She’s Got High Hopes
Tita is in. The widow of the famed lyricist Sammy Cahn is at the door of her Beverly Hills mini-manse. On the phone as she greets a guest while directing an offstage servant: “Mahogany,” she bellows, arms waving, “some water for our visitor.”
The Cahn house is behind electric gates just steps from Rodeo Drive, and from the homes of other famous-name wives and widows who’ve matured along with the city, which is still Old Hollywood’s boudoir belt.
Today Tita is--for lack of a better word--working. This is nothing she’s been known for. In fact, any fame she garnered in her 22-year marriage was as a hostess, a fact well-documented in gossip columns on both coasts.
“She still gives great parties,” says novelist Jackie Collins, who lives a few streets away. “It’s like a salon, with fascinating people and conversation. Michael Feinstein will play the piano, Sean Connery starts to sing, Tony Danza joins in. She’s a fabulous, interesting character.”
“Jackie has no idea what I really do,” Tita insists. “Nobody knows. They all think I’m at leisure because I inherited Sammy’s money.” Which she did. But when Cahn died at 80 in 1993, he unwittingly left her a set of options he never would have offered while he was living. She has seized them, with the goal of enhancing his legacy--and her bottom line. In the process, she has caused some music industry jaws to drop.
Recently, for example, she moved her husband’s valuable body of work from a large international firm, Warner/Chappell, where her husband had placed it, to the newer, more Tita-friendly DreamWorks group. She calls it a “traumatic” decision. In fact, all decisions she makes still amaze her, she says, because in life, Sammy never let her be involved in his affairs.
To be blunt, which Tita is, “Sammy was a real chauvinist.” Not only wouldn’t he have let her take a job if she’d wanted one (which she didn’t), he didn’t even allow dissent about daily minutiae. “He’d say, ‘If you want to pick up the tab for our lifestyle, I would be happy to go where you want to go, see the people you want to see, and say yes dear, no dear all day long.’”
That was perfectly OK with her, Tita says. She’d never known another way. “I was an Italian girl from the Bronx who grew up thinking this was the way it’s supposed to be. Sammy was 25 years older, so he was even more that way. If the guy pays for everything, why shouldn’t the wife be compliant?”
Tita glides into what was once her husband’s den (her supple stride the result of four yoga classes per week, among other ritual workouts). It is a cozy room with four Oscars on a small table and a huge mahogany desk, which was once his command post and has now become hers. Phones to her right, along with every accouterment she needs to conduct the job she has given herself. And that, quite simply, is to act as CEO for his valuable body of work, to burnish its luster and currency wherever, whenever and with whomever she can. Which is why she’s decided to talk to the press.
“Don’t get me wrong about Sammy,” she says. “We were crazy in love most of the time.” Except when they got divorced halfway into the marriage. “He thought I was spoiled and bratty, which I probably was. So his business manager called and said, ‘My client wants an expeditious divorce.’” Tita gave him what he wanted, as she always did, she says. “But then I got what I wanted, which was to get him back again.”
They dated awhile, she moved back in but wouldn’t marry him because “I was getting this huge amount of alimony. Sammy would take me to dinner, look at my plate and say, ‘I’m paying twice for this.’ His sense of humor was great. It was a wonderful time in our lives. We got to know each other better than ever.” They soon remarried.
Sammy took care of his business, and she took care of him--and of their homes in New York and L.A., and the nonstop social life that comes with a talented, charismatic guy who was Frank Sinatra’s favorite songwriter. (When he was in his 60s Cahn was voted “best new talent on Broadway” for a show he wrote and performed featuring his songs. “He was a firecracker until the end,” Tita says. “We’d go to a party and I’d say, sweetheart, let’s go over there where the action is. He’d say, ‘Honey, just stand right here and watch the action come to us.’ And it always did.”
In addition to the usual assets left by wealthy men, Cahn’s wife fell heir to what she calls full control of, and 100% of the income from the copyrights for his songs, considered to be one of the five top “standard” catalogs in the world. Songs so entwined in the fabric of national memory that they float full-blown into mind when just a few bars are sung. “Come Fly With Me,” “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is),” “Love and Marriage,” “It’s Magic,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “High Hopes,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” to name a few of the hundreds he wrote.
Tita emerged from a period of grief and did some “unproductive” things, only to realize that although she could “easily not work for the rest of my life,” she wanted to work--for Sammy. She would renew her vows, in a sense, the third time around.
“It took a few years to understand that need in myself,” she says. For the first few years after Sammy’s death, things were taken care of by people who’d worked with him for years. But she received phone calls regularly from folks who said they wanted to administer Sammy’s catalog, or buy it outright. Some were like ambulance chasers, she admits, sniffing the scent of profits if they could persuade the grieving, naive widow to sign on a dotted line. They had no idea who they were dealing with, she says with a hearty laugh.
She was listening and learning, from the good folks and even from the con men. “I began to assimilate what I’d heard, to evaluate, to realize there were things I could do that needed to be done.” She finally took action.
Her first triumph, she says, was to help create a new three-disc promotional album of Sammy’s greatest work (written with Saul Chaplin, Jule Styne, Nicholas Brodszky, James Van Heusen and others) as performed by dozens of top artists through the years. Such discs are not for sale to the public, she explains, because they include so many artists who recorded for so many companies that it would be impossible to make deals with them all. So she sends it only to those who might perform or use Cahn songs on radio, TV, in theater or other commercial venues. Cahn’s previous promotional album--the equivalent of an artist’s portfolio--was on 33 rpm records at the time. “I went to Warner/Chappell, which administered his music deals and royalties, and said we should make some changes and put Sammy’s album on CD. I chose what songs, what artists--I plowed through mountains of material, listening to different versions of his songs, and saying, ‘Let’s put Peggy Lee in this one, let’s do Frank [Sinatra] for that.’
“Now it’s a wonderful boxed set, which I sent out last November and got incredible, unexpected response. Notes and phone calls from people like Sydney Pollack, Bob Evans, Ron Meyer at Universal, Sumner Redstone, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone. Everybody says the same thing: These songs are part of the American landscape.”
She pauses as Mahogany delivers drinks in stemmed glasses on a silver tray. The phone has rung nonstop in the den, interrupting Tita’s openhearted interview. “No, I can’t make it tomorrow,” she tells one friend. “It’s my birthday, and I’ll be with Irwin and Margo Winkler and Jimmy Woods.” (Winkler’s the Oscar-winning film producer; Woods is the actor.)
Tita, who says friends always knew she was “smart and funny,” soon realized her talents had a wider application. “When Sammy was around, I never let my smarts show. I thought it was not girlie, not feminine, that men wouldn’t like you if you seemed capable. When he died, I wanted to do right by him and his songs. And an amazing thing happened. The things I’d liked least about myself were things that came to the fore. I didn’t have to pretend they weren’t there any more. I liked who I was, I liked that Sammy left me in charge, I liked sitting in a roomful of men and making the decisions. As unhappy as I was, I had a goal--to keep his image vital, so his songs don’t just become the brilliant work of a bygone poet. Without me, people would be dealing with a nameless, faceless estate.”
Many thousands, if not millions, have already heard Tita in the performing phase of her new job. She started making herself available for TV shows, such as Larry King’s, and for late-night radio shows around the world, on which DJs and hosts play Cahn’s songs (from the new demo album), and Tita talks her colorful talk. “It’s fun, and audiences seem to love it.”
She began investigating possible new uses for her husband’s work, much of which she says is as vital as anything around. This may sound like a stretch, because Cahn’s work predates and has little in common with contemporary pop music, but Michael Feinstein, the concert and cabaret vocalist who co-owns Feinstein’s at the Regency in New York, says Cahn’s lyrics have “as much relevance as Beethoven or Shakespeare. Great art transcends the time in which it was created. In fact, I’m always singing Cahn’s songs. My new album has one of the first great torch songs he wrote for Sinatra, with Jule Styne, “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.”
(Since Cahn’s death, Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, Gloria Estefan, Diana Krall, and Harry Connick Jr. have recorded Cahn songs, she says. And in England, Robbie Williams’ new hit album features Cahn’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.”)
Tita says she knew, after Cahn’s will was read, that she’d have some soul-searching to do about how she would carry out “this tremendous gift and responsibility that he left in my care.”
“I’d started listening and fretting the day I was put in charge.” She could do nothing, sell the catalog outright or maybe change publishers. “Warner’s is the biggest. They were doing right by me, administering and making deals. But there were some great guys at DreamWorks whom I’d known through the years. Chuck Kaye, who had been at Warner/Chappell, Dave Geffen and Mo Ostin, (head of DreamWorks records). I felt comfortable there.” Still, she says, it was a difficult tie to sever. “It became like a divorce--a messy one at that. At first, when I tried to talk to them, they said things like, ‘Don’t worry honey, we’re taking care of everything.’ Can you imagine? I’m still being called honey and I’m 63 years old? They didn’t want the little woman to interfere.”
As things heated up, she says, “they literally stomped their feet and tried to bully me, telling me I was disloyal, that I could never come back if I left. It should have been strictly a business thing. It wound up to be very personal and emotional, with people not speaking to me. Literally turning away when they see me in a restaurant. That’s still going on. Would they bully Burt Bacharach like that? Or is it just ‘cause I’m a woman?”
The business of administering a catalog such as Cahn’s is a byzantine legal and financial specialty that no layman is equipped to handle. Deals are made for each song’s use in radio, TV, films, theaters, malls, restaurants, live performance, commercials, etc., around the world. Each deal involves determining and collecting royalties based upon legalities specific to that kind of use and upon fractional percentages of royalties that must be shared among lyricist, composer, music publisher, etc. “Even Sammy couldn’t have known if he was getting accurate accounts and the best deals possible,” Tita says. She certainly didn’t pretend to be able to figure it out. She chose DreamWorks and Cherry Lane.
A spokesman at Warner/Chappell, who did not want his name used, says, “It is not unusual for catalogs to move. What was unusual is that Sammy had been a friend for so many years, there was a very close relationship and this move was certainly not expected. But his catalog is not that big, not huge in comparison with George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe or Stephen Sondheim, all of whose work we represent.”
Tita is livid when she hears his remarks. “He said, ‘Not that big?’” she screeches, practically coming through the phone. “Well, lemme tell you, if it’s not so big, then why did they try so hard to keep me? I know three catalogs larger than ours. The Gershwin brothers, because they own words and music. Irving Berlin, who owns words, music and publishing. And Cole Porter ... “ She stops, catches her breath and laughs. “You see now how protective I am of Sammy. He got a really hard worker and good advocate when he left me in charge.”
Tita is singing now. Snippets from her husband’s “amazing range of lyrics” tumble out in the throaty warble of a born chanteuse. She is trying to convey the versatility of her husband’s talent. “Can you imagine that one man wrote ‘Come Fly With Me’ and ‘Be My Love?’” (popularized by Mario Lanza in the ‘50s). To another caller, she gives the go-ahead for a demo tape of music written by Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen for the 1955 live TV production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” It starred Frank Sinatra as narrator, with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. “There’s no cast album for that show, for lack of a better term,” she says. “So I’ve taken the score from the TV tape, which was full of crackling and noise, and had it enhanced. Then I will have a soundtrack to take to a producer and say, ‘What do you think? Do you want to do a Broadway production of this?’” Cahn won an Emmy for “Love and Marriage,” one of about a dozen songs written for that TV show. (The tune later became the theme for “Married ... With Children.”) At this point, Tita is singing the title song to illustrate just how wonderful it is.
She will leave in two days, she says, for a monthlong business trip to New York, London and Milan, Italy. In New York, she’ll set up more radio and TV interviews, meet with Broadway producers and people such as Robert Osborne, a host on Turner Classic Movies network, “who might do a tribute to Sammy on his birthday” in June. With her friend Tim Rice, she’ll check out a Broadway show about the rock ‘n’ roll group Queen.
She seems to have memorized a calendar of meetings in three countries and two continents, much as she has memorized the phone number of Claridge’s in London, where she’s stayed for 20 years and where she’ll meet with people such as Mike Parkinson from the BBC, who may do a Sunday afternoon show on Sammy with Tita.
Tita walks her guest to the door with a final admonition: “I hope you will convey the spirit of great love and fun we shared between us. We were totally crazy about each other. We never said mean things to each other. The worst he ever said when I was carrying on was: ‘If you are smart, you will desist.’ Isn’t that great? It used to break me up. It still does.”