‘Prelude’ Prefaced a Long Career : Lyricist Remembers Penning Words for Ellington

When Irving Gordon opened the paper last month and saw that the South Coast Repertory was presenting a new play called “Prelude to a Kiss,” the title had a certain familiar ring: It had come to him 50 years before during a ride on the New York City subway.

Gordon was 22 then, a budding songwriter who found himself with the improbable assignment of setting words to the music of the Duke Ellington band. With the subway’s rattle and clatter in his ears all the way from Manhattan to Coney Island, but a most enduring melody in his head, Gordon came up with the title and lyrics to “Prelude To A Kiss” and had it on paper by the time he reached the Brooklyn apartment where he lived with his immigrant parents.

The melody line for the ballad is a long, languorous, sexually charged sigh. Gordon’s lyric likens a lover’s unfulfilled desire to a never-ending song. Together, music and words suspend in time a moment of bated yearning, forever intense, forever unconsummated, heavy with emotions both sweet and ineffably sad.

When playwright Craig Lucas started working on his new drama, Irving Gordon was nothing to him but a name in small type on an album label. But Gordon’s line about love being “a prelude that never dies, a prelude to a kiss” connected with Lucas’ own ideas for a play about the mysteries of love and mortality--all bound up in a plot revolving around a supernatural kiss.

Speaking from his Manhattan home last week, Lucas said that “Prelude To A Kiss,” specifically Ella Fitzgerald’s 1957 version of the song, entered his thoughts “very early on” in the play’s creation. “It’s such a great song, and it really was the inspiration for the play.”

Gordon, who lives in Malibu Beach with an aged German shepherd and a year-old Labrador retriever, came to a preview performance of “Prelude To A Kiss” and approved of what he saw. Last week, he was back in Costa Mesa to see the play again (it continues through Feb. 21 at SCR). During a pre-show meal, between bites of steak fajitas and sips of black coffee, Gordon reminisced about a career that dates back to 1937, a big year that saw him land a contract to write for Ellington after placing hit lyrics with Bing Crosby (“What Will I Tell My Heart?”) and Billie Holiday (“Me, Myself And I”). Half a century later, Gordon’s work is, at least indirectly, as current as today’s entertainment ads: not only can he claim “Prelude To A Kiss,” but the hit film, “Throw Momma From the Train,” cops the title of yet another Gordon song, originally sung by Patti Page in 1956.

Gordon has a compact build, kept trim by serious tennis, and a full, tousled head of hair where dark streaks yield grudgingly to oncoming gray. The songwriter, who turns 73 today, conducts conversation in a mild, faintly musical voice. If Gordon’s yarns were song structures, one would have to criticize the arrangements as terribly scattered, jumping back and forth in time and place between Ellingtonia in the late 30s and the light pop he wrote for the likes of Page, Perry Como and Nat King Cole in the 50s. A compensating virtue is a friendly, consistently low-key manner informed by self-deprecating humor and a puckish, word-playing wit.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Gordon had a Hungarian father who worked in New York’s garment district and an Austrian mother who loved classical music and insisted that her son learn to play the violin. But his interest tended toward popular songs. While still in high school, Gordon said, he would hang around Manhattan’s Tin Pan Alley, trying to pitch tunes he’d brought along in his violin case. “People felt sorry for me, I guess,” and one songwriting veteran advised Gordon that the melodies he was trying to peddle wouldn’t catch anyone’s notice without lyrics to go with them.

“So I put anything that came to my mind. When I had somebody listen to it, they said the music was bad but the lyrics were very good. So I became a lyricist. Shortly after that, I ended up with Duke.”

Gordon’s early work for other performers had come to the attention of Irving Mills, Ellington’s manager and music publisher. Gordon says Mills paid him $50 a week to write for Ellington, who at the time was keeping up a furious songwriting and recording pace.

One of Gordon’s first assignments was to contribute lyrics for Ellington’s 1937 stand at the Cotton Club, which by then had been transplanted from its famed Harlem location to a spot downtown on Broadway. The show would feature singers and dancers, backed by Ellington and his orchestra, in a revue that was supposed to reflect the Cotton Club’s hot and sassy Harlem heritage. Gordon said he submitted “Prelude To A Kiss” for the show, but it wasn’t performed until later. When the song was published, Gordon and Ellington shared songwriter’s credit with Mills, who had no creative role but commonly put his name on songs to reap a share of the royalties. According to Gordon, Ellington’s own co-writer’s credit also stretched the facts.

“Duke didn’t write that tune. It was written by Johnny Hodges (the ace saxophonist of the Ellington band). I’m not putting down Duke’s genius, but there were a lot of things written by the band that they never got credit for. I knew every musician in that band. It was no secret. And it wasn’t questioned, because (Ellington) was the one who held them together. Ellington was a great editor. He could take the tunes that people wrote and dot the i’s and make sure the spelling was correct.”

Gordon’s view resembles the thesis advanced by author James Lincoln Collier in a recent, controversial biography of Ellington, although Collier assigns credit for “Prelude To A Kiss” to another band member, Otto Hardwick. Among those begging to differ is Mercer Ellington, who has led the Ellington Orchestra since his father’s death in 1974.

“In a lot of cases,” Mercer said last week in a phone interview from his home in New York City, “the guys would have the germ of a song, and get together with (Ellington),” who would turn it into a fully realized piece of music. “As I remember it, (“Prelude To A Kiss”) is strictly Ellington’s. It was a very daring song, which leads me to doubt that Johnny Hodges would have written it. It calls for tremendous range and scope in a person’s voice.

“I knew Johnny,” Mercer added, “and Johnny was an excellent businessman. I don’t think he would have stood still to let a song get that big without getting credit at some point.” (Incidentally, Irving Gordon set words to one of Mercer Ellington’s own compositions, the 1941 tune, “Tonight I Shall Sleep With a Smile on My Face.”)

Sometimes, Gordon said, he sat in on Duke Ellington’s recording sessions, where he was expected to come up with lyrics on the spot for the tunes the band was laying down. The Duke, who ran those sessions, ruled with a gentle hand, Gordon says. “He wasn’t strict. I can’t remember ever hearing him scold anybody.”

Gordon said he didn’t have a great deal of personal contact with Ellington but sensed that the bandleader took a liking to him. “I was very quiet, very shy. I would never come on, and I think he respected that.” Several years later, when Gordon married, he saw Ellington’s famed courtly manner in action. “He went to my wedding and he told people that my wife and I were his favorite people. This is the way he would talk. But he didn’t lay it on real thick. Duke was sort of a combination Clark Gable and Noel Coward. He knew how to say the right thing, and women loved him.”

Gordon said his main ambition after his early days with Ellington was to be a playwright. “I wrote some bad ones, the worst in the world. At the first rejection, I threw them away.” He continued to busy himself with songwriting--music as well as lyrics--through the 1950s.

“I was turning out two or three a day at that time. I had to pay for my wife’s psychiatrist and my psychiatrist,” he said with a laugh. Among the songs Gordon churned out was “Unforgettable,” one of Nat King Cole’s signature songs. Gordon cites it as an example of his own limitations as a composer.

Pausing to hum the tune lightly, he pointed out how “Unforgettable” starts in key, goes awandering, and fails to return to harmonic home base, thereby violating one of the then-current rules of song-smithery. “I couldn’t get back in key, no matter how hard I tried. I didn’t know my harmony theory.” Soon enough, in the 1960s, popular music was transformed by songwriters like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who didn’t worry much about rules and theory. Actually, there was one rule, and it spelled the end for songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley tradition: performers were expected to write their own material.

Gordon looks back on that time with a touch of bitterness that he quickly smoothes over with brush strokes of equanimity. “The 60s were a disaster. There was a revolution, and when there’s a revolution, there’s blood spilled. You had three-chord music, musicians coming in in the 60s and writing crap. But some of it was good. The Beatles did good stuff, and some of the others. And there’s always been crap. All of a sudden, the oldtimers, there was no market for them. So I became a tennis pro. I have many lives.”

Gordon, who enjoys telling about his encounters with such intellectual luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre, says he never really reconciled himself to the life of a spinner of pop songs.

“I always felt awkward about being a songwriter. I would carry these profound books around with me wherever I went so they couldn’t mistake me for a songwriter. I always thought I would do something else, some good writing. I was a snob. It was insecurity, I guess.”

But at 73, Gordon still finds himself a songwriter, and a hopeful one at that. He says he’s currently working on his most ambitious project, a musical based on the life of Sigmund Freud that he hopes to have produced after some final revisions.

With “Prelude,” the play, and “Throw Momma,” the movie, it’s clear that Gordon’s clever titles have made some sort of lasting impression. But he declines to read the two titles’ new currency as the harbinger of a revival for the rest of his songbook.

“I don’t think (the interest) is out there,” Gordon said. “But maybe there is a revival in me.”