y. "Yip" Harburg in 1976 - Arlen worked with dozens of collaborators . His son, Sam, says that may have kept him from becoming a household name.
"If he had only worked with one lyricist, in some ways maybe he'd be better known, because it would have been like a writing team, as opposed to the different people. But you wouldn't have had these great songs, because everybody puts in something special. And when you have Harburg and (Johnny) Mercer and (Ira) Gershwin and (Truman) Capote and all the different lyricists he worked with, great things came out of that."
Great things as diverse as "A Sleepin' Bee" for Diahann Carroll, "If I Only Had a Brain" for Ray Bolger and "The Man That Got Away" for Garland.
Changes in writing partners had less of an impact on Arlen's style than the variety of the shows he was working on, his son says.
"His style changed according to the project more so than the collaborator," Arlen says. "(They) were writing for a certain time period or type of show. So (he) had to adapt to that. Then it becomes that perfect melding of the lyric and the melody."
Singer Michael Feinstein says that Arlen's range can be attributed to his painstaking approach to music.
"One of the things that makes a song good is the perfect combination of lyric and music," Feinstein says. "Harold was certainly a very savvy guy who could recognize how words themselves change the character of a tune." For example, "The Man That Got Away," Feinstein says, began life as "I Won't Believe My Eyes," with a lyric by Johnny Mercer. It was sweeter at first:
I've seen the table
That held the Declaration
And Betty Grable
In my imagination,
But I have never seen the likes of you.
But in 1954, looking for a song for Judy Garland to sing in "A Star is Born," Arlen revisited the melody and Ira Gershwin wrote the lyric:
The road gets rougher,
It's lonelier and tougher.
With hope you burn up,
Tomorrow he may turn up.
"Suddenly," Feinstein says, "the tune takes on a grittiness and a feeling of lament that is not experienced in the other words."
Feinstein says that Arlen was adept at drawing on his life to put emotion into his songs.
Throughout his career, Arlen would successfully tap into black music, something young Harold was exposed to back in Buffalo. His father rented an apartment to a black family and encouraged his son to see other religions, other ways of life. Along with that came exposure to ragtime, jazz and the blues - which Arlen extrapolated into classic songs like "A Sleepin' Bee" and "Blues in the Night."
Sam Arlen, a saxophonist who has just released a CD of 13 favorite songs by his father - "Arlen Plays Arlen: A Timeless Tribute to Harold Arlen" (JoSam Records, $18.98) - says that if his father had had his choice, he would have been in front of the piano, not behind it. Harold Arlen wanted to sing.
"It wasn't in his mind to be a composer. All through his life, he continued to sing," Arlen says. (It was Harold Arlen who first recorded "Stormy Weather," although Ethel Waters introduced it on stage.) As a singer, he was more responsive to performers' needs, Arlen says, than other non-singing composers who would demand that the songs be sung as written.
"(He) always believed that you take a song and you give it a life of its own," Arlen says.
And Arlen wasn't above pitching in to help a singer out.
Jonathan Schwartz, the WNYC radio personality and music historian, tells the story of the 1954 original cast recording of Arlen's "House of Flowers." Diahann Carroll had a bad cold. Singing "I Never Has Seen Snow" was within her range, but the cold kept her from hitting the highest note at the song's end.
Arlen stepped into the recording booth and, Schwartz points out, it is Arlen's voice singing that one note.
Sam Arlen adds: "Diahann sang all the way up, Harold sang that one note, and Diahann sang all the way down."
Arlen left school at 16 and became a professional musician in and around Buffalo, where, playing with a band called The Buffalodians, he met a Boston dancer named Ray Bolger, who would later play the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." When Arlen moved to Manhattan in 1925, he and Bolger were roommates.
Arlen played, sang and arranged music for bands and even tried his hand at a solo career in vaudeville.
While sitting in for an ailing rehearsal pianist on the musical "Great Day," Arlen playfully developed a little melody. He was teamed up with lyricist Ted Koehler, and when that melody was released as "Get Happy" in 1929, they had a hit on their hands - and a job writing shows at Harlem's famed Cotton Club. From 1930 to '34, Arlen and Koehler banged out hit after hit - "Stormy Weather," "Ill Wind," "I Love a Parade" and "I've Got the World on a String."
Arlen was soon writing melodies for Broadway shows, although the songs were invariably better than the shows they were in, with two exceptions: "St. Louis Woman" (lyrics by Johnny Mercer) in 1946 and "Jamaica" (lyrics by Harburg) in 1957, which marked Lena Horne's Broadway debut and ran for 500 performances.
Off to see the wizard
Regardless of the success of these Broadway shows, Arlen was inducted into a loose fraternity of East Coast songwriters - Irving Berlin and George and Ira Gershwin among them - and gravitated to Hollywood.
When these songwriters got together at what was affectionately called "the Gershwin Salons," Schwartz says "it was inevitably a musical occasion" where they would share what they were working on.
Feinstein says that at one such gathering in 1938, at Ira Gershwin's home, Harburg and Arlen played "Over the Rainbow" for the assembled writers. Harburg had thought the ballad too highfalutin for a Kansas farmgirl to sing. Over the course of the conversation, Gershwin suggested Arlen play the melody more simply. After that change, Harburg was sold, though he admitted to having trouble finishing the lyric. Feinstein, Ira Gershwin's longtime assistant, says Gershwin thought about it and then threw in the last line: "If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh why, can't I?"
Now they had Dorothy's ballad and Garland recorded it. But when they went to the first screening, the song had been cut. The producers felt it slowed the movie down. Arlen and Harburg fought to get it back in. At the second screening, it still wasn't in. The writers fought again, this time joined by one of the producers. At the third screening, Arlen and Harburg got their way.
And "Over the Rainbow" got the Oscar.
Last June, it topped the American Film Institute's list of 100 best movie songs. ("As Time Goes By" from "Casablanca" was No. 2 and the title tune from "Singin' in the Rain" was No. 3.)
"The Wizard of Oz" succeeds, Jonathan Schwartz says, because the songs "are so well integrated into the story." He attributes this to the chemistry between Harburg and Arlen. Schwartz adds that while Arlen may not have been given his due early on, "increasingly through the years, he's been recognized as one of the top five or six composers of popular song."
Harold Arlen died on April 23, 1986, in his Manhattan apartment.
Sam Arlen said the goal of the centennial celebration is clear: "We want his name to come to the forefront. You recognize the songs, you pass it on to generations. Recognize that pen or pencil went to paper to create these songs and give credit to the composer."