JAY WALKS

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3773/28

Ave atque vale
Wednesday, 02 March 2011

Jay Landesman died in London a few days ago at the grand and (considering how he lived) highly improbable age of 91. I got to know Jay through his wife Fran, the lyricist of "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" and many other songs that ought to be better known. (I gave a copy of "Photographs", a lovely ballad she wrote with Alec Wilder, to my friend Monique Fauteux a couple of years ago, and had the pleasure of hearing Monique sing it in concert in Montreal.) Jay didn't have Fran's talent, but he was for a while an impresario of talent - in Norman Mailer's words, "the man who started it all", for a bewildering range of people. It frustrated him that his proximity to fame had brought him so little of it himself, but his ventures into traditional routes to celebrity were ill-starred. He once auditioned for an unimpressed Peter Cook what he called the first stand-up "subliminal comedy" act. "I'm trying to take the laughter out of comedy," he explained. "Congratulations, Jay," said Peter. In my book A Song For The Season , I wrote about "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most", and included a few asides on the Landesman clan:

   Spring this year has got me feeling
   Like a horse that never left the post
   I lie in my room
   Staring up at the ceiling
   Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most…

Isn’t that just the most? The title has, in one sense, dated, but its retro cool somehow suits the situation, which is why the song seems to get a little bigger every year.

The writers were Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman. I’ve known Fran and her husband, and her son, and her nephew, and her ex-daughter-in-law, and her ex-daughter-in-law’s girlfriend, and probably a few other members of the Landesman clan at various points over the years. Fran was born in New York in 1927 and in 1950 moved to St Louis with her husband, Jay Landesman. Jay was one of life’s natural hipsters and, although he was supposedly in Missouri to work in the family antiques business, he and his brother Fred wound up opening a club called the Crystal Palace. There, in 1952, sitting at the bar, Fran began writing lyics. She was very taken by a line from T S Eliot:

   April is the cruellest month, breeding
   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
   Memory and desire, stirring
   Dull roots with spring rain.

What would “April is the cruellest month” be rendered into hep-cat talk? Fran mulled it over and came up with:

   Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.

One day George Shearing came into the club, heard the song, and asked what it was. They told him, and he took a tape of half-a-dozen songs back to New York with him, and that’s why we know “Spring Can Really Hang You Up” today. He gave the Landesman/Wolf tape to Jackie & Roy, who were a terrific duo in the Fifties and looking for material for their new act, and he also gave “Spring” to Jerry Winter, who made the first recording of it, and from there it went to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter and then to Bette Midler and Elkie Brooks and Rickie Lee Jones and on to Ann Hampton Callaway and Jane Monheit today. Women love the song; it’s not showy, but it’s very insinuating: 

   Love seems sure around the New Year
   Now it’s April love is just a ghost
   Spring arrived on time
   Only what became of you, dear?
   Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most…

Fran's husband, Jay, was a versatile beatnik. By day he was editing a magazine called Neurotica; by night he was running the Crystal Palace, and introducing St Louis to up-and-coming talent such as Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, the Smothers Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Nichols and May, Stiller and Meara; and somewhere in between he wrote a roman à clef about his friendship with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He called it The Nervous Set, and Fran and Tommy Wolf turned it into a musical, and it was a hit in St Louis, and then they took it to Broadway, rubbed a few too many rough edges off, and it didn’t do so well, but Richard Rodgers, among others, liked it very much.

By the time I knew the Landesmans, they were living in London. Their son Cosmo was a dapper man about town: he’s currently the film critic of The Sunday Times, but you wouldn’t have been surprised, from the cut of his suit, to hear he was something big in the City. I assumed the bespoke thing arose as a child’s rebellion against his parents, who by then were quaintly bohemian. As Cosmo wrote of them:

   By the time Flower Power came around, they were in the twilight world of middle-age. Their hair became longer, their dress became wilder, the drugs got stronger and marriage became more experimental. I tried to get them to stay at home more instead of rushing round to pop festivals …and I warned them about the friends they ran around with. The thing that upset me most was their dress and appearance. I can remember when I first thought of having them committed to the Institute for the Criminally Dressed. It was Parents’ Day at school. They arrived looking like two hippies who had failed the audition for the musical Hair. Mother wore a purple Afghan coat that from a distance looked like a seasick piece of mutton. She was wearing enough bits of glass beads and jewellery to resemble Brighton beach after a bank holiday rumble. Dad came with his long hair, mirror-lens sun glasses: the pièce de resistance of this visual cacophony was not the orange rudiments of a shirt, but the black plastic trousers. In those days the only people who wore them were industrial workers and the insane. My classmates stared in disbelief as I shrivelled in horror. 

Fran and I had a mutual interest in showtunes. So, every so often, they’d call up and we’d go hear Steve Ross at Pizza On The Park or some such, and Cosmo would bring along his wife, Julie Burchill, who’s now a ferocious scourge of Islam but back then was running with Toby Young a publication called The Modern Review, to which I occasionally contributed. In London, Julie’s loved and hated, but for a punk gal she’s very well informed about the pre-Sex Pistols stuff: she gave me one of the sweetest gifts I’ve ever received – a copy of a long out-of-print autobiography by Sam Coslow, the man who wrote “Cocktails For Two” - and she knew all the funniest anecdotes from it, too. As for Fran, she doesn’t have the disdain that a lot of that milieu had for their mainstream predecessors: we once had a long conversation about what a marvelous song Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “No One But Me” is. She considered it one of Hammerstein’s “wildest” lyrics.

It was never very clear to me quite how they supported themselves. Jay wrote a very groovy memoir - Jay Walking - and they lived in a big if somewhat chaotic house in North London. I said to Fran I liked it a lot and she said none of her old New York pals did. “It’s a Jew-proof house,” she laughed. “They won’t stay here. It’s the lack of carpet.” Well, maybe. Yet, when I swung by for what I’d assumed was a small drinks party I’d find that, say, Paul Schrader, the director of Cat People and American Gigolo and screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, had also dropped by, and there was a big movie crowd there. And then I’d head to New York and bump into them at Broadway openings of plays produced by their nephew, Rocco Landesman, who ran the third biggest group of theatres on the Great White Way and is now Obama's head honcho at the National Endowment for the Arts.  

If Jay never found fame himself, it’s quite a trick to be the link between George Shearing and Julie Burchill and Martin Scorsese. The Landesmans are a couple of curious footnotes to 20th century pop culture, who had a go at a whole bunch of things, did some of them well, and bequeathed us at least one song for the ages: 

   All alone, the party’s over
   Old man winter was a gracious host
   But when you keep praying
   For snow to hide the clover
   Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.

He was a very gracious host, in a somewhat ad hoc way. Rest in hepcat peace, Jay. Spring will be a little late this year.


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