The Dapper Wolf

Richard M. Sudhalter begins this invaluable book with the memory of meeting two college juniors, female and blond, on a United flight. You see, these kids don’t know who Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981) was, even though Sudhalter has just told them that work on Carmichael is dominating his life.

It doesn’t matter what Sudhalter looks like; just evoking Carmichael’s name--for those who knew who he was--summons up the lazy stare, the bravura deadpan teasing, the looking the girls over. It’s the way he eyes Lauren Bacall in “To Have and Have Not” after she’s asked him about the song he’s playing, and he comes back with: “Did you say something?” Bacall, 19, tawny and untamed. And Carmichael sitting at that upright, playing a guy named Cricket, with a match in his mouth, 45 or so, and catnip all the way home. No wonder Humphrey Bogart worried once he saw how seriously this novice was approaching the movie without ever losing his sultry cool: “Did you say something?” he asks, instead of signing away his soul, his songs and the mineral rights of Indiana just to look at her.

What I mean is, if you “get” Carmichael, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the wistful, dreamy songs, “Star Dust,” “Skylark,” “One Morning in May,” “Rockin’ Chair” and “Lazybones.” If you take one look at his sly act--sitting at a piano in the corner of life’s cafe-cabaret, cool, collected and canny if talked to, picking out some back-country tune that keeps slipping closer to jazz--then you’re hooked. That Hoagy Carmichael is an icon of style, not just a provider of music, but somewhere between Feste and the Fool, a sublime, benign attendant to the action. Indeed, after “To Have and Have Not,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “Young Man With a Horn,” how did anyone ever make a movie again without Carmichael at a piano straddling that soft line where the light meets the shadows?

Yes, he was a songwriter too, with an ease, a completeness and a presence that just about every songwriter since has envied. Don’t think I’m putting him down in ranking the songwriting second, and I haven’t even mentioned the best song yet. But try forgetting that lean, taut face, the horny eyes, the suave, rustic voice and the absolute aplomb of just being there, doodling, noodling, coaxing some shy cat of melody out of the keys. But for Carmichael, we might not have the classic Sinatra pose of the ‘50s, the one more for the road.

Nevertheless, there are United flights flying the friendly skies, loaded with kids who don’t know the song titles and who can barely summon up the memory of their mother humming “Two Sleepy People” or some similar tune, some moment after their parents made love. All the more reason to appreciate Sudhalter’s “Stardust Melody.”

Surprisingly, there has been no objective book on Carmichael before. Carmichael himself published two memoirs, “The Stardust Road” (1946) and “Sometimes I Wonder” (1965), but Sudhalter is a dedicated researcher who has to admit that his hero sometimes made a few things up, tricked cold facts into a wry story and generally saw himself in a smoky light akin to that of movies. He was a character.

Sudhalter doesn’t let the gaps and cracks of history spoil his fondness. That’s fair enough, even if it leads to one serious shortcoming that I’ll address. But as an author, he is also a musician (a trumpet player) and the coauthor of a biography of Bix Beiderbecke. Though he stresses this point a few times too many, Sudhalter is very good on the impact of the early friendship between Bix and Hoagy (cut short by Bix’s death in 1931) and, above all, on the inspiration left by the ill-fated crystal cornet player whose melodic and harmonic inventions were as startling as Louis Armstrong’s but who lacked the vitality or the racial need to be the great jazz trumpeter of that day.

Sudhalter’s credentials mean that the tracking of Carmichael’s songwriting is in reliable hands. Still, Carmichael was not just a songwriter, but also an actor or storyteller in his great songs. He was candid about his own vocal limits (but sure of their charm). He sometimes elected to speak the lyrics as much as sing them. And in his most characteristic work, we feel we are listening to a yarn. For that reason alone, Sudhalter’s strictly musical exegeses can be a little chilly or off-putting. For instance, I can think of warmer ways of elaborating on “Georgia on My Mind” than this:

“The melody, as with all else Carmichael has written to date, spills off the page like a hot chorus--a Bix chorus. Not only is the ‘correlated’ phrasing of the first eight bars readily apparent, but the half-step downward shift from tonic to E7 in bar 5 is a particularly subtle move.”

Of course, writing about music for the untrained is hard, and Sudhalter has every reason to quote so much musical notation. Still, while something of the innate Carmichael is missing, most keen readers may do as I did: read with Carmichael music playing at the same time.

Sudhalter is far more successful at tracing Carmichael’s role as lyricist. By habit, Carmichael employed lyric writers, usually of a very high order. Yet he was plainly a laconic guy who loved and felt words deeply. By careful examination of composition notes, Sudhalter has discovered how regularly Carmichael nagged away at his lyricists and got his own stuff into the songs. Nowhere is that truer than with “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (1939), a song on which Carmichael is the credited lyricist, though he acknowledged his debt to a poem found in an old magazine. The last lines of that song, with poise shuddering at its own wound, make one of the most piercing moments in popular song:

I get along without you very well,

Of course I do.

Except perhaps in spring--

But I should never think of spring,

For that would surely break my heart in two.

But here’s the larger dilemma with “Stardust Melody.” Those lines, that song (the best, but characteristic), come from a tough, tragic, artistic intelligence. It may be that, most of the time, Carmichael was resolved to mask that persona from the world, his family and even from himself. Sudhalter is good at recording the life of the poor Bloomington boy who became a Hoosier character, the piano player at the arty Book Nook and a halfhearted law student who sooner or later was going to settle for the perilous life of songwriter. And maybe that Indiana sprite was so expert at concealing himself that the biographer must keep bumping against locked doors.

So we hear about a “storybook” marriage that suddenly ends. But just as that romance has gone unexplored or unfelt, it’s hard to fathom the breakup. Yet the songs and the attitudinizing of the man are intensely seductive. You only have to look at Carmichael to feel a sexual atmosphere. There was an affair with the English actress Jean Simmons, but she has not helped with the book and that’s a big loss.

Equally, we gather that Carmichael was extremely tight with money. He was likely to take you out to dinner but then split a steak with you. Such stories are sketchy, and the book is woefully short on the financial life of the career free-lancer. Every now and then, we realize how wealthy he was from song royalties, but the daily hardness of the miser and the unshakable Republican instincts (not unknown in Indiana, or much questioned) are missing.

The kid who loved “hot” jazz wasn’t often out of control. Sudhalter doesn’t underline such things as the Indiana band that played one of Carmichael’s first great tunes, “Washboard Blues” (1927): eight clean-cut white guys, most of them with center partings in their groomed hair. Carmichael liked black music, and sometimes heard it: “When those ‘dinges’ whipped that tune into a wild, almost blood-curdling shriek of weird harmony as they came into the last chorus, I got the spirit of jazz like a Congo medicine man. I wilted to the floor!”

I can believe that, yet I applaud Sudhalter’s sticking with a word like “dinges” because it reminds us of the definite racial barriers in the Indiana of Carmichael’s youth. He would be a friend of Louis Armstrong’s later (they both liked marijuana), but “Washboard Blues,” written in the character of a poor black woman, is pretty close to black-voice (akin to blackface).

Maybe Sudhalter is reluctant to explore such things, or is being kind to two sons who helped him a great deal on the book. Still, if you’re going to quote the music itself, then I’d like to know the bank balance that went with it and the details of liaisons with women who were lost the moment that dapper wolf asked them, “Did you say something?”

*

FROM ‘DON’T FORGET TO SAY NO, BABY’

By Hoagy Carmichael

Don’t forget to say no, baby, while I’m with your Uncle Sam.

I’ll be missing you so, baby, that’s the kind of guy I am.

The boys may call your number, but if they take you to tea,

Don’t be thrilling while I’m drilling,

Remember you belong to me.

Don’t forget to say no, baby, if they want a kiss goodnight ...

Just remember it’s no baby, if they want to hold you tight.

While I’m out to train don’t you entertain,

Remember you’re not the USO.

*

From “Reading Lyrics,” edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Pantheon: 706 pp., $39.50)