THERE'S A SMALL HOTEL

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3922/28

Monday, 11 April 2011

Song of the Week #182
by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

It’s not the vulgarity of current pop that alarms me (Cee Lo Green’s “F**k You”, also Lily Allen's "F**k You"* , Pink’s “F**kin’ Perfect”), nor the crassness (Kesha’s “Take It Off”) nor even the grunting moronic ugliness (“Sex Room” and “Candy Shop”, the latter apparently a synonym for the former). I’m way beyond that: Driving around and roaming the dial, I’m struck, even in the non-effin’, disrobin’, sex-room humpin’ numbers, by something more basic - the absence of tenderness. The first quarter-century of rock’n’roll saw a diminution in harmonic sophistication and the discipline of rhyme but its practitioners inhabited broadly the same emotional universe as their predecessors. These days, as time goes by I’m not so sure, as I said somewhere or other recently, that the fundamental things do still apply.

So it’s something of a relief to turn to Rodgers & Hart. The authors of our Song of the Week #88 (“My Funny Valentine”) and #155 (“Blue Moon”), Rodgers & Hart belong to a group of writers who specialized in what seems to be a now obsolete genre of aspirational romance – that’s to say, we’d all like to have a love worthy of such a love song. This week, though, we’re celebrating a different side of them: Not the R&H of “Isn’t It Romantic?” or “Bewitched, Bothered Or Bewildered”, nor, alternatively, of Larry Hart’s slick triple-rhymed polysyllabic wit, but the team at their sweetest and truest, in a lovely pastoral ballad.

It was introduced to the world three-quarters of a century ago today, April 11th 1936, at the Imperial Theatre in New York. The show was On Your Toes and for that first-night audience it was quite an eye-opener: It was the first Broadway musical to attempt to integrate a ballet into the plot, “Slaughter On Tenth Avenue”, choreographed by George Balanchine; it was the first time Rodgers & Hart had had a hand in the book – the plot and dialogue – of their musicals, and it was the first enduring hit to be directed by my old friend George Abbott, the master of peppy farces and weepy melodrama, as he moved into musical comedy. It marked the start of a half-century run in song’n’dance that ended in the Eighties with Mister Abbott’s revival of On Your Toes, when he became the first nonagenarian director to score a Broadway hit and then, a season or two later, a West End hit. On Your Toes was an important work in the long careers of Rodgers, Hart, Abbott and Balanchine. But on that opening night in 1936 there was no doubt of the hit of the evening:

   There's A Small Hotel
   With a wishing well
   I wish that we were there
   Together
   There's a bridal suite
   One room bright and neat
   Complete for us to share
   Together... 

In fact, the tune originated in what was, technically, Rodgers, Hart and Abbott’s first show together, the 1935 hit Jumbo. As its title suggests, it had an elephant in the cast. It also had Jimmy Durante, who got the biggest laugh of the night when accosted by a sheriff demanding to know where he’s going with that elephant. Durante responds: “What elephant?” It was a Billy Rose extravaganza staged at the Hippodrome in a giant circus ring, and, between the elephant, Durante, Billy Rose and the circus, the songs and story had a hard job getting noticed, although the score was superb – “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World”, “My Romance”, “Little Girl Blue”. In the course of writing the music, Rodgers came up with a lovely lilting tune that Hart didn’t care for: He found it “obnoxiously” simple. Nevertheless, to fix it in his head he wrote a dummy lyric. We’ve touched on dummy lyrics before: In the days before cassette recorders, lyricists sometimes wrote up a nonsense lyric to fix the rhyme pattern and the musical stresses in their head. Paul McCartney’s dummy for “Yesterday” ran:

   Scrambled eggs
   Oh my darling, how I love your legs...

As we recounted in SotW #24, Vincent Youmans liked Irving Caesar’s dummy so much – “Picture you upon my knee/Just Tea For Two and two for tea”, he insisted Caesar change not a word. Hart’s dummy didn’t prove that winning, but it’s worth noting for the record, as it seems to reflect not just Hart’s sense of where the rhymes should fall but also his contempt for the tune. For Rodgers’ main theme, he wrote:

   There's a girl next door
   Who's an awful bore
   It really makes you sore
   To see her
   She's a forty waist
   But she's got no taste
   I know I'm sure I'd hate
   To be her...

It's striking that, even on a melody he despised, his instinct and facility were so sure he immediately hit on the first two words of what would eventually become the real lyric. Even in his contempt, he heard what the tune was trying to say. For Rodgers’ middle section, he offered:

   By and by perhaps she'll die
   Perhaps she'll croak next summer
   Her old man's a plumber
   She's much dumber for…

And then he forgot all about it, and went back to drinking. A few months later, during a somewhat fraught out-of-town tryout for On Your Toes, Rodgers & Hart found themselves needing a new song in something of a hurry. So at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven Lorenz Hart went downstairs to the men’s room, found a quiet spot, and wrote:

   There's A Small Hotel
   With a wishing well
   I wish that we were there
   Together
   There's a bridal suite
   One room bright and neat
   Complete for us to share
   Together.. 

It was supposedly inspired by a real-life small hotel – the Stockton Inn, in Stockton, New Jersey -  that you can still stay at. Don’t know whether it’s kept the wishing well or the rest of the local color memorialized by Hart:

   Looking through the window
   You can see a distant steeple
   Not a sign of people
   Who wants people? 

The composer and musicologist Alec Wilder subsequently stayed at the inn, and reported that he failed to see the steeple because there were too many people.

What I find interesting is the difference between the dummy and the finished lyric. Hart liked to rhyme, and it showed:

   Lover
   When I'm near you
   And I hear you
   Speak my name
   Softly in my ear you
   Breathe a flame.... 

“Larry Hart can rhyme anything and does,” observed Howard Dietz, lyricist of “Dancing In The Dark”. Hart resented this, and liked to cite “My Heart Stood Still”:

   I took one look at you
   That’s all I meant to do…

“I could have written ‘I took one look at you/I threw a book at you’,” he’d say. For the first strain of “Small Hotel”, he simplified the dummy, replacing the feminine rhyme of...

   It really makes you sore
   To see her...

   I know I'm sure I'd hate
   To be her...

   ...with the much stronger:

   I wish that we were there
   Together...

   Complete for us to share
   Together... 

"Together" is not just a big word, but the point of the song. For the release, he simplified further, eliminating the first line's internal rhyme:

   By and by perhaps she'll die.... 

Instead, he wrote:

   Looking through the window, you
   Can see a distant steeple...

Much better. The dummy moves on to a three-way feminine rhyme:

   Perhaps she'll croak next summer
   Her old man's a plumber
   She's much dumber...

That certainly follows the stresses of the tune, but too obtrusively. You hear the structure rather than feeling the sentiment. Hart threw out the three-rhyme and replaced it with:

   Looking through the window
   You can see a distant steeple
   Not a sign of people
   Who wants people?

The repeat of “people” is what writers call an “identity” rather than a rhyme. It’s lovely here because it’s so unforced and conversational – just a charming throwaway. And, after all, in such a situation, who does want people? Or rhyme?

It was introduced in the show as a duet between Frankie (played by Doris Carson) and Junior (Ray Bolger pre-Scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz), and thus required an introductory verse. (Jack Whiting took the Bolger role the following year in London, and his version has survived the decades better than the Broadway original.) Hart could be lazy in his verses, but here the simplicity is delightful. And Rodgers’ tune is wonderful, far better than a mere verse requires. It’s full of unexpected intervals that sound entirely natural, starting right at the top with the fourth interval. As simple as the words are, the music sets up a kind of suspense, delightfully resolved by Hart’s punning countdown into the chorus:

   I'd like to get away, Junior
   Somewhere alone with you
   It could be oh so gay, Junior
   You need a laugh or two
   A certain place I know, Frankie
   Where funny people can have fun
   That's where we two will go, darling
   Before you can count up
   One, two, three
   For...

   There's A Small Hotel...

“It was the melody--romantic, unsophisticated, youthful--that suggested the theme to Larry of an idealized country inn with its wishing well, one-room bridal suite and view of a nearby church steeple,” wrote Rodgers. “This was another example of his ability to convey the appeal of the simple life.” Not that he had much interest in the “simple life” himself. His attitude to anywhere west of West End Avenue was summed up in “Way Out West …where seldom is heard an intelligent word”. And yet, marveled Rodgers, Hart could “write longingly about quiet pleasures far from the razzle-dazzle world… When in ‘There’s A Small Hotel’ he wrote the lines ‘Not a sign of people – who wants people?’ he made you believe that a rural retreat was his idea of heaven.”

Up to a point. If you heard our Presidents Day medley a few weeks ago, you’ll know that, for On Your Toes, Hart provided a patter section itemizing some of the small hotel’s other features:

   Pretty window curtains made of chintz
   In our make-believe land
   On the wall are sev'ral cheerful prints
   Of Grant and Grover Cleveland
   Go down into the parlor and feast your eyes
   On the moose head on the wall
   Perhaps you'd like to play the organ
   They tune it ev'ry other fall...  

I seriously doubt whether the Stockton Inn in the mid-thirties displayed prints of Grover Cleveland, but it's certainly the guy's principal claim to a place in the American songbook.

And, of course, being a Broadway show, there was a comic reprise for Luella Gear and the man who came to dinner Monty Woolley:

   There's A Small Hotel
   Which we loved so well
   From there we'll get the air
   Tomorrow...

   Looking through the window
   Is a man with a subpoenie
   If you lose that meanie
   You're Houdini...

But you don’t worry about the special material and patter choruses when you’re making a record. In 1936, Hal Kemp’s orchestra beat Paul Whiteman and Claude Thornhill to the Number One spot, with a vocal by Skinnay Ennis, and the song has ticked over as a third-tier standard ever since. Ella sang it, and Chet Baker, and Sinatra did a lovely reading for the 1957 film Pal Joey. It’s never going to be “The Way You Look Tonight” or “The Very Thought Of You” – it’s not ardent or obsessive, but placid and contented. But that’s okay: there’s a place for that too.

And, considering how much he loathed the melody, Lorenz Hart never really stopped writing lyrics for it. His “agent” at the time was a fellow called Doc Bender, who liked to hang around backstage with the male dancers. This caused certain problems, and Rodgers, who liked to run a tight ship, noticed that the entrance of the “Nubian slaves” for the “Princess Zenobia” ballet was happening later and later. He ordered Hart to keep Bender away from the Nubians. But the disruptions continued, and one day an infuriated George Balanchine yelled out: “Vere de hell is de zlaves?” Larry Hart answered in song: 

   Look behind the curtain
   You can see six slaves and Bender
   Bender's on the ender
   Lucky Bender...

Indeed. But for the rest of us, like the lyric says, who wants people, even if they're Nubians? Lorenz Hart spent a lot of his short life being too clever for his own good, but, as Jule Styne said to me on several occasions, the really clever thing is to be simple. And in one of his sweetest ballads he surely was:

   When the steeple bell
   Says 'Good night, sleep well'
   We'll creep into our little shell
   And we will thank the small hotel
   Together.

Good night. Sleep well. And thank a small hotel in Stockton, New Jersey, and a men's room in New Haven, Connecticut.

[*CORRECTED: My mistake. I briefly confused the distributors of this suddenly ubiquitous song title.]


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