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Midnight At Mabel's - The Mabel Mercer Story

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The composer Cole Porter preferred her rendition of his "It Was Just One of Those Things" to any other singer's. A skinny blue-eyed young crooner named Frank Sinatra used to jot down notes on a cocktail napkin when he came to hear her perform at Tony's, a club on Manhattan's 52nd Street. Sinatra would later say, "Everything I know about phrasing I learned from Mabel Mercer." Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Bobby Short, even Edith Piaf and the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor discovered in Mabel Mercer an artist of incomparable style and eloquence. From the 1930s until her death in 1984, Mercer was a singer's singer-a consummate interpreter of the popular song. She launched dozens of songs by Porter, Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, Arlen, and others that have since become classics in the repertoire. Mercer was, however, relatively unknown by the general public because she shunned fame. For much of her career, she performed almost exclusively in small nightclubs in Paris and New York. Not just any nightclubs, it should be noted, but the legendary cabaret clubs Bricktop's and Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Paris, Tony's,the Café Carlisle, and the St. Regis Room in Manhattan. Margaret Cheney's marvelous biography, the first full-length study of Mercer's life and times, will introduce many music lovers to one of the twentieth century's greatest unsung vocal stylists and fill in the missing pieces for the aficionados. The life itself was eventful from its conception. Born 100 years ago, in Staffordshire, England, Mercer was the daughter of an Anglo-Welsh teenaged mother and an African-American father. The child--of light complexion, blue-eyed, freckled, with frizzy black hair--was essentially orphaned when Emily Wadham ran off with her future husband (emphatically not Mabel's father Ben Mercer) to the music halls of Australia. Though raised by a kindly grandmother in a cottage in North Wales, Mabel suffered as a child, and for her entire life, from feelings of abandonment. The beloved grandmother died when Mabel was nine. Far too early in her life, she was entrusted to a convent school in Manchester run by Italian nuns; there the little girls branded the vulnerable Mabel a golliwog and tortured her because of her unusual looks and her orphaned status. At the tender age of 14, Mercer graduated from convent school and entered the music hall world that was her family inheritance. She took to it like a fish to water. In the years after World War I, African-Americans began coming in appreciable numbers to England and the Continent to perform. Eventually Mercer found herself living and working among black artists who were welcomed by Paris-the Paris of the Jazz Age. Midnight at Mabel's is especially fine on this formative period in the young singer's life. It was at Bricktop's, the great cabaret at 66 Rue Pigalle, that Mercer arrived at her elegant signature style. And it was at Bricktop's that the world of popular music composers and performing artists took note. In the 1920s and 1930s, and mostly in the wee hours, Mercer played with the best of them: Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli. Even in the years of her early success a modest, very private and dignified person, Mercer was beloved of people in all walks of life. Among her many friends were British royalty, singular artists, like Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward, whom she met at Bricktop's, and adventurous tourists who had the wit to drop in at the Montmartre boite. In 1938, with the Nazi invasion of Europe looming, Mercer reluctantly, and with great difficulty, made her way to the United States. Several lean and lonely years passed before she reclaimed her rightful place as the toast of the cabaret world. But by the late 1940s, Cheney tells us of the New York music scene, "It became customary to say, `Let's go to Mabel's!' Any club she sang in was automatically `Mabel's.'" New York became the home she rarely left, except for weekends at her country retreat in the Berkshires. In the 1950s, Mercer occasionally appeared before enthusiastic audiences in clubs in Chicago and San Francisco. She annoyed club owners by refusing to book return engagements. However, Mercer's audience grew appreciably with the several albums she recorded for Atlantic, including two concerts with Bobby Short at Town Hall. But in the mid-1960s, rock music came to dominate the music scene on stage and in the recording studios. Club life in general, and Mercer's splendid career and the careers of her friends in particular, declined precipitously. However, near the end of her life, when she was prepared for poverty and obscurity, there came a final almost Dickensian turn of events. Mercer was discovered and celebrated by a new generation of fans, many of whom were gay New Yorkers. In her seventies and eighties, she was showered with honorary degrees and honorary appointments, television appearances and an award-winning documentary, concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Kool Jazz Festival, a triumphal return to London, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and so on. This was the kind of comeback, or vindication, a star performer might reasonably yearn for. Not Mercer, it would seem. For the first time in her life, and to her despair, she encountered autograph seekers. Cheney tells us that "biographers had often sought [Mercer's] permission to write her story but she wanted no part of them or it. After she was gone, she said, they could say whatever the liked, but while she lived she would have peace and privacy." In her knowledgeable, insightful and sensitive telling of her subject's life story, Cheney has succeeded in enlightening the grateful reader while managing to preserve a measure of Mercer's privacy. Mercer died of a heart attack in the early spring of 1984. Among the honorary pallbearers at her funeral mass were her good friends Bobby Short, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Johnny Mathis. One need hardly add that Mercer's legacy lives on in the great repertoire of American popular song.

Mable Mercer was the best...her voice, her style, her passion. All the great cabaret singers learned so much from her, about phrasing and interpretation. Few people know much about her life, so this biography is very welcome. She was of mixed race, and mixed cultures...she became a star very early, and then had a long career. Her fans were madly devoted. I was lucky enough to see her perform in her later years...powerful. A great, inspirational story; a terrific read.

I have been a fan of Mable Mercer since i saw her perform at the Downstairs at the Upstairs in NYC in 1961. I jumped at the chance to buy this book, wanting to know more about her. I managed to plow thru it since I was really interested in knowing about her life - but it sure was a chore to do so. This is perhaps the worst written book I have ever read. Redundant, terrible uncalled for puns - you name it. If you are a fan, do read it - her life story is there. But be prepared for a tortureous journey.
I would have given minus stars, but that didn't seem to be an option.

I was lucky enough to see Mabel Mercer perform and this book captures her for those of us who are familiar with her work. There was an earlier biography of Mercer but this one has a slight edge on that excellent book.The photographs are good too and this book should make you run out to buy all of Mabel's recordings. Mabel Mercer was unique and this book effectively chronicles her life, music, and her very special qualities as a person and performer.

The term biracial did not exist in Ms. Mercer's time. Black people recognized themselves as black with a culture that was founded in at least two different worlds. What most whites do not know is that African-American people have multiple heritages: the most common are Native American(the high cheek bones of some persons evidence this inheritance), European( the result of rape by the slave owners, overseers, or other white males who indulged in human brutality). The term biracial is the ever present intent by the white power structure to divide and conquer people of color by imposing a color hierarchy that brainwashes both white and black people to believe that the desired state is to be as light skinned as possible. Light -skinned blacks are thus rewarded with more financial and social opportunities than brown or black -skinned persons.This goes back to the high-yellow classification of yesteryear.

Euphemisms and carefully selected verbiage for the masses is intended to have a psychological consequence and to evoke an emotional response. Light-skinned blacks with this designation are then rewarded with a sense of superiority and are removed from the main group. When asked about racism they now can deny the existence of the horror or at least downplay it as operational in their lives. This serves the dual purpose of deniability and obviates the necessity of dealing with this socio-economic impediment. It allows the use of the most racist terminology yet to be formulated at the forum table of power-" the race card". Now all can proceed as usual and American policies that promote bigotry and exclusion proceed undisturbed without a second thought or ounce of recognition.