[Dixielandjazz] Jimmy Van Heusen

[Robert Ringwald]

Jimmy Van Heusen Made a Career of Flying, Women, Partying and Music
by Bruce Fessier
Palm Springs Desert Sun, December 14, 2013
Jack Jones took umbrage with a New York Times' review of a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen
centennial celebration in October at the Lincoln Center in New York.
It had nothing to do with his performance. He was more upset at what the critic said
about the late Coachella Valley songwriters being feted.
"Much as I admire the output of the Cahn-Van Heusen team," wrote Stephen Holden,
"an entire evening of their songs made it clear that for all its craft and heart,
it is a cut below Porter, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, Berlin, Johnny Mercer
and their ilk. Many selections were movie songs that suited their purpose but weren't
written for the ages."
Cahn and Van Heusen wrote such Frank Sinatra classics as "All the Way," "September
of My Years" and "Come Fly With Me." They wrote the Dean Martin staple, "Ain't That
a Kick in the Head," which is often used in films to represent Las Vegas or the Rat
Pack era. Cahn and Van Heusen also had a hit with Jones' recording of "Call Me Irresponsible."
They won three Academy Awards and an Emmy (for the "Married, With Children" theme
song, "Love and Marriage"), but Jones recognizes them for giving Sinatra the material
that defined a generation.
"Frank spoke in these rhythms, so Jimmy and Sammy actually were writing for Frank's
idiosyncrasies," he said. "Frank would undoubtedly say, 'Hey, ain't that a kick in
the head.' And they go, 'Write that down.' So they were adapting their talent to
what Frank wanted.
"You go to New York and that's kind of pooh-poohed as Hollywood stuff. That (New
York Times review) bothered me because they were really one of the few talented writers
that could make a song out of anything. But they worked for Frank!"
Van Heusen was the favorite pop composer of both Sinatra and Bing Crosby. To Van
Heusen's great nephew and music publisher Brook Babcock, that and his output are
enough to rank Van Heusen among the elite Great American Songbook writers of all
time.
"It is interesting to me that out of the 800-plus songs Jimmy composed, 50 are considered
standards," Babcock said from his home in Nashville. "These songs dating from the
late '30s to the late '60s still are being played around the world. There are another
100 songs that still get attention."
Van Heusen, who named himself after a shirt label after being raised in Syracuse
as Chester Babcock, was Sinatra's best friend from the late 1930s in New York until
Van Heusen's death in Rancho Mirage in 1990. He's buried several feet from Sinatra
in Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City.
He not only wrote songs that defined the Swing Generation, he was the role model
for it. He was a Hollywood bachelor who would invite girls to "Come fly with me to
Palm Springs" in his own planes and helicopters.
Babcock said of his gravelly-voiced relative, whose manner was as smooth as his shaved
head, "Music was his passion along with flying, chasing women and drinking. He excelled
at all four."
Sinatra's role model
Van Heusen didn't marry until he was 56, two years after composing his last Hollywood
musical, "Star." In his wife, singer Bobbe Brox's 1999 obituary, Van Heusen was quoted
as having said, "I dig chicks, booze, music and Sinatra -- in that order."
So director Jim Burns, who is making a documentary about the songwriter, makes the
case that Van Heusen was the real architect of the post-World War II swing generation.
"Sinatra apparently said he would be Jimmy Van Heusen if he could only pass the physical,"
Burns said in a telephone interview. "Sammy Cahn once said the problem with Sinatra
is he thinks he's Van Heusen. So there's the fact that Van Heusen was actually living
out the music and the lifestyle, reportedly to a greater degree than Sinatra was."
Van Heusen arrived in Palm Springs from New York four years before Sinatra in 1940.
"He decided to get to Hollywood to start writing with Paramount by flying himself
there in this tiny Westcomb 8," Burns said. "The plane only had a range of 150 miles,
so you can imagine how many times he was landing in farmers' fields. It took him
like nine days to get there and the people at Paramount were wondering where he was.
They figured he'd get on a train and be here in three days.
"But when he landed to fuel up in Palm Springs, he stepped out of his plane and immediately
knew that was where he wanted to live because of the dry breezes, which were great
for the asthma he had had since he was a child. This was an incredible change for
him. From then on, he began telling Sinatra and everybody how great it was."
Van Heusen was already legendary in some New York circles. His first published song
was "Harlem Hospitality" for Cab Calloway's Cotton Club Revue in 1934. He began a
string of hits in 1938 with "It's the Dreamer in Me" for Jimmy Dorsey followed by
"Polka Dots and Moonbeams," "Imagination" and "Shake Down the Stars" by the Tommy
Dorsey Orchestra with Sinatra on vocals.
But his swinging lifestyle began even before coming to New York City.
Burns, who attended the same high school as Van Heusen, said it was a school legend
that Van Heusen was expelled at 16 for performing a bawdy tune.
"This was during the Prohibition era," he said. "He already had a radio show at one
of the major stations in Syracuse and he was playing piano at speakeasies and house
parties. He was asked to perform at a school assembly to demonstrate an early tape
recording device and he selected a song called 'My Canary Has Circles Under Its Eyes,'
which was a popular saloon song and a takeoff of 'Makin' Whoopee.' It's all about
his canary going out and getting drunk. So, in an audio interview I heard Jimmy do,
he said you never heard 2,000 kids laugh louder as he sang this. Then it was repeated
because it was recorded, so they laughed at the thing twice. The next day he was
called in by the principal and told he would have to leave permanently because of
that."
By the time he was writing for the big bands, he had developed a penchant for prostitutes.
He was soon living with one of New York's top madams, Polly Adler, who would "loan"
her girls to Van Heusen's musician friends.
When Van Heusen started at Paramount, he discovered the studio had contracts with
moral clauses. So he flew girls to the desert.
Swingin' star
Palm Springs resident George Jacobs, who was Sinatra's valet in the 1950s and '60s,
said Van Heusen used a song plugger who worked with a madam in the San Fernando Valley
to procure hookers. But Van Heusen didn't need madams to find women.
"Van Heusen had his own place in the hills above Palm Springs (in Yucca Valley) called
Rattlesnake Ranch, which was all sex, all the time," Jacobs wrote in his 2003 memoir,
"Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra." "He would have entire plane crews of stewardesses
when stewardesses were the big sex symbols, crashing there at once."
Jacobs, now 92 and living in a convalescent home, said Van Heusen actually helped
Sinatra get through a stormy marriage with Ava Gardner in which Sinatra tried to
commit suicide in Van Heusen's New York apartment.
"Van Heusen's mission was to never let his friend get so low again," Jacobs wrote,
"and to that end, he kept the booze and the broads flowing non-stop."
Burns' documentary, which doesn't have a release date, focuses primarily on Van Heusen's
music. But he says, "We say in the documentary, even by Hollywood standards, he was
quite the legendary bachelor."
Jacobs said Cahn was "horrified by Van Heusen's non-stop debauchery." But Cahn provided
the double-entendres that mirrored Sinatra's and Van Heusen's jet-set lives.
"It played in perfectly," said Burns. "He (Van Heusen) was writing music that expressed
his love of flight with 'Come Fly With Me' and all that 'Lighter Than Air' material
he did. Even his earlier music was sort of on a flying theme, like 'Swinging on a
Star.'
"In the '50s, the whole decade was the swinging Sinatra decade. It was all about
being this new Sinatra who was no longer just the sailor guy in these MGM musicals.
He has transformed himself into this very cosmopolitan playboy image."
Sinatra, Van Heusen and Cahn made such '50s and early '60s movies as "The Tender
Trap," "Some Came Running," "The Joker Is Wild" and "Ocean's Eleven." But, as busy
as he was, Van Heusen also ran his own piano lounge in the Desert Inn when it was
owned by William Randolph Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies.
Babcock said one of his favorite photos of his great-uncle was taken at that bar.
"The photo shows Sinatra, Jimmy Van Heusen and Lauren Bacall having a drink together
and (looking) very happy," he said. "On the table are napkins with Van Heusen piano
bar inscriptions."
Sinatra and Van Heusen's last movie together, "Robin and the 7 Hoods," also was the
last Rat Pack film. Sinatra replaced Rat Pack member Peter Lawford with Bing Crosby
after Lawford told Sinatra in 1962 that his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy,
was staying at Crosby's Palm Desert house instead of the compound Sinatra had been
building for Kennedy.
Van Heusen lived next door to Crosby and actually showed Crosby's house to the young
reporter Gloria Greer before Kennedy's bacchanal weekend that was said to have included
a tryst with Sinatra's friend, Marilyn Monroe. Greer said she heard Van Heusen tell
Lawford he couldn't stay at his home.
Van Heusen's lounge and Desert Fashion Plaza were gone by 1960. By the late '60s,
Sinatra was hanging out with another best pal, Jilly Rizzo, at Rizzo's Palm Springs
restaurant where Wang's in the Desert is now.
Van Heusen suffered from brain cancer his final years while living at The Springs
Country Club in Rancho Mirage. By then, artists such as Harry Connick Jr. and Michael
Feinstein were reviving interest in the Great American Songbook.
Van Heusen wasn't as acclaimed as Gershwin, Porter and Richard Rodgers. But Jones
said people didn't have to rediscover Van Heusen's music.
"They certainly sang all the songs that Sinatra sang," he said, "and those were his
songs."
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

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