THE JOHNNY MERCER EDUCATIONAL ARCHIVES
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THE JOHNNY MERCER EDUCATIONAL ARCHIVES
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PAULETTE ATTIE New York City, NY It was the mid 1960's and I was a new kid on the block. In this case, the block was the sidewalks of New York, and I had my own radio show, Paulette Attiie's Musical Playbill on WNYC AM and FM. I was thrilled, because the show was on my two favorite subjects: music and the theatre. I knew from the start that I wanted to interview Johnny Mercer, but he was then living in Los Angeles. My parents conveniently lived in L.A., so I packed up my reel to reel tape recorder and got myself to L.A. I taped some other musical legends while in L.A. - Gene Kelly, Jimmy Mc. Hugh, John Green , but Johnny was the only one I invited to my parents home for our taping. I thought my parents would enjoy meeting him as well, and sure enough, my mother, father and Johnny got along like they were old friends. You couldn't ask for a more congenial and engaging person to interview. He shared many stories about his early days, his work habits and his thoughts about songwriting. These insights should be in a textbook for aspiring songwriters. Johnny told the story about going to a Theatre Guild audition for a review being put together called The Garrick Gaieties. He found out that they were looking for songs, so he wrote "Out of Breath and Scared to Death" the night after his audition, presented it the next day, and as he put it, "they put the song, in the show instead of me." When I asked him how he was able to come up with a song that quickly, he said, "When you're young and when you're hungry, you can accomplish an awful lot." We later spoke about the wide breadth and range of his songs, from "Dearly Beloved" to "Accentuate the Positive." He believed a well rounded songwriter has to be able to write every kind of song. When I asked him about "That Old Black Magic," he generously credited Cole Porter, saying the Porter lyric, "Do do that voo doo that you do so well," always appealed to him and was a source of inspiration for "That Old Black Magic." Great source and great results, I'd say. On each of my radio shows, I sang a song by the guest being interviewed. "I Wanna Be Around" was my choice for our first interview, and "I Wonder What Became of Me" was my choice for the second show. Johnny graciously complimented my renditions of his songs. But I considered his subsequent visits to me in New York an even greater compliment. We spoke about, you guessed it, lyrics and music. One time, he talked about writing down song ideas right away when they come to you. To paraphrase his reason, he said, if you think of it, the vibrations are already in the air, and if you let time pass, someone else might pick up the idea and write it down before you do. Johnny was any easy going, "Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home" kind of guy, yet he was diligent and meticulous about his work. And then, as Julius La Rosa mentions in his article about Johnny, -there were those wonderful annual Christmas cards, which included uplifting poems and pictures of him with Ginger. I had many outstanding guests on, Paulette Attie's Musical Playbill: Johnny, Harold Arlen, Burton Lane, Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields, Mary Rodgers, "Yip" Harburg, to name a few, but Johnny was the most fun of them all.
Paulette won the Silver Globe Award playing a French nightclub singer on TV's The Yanks Are Coming. Other TV credits include the part of Marshal Dobbs in One Life to Live plus leading roles on General Hospital, Another World, All My Children, Sesame Street, Mercy or Murder etc. Paulette has performed on and off-Broadway. Her highly acclaimed one-woman show, About Time opened off-Broadway in 1997 ("Her voice has size and power and her comic timing is in great shape"...The New York Times. "Rush to see About Time, where Paulette Attie personifies grace and talent"... Aisle Say. "Astounding talent"...The Village Voice. She has played the leading female roles in musicals and operettas: My Fair Lady, Gypsy, Can-Can, The Merry Widow, La Vie Parisienne and plays by Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward. On her award winning weekly radio show, Paulette Attie's Musical Playbill (WNYC for 2 years), Paulette sang songs by America's best loved songwriters, often accompanied by the composers themselves. Her legendary list of guests includes Lee Adams, Harold Arlen, Jerry Bock, Cy Coleman, "Yip" Harburg, Sheldon Harnick, Burton Lane, Cy Coleman, John Green, Dorothy Fields, Jimmy Mc Hugh, Arthur Schwartz, Mary Rodgers, Harold Rome, Charles Strouse and Jule Styne. "The songwriter I most enjoyed talking with was Johnny Mercer," says Paulette. "If there ever was a person who could charm the birds out of the trees, it was Johnny." Paulette made two separate shows of her interview with Johnny Mercer and had the pleasure of seeing him on several occasions thereafter. Of her over one thousand concerts, she has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Hollywood Bowl, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Westbury Music Fair and concert halls in Japan and South America.
She has sung in Washington D.C. for Presidents and Heads of State, including being chosen in 1998 to sing in Washington for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Statehood of Israel.To order Paulette's tape, Paulette Performs Puccini to Porter, send a $17 check to her, in care of the National Musical Theater, Inc. 159 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019. Selections include songs by Gershwin, Porter, Kander and Ebb, Ervin Drake, etc. Reviewing her work, Roy Sander in Back Stage said she's "a combination of Lily Pons and Carmen Miranda. I daresay millions would adore her."
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