Ella Fitzgerald: It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
It is time to put the cards on the table for all to see. Rodgers and Hart are the finest songwriting team in the English language; Ella Fitzgerald’s collection of their songs is her shining hour; and It Never Entered My Mind is her most memorable performance. Please, no arguments.
There are so many wonders on that double lp, recorded in 1956: Little Girl Blue, Ten Cents A Dance, Give It Back To The Indians, Isn’t It Romantic?, I Wish I Were In Love Again, Johnny One Note, Blue Moon, My Funny Valentine, To Keep My Love Alive, Dancing on the Ceiling, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, Manhattan. Ella got Rodgers and Hart in a way she didn’t always get Cole Porter, the author of her first Songbook. She did justice to Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer and the Gershwins, by golly she did, but R&H stretched her, and her response was a revelation.
Rodgers met Hart in 1919, when he was 17. Hart, seven years his senior, had left Columbia University by then, just as Rodgers was preparing to go up. In the 24 years they were together they carried the American songbook from short pants to adulthood, with a little help from their friends. Rodgers was the supreme melodist; Hart a writer of unique wit. There was pain, too. Their best songs have a bitter-sweet quality that no other pairing, not even George and Ira, could match.
Playful and astringent, Hart’s lyrics often undercut his partner’s great tunes. The younger man would introduce the melody, and tell Hart to supply the words. When he worked with Oscar Hammerstein it was the other way round, and Rodgers became more expansive, writing the ‘super soar-aways’ that filled Broadway theatres for years on end. Both partnerships were magnificent, but there should be no doubt which songs were superior.
Hart cut a sad figure. Small, at 4 foot 11, he was homosexual, a raging alcoholic, and suffered from depression, so he never fitted in. ‘Spring is here’, goes the opening line of one of his best-known lyrics. ‘Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?’ Another revealing lyric, Ella pulls off wonderfully:
‘Sometimes I think I’ve met my hero
But it’s a queer ro-
mance.
All you need is a ticket,
Come on, big boy,
Ten cents a dance’.
Painful.
And how’s this for brilliance?
‘The sleepless nights,
The daily fights,
The quick toboggan
When you reach the heights.
I miss the kisses,
And I miss the bites.
I wish I were in love again’.
Nobody, not Ira Gershwin, not Porter, not even Mercer, could write those lines. They dazzle, as those men could dazzle. They also draw blood.
There was no formal separation. In the summer of 1942 Rodgers was keen to work on a new musical, and Hart wasn’t. When he took off for a boozer’s trip to Mexico Rodgers invited Hammerstein to write the words for the show that turned out to be Oklahoma!, which opened to hurrahs in March 1943. Hart congratulated Rodgers on his achievement. Then his mother died in April, and the boozing became impossible.
He worked briefly with Rodgers that summer, reworking the 1927 show A Connecticut Yankee, and adding some new lyrics. The revival opened on November 17, and Hart marked the occasion by getting riotously drunk. He was found, incapable, in a bar on Eighth Avenue. Five days later he died in hospital, a broken man.
It Never Entered My Mind is classic Hart: a confessional song of missed opportunities, seen in this reading through the eyes of a spurned woman, which gives Ella the chance to sing the introductory verse.
‘I don’t care if there’s powder on my nose.
I don’t care if my hairdo is in place.
I’ve lost the very meaning of repose.
I never put a mudpack on my face’.
‘Hairdo’! We’re almost in the world of Alan Bennett (who selected R & H’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered when he appeared on the Radio 3 programme Private Passions).
‘Who’d have thought that I walk in a daze now?
I never go to shows at night,
Just to matinees now.
I see the show,
And home I go…’
Hart is at his best here, using wit to reveal (and conceal) pain. Then we’re into the body of the song, with his penchant for internal rhymes and exposed words that stretch to lines.
‘Once I laughed when I heard you saying
That I’d be playing
Solitaire,
Uneasy in my easy chair
It never entered my mind’.
The next verse rhymes ‘mistaken’ with ‘awaken’, and ‘the sun’ with ‘order orange juice for one’, an image that merits a painting; by Bonnard, perhaps. Then a linking verse:
‘You have what I lack myself,
Now I even have to scratch my back
Myself’.
An amusing image, reinforced by the final verse, apparently casual but really wracked with pain:
‘Once you warned me
That if you scorned me,
I’d say a lonely prayer again,
And wish that you were there again,
To get into my hair again.
It never entered my mind’.
Buddy Bregman, the arranger, never did anything finer than his moulding of this number. It’s quite an austere song, however often it has been covered by singers and instrumentalists like Miles Davis. This is not a melody Rodgers could have written for Hammerstein; nor could Hammerstein have written a lyric like Hart’s. He was a story teller, at home on the stage. Hart was, well, not a poet, but a weaver of poetic images. Hammerstein was an optimist. Hart found life a struggle. In songs like this we are closer in spirit to the world of German lieder than vaudeville. After all, Hart was distantly related to Heinrich Heine.
And Ella? She is glorious, in full command of the song and of her own refulgent talent. It’s hard to think of a more touching or convincing performance of any song in the American Songbook. Chapeaux to her, to Bregman, to Rodgers, and to the unsurpassable gift of Lorenz Hart.
Hendo’s Dozen, so far:
Ella Fitzgerald: It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
Frank Sinatra, Ill Wind by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler
Judy Garland, Do It Again by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva
Bobby Darin: Once Upon A Time, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned; Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen to You; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.
Tony Bennett: I Walk A Little Faster; Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.
Peggy Lee: Then I’ll Be Tired of You; Arthur Schwartz and Yip Harburg.
Ah. The best yet.