http://www.steynonline.com/5684/ill-be-seeing-youI'll Be Seeing You
Steyn's Song of the Week
by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal
July 22, 2013
As the back-porch column in my local newspaper likes to say, lawdy lawdy, look who's forty (a very American rhyme, as I like to think of it). This Tuesday the world's most famous intern hits the big four-oh. No longer an intern, and no longer that famous, Monica Lewinsky has kept her head down in recent years: the fashion line of Monica handbags is gone, and the reality show went nowhere, and last I heard she was over in London finishing up a degree at the LSE. She has never married, so she remains as she was the day Bill Clinton first uttered her name - "that woman, Miss Lewinsky". Rather than dredge up all the stuff first reported by a then obscure website called the Drudge Report, I thought instead we'd pick some music for the occasion. And, happily, the Starr Report on President Clinton's crimes and misdemeanors provides plenty of guidance. For example, footnote 707, a letter from Monica to Bill:
When I was hiding out in your office, I noticed you had the new Sarah McLachlan CD. I have it, too, and it's wonderful. Whenever I listen to song #5 I think of you. That song and Billie Holiday's version of I'll Be Seeing You are guaranteed to put me to tears when it comes to you!
Many elderly philanderers will recognize the moment: The meaningless, commitment-free sex is great, the girlish giggle is charming (in small doses), but darn it, now she wants to know what kind of music you dig. I can't be the only busy executive who's found himself buzzing through to the outer office: "Miss Jones, I'm scheduled for sex with my intern this afternoon. Find out what ghastly caterwauling the young people are into these days and stick it on the iPod." Still, I was interested to discover why "song #5" made Monica think of Bill, not only because I like to stay on top of what cutting-edge adulterers are listening to but also because it's hard to imagine Bill and Monica having an "our song" song: for one thing, "fellatio" is tricky to rhyme (except with "Horatio," which is of little use unless you're writing an adultery number for Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton). In the event, the song is called "Do What You Have To Do", which suggests Monica was viewing her brief encounters with the shrewd worldliness of the old-school grandes horizontales. Except that, halfway through, Sarah McLachlan ominously adds:
Now have the sense to recognize
That I don't know how to let you go
I do what I have to do...
Oh, dear. For the kind of relationship Monica really had in mind, turn to her second choice, "I'll Be Seeing You", by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal. It was a big wartime hit, a kind of talisman for parted lovers, with a beguiling tune and a lyric that catalogues "all the old familiar places" where the memory lingers...
In that small café
The park across the way
The children's carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well...
Isn't that just like a girl? When the Oval Office bathroom is so much more convenient? The President of the United States was way too busy for chestnut trees and wishing wells. And yet "I'll Be Seeing You" was Bill and Monica's song.
Unbeknownst to Monica, it was also Bill and Hillary's song. At the 50th anniversary D-Day celebrations in England in 1994, it was "I'll Be Seeing You" that the band struck up as the President and First Lady walked away hand in hand. And, according to a 1997 interview he gave about his record collection, it's Bill's favorite song, even if there are no women to hand.
Well, why wouldn't it be? It's the song Johnny Carson asked Stevie Wonder to sing to him at the end of his 30-year run on "The Tonight Show". And a decade ago, when the Queen Mum died, I chanced to hear this as I was driving through the mountains in Vermont that week:
...I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll Be Seeing You
"That's Rosemary Clooney," announced the disc jockey. "Did you know that was the Queen Mother of England's favorite song?"
Well, no, I didn't. As far as I can tell, he got it from the New York tabloids, which reported that, in her recent London concerts, Liza Minnelli had sung it as a tribute to the Queen Mum because it was "one of her favorites". But I'm not surprised. It's a lot of people's favorite song - especially if you happened to find yourself on a railway platform in the early 1940s waving a loved one off to war. It's one of those tunes that's more than a hit, that somehow distills the mood of an era, as John Schlesinger understood when he used it in Yanks, his 1979 wartime romance starring young Richard Gere, over-sexed, overpaid and over here.
Schlesinger had it sung on the soundtrack not by Vera Lynn but by Anne Shelton, Britain's other "Forces' Sweetheart". I once asked Sammy Fain, the song's composer, which was his favorite recording, and he reeled off about 40 he enjoyed - country, big band, rhythm'n'blues. But, if you fell in love with it as a wartime ballad, you always hear it in the voices of the day, as the last dance under the glitterball, with some big-band canary up on the stage. A couple of years back, Nancy Franklin wrote a piece for The New Yorker insisting Jo Stafford's was the best version. Bing had the big hit with it, but the Tommy Dorsey band wasn't far behind, though it's Johnny Mince's clarinet rather than the young Sinatra's vocal that supplies the real wartime wistfulness.
Nevertheless, it's not a war song, not really. Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal wrote "I'll Be Seeing You" in 1938, for a Broadway show called Right This Way. The team had been together off and on for about a decade and had had a handful of hits, including "You Brouight A New Kind Of Love To Me" and one of those pop songs that's a perfect evocation of the late Twenties:
When I Take My Sugar To Tea
All the boys are jealous of me
So I never take her where the gang goes
When I Take My Sugar To Tea...
But for Right This Way, Fain and Kahal surpassed themselves, writing two terrific ballads, "I Can Dream, Can't I?" and "I'll Be Seeing You", both introduced by Tamara. If you're wondering "Tamara who?", well, just for the record, it was Tamara Drasin, but she was a big enough star to go uni-appellated, even when appearing with Bob Hope, Fay Templeton and Sidney Greenstreet in Kern and Hammerstein's Roberta. Right This Way is basic boy-meets-girl, but the boy's a foreign correspondent based in Paris and, when he's called back to the States, the girl's left behind. Hence the verse:
Cathedral bells were tolling and our hearts sang on;
Was it the spell of Paris or the April dawn?
Who knows if we shall meet again?
But when the morning chimes ring sweet again
I'll Be Seeing You
In all the old familiar places...
A surprising number of singers make a point of singing the verse. I don't know why, to be honest. The tune is moving, if oddly formal. But the words, in making the situation more special ("cathedral bells", "the spell of Paris"), somehow make the song less so. Its real power derives from the chorus, and its transformation of the commonplace:
I'll Be Seeing You
In every lovely summer's day
In everything that's light and gay
I'll always think of you that way
How could it miss? But it did. Right This Way ran 15 performances, which suggests an awful lot of theatergoers never stuck around for the big ballad. As Sammy Fain joked to me: "Where's the exit?" "Right this way." The song disappeared, and it took the upending of the world for it to find its raison d'être - in a transformed landscape where parting was a fact of life. The lyrical imagery is unexceptional but in the tune you hear something melancholy and uncertain and even Mahleresque (the last movement of the Third Symphony). That's what made the song in 1943: In war, you can't even bet on ordinariness, on small cafés and parks across the way.
Not everyone responds to it. Regular readers will know I'm a big fan of the musicologist and composer Alec Wilder, but, aside from a pick-up note in the 16th bar, Wilder pronounces the tune "boneless and insipid and written as if at an organ with the Vox Humana stop out. I simply don't believe that the experience of writing it was one of deep involvement."
Oh, well. The Queen Mother and President Daddy-o and Monica and Johnny and millions of others beg to differ. For them, Irving Kahal's lyric is an accumulation of treasured places where love will always linger:
I'll Be Seeing You
In that small café
The park across the way
The children's carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well...
Most couples have done these things - sat in cafés, walked in parks. But one of the few who almost certainly hadn't were the Queen Mother and King George VI. Even when she and the Duke of York were courting, you'd be unlikely to find a Bowes-Lyon in a Corner House (an English pun: if you're American, don't worry about it). I doubt she ever visited a municipal park except to name it after her husband. Yet the imagery of love songs is a kind of aspirational ordinariness - the ennobling of trivialities - and they speak to princes as well as paupers.
Of course, the other couple who never did any of the things in "I'll Be Seeing You" are Bill and Monica. Did President Clinton have the same song for all his women? Well, it makes things easier. Putting aside Paula Jones, for whom "I'll Be Suing You" would be more appropriate, it seems that few men have so appreciated the number's timeless, universal appeal quite as thoroughly as Slick Willie. The song "kind of sustained me", Monica told her biographer Andrew Morton.
I'll Be Seeing You
In all the old familiar places...
The knee indentations on the Oval Office broadloom? "At the party they enjoyed a secret erotic encounter," wrote Morton, a royal biographer finding himself on unfamiliar turf, "for, in the crush of people around him, she was able briefly to brush his crotch with her hand as he was greeting well-wishers."
I'll Be Feeling You
In all the old familiar places
That this hand of mine still brushes
When it can...
Even before she began phone sex sessions with the President, it would seem Monica had never sat with a boyfriend in a small café or walked through a park holding hands. Her first "lover" was another married man, Andy Bleiler, her drama teacher - or, as he preferred to be styled, "drama technician". His technique was certainly impressive. They had sex in the lighting booth during a rehearsal for the Beverly Hills High production of Oliver!, as the Artful Dodger and his Cockney lads chirruped away on stage:
Consider yourself at 'ome!
Consider yourself part of the furniture!
Now there's a song for Monica: Andy Bleiler considered 'imself at 'ome; Bill Clinton, the most artful dodger of all, considered her part of the furniture. One of the many fun games to play with the Starr Report is to pull quotes at random and guess whether it's Bill or Monica talking:
If I had known what kind of person you really were, I wouldn't have got involved with you.
Who said that? The airhead Valley Girl? No, the leader of the world's superpower. Like, duh. Ah, well. Come the big day when it came time to lead Monica gently into the outer office, after informing her that regrettably they could no longer be "involved" and it was going to be ixnay on the owjoblay from now on, Bill at least had the sensitivity to say it with music. According to her account, they stood there and sang a duet of "Try A Little Tenderness":
She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But when she's weary
Stain another shabby dress...
The songwriter has to say it for everyone, for the GIs shipping out tomorrow, and for more specialized scenarios half-a-century hence. Of the three people most involved in the birth of "I'll Be Seeing You", two-thirds never lived to see its great wartime success. In 1944, the song lent its title to a Ginger Rogers/Joseph Cotten film, and never looked back. But its lyricist Irving Kahal had died two years earlier, and the lady who first sang it, Tamara, had been killed in a plane crash in Lisbon in 1943. Neither knew the song as anything other than a failure. Liberace's syrupy TV theme-tune version, Sinatra's up-tempo swinger arranged by his old Dorsey pal Sy Oliver, the final episode of "Star Trek: Deep Six Nine" and "Beavis & Butthead", Gene Pitney and the Carpenters and Rickie Lee Jones, a weird duet by French chanteuse Françoise Hardy and Iggy Pop, all were unheard by Irving Kahal.
But the spectacular rehabilitation of the song tickled his old partner Sammy Fain. I knew him a little in his last years: he was a small, dapper, joyous reliable at Ascap gatherings in New York, and he enjoyed being apprised of the latest unlikely recording. Like "It Had To Be You" or "The Way You Look Tonight", "I'll Be Seeing You" belongs to a select group of über-standards, the ones we'll still be singing even when 90 per cent of the rest have fallen away.
The Queen Mother's friend Noel Coward called it "the potency of cheap music", and how potent it must be to appeal to a Queen-Empress and a presidential plaything, for both of whom its commonplace imagery is purest fantasy. You don't have to have done any of those things to recognize your own great love in those lines, as the Queen Mum did. But with Monica it seems either the most absurd self-delusion, or a bleak recognition that her own "relationship" was nothing to sing about. On that very first meeting, after delivering pizza to the President, Monica turned to leave the Oval Office and famously flipped up her skirt to give him a glimpse of her departing thong. When I first read that "I'll Be Seeing You" was her favorite song, it reminded me of a story Sammy Cahn (whose centenary we celebrate here) told me many years ago. It was a private party for the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, and Sammy had written some special material, including a sketch which ended with Judy Garland turning and flipping up her own skirt, prompting Phil Silvers to sing:
I'll be looking at your moon
But I'll Be Seeing You.
Perhaps even now, over a decade and a half later, that's how Bill thinks of his lost love.If only she'd held out for small cafés and chestnut trees...
~don't forget, many of Mark's most requested Song of the Week essays are collected in his book A Song For The Season. Order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the SteynOnline bookstore.
