‘Moon’ Struck

Savannah, Ga., is a grand old Southern city, resolutely looking inward, its greenery-fringed squares filled with elegant houses and stately facades.

But John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” describes a darker world behind the Spanish moss-decked live oak trees and the heavy evening mists. The Savannah of his best-selling 1994 book is home to an intriguing gallery of eccentrics, rogues and slightly off-center society types whose sometimes murderous interaction mirrors the shadowy life beneath the city’s enchanting exterior.

“The tourists would leave Savannah in a few hours,” writes Berendt, “enchanted by the elegance of this romantic garden city but none the wiser about the secrets that lay within the innermost glades of its secluded bower.”

The characters who saunter through Berendt’s compelling chapters are, to say the least, colorful. Minerva, a voodoo priestess, is one; Lady Chablis, a black drag queen, is another. There’s a recluse with a powerful bottle of poison, a redneck stud and an elderly porter who sings the “Hallelujah” chorus while walking an imaginary dog.

And another important “hovering presence over the book,” Berendt says, is songwriter Johnny Mercer.

Johnny Mercer? For many, the name’s familiar, but the game is vague.

Consider this: Mercer is the guy who wrote the words for such lighthearted songs as “Accentuate the Positive,” “Lazybones,” “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” and “G.I. Jive,” as well as such romantic classics as “Autumn Leaves,” “Charade,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Fools Rush In,” “Moon River,” “One for My Baby,” “Skylark” and ‘That Old Black Magic.” And that’s just a brief, random listing of the tunes for which Mercer provided lyrics to music by, among others, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Henry Mancini, Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren . . . and, let’s not forget, Johnny Mercer.

Mercer won four Academy Awards for his lyrics, two with Mancini (“Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the title song for “Days of Wine and Roses”), one with Warren (“On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” from “The Harvey Girls”) and one with Carmichael (“In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” from “Here Comes the Groom”). He was a director of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, wrote or co-wrote more than 1,000 numbers and was the co-founder of Capitol Records.

But why the connection between the apparently lighthearted Mercer and the dark-toned “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”?

In part because Mercer was a native of Savannah, still recognized--20 years after his death in June 1976--as one of its most illustrious figures.

“A tidal creek named Moon River [renamed in Mercer’s honor after he won his Academy Award for the song] meanders within sight of the summer house he used to live in,” Berendt explains. “Several of the real-life characters in the book were friends of Mercer’s. Finally, the book’s main event--a murder--actually happened in 1981 in Mercer House, a magnificent Victorian mansion built by Mercer’s great-grandfather.”

There’s no doubt about Mercer’s deep attachment to Savannah, his hometown, and to the South, his home territory, both of which he insisted upon visiting annually, even during the decades in which he lived in Los Angeles.

“Pardon My Southern Accent” was his signature song, and he continued to celebrate his heritage for the next four decades whenever he wrote about “meadowlarks” and “nightingales,” “winding streams,” “shadowy lanes” and clouds that were “cotton blossoms in a field of blue.”

Because of his intimate association with Savannah, because of the quintessential Southern-ness that remained part of his character even during the years when he was a Hollywood insider and a successful businessman, the association of Mercer with “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” works. The South has always had contradictory facets of darkness and light, as did Mercer, whose darker songs provided the perfect reflection to the shadowy inner world that courses through Berendt’s book.

Mercer’s songs are the centerpiece for a concert version of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” which is touring Southern California (it will be performed tonight at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater). The production juxtaposes passages from the book with carefully chosen Mercer songs. And the emotional contrasts--sometimes confrontational, sometimes indirect--between Berendt’s pithy text and the multilayered Mercer lyrics are what gives the show its special panache.

The concert version of “Midnight” features singers Margaret Whiting, Julius LaRosa and John Pizzarelli; actors Claiborne Cary and Carrie Nye; and jazz players Warren Vache on cornet and Joe Temperly on clarinet and saxophone. Berendt will participate in some of the readings, and two performers who play prominent roles in his book--Lady Chablis and Emma Kelly, “The Lady of 6,000 Songs” (a nickname bestowed upon her by Mercer)--are also featured.

For Whiting, the preparation and participation in the performances have given her an opportunity to recall a long, fruitful association with Mercer, who was, for her, a “mentor and a dear friend.”

“I was 7 when I first saw Johnny,” she recalls. “He was about to start writing with my father [songwriter Richard Whiting], and they were on the way to a party. So I sang for them--my father’s song ‘My Ideal.’ Johnny called me aside and said, ‘I want to give you two words of advice: Grow up.’ From that moment on, he was on my shoulder, my good-luck piece.”

Mercer’s advice to young Whiting--that she needed to gain more maturity before singing songs such as “My Ideal”--was an extension of the pressure that was placed upon him to grow up quickly when he was still a teenager. Mercer, who was born in Savannah on Nov. 18, 1909, was obliged to drop out of school when his father’s real estate business failed in 1927. Moving to New York in 1928, he worked bit parts as an actor until a song of his was accepted for “The Garrick Gaieties of 1930” (where he also met dancer Ginger Meehan, whom he later married). Shortly thereafter, he replaced Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys vocal trio as a singer with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. And in 1933, writing with Hoagy Carmichael, he had his first hit: “Lazybones.”

Settling in Hollywood, he began to work with the best songwriters of the period--among them Arlen, Whiting, Warren, Kern and Jimmy Van Heusen. His success escalating, he wrote for and appeared in numerous films, and in 1942 his financial accomplishments allowed him to become a co-founder of Capitol Records, which initially was a small company but grew to become a giant in the industry.

“I can remember exactly when that happened,” Whiting says. “One day, Harold Arlen, [bandleader] Bobby Sherwood and I were going around the golf course with Johnny and he said, ‘You know, I’m going to start a record company. And Maggie’s going to be the first singer, we’re going to do your songs, Harold, and, Bobby, you’re going to be one of the bandleaders.’ ”

Mercer kept his word, signing Whiting but making her wait more than a year before releasing a record.

“He had been looking for a song for me for a long time for my first record,” she explains. “But when he picked ‘My Ideal,’ I said, ‘But it’s my father’s song. And Sinatra’s sung it. And Maurice Chevalier.’ But he said, ‘You’re going to sing it.’ And I did.”

Other songs followed.

“When Johnny and Harold Arlen did the film musical ‘Star Spangled Rhythm,’ ” Whiting recalls, “they came to see me and played ‘Black Magic’ for me. I sang it, and they said, ‘Can you do it?’ I laughed and said, ‘Can I do it? Are you kidding?’ And I recorded it. It was a very big hit for me, and of course since then it’s been a hit for many people.”

“Come Rain or Come Shine,” another Mercer hit for Whiting, came out of the stage musical “St. Louis Woman.”

“In 1945,” she says, “he called me when I was in New York and said, ‘We have this song in mind for you, and we want you to be the first to record it.’ He sent it to me and said I should learn it backwards and forwards.

“When we went into the studio to record the song, I knew it so well that in the last line, I sang it with that little blues phrase on the end--’Come rain or come shi-i-ine’--instead of the way it was written. Johnny came running out of the booth and said, ‘What was that?’ But Harold said, ‘Leave her alone. That’s the way I should have written it.’ ”

Mercer’s facility with lyric writing was legendary. Berendt points out what he describes as “dazzling verbal dexterity” in rhymes such as “aurora borealis,” “red and ruby chalice” and “alabaster palace” (from “Midnight Sun”).

“In addition to that,” Berendt adds, “he was technically ingenious. You can see it in lines from ‘Day In, Day Out’: ‘When I awake I awaken with a tingle, one possibility in view, that possibility of maybe seeing you.’ ”

Although Mercer reportedly could spend a great deal of time working on a song, he also was famously capable of turning a number around in a remarkably short time.

“The composers used to call him ‘Cloud Boy’ for the way he worked,” Whiting recalls. “When he was working on the songs for ‘The Harvey Girls’ with Harry Warren, he asked Harry to play the song a couple of times, and then he said, ‘Do me a favor--come back at 2 o’clock,’ and threw himself down on a couch. When Harry came back, Johnny was still on the couch, so Harry figured he was asleep. But Johnny said, ‘Play the song again,’ and when Harry did, Johnny started singing the words he’d just written, ‘Down in O-hio where I come from. . . .’ And it was ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.’ ”

Mercer’s lyrics for Lionel Hampton’s “Midnight Sun” came in similarly rapid fashion.

“He was driving to Palm Springs when he heard the song on his car radio,” Whiting reports. “He stopped, went into a gas station and phoned the radio station to ask them to play the song again in a half an hour. Then he continues driving. They play the song again, and by the time he gets to Palm Springs, he has the lyrics. Amazing.”

Whiting once asked Mercer how he managed to come up with the words for “Days of Wine and Roses,” one of several hits written with Mancini. Mercer shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I just leaned against the wall, started thinking, and the whole song came to me in five minutes.”

Whiting, who heads the Mercer Foundation, a nonprofit corporation distributing contributions to charities and music-related ventures, came up with the original idea to combine Mercer’s songs with text excerpts from “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” viewing the program as an unusual way to celebrate the lyricist’s work.

“When the book came out,” she says, “I thought that it was a perfect setting for jazz and Johnny’s tunes. So we did it first in the Russian Tea Room, and then George Wein [producer of New York’s JVC Jazz Festival] said, ‘OK, we’ll do it at JVC,’ and now we’re taking it all around the country.”

Although the book has been a bestseller and a Clint Eastwood-directed movie version is expected to start filming next year, a presentation onstage is an unusual path for a novel.

“Books become movies and plays,” Berendt says. “But Wein told me that this is the first time a book has been turned into a jazz concert.”

Whiting’s husband, Jack Wrangler, came up with a script that links passages from the book with appropriate Mercer songs.

“Some of the choices,” Wrangler says, “were intended to be directly descriptive.”

A good example: An opening reading by Berendt that portrays the visual delights of Savannah is underscored with “Moon River.”

“With others,” Wrangler adds, “we tried to make an ironic connection. And since there’s so much to choose from in the Mercer lyrics, we had very little problem coming up with appropriate material.”

Another example: A reading in which the Lady Chablis is asked “What was your name before that?” and she sardonically replies “Frank” is underscored with “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” written with Warren.

Twenty years after his death from a brain tumor at the age of 66 (he died in Los Angeles but is buried in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery), Mercer may be coming back into his own. The upbeat, optimistic, whimsical and romantic lyrics so essential to his style--out of fashion for years--seem fashionable again, even fascinating to a younger generation of listeners.

He would undoubtedly have winked slyly at the stage production of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” with its atmospheric Savannah setting and its imaginative use of his songs. And in April, Whiting, Lesley Ann Warren and John Pizzarelli will star in “Dream,” a new Broadway musical based on Mercer’s material.

But it may have been Mercer himself, in his characteristically self-deprecating but essentially optimistic way, who had the best evaluation of his remarkable talent.

“You’d never know it,” he wrote in “One for My Baby,” “but, buddy, I’m a kind of poet.”

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* “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. Tonight at 7. (310) 825-2101.