Fortuitously #5

 

On any list of the good things in life, those things we hold dear and which help ward off the darkness and evil that threatens to take over the world, I would have to include torch songs and film noirs, which if you think about it too closely seems a little illogical given the subject matter of these, but, oh, you know. And somehow one mentally brackets torch songs and film noirs, but should that really be the case? Well, while you are considering that, I will tell you about Film Noir, a 1989 record by the great jazz ballad singer Audrey Morris which, for me, is just about perfect.

Those with good memories may recall Ghosts of Midnight, an issue of Your Heart Out back in 2011 which was a celebration of the singers who recorded for the Bethlehem label, such as Audrey Morris, Helen Carr, Marilyn Moore, Betty Blake and, where this particular obsession started, the wonderful Chris Connor. And me being me, it makes my heart skip a beat that Lou Reed chose Chris’ recording of ‘When Sunny Gets Blue’ as one of his all-time favourites, which makes perfect sense, at least to someone who has long been convinced songs like ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ are among the greatest of torch songs.

Anyway, with Ghosts of Midnight, were there echoes of Jack’s Dharma Bums and the freight train known as the Midnight Ghost, the one where “you get on it at L.A. and nobody sees you till you get to San Francisco in the morning the thing flies so fast.”? I don’t think so, or at least not consciously. I suspect it was more a reference to the after-hours intimacy of performances in jazz clubs and the like, with a bit of a Jean Rhys feel. This edition actually started with Audrey Morris, and there is a reference to her Film Noir LP which “remained elusive”. But many years down the line I managed to get hold of a reasonably priced copy on CD, and it certainly lived up to the ‘idea’ of it I had in my rather too romantic mind.

The record is wonderfully stark, with just Audrey singing and accompanying herself on piano. I think it is the only one of the half-a-dozen LPs she released where this is the case, mirroring the way she performed in a host of legendary Chicago nightspots over the years. She made a couple of records in the mid-1950s, wonderful things that were helpfully put together on a CD by Fresh Sounds, but then there was a massive gap until she put out Afterthoughts in 1985, the first of three on her own Fancy Faire label. Film Noir was one of these and came out in 1989 then there was her final record, Round About, in 1998 when Audrey was 70.

On Round About she is accompanied by Joe Vito on piano and on violin Johnny Frigo who I associate with wonderful recordings by Lucy Reed and Helen Merrill back in the 1950s. Time plays tricks on us, and it is easy to forget that when Audrey recorded and put out Round About this was at the height of the Chicago Underground-era with Tortoise, Sea & Cake, and so on, all of whom are now veterans themselves and still sounding great in their way. I wonder if their paths ever crossed? I doubt it, but you never know. Imagine Audrey backed by Jeff Parker and Joshua Abrams!

James Gavin’s liner notes for Round About end with Audrey saying: “At this point I really feel like I’ve beaten the system. I never made a million dollars, but I was able to do exactly what I wanted. It’s a nice way to live.” And while, as far as I know, this was the last record Audrey made, she carried on performing. If you look on YouTube, you can see footage of an intimate performance by Audrey at Katerina’s in Chicago when she was well into her 80s. From a few years earlier there is a clip of her appearing at a tribute for her dear friend Oscar Peterson.

There is, by the way, a lovely story of how Audrey passed a demo of the Singers Unlimited's gorgeous recording of ‘The Fool on the Hill’ to Oscar who enthusiastically shared it with Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer at MPS who fell for the vocal ensemble’s magic instantly. Coincidentally or not, Gene Puerling, who formed the Hi-Lo’s and then Singers Unlimited, wrote the liner notes for Audrey’s Afterthoughts.

On a few of the exquisite tracks on Afterthoughts there are subtle saxophone colourations from Stu Genovese whom Audrey married in 1949. They were together for 54 years until his passing in 2003. Stu was a lucky man, as Audrey was strikingly beautiful. She could easily have been a film star herself, appearing in a nightclub scene, but wearing gowns and doing what she was told really wasn’t Audrey’s style. She was spectacularly stubborn and did things her way. Nevertheless, I am sure with a hint of mischief, on the cover of her Film Noir set there, alongside the obligatory ashtray, matches and cigarettes, stands an early photo of a voluptuous Audrey taken by the celebrated Chicago photographer Maurice Seymour, maybe with echoes of Chris Bailey’s immortal line in another lost torch song: “There is a photograph in a haunted room filled with memories that have gone too soon”

The sleeve notes for Film Noir are by Joel Siegel, the respected film critic who was at the time writing for Washington DC’s City Paper. He was a great aficionado of jazz vocalists. He also wrote the liner notes for Audrey’s Look At Me Now released on the often-valuable Audiophile label which provided opportunities for many jazz singers to record again in their twilight days. Look At Me is a celebration of singer-pianist-composers which was inspired by shows Audrey did at Eighty-Eight’s in Greenwich Village in November 1996. Audrey is on piano, accompanied by bass and drums, rather like on her debut 40-years earlier where she was backed by Johnny Pate on bass and Charles Walton barely there on percussion. That record, the exquisitely titled Bistro Ballads is one of my very favourite things, something I discovered back in the days when people were sharing lost recordings on their blogs.

According to Joel Siegel’s notes for Film Noir, Audrey was “an obsessive movie buff, and owner of one of the most comprehensive collections of sheet music.” He adds that “Audrey spent hundreds of hours compiling her repertoire for this album. Her videotape machine ran incessantly for over a year, capturing a filmography of film noir.” Certainly, her choice of songs suggests an in-depth knowledge of numbers featured in these old films, and one suspects her diligent research into the subject must have been great fun.

I guess there is a prevailing romantic idea of femme fatales in old film noirs singing torch songs in nightclubs, lost and oh so forlorn, rather like the selections on Film Noir originally sung on the screen by Lizabeth Scott in I Walk Alone and The Racket. Robert Mitchum is fantastic in the latter, by the way. But not all the choices on Film Noir fit that sort of scenario. Some are simply incidental music, on the jukebox or radio, and maybe best of all is ‘She’s Funny That Way’ in The Postman Always Rings Twice which an endearingly drunk Cecil Kellaway sings for his wife Lana Turner who doesn’t have a lot to smile about in the film. And plenty of the numbers Audrey sings are older compositions that fit in to the storyline rather than ones written specifically for a new film.

So, yeah, on this record there is plenty to amuse addicts of connectivity, those of us who look for patterns in things. For me, part of the fun is how it also links to that other part of a holy trinity of distractions, alongside torch songs and film noirs, namely the world of books and that genre without an easy appellation, the sort of suspense, mystery, crime, hardboiled, noir titles. I believe it was Barry Gifford at the Black Lizard salvage imprint which got going in the mid 1980s who really started using the term noir for a certain sort of novel. Barry’s noir scope took in titles by, among others, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford, and even Gertrude Stein as well as his own wonderfully eccentric Port Tropique.

Incidentally, when I was discovering and devouring Barry’s writing in the early years of the new Millennium a particular favourite was his Out Of The Past: Adventures in Film Noir, which was first published as The Devil Thumbs A Ride & Other Unforgettable Films in 1988. In true Gifford-style it is a collection of beautiful micro-essays on film noirs. And rather nicely a handful of the films Audrey sings songs from are among those Barry writes about: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, ‘Detour’, ‘Gun Crazy’, ‘Road House’ and ‘In A Lonely Place’. I suppose it is too much to hope that somehow one day Barry met Audrey and that they got chatting about their favourite film noirs. Well, they were both from Chicago, so you never know.

With Audrey’s Film Noir there are irresistible connections to two of my very favourite authors, Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes. The Fritz Lang film The Blue Gardenia was based on Vera’s 1952 novella The Gardenia, which reminds me of a quote from her autobiography where she talks about growing up in Chicago and how “gloves and gardenia made me a lady”. Audrey on her LP sings the title theme from The Blue Gardenia which Nat King Cole performs in the film. Interestingly it is the only song on the LP that was specifically written for a film using its title. Another song Nat sings also was recorded by Audrey for the LP, and that was Frank De Vol’s blues theme from Kiss Me Deadly, also known as ‘I’d Rather Have The Blues’. So, that’s two books by Vera Caspary which indirectly inspired classic torch songs, ‘Laura’ being the other one.

When I wrote about Vera Caspary at the start of last year I had an elusive memory of first seeing her name somewhere but couldn’t pin down where, then later in the year I reread Alexander Baron’s classic 1963 novel The Lowlife, the perfect companion to The Small World of Sammy Lee from the same year, which I remember buying when it appeared as part of the London Fiction series with an introduction by the then ubiquitous and, lest we forget, inspiring Iain Sinclair, again at the start of the new Millennium.

Sure enough, there was Harryboy Boas saying: “The three of us were on one of our Sunday morning walks. Vic and I were talking about books - we were both at that time searching out psychological thrillers at the library, the kind the Americans do well, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith and so on, and recommending them to each other.” So that was what Harry would lie on his bed reading, apart from his beloved Zola (with irresistible echoes of Robert Manton, there).

And then there’s Dorothy B. Hughes whose magnificently unsettling novel In A Lonely Place inspired the Nicholas Ray movie a few years later, memorably starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. There are striking differences between the book and the film, but that’s the way it goes. I’m not sure there was a song called ‘In A Lonely Place’ until Ian Curtis wrote the one New Order would record: “Someday we will die in your dreams”. The song that appears in the film is the old Ray Noble composition ‘I Hadn't Anyone Till You’. Hadda Brooks sings it exquisitely, and oh that look she gives Bogie when he has a temper tantrum. Audrey Morris’ recording of it is wonderful too.

Audrey’s Film Noir also features her recording of ‘Ace in the Hole’ which she dedicates to Gloria Grahame who so unforgettably performs it in a nightclub scene in Naked Alibi. This amazing clip can be seen in the film version from 2017 of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool which is, perhaps surprisingly, fairly faithful to the Peter Turner book that was so much a big, big part of the mid-to-late 1980s for me. I suppose I should try not to get too sidetracked here, but I was very taken at the time by the impossible glamour of this young, struggling actor falling in love with a legendary Hollywood actress. I guess it was also tied in to the M.E.S. “take an older lover” line. I don’t know. Now, reading it recently, I was just struck by Peter’s description of his family coping with Gloria’s end-of-life care, and how one can be torn apart by the devastation of witnessing at close quarters a loved one’s final days while feeling so utterly useless, exhausted and mad at the world.

It is interesting reading in the most recent edition Peter’s thoughts on the book 30 years on. I think he is right to say it seems Gloria is better known now. I’m not sure I really had any clear idea who she was when I first read the book, so I had no preconceptions about her and wasn’t aware of her glorious insolent, sullen, amused, aloof film noir appearances. But revisiting it I was struck how firmly certain passages or phrases had stuck in my mind, like how Gloria loathed right wing politics and politicians. And how, after a big bust-up, “unexpectedly, a few months after my return, I got a letter, just a short note: ‘Both Sartre and Camus said when they died that in this world there is only love that is important.’”  

It had apparently been a dream of Barbara Broccoli for a long, long time to make a film version, and despite my initial cynicism I have to say the director Paul McGuigan and colleagues made something pretty special and indeed something as cool as that ghost of a young man imagined. In the lead roles Annette Bening and Jamie Bell are excellent. I approve of Jamie’s ‘period drama’ attire, the crew neck jumpers, jeans, tennis shirts, and the old Arthur Daley-style velvet-collared overcoat, which seems correctly very early 1980s. And being shallow, the soundtrack is right up my street: Irma Thomas, Small Faces, Clarence Carter, the Velvets, Elvis Costello, José Feliciano doing ‘California Dreamin’’. I am not sure to what extent this reflects Peter Turner’s taste and memories or the director’s own predilections, but it works wonderfully for me.

Oddly I don’t remember much music in the book. As in the film, Elton’s ‘A Song For Guy’ appears as Gloria’s own particular favourite. And there is a scene in an afterhours Liverpool club where “two girls were shuffling around their handbags to the sound of Roberta Flack . . . ‘The first time ever I saw your face’.” Now there’s something that takes me right back: young ladies dancing with their handbags at their feet. That instantly makes me think of the great HL Ray and Flowers' ‘(Life) After Dark’. Have you seen the clip of them doing that at the horrorshow that was the first Futurama festival? Wow! Anyway, I can’t think of many more musical references in Peter’s love story.

Returning to the book it struck me how, in a way, Peter is sometimes self-effacing. Just take, for instance, how he mentions performing at the Liverpool Playhouse in a play about a vasectomy clinic but fails to mention it was Having A Ball, a new work by Alan Bleasdale. When the book was published Alan was quite big news and, again, a big part of the 1980s, for me, with Boys From The Blackstuff, Scully, No Surrender, The Monocled Mutineer. Indeed, if Peter Turner’s book had been filmed when it was first published you could pretty much guarantee Paul McGann would take the lead role. And then again, Peter mentions being in the 1979 film adaptation of The Tempest but without reference to the director being Derek Jarman and the cast including Toyah, Ken Campbell & co. Plenty of people would have been making a big song and dance about that.

Now we can cross-reference Peter’s book with Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame, the 1989 biography by Vincent Curcio, as I strongly suspect the film makers did. I steered clear of it for years, fearing the worst. While the title is rather misleading, the book itself is not as sensationalist as I expected. It is entertaining and very much a labour of love. I suspect a lot of thought went into the passage covering the very end of Gloria’s life, with her struggling to a hospital window to look down upon Greenwich Village one final time. For effect, Curcio adds lines from Baudelaire’s Recueillement, in French of course.

I still mentally link Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool to Michael Head without any evidence for doing so. If you look the two up on the Internet you just might end up reading a short story with music at its heart from 2006, part of a series named in honour of a wonderful Biff Bang Pow! song: “In my world of books and films where darkness comes too soon.” I guess it was simply thought association, listening a lot to Pale Fountains’ From Across The Kitchen Table at the time I first read the book. The funny thing is that the story mentions the song ‘Gloria’ by Hurrah! That makes perfect sense. It really is quite remarkable and eerie how perfectly the song fits the love affair of Peter Turner and Gloria Grahame.

Anyway, fans of Michael Head will appreciate that John Garfield and Ida Lupino are represented on the Audrey Morris Film Noir collection. John is there by way of his memorable roles in Body and Soul and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ida’s wonderful performance as a torch singer with attitude in Road House is celebrated by the inclusion of the song ‘Again’ which was written for the film. I guess out of all the 16 films that contribute to Film Noir it is Ida singing while playing the piano that would come closest to how one imagines Audrey was back in the day. Oh, to have the chance to see her on film when she was young.

In his liner notes Joel Siegel mentions that Audrey and her fellow singer Lurlean Hunter were ‘studied’ by the author Willard Motley when he was “creating the character of a doomed nightclub performer” for his 1958 story Let No Man Write My Epitaph. When it was filmed a couple of years later Ella Fitzgerald took on the role for the big screen which was a brave move as her character Flora is a heroin addict and having a tough time of it. I don’t know what her motivation was for taking on the part but maybe she was doing it for the friends she’d lost along the way. I don’t know.

It’s a strange old film, but I love it, being a sentimental old fool. I had no idea it even existed until I heard Audrey’s Film Noir LP where she closes proceedings with ‘Reach For Tomorrow’, one of three songs on the LP with words by Ned Washington. In the film Ella sings it in the background briefly, right near the end in a heartbreaking scene. If that doesn’t have you sobbing your heart out then, well, whatever.

The film has such a great cast, with Ella, Burl Ives, Shelley Winters, the spectacularly evil Ricardo Montelbano, plus James Darren and Jean Seberg as the star-crossed young lovers. Incidentally, Let No Man Write My Epitaph is not the only film on Audrey’s record that features a great singer moonlighting in a film noir. Hoagy Carmichael steals the show in Johnny Angel as the New Orleans cab driver Celestial O’Brien, singing his ‘Memphis in June’ along the way.

Let No Man Write My Epitaph is the sequel to Willard Motley’s earlier novel, Knock On Any Door, which was filmed by Nicholas Ray in 1949 with Humphrey Bogart excelling as a lawyer reconnecting with his roots while defending young hoodlum Nick Romano. I can vividly recall seeing this on TV when I was a kid and once again sobbing like an idiot. There really has never been any hope for me.

Ella’s studio version of ‘Reach For Tomorrow’ closes a record she released in 1960, Ella Fitzgerald Sings Songs from the Soundtrack of ‘Let No Man Write My Epitaph’. Later released on CD as The Intimate Ella, it features the three songs she performs in the film, including my beloved ‘Angel Eyes’ (“Excuse me while I disappear”), plus a carefully chosen selection of torch songs, including ‘Black Coffee’ and another number sung by Ida Lupino in Road House, ‘One For My Baby (and One More for the Road)’. I am no expert on Ella’s recordings, but this is such a beautiful record. It’s simply Ella and pianist Paul Smith and her singing is incredibly intimate and remarkably restrained. It feels like she is still in character as Flora, singing to herself, to save herself, in a dingy corner of a bar, among all the other lost souls. And it touches the soul in a way that a more emotive performance could not. A very special record.

On this LP Ella seems to deliver the sort of understated performance one imagines Audrey Morris gave when singing and playing live in the supper clubs. It reminds me of something Vincent Curcio touched on in Suicide Blonde. He refers to the director Peter James who worked with Gloria in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, and later at the Roundhouse in London. This was during the time she and Peter Turner were in love.

Curcio describes James as “possibly the most astute observer of her personality and mystique she was ever to encounter.” He quotes James as saying: “At those times she had an extraordinary ability to be natural, to enhance an effect without straining.” He goes on to quote another director, David Miller, who noted during the filming of Sudden Fear in 1952 that: “She always seemed to know how to reach without reaching, how to express without being overt.” I like that! You can apply it to Gloria’s acting, Audrey Morris’ singing, Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes’ writing, and so many of the things on my list of good things in life. I don’t think that’s coincidental.