Songwriters are the unknown soldiers of popular music. A few, like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, have won lasting fame, but more often than not they labor in the shadows. Unless a songwriter has a parallel career as a performer, as did Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, he does his job behind the scenes and never takes a bow. This was especially true of the songwriters of the 1930s and ’40s who worked in Hollywood. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart got star billing on Broadway, but no sooner did they cross the Rockies than they became well-paid craftsmen who did as they were told. As for those songwriters who specialized in writing for films, even the best of them were considered fungible by the tone-deaf moguls for whom they churned out three-minute masterpieces on company time. Everybody knows “Blues in the Night” and “Over the Rainbow,” but how many people can tell you who made those classic movie
songs hummable?
The answer, of course, is Harold Arlen, and among musicians and connoisseurs, he is universally regarded as one of the half-dozen greatest composers from the golden age of American popular song—the greatest, according to Irving Berlin, who said that “Harold’s best is the best.” George Gershwin, whose ego was more than usually well developed, called him “the most original of all of us.” Nor was that high opinion limited to songwriters of Arlen’s own generation: His songs are also admired by Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Donald Fagen (who mentions “an Arlen tune” in the lyrics of “Morph the Cat,” in which he catalogues the classy delights of Manhattan life). Yet Arlen was and is so little known outside the profession that when, in 1959, Moss Hart suggested to Edna Ferber that she approach Arlen about writing the score for a stage version of her novel Saratoga Trunk, she replied, “Who? What’s he done? What are his credits? Never heard of him.”
In one sense Arlen’s credits are lackluster. None of his Broadway shows has ever been successfully revived, and except for The Wizard of Oz, the films on which he worked were, for the most part, unmemorable. And while he was also a highly accomplished singer who recorded a fair number of his finest songs—no one ever sang “Ill Wind” better—the timbre of his plaintive, throaty tenor voice was not quite distinctive enough to bring him the kind of mass popularity that Carmichael and Mercer had during their salad days.
But . . . the songs! To catalogue them is to be reminded of what made the golden age of American popular song golden, and to be struck by how many of them were performed and recorded to indelible effect by the very best pop and jazz singers of the 20th century. Think, just for openers, of Fred Astaire’s “My Shining Hour,” Ray Charles’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” Nat Cole’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” Bing Crosby’s “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” Judy Garland’s “The Man That Got Away,” Lena Horne’s “Stormy Weather,” Peggy Lee’s “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road),” and Mel Tormé’s “When the Sun Comes Out.” Of such records is an era made.
Arlen and his songs have been written about intelligently and in exhaustive detail by Edward Jablonski, who knew him well and whose Harold Arlen: Rhythms, Rainbows, and Blues (1996) is a somewhat pedestrian but nonetheless solid account of his uncommonly sad life. Yet there is still room for a short, stylish book aimed at general audiences, and Walter Rimler’s The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen fills that bill as well as it could possibly be filled. The author, whose previous books include a Gershwin biography, steers clear of the grating solecisms with which popular books about music are too often crammed, and while he is inevitably a bit unspecific about musical matters, he offers pithy and readable accounts of Arlen’s personal and professional lives. If you want to know what Harold Arlen was all about, you’ll find it here.
Born Hyman Arluck in 1905, Arlen was the son of a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox cantor from Buffalo, and the course of his life was not greatly dissimilar to the plot of The Jazz Singer, save for the last cruel twist. He discovered jazz as a teenager, dropped out of high school to lead a band, wrote songs for Duke Ellington and arrangements for Fletcher Henderson, changed his name, and married a chorus girl named Anya Taranda who was neither Jewish nor—as it turned out—sane.
Arlen’s unhappy marriage was the defining fact of his offstage life. Not only did his parents find it impossible to accept that he had married a gentile, but Anya’s mood swings, which became so pronounced over time that she finally had to be institutionalized, were emotionally devastating. A devoted husband, Arlen was a quiet, gentle man who was unwilling to walk away from her—he seems never to have been romantically involved with any other woman—but found her protracted suffering all but impossible to bear. Fortunately for him, he was able to escape into his art, which was enriched both by his personal heartbreak and by his youthful immersion in jazz.
Arlen was one of the only major songwriters to start out as a working jazz musician, and it is the combination of blues-inflected melody with the Hebraic cantillation of his father’s synagogue singing that gave shape and definition to his composing language. He liked to write long, twisty, seemingly improvised tunes (he called them “tapeworms”) that broke free from the blocky symmetries of 32-bar-chorus song style, and even when those tunes were free of the piquant “blue” notes with which “Blues in the Night” and “Stormy Weather” are flavored, they drew upon a well of emotion that is deeper than that of any other popular songwriter of his generation. Sometimes Arlen’s tunes were as warm and hopeful as “Over the Rainbow,” and he was also capable of writing with the aria-like purity of “Last Night When We Were Young” and “My Shining Hour.” Just as often, though, he partook of the despair to which Bob Dylan referred when he spoke in Chronicles, his 2004 autobiography, of “the lonely intense world of Harold Arlen.”
Though Arlen collaborated to fine effect with a number of accomplished lyricists—most famously Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, and Ted Koehler—it was when he started working with Johnny Mercer in 1941 that he truly found himself as a composer. Not only was Mercer as much a product of jazz and the blues as Arlen, but he was himself an intensely romantic, emotionally unstable man, an alcoholic trapped in a loveless marriage who drank not to quell his demons but to unleash them. The two men bonded at once and promptly started churning out one hit after another: “Blues in the Night” and “This Time the Dream’s on Me” in 1941, “Hit the Road to Dreamland” and “That Old Black Magic” in 1942, “My Shining Hour” and “One for My Baby” in 1943, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” in 1944, “Out of This World” in 1945, “Come Rain or Come Shine” in 1946. They also wrote “I Wonder What Became of Me,” a shockingly black 1946 saloon song that made Stephen Sondheim’s list of “songs I wish I’d written (at least in part),” and though it never made the charts, it speaks eloquently of their shared sorrows: I can’t be gay, / For along the way / Something went astray, / And I can’t explain, / It’s the same champagne, / It’s a sight to see, / But I wonder what became of me.
For all their singular gifts, neither Arlen nor Mercer managed to write a first-rate Broadway musical, whether together or separately. Not only was Arlen hopelessly untheatrical—he had no plot sense whatsoever—but he was, like Mercer, a singer-songwriter avant la lettre who wrote songs of himself, not of others. Rimler puts it well when he observes, “[E]ven when Arlen and Mercer put a character’s name into a song, they didn’t venture outside themselves.” Hence they found it all but impossible to produce the plot-propelling, vividly characterized songs that are the stuff of musical comedy. This is why Arlen is obscure and Rodgers and Hammerstein celebrated, and now that we are separated from their shared heyday by the half-century-long rise and fall of rock ‘n’ roll, it is even less likely that he will ever become a household name. But I have no doubt whatsoever that the songs will last, and that every time a jilted lover listens to Frank Sinatra sing It’s quarter to three, / There’s no one in the place except you and me, he will pay silent tribute—knowingly or not—to the genius of Harold Arlen.
Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and critic-at-large of Commentary, is the biographer of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken. His first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, ran off Broadway in 2014 and is being produced this month by Chicago’s Court Theatre and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.
