The man that got away: the life and songs of Harold Arlen

Abstract

The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen. By Walter Rimler Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 209pp. $29.95 How strange that, for some, Harold Arlen isn't a known name: a composer of mid-century popular music who deserved the celebrity of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, and so many others! For others, his music is one of the foundations of the Great American Songbook. These two opposing worlds are bridged in Walter Rimler's fascinating new biography. From the introduction, the book takes a approach to Arlen's life (Rimler calls it Arlen's personal story), especially regarding Arlen's alcoholism and his wife Anya's behavioral issues. Arlen friend and biographer Edward Jablonski's earlier opus, Harold Arlen: with the Blues (Doubleday, 1961), written during Arlen's lifetime, did not touch on such issues, although his second work, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues (Northeastern University Press, 1996), did. This intimacy creates a rounded picture of the artist, whose work is woven into the fabric of his life. A dispassionate overview of Arlen's life and career, this primer has the necessary distance from its subject to give the twenty-first-century reader and music lover the information needed to understand this most essential composer. Shy by nature, bold by craft, Arlen had a career that began in the Cotton Club and went beyond the era of the Beatles. Such longevity belies the fact that Arlen was a musical laborer, ever searching for inspiration, which did not always come easily. Not finding any ideas for the music for Judy Garland's ballad in The Wizard of Oz, Arlen and Anya drove to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre for distraction, and along the way the melody for Over the Rainbow came to him out of the blue, at which time they pulled over and he jotted it down. For Arlen, inspiration was divine. Like Peter Shaffer's Mozart, Arlen's music pre-existed and he was the scribe. Son of a cantor, Arlen was also the blackest of the great American melodists. His first success, the 1929 Get Happy (lyrics by Ted Koehler), is a feel-good rouser that could have been invented by no one but Arlen. He next contributed the music to a good number of now-standards that were first featured at the Cotton Club, among which were Stormy Weather (1933, made famous by Ethel Waters), Long As I Live (1934, as sung by Lena Horne), and Ill Wind (1934, as sung by Adelaide Hall). His Hollywood career included many a film that is today forgotten, but those years produced a wealth of songs that are today considered standards. His Broadway notables included such musicals as You Said It (1931), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), Hooray for What! (1937), Bloomer Girl (1944), St. Louis Woman (1946), House of Flowers (1954), Jamaica (1957), and Saratoga (1959). Like the Gershwin brothers, his list of song classics and standouts in Hollywood and New York is long and outstanding, from 1932's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea to 1976's Looks Like the End of a Beautiful Friendship. In an October 29, 2015, posting to the Songbirds Yahoo! group (https://groups.yahoo. com/neo/groups/songbirds/info), author Walter Rimler stated: The two Jablonski biographies of Harold Arlen will always be essential reading for anyone who wants to learn about this great composer. But it seemed to me a good idea that he have more than one biographer, and that the time to write a new one was now because it's still possible to interview people who knew Arlen. I was able to speak at length to his sister-in-law, Rita Arlen, who explained internal family dynamics and showed me letters to Arlen, including revealing ones from Cantor Samuel Arluck (his father) and--surprisingly--Paul McCartney. …