All through the 1960s, as I had told Dinah, I stayed hard at work on my own songwriting. I had no end of melodies tumbling around in my head. The big objective I faced was to find the right lyricists who could come up with words that fit my notes. I had pretty good success in blending with Peggy Lee and Johnny Mercer as lyricists, but I needed more people who had a poetic touch with words. And over the years, I found a few guys with the right credentials.
Bill and Sue Comstock in their '52 Jag.
Bill Comstock was one of them, a man with whom I was to write dozens of songs. Bill came into the business as a singer. He made his career in different vocal groups, and since he had a good jazz sense, he ended up with the Four Freshmen at the beginning of the 1960s. The Freshmen had been around since the middle 1940s, a group of guys who came under a heavy Stan Kenton influence. Taking Kenton's example, the Freshmen did farout things, singing inventive harmony and arrangements. No other vocal group I knew of was trying anything so harmonically advanced in those early days, and the Freshmen became huge in popularity. They toured with Kenton, recorded for Capitol Records and played a lot of good venues across the country.
Bill Comstock joined the Freshmen when he replaced the original second tenor in 1960, and right around then, I began to run into Bill. All of these meetings happened in Vegas when I was playing in the main room of one of the hotels with Lena or some other singer, and the Freshmen were working the lounge in the same hotel. I found Bill to be an all-round smart guy, someone very good with words. We hit it off as friends, and pretty soon, we began writing songs together.
Early on, we wrote a song called Summer Has Gone. One of us, Bill or me or someone entirely different, thought of Doris Day as a singer who was suited to the song. But how did we get to Doris? The answer was a familiar one to me: we got to Doris by way of my friend Rosemary Edelman. Doris was managed by her husband Marty Melcher (the guy who was later found to have swindled Doris for millions of bucks), and Melcher had an assistant named Bobby Crystal who happened to be a friend of Rosemary's. Proceeding along that route, Summer Has Gone reached Doris. She loved the song, and a recording followed.
Then we tried another song on Doris. At the time, she was shooting a movie called Do Not Disturb. We heard that the movie had some Parisian scenes, so we wrote a Paris-type song we called Tout Va Bien. This time, for reasons Bill and I weren't aware of, our song got rejected. But someone at the Mills Music Publishing Company, probably a son of the company's founder, Irving Mills, suggested we take Tout Va Bien to Maurice Chevalier. We got together with Maurice when he was performing in a theatre in the round in Los Angeles. On stage at the time, he looked no more than fifty years old; in person, back in his dressing room, he looked about 150 years old. He may have been near the end of his long career, but he loved Tout Va Bien, and he eventually performed it on television in his last TV special in 1967.
When Bill and I were talking to Maurice in his dressng room on that only occasion we met him, he told us to send him more songs.
"And you know," he said with a twinkle, "they don't have to be songs about Paris."
Too bad, we never came up with more songs that might have suited Maurice, whether they were about Paris or not.
As things unfolded many years later when our children began to marry and have children of their own, the majority of the songs Bill and I wrote together marked occasions of family celebrations. They were for birthdays, anniversaries and weddings. It became a tradition for the two of us that just kind of evolved.
On my side of the family, we began in November 1990 with a song for Mac, Denise's oldest child and my first grandchild. Three years after that, we wrote one for Alex, Michelle's son, a boy who grew into a big rangy kid and a terrific baseball player. He was a third baseman with power in his bat, so impressive that Bill and I figured one day we might be writing a song celebrating Alex's first World Series.
We came up with songs for every large occasion in our families' lives. It was fun for us and pleasantly sentimental. And it had the additional benefit of letting my grandchildren learn a little about their grandfather, to understand that I wasn't just this old guy in the family but someone who had accomplished a few things over many years as a muscian and composer.
Spence Maxwell was a lyric guy I met through Percy Faith's son Peter who had a very active talent agency. Spence was a piece of work, a bit of a heavy drinker, but he could write witty lyrics, a guy who took a Johnny Appleseed approach to life. That quality showed through in a song he wrote before I met him. He did it with a composer named Howlett Smith, and it was titled Let's Go Where the Grass Is Greener. Nancy Wilson had a hit record with the song. I liked it, and I liked working with Spence. Looking back, I think I wrote some of my best songs with him.
There was one called Walk an Autumn Day With Me that really caught Spence's Johnny Appleseed persona. The Johnny Mann Singers-the Johnny Mann of Joey Bishop's TV show-recorded a very good version of the song. Then there was I Can Hear The Music, which both Peggy Lee and Sue Raney recorded. But the most exciting experience with songs that Spence and I wrote came on a Carmen McRae album, which included two of our songs.
The two were titled Boy, Do I Have a Surprise For You and My Very Own Person. Carmen picked them to record as part of an Atlantic album in the fall of 1967. I wrote the arrangements for two songs, and that put me in pretty fast company because the other arrangements for the album, which had eleven tunes altogether, were by Benny Carter, Oliver Nelson and Shorty Rogers. These guys represented the absolute cream of the west coast arrangers. They were top drawer, and so were the musicians in the big band that played the arrangements at the recording session.
Atlantic Records was owned by two smart and capable brothers of Turkish ancestry, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun. Nesuhi produccd the recordings with the arrangements by me and the others, and a couple of weeks before we went into the studio, I had a meeting with Nesuhi to discuss the musicians for the date. In picking them, I asked for the moon. I wanted Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on bass and everybody else who was the best on their instruments in L. A.
"Hey, wait," Nesuhi said, "this is getting to be a very expensive list of people you want to hire."
Then we heard a husky, commanding voice coming through the open door from the next room.
"Give him what he wants!" the voice said.
The voice was Carmen's.
So, in the studio on the recording days were Herb and Ray and a bunch of other heavyweights. Ted Nash was in the reed section, Frank Rosolino on trombone, Al Porcino and Jimmy Zito in the trumpet section, the whole works plus Norman Simmons, the very nice pianist who worked a lot with Carmen.
All of us arrangers took turns in the studio, each one of us getting a chance to conduct the band on our different numbers. This was routine stuff for guys like Benny, but for me, the experience was more rare. As it turned out, the band responded beautifully to my writing and conducting on My Very Own Person. When I stepped down from the podium to make way for Benny, he said to me, "You're a tough act to follow."
That remark was great for the ego, and so was something that happened years later to my arrangement for Carmen of the tune. Don Thompson is a great Canadian bass player, pianist, vibes player, composer and arranger whom I met and played with when I moved to Toronto. We became good friends, and Don told me that he taught himself how to write for a symphony orchestra by listening to the arrangement I wrote for Carmen's version of Boy, Do I Have a Surprise For You. This was amazing to me, but Don swore it was all true.
In 1968, when I was well launched in my songwriting period (which continues to this day), I took an unusual job that might have had the potential to lead to something much bigger. This job was all about the efforts of some well-heeled people in Hollywood to make a movie out of a much earlier Broadway musical called Bloomer Girl.
The show ran for 657 performances on Broadway in the mid-1940s. It told a story, set in the middle of the nineteenth century, about a company that championed the radical cause of bloomers over hoop skirts as acceptable wear for woman. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote the songs for the show, and even though none of the numbers became popular hits-who remembers I Got A Song, Never Was Born or When the Boys Come Home?-Arlen and Harburg were in their prime during this period, and the show had a lot to admire. Still, Bloomer Girl was never revived on Broadway and never made into a movie. Then, in '68, the Hollywood group with money and moxie made plans to get the show on to the screen. It was in this process that I came into the story.
The key step in the plan was to convince a top movie actress to sign on for the crucial female lead. To get that done, the guys behind the project invited five people, each of whom might agree to play the lead, to hear a presentation of the show's songs, each guest on a different night. The five presentations took place at the home of a Hollywood agent named Nat Goldstone who'd had a hand in the Broadway version of Bloomer Girl; Goldstone was so famous as an agent that Stephen Sondheim (words) and Jule Styne (music) wrote a song called Have an Egg Roll, Mr. Goldstone for their big hit show, Gypsy. And who made the presentations for Bloomer Girl as a movie in the Goldstone living room? A guy named Herbie Baker handled all the vocal parts, and I accompanied him on piano.
Herbie Baker had a long and interesting history in show business. His mother Belle Baker was a star in early Broadway shows, in radio and vaudeville. One of Herbie's earliest memories of his childhood in New York City-this would have probably been in 1926-was of his mother on the phone to Irving Berlin.
"Oh, Irving," she said on the phone, "I need a hit for my new show! Please, you must come over to the house and help me?"
The show was called Betsy, and its songs were written by the very young Rodgers and Hart. But, talented as those two young gentlemen were, none of their songs measured up to Belle Baker's idea of a hit (and she was probably right since none of the songs survive today). So Irving Berlin hurried over to the Baker home, and right away, as little Herbie Baker in his bed upstairs listened, Berlin wrote a song that Billie Baker loved, and she sang it in Betsy. The song became a hit and is still popular after all these years. The song Berlin wrote that day in the Baker apartment was Blue Skies.
When Herbie grew up, he had a busy and diverse career of his own. He was an especially clever writer. He wrote routines for Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis, he wrote two Elvis Presley movies, a TV show for Fred Astaire (Herbie won an Emmy for that) and special material for all kinds of entertainers including Frank Sinatra, John Denver, Perry Como and-this was where I met Herbie-Lena Horne.
In Nat Goldstone's living room, Herbie and I performed for each of the five invitees, all of them famous and talented. Three of them were really serious candidates for the role: Julie Andrews, Debbie Reynolds and Shirley MacLaine. Katherine Hepburn was also invited. She showed up in silk pajamas, carrying a skateboard. I couldn't believe anybody really wanted her for the lead. And the fifth person was Harry Belafonte who was called in, I believed, just in case the movie went in a different direction and featured a male performer in the main role.
The only tense moments in the presentations came at the very beginning of each of them. That was when Nat opened the performances with the words, "Darling (insert name), this role was just made for you!" Nat sometimes had memory problems, and all of us were terrified that he'd get a name wrong, that he'd say "Darling Debbie" when it was "Darling Julie" who was sitting there. But that didn't happen, thank goodness, and each night, after we were over the opening hump, we always sailed through the entire list of Arlen and Harburg songs.
At the end of this process, one of the five emerged as the future star of Bloomer Girl. This woman wanted to do the show on screen, and Nat Goldstone's group wanted her for the role. The winner was Shirley MacLaine. Great celebrations followed. Shirley got eight hundred thousand dollars in advance of the film. I got two thousands bucks, plus two bicycles for my daughters, all in payment for playing as Herbie's accompanist on the five pitch nights. A big dinner was thrown for all of us, and everybody was happy.
It happened that, at the very time we were making the pitches to the five candidates for the Bloomer Girl role, Barbra Streisand arrived in Hollywood for the first time. She was there to do a Bob Hope Special on NBC-TV. I was always getting calls in those days to work one-shot performances for different vocalists on important occasions. Usually it was the arrangers who phoned, people like Neal Hefti, Marty Paich and Don Costa who liked my work. In the case of Barbra Streisand, it was a contractor named Al Lapin who called me. Al was known among musicians for the way he screwed up his terms and his phrasing in conversations, a kind of Yogi Berra approach to the English language. I remember him speaking of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Brazilian bossa nova master who was coming to town. "Jim Beam doesn't have to worry," Al said. "I've got Lawrence Ohmada for him on guitar." Al meant Jobim and Laurendo Almeida. The odd thing is that Al went on to make a fortune as the owner of the House of Pancakes franchises. But he was still a contractor when he hired me to play piano for Barbra in rehearsals for the Hope show and on the show itself.
Everybody in Hollyood was talking about Barbra that week. Bob said in rehearsals, "This girl has got IT!" And, playing for her, I learned from close up just how much of a punch she really packed, how she projected an emotion that made you sit up and take notice.
Meanwhile, during the fuss over Barbra, during our celebrations over the future of Bloomer Girl, Yip Harburg, pulled the plug on the whole movie deal. As the guy who wrote the lyrics to the show's songs, he had the power to say whether the songs were used in the movie or not. He decided for no rational reason I ever heard that he was nixing the project. There would be no movie version of Bloomer Girl.
Yip was a great lyric writer, maybe the very best of them all. His words always meshed so perfectly with the music. They seemed logical and fresh, and above all, Yip could give the words a warmth that other lyricists were incapable of. That made Yip a great artist. But he could also be a trouble-making pain in the ass, and it was the trouble-making side of him that was on display in the Bloomer Girl fiasco. Yip said he was merely being professional in his obnoxious behaviour. But what was really happening was that he was showing himself to be a sore winner.
Nobody was happy in the aftermath of Yip's actions-except maybe Shirley MacLaine who got to keep her eight hundred thousand dollars. The rest of us were left with nothing except disappoinment. I had expected to get some work out of the movie. I had planned to suggest to the film's producers that Lennie Hayton would be a great choice to orchestrate the music, but I knew I would have a role in all of that. Maybe I would even have a chance to score the whole thing on my own. That would have been a terrific credit on my resume, but everything went out the window with Yip's decision.
So, as always, I got on with other work in my career. There were always other girl singers around for a pianist like me to accompany