Treva, my writing partner, and I hooked up after I came back from a year in Europe (more of this later).  In fact, over Christmas vacation we’d gone to Julius Monk’s new revue room (a boite, yes) to see a show called Take Five, which featured comic Ronny Graham, remembered from New Faces of ’52.  

The room was in a cellar on 51st street and sixth avenue, it was called Julius Monk’s Downstairs Room; five performers and a spinet on a tiny stage in the basement, and they were funny. And just when you thought the comedy had reached a peak, the show delivered a ballad –which held you in suspension until you could begin laughing again, refreshed by the pause. Julius had re-packaged intimate revue.  Ronny Graham came out with a joint and pretended to get stoned –marijuana was just gaining prominence (again) among ‘bopsters’  “-and don’t breathe in,” he wheezed, “it’s mine!” Jeanne Arnold sang about discovering love (or at least lust) in the supermarket:

            GRISTEDE’S

            WE MET AT GRISTEDE’S

            I WAS LOOKING FOR WHEATIES

            YOU WERE LOOKING FOR KIX

And there was another Bart Howard ballad, Perfect Stranger. Treva and I were enchanted, dazzled. God, we thought, if we could only get a piece of our material into one of these shows, what a coup that would be! How hip would we be then?!  We agonized and compared notes: which pieces would we select to present?  We decided to go down to 51st street, talk to Mr. Monk and make an appointment to show him our numbers.  We presented ourselves at the club one September evening and found Julius readily approachable. In fact, he played intermission piano at the spinet upstairs. As we came in the door, I recognized what he was playing, Rodgers & Hart’s Quiet Night.  Portia Nelson sang it on my Goddard Lieberson recording of On Your Toes. Oh, God please let him grant us an appointment.It felt as if we were seeking an audience with the Pope.

We were only partially prepared for Julius’ rococo manner of speech.  He was from Oxford, Mississippi, but seemed to believe he was from Oxford, England. We had heard some of his bizarre locutions: “Ladies and gentlemen,’ he would say, “Friars, Congregants and conceivably Elders. May ah direct yaw attention and applawse to our post-prandial prank, a prank for the shank, Take Fahve!” I waited till he was just getting up from the piano. “Mr Monk?”           He turned towards me without a smile, but with eyebrows quizzically raised.He was attired in a navy pinstripe suit, very elegant. He was, we knew, currently modeling for Hathaway shirts. He sported a British Colonel’s mustache, graying, as was his hair. “Yes?”  “I’m John Meyer and this is Treva Silverman. We’re writers, and we’ve written some numbers we’d like you to hear.” Now he smiled, displaying a set of uneven, yellowing teeth. “Well, how utterly charming, how positively Marie Antoinette of you.”  I had no idea what he meant, but he was moving towards the head of the stairwell which led to the cellar. He stretched out his arm, inviting us to follow him. We did.

It was a real basement. As I recall, the floor was stone, painted gray-blue. A platform had been set at one end, with a curtain drawn around it in a semi-circle. I could see the spinet behind the scrim, set down center. There were perhaps twenty half-dollar sized tables placed before the platform; people were drinking, smoking, chatting away. It was intermission.   Mr. Monk led us to the side of the stage. He pulled the scrim aside, creating an opening. “Well, mes enfants, the stage is yours.”  Treva and I stared at each other in horror. Could he mean…could he possibly mean…? “You mean…now?”  “Pourquoi pas?” said Mr. Monk with a wide smile. It never occurred to either of us to do anything but follow his request.  This was the chance we’d prayed for: you had to grab your opportunities when they appeared. Who knew when Mr. Monk would be receptive again?  We were twenty-one, we didn’t know enough to say No. But…there were people out there, the audience, we could see them just beyond the gossamer scrim. Wouldn’t they hear us?  Nonetheless, we spread our music sheets out on the piano, on top of the show’s score. I went first. I was so nervous that even now, I can hardly remember what I played. A couple of my Pheasant Under Glass songs, probably, like Chewgum Smith and Santa Claus is Welching This Year and a ballad, Carousel. I was careful to keep my voice low, away from the paying customers. This did NOT help my performance.

Then Treva went. As she was playing, I saw the some of the show’s cast  standing to the side, listening. Gerry Matthews and Ceil Cabot. They were smiling to themselves. Did they think it strange that Mr. Monk was auditioning new material in the middle of their performance?  Treva finished. The room’s ambient noise filtered back into our consciousness. We both looked at Mr. Monk. “Step into this area, won’t you, if it doesn’t strahk you as too much of a cul-de-sac”. Treva collected our music from the piano and together we followed Mr. Monk into a small area adjacent to the stage.  “Well, children,’ Mr. Monk began, “you are both obviously extremely gifted. Permit me to express mah deepest gratitude for your visit, impromptu as it may have been.  Ah’d be pleased if you could entertain the idea of coming to see me encore next year.”

In this manner, Julius gave us to understand that he didn’t want -couldn’t use- any of the songs he’d just heard. It has always been painful to me when my material is rejected, and my reaction to my humiliation is to scamper away immediately, to evade any sympathy and to stew in my own feelings of shame and disappointment.  But I was with Treva.  “Let’s go,” I whispered urgently. However, Mr. Monk was offering an invitation. “Would you enjoy staying and seeing our second act?” he queried. I didn’t wait for Treva (who would gladly have taken him up on it) to respond. “Thank you, Mr. Monk, some other time.’ I said, and headed for the stairwell.

Once outside on Sixth Avenue, I was overcome by a mix of anger and shame: I’d been forced to perform at a disadvantage, and then judged not good enough!  “Jesus, how could he put us on the spot like that–?”  “In front of everybody!” Treva cried. “Did you see the performers, trying to listen–?” “Oh, God. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to…Reubens.” Reuben’s, the great sandwich joint, was on East 58th street, a ten minute walk.

We settled into our booth, and we each ordered sandwiches. Treva got The Dorothy Kilgallen and I went for The Joey Adams. “And I’ll have a Dewar’s and water.”  said Treva.  “Yeah, a drink, that’s a good idea. I’ll have a glass of Cotes-du-Rhone.” A moment passed. “Is that what your folks drink, Dewar’s?”  “My sister, Corky. She graduated from rye and ginger. She said she’s getting to like the taste. Very grown up, she says. You know, I could tell he wasn’t responding. When you were doing the Santa Claus song–?” “Yeah?”             “His eyes kind of, like, clouded over.”  “And at one point I saw him put his head down.”   “And at one point he scratched his knee.”

I glanced down at the pile of music Treva had hurriedly snatched from            Mr. Monk’s piano. “Treva” I said, “did you write a song called Perfect Stranger?”Treva shook her head. “Unh unh.”  I picked up the sheet. The name on the song was Bart Howard, a name we both knew well enough, he’d written Walk-Up. Beneath it was a song called The Night the Hurricane Struck. By Bud McCreery. Oh, Jesus. It suddenly struck me–  “Treva, when you grabbed our music from the piano—“

“What?”   “Didn’t it feel heavy to you? Heavier than usual?”
“No. What is it?”
“We’ve just walked off with the music for the second act of Mr. Monk’s show.”  “Oh my god.” We broke into the kind of raucous laughter that starts big and gets bigger. “Oh my God, oh shit, Jesus Fucking Christ—“  I pounded the table. “And he wants us back next year!”  “Oh, sure, next year we’ll take the piano!” The drinks came, but we were half-way to the door, leaving a bill on the table.  Outside we hailed a cab and I had the agonizing duty of running into the club and throwing the music at the maitre d’: “I’m sorry, we ran off with this by mistake –it’s the music for the second act. Would you make sure Mr. Monk gets it?  And tell him we’re sorry. Thank you, thank you so much.”

I come from a line of Composer-Insulters, starting with my father, Herb, who harbored his own, thwarted composing ambitions. He grew up in an era when you sat around the piano after dinner singing, and he played a fair version of popular piano, which in those days -the 20’s and 30’s- meant songs from Broadway.  In prep school (Exeter) he even wrote a melody that became the minor standard I’m Yours when Johnny Green stole it. One afternoon, at a cocktail party given by his parents, Herb was seated near Jerome Kern, the man who wrote Showboat, who was demonstrating a few of his tunes at the keyboard. Herb, possessed by God-Knows-What competitive impulse, said to this icon of show-music, “Doesn’t Russell Bennet do a lot of your harmonies?” Bennett was Kern’s orchestrator. Kern didn’t respond, simply left the piano.

Pop would tell me this story, years later, and it must have had a profound effect because I repeated his behavior with Cole Porter. I’d been to see a Porter show, Silk Stockings (1954), at a matinee, and afterwards was leaving the theater with my pal Bobby Rosenblum, when, approaching Shubert alley, I saw Cole Porter, walking with a cane, shuffling his painful way towards the stage door. Jesus, Cole Porter! One of my idols. Since I’d discovered Rodgers & Hart at the age of thirteen, I’d been entranced by the world of show music -and Porter, of course, was probably the avatar of this universe. On an impulse, I approached the composer. “Mr. Porter,” I started. “I really enjoyed the show–” He actually placed his arm about my shoulder, perhaps to steady himself. “I’m happy you did, I worked very hard to make the songs appealing.” I adjusted my step to his, and then, dealing myself a hideously embarrassing memory for the rest of my life, I said to him, “But Mr. Porter…I wonder if you ever heard a Noel Coward song called Josephine.” In the show, Gretchen Wyler had sung a number about the Creole temptress who’d become Napoleon’s consort. It had closely approached the Coward number, in attitude and even some rhymes (‘chic’ and ‘Martinique’, for example). ” Porter stopped and looked at me. His face was impassive, a blank. “No,” he told me, “I never heard that song.” He smiled, almost paternally. He must have recognized that I was a misguided, brash kid simply trying to be provocative. “But Mister Coward and I,” he finished, “are very great friends.” With that, he vanished into the stage door.

In 1968 I was asked to play piano at a benefit for Eugene McCarthy, the Democrat who was fronting the liberal platform. It was a cocktail reception, given at a ball room in the St. Regis hotel. Robert Ryan was there, lending his considerable weight and presence. He was in town with the show Mr. President. I had the worm’s eye view, from the piano. At the height of the party who should appear but Harold Rome, perhaps the most politically committed of songwriters (along with maybe Yip Harburg). Treva and I used to ridicule Rome, claiming he only had to write one-third of a song because he used repetition so much, i.e. WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH YOU WERE HERE and FANNY, FANNY FANNY -also from the show Fanny, I HAVE TO/IHAVETO/IHAVE TO TELL YOU.

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Well, in true Rome fashion, he’d written a campaign song for McCarthy, and I couldn’t wait to hear the repetitions begin. He took the stage and proceeded to declaim his paean to the candidate. It went like this: AROUSE, AROUSE FOR WE MUST JUSTIFY HIM/THE COUNTRY’S CALLING, WILL WE ANSWER?

Well, I thought, he made two out of three. Arouse, arouse. He had bumped me from the piano and accompanied the actor Robert Loggia, who sang the lyric.  An odd choice of performer, not a singer but an actor. It was a Godawful song.

What they needed was a Jerry Herman-style, Hello Dolly rabble-rouser -and here was this grim, 30’s, Social Protest anthem that wasn’t going to galvanize anybody into anything. Anyway, thinking I’d have a story for Treva, I approached Rome afterwards. “Mr. Rome, it’s a great pleasure, I’m a songwriter myself, and I’ve always appreciated your technique of repeating a phrase -to kind of drive the point home. I wonder, though, if you’ve ever heard the story of the writer who was introduced to you and said, ‘Glad to meet you, Mister Rome, Mister Rome.” I was, of course, making this up, just to see how he’d react. Well, his reaction couldn’t have been more characteristic: first he said, “Ha ha.” Right after that he said, “Very funny, very funny.” And, though it’s anti-climactic, I must tell you what happened next -because it’s the truth. He proceeded to justify the concept of repetition (in lyrics) to me: “– I mean, see how important it’s always been,” he said. “Look at our folk music– I GAVE MY LOVE A CHERRY THAT HAD NO STONE/I GAVE MY LOVE A CHERRY THAT HAD NO STONE -and what about JIMMY CRACK CORN AND I DON’T CARE/JIMMY CRACK CORN AND I DON’T CARE…I left him humming his way out of the ballroom.