Face It, It’s Over

1/2/19

Yesterday I watched Love Me or Leave Me on TV. For some reason, I’d never seen it, which is odd, since it starred Jimmy Cagney and Doris Day—two of my favorites. It’s a fictionalized biopic about singer Ruth Etting. Etting was very popular in the 1920s and ’30s, when gangsters ran the music business, which is at the center of her story.

In real life, her husband/manager was a Chicago gangster who got her to the top of the business. In 1937 she divorced him and married a piano player. Shortly after her second marriage, her first husband shot her second husband in a jealous rage. This was a front-page scandal. Her new husband recovered, and the couple retired from the business.

Being that the movie was made in the 1950s, the seedier elements of the story were removed and silly stuff was added. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Cagney’s acting (although it’s a bit over the top) and Day’s incredibly beautiful singing. It seems that Day listened to Etting’s recordings in preparation for the role. That made me want to listen to Etting herself and see what all the fuss was about.

After listening to several of Etting’s big hits, I was underwhelmed to say the least. Oh, she had good pitch and diction, but she was stiff as a board. Not operatic, but non-swinging. She rarely took rhythmic liberties to make the lyrics sound conversational. Apparently, she never heard Louis Armstrong or his protégé, Bing Crosby. She wasn’t awful like Kate Smith, but let’s just say that she got out of the business just in time. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, Helen O’Connell and a host of other great female singers, including Doris Day, were just getting popular and about to bury her.

Here’s my question: why resurrect Ruth Etting 20 years later for this movie? Clearly, no one was listening to her records. My guess is that the Hollywood studio liked the gangster-beats-up-his-wife-and-shoots-her-boyfriend angle (in the movie he gets shot before he has a chance to marry her, and then she feels sorry for the creep and sings at his new nightclub while he cools his heels in prison for attempted murder. Hollywood, ugh!).

So this movie wasn’t made for the music, although if she wasn’t a famous singer back then, who would care about her? The funny thing is that even though Day listened to Etting’s records, she had the good sense to sing like Doris Day and not try to imitate the clearly inferior Etting.

In the late ’40s and ’50s, Hollywood was churning out biopics of musical stars of the Swing Era and before: The Jazz Singer (Al Jolson), The Fabulous Dorseys (Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), The Eddie Duchin Story, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, The Gene Krupa Story, and With a Song in My Heart (Jane Froman). With the exception of Goodman, Krupa, and the Dorseys who were still barely hanging on (but were no longer the pop stars they once had been), the others were either dead or long forgotten. I find it curious that Hollywood didn’t give us biopics of the four biggest names and innovators of American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. As long as they were fictionalizing lives, why not these lives? Years later we’d see Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker dragged through the mud.

In the 1950s the music business was changing. Adults were still listening to swing music, but now it was singers backed by big bands. Kids were listening to rock ‘n’ roll. Hipper kids were listening to Ray Charles. By the mid-’50s, Hollywood started churning out teen exploitation movies. With the exception of Blackboard Jungle, which pits Bix Beiderbecke’s records against Bill Haley and His Comets, most of these movies are third rate, unless you still get a thrill from seeing former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello doing The Twist in a bikini.

Yes, the ’50s and ’60s were a strange time. We had adult pop culture and teen pop culture co-existing. Before that, America all listened to the same pop music. Well, almost. Country, hillbilly and folk music was still popular outside the urban areas, but radio infiltrated even those unsophisticated sectors. We all went through the Depression and World War II together, but then when prosperity came, Madison Avenue sold us the generation gap.

Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Billie Holiday, and a few other black artists were able to cross over to white audiences, but the country was split along racial lines. Rhythm and Blues artists were making great strides in reaching teenagers, and by the 1960s they were starting to dominate, when along came the Beatles –The Great White Hope. Come to think of it, we’ve been spared a Beatles biopic. I guess Hollywood will wait another generation until everyone who was there is dead, and there are as many Beatles fans as there are Al Jolson devotees.

As I was thinking about all this, my son texted me to ask what I thought about his buddy being able to make a living off out-of-work former hip hop stars. I told him about my college roommate who had a few hit records in the 1970s and spent the next 20 years playing club dates (weddings, bar mitzvahs, fundraisers, etc.) and occasional nostalgia gigs. When, at last, he had to resort to selling insurance, he committed suicide. Pop culture has a short shelf life. When it’s over, it’s over.

Earl “Speedo” Carroll of the Cadillacs spent 25 years as the janitor at PS 87, where my kids went to elementary school. When I taught at Manhattan School of Music just up the street, I would bring one of my groups to PS 87 to perform for the kids. Earl would sing Star Dust or some another standard, and the kids would go wild. They loved Earl, and Earl loved them. When Earl died, my son told me that Earl was the soul of the school. There was no doubt about that. Earl was lucky. He found a fulfilling life after stardom. He was an unpretentious man, so he never felt cheated. Man, could he sing.

This being the holiday season, I’ve had a lot of time to watch movies on TV. I watched my favorite screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Grant was very unhappy making the movie and even offered to buy out his contract. Director Leo McCarey liked to have his actors improvise. Grant was not comfortable doing this, but McCarey was onto something. This is not only Grant’s best comedic performance, but it is in this role that he created the Cary Grant persona. I hope he thanked McCarey. I suspect they came to terms when three years later the two of them teamed up again with co-star Irene Dunne for another great screwball comedy, My Favorite Wife. This time McCarey got sick and wound up producing, leaving the directing to Garson Kanin. Is it my imagination, or was there an abnormal amount of top-notch talent in those days?

Irene Dunne started out as an opera singer and toured Showboat before being offered a movie contract. She then spent five years as the queen of the weepers until finally the studio let her do a comedy. She was nominated for Best Actress five times, but never won. How she lost out for Best Actress for The Awful Truth in 1937 to Luise Rainer is nothing short of highway robbery. In an interview she said she had lacked the “terrifying ambition” of some other actresses. “I drifted into acting and drifted out. Acting is not everything. Living is.”

I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve spent my life focused on my music. I’ve been fortunate to have had a couple of marriages and a bunch of love affairs along the way, and even more fortunate to have children and grandchildren. I’m nearing my 70^th birthday, and still have the passion to create new compositions, arrangements and shows. The thought of retiring and never standing in front of a band again scares me.

About 25 years ago, I was going through a rough patch in my personal life, and went to see a shrink. She asked me who I was. I told her that I was a musician. She said that she didn’t ask me what I do, but who I am. I was stunned. I didn’t know how to answer. She said that I must have other relationships in my life. It was then that I realized that I was an ex-husband, a father, a lover, a friend, a teacher, and a bunch of other things that I did a pretty good job at. Well, maybe not the ex-husband part, but I came to understand that although I love music, I can express love in other ways as well. Even still, I’m afraid to remove the music part of my life. I’ve been doing it for 65 years now. Hopefully, I’ll never have to face this decision. I don’t know that my heart is as big as Earl’s. You should have seen him with those kids. It was like he was each one’s grandfather. Now, that was a special human being.