Robert Altman, Anita O’Day, and Betty Comden: it was a rocky Thanksgiving for lovers of American art.
About Altman’s death I have nothing much to say, for I respected his films far more than I liked them, and only wrote about one of them, Gosford Park. Our Girl (with whom I saw Gosford Park five years ago) thinks otherwise, and I’m hoping she’ll get around to explaining why at some point.
I felt much the same way about O’Day, whose hard-swinging, ever-ingenious jazz singing I admired greatly without ever warming to it. I saw her in person twice, once in her prime and once long afterward, blogging about the second occasion without identifying her:
I recently saw a public performance by a very old artist. No names or details–it wouldn’t serve any purpose–but it was a disastrous, pitiful self-parody of ruined greatness, the kind that leaves a dark and permanent stain of humiliation in the memory. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Yet it did…
I still recall that performance with retrospective horror, and since then have been exceedingly careful about going to see performers whose time has come and gone.
My memories of Betty Comden are sunnier, not only because I was an unabashed fan of her work but also because I was lucky enough to interview Comden and Adolph Green, her late friend and lifelong colleague, for a 1999 New York Times profile:
Sixty-one years after they began working together, it is almost possible to take Ms. Comden and Mr. Green for granted, because they are so much a part of the theatrical air we breathe. Their hit shows, which include ”On the Town,” ”Wonderful Town,” ”Peter Pan,” ”Bells Are Ringing” and ”On the Twentieth Century,” have yielded a bumper crop of standards; whenever you sing ”New York, New York, a helluva town” or ”The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day” in the shower, their words are on your lips. In addition, they wrote the scripts for ”Singin’ in the Rain” and ”The Band Wagon,” by common consent the two finest film musicals to come out of Hollywood since World War II. No less remarkable is the roster of superstars with whom they have worked, including–just for starters–Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, Mary Martin, Andre Previn, Jerome Robbins and Frank Sinatra….
One unintended consequence of the drying up of musical comedy as a living idiom has been the welcome opportunity to revisit the best shows of the 40’s and 50’s. My guess is that the joint reputation of Betty Comden and Adolph Green has only just begun to benefit from that continuing revaluation. But even if their musicals should fail to survive the test of time, I am certain that the elegantly turned, emotionally true lyrics they wrote for such individual songs as ”Lucky to Be Me,” ”Lonely Town,” ”Just in Time,” ”The Party’s Over” and ”Make Someone Happy” will continue to be sung so long as human beings stubbornly insist on falling in and out of love. To listen as Tony Bennett and Bill Evans turn ”Some Other Time” into a piercingly rueful monologue about missed chances (”This day was just a token/Too many words are still unspoken”) is to realize, once and for all, that the life’s work of the longest-lived writing team in the history of the American theater is far more than just a barrel of laughs.
I made no secret of the fact that I admired Comden and Green without reservation when I visited them at her Upper West Side apartment six years ago, and they in turn made it known to me that they liked what I later wrote about them in the Times. I wouldn’t change a word of it today.
Back then “Some Other Time” was my favorite song, and though in recent years I’ve come to love another song
from On the Town even more, I have no doubt that there can be no more fitting tribute to Betty Comden than to recall the words she and Adolph Green wrote for the most piercingly beautiful of wartime ballads:
Twenty-four hours can go so fast,
You look around, the day has passed.
When you’re in love
Time is precious stuff;
Even a lifetime isn’t enough.
Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to.
Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.
This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken,
Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.
Just when the fun is starting,
Come’s the time for parting,
But let’s be glad for what we’ve had
And what’s to come.
There’s so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing.
Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.
The world is poorer for her passing.