Books: “Love Song”

I have always associated “September Song” with Jimmy Durante, who recorded it for an album in 1963. I like Durante’s version because it has a touch of melancholy that doesn’t come through with quite the same effect when the singer is Bing Crosby or Sammy Davis Jr.

Come to find out in Ethan Mordden’s book Love Song that the song was written by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson specifically for another entertainer who had no singing voice — namely, Walter Huston. Huston played Peter Stuyvesant in the 1938 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and he more or less insisted that he should have a solo in the show. Weill and Anderson accommodated him, devoting only a couple of hours to writing the song. The show was designed to criticize the New Deal by portraying Stuyvesant as corrupt and dictatorial in his rule over the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in the mid 17th century. The musical closed after about six months, although it was the basis for a later movie. The song didn’t attract too much attention until Walter Huston’s version of it was used in the 1950 movie September Affair. After that, it was recorded by many male and female vocalists, ranging in type from Ezio Pinza to Tex Ritter. Among the females who recorded it was Lotte Lenya, who was twice Kurt Weill’s wife and the love of his life — after his music.

KURT WEILL

The composer and the singer are the subjects of Mordden’s book, which is subtitled The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, although Mordden devotes at least as much attention to Weill’s sometime collaborator Bertolt Brecht as he does to Lenya. 

Pretty much everything in this book has been reported before, but Mordden brings to the story a knowledge of music and 20th century culture, and a sharp wit, that makes this a worthwhile profile of three fascinating figures — the trio who, among other things, brought the world The Threepenny Opera.

Weill was Jewish and totally absorbed in music; Lenya, who was born Karoline Blamauer, was flirty and unfettered. They separated and divorced once, but remarried and never really lost their mutual devotion. They became enamored of each other in Berlin during the hiatus between the two world wars, or during the pause in the one great war, depending on how you look at it.

This was the period of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, a part of German history perhaps not well known to Americans — certainly not to me. Mordden shares his own understanding of the uproarious time with its inept government, dead-on-arrival economy, and non-conformist arts scene, an odd recitative to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

LOTTE LENYA

It was in the Weimar incubator that Weill and Brecht hatched The Threepenny Opera, Brecht’s book lampooning the milieu in Berlin at that time.  The show appeared in 1928 and is regarded as a classic, but the nascent Nazi crowd thought it smelled of socialism. Eventually, Nazism drove Weill, Lenya, and Brecht out of Germany. Weill and Lenya went first to Paris and then to New York where the artistic and personal freedom they experienced for the first time had a trans-formative effect on their lives.

BERTOLT BRECHT

The couple hadn’t planned to stay in the United States, but they did stay, and both became American citizens. It may have been inevitable, at least for Weill, because he had long had an interest in using American themes in his compositions.

Weill was prolific and versatile; his work included  cantatas, orchestral pieces, chamber works, and film scores, but he is best remembered for what he wrote for the stage, including the musical plays Johnny Johnson; Street Scene – ostensibly an American opera; One Touch of Venus, which introduced the song “Speak Low”; and, of course,  Knickerbocker Holiday and The Threepenny Opera.

LOTTE LENYA

Lenya’s career as an actress and singer had its ups and downs. After Weill died in 1950, she became the central figure in a revival of his work. She recorded many of his songs. In 1952, she sang in Leonard Bernstein’s concert version of The Threepenny Opera at Brandeis University; that led to a New York production that ran for 2,706 performances. Lenya won a Tony Award for her performance, even though the show ran off Broadway.

In 1966, she created the role of Fraulein Schneider in the original Broadway production of Cabaret, believed to have been inspired by Weill’s work, and she had highly visible movie roles in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and From Russia with Love.

Brecht, with whom Weill worked on several projects, settled in East Berlin where, Mordden writes, he was a “stooge” for the Communist regime. “Oathed to the extermination of oppression,” Mordden writes, “Brecht allied himself with the most oppressive regime of the century, and he lived by recognizing no one’s rights but his own.’’

Brecht comes across as a character who many found magnetic but who was offensive in many respects, including his abusive treatment of actors and his substandard personal hygiene.

Where have you gone, Carmen Miranda?

The allusion to Carmen Miranda on this week’s episode of “Modern Family” got us to thinking about her for the first time in recent memory. Our first reaction was to wonder how many people in, say, their 40s or less who were watching that show would have known who Carmen Miranda was. When she was in her heyday, there was no need to ask; she was very popular — with good reason — and she was very successful.

Carmen Miranda was part of the good-natured entertainment milieu that appealed to mass audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. It was appropriate that her  last appearance was on a Jimmy Durante television show, because she and Durante epitomized the gentle, wholesome fare that fit the mood of many people in that era.

Carmen Miranda died in 1955, shortly after suffering a heart attack during a live broadcast of Durante’s show, but it’s an indication of her appeal that the writers on “Modern Family” felt secure in paying homage to her more than 55 years later with no need for an explanation.

Carmen Miranda was born in Portugal in 1909, but she grew up in Brazil. She began performing at an early age, although financial stresses on her family led her to a short-lived but profitable career as a milliner. She continued to pursue her musical career, though, and before she came to the United States in 1939, she was already established as a star on radio, recordings, and film. She ultimately made 14 Hollywood movies and at one point was the highest-paid woman in the industry.  She also made occasional appearances in the variety-show format that was a staple in early American television.

Carmen Miranda sang and danced either barefoot or in sandals, wearing wildly colorful costumes that included enormous head-dresses that often were composed of fruit – an image that is still emulated by drag peformers. She was the inspiration for Chiquita Banana, the cartoon character created by Dik Browne as the logo for a banana company. (Browne was the unseen “angel” who drew cartoons to illustrate the televised sermons of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and later created the popular comic strip Hagar the Horrible.)

Carmen Miranda was subject to some criticism in Brazil during her lifetime on the grounds that she had become too Americanized and was presenting an inaccurate image of Brazilian culture. She was so upset by this evaluation of her work that she stayed away from Brazil for many years. Now, however, she is memorialized by museums in both Brazil and Portugal. She is also the namesake of Carmen Miranda Square at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive, across from Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Her personal life was not happy; she had one unsuccessful marriage and, because she was a Catholic, would not divorce her husband after they separated. She kept up a hectic schedule and probably damaged her health with drugs, cigarettes, and tobacco.

If you’re old enough — as we are — to remember Carmen Miranda, there is no doubt in your mind about her legacy. When you think of her, you smile.

You can see and hear Carmen Miranda sing her iconic “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti” hat in THIS SCENE from the 1943 Busby Berkeley musical “The Gang’s All Here.”

Harold Lloyd, one more time

HAROLD LLOYD

An obscure public-access channel on our Comcast system showed “The Sin of Mr. Diddlebock” last night — an historic film in the sense that it was Harold Lloyd’s last.

Lloyd was such a genius at film comedy that I’m not sure anyone can be said to have surpassed him. This is not a good example of his work, and yet — because it’s Harold Lloyd — it’s worth watching anyway. Lloyd was coaxed out of retirement by Preston Sturgess, who wrote and directed this movie, but the two men fought bitterly throughout the production. In fact, there are two cuts of this film — the Lloyd version and the Sturgess version, the latter titled “Mad Wednesday.”

In what is probably the only instance of its kind in film history, Sturgess opens this 1947 sound film with a scene from Lloyd’s 1925 silent feature “The Freshman” in which the water boy on a college football team gets into the game and scores the last-minute winning touchdown. Lloyd charged Sturgess $50,000 for the use of that clip.

"HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK"

“The Sin of Mr. Diddlebock” ostensibly picks up the story of the same character — though with a different name — as he takes a job “at the bottom” of an advertising agency with the promise that he will get an opportunity to move up and express his bright ideas. Twenty years later, he is at the same job in the basement bookkeeping department when his boss hands him a watch and about $2,000 in savings and shows him the door. Out on the street, Diddlebock meets a panhandler and agrees to have a drink with him — the first drink of Diddlebock’s life. This is the occasion for a hilarious scene in which the bartender played by Edgar Kennedy — a wonderful comedian — mixes an original and potent concoction to make the maiden voyage memorable. You can watch that scene at THIS LINK.

Under the influence of the drink named in his honor, Diddlebock unwittingly stumbles through a series of adventures that end with him owning a horse-drawn cab complete with driver, and a penniless circus complete with 27 hungry lions.

Harold Diddlebock and his newfound friend.

The resolution comes complete with a dose of Lloyd’s trade-mark, nail-biting high-jinx on a ledge many stories above a city street.

Besides Kennedy, the cast includes Margaret Hamilton, Franklin Pangborn, and Rudy Vallee. The film — juvenile and clumsy at times — is not in the same class of the earlier work in which Lloyd was more prolific and more financially successful than Chaplin or Keaton. But Sturgess’s dialogue shows some of the old flair and Lloyd, at 54, is still able to pull off that boyish exuberance.

JIMMY DURANTE

There is a sequence of scenes in this movie in which Lloyd and other actors work closely with a lion. Some of these scenes are quite physical, and they reminded me of a story Jimmy Durante once told on the David Susskind TV show. Durante said he did a routine with an elephant in the Broadway production of Billy Rose’s “Jumbo,” which was later a movie in which Durante also appeared. In the stage show, Durante did a stunt in which he lay down on the stage while the elephant used its foot to crush a cinder block that was next to Durante’s head. According to Durante, Frank Buck — the big-game hunter — came backstage after one performance to meet the cast. He mentioned the scene with the elephant and told Durante, “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars. You can never trust an elephant.” Well, Lloyd and his colleagues trusted a lion a lot more than I would — I don’t care how well fed, sedated, trained, or elderly the animal might be.