Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (3 page)

O
ne of the most famous modern-day Christmas songs was written on one of the hottest California days on record. The song, which resulted from a collaboration between two of America’s best singer-songwriters, has touched millions and made both men a fixture of every holiday season. In fact, for many, Nat King Cole singing “chestnuts roasting on an open fire”—the opening line of “The Christmas Song”—is one of the greatest moments in the history of music. Yet had it not been for a friend of Cole’s named Mel Torme, who happened to drop by Cole’s house with the song, Cole would never have had the chance to record it.

Most baby boomers came to know Mel Torme from his appearances on the television series
Night Court.
Because of the show, “The Velvet Fog”—as he was called by fans—was seen as little more than an old, almost forgotten jazz singer. Torme relished playing up this false image of being a lounge
lizard, though nothing could have been farther from the truth. Actually, Torme—a talented singer, songwriter, performer, and author—was one of the most ambitious men ever to walk onto a stage. His incredible catalog of credits continues to inspire people even after his death.

Torme grew up in show business. In the 1930s he was a child radio actor and vaudeville performer. By his teens he was already writing songs. When he was just sixteen, he quit high school to arrange music and play drums for the Marx Orchestra. Soon after, he worked with Frank Sinatra.

In 1944, Torme got together with two other talented musicians, Les Baxter and Henry Mancini, to form the vocal group the Mcl-Toncs. The trio was among the first of the jazz-influenced vocal groups. Five years later, Mel scored a solo number one hit with “Careless Hands” and quickly gained recognition as one of the top jazz artists in the world. Ethel Waters once said that Torme was “the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man.” Soon, without realizing it, Mel—whose views of life and music were never complicated by racial prejudice—would serve as the key in opening a holiday door previously closed to African Americans.

Over the course of the next fifty years, Torme influenced generations of singers, sold millions of records, acted in dozens of movies and television shows, wrote a couple of best-selling books, arranged music for some of the greatest names in the business, and took a few years off to fly airplanes as a commercial pilot. Yet the one facet of his career that is often overlooked was his ability to write music. If the singer-songwriter hadn’t decided to visit his friend Nat King Cole’s house one hot summer day, “Born to Be Blue” would have probably gone down as his most remembered composition. But a July drive across Los Angeles changed all that forever.

Robert Wells, a lyricist, was one of Torme’s best friends. They had written together for several years and had just been hired to produce the title songs for two movies,
Abie’s Irish Rose
and
Magic Town.
When Mel arrived, rather than working on the assignments, he found Wells trying to drive off the California heat with fans and positive thinking. The fans were doing little good, and the positive thoughts—which consisted of writing down everything that reminded Wells of cold winters in New England—were only making Wells warmer. Many years later, Torme recalled what happened.

“I saw a spiral pad on his piano with four lines written in pencil. They started, ‘Chestnuts roasting…Jack Frost nipping…Yuletide carols…Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’ Bob didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter he could cool off.”

It had been chestnuts that started Wells’s strange train of thought. He had seen his mother bring in a bag of them to stuff a turkey for dinner. Wells was thrown back to the days when he saw vendors selling chestnuts on New York City street corners. Yet while Wells was after nothing more than an attempt to “think cold,” Mel caught a glimpse of a song in the phrases he had written. With the temperature in the nineties and both men sweating through their clothes, they got to work on what was to become a Christmas classic. It took just forty minutes. The assigned movie title songs were pushed aside as Wells and Torme climbed into a car and drove away to show off their latest song.

Torme knew all the great singers who worked in Los Angeles. They all liked and respected Mel’s work and most of them palled around with the singer. So when Wells and Torme dropped by Nat King Cole’s home uninvited, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. It was just old, friendly Mel being Mel. Yet the
results of that visit were monumental. After a brief greeting, Torme took a seat at King’s piano. On the hottest day of the year, Mel played the new Christmas number. It might not have cooled anyone off, but Cole was deeply impressed.

Nat King Cole had begun his career as a jazz pianist and was one of the best. Yet by the 1940s, it was his smooth baritone that had mesmerized fans all over the world. Even at a time when some of the greatest balladeers in history ruled the airwaves, Cole stood out. The young black man from Chicago’s voice and styling set him apart; his voice and stage presence earned him the nickname “King.”

Cole’s first huge hit came in 1946 with “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons.” A long list of well-loved songs including “Mona Lisa,” “Nature Boy,” and “Too Young” followed. During an era when America was almost totally segregated, Cole’s music erased the racial barriers, at least in music.

From the moment Torme stopped in at Cole’s Los Angeles home and played “The Christmas Song” on his piano, Nat loved it. Sensing the song was a classic, he wanted to record it before Torme could offer it to anyone else. Within days, Cole had rearranged the song to suit his voice and pacing, and cut it for Capitol Records. His instincts about the song’s potential were right. Released in October of 1946, the song stayed in the Top Ten for almost two months. Nat’s hit charted again
in 1947, 1949, 1950, and 1954. Though “The Christmas Song” would ultimately be recorded by more than a hundred other artists—including Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and even Mel Torme himself—none could ever break Cole’s “ownership rights.” The song was instantly and forevermore a Nat King Cole classic.

No one thought about it at the time, but Cole’s cut of Torme’s song became the first American Christmas standard introduced by an African American. The success of that cut helped open the door for Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, and Ethel Waters to put their own spins on holiday classics. It gave black audiences a chance to hear their favorite stars sing the carols that they loved as deeply as all other Christians. Thanks to “The Christmas Song,” for the first time in the commercial marketplace, Christmas was not reserved for “whites only.”

Cole died in his forties of cancer, while Torme lived into his seventies. Both men’s careers hit incredible high notes, and their list of honors and accomplishments set them apart from most of their peers. But no moment for either was as memorable as when they were brought together by words that were meant to simply cool off a body on a hot day.

If there is such a thing as inspired magic, it can be found in this song. When people around the world hear Nat King Cole’s rich baritone singing about cold noses and the wonderful carols that warm hearts at Christmas, they are blessed. The world has lost both Nat King Cole and Mel Torme, but their genius lives on in a song that continues to give millions the special spirit of the season—and the memory of a cool winter’s eve—each and every year.

T
he odds of Gloria Shayne and Noel Regney coming together were long at best. Yet somehow, although born worlds apart, a Frenchman and an American found each other in the middle of the world’s busiest city and eventually teamed up to create a Christmas song that was truly inspired.

Noel Regney grew up in Europe with a deep love of music. As a young man, his effort to create new classical compositions was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Forced into the Nazi army, Regney soon escaped to his native France and joined a group of resistance fighters. Instead of writing peaceful music, he spent the rest of the war fighting to bring peace back to France.

After the war, it was music that brought Noel to the United States, and in the late 1950s he wandered into New York’s Beverly Hotel. There, in the luxurious dining room, he saw a beautiful woman playing popular music on the piano. Though he spoke very little English, Noel was so enthralled
that he boldly introduced himself to Gloria Shayne. Within a month, the man who spoke rudimentary English and the woman who didn’t understand French, married.

On the surface, Noel and Gloria’s union was very unique. What could an American woman, determined to write rock and roll, and a Frenchman, in the States to record classical music, have in common? Yet it would take the marriage of both their skill and insight, as well as their cultures and experience, to create a song that would cause millions around the world to stop, look, and listen.

By 1962, Noel had mastered English and been completely exposed to the world of American popular music, thanks in large part to Gloria’s writing a huge rock and roll hit. Teen idol James Darren had cut Shayne’s “Goodbye Cruel World” and took the number to the top of the charts. As her career took off, Gloria’s passion for writing magnified. She spent hours each day at the piano beating out new material.

While Noel saw the financial potential of popular music and heard his wife playing it every day, he still wanted to create something beautiful that would last longer than just a quick trip up the charts. The inspiration that would utilize both the man’s classical imagery and his wife’s contemporary beat was to come from yet another war, this one fought a long way from the American city Regney now called home.

Noel had often prayed that World War II would be the war that would finally end all wars. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to revisit the horrors he had viewed firsthand. Yet his prayer had been shattered in the ‘50s by the fighting in Korea. After Korea, Regney watched his native France, and then the United States, become entangled in a bloody jungle battle in Vietnam. As more and more young men were injured and killed, the Frenchman wondered if the world would ever find real peace.

Fighting the depression brought on by flashbacks to his own days as a Nazi soldier and then as a resistance fighter, coupled with the news he saw on television each day, Noel sought out something that would bring him peace of mind. In an effort to put his pain into perspective, he turned back to the one moment in time when he felt the Lord had given men a chance to live life without hate, fear, or conflict.

Picking up a pen, Regney wrote a poem about the first Christmas. Fighting through some of the most difficult moments he had ever faced, Noel pushed away his nightmarish memories of World War II, the news from Vietnam, and the current tension building between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.—a pressure that seemed to be pushing the world into yet another war. As he concentrated on the events leading up to the birth of Jesus, the world around him grew strangely quiet.

His memories took Noel back to a scene of sheep walking through the beautiful green fields of his native France. He considered the innocence of a newly born lamb. This was a creature whose spirit man should emulate, an animal that surely the Creator himself had touched in a very special way. Thoughts of the lamb, and a child who might have cared for it, inspired Noel to write a poem that not only described peace on earth, but which also spoke of the peace that came to earth on that first Christmas night.

“When he finished,” Gloria recalled, “Noel gave it to me and asked me to write the music. He said he wanted me to do it because he didn’t want the song to be too classical. I read over the lyrics, then went shopping. I was going to Bloomingdale’s when I thought of the first music line.”

When Gloria returned home she discovered that she had inserted an extra note in her melody, causing her music to no longer fit Noel’s lyrics. Listening to what his wife had composed,
Noel opted to add a word rather than risk losing what he considered one of the most beautiful melodies he had ever heard. So “Said the wind to the little lamb” became “Said the night wind to the little lamb.” Not only did this addition keep the music intact, but the imagery of God speaking on the wind became even more wondrous. Yet when Gloria asked him to change one more line in the first verse, Noel balked.

“I told him that no one in this country would understand ‘tail as big as a kite,’” Gloria explained. “Yet he wouldn’t change that. As it turned out, he was right. It is a line that people dearly love.”

The couple took the finished song to the Regent Publishing Company. Owned by the brothers of famed big band leader Benny Goodman, it was one of New York’s best music houses. With Noel singing and Gloria playing, the song made its professional debut. Within minutes, Regent had contacted Harry Simeone. It was his group that had scored a huge Christmas hit four years before with “Little Drummer Boy.” Simeone wanted to hear the song right away. Since the couple didn’t have a demo, Gloria recalled that this created a major problem:

“Noel couldn’t play and sing at the same time, and I had to go play for a commercial. I couldn’t break my date, so he went by himself. When he got home he told me that he had botched it up.”

Gloria and Noel had every reason to believe “Do You Hear What I Hear?” would not be recorded. Even if Regney had perfectly performed the song for Simeone, since the David Seville’s comical Chipmunks had recently scored with a novelty Christmas number, it seemed that no one was looking for a spiritual holiday song. Both were shocked when, a few
days later, the Harry Simeone Chorale recorded their touching work with plans to release it as a single.

“Noel hadn’t had much success in his classical career,” Gloria recalled, “and he wanted to do something meaningful and beautiful. In this song he did.”

The couple could not have dared imagine the effect “Do You Hear What I Hear?” would have on the nation. At the height of the Cold War, millions, like Noel, were yearning for peace and hope. This carol’s combination of words and music powerfully voiced those prayers. Newspaper stories of the time wrote of drivers hearing it for the first time on the radio and pulling their cars off the road to listen. It seemed that the song didn’t just touch the world; it made people stop, look, and listen.

In 1963, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” became a Christmas standard when it was recorded by Bing Crosby. It was sung by church choirs, became an integral part of television specials, and inspired numerous magazine features and even Christmas sermons.

“We couldn’t believe it,” Gloria admitted. “So many people wrote us to tell how much the song meant to them. We didn’t know it would cause that kind of outpouring of emotion.”

Four decades after they first sang it for their publisher, Noel and Gloria have heard hundreds of different versions of their song. While each is special in its own way, Gloria explained that it was Robert Goulet’s that made even the songwriters step back and listen:

“When Robert Goulet came to the line, ‘Pray for peace people everywhere,’ he almost shouted those words out. It was so powerful!”

Goulet had gotten it right. That shout was exactly what Noel thought the whole world needed to be doing each day—
demanding
peace for all people everywhere.

The hands of the woman who composed the music have now been silenced by an operation that keeps her from playing
the piano. Noel, whose past experiences brought the words to life, recently had a stroke; he can no longer speak, much less sing. Yet thanks to the song that brought both Gloria and Noel to the spotlight, the message of peace on earth and goodwill toward all found in “Do You Hear What I Hear?” touches millions each year.