Bobby Short: Mad About Noël Coward
GUEST POST: Leon Nock
Jazz Journal’s Leon Nock reviews 1972’s Bobby Short Is Mad About Noël Coward and finds some unusual song choices…
Were I asked to name the one male performer who epitomised cabaret I would, without thinking, say Noel Coward, recalling his seasons at the Cafe de Paris and at Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn in Las Vegas. But should I then start to think about it my mind would be overwhelmed with images of Bobby Short, seated at the piano in the Cafe Carlyle, flanked by the two other members of his trio, Beverly Peer, bass, and Richard Sheridan, drums, barnstorming his way through one of his many 'signature' songs, Sand In My Shoes, maybe, or And Her Mother Came, Too, whilst the capacity crowd bask in his showmanship. Perhaps because I have myself basked in that showmanship on display for 12 weeks every Spring and Autumn at the Cafe Carlyle - the elegant supper club located in the lower depths of the Carlyle Hotel at 79th and Madison - a good dozen times, but never, alas, even a standee at the Cafe de Paris or the Desert Inn I am obliged to score it an honourable tie.
Like several people we think of as sophisticated - Coward himself (Teddington), Fred Astaire (Omaha), Mabel Mercer (Buton-on-Trent) Jack Buchanan (Helensburgh), Rex Harrison (Liverpool) - he was born neither in Mayfair nor Manhattan but instead - on November 24, 1924 - in Danville, Illinois, which, if not exactly the 'wide part in the road' as vaudeville comics described small towns, was neither a bustling Metropolis yet maybe they put something in the water there for apart from Gene Hackman (roughly five years their junior) two of Short's classmates were Donald O'Connor and Dick Van Dyke.
The ninth of ten children, and with only a grade school education he taught himself to play the piano - though never to read music - 'gifted' he was, singing and dancing in the saloons of Danville. At age eleven and with the consent and blessing of his mother he moved to Chicago and did the same thing there in what was now the midst of the Great Depression. After several years on the local 'wheel' i.e. the mid-West vaudeville circuit that spanned Milwaukee, Kansas City and St Louis, he fetched up in Los Angeles and secured a three year residency at the Cafe Gala, constantly expanding his repertoire of 'forgotten' and/or 'neglected' songs by A-list writers. In 1955 Atlantic released his first album entitled simply Bobby Short; he went on to record 23 solo albums. several of which were 'doubles', all but six on the Atlantic label.
By now he was more or less settled in New York and in 1968 the Cafe Carlyle offered him a two-week engagement standing in for the resident performer George Freyer who was on vacation. He was such a success that he stayed for thirty-five years, doing two 12-week seasons annually, one in Spring and one in Autumn.
In 1971 Atlantic issued his 10th album, a true delight, Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, it was also his first 'double' album, featuring 22 songs by Porter of which 15 were lesser-known and one was unpublished. Short accompanied himself on piano throughout aided and abetted by Beverly Peer (bass) and Richard Sheridan (drums), the album was so successful that Atlantic followed it the next year with another double, Bobby Short Is Mad About Noel Coward, and it's that album that will occupy the rest of this piece.
On this occasion Short prevailed on fellow pianist and composer (Chicago, Illinois) William Roy to play piano on 5 of the 23 tracks. with, of course, Peer and Sheridan, accompanying himself on the remaining 20.
The 23 songs were divided fairly evenly with 10 from Revues, 10 from Plays, 2 stand alone songs and one with a Coward lyric to a song from the Broadway show The New Yorkers with words and music by Cole Porter and, with permission from Porter, a new lyric by Coward.
The album gets off to a rousing start with The Younger Generation from the 1932 Revue Words and Music, which, after trying out in Manchester, opened at the Aldwych (nine years later it was renamed Set To Music when it opened on Broadway directed by Cowards' then lover, John C. Wilson and starring Beatrice Lillie). Alas, I had still to make my own debut on the world stage and so the closest I got was a pristine copy of the Aldwych programme, acquired some sixty years later. Amongs the cast were Ivy St Helier - still warmly remembered for her performing of the exquisite If Love Were All in Bittersweet some three years earlier, and John Mills, still primarily a song and dance man. Coward had encountered Mills in Singapore, when he, Coward, was on a world cruise and Mills was appearing in a touring production of R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End. On a whim Coward learned the role of Stanhope and played it for three performances (Sherriff had 'borrowed' the title of his play from Shakespeare's O Mistress Mine, the song sung by Feste, the Clown in Twelfth Night, 'Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journeys end in lovers' meeting'. Roughly a decade later Coward quoted from the same source for the title of one of his best-known plays, 'What is love, 'tis not hereafter, Present mirth hath present laughter' John Mills went on to appear in several Coward productions on both stage (Cavalcade, Cochran's 1931 Revue) and screen (In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed) and also wrote the Foreword for one of the many books about Coward.
Next comes the first of two medleys on the album, two selections, You Were There and Then, from Shadow Play, one of the nine one-acters - there were originally ten but Star Chamber was dropped after one performance - that Coward wrote in 1936 as vehicles for himself and Gertrude Lawrence under the collective title Tonight At 8.30. Like most Coward buffs who weren't alive at the time I had seen only four or five in revivals over the years but in 2014 the English Stage Company toured all nine, performing them all in a single day and I drove down to Southampton, the nearest venue to me, for a magical day in the theatre. You Were There is sometimes performed as a stand-alone song away from the play but I personally have never heard Then other than in context which makes this rendition doubly valuable.
Coward made several attempts to establish his long-time lover Graham Payne as a leading performer, one of which was to write a lead role for him in his post-war Revue Sigh No More, which featured Payne singing the lovely song Matelot about the love that two women had for the young French sailor Jean-Louis Dominic Pierre Bouchon, it ramains one of Coward's finest songs and Mr. Short does it full-throated justice. A Room With A View is one of Coward's best known and best loved 'early' songs, emanating, in fact, from the Revue This Year Of Grace, where it was, of course, performed as a duet.I've always been partial to the first two 'A' sections of the second verse with its deft rhymes;
A room with a view and you
With no one to give advice
That seems a paradise
Few
Could fail to choose
With fingers entwined we'll find
Relief from the preachers who
Always beseech us to
Mind
Our Ps and Qs.
Of course the rhyming in A Room With A View is as nothing compared to Nina, the next selection and, like Matelot, also from Sigh No More (which is itself a great number if anyone asks you) With Nina it's difficult to resist quoting the whole lyric although, of course, that is a non-starter; whenever I hear it I think of the chain of lunch counters in Manhattan called Chock Full O'Nuts because Nina is chock full of rhymes. Although not a coffee drinker myself I did once visit a Chock Full 'O Nuts outlet because after he retired from the game in 1961, the great Jackie Robinson - the first black man to play Major League baseball and eventually captain of what became known as the 'Jackie Robinson Dodgers' - became vice president of the company and director of personnel. I had no hope of seeing him, of course, but I was an admirer and a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I'll content myself with just a single quotation from Nina which should give the flavour:
She said 'I hate to be pedantic
But it drives me nearly frantic
When I see that unromantic
Sycophantic lot of sluts
Forever wriggling their guts
It drives me absolutely nuts'.
There's only one selection from Cochran's 1931 Revue and as if to compensate Short throw in the seldom-heard but well worth hearing verse to Any Little Fish. There's one more selection from This Year Of Grace and World Weary does make one wonder where Coward got his ideas from back in 1928. We Were Dancing is the title of one of the nine one-act plays presented under the title Tonight At 8,30. It's also a beguiling song that tends to be neglected and it's a pleasure to hear it once again. I confess to harbouring a soft spot for Never Again which was heard in the US version of Words and Music (Set to Music) in 1939 and surfaced again in Sigh No More. Short does right by it. Short and Cole Porter were great friends so much so that when Porter was writing what turned out to be his last Broadway show, Silk Stockings 1955, and had trouble with one of the lyrics (Siberia) he asked Noel, who duly obliged, for help. Interestingly both friends wrote songs with the same title, Josephine, and about the same person, Marie-Josephe-Rose de La Pagerie, the Martinique-born woman who went on to marry Napoleon Bonaparte. Ironically Porter wrote his version as part of his score for Silk Stockings, for which he turned to Coward for help with another lyric, whilst Coward's take on the young man who 'balled up the Russian campaign' yet 'wasn't above making passionate love, in a coarse, rather Corsican way' came from his 1950 show Ace Of Clubs, yet another abortive attempt to launch Graham Payne as a leading man.
The average number of tracks on a single vinyl long-playing album was around fifteen so it's safe to say that track eleven here - out of twenty numbered tracks but 23 songs - is near enough the end of what would be Side 1. The track in question, If Love Were All, is from the operetta Bittersweet and although clearly meant to be performed by a female - Ivy St Helier introduced it in the show - Short makes no concession to this and carries it off perfectly.
Although he was active in Coward's breakthrough year, 1924 - indeed his first full-length Broadway shoe, See America First, had opened (and closed) in 1916, leaving only one gem, I've A Shooting-Box In Scotland, behind - Cole Porter was far from being established and his own breakthrough occurred just as the twenties segued into the thirties and he had three shows, Paris, 50 Million Frenchmen and The New Yorkers following themselves on the Great White Way In the last of the three, in 1930, there was a number about jaded Manhattanites yearning for a simpler, rural lifestyle. With hindsight it's tempting to spot its origins in Coward's own World Weary. Whatever, Porter gave Coward permission to write alternate lyrics albeit on the sme theme and Coward's take on Porter's Let's Fly Away is track 12 on the album. Somethng To Do With Spring, which followa, is the final selection from what, in my opinion, was Cowards' finest Revue, Words And Music. Someday I'll Find You, on the other hand, is the only song in the ultimate and consistently revived comedy Private Lives, which is probably being performed somewhere even as we speak. Imagine The Duchesses' Feelings belongs in a third category; songs that were written for neither Revue, full-scale musical, nor for inclusion in otherwise non-musical plays, other examples are London Pride, Can You Please Oblige Us With A Bren-Gun, Don't Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington.
Next up is the oldest song on the album, dating as it does, from the 1925 Revue, On With The Dance - though Coward actually wrote the songs whilst appearing in The Vortex, the previous year - Poor Little Rich Girl can expect a telegram from the Queen in something like 36 months. The second and last medley on the album is something of a charmer; Where Are The Songs We Sung is from the 1938 show Operette, whch, despite a disappointingle short run, did leave behind The Stately Homes Of England, not to mention Where Are The Songs We Sung, which isn't performed half as much as I'd like and I shall always be grateful to Bobby Short for including it here. With Operette Coward was sttempting to replicate his towering success Bittersweet, another nostalgic sojourn into a romantic past and I have always had a soft spot for the duet Dear Little Cafe, in which the doomed lovers aspire to 'thrive on the vain and replendent, and contrive to remain independent' very much as young marrieds of the day (1929) aspired to a little semi in Cleethorpes with an Austin 7 on the drive. Bliss. Hearts And Flowers is from Family Album, one of the nine one-Acter from Tonight At 8.30 and arguably the Master's least-revived production so perhaps we should make the most of this rare sighting.
Wait A Bit, Joe is the final selection from Sigh No More. I have always found it rather appealing and am at a loss to understand why it isn't done more frequently. The penultimate number, I Travel Alone, is yet another stand-alone song written, apparently just for the hell of it and rarely performed other than by Coward himself. Readers slightly longer in the tooth may well cherish memories of the hey day of the palais de dance, once ubiquitous throughout the UK, when every evening ended with the 'last waltz', I'll See You Again the evergreen number from Bittersweet and fitting close to a wonderful album in which Bobby Short reminds us of the awesome breadth and scope of just one facet of a multi-talented entertainer.
