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Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer

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Yesterday, I spoke with about a dozen of my co-workers -- most of them ten or even twenty years younger -- and asked each of them, "Who's Jerome Kern? -- does that name ring a bell with you?" None of my friends recognized the name of the `dean' of great American popular songwriters - the man whose melodies inspired ALL of the other great composers - especially, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers.

This sad reality confirmed a thought I had, the moment I picked up this book, and wondered, to myself, Is there really any market for a book about Johnny Mercer? -- a songwriter who died almost 30 years ago?- How many people today would care to read a biography - however interesting (and this one is simply superb) - that concerns an old songwriter? --- even someone who was, according to his peers, the greatest lyricist of the English language?

Here's a simple test: If the following song titles mean something to you - then I can guarantee you will LOVE this book: "Skylark," "Autumn Leaves," "The Summer Wind," "One For My Baby," "Something's Gotta Give," "Laura," "I Remember You," "That Old Black Magic," "Dream (when you're feeling blue) --- all of them, and many others, written by the same man, and celebrated here in "The Life of John Herndon Mercer," written by an old friend and fellow lyricist, Gene Lees.

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Mercer's best writing was to the music of the greatest composers of popular song - beginning with Jerome Kern in the early 1930s, ("I'm Old Fashioned") and continuing for 30 years, until the early 60s, when Johnny wrote two, consecutive "Best Song" Oscar winners with Henry Mancini -- "Moon River" and "Days of Wine and Roses."

We're reminded with many a poignant anecdote, that a golden age of great song writing died, years before Johnny Mercer left us, on June 25, 1976 - after lingering in a semi-vegetative state for eight months, following brain cancer surgery.

His widow, Ginger, presented Gene Lees with the only copy of Johnny's unfinished memoir, in the hopes that the author could develop it, into a book. Lees uses portions of Johnny's insightful writings, interjecting trenchant observations of his own -- as if conversing with the spirit of his old friend. Interspersed are conversations Gene had with Johnny, such as one from the late 60s, concerning the quality of contemporary song lyrics. Said Mercer,

"A lot of people who can't write (songs) are trying to write . . . and it's based on (a combination of) Elizabethan structure and hill music . . . like Simon and Garfunkel and Jimmy Webb and Johnny Hartford, and the kids down in Nashville - they take the guitar and try to philosophize to a hillbilly tune with chords that come from 'way, 'way (long) ago . . . I think Webb is a superior writer, I didn't mean to classify him with the others, and Burt Bacharach is trying very hard to be different --- too hard (I'd say) but he is gifted."

Then, musing about the songs that were popular in America almost a century ago, Mercer (born in 1909) wrote, "I used to listen with awe and wonder to every kind of music I could get my hands on. Gypsy airs on the accordion or zither, harmonica blues, gems from Broadway, the yodels of Jimmy Rodgers, cowboy songs from the prairies, all reached my ears and touched my heart.

When I remember talking to the old timers as a child, I know that the well of our folk music goes deeper than I or even my grandfather knew. The traditional songs were brought over here in the holds of the immigrant boats and the slave traders, those that reached us via the islands, are only a drop in the bucket, so vast and deep is the reservoir that we have kept hidden in our heart.

After a man spent all day ploughing a field, or herding cattle, laboring on the docks or in the mills, poling the canals and picking cotton, he had no movies or phonograph to lighten his burden . . . but he had his family, his jug and his banjo or mouth organ or concertina, and he could sing the old songs to escape and remind himself of happier times and wonderful far-off places. . . These were times when Mama and Pa and Grandpa and Uncle Silas forgot their troubles, forgot to be stern, and were as human as the kids."

This is a passage, according to Lees, "that could never have been written by Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Dorothy Fields or . . . any of the other major lyricists Johnny respected. It reveals a deep identification with the American people, the so-called common folk. Of all the sophisticated, literate lyricists, only John Mercer had this quality.

On the very next page, Lees chides his old friend for expressing the hope, in his memoir, that it's never too late for there to be another generation of good, if not great, song writers. As if in conversation, Lees writes tellingly,

"Oh John, you've fallen into the trap of optimism. Since you died, popular music has only deteriorated further. In the age of Elvis popular music dispensed with interesting and beautiful harmony. In the age of rap, it dispensed even with melody, beautiful or otherwise . . . . and radio (which made the career of Johnny Mercer) evolved in such a way that it is impossible to find anything by Jerome Kern on the air, and jazz has disappeared from commercial radio broadcasting. In 2002, National Public Radio cancelled its jazz shows. John, you may not have liked "Hair" the musical, or the Beatles . . . but compared with what is going on now, the songs of both seem like towers of taste and intelligence.

"Occasionally Shirley Horn or Natalie Cole will have a successful album of the great standards, and Diana Krall became a star singing them. But there is NO circumstance to generate the creation of (great) new songs in your tradition."

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Near the end of this splendid biography, Lees quotes Mercer in a prophetic observation about his own legacy, in answer to a question posed by a BBC interviewer,

"I think some of my songs may be noticed, as individual pieces, but I think Gilbert (& Sullivan, and Lorenz) Hart, possibly (Ira) Gershwin - because of his brother, but mostly because of his wit, his sly sense of humor, and (Irving) Berlin and (Cole) Porter, going right on up into (Alan Jay) Lerner and (Frank) Loesser, will be studied . . . and collected . . . and forgotten."

After including the names of "a few more" Johnny forgot to mention - Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein and the Bergmans, Marilyn and Alan, among others, the author recapitulates that lyric writing, "at least when it is pursued to its highest level" is the most difficult literary form of all - matching perfect words to great melodies.

The author recalls a stranger asking him (Gene Lees): "Don't you think Johnny was MORE than a lyricist? - that he was a poet?" Lees replied, without hesitation, "No, he was more than a poet - he was a lyricist."

Neither of them do a great job showing what kind of woman Ginger really was, though Furia has some scenes showing Johnny treating her as though she were nothing but trailer trash. Let's face it, Ginger isn't going to be well thought of by any member of the reading public until she gets a full biography of her own. Why not? Ada had one--the wife of Vladimir Nabokov. And after the two biographies of Johnny, we certainly need a life of Ginger as a corrective. Lees hints that Johnny Mercer had a sexual identity problem. Even if he did it wasn't Ginger's fault. You know right away that as soon as some guy reveals that Judy Garland was the love of his life, well basically that is saying, well, he's gay.

That said, Lees is very good about exploring the general shape of Mercer's career. It was a skyrocket that looped and billowed all over the night sky, and he never wound up in the place you might have predicted for him. His writing was sometimes ornate and flowery, but just when you had him figured out as a Swinburne of popular song, he could surprise you with something austere and simple (like "I Thought About You" or "Autumn Leaves" or "The Sweetheart Tree"). His writing changed with the times, and yet it seems timeless, like the moods of "Moon River." Gene Lees responds more than Furia to the claims place made on Mercer, from Savannah to New York to the famous Capital Records building in LA which he helped to build. He remains an inspiration to songwriters everywhere; poets too.

Though primarily a sympathetic, admiring portrait of a brilliant American lyricist--arguably the best despite not producing a "hit" Broadway show--Lees doesn't appear to pull any punches in what is ostensibly a biography not merely of an extraordinary talent but a personal friend of the author. Based on his remembrances as well as his primary research and Mercer's own fragmented attempt at an autobiography (Lees points out the irony of the great lyricist-poet being a rather clumsy, even amateurish, writer of prose--perhaps best seen as another of the many qualities connecting Mercer with the "common man"), Lees produces a fascinating portrait, one most likely to score with the reader who is already familiar with the significance and accomplishments of the subject, or with the songs themselves.

There are a few quirks, as when the author warns us that Mercer's letters are likely to embarrass the present-day reader, not just because of their candor but the writer's seemingly superhuman tolerance and self-subjugation if not masochism. Perhaps I'd been overly prepared for the shock or I simply missed it, but I failed to find them all that remarkable. More striking is Lees' employment of an 18th and 19th-century literary device known as the "apostrophe" (same spelling as the punctuation mark used for contractions and possessives), permitting the author to address the deceased himself, imploring Johnny, in effect, to acknowledge the dismal state of the art since his departure and to spread what remains of his legacy toward reversing the undeniable decline of popular song, which was distinguished during Mercer's time by the felicitous marriage of words and melody, resulting in a "lyric poem" no less artful for its employment of the vernacular and its focus on a broad-based audience whose lack of sophistication did not prevent it from being deeply and irrevocably moved by the emotional power of Mercer's lyrics. I'll confess that these sorts of sudden shifts in focus on the part of the author--where he drops the 3rd-person "he" in favor of the 2nd-person "you" (at one point, the reference is to the reader; at another, it's to Johnny Mercer himself)--at first struck me as strange if not disruptive. But upon reflection, they strengthen the sense of the author's close and passionate connection with his subject. The reader, in turn, is more likely to feel and remember the impact of what he has just read.

The playing out of the Mercer story continues beyond the lyricist's death to the sad and somewhat depressing end, reminiscent in some respects of the fall of the once proud Compson family in Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." It's hard to infer from the author's research that he has necessarily loaded the dice in Mercer's favor, as stated by another reviewer. John's problems with alcohol and the pain it causes family and friends are more thoroughly documented than in other accounts I have read, and the lengths to which Ginger goes to secure him the best medical treatment by the most qualified surgeons qualify as testimony to her strong feelings toward her extraordinary husband. It's during the aftermath of the surgery that the picture becomes less clear.

Ginger's decision not to attend to her husband during the months of his post-operative vegetative state is less problematic for the reader seeking to assign blame than her behavior and poor decisions following his death. She appears equally victimized by the bottle and an opportunist-gigolo who represents not just continuity of her husband's legacy as she would prefer to remember it but welcome human companionship. Some of the descriptions given Lees by family members are reminiscent of the more sensational pages from Art Pepper's "Straight Life"--if true, an indictment of the disease of alcoholism as much as an expose of a dysfunctional family or failed relationship.

Mercer knew all too well the complexities, paradoxes, and inscrutability of love, his knowledge heightened by the appetites, desires, and dreams which for the artist are necessarily writ large in consciousness long before the challenge of capturing and sharing a small part of them for the reader, or listener. In that regard, Ginger didn't fail Johnny by reigning in his creative muse (or those ever-present "angels") just as Mercer's art stands as powerful testimony of a love that embraced not merely Ginger but included us all. Those angels, at least in Johnny's case, are still singing.

PORTRAIT OF JOHNNY: THE LIFE OF JOHN HERNDON MERCER isn't just for already-dedicated fans of the musician, but for any interested in the lasting effects of his songs. Gene Lees is a music historian and songwriter who handles well the sensitive details of Mercer's life and times. From his complicated relationships with a domineering mother and tormenting wife and to his work on show songs which succeeded and some which failed, PORTRAIT OF JOHNNY is packed with reflections by those who knew him best.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

Gene Lees captures Johnny Mercer's melancholy in his Portrait of Johnny, and he shows us the control two women had on his life. It's not pretty.

His mother, Lillian, tried to stifle his marriage and control his affections. Herself an emotionally-distant mother, she failed to keep Johnny in Savannah, but did crack down on Mercer's spontaniety and outgoing view toward life.

His wife, Ginger, was almost prevented from marrying him, which would have been a great thing for Johnny. Instead, however, they married and Ginger made Johnny miserable his whole life.

With these two control freaks adding to his depression, Johnny somehow continued to write loving and often lively popular lyrics. In fact. Lees shows he was often the first choice of song writers to write their lyrics.

Mercer's fate was harsh, he drank and had a temper, yet his deep seated love for music and life were not stifled entirely by these two distant and egotistical women.

I've always been a fan of Johnny Mercer and this book let me know thhe man behind the songs that he wrote.
Excellent book

I am extremely disappointed in this book on Johnny Mercer. I would not classify it as a biography but rather a bound copy of his extensive resume' and catalog of his work. Mr. Lees does not bring Johnny Mercer to the table. He has a whole chapter on Mercer the drinker with comments by several people but never brings out what his wife, his children or anyone else found to be the reason for his drinking or his being "nasty drunk". He talks of him being " on the wagon" at times. When were these and what brought him to go on the wagon, why did he go off? There is talk of Judy Garland and life long episodes of affairs between them but only mentions one. Long paragraphs of Ginger and her personality and her drinking and their unhappiness but no mention of why either was unhappy except for Biong Crosby and Judy Garland-- did their friends not know- surely the children knew what was going on in their house. Johnny wanted children and it is stated Ginger did not- how does the writer know this. When they got children how were they treated and what was day to day life from their standpoint ( all that is mentioned is who they lived by and who they knew). Mr. Lees spends great portion of the book expressing his own views as to the state of the world and the music world in particular and we still do not know Johnny Mercer the man or the poet or the lyrist. I could og on and on on what this book lacks.

This is a typical Gene Lees book in which his opinions and his outlandish takes on the jazz people he adores comes through, rather than reporting the facts and telling the reader something new and revealing. I knew Johnny's wife Ginger, and was a confidante of hers for years. She was a lovely woman who adored Johnny, yet was insecure about whether the feeling was reciprocal. For Lees to call their long marraige 'loveless' is an insult to the Mercer's life together and to their children. Yes, Johnny strayed, he was confused about his sexuality (which is not explored in depth because Gene Lees didn't want to open a Pandora's box about his idol), and he always felt there was a black man living inside of him (his impetus for writing Southern jazz. Gene Lees writes as if he personally knows his subjects, but nothing knew is ever tackled, and it becomes the same old, same old story about the author's feelings instead of the research and reporting that is the cornerstone of any good bio. This book was a waste of time and money. There are other books about Johnny Mercer that will inform you, and entertain you. This one definitely does not.

Being an admirer of Mr. Mercer's work, I looked forward to reading this book. I found the bio's author, who was acquainted with the songwriter, to be way too intrusive, opinionated and judgmental. The author heaps abuse on Mercer's wife of many years mostly because of her life post-Johnny and, amazingly enough, because she apparently wasn't a good conversationalist ("I could never find anything to talk about with her" is the refrain that occurs way too often). The other reviews of this book posted here interested me because it hints at something that is completely glossed over in the book - Mercer's sexuality. The closest it gets to the issue is the statement that Judy Garland always got involved with homosexual men, followed a few sentences later with the beginning of Mercer's affair with her. Mercer is obviously tormented and unhappy about something throughout his life - Lees near the end of the book tries to pin it on Ginger, but given the apparent lack of passion in that relationship, that doesn't seem to hold up. If Lees is afraid to say Mercer was closeted, fine - but he shouldn't then blame everything wrong in his life on his wife. Mercer was an incredibly talented man - but I think being the wife of a sexually conflicted man is probably not the happiest position to be in either. There is a lot of good information about Mercer in this book, but the author puts himself in the middle of it much too much.

I just bought and began reading "Portrait of Johnny" by Gene Lees, and I am furious.

What a lazy book.

Page seven: "Whether Lerner set the words to Loewe's music or Loewe set the music to Lerner's words I don't know." HOW HARD CAN THAT BE TO FIND OUT?

Page eleven: "And to this day I do not know if Johnny Mercer knew that Patton was his distant cousin." WELL, DID HE EVER MENTION IT TO HIS DAUGHTER OR ANYONE ELSE YOU INTERVIEWED?

Page fourteen: "...Mercer grew up...at the intersection of Lincoln and Gwuinnett Streets. Street names in Savannah predate the Civil War: the Lincoln in question is not Abraham, and Button Gwuinnett was Georgia's delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence." AND FOR WHOM IS LINCOLN STREET NAMED?

I read a positive review of this book and was looking forward to reading it. I am ready to throw it out the window, and I want my money back.

Kathy Moore