The Undocumented Mark Steyn (37 page)

In the Forties, he founded Capitol Records and became a big pop singer with a lot of Top Ten records and a handful of number ones, not just of his songs but of other folks’ (“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”). It was famously said of Bing Crosby that he sang like every guy in America thought he sounded like when he sang in the shower. But, if anything, that description applies more to Mercer (he and Bing duetted together, lots, from the Thirties to the Seventies). There’s something about that Savannah drawl that gave him a warm mellow tone that sounds like a regular guy jes’ wandering from the living room to the backyard and maybe out onto the golf course and doing a little warbling along the way. And, in part because he sang himself, his songs have a singable ease. He liked to say that writing music took more talent, but writing lyrics took more courage. A tune can be beguiling and wistful and intoxicating and a bunch of other vagaries, but the lyricist has to sit down and get specific and put words on top of those notes. Stick an overripe adjective or an awkward image in there and a vaguely pleasant melody is suddenly precious or contrived or ridiculous. Not in “Fools Rush In” or “Jeepers Creepers.” With Mercer, you rarely hear the false tinkle of an over-clever word in a love ballad or an obtrusive rhyme in a rural charm song.

That said, he gave the movie industry its theme song and summed it up in a single couplet:

         
Hooray for Hollywood

         
Where you’re terrific if you’re even good
.

And how about this rhyme? “Spring, Spring, Spring” is a catalogue song, a laundry list of the joys of the mating season when “the barnyard is busy / In
a regular tizzy.” But, after getting through the various habits of the farm animals, the birds and the bees, the fish and the fowl, Mercer throws in this:

         
To itself each amoeba

         
Softly croons “Ach, du liebe. . . .

A biological and bilingual rhyme: that’s positively Porteresque.

Mercer wrote “Spring, Spring, Spring” and “Summer Wind” and always wanted to write a Christmas standard but never managed it (though his recording of “Jingle Bells” is marvelous). But what he really liked was autumn. Lyric-wise, he got old early, and intimations of mortality hang over a lot of his work from the late Forties on. Yes, the days grow short when you reach September and dwindle down to a precious few and so on, but Mercer chose to embrace (as one of his titles has it) an “Early Autumn.” Thereafter came “Autumn Leaves” and “When the World Was Young” and . . .

         
The days of wine and roses

         
Laugh and run away

         
Like a child at play . . .

         
The lonely night discloses

         
Just a passing breeze

         
Filled with memories . . .

Memories that, as with “Laura,” “you can never quite recall.” Mercer became near obsessed with the elusiveness of memory, of love and youth. Along the way, there was a lot of wine at night, and roses the morning after. He was the nicest guy, and the nastiest—once the bottle got south of two inches from the bottom. The following day, he’d feel bad about being a mean drunk to a close friend or a casual acquaintance or the cocktail waitress, and many florists benefited from his guilt. But, as Jo Stafford said to him as he staggered up to her one evening, “Please, John. I don’t want any of your roses
in the morning.” If he’d been sober, he’d have written that down as a potential title, the way he did with “Goody Goody” and “PS I Love You.” But he was sufficiently self-aware to get more than a few songs out of it:

         
Drinking
a
gain

         
And thinking of when

         
You loved me

         
Having a few

         
And wishing that you

         
Were here

         
Making the rounds

         
And buying the rounds

         
For strangers . . .

Sinatra liked that one, and he
loved
Mercer’s all-time great saloon song:

         
It’s quarter to three

         
There’s no one in the place except you and me

         
So set ’em up, Joe

         
I got a little story you oughtta know . . .

Supposedly he wrote that as catharsis after a doomed affair with Judy Garland, but we only found that out years later. Like he said:

         
Could tell you a lot

         
But you’ve got

         
To be true to your code

         
Make it one for my baby

         
And one more for the road . . .

Thinking about Mercer songs for this column, I remembered an evening long ago when, a mere slip of a lad, I took a gal I adored to a country club
dance I couldn’t really afford. Johnny Mercer saved the night for me: The master of ceremonies announced a competition. To win, you had to answer a simple question:

“How wide is Moon River?”

“Wider than a mile,” of course. We won a magnum of champagne, and the waiters treated us like royalty. A magical night. But the days of wine and roses laugh and run away toward a closing door, a door marked “Nevermore. . . .” Conjuring up that evening for the first time in years, I wondered about my lost love, and whether that country club was still there. But then I remembered Mercer had got to all that, too:

         
There’s a dance pavilion in the rain

         
All shuttered down

         
A winding country lane

         
All russet brown . . .

Not long before his death in 1976, he said that in fifty years’ time the best of Porter and Hart and Gershwin will be “studied and taught in schools, and collected . . . and forgotten.” But we’re getting mighty near 2026, and we’re still singing Johnny Mercer. It’s quarter to three, and somewhere out there Willie Nelson’s promoting his new record of “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Michael Bublé’s doing his hugely successful if somewhat vulgar revival of Mercer and Mancini’s “Meglio Stasera” from
The Pink Panther
.

Set ’em up, Joe . . . and drop another nickel in the machine.

XI

AFTER WORK

THE ARISTOROCKRACY

National Review
, April 30, 2012

MIDWAY THROUGH A
Julie Burchill column in
The Guardian
bemoaning the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, I was startled to learn the following: Although fewer than 10 percent of British children attend private schools, their alumni make up over 60 percent of the acts on the UK pop charts. Twenty years ago, it was 1 percent.

There’s always been a bit of this, of course: Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics and made more money singing the songs of hardscrabble Mississippi bluesmen than the gnarled old-timers who’d lived those lyrics could ever dream of. But he was “middle class” in what your average exquisitely attuned snob would regard as a very drearily provincial sense: Mick’s dad was a teacher in Kent and his mum was an Aussie hairdresser, and he went to the local grammar school. The new pop stars attended some of the most exclusive and expensive academies in the land: Chris Martin (of Coldplay and Gwyneth Paltrow) went to Sherborne, and Lily Allen to Bedales, and James Blunt to Harrow. The five lads from Radiohead got together at Abingdon, founded by Richard the Pedagogue in 1100 and where annual boarding fees are now just shy of fifty thousand dollars. So, to recreate the conditions that enabled Radiohead, you’d have to spend about one-and-three-quarter-million bucks. You could try it the Elvis way—drive a truck, blow $8.25 to make an acetate, and record your mama’s favorite Ink Spots song—but it’s not clear that works anymore. In the space of two generations, almost every traditional escape route out of England’s slums—from pop music to journalism—has become the preserve of the expensively credentialed. I say “almost,” because as far as I know no Old Abingdonian has yet won the heavyweight boxing championship.

A couple of weeks earlier, another Guardianista, Zoe Williams, filed a column deploring the fashionable professions’ increasing reliance on unpaid interns. The first time I used the word “intern” on Fleet Street was fourteen years ago when the Monica story broke and my editor asked me to explain to British readers what it meant. Now they’re everywhere. “Most people could weather a fortnight of unpaid work,” writes Miss Williams, “but once you start talking about three or six months, you basically have to be living with your parents, they have to live in the same city—usually London for the desirable posts—and they have to be able to support you. So pretty soon the point arrives when there’s a middle-class stranglehold on the jobs that people want to do—notably in politics, the media and the third sector.”

The “third sector” is what the British call all those non-profits the cool kids aspire to. If memory serves, Mr. Blair introduced to Her Majesty’s Government a department called the “Office of the Third Sector,” which sounds so bland it ought to be one of those covers for a ruthless wet-work operation the spooks want to keep off the books, but is instead just a way of “coordinating” “resources” between the public sector and the third sector—i.e., a colossal waste of the private sector’s money.

The Internet wallah Tim Worstall thought that Miss Williams had sort of missed her own point with that bit about politics, media, and the third sector: “When the desirable jobs are spending other people’s money, reporting on spending other people’s money and lobbying to spend other people’s money then you know that the society is f***ed.”

While the upper-middle-class corner the pop biz and the NGOs, what’s left for the masses? Back when Mick Jagger was at the LSE, the futuristic comic books were full of computer-brained robot maids whirring from room to room dusting the table, bringing our afternoon tea, and generally liberating humanity from menial labor. How’d that work out? In America, 40 percent of the population now do minimal-skill service jobs. Meanwhile, the robot maids are thin on the ground, but computers have replaced the typing pool and the receptionist and the bookkeeping clerk—i.e., most of the entry-level jobs to the middle class. If you lack the schooling of a typical British pop star
but you’ve mastered flipping tacos and the night shift at the KwikkiKrap, what’s there to move on to?

Social mobility is already declining in the credential-crazed United States and the wider west, and will decline further. If you’re already on the right side of the great divide, the world emerging isn’t so different from the way it was back when Harrow was producing Winston Churchill rather than James Blunt: The less ambitious scions of great and well-to-do families amuse themselves with a leisurely varsity and then something not too onerous with a non-profit, in the way that the younger sons of Victorian toffs passed a couple of years in a minor post in a British legation in an agreeable capital.

If you’re on the wrong side of the divide, it’s less like
Downton Abbey
and more like one of those Latin-American
favelas
the presidential motorcade makes a point of giving a wide berth to. Even Mick Jagger’s parentage—teacher and hairdresser—sounds a bit of an unlikely match in an age when the professionally credentialed prefer to marry within their caste. Perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of the love-across-the-classes plot beloved by Edwardian England, back when real-life showgirls (Connie Gilchrist) married real-life earls (the seventh Lord Orkney). But I wouldn’t bet on it: These days, at least on the British pop charts, the earl is his own showgirl.

THE WASTE OF PEOPLE

The Daily Telegraph
, February 24, 2004

THE OTHER DAY
The Sun
bestowed the title of “Britain’s Laziest Woman” on Susan Moore of Burythorpe, North Yorkshire. Miss Moore had come to the paper’s attention courtesy of its Shop-A-Sponger Hotline: as Alastair Taylor explained, “Super-sponger Susan, 34, has not done a day’s work since dropping out of college in 1988.”

Despite receiving “Jobseeker’s Allowance” for sixteen years, she does not seek jobs, and never has. She was offered one by a supermarket, but it was five miles away so she wasn’t interested. Ryedale Jobcentre put her on a “New Deal” course and, to make sure she attended, sent a taxi for her every morning. But one day the cab didn’t show up, so Susan gave up the course. She lives with her divorced mum, who’s also on “Jobseeker’s Allowance,” though she hasn’t sought a job since giving birth to Susan in 1969.

Sportingly,
The Sun
offered Susan the chance to make a few quid manning the Shop-A-Sponger Hotline over the weekend, but she didn’t fancy the disruption. “I shop on a Saturday,” she said, “and on Sunday I sit at home and relax a bit.”

But then my eye fell on the amount “scrounger Susan” had managed to scrounge: thirty thousand pounds in sixteen years—two thousand pounds per annum. Forty quid a week. She and her mum get another forty-five-pound housing benefit to live in what looks like an attractive and spacious semidetached house, and she’s trying to claim “income support” on medical grounds, because she suffers “monthly painful spells.” But, if an average forty pounds a week is the best a “super-sponger” can do, it should remind us of a basic truth: the greatest crime of welfare isn’t that it’s a waste of money, but
that it’s a waste of people. Forty quid wasn’t enough for a “welfare queen” to queen around on, but it was just enough to enable her to avoid making anything of her life, enough to let her sit around all week “listening to CDs and watching videos.”