Back On Earth
Back On Earth
9/29/21 Cocoa Village Harbor
Susan’s Blue Mountain greeting card woke me just now with a happy birthday serenade from Michael Bolton, sincere and heartfelt as he sang my name. Okay, it was a tad creepy, and I loved it least as much as he pretended to love my bombastic rendition of his early hit “Baby, That’s What Love Is All About” in the rear seats of a Moscow tour bus. The Songwriters Summit of 1988 brought generations of American pop songwriters together (Mike Stoller, Cyndi, Lauper, Brenda Russell, Diane Warren and 20+ notables) for a week in the underhanded clutches of Igor Granov’s VAAP (Soviet ‘copyright’ agency) lounge lizards. And that’s another story I’ll tell you on another day.
Today at 5:05 am I turned 71, the exact age of Sammy Cahn when we met. I was a lowly intern at the American Guild of Authors and Composers (i.e., AGAC), subsequently rebranded The Songwriters Guild of America. Mr. Cahn pulled me out of the chorus line to be his personal chauffeur, the best driving job I ever had, and I’ve had many.
Sammy Cahn was always ready for the day, the appointment, and most of all the pitch. A playful lyricist who peppered conversations with rhyming couplets, Sammy never stopped plugging his wares as one of the foremost progenitors of the American Songbook. Sammy’s fans included Frank Sinatra, who recorded 89 of his collaborations.
By 1983 Sammy’s career had morphed into a nonstop series of tributes, retrospectives, honors (Songwriters Hall of Fame) and a peripatetic one-man show in New York, road show or your living room. Sammy lived to create and share. He had money - lots of it - but I don’t believe that was anything but a ticket to the big show. Discouraged from playing violin by a strict father, Sammy switched to piano to acquire the language of success: Kid from Lower East Side makes good, runs with the Rat Pack.
Taking me under his wing for one short summer, he introduced me to his friends about town. At the Friars Club we met them all; Maxine Andrews, Milton Berle, Hal Kanter and dear ‘Saulie’ Chaplin, with whom he’d moved to LA in 1940. We would start each day ten minutes earlier than scheduled at his home in the flats of Beverly Hills, lighting out for daily rounds in a finely-tuned custom black Chrysler LeBaron convertible. Slow days were filled with senior medical appointments; livelier days with radio and press interviews he'd arranged to keep his name in the game. On the “Desert Island Discs” radio show he named his all-time favorite record, "I Cover The Waterfront” by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman. That same night he introduced me to Johnny Green.
Weekdays often ended the same way. At 4:00 pm, we’d pull up to the valet at Hillcrest Country Club, make a bee line to the comedians round table near the entrance on Pico Boulevard, where Berle, Chaplin, Kanter, Steve Lawrence, Mel Torme’ and a rotating cast of luminaries regaled the toughest audience in town with unprintable material they could never use on TV.
In that pungent haze of cigar smoke you might spot George Burns playing his daily bridge game, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Henny Youngman, Alan King or any number of Hollywood's brightest comedy minds of yesteryear working the room, trying out new material long past its shelf life. If you were caught being distracted by sheer celebrity, Uncle Miltie was ready to pounce on your faux pas. "Are we boring you, sir”? In all of our afternoons at Hillcrest, I never saw Sammy or anyone at the comedians round table order a cocktail. Cigars and coffee were enough to fuel this minyan into uncontrolled fits of delight. The irreverent ghost of Groucho Marx hovered over that place.
Back on earth, I was being tested the entire time for my abilities both behind the wheel and for getting Sammy safely home each day. Two months passed and I was given a thumbs-up by the power behind the Sammy Cahn throne. One day, Sammy’s wife Tita allowed us a road trip. Sammy had produced hits with many greats: Chaplin, Johnny Burke and Jule Styne, but he missed his most successful collaborator, Jimmy Van Heusen.
A day trip to Jimmy's Rancho Mirage compound was approved. As we headed East on Interstate 10, Sammy unspooled the escapades he’d witnessed as a bonafide founding member of the Rat Pack. I say witnessed because Sammy was the lyricist, a contributing raconteur, but never, ever a participant in the kind of shenanigans triggered by Van Heusen. That he was Sinatra’s role model should tell you something about Jimmy, born Edwin Chester Babcock in 1913 in Syracuse. He was Belushi before Belushi, and his choices had cost him his health, suffering the first of two major strokes in 1980.
On the long ride through Banning Pass, I politely questioned Sammy further about his son Steve Kahn, whose jazzy music I had first come to know before I knew of his lineage. “We have our differences” was almost all I heard from Sammy on the subject.
“Still”?
”We’re working things out.”
Sammy went silent, staring out the shotgun window. I gulped and redirected, addressing the moment in many a songwriter’s career when they saw the Beatles coming.
“How do you feel about Lennon and McCartney’s stuff”?
“Best thing going. Wonderful material. I play it at parties, and a lot of newer things; lots of talent out there. It’s like the 40’s again”.
We arrived at Jimmy and Bobbe Van Heusens’ home to find Jimmy in a wheelchair, unable to speak or communicate with anything but a pained smile to acknowledge Sammy's presence. Glory days gone forever, it was too late to reminisce. Sammy said not a word on the drive back to Beverly Hills. Tita took one look at us at the front door as if to say "You can never go home again, boys."
Back on earth it’s my birthday. Today we’ll steam into the oldest city in the contiguous United States to search for the Fountain of Youth