Gifts my mother gave me

My mother in
Ireland. Not a great 
photo of her, but one
she loved.

My mother was a square. That’s not a nice way to start a tribute to a parent who recently departed (on Aug. 29, at 85 years of age), but when I decided to write about the tastes that my mother passed on to me (as I did with my father eight years ago), I came up against the fact that, in the rock ’n’ roll era that she grew up in, my mother was generally into “square” music, meaning popular standards (called more grandiosely “The Great American Songbook”) as opposed to rhythm and blues and its flashier stepchild, rock ’n’ roll. 

But there was a greater beauty in the stuff that my mother enjoyed. I only understood it from my 30s onward, when I began to actively listen to the popular standards my mother loved and delve into the different singing styles, and the exquisiteness of some of the songs. You see, my mother was lucky in that she always wanted to be a wife and mother (this was a part of her Eisenhower-era Catholic training) and so, she was blessed to raise me and my sister for a bunch of years at home before she did have to go back into the workplace (the late Seventies were difficult for everybody). 

And while my father led me to the golden age of movie comedy, comics, pulp thrillers, and most importantly, foreign film, my mother did have more staid taste. That said, I did pick up some cultural items from her that have stayed with me lo the many years. I’ll start off with a few movie/TV things (because generally that was my dad’s area for cool-stuff indoctrination) and then tackle the whole musical issue.

Champagne for Caesar (1950). My mother did like certain kinds of screwball comedies — not the rowdier ones, but movies that were cleverly scripted. In this regard, she turned me on to this light comedy that tackles the TV quiz show world just as it was taking off.

It’s a smart little satire of these shows and also their viewers. It features Vincent Price in a great role (one of his own personal faves), as the quirky owner of a soap company that Ronald Coleman is trying to bankrupt via the game show that the company sponsors, called “Masquerade for Money.” The smart casting extends all the way down to the pet that the film is named after, an alcoholic parrot named “Caesar.” (Voice courtesy of the inimitable Mel Blanc.) 

 

Ah, the mysteries! My mother also loved carefully plotted Christie-type whodunits. She never read ol’ Agatha (in the second half of her life, she became addicted to the work of Mary Higgins Clark, though), but she, along with her brother, my Uncle Neil, was a definite fan of the clever-detective-unlocks-the-“perfect murder” type of murder mystery. (Her absolute fave of these was Rene Clair’s And Then There Were None, 1945.) 

Her primo fascination in this regard as far as TV detectives went was the best of the bunch, hands down — that being Lt. Columbo of the LAPD. The show was indeed the best-written mystery show on the air for two reasons: The first was the fact that its creators, Levinson and Link, decided to invert the murder-mystery formula and let the viewer see who the killer was — the mystery then became how Columbo could figure out the culprit and apprehend them. (The fact that he would often entrap them with what seemed like flimsy circumstantial evidence didn’t matter, as the killer would usually have a flip-out when accused and could then be arrested; the matter of whether these cases would hold up in a court of law was beyond the purview of the show.) 

The second reason that the show (which wasn’t a regular weekly series; it was instead a sequence of TV movies with some great haughty murderers) remains so indelible is, of course, because of Peter Falk’s timeless and brilliant performance as the Lieutenant. Blending a deceptively sloppy facade with a razor-sharp mind, in every good episode (there were only a few real clinkers — most of those came in the ABC reboot from the ’90s) Columbo constantly surprised the killer by figuring out their “perfect crime” and proving that ratiocination (the ultimate Holmesian phrase!) didn’t need to be exercised while wearing an attention-getting mustache or a deerstalker cap. 

 

And my mother truly got me into Hollywood musicals. While my father steered me toward the Marx Bros, Laurel and Hardy, and W.C. Fields, as well as more serious films by Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau, my mother did prefer a happy ending. Thus, her love of MGM musicals (most decidedly of the Arthur Freed unit vintage — and the “A” titles, not those “B” musicals).

She had two heroines as a girl: Margaret O’Brien and Esther Williams. (One identifiable for a kid; the other aspirational for a girl going to the pool in Astoria Park.) Her all-time favorite MGM title was their Little Women (1949), but aside from that one dramatic foray into Alcott-land, she primarily watched and rewatched the musicals starring Gene, Judy, Fred, and Debbie. 

The best among those is arguably Singin’ in the Rain, which remains fresh and lively every time it is viewed, and also sported some crazy-ass colors in the “Broadway ballet” that featured athletic and acrobatic Mr. Kelly and the sensuous and slinky Ms. Charisse.

The film was often seen on TV, but for the moviegoing experience, nothing was as impressive as seeing musicals at the now defunct Ziegfeld Theater, where That’s Entertainment (1974) premiered and which later had programs of classic MGM titles. As was the case with Disney movies (which I never got hooked on — sorry, Ma!), my mother brought us to these screenings in the hopes that we would like what we saw, but also to rewatch the films that she had loved from her childhood and teen years. 

As a teen my mother really loved Eddie Fisher. Yes, the same Eddie who is mostly known to show-biz fans for leaving Debbie and wedding Liz, only to have Liz publicly humiliate him with Burton the way he had humiliated her with Debbie. (Later in the Sixties he married Connie Stevens but there wasn’t much humiliation [that we know of] in that relationship, so it’s not much talked about.) 

My mother was a member of the Eddie Fisher fan club, Astoria, Queens, division. She described the meetings to me once — there was another teen girl in Astoria who loved Eddie, too, so they sat around and talked about him and played his records. But they were given “official” status!

Oddly enough, my mother didn’t have any LPs of her favorites saved from her child/teen years. But she did have some 45s, and one of them was this “Italianate” tune from 1954 that sounds moderately operetta-ish and significantly from the school of fake Italian songs that gave us “Come On-a My House.” (My mother also loved Rosie.)

The songwriters of this opus were Bennie Benjamin (a Black songwriter who gave us both “Wheel of Fortune” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”), George Weiss (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “What a Wonderful World”), and Al Bandini (a jazz trumpet player). The song is not one of Fisher’s greatest hits, but it kinda mesmerized me as a kid, since it seemed like a gibberish tune back then (I loved novelty tunes and still do), but catchy. Now I’m grown up and it’s still gibberish and just as catchy.

 

The big discovery for me as a kid, though, was my mother’s love of Nat King Cole. The odd thing was, again, that she had just one surviving single of his (I’ll get to that), and I was first hearing his songs via an album of Jerry Vale’s that my mother loved where he covered Nat’s hits. (Yes, this is a very “square” way to find out about Nat.)

But my uncle had extra pristine-condition LPs at his house and ended up gifting my mother with a greatest hits record by Nat that had a number of his romantic ballads. I didn’t really wanna hear them all the time as a kid because… well, I was a kid. But they got into my subconscious and, as of my 30s, I did realize how singular and beautiful Nat’s ballads were. They remain so, and always will be.

This song is from 1952 and was written by Jimmy Van Heusen (a regular supplier of great fare for Sinatra) and Sammy Gallop (“Wake the Town and Tell the People”).

 

The interesting part about my mother’s love for Nat’s music is that the one 45 she had of his was this one, which is one of the times that Nat tackled rhythm and blues. Thus, this was one of the rockin’-est singles my mother had in her possession. (I enjoyed the Crewcuts “Sh-Boom,” but I had no idea that was a whitebread cover that just kept the hook and got rid of the soul.)

The song was released in 1957 and was written by Ollie Jones (a member of the doo-wop group the Cues, who backed up Nat on various tracks). 

 

My father passed on to me a fascination for radio as a medium, since he was of the generation that thrived on the theater of the mind that is now quaintly called “old time radio” (although they still have radio comedy and dramas over in the U.K.). My mother was of the TV generation, and while she had dim memories of some of the major radio shows of the Forties, she had major reminiscences about her and her brothers rewatching “the Million Dollar Movie” (which aired one movie every day for a week, twice a day).

She therefore was more familiar with radio as a medium for deejays playing music. And one of the most velvet-voiced of that breed, in NYC at least, was the late, great William B. Williams. Willie B. hated playing anything that wasn’t the Great American Songbook, but WNEW-AM played MOR “soft rock” for more than a decade — and that’s when I got into listening to it, to hear the new songs and also the patter by the deejays (Klavan in the Morning, Willie B., Julie LaRosa, Ted Brown, Jim Lowe, what a bunch!).

My mother felt Willie B. was the best of the group, thus this aircheck from around the time we had it playing around the house. It sounds just like AM radio, since it goes in and out at points. And though Willie got to play his beloved American popular standards, you’ll notice that he also plays Linda Ronstadt (in her soft-rock heyday), Carly Simon, and the Association’s “Windy.” (One of the interesting things was that WNEW was still playing Sixties hits in the Seventies.) This is a joy to hear, for those who used to listen to Willie B.

 

I move from the radio to the music it played, and the music my mother played around the house. Her album collection contained no old LPs from the Fifties, but it did contain original cast albums of Broadway shows. And so I was “drilled” on this music by her playing it on record. Once I hit upon the kind of rock I wanted to hear (which did move back and forth from singer-songwriter stuff to “new wave” and back again), I said goodbye to the popular standards. 

But in the Nineties, people were unloading their albums like crazy. A store I used to shop at (which was directly across from my dotcom office at the time) had what seemed like the full discography of Sinatra LPs going for 50 cents to 3 dollars a pop. I ended up buying all of them and then (while retaining my love of singer-songwriters and certain bands very much) falling down the rabbit hole of American popular standards. 

At various points, I realized I was now listening to “my parents’ music.” But I didn’t care because the songs were so fuckin’ beautiful. (Really, when you’re into Tom Waits, how can you not go back and listen to Sinatra’s “suicide” albums?) I credit my mother for this part of my musical taste, since she was so entrenched in that area.

And I turn here to a singer she didn’t particularly care for, but who does here a simply perfect rendition of a song that I’m sure I heard first from her record collection. You see, she had this original cast album for a show called “All-American” that flopped on B’way in 1962. The show is notable for two things: its lovely score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Byrdie), and for the fact that it was the only B’way show to ever have an original libretto by Mel Brooks.

Duke Ellington thought the score so good that he released an album of his versions of the tunes. And vocalists began to record the beautiful “Once Upon a Time.” Sinatra did a very solid version of it, but I prefer this particular version by Bobby Darin because there is a palpable sadness and yearning in his voice.

It could be attributable to the fact that his marriage to Sandra Dee had ended (he left her in May of 1966 and this concert was taped in November of the same year; their divorce was finalized the following year), or it could just be that this emotional version (seen in a British TV concert by Darin called “Something Special” that never aired over here) found him in a reflective mood. Whatever the case, it’s one of the best renditions of this big song from a flop musical.

 

One of the performers I was able to get my mother into from the raft of singer-songwriters I loved was the great storyteller Harry Chapin. Harry is an acquired taste because his songs were so long and the best ones among them were indeed short stories in song form. At his best he crafted these terrific little narratives that were remarkably emotional, yet contained, as in the song below. 

Of all the Chapin songs to choose to celebrate my mother I choose this one because she also had a secret desire to be a children’s book author. She wrote little stories for the family to read about myself and my sister, or the holidays, or memories she had of this or that incident. (My father used to draw the illustrations for them. I have none of these particular stories — but the tale behind that is a long and thorny one, as many of my mother’s final years were a sadly thorny situation.) 

My mother was drawn to Chapin because I would listen to his albums and she noted that they “sounded like a Broadway show.” He did indeed have a short-lived 1975 Broadway show made from his songs, The Night That Made America Famous; he appeared in the show along with his two brothers and other cast members — at that time I was too young to be into his music. She was unfortunately busy the one night that I saw Harry (at Carnegie Hall!), but we attended tributes to him together after he died.

The song below is a very beloved one among Harry’s fans (along with the exquisite “Better Place to Be” and “Corey’s Coming”); it talks about a real-life individual in a fictionalized manner. Harry read a brutally terse review of a man’s singing debut at Town Hall in Manhattan. He decided that his song would provide the man’s point of view, but also give us the review, and the aftermath, which is quiet and very touching. It is a gorgeous parable about how the arts “make us whole.”

 

And because if you’re going to talk musicals, you might as well go for the big guns: I close out with what I believe was the last Broadway show I saw with my mother. You can’t surpass Sondheim, he was truly the end of classic B’way musical-writing, and Sunday in the Park With George was one of the musicals that had a book that didn’t “let down” his absolutely impeccable songwriting. 

The best songs by Sondheim have a deeply emotional core; the best thing about the songs here is that he split the topics between the act of creation and the act of loving (and how they’re really the same thing). In this case, James Lapine’s book was split into a flawless first act (showing the creation of a painting piece by piece, which in itself is a marvel) and a somewhat bumpier second act, but one that added the notion of being “in fashion” in the art world and how raising money was a key part of the artistic process in the 20th century.

Sondheim and Lapine.

I’m trying to remember if we saw the show with both leads intact — one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation about Broadway shows was how many “follow-up” stars she saw in lead roles, after the original lead performers have taken a hike. I believe we saw both original leads in it. In any case, this play was thankfully put on PBS and made available for the world to see. It wouldn’t’ve made a good movie (and it’s good that one time they left things at the level of a stage play, where the magic actually was).

There’s absolutely no better place to end this tribute to my mother’s “gifts.”