My
favorite recollection of Margaret was during the Broadway run of DREAM in 1997,
Margaret’s solo scene was her rendition of “One For My
Baby”. While she is singing the song and strolling by “Joe’-(the
bartender) she has something clutched in her outstretched hand. After
the show in her dressing room, she explained to me, that every night, she held
a golden compact – in her hand; a gift from her very good friend- Johnny
Mercer. This way Johnny joined her on the stage, at each and every
performance.
She told me, that the Richard and Eleanor Whiting house was a very popular
place for Hollywood folks to gather on a Saturday night. As a thirteen
year old kid she would sit on the staircase (often with her friend Judy
Garland) and listen to the all the piano playing and singing. Here she met
Johnny Mercer who would turn out not only to be a father figure but also a dear
lifelong friend.
With total certainty I can say that the only reason to account for Mercer’s popularity,
101 years after his birth, was Maggie’s constant efforts to keep his music
alive. She was the energy behind the Johnny Mercer Foundation from its
inception.
Thanks Margaret for your encouragement and inspiration, you brought a new
meaning to my life.
Stephen Taksler
stevetaksler@hotmail.com
January 11, 2011
Margaret
Whiting
NYC, NY (1997)
_______________________________________________________________________
“I
never realized when I was a little girl learning how to sing that the man who
was helping me was one of the top lyricists in the business. He knew the magic
of writing a very special lyric -- or appreciated a good lyric written by Alan
Lerner, Irving Berlin or Larry Hart. He was a natural, and taught me a way to
demonstrate lyrics. For example, as the head of Capitol Records, he was our
A&R man in the beginning.
And
he found me a song that he was in love with by two writers, Johnny Blackburn
and Karl Suessdorf, who wrote a very poetic song
about the charms of Vermont. Johnny had heard that song and thought it was a
natural for me. I naively asked him, "How can I sing a song about a place
I've never been to?". He said "I haven't either,
but we'll use our imagination." So he had me imagine the four seasons, and
what each season would be like there.,the warmth, the
chill, what it was like to ski there, the smell of maple syrup. All these
things conjured up a place with great memories that helped me sing the song.
The song, of course, was "Moonlight In Vermont," and became a
signature song for me, After it became a hit for me, he would come and hear me
sing and say, "Do the song that hasn't got a rhyme in it.
" I think it's the only hit song ever written without a rhyme in
the entire lyric.
Johnny
had the ability to intuit what songs should be sung by what singer. He had to
write a love song for Fred Astaire to sing to Leslie Caron,
Astaire came to Johnny in a tizzy. "My audiences will think I'm an evil
old man seducing a young. girl if I don't have the
right lyric." Johnny knew what Fred meant, and wrote the unusual and
charming `'Something's Gotta
Give."
Johnny
was writing for Warner Brothers Pictures with my father, Richard Whiting. It was for the film "Ready, Willing
and Able," and the producer, Jerry Wald; told them they had to have a
special kind of a love song that Dick Powell had met and fallen in love with.
He told Johnny to write at least ten sets of lyrics, because the secretary
would read the first set back to the writer and then Ruby Keeler would receive
the letter he sent, and she would have another lyric to sing to her girlfriends
would read the letter back with another set of lyrics. The letter went on and
on, with several other people reading. when it finally
came to ten, they thought it was enough, The boys went to the studio a few days
later and read all the lyrics of the song. Not being content, the producer
asked for five more Johnny had a temper, said "That's enough, I can do no
more," and stalked out. The next day Johnny received a gift from my father
in his mailbox. It was a Webster's Dictionary," with the words "Don't
give up so easy." That song was "Too Marvelous for Words."
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