[Dixielandjazz] Terry Teachout's column about Johnny Mercer--Arts Journal

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML & Musicians and Jazzfans

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

This from Terry Teachout’s column in today’s Arts Journal.  Teachout
discusses Johnny Mercer’s lyrics.

 

Permit me one small anecdote.  I’ve  long been an admirer of Johnny Mercer.
Played harmonica over his grave in Savannah.  Relished  Philip Furia’s
biography of Mercer.  A few years ago Monica Mancini was guest vocalist for
pops concert for Pensacola Symphony.  She , of course, featured songs that
her father Henry wrote with Mercer as lyricist.  Curious, I asked her about
her impressions of  Mr. Mercer.  Her reply: “ I was a teenager then and he
was just one of my father’s friends.  I never paid much attention.”

 

The late Jean Bach told me the story about the long-running romance between
Judy Garland and Mercer before I read it in Furia’s book.

 

The column is long—but worth it!  Enjoy!

 

 

  _____  


Too Marvelous for Words 


11.01.04 - 12:00 AM |by
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/pods-author/terry-teachout> Terry
Teachout

*
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/> Share
on print Print

Do the lyrics of popular songs qualify as poetry?

In 2000, the Library of America published American Poetry: The Twentieth
Century, a two-volume anthology in which Cole Porter's “I Get a Kick out of
You,” Lorenz Hart's “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and Johnny
Mercer's “Blues in the Night” were printed side by side with such classics
of American verse as T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” and Robert Frost's
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Though the critical response was
mixed, the editors' decision reflected a growing consensus that at least
some of the work of the lyricists of the pre-rock era is worthy of serious
consideration as a species of poetry.

The case against treating song lyrics as poetry, however, is both easily
made and generally convincing. To begin with, most golden-age song lyrics
were written for preexisting melodies, and thus have no independent metrical
life. In addition, many of the best-known pop songs were originally composed
for Broadway musicals, meaning that they first had to fulfill utilitarian
theatrical considerations before seeking to make any kind of purely
expressive statement. Similarly, not only are the vast majority of
lyrics—and virtually all of the well-known ones—about romantic love, but
they are specifically tailored to appeal to a mass audience.

Above all, lyrics are written to be sung, not read. To consider them
separately from the tunes to which they were set is like listening to a film
score without simultaneously viewing the film for which it was composed.
However interesting or instructive such an experience may be, it is nothing
like what its creators had in mind.

True, some of the best movie music of the 20th century has found its way
into the concert hall, where it has proved to have considerable appeal in
its own right.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#1.1> 1
Might something similar be said for song lyrics on the printed page? For the
most part, the answer is no. Setting aside the technical fascination exerted
by the virtuosic wordplay of such lyricists as Porter, Hart, and Ira
Gershwin, it is striking—if not surprising—how modest an impact even their
lyrics make when read. As is the case with classical art song, the primary
expressive effect of popular songs is achieved through the music, to which
the words serve merely as a kind of articulate accompaniment. It is
perfectly possible to spend an entire evening listening to instrumental
versions of such songs as Hoagy Carmichael's “Stardust” or Johnny Green's
“Body and Soul.” But imagine spending the same evening listening to their
lyrics being read out loud by an actor, and you will acquire a surer grasp
of the relative significance of the two elements of popular song.

Johnny Mercer's lyrics, however, are different.

_____________

Mercer was born in 1909, eighteen years after Porter and thirteen after
Gershwin. Unlike his older colleagues, he was not significantly influenced
by W.S. Gilbert, whose witty but emotionally null versification in the comic
operettas he wrote with Arthur Sullivan did much to shape the styles of the
first generation of modern American theatrical lyricists. Moreover, Mercer
rarely wrote for the stage—most of his songs were done for Hollywood
films—and so he rarely had to serve narrowly theatrical ends. Instead, his
songs are “lyrical” in the other, older sense of the word, meaning that they
express intensely subjective emotions in a songlike way.

Mercer's brand of lyricism—unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a
colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication—is
unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like
“Skylark” (1942): “Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won't you tell
me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone's
waiting to be kissed?” In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped
cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American
songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein
II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity.

This special quality was widely recognized by those in a position to
appreciate it most completely. “Johnny Mercer is the greatest American
lyricist alive,” Hammer-stein once said. “I could no more write a lyric like
one of his than fly. It's so Americana.”

The “Americana” was genuine enough. Mercer was one of the few major American
songwriters who were not big-city Easterners—he came from Savannah,
Georgia—and to some extent his style reflects this difference of cultural
background. At the same time, though, he was more than a homespun versifier
who just happened to write popular songs. His creative impulse, unlike that
of Gershwin or Porter, was essentially lyrical, and this quality intensified
as he grew older—so much so that in such later songs as “Days of Wine and
Roses” (1962), the melody, memorable though it may be, is not needed in
order to heighten the poetic quality of the words: “The days of wine and
roses/Laugh and run away,/Like a child at play,/Through the meadowland
toward a closing door,/A door marked ‘Nevermore,’/That wasn't there before.”
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#2.2> 2

Mercer's songwriting is discussed at length in two biographies. Philip
Furia's Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer, published last year,
is a semi-formal, fully annotated monograph by a professor of creative
writing at the University of North Carolina who has also written about Ira
Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Gene Lees's newly published Portrait of Johnny:
The Life of John Herndon Mercer
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#3.3> 3
is, as the title suggests, an informal biography by a distinguished lyricist
and music journalist who knew Mercer personally in his later years. While
the two books use much of the same source material, including an unpublished
memoir by Mercer, they differ considerably in tone and emphasis. Furia is
thorough and detailed (as well as error-prone, to the point of misquoting
some of Mercer's lyrics); Lees is vivid, insightful, and discursive to a
fault.

Between them, Skylark and Portrait of Johnny supply a clear account of
Mercer's life, leaving no doubt whatsoever that he was a deeply troubled man
whose great personal charm concealed an enormous amount of barely controlled
rage. A heavy social drinker, he was notorious in Hollywood for viciously
insulting friends at parties, then sending them roses the next day. His
marriage appears to have been loveless, and his final years were blighted by
the rise of rock-and-roll, which left the songwriters of his generation
scrambling for work.

Mercer held on longer than most, writing several of his most successful
songs in the early 60's, but he, too, ultimately faded from view. Even in
his heyday, he had been better known to the public at large as the winsomely
relaxed singer of such jazzy hit records of the 40's as G.I. Jive,
Personality, and Strip Polka (all recorded for his own label, Capitol, to
which he also signed such hugely popular artists as Nat King Cole, Peggy
Lee, Jo Stafford, and Margaret Whiting). Today his name is less widely
recognized than those of Porter, Berlin, and the Gershwin brothers, perhaps
because he collaborated with so many different composers instead of forging
a single long-lasting artistic partnership.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#4.4> 4
Nevertheless, his special place in American popular song continues to be
acknowledged by his peers. “Every American lyricist I have known,” Lees
writes, “considers, or considered, him the best of them all.”

_____________

Looking at Mercer's 1,088 songs in the light of Skylark and Portrait of
Johnny suggests that there were three major creative turning points in his
life. The first was his decision to move from New York to Hollywood in 1935.
Though he started out as an actor and longed throughout his life to write a
Broadway hit, his natural inclinations, as Philip Furia explains, were
anything but theatrical: “Whereas Hart and Hammerstein wrote to dramatic
character and situation in a musical, Johnny Mercer . . . would best craft
lyrics out of his own emotions.”

A case in point is his lyric for “Laura” (1945): “Laura is the face in the
misty light,/Footsteps that you hear down the hall,/The laugh that floats on
a summer night/That you can never quite recall.” For all its evocative
power, this song is (in Fu-ria's words) “inconceivable as a number in a
musical comedy. Purely lyrical, it evokes no character or dramatic situation
for the singer that can be staged, performed, acted out.” In Hollywood, such
action-halting songs were acceptable; on Broadway, and especially after
Rodgers and Hammerstein began writing “integrated” musicals whose songs
arose naturally out of onstage action, they were not.

No less significant were Mercer's more or less simultaneous encounters in
1941 with Judy Garland and the composer Harold Arlen. Though Garland was
only nineteen when she and Mercer met and became romantically entangled, she
was far more sexually experienced than her older lover, and their ill-fated
relationship (she chose to marry another man) left its mark on Mercer's
writing, which up to that time had mostly run to witty novelties and
once-over-lightly love songs. In tandem with Arlen, whose jazzy,
harmonically complex melodies were ideally suited to a lyricist who had
grown up listening to black music in Georgia, Mercer produced a series of
songs, including “Blues in the Night” (1941), “That Old Black Magic” (1942),
and “One for My Baby” (1943), whose darker, more intense tone is plainly
indicative of the disruption in his emotional life.

Finally, there was the emergence of what Lees perceptively terms the
“quality of abstraction” heard in so many of Mercer's later lyrics (though
apparent as early as “Laura”). Already disposed to write about emotional
states rather than concrete situations, Mercer increasingly incorporated
into his songs evocative imagery that floated free of any semblance of
“realistic” specificity. The “door marked ‘Nevermore’ ” in “Days of Wine and
Roses” is a prime example, as is this mysterious quatrain from “Charade”
(1963): “Fate seemed to pull the strings,/I turned and you were gone./While
from the darkened wings/The music box played on.”

Mercer was acutely conscious of what he was doing in these songs. As he
observed of “Days of Wine and Roses”:

Allegorically, it's like a Dali painting, you know. You're walking through a
meadow and suddenly there's a door and there's a word on it. You see past
that and past that you can't go.

It is inconceivable that Berlin or Gershwin would have analyzed one of his
own lyrics in such a way—or written a lyric that could be so analyzed.

_____________

But did Mercer's use of such techniques make him a poet, or merely an
exceptionally imaginative craftsman?

At the end of Portrait of Johnny, Gene Lees paradoxically asserts that
Mercer “was more than a poet, he was a lyricist.” Like all paradoxes, this
one sheds light without offering a definitive answer to the question it
implies. My own published view, if less suggestive, has the virtue of being
more clear-cut:

For all the utilitarian considerations that brought [his songs] into being,
their aesthetic appeal is considerable, and the more I reflect on Mercer's
achievement, the more I am inclined to think that he deserves to be
considered not merely as a writer of supremely well-crafted song lyrics, but
as one of the most gifted poets this country has produced.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#5.5> 5

Continued immersion in and reflection on Mercer's work has done nothing to
change my opinion—though I would hasten to add that even his most frankly
poetic lyrics are best heard in tandem with the melodies that inspired them.
Hence they occupy the same equivocal position as, say, Bernard Herrmann's
film scores, which are the products of a collaborative process and cannot be
properly evaluated outside the context of that process. It is revealing that
Mercer published no poetry, presumably because he felt he had no gift for
writing it. Only in the crucible of collaboration did his talents manifest
themselves completely.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#6.6> 6

Does this diminish the significance of his achievement? Must he necessarily
be considered a lesser artist than a writer who works exclusively on his
own? To make such a claim, after all, is by extension to relegate all forms
of collaborative art to a lower level of excellence simply because of the
process by which they came into being. Is Citizen Kane an inferior work
because Orson Welles created it in collaboration with Herrmann, the
screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the cinematographer Gregg Toland?
Conversely, is Irving Berlin's “How Deep Is the Ocean?” a better song than
“Days of Wine and Roses” simply by virtue of the fact that Berlin wrote both
words and music?

For me, the answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no—but whether
or not that makes Johnny Mercer a true poet is another matter, and one about
which he himself had nothing to say. Perhaps, though, one might look to one
of his own lyrics, “One for My Baby,” for an answer:

You'd never know it,
But buddy, I'm a kind of poet,
And I've gotta lotta things to say.
And when I'm gloomy,
You simply gotta listen to me,
Until it's talked away.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#7.7> 7

Who can doubt that the man who wrote these lines was at the very least “a
kind of poet”? Or that the world will continue to listen to the things he
had to say long after most of the full-fledged “poets” of our own day are
dead and forgotten?

_____________

Johnny Mercer on CD: A Personal Selection

Nearly every important American popular singer of the prerock era recorded
at least one song with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and usually many more. Here
are fifteen of my favorites:

1936: “I'm an Old Cowhand” (music by Johnny Mercer)—Bing Crosby, Bing: His
Legendary Years, 1931 to 1957 (MCA, four CD's). An occasional amateur
composer whose simple melodies crackled with rhythmic life, Mercer scored
his first Hollywood hit with a song for which he wrote both words and music
(the former, he claimed, in fifteen minutes). The well-read, classically
educated Crosby reveled in Mercer's witty wordplay, though his jazz roots
are no less evident in his rocking performance of this droll send-up of a
latter-day cowboy: “I'm a ridin' fool who is up to date,/I know ev'ry trail
in the Lone Star State,/'Cause I ride the range in a Ford V-8.” The
infectious accompaniment is supplied by a big band led by the alto
saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey and featuring Ray McKinley, among the finest
drummers of the 30's.

1937: “Too Marvelous for Words” (music by Richard Whiting)—King Cole Trio,
The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio: Vocal Classics, Vol. 2 (1947-1950)
(Capitol Jazz/Blue Note). It was at Mercer's urging that Nat King Cole, a
great jazz pianist who sang on the side, began to feature his engaging
vocals on his recordings for Capitol (many of which were produced by Mercer,
who signed him to the label in 1943). Both men had strong Southern accents,
and though Cole's became less pronounced in later life, it adds a winningly
idiomatic touch to his light-footed 1947 performance of one of Mercer's
cleverest “list” songs.

1938: “Jeepers Creepers” (music by Harry Warren)—Louis Armstrong, Louis
Armstrong: Highlights from His Decca Years (Decca Jazz, two CD's). Armstrong
introduced this charming novelty in the now-forgotten 1938 Hollywood musical
Going Places (whose supporting cast included Ronald Reagan), subsequently
making a genial studio recording that helped to solidify his growing
reputation as a full-fledged pop singer whose appeal extended far beyond the
world of jazz.

1939: “I Thought About You” (music by Jimmy Van Heusen)—Frank Sinatra, Songs
for Swingin' Lovers (Capitol). The greatest popular singer of the 20th
century made definitive recordings of numerous Mercer songs, many of them
for Capitol. “A Johnny Mercer lyric,” Sinatra reportedly said, “is all the
wit you wish you had and all the love you ever lost.” The deceptively casual
tone of this one, perfectly arranged by Nelson Riddle, conceals the
painstaking care with which Sinatra realizes the onomatopoeic effect of the
crisp terminal consonants used by Mercer to suggest a train rolling down the
track: “I peeked through the crack/And looked at the track,/ The one going
back to you.” (Interestingly, this is a rare example of a Mercer lyric that
was written first, then set to music.)

1942: “I Remember You” (music by Victor Schertzinger)—Peggy Lee, Pretty
Eyes/Guitars à la Lee (Capitol/EMI). No less memorable is Peggy Lee's hushed
version of another song in which Mercer uses consonants to ingenious effect,
here in the liquid double l's of the closing lines: “When my life is
through/And the angels ask me to recall / The thrill of them all,/Then I
shall tell them I remember you.” Yet for all its virtuosity, “I Remember
You” is also directly autobiographical: “I always had such a crush on Judy
Garland I couldn't think straight,” Mercer told a relative, “so I wrote this
song.”

1942: “Skylark” (music by Hoagy Carmichael)—Tony Bennett, Forty Years: The
Artistry of Tony Bennett (Columbia/Legacy, four CD's). The gracefully
balanced phrases of Carmichael's Bix Beiderbecke-like melody inspired Mercer
to write one of his most “outdoorsy” lyrics. Accompanied only by the piano
of Ralph Sharon, his longtime musical director, Bennett reshapes the
familiar tune with an expansive flexibility that places Mercer's words at
center stage.

1942: “That Old Black Magic” (music by Harold Arlen)—Judy Garland, Judy
Garland: The Complete Decca Masters (MCA, four CD's). Mercer's ode to
physical passion (“I hear your name and I'm aflame,/ Aflame with such a
burning desire/That only your kiss can put out the fire”) has been recorded
countless times, but rarely with the unsettling effect of this little-known,
surprisingly understated 1942 performance, which was recorded by Garland not
long after she became romantically entangled with the thirty-one-year-old
songwriter.

1944: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” (music by Harold Arlen)—Johnny Mercer,
The Capitol Collector's Series: Johnny Mercer (Capitol). Inspired by a
phrase Mercer overheard in a sermon by a black preacher from Savannah,
“Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” is the quintessential example of the
sharp-eared deftness with which he tucked colloquial idioms into his lyrics:
“You've got to accentuate the positive,/Eliminate the negative,/Latch on to
the affir-mative,/Don't mess with Mr. In-Between.” Mercer's delightful
recording, which topped the charts in 1945, is no less illustrative of his
prowess as a singer of rhythm tunes.

1945: “Laura” (music by David Raksin)—Woody Herman, Pop Music: The Early
Years 1890-1950 (Sony, two CD's). Though far better known as a bandleader,
Woody Herman was also an outstanding vocalist who scored a well-deserved hit
with his 1945 recording of the sinuous theme from Laura, a film noir scored
by David Raksin. In addition to his stylish singing of Mercer's evocative
lyric, which was written after the film was released (but before Mercer had
seen it!), Herman contributes a ripely romantic half-chorus solo on alto
saxophone.

1946: “Come Rain or Come Shine” (music by Harold Arlen)—Dick Haymes, The
Best of Dick Haymes (Curb). Most singers pull out all the stops on this
swinging ballad, written for the unsuccessful Broadway musical St. Louis
Woman. But Haymes, a much-admired pop balladeer of the 40's who made his
best recordings in the mid-50's, after a long battle with alcoholism had
darkened his youthful voice and tinged it with disillusion, sings with a
controlled restraint that proves more rewarding.

1946: “I Wonder What Became of Me” (music by Harold Arlen)—Joe Mooney, The
Happiness of Joe Mooney/The Greatness of Joe Mooney (Koch Jazz). Mooney, a
blind, crippled singer-accordionist whose sophisticated jazz quartet enjoyed
a brief vogue on New York's 52nd Street in 1946, emerged from
semi-retirement eighteen years later to record two albums for Columbia that
show off his subtle singing to remarkable effect. This version of “I Wonder
What Became of Me,” a little-known ballad from St. Louis Woman, is acutely
alive to the self-lacerating streak in Mercer's personality that sometimes
surfaced in his songwriting as well.

1949: “Early Autumn” (music by Ralph Burns)—Jo Stafford, The “Big Band”
Sound (Corinthian). Burns, who wrote arrangements for Woody Herman from the
mid-40's on, borrowed this handsome melody from “Summer Sequence,” a
multi-movement suite he had composed for the Herman band in 1947, and spun
it into a free-standing instrumental that became one of Herman's most
popular recordings. Mercer then added a nostalgic lyric, giving “Early
Autumn” a second life as a standard: “When an early autumn walks the land
and chills the breeze/And touches with her hand the summer trees,/Perhaps
you'll understand what memories I own.” As always, Jo Stafford's warm
mezzo-soprano voice and unadorned simplicity are irresistibly winning. The
gentle accompaniment for clarinets and rhythm section was scored by Paul
Weston, Stafford's husband.

1954: “Something's Gotta Give” (music by Johnny Mercer)—Fred Astaire, Fred
Astaire's Finest Hour (Verve). In addition to being one of his strongest
self-penned tunes, this deliciously syncopated swing song offers a rare look
at Mercer the character-driven dramatist (while perhaps also affording a
somewhat calmer look back at his affair with Judy Garland). Written for Fred
Astaire to sing to Leslie Caron in Daddy Longlegs, “Something's Gotta Give”
tells how a middle-aged man can become attracted to a much younger woman:
“When an irresistible force such as you/Meets an old immovable object like
me,/You can bet as sure as you live,/Some-thing's gotta give.” Even at
fifty-five, Astaire tosses it off with a dancer's lithe grace.

1961: “Moon River” (music by Henry Mancini)—Nancy LaMott, Come Rain or Come
Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer (Midder Music). Originally recorded by
Audrey Hepburn for the soundtrack of Breakfast at Tiffany's, “Moon River”
was one of Mercer's biggest hits, and its unexpected success briefly revived
his flagging career. Though it was composed specifically for Hepburn, its
folksy lyric might just as easily have been written for Nancy LaMott, a
cabaret singer who was profoundly in tune with Mercer's small-town
sensibility: “We're after the same/Rainbow's end/Wait-in' round the bend,/
My huckleberry friend,/Moon River/And me.” Her heartfelt, unaffected
recording is a priceless memento of the promising career that was cut short
by her untimely death in 1995.
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#8.8> 8
This CD, which was out of print for several years, can now be ordered
directly from www.middermusic.com.

1964: “Emily” (music by Johnny Mandel)—The Singers Unlimited, A Cappella
(Universal). This tender love song in waltz time, written for the Arthur
Hiller film The Americanization of Emily, was Johnny Mercer's last truly
popular song. It is heard here in a sweetly lyrical performance arranged by
Gene Puerling for the Singers Unlimited, a vocal quartet led by Puerling
that used overdubbing to create harmonically complex choral effects in the
recording studio (the group never performed in public). Bonnie Herman's lead
vocal is noteworthy for its combination of tonal purity and emotional
expressiveness.

Except as indicated, these CD's can all be purchased online by viewing this
article during the month of November on COMMENTARY's website:

www.commentarymagazine.com

_____________

  _____  

Footnotes

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#1> 1
See my essay, “I Heard It at the Movies” (COMMENTARY, November 1996).

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#2> 2
“Days of Wine and Roses” has been recorded many times, most notably by Peggy
Lee in 1963 on Mink Jazz (Capitol). Other notable recordings of Mercer
lyrics, including “Skylark,” are discussed in the discography at the end of
this piece.

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#3> 3
St. Martin's, 328 pp., $27.95.

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#4> 4
Though Mercer wrote most of his best-remembered songs with Harold Arlen, he
also worked with Rube Bloom, Ralph Burns, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington,
Gordon Jenkins, Jerome Kern, Michel Legrand, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel,
David Raksin, Victor Schertzinger, Jimmy Van Heusen, Harry Warren, and
Richard Whiting. In addition, Mercer himself wrote the music for three of
his biggest hits, “Dream,” “I'm an Old Cowhand,” and “Something's Gotta
Give.”

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#5> 5
“The Great American Songbook: A Finale” (COMMENTARY, May 2002).

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#6> 6
Skylark contains excerpts from a series of undated, unpublished free-verse
poems by Mercer that may possibly describe his affair with Judy Garland.
Without exception, they are undistinguished.

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#7> 7
Mercer recorded “One for My Baby” in a 1946 performance currently available
on The Capitol Collector's Series: Johnny Mercer (Capitol). His quietly
rueful interpretation contrasts strikingly with the slower, more explicitly
theatricalized version recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1958 on Frank Sinatra
Sings for Only the Lonely (Capitol).

 <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/too-marvelous-for-words/#8> 8
See “Mourning Nancy LaMott” (COMMENTARY, May 1996), reprinted in A Terry
Teachout Reader (Yale) under the title “My Friend Nancy.”

_____________

 


About the Author


Terry Teachout is COMMENTARY’s critic-at-large and the drama critic of the
Wall Street Journal. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his first play, runs through
November 4 at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.