Popular Music and Culture Collection

Johnny Mercer Oral History Project

Interview with Margaret Whiting and Jack

Wrangler

March 31, 1995

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CITATION:

Margaret Whiting and Jack Wrangler, M206, Johnny Mercer Oral History Project, Popular

Music & Culture Collection, Special Collection and Archives, Georgia State University Library,

Atlanta, GA.

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INTERVIEWEE: Margaret Whiting and Jack Wrangler

INTERVIEWER: Chris Paton

LOCATION: Albany Georgia

DATE: March 31, 1995

MANUSCRIPT NUMBER: M206

ACCESSION NUMBER: M1995-07

The following transcript is edited. The tapes for this interview are closed to researchers.

SIDE 1 OF 4

PATON: Today is March 31, we’re in Albany, Georgia, and this will be an interview with

Margaret Whiting and Jack Wrangler. I have questions for you. Lots of questions.

WHITING: All right, and I have answers.

PATON: I know you do.

[laughter]

WHITING: This is Chris and Margaret.

PATON: Yes, and if you hear a boy, it’s Jack.

WRANGLER: Yes, it’s hard to distinguish sometimes from Margaret.

PATON: What I’m hoping to get in this interview is information that's not written down

somewhere else, or hasn’t been covered intently somewhere else. As you know, we’re going to

have to talk to you a lot of times, over long periods of time to get even a fraction of the

information. So what I’m curious about today is Johnny Mercer more as a personal person, as

opposed to a professional songwriter.

Now, you’ve written in your book about first meeting Johnny when he came to your

parents' home, at gatherings that they had. And I was wondering, what were gatherings like at

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Johnny Mercer’s house? When you got to be of an age when you'd be going visiting?

WHITING: Well, they lived in a darling little house right off of Sunset Boulevard, but it was

down the hill between Sunset and Santa Monica. It had a white fence, white picket fence, and, as

I said at the funeral, of Ginger, she had impeccable taste. You saw many of those things, Chris,

that was in the house, you saw beautiful pictures of her, and you knew how [tasteful] she was.

WRANGLER: Incidentally, on that white picket fence, Ginger Mercer painted that fence once,

and Johnny gave her a mink coat.

[laughter]

PATON: Was this their first home?

WRANGLER: In their first home, yes.

WHITING: It was just a little one, I can’t think of the street, but it was not far from where you

lived, Jack. That’s West Hollywood, right off --

WRANGLER: Franklin/LaBrea, that area?

WHITING: Well, it was near --. You went down a couple of blocks from Sunset Boulevard,

and you were on a street that ran like Sunset, and it was between --

WRANGLER: Fountain.

WHITING: Probably Fountain, yes, it probably was. And they lived in this darling house and

we used to go over there. And sometimes he’d make the spaghetti that I talk about, with strands

flying in the air.

PATON: Did he throw it when it was cooked, to see if it was cooked enough?

WHITING: Yeah, he just went ch...ch...ch..., and up it went, you know. But he was a good

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cook, and, as we know, he was painting all the time and he loved to paint. He was one of the

smartest, most intelligent men I ever met. And he hurt a lot through the years I knew him. You

want the personal Johnny?

PATON: Um-hmm.

WHITING: Later on, in years when he was writing “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and

“Moon River,” and things like that, he would come over to my apartment where I stayed with my

mother. I remember that was in Beverly Hills, right off Wilshire. We would walk at night, and

we would take these walks, and we would talk about what was going on in the world. And that

things were happening that he didn’t like, that he thought would hurt the balance of our country

or our world. Things were wrong, people weren’t paying attention to things. They weren’t

paying attention to nature. He loved nature. They weren’t paying attention to the laws. People

were getting too many guns. The world and our country as we knew it was off balance, and that

worried him a lot.

PATON: What years would that be?

WHITING: Well, that would have been probably in the sixties, when I was out in California.

And he said to me one day, "I’m not having any more fun, Margaret. Remember the fun we had

when we started Capitol records, and you’d come in every day, and we’d sit around and talk, and

I met all these wonderful songwriters and different talents, and we watched Capitol Records

become this monumental thing that we never dreamed it would be?" And the fact that between

all of us we were just absolutely surrounded by talents like Nat Cole, who became such a good

friend, and Glenn Wallichs, who was a dear friend, and was his partner. He loved those

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moments. He was busy, he was happy, he was meeting people. He was creating something

besides writing songs.

WRANGLER: Yes, one thing --. I went out and interviewed Henry Mancini before he died, and

one thing that Henry said that was interesting to me is, he said, “One of the things that made

Johnny unhappy is that he really enjoyed being a celebrity, as a singer, as a performer. He loved

that. When he was no longer a celebrity status --." Henry said, “You know, I go out and lead

orchestras and stuff, and that’s my fifteen minutes of fame.” He said, “That’s my excitement.”

Johnny loved being an entertainer, and when that aspect of his career suddenly wasn’t there that

much anymore, it bothered him a great deal.

WHITING: Well, what he said to me this day, or this night --. We were walking around. He

said, “Let’s go over -- Let's have a drink somewhere.” So we sat down at the bar, and he says,

“I’m not having fun anymore. I’m not writing enough songs to keep me happy. I used to write

four or five pictures a year, and I would do different things, and I had the company [Capitol

Records], and I was writing songs for people to sing at the company, and I was doing all these

things. And I just -- we ought to do something together, kid.” And I said, “Well, what would

we do? I mean, I’m a singer; you're a songwriter, you're a performer. I’m a performer. I don’t

write songs. What are we going to do? Open another record company?”

He said, “Well, probably not, because I had that, but I’d like to do something. Maybe we

should write a play.” I said, “But you write, I can’t write.” But he was so anxious to be doing

some things. He wanted to write songs, of course. Write plays. He was a little leery of writing a

new play because he felt that the different plays he wrote were never successful, that the songs

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weren’t successful. He was very unhappy, he always felt that he had failed writing different

shows. And in reality, St. Louis Woman, which was not the greatest book, turned out to have

one of the greatest scores of all times.

WRANGLER: And Li'l Abner I would call a success. Except that he compared himself

oftentimes, in the theater, to Frank Loesser; and Frank, by comparison -- his shows --. He

[Mercer] wanted a Guys and Dolls, He wanted that kind of a show, and when he didn’t have that,

he thought of himself as a failure. Frank Loesser once told him that he should save songs that he

wrote, [the ones] that would be great for a show, but Johnny always said that if he saved them,

somebody else would write them. In other words, the whole idea would be in the air, and

somebody else would write the song, so he never felt he could save a song for a show.

WHITING: See, Frank Loesser did what Johnny wanted to do. I don’t say leave Hollywood,

but Frank Loesser knew that the time was over when they could write all those Hollywood

musicals, so --. He always wanted to write theater, too, he aimed for Broadway, and started, and

had one hit after another. Now, they could do motion pictures of Loesser's music, but Johnny

never felt that he [Mercer] was that successful. So that when we were walking, this day, he was

trying to tell me that he was unhappy and he desperately wanted something to do. He was

acknowledged as a great writer, people called him on the phone, he had an agent. He wrote a

song called “Darling Lili,” and different songs around, but he wasn’t doing what he wanted to do.

Now. I remember a day when I was asked to come to the house and see him. Marshall

Robbins was handling Commander Music, and he called me up and he said, “Margaret, people

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that have something to do with Paul McCartney -- Paul has a desire to try to write with Johnny

Mercer, he knows who he is, he worships the way he writes and --.” This might have been, I'm

not sure, after John Lennon died, I’m just not sure about what time --

WRANGLER: Remember, the Beatles were signed on with Capitol.

WHITING: Yes, but he [Mercer] liked John and he liked Paul, and Jim Webb, and Burt

Bacharach -- those were the four he talked about a lot, new songwriters. “Who do you like? Do

you like the new music?” “Not all of it. They don’t do their homework, they don’t write like

your father and Jerome Kern and myself, and Frank Loesser. We take forever to write a lyric.”

WRANGLER: Yeah, he said, "They don’t dig deep enough. You know, if they write a

lyric, they toss it out there, whereas we would take it back and rework it, and rework it.” And

there was another thing about -- before you go on, Margaret, but while we’re still on the theater.

I think one of the reasons why Johnny was not as successful bringing standards out of his

theatrical presentations is because he was such a chameleon, he could write with anybody, that he

wrote "to book," and that everything in a musical that he would write came right out of the book.

Because he would grab on to that, and that doesn’t necessarily make a standard that could be

lifted and used for something else, like Li'l Abner. From St. Louis Woman it was easier because

the book was so awful. But in most [Mercer] shows, if you look at the songs in the shows

themselves, without the -- they're written to character --

WHITING: Right.

WRANGLER: -- and without the characters, they don’t make a lot of sense, oftentimes.

PATON: Were there shows of his that he really did like?

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WHITING: Well, he loved the music of St. Louis Woman. He loved “Come Rain or Come

Shine,” and “Any Place I Hang My Hat,” and “I Had Myself a True Love.” He loved the music

and he was very unhappy that it wasn’t a smash hit like a Frank Loesser or a Cole Porter.

I’m jumping around different things, but I’m closing my eyes and I’m doing memory of

different things that stick out for me.

WRANGLER: I know that when he was writing Saratoga, which he thought was going to

be very successful, the biggest problem with that is that Harold Arlen was so ill at that time and

they had also revived St. Louis Woman to do as A Blues Opera in Vienna, to open it in Vienna

simultaneously with Saratoga. And here's Harold Arlen in the hospital! And Harold dictated

from the hospital bed every day, to Johnny, the music, and Johnny actually ended up writing

some of the music himself because, because of the position they were in. So they couldn’t be

there to police either the show, or the opening of the Blues Opera in Vienna, which I understand

was enormously successful and didn’t go on from there because there was nobody to do anything

about it.

PATON: Um-hmm.

WHITING: He could just do so much. But this was a time when he was acknowledging that --

this had to be around the sixties and into the seventies, where he was acknowledging the fact that

there were great young writers, but only a few of them passed his trial and error of who’s good

and who’s bad because he felt, as I said, that they didn’t do their homework. He said that many a

time. “Burt is great and Hal David -- and I love Lennon and McCartney.” So anyway, this day

they asked me to go over and talk to him. So I called him up [and] he says, “Come on over.” He

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used to get into what I call “Celtic moods” -- black moods, and he was seated by the fire. Now

you’ve seen the room, so we’ll say the piano was there and the picture was there and then you

went around the corner into the bar and other rooms, but he was seated in front of the fireplace,

and he said, “So, what can I get you?” And I said, “Well, get me some tea.” So I pulled up a

chair and we sat in front -- it was a cold, rainy day and we sat there and I said, “Johnny, this is

very funny because I’ve known you ever since I’ve been seven, and I’ve never had a request like

this. I know you well enough to say anything to you and God knows I have. I love you so much,

and I’m very flattered to have been asked because we know each other so well that you might

listen to what I have to say.” I said, “You know Paul McCartney? Well, through your music firm

and some people, he has asked if he could get together with you and maybe you could write

together.” And he says, “Gee, Maggie, that’s just great, I love the way he writes and that’s really

thrilling, I’d love to do that, but unfortunately, I think Ginger’s sick. She might have cancer and I

just can’t do anything now. I have to find out what it’s all about and help her. I mean, I love her,

and I’ve got to see if everything is all right.” So we drank our tea. We talked some more about

things, and what a wonderful thing that was. I said, “Can’t you see these two generations getting

together? I mean, you write the best, he writes the best, it would be awesome,” although I didn’t

use that word. But he says, “I know what you mean. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am. I’m

really excited about this, and maybe, you know, when we get Ginger straightened out and she is

fine I’ll do it, I’d love to do it, but right now the only thing on my mind is Ginger.” So, I think if

Paul, if he’d been able at that time to write with Paul, and maybe Burt wasn’t writing with Hal,

or Jimmy Webb -- he might have found one of those men to write with because he really -- not

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with all of them, but he said, “Oh yeah, they write great, they just --” you know. And I know,

through the years, that after “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Moon River” he didn’t have very

much to do songwriting, and I know he was very unhappy and that’s why he said, “Let’s do

something. We did Capitol Records.” I said, “I had nothing to do with it.” He said, “But we’ll

do something, we’ll find something, we’ll find something to do. I want to do something with

you.” I mean it wasn’t me, it was anybody that he cared for, but the urge was there because he

felt the world had passed him by, and he -- Jack, explain about what you wrote in the book and

what you know about the music.

WRANGLER: Well, he said, “It was my reason, my reason for getting up in the

morning.” It was when you have a passion in life, which, today --. It’s funny that if you think

about, I think one of the great things that might be missing from aspirations today is passion.

That you want something so much, and you love it so much, and that’s your reason for getting up

in the morning, is the way he put it. When all of a sudden that reason isn’t there anymore, or he

feels it isn’t there --. One title song a year for him, whether he won the Academy Award or not,

which is hard for some people to understand when they don’t think in terms of passion, that, that

was not enough for him. He wanted to be out there, he wanted to be still a major force writing

for an industry that he adored and that he worshiped.

A couple of quick collaboration stories that were told to me that I don’t think are any

books anywhere, before I forget them, while we’re on the subject of collaborations. Jule Styne

told a wonderful story which is, I think, a great compliment to Johnny. It’s also the “third drink,

second sip” kind of story, but he, Jule, had always wanted to work with Johnny and wanted to

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write a score, he wanted to do a musical with him. And Jule optioned Rose Tattoo, and he

wanted to do a musical of it, and so he thought, “Well, the South and everything. Well, that’s

going to be just perfect Johnny Mercer.” He called Johnny Mercer and he said, “I’ve got the

thing of Rose Tattoo, I’d love to do a musical of it, would you consider doing it?” He said,

“Well, I think that would be wonderful, fly on out here. I’ll read it.” He apparently had never

read it. And so Jule flew out to California, he went out to the house, I assume this was the new

house because it was the upstairs --

WHITING: By that time long, he had the place at Bel-Air.

WRANGLER: Right, the Bel-Air house, because it had the staircase, I know.

WHITING: All of us had been there.

WRANGLER: He got in the driveway, he got to the house, rang the door bell, got inside,

and there is Johnny with a drink, standing at the top of the stairs with the script of Rose Tattoo in

his hand. He threw the script at Jule Styne and said, “That god-damn Tennessee Williams

doesn’t know anything about the South!” Which to me made so much sense, because Tennessee

Williams’ version of the South, which was about decay, and Johnny Mercer’s version of the

South, which was about the romantic yearning [for] a place that still exists, that’s frozen in time,

and ain’t that grand? He thought it was so wonderful that Savannah never changed; to Tennessee

Williams it was the decadence that he was seeing. He [Mercer] could not understand that. [He]

threw the script at Jule, Jule got back up the driveway, got on a plane and went back to New

York. True story. Second thing about collaboration, before I forget it, Henry Mancini told me.

He said, “The one thing that you never did with Johnny --.” There were only two composers that

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he knew of that Johnny would ever, ever, allow in the same room while he was working on a

piece of material for them. He would hear the music and he’d send them home. And Henry said,

“I learned that you do not call Johnny Mercer and ask him if the lyric’s ready yet.” He said he

made that mistake only once. He phoned and he said, “Johnny, how about that lyric?” And

Johnny bit his head off, and screamed at him over the phone, and he said, “I never!” He said

when Johnny was ready with a lyric, he phoned you, you never phoned Johnny. And he [Mercer]

just wanted to hear the tune first. In the early days he had a shorthand that he wrote, and the way

he’d do it is with a dummy lyric. He would write it to rhythm and just write nonsense rhymes, or

whatever, but to get the meter feel -- this was before tape recorders and stuff, then later on, he

would just tape it and send the composer home. The two people that he would work with in the

room were Richard Whiting and Harold Arlen. Only two. Other people, he couldn’t stand

having them around. Wasn’t too crazy about them. So it wasn’t like he loved all collaborations,

that’s not true. Was there anything more that you --?

WHITING: I think the story that you tell, and it may have been told before, but, you know –

it’s because you read and you heard from several of the composers how he used to -- and Harry

Warren and Harold Arlen told me this -- about the couch.

WRANGLER: Oh yes, well that’s the, ah, “cloud boy,” “fly away to Mercer-land --.”

What he would do is, he would -- they would play the tune for him, he would then lie down on

his couch and he would, by all intents and purposes, fall asleep. And he then would wake up,

maybe an hour later, and he’d say, “How’s this work?”, and hand him a lyric by just jotting it

down right then and there. He said, the way Johnny put it, which later even Johnny said he

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thought it was a little pretentious, he said he “got in touch with the infinite.” Whatever he got in

touch with, he’d go off into “Mercer-land” and then all of a sudden it would form and he’d wake

up and there it was. He’d also do a thing, and Harry Warren talked about this. Once, he would

be in one of those “cloud boy” moods, Harry Warren would walk in and say, “How are you?” and

he would then -- no response. He’d [Warren would] leave the room, come back two hours later

and Johnny would say, “I’m fine. How are you?” [laughter], not even aware of the passage of

time. His concentration level must have been just enormous, that he could phase everything else

out when he was thinking of a lyric.

WHITING: I asked him to write some special lyrics for me for “I’m Having a Wonderful

Ball,” which I think --

PATON: When was that?

WHITING: Oh, when was that show? That was probably --

WRANGLER: Was that the Buddy Hackett show?

WHITING: Yeah, “Having a Wonderful Ball.”

WRANGLER: Oh, sixties I think, or late fifties.

WHITING: Oh, I think Frank Fletcher – didn’t Frank Fletcher do that show?

WRANGLER: I don’t know, I really don’t know.

WHITING: I’ll take a note and I’ll find out when, because I can get the copy of the song [that

shows] when it was done. So, soon after that I put the “I’m Having a Wonderful Ball” in my act,

and it had been in this show with Buddy Hackett. And I never was by his side when he wrote a

song. My father was. I’d see them working. But he sat and he said, “I’m having a big wonderful

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ball, something to something you-all.” You know, he just wrote dummy lyrics to these things.

WRANGLER: Right.

WHITING: But you’re right about the concentration, it was like steel. And he’d say “you-all,

ball,” you know, and he’d go through this thing, and maybe an hour or two later he says, “What

do you all think about this?” But it was absolutely extreme concentration. It was like a beam

that would go through a table.

WRANGLER: I did hear that he very seldom would change. If somebody put something

in specific structure he would very seldom call them back and say, “May I make that a half note

or an eighth?” Or, “I really need this in order to make the thing flow,” or something. He would

go right to what the composer gave him, and very seldom would go away from that. He was also

a big stickler for the rhyme coming down precise; he never did an indicated rhyme, very seldom.

Now, if he had to do something for a show -- and you’ll find this in a lot of lyrics where it’s

needed for changing, where they do -- with shows and stuff, or in a movie where there are

extended lyrics on things, oftentimes, then sometimes you’ll find [lyrics that are] a little bit

sloppy down the line, and that’s because of speed and things that were needed on a set

immediately. Also, sometimes he didn’t write them. In Harvey Girls he was furious about that

because Evans --. Who’s the guy that had the team?

WHITING: Well, it was --. Now, let me see. Harry Warren wrote that song with him, but

Roger Edens and Kay Thompson were part of the Arthur Freed unit.

WRANGLER: And when they were doing the thing about the arrival of the train, they

realized they were going to do an interior of the train and identify the waitresses, where they were

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from, and all the stuff. They never contacted Johnny on that, all that stuff. “I’m from Paris,” and

“Paris, Texas,” and all those different lines that are all rhymes on the thing, they’re not Johnny’s.

And he was livid about that, ‘cause he thought they stunk, and he said that “they’re going to

make me look like an idiot, that, that kind of writer, everybody’s going to think I wrote that

junk.” So, he did not. There were some things in movies that he didn’t write that were thrown

in. I think more at MGM than anywhere else because Roger Edens and Kay Thompson often

took it upon themselves to write extra words.

WHITING: Probably Seven Brides, maybe, but I don’t think they did anything like that at

Warner’s --

WRANGLER: No, I don’t think so either, but they did at MGM and it made him furious.

PATON: I’m sure. I had not heard that before.

WHITING: Oh yes, because --. I’m singing the verse to “Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe”

tomorrow night. We put that in the show, and that verse is not written by Johnny Mercer or

Harry Warren, but there is a riff that I’m going to sing that was taken right off this record of

“Atchison, Topeka.”

WRANGLER: Yes, and he did write that.

WHITING: We did it in a show that I did last summer --

WRANGLER: Now. Oh, Harry Warren said something interesting. They’re quite at odds

with one another, and Harry --. Johnny said, “The first time I heard those new lyrics [they] were

on the radio,” and Harry said, “You’re out of your mind.” He said, “You had to hear them --.

First of all, they never played those lyrics on the radio, they just played the straight song, and

15

secondly, you were in the studio when they recorded those new lyrics. You were very much

aware of it.” So Johnny obviously wasn’t paying attention or something else at the time, because

according to Harry he heard them damn well before it, but he was livid when the movie came

out.

WHITING: In fact, when they got the Oscar for it, you know, they were fighting, because -- I

guess you know this story, that Harry walked into Music City and he saw this banner because

Capitol Records --

WRANGLER: -- released the song.

WHITING: -- released the song. [The banner read:] “Johnny Mercer’s ‘On the Atchison,

Topeka and the Santa Fe.’”

WRANGLER: And they didn’t speak for a year.

WHITING: And they didn’t talk for months, and Van Johnson had to pick up the awards.

WRANGLER: And that was Johnny’s first Academy Award, and Van Johnson picked up the

award because Johnny wasn’t there. He was that mad. And neither was Harry. Harry was in

Palm Springs, and Harry heard it on the radio -- [recording not intelligible at this point].

PATON: No, I hadn’t heard that.

WHITING: Oh yeah, that’s true.

PATON: You talked about Johnny not wanting composers in the room when he was

working, but he couldn’t write formal --

WRANGLER: He couldn’t play the piano.

PATON: He could not play piano, nor could he write formal music notation, so when he did

16

create, there must have been times when he worked with somebody, did he? I know that he --

WRANGLER: That was the way, yeah, his shorthand --

WHITING: -- he had before tape recorders. It’s like the story about the “Midnight Sun.” He

was driving to Palm Springs and he heard the black xylophonist playing the melody of “Midnight

Sun.” What’s the guy’s name -- and he’s famous -- old, but famous -- Lionel Hampton.

WRANGLER: Oh, of course.

WHITING: So he stopped -- he wondered. So, he got out, stopped at the gas station, called the

disc jockey, whoever it was, said, “This is Johnny Mercer. I’m on my way to Palm Springs.

Would you mind playing that again? I love it.” So they played it again in a few minutes, and by

the time he got to Palm Springs he’d written a lyric to “Midnight Sun.”

WRANGLER: But no, you’re asking about – I’m sorry, what was your question?

PATON: When he had to work with somebody, when he had to, because things had to get

written down. Does anybody know, is there anybody who saw him? Margaret, did you?

WRANGLER: Oh, actually sitting with the composer?

WHITING: No.

PATON: Sitting with him and -- How did that go?

WHITING: Well, my father just kept -- one thing I would know is that my father would play

the song over and over for him till he had the melody in his head, then he could rhyme. That was

easy, so I don’t know how he wrote --

WRANGLER: Mancini was never there. He told me that.

WHITING: Some of the men came in. Harold Arlen would come in and play a song. He said,

17

“We need a song,” and it’s -- the plot, they discussed the plot, and what it was, and he played it

three or four times, and then Johnny said, “Come back.” Then he took the couch route, then he

woke up and said, “Play it again.” [Arlen] played it again, and he [Mercer] was checking out. He

[Mercer] said, “How do you like this?” And [this is how they] did, like, “Blues in the Night,”

because he remembered the melody. I don’t think he wrote with many composers. I think he

listened to the melodies, and then he wrote. I know that he wrote with Kern. Kern told me that

he -- he said, “Isn’t this beautiful.” Kern always wrote the melody and then gave it to --whoever

it was, and this time it was Johnny, and Johnny wrote to Kern’s melody. I don’t think tape

recorders --

WRANGLER: See, a lot of those -- in those days, a lot of people worked together as

teams, and there was a true collaboration in that they’d write a melody and then the lyricist would

start to play with it, and then they’d adjust the melody, and they’d go back and forth to work

together. That’s not the way Johnny worked. He would do it exactly to the melody without

asking for any changes.

PATON: Disciplined.

WHITING: Yeah, very. I don’t recall -- I know how he wrote with my father. It was easy,

and like --. He said, “I cannot write this,” [what] I [Margaret] call “little old piece of material,”

which turned out to be “Hooray For Hollywood,” because they needed a march in it [in the

picture]. And my father wrote a tune and played it over, and Johnny kept saying this “little old

piece of material,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” and it fit, and they liked it. “Marvelous” was the

tough one because he had to write lyrics over and over and over again. The plot called for all

18

these production [numbers]. In this production number they had to write about fifteen to twenty

choruses.

WRANGLER: And there was a rap in the middle of it, too.

WHITING: Yes. So he kept writing, writing, writing. My father did the dummy tune, and it

was almost the way “Too Marvelous” [finally] went, but they made adjustments. But he

[Whiting] had to give him [Mercer] something to write this massive lyric to, so he wrote --

WRANGLER: [name?] Dixon, yeah, he was the one that had to do the rap in the

middle and say “These words are not enough,” or something, in the dialog or the movie, and the

guy says, “Well, how about a da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da,

da,” and it goes on, and on, and on, and it’s about two pages of a rap lyric in the middle of “Too

Marvelous.” I’ve got it somewhere, it’s just remarkable.

WHITING: But he usually wrote to their melodies. If Mancini needed a theme for the picture,

he’d write something and he’d say, “We’re going to get a song out of this later, but let’s play the

da-da-da-di---da-da,” [sings first few bars of “Charade”] and that was the theme of the picture,

and then he’d say, “Johnny, write the theme song.” He did that with “Days of Wine and Roses” -

-

WRANGLER: “Laura.”

WHITING: “Laura.” Well, what happened with “Laura,” David Raksin wrote the background

score, and when the picture came out, there was so much of a demand [for the tune “Laura”] --

Irving Caesar was asked first. He couldn’t write it, so the publishers asked Johnny to write it.

WRANGLER: There was a lawsuit connected with that, too --

19

WHITING: But, that’s after the fact, for “Laura,” but not -- I don’t think for “Days of Wine

and Roses” --

WRANGLER: No, not at all.

WHITING: “Charade.” I think they write the song, and they used the melody from the song

for the picture, the background, and there was the song --

WRANGLER: Oh, yes, because at that time, in motion pictures, the song, often, was used

to sell the picture, and so every motion picture during the sixties, there was always a theme song,

and it was written up front. Bacharach did a lot of them, they were, they were songs that were

used to sell the picture, and that was very important to them.

WHITING: So, “Charade,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” and “Moon River,” they needed a

song. Now, Hank had the melody, and they said “We’ve got to get this song of this girl yearning

about -- she was a prostitute, and she’s got to go back home, and we’ve got to have that thing.”

And Johnny said “Moon River.” And it fit the melody, the theme of the picture, then it went off

all over the place. You heard it all the way through the picture. But Johnny said “We’ll call it

‘Moon River,’” and he wrote, right away, the song for it. But, see --

WRANGLER: And they actually had to write a scene, in the picture, with her singing it

on a fire escape, at -- which doesn’t even jell that well with the motion picture, they just wanted

it in the film.

PATON: Yeah, I wondered about that.

WRANGLER: But, Johnny talked about that, too, and that Andy Williams really made it

famous, and the same thing with “Days of Wine and Roses.” If it hadn’t been for Andy

20

Williams, he never felt that either one of the songs would have been the hit that they were.

PATON: Really?

WRANGLER: Yeah, that his television show did it.

WHITING: Well, Henry told me that they walked into a restaurant one night. Andy was there,

and Mancini said “Let’s go after him, we’ve written this great song.” So they went over and

talked to Andy, and they said, you know, “We’ve got this great song, and you, you know us, we

know you” – [phone rings] [To Paton:] Do you want to turn it [the tape recorder] off?

PATON: Yeah, I’m going to stop.

[END OF SIDE 1]

[SIDE 2]

WRANGLER: We interviewed Edie Adams, because she starred in Li’l Abner, and she

said that Johnny hated being around the set. He wanted to see all the -- She said you always saw

him at a jazz club somewhere. He didn’t like to hang around the theater. He wasn’t there a lot.

She said that he’d come in and he’d get the material, he was always there with a rewrite on a lyric

and stuff, but he did not hang around the theater a lot. [Sentence concerning Al Capp, the creator

of the characters, has been omitted from this transcript.]

WHITING: He and Harold would have been available to the director, and [for] what they had

to change, like any composers, but he loved New York because he could play. He could have a

ball. And he went to all the jazz clubs and saw all the people. He just loved it.

PATON: We’ve heard stories about him being known for being able to make up songs on

the spot. Especially in his younger years.

21

WHITING: Oh yes, he’d say -- he had a riff that he did on the Camel Caravan called [Miss

Whiting sings] “Hello everybody, and a howdee do, and I want to say it’s morning and something

dee dee.” Well, he would do that every week and he would do the news of the week

WRANGLER: Called “Newsy Bluesies,” I have several of them.

PATON: Oh, good.

WHITING: But, he could make up anything to that. He would say, [Miss Whiting sings]

“Mister Jack’s got his shirt on right, what do you think of Saturday night?” Everything rhymed. I

mean, he just, [he] was like a typewriter, he just could do that, and he was wonderful in it.

WRANGLER: They said he’d go outside the studio and sit on the fire escape, and then

he’d come back and have the lyric ready to do that evening.

PATON: For – that’s for --?

WRANGLER: For the “Newsy Bluesies.”

PATON: Camel Caravan. And that was late thirties, thirty-eight, thirty-nine?

WHITING: Well, the late thirties, he was writing with my father.

WRANGLER: It’d be earlier than that.

WHITING: Yes, it had to be the early thirties. We’ll have to do homework on that and find

out when it was on. But he came to Hollywood in nineteen thirty-five. They wrote together for

about three, four years and then [my father] passed away, and then he [Mercer] was with Harry

Warren. We have none of the Harry Warren family that know anything. The little girl that’s

handling, the daughter that’s handling Harry’s estate, Jophie [sp?], belongs to this thing I belong

to, Amsong, but I don’t think she knows anything about her grandfather’s --

22

WRANGLER: Let’s go on to the next question.

PATON: Okay, let’s see. Capitol Records in the early days: was it sensibly different from

the other companies, from the artist’s point of view?

WHITING: Yes, absolutely.

PATON: What was different?

WHITING: The one thing that was so different was a -- a man of Johnny Mercer’s ability ran a

company, rather than a business man. A songwriter, performer, ran a company. It started with

Johnny going in every day to Music City and talking to Glenn Wallichs, who owned it, and he’d

say, “Now, here’s one of my songs, and Decca’s done it, and, damn it, nobody sings like Bing

Crosby, but it just isn’t done right.” And he kept saying that, and he said to Glenn, “You know,

we ought to go into business together. We should start a record company. I’d love it, I’d get

people that I’d love to record, and I’d know what to do with it. I’d write songs for them, I’d get

songs that would fit the people.” So he’s over at Paramount, doing Star Spangled Rhythm for

Buddy DeSylva, who’s the head of the studio, [short phrase omitted] and a great songwriter

himself.

[Short comment by Jack Wrangler concerning Buddy DeSylva is omitted.]

WHITING: [Sentence concerning Buddy DeSylva is omitted.] [Johnny] and Harold [Arlen]

are having lunch one day [with Buddy] and Johnny says, “You know, you do all these songs so

well in pictures and then they’re recorded and they’re just not the way we wrote them. I’m going

to start a record company, and I talked to, to Glenn Wallichs and --.” Buddy says, “Hey, let me

help, let me help. Well, what do you think you need to start?” He says, “Gee I don’t know, I’ve

23

never started a record company. About ten, fifteen thousand dollars.” So Buddy wrote a check.

So then the war was on [World War II], and the first, the four first records were coming out, the

number one “release,” and it was Dennis Day with “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose In Ireland.”

WRANGLER: I didn’t know that.

WHITING: Yeah. The reason I know is, when I wrote my book, I had to call somebody at

Capitol and find out what they were.

WRANGLER: I never knew that. I thought “Strip Polka” was the first one.

WHITING: “Strip Polka” was one, this one release, “Strip Polka,” “Johnny Doughboy,”uh

lets see there’s, ah, something “Jump,” to Paul Whiteman --

WRANGLER: “The Rumba Jumps?”

WHITING: No, it’s in my book and I can get it for you. Mark the things that you need for me

to check out. So, it was called “The Captain Jumped,” or “Somebody Jumped at Midnight,”

that’s Paul Whiteman, and the fourth one was Ella Mae Morse and Freddy Slack singing the

“Cow-Cow Boogie.” And I’ve got them in my book, so I know that I’ll get you the right title.

WRANGLER: I must read this book.

WHITING: First release, 1941.

WHITING: Now, Glenn Wallichs was head of a music company. In other words, he ran two

record shops and they were big, they were in Hollywood. So he knew about shipping, he knew

about selling. People were selling him records, so he knew what to do. So, he said, “I will go on

the road, and I will start our distributorship, and you get the songs and the artists. And Buddy

said, “I’ll help a bit, we can get Hutton from Paramount, and whoever wants to record from

24

Paramount, but I’ll give you some more money.” Now, the war was on and they ran out of

shellac. And shellac was what it took to make records. So, Glenn Wallichs did this brilliant

thing. He ran ads and he said, “Come one, come all! If you want to buy new records, bring in

some old ones you don’t want anymore. We need them.” So that’s what they [did]. They said,

“Man, here’s a pile of records.” He said, “Great. It’s, ah, three pounds, four pounds, eight

pounds. You put it in these great big vats,” or things where they could keep them, and they

didn’t mind if they broke them, because they were going to be broken anyway. And then he said,

“You get about $50 worth of new records.” So, finally, they got twenty thousand tons of shellac,

and $25,000 from Buddy DeSylva, and Capitol was born. [Short comments from Ms. Paton and

Miss Whiting are omitted from this transcript.]

Now, the thing that made Capitol Records different, was --. First of all, we had Decca,

we had Victor, we had Columbia, and it [Capitol] was the first new record company. But what

Johnny did was so brilliant. Those other companies, you made appointments with them, you

came in on a certain day, you saw one of the heads, who mostly were not musicians. They were

businessmen, and they learned to know what to do, A&R, with artists and records. But Johnny

had hired Paul Weston as a musical man, so when you came in with a new song, you sat down

and Paul said, “Let me read it.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, “it goes like this.” Now the songwriter

sings it, then Johnny picks it up and he starts to sing and says, “Hey I like this, this is good. I

think you’ve got a great song. May I suggest that one line, you know, you should work on it.”

“Well, well what do you mean?” He said, “Well, for example, this line would be a better line

than the one you’ve got.” And the guy says, “Man, that’s great.”

25

So he says, “I don’t know, but think this will be --.” I’m making up this dialogue, but I

was there enough to hear it. “-- I think it might be good for Jo Stafford, I’ll let you know. If she

likes, and it’s on a release --.” That’s what happened, they took this song. He opened the door to

all the songwriters. Older, newer people that had never written a song before, and people that

were, like, some of the big songwriters. They could get into that company.

WRANGLER: If Johnny found you a song and said, “I think,” ah, you know, like you

said, “I think this would be good for Margaret Whiting.” If you looked at it and said, “I don’t

think this is good for me at all,” did he say, “toss it,” or did he say, “do it?”

WHITING: He said, “Well, why didn’t you like it?” And such a, such a thing.

WRANGLER: Do you remember any song that that might have happened with?

WHITING: No. Maybe with some of the others, but never with Johnny. I mean later on, we

had bosses that were ex-musicians, and did all kinds of things, but with Johnny --

WRANGLER: If he -- any song he brought to you, you thought was right?

WHITING: That’s right. Well, for example, the first one [I recorded] was my father’s song,

[“My Ideal”]. [Short comment on an upcoming performance of “My Ideal” is omitted.]

WHITING: “But it’s been recorded.” [Johnny said,] “I don’t care. This song, I love this song

more than any other song, and I loved your father, so, damn it, you’re gonna sing this song. I’ve

gone through all this material, this is the one, I believe,” and he was right. Now, when he called

me up -- I tell that story about “Moonlight in Vermont,” but it’s true, “Come on down, honey --”

WRANGLER: I actually don’t know that much about “Moonlight in Vermont.” I mean,

what happened?

26

WHITING: Well, what happened was, I walked in, sat down, he says “I’ve got a song for

you,” and Paul played it and then Johnny sang it. And he said, “What do you think of it?” And I

said, “Well, God, those musical jumps, you know, that’s --”

WRANGLER: Did it, did it bother you there was no rhyme in the song?

WHITING: No, no, it told you the whole story, that I could listen to and, except that one line.

So I told him “I don’t know what a ski tow is, how do I sing about that?” He said, “I’ll get the

guys.”

WRANGLER: Nobody knew what a ski tow was, in the office?

WHITING: Well, he didn’t, because he said, “I’m from Savannah, I don’t know what a ski

tow is.” But he said, “Now we’ll get the songwriters.” So, he called them up and they were

going to come over. And he said, “I’ve already got a line I hope they’ll buy, ‘ski trails on a

mountainside.’ So, when they came in later, he said, “I’ve just done your song for Margaret, and

I think it’s perfect for her, and I want her to do it if she wants to do it. Now we have one trouble,

she doesn’t know what a ski tow is.” So they said, “Well we can change it --” He said, “Hey,

guys, how do you like this line, ‘ski trails on the mountainside?’” And they said, “Hey,

wonderful, wonderful, put it in.” They weren’t jealous at all. Put it in. They were so happy they

were going to get a song recorded. Now, they left and I said, “Okay.” So it was a follow-up to

Billy Butterfield and “My Ideal,” the sound of the band and the song. He said, “She sings like he

[Butterfield] plays. And we had a success with the one, we’re going to do it again.”

WRANGLER: Now explain what that would mean.

WHITING: It meant that I sang like a trumpet, or he [Butterfield] phrased like I sang. Mostly

27

because [Mercer] thought I sang like a trumpet, and I’d hit a note and it would be flat [straight

tone] and it would open up into vibrato.

WRANGLER: Oh, I see.

WHITING: So, he heard me singing like Billy Butterfield.

WRANGLER: And Billy Butterfield was a star at that point.

WHITING: He was a, he was a star musician, so --

WRANGLER: So the first release was with Billy Butterfield.

WHITING: Oh yeah, and I, you know, this was my start, with this song. So I said --. He said,

“What do you think about Vermont?” I said, “I don’t know how I’m going to sing this song.”

He said, “Think about Vermont.” This is where he was great. This is where he was brilliant.

Now, he finds this song. He figures I’ll be good with Butterfield. He wants a certain kind of

arrangement where I’d sing it and the trumpet plays it. But how do you sing this song? He told

me that – “Pick up a lyric of the song. Forget the melody. Become familiar with it, but sing that

lyric. Talk it out. It’s a piece of poetry. Talk it out. ‘Pennies in a stream, falling leaves of

sycamore, moonlight in Vermont.’” And he made me go over it and over it, so that [with]

“pennies in a stream,” you accentuate the word “stream.” Now when he said, “Pennies in a

stream, that’s like throwing a penny in the water, and you watch it go ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. And the

falling leaves. What is that?” I said, “That’s fall. And that’s where everybody goes to see the

falling leaves and to see fall, in Vermont.” He said, “Good. But what do you think of

Vermont?” I said, “Well, first of all, I think of a certain church that I’ve seen on a calendar, and

it’s winter, and I’ve seen that church so many times.” He said, “Good, now tell me about winter

28

following ‘pennies in a stream.’” I said, “Well, you’re tobogganing, you’re in those, those

beautiful -- like with reindeer, you know --”

WRANGLER: Sleds?

WHITING: “-- drawn by horses, and sleds and sleighs,” and I went through everything I could

think of, you know, and he said, “Great. Now, what would be the difference between fall and

winter?” I said, “Winter’s much colder.” He said, “Then get, try to get that cold [feeling] in you.

You’ve gone from fires at night and the smell of leaves and -- you know, in Vermont --.” [I said]

“I’ve never been there.” He said, “Neither have I.” I said --. He said, “What would you smell?”

I said, “Falling leaves, burning leaves, people cleaning up -- ahhh, syrup! This is when they drill

the holes and the syrup comes out.” And he said, “And there’s a smell in the air, right?” I said,

“Had to be, with those big vats, making syrup.” So we -- I tried, and he drew the picture for me.

Now he’s --

WRANGLER: Now, when you listen to the song from the original recording of it, do you

hear all of those things?

WHITING: Some of them.

WRANGLER: Uh-huh?

WHITING: I couldn’t get them all. But --

WRANGLER: Because now when you do it -- because you are “lyrics first” --

WHITING: Yeah.

WRANGLER: In those days, so often people put the melody importance before the lyric.

WHITING: Absolutely --

29

WRANGLER: Because that’s the way people worked.

WHITING: But not with him or Frank Loesser. Because I worked with a guy that I recorded

and he used the word “apple -- crisp --,” ah, thing, you know. And there were little cues that they

gave me. But he [Mercer] was, he gave me that piece of advice: pick a song and talk it, and talk

it until you got familiar with it and you knew the words to emphasize that would make the

sentence come out right.

WRANGLER: I know before --. When I first met Margaret and we started going together,

people would say to me, “She’s the greatest phraser in the business. She can phrase a lyric better

than anybody.” And people thought that was instinctual with you. I guess maybe that came from

Johnny.

WHITING: Well, a great deal of it came from me, as just the way I sang without really

knowing what to do with it. But he made me aware of reading the lyric and putting commas in,

and he helped me with so many of the songs at first. Like the day they came over and asked me

to do “Black Magic” because they had a record --

WRANGLER: Was that the first Johnny Mercer lyric that you did for Capitol?

WHITING: Yeah, yes, “Black Magic.” Because they were very unhappy with Johnny

Johnson’s recording of it. Gordon Jenkins made the arrangement and it just wasn’t what Harold

wanted musically, it wasn’t exciting enough. So Johnny said, “The kid’s going to do it.” So they

came over to the house to visit, and I learned the song. And he said, “I don’t know about a band.

We could put Paul Weston and put a band together. This is not right for Billy Butterfield.” He

said, “You know, the band we’ve got that Ella Mae Morse used,” which was Freddie Slack, “that

30

would be great because he’s a piano -- a pianist, and we could go bum-bum-bum-bum-bum,

something that was hypnotic and kept repeating in the introduction.” She [Ella Mae Morse]

couldn’t sing the song, because first of all, she was pregnant, and she couldn’t sing that kind of

song, so I sang it. And everybody was very happy with it, it was a good reading of the song and

it, it, I mean, this is the virgin trip, you know. So those guys wanted it to be by the right person,

and they didn’t like the way Johnny sang it. So we did it, and there was a radio show called

“Peter Potter’s [Hit or Miss.”]

WRANGLER: Oh yeah.

WHITING: And Paul called me up on the phone and said, “The record is going to be on this

afternoon, listen.” I threw up, I couldn’t stand it. You know, because this record really came out

first, because they rushed it out because of the picture. So I’m sitting there, listening to this Peter

Potter thing. Artie Shaw was on, who would knock everything.

WRANGLER: Yeah, uh-huh.

WHITING: And I can’t remember the other people, but they all gave it a hundred, and they

said it’s a hit. And I just rolled over in the bed and cried. I mean, it was the most amazing thing.

And Johnny called me and said, “Hey, kid, did you hear what happened to our record?” And

Paul called me up, and it was -- it took off.

PATON: Did he take that kind of care, or did the people at Capitol at that time take that

kind of care, with most of the releases?

WHITING: It was him. He was the head, with Paul Weston, they didn’t have anybody else

there doing it. They had business people, but that’s what was so remarkable, it was small and

31

they had --. Remember, they had four releases a month, altogether, on this one release. Now, of

course, the first release -- they had two million-sellers on it, so they were off and running.

Now, we had a strike, and I think that was in July, and we started in June. And the strike

could have killed us, because we had no backlog, and we all went in and did about seven, eight,

nine songs, you know, that --. Paul called me one day and he said, “Get off that boat you’re on,

wherever you are, and get back here. We need you to do seven or eight songs.”

WRANGLER: Now, in a crisis like that, how did Johnny behave in a crisis? I mean, did

he get _________ [ripped?], did he just go nuts?

WHITING: No. He said, “Who do we have to record? Freddie Slack, Ella Mae Morse,

myself, you,” and whoever else, there were people on the label. But the way he handled it was,

uh, “I want you to sing ‘St. Louis Blues.’” I can’t tell you, I can’t re -- I remember I did that, and

I had a few drinks because it was, you know, we were all crazy there. But Johnny was calm.

Johnny said, “Great,” he came into it, and we had sessions going everywhere we could record,

because everybody else was doing the same thing.

WRANGLER: So you’d record to either existing tracks or --

WHITING: No, no existing tracks, there was nothing existing. This was like the second

month they had -- they had some releases to come out. But like in three, four months we [would

have] had nothing.

WRANGLER: So what did --

WHITING: So Paul Weston made seven arrangements for me. One was “St. Louis Blues.”

Oh, God -- [let me] try to think of some of the others --

32

PATON: This was during the instrumentalists’ strike?

WHITING: Yes, this is the musicians’ strike. They stopped --

WRANGLER: But they --. In other words, he made the arrangements right before the

strike?

WHITING: Yes, we had a week or two.

WRANGLER: That’s what I was -- I didn’t quite understand. So he laid down tracks

which you had to --

WHITING: No, we went into the studio and recorded them.

WRANGLER: I see.

PATON: They didn’t have tape at this time.

WHITING: Right. Petrillo was the guy who did it, and it was in July and every company was

doing the same thing. So we’d go in and take, um, three sessions in one night. You know, you

find, the musicians would give up and so would you. So we’d come back the next night with

another three sessions. So we got seven, eight songs in. And then they forgot about me, and they

got the next one [singer] and Johnny had to find material [for that person].

WRANGLER: Right, and there was that thing, at that time, where if anybody screwed up

you had to start all over again. Because I know --. That’s funny on that “Mr. Echo” tape that we

have, it was like, I believe, like, take eighteen or take nineteen, or -- eighteen, I think it was.

WHITING: Well, that was because they had to turn [on the switch for the] “echo, echo, echo.”

I mean that was really the main thing, because now you would do it in a completely different

way. But [sings] “Good morning, Mr. Echo, echo, echo, echo --” [making hand motions to show

33

that the engineer made each “echo” manually, by turning a switch]

WRANGLER: But you hear Margaret, they say “take eighteen,” she says “Oh, God --”

(laughter)

WHITING: Well, you know, yeah. But that’s the thing that made Capitol Records, [it] was

Johnny Mercer and his team.

PATON: What were recording sessions like? Were they different than at other studios?

WHITING: Well, we used several studios because we didn’t have one.

PATON: But I mean for other -- were they -- did Capitol and did Johnny handle them

differently than, say, Columbia or Victor?

WHITING: Well, Jack writes about “Johnny had a dream.” And this dream was to get all his

favorite singers and favorite musicians and favorite songwriters and put them all together and

have a ball. The first session I remember was “Strip Polka.” We went down to Western Avenue

and I think it was a studio called McGregor’s. I had nothing to do with it, but I was invited to the

session. Phil Silvers was on the record.

WRANGLER: Right.

WHITING: He said some line like, “Glad to see ya,” or something. And there were a lot of

Mercer friends there and they had the god-damnedest ball that night of anything I’d ever seen.

WRANGLER: Yeah.

WHITING: They just went crazy. And you had fun with him, because he was in the booth,

and he was making cracks to you, and we had a hip arranger, and the band was great, you know.

They were part of a family because so many of the people had gone to school with Paul Weston

34

at Dartmouth, and they knew Johnny, and every recording studio, and every studio had a band, a

bigger band, a smaller band, in mind. They were the first, first player. So that Capitol could

almost always get the nucleus of a certain band. Because if -- not under contract, but they were

first called. And the bands were always great, and Paul was funny and doing things, so that

you’d go to a session, it was one of the greatest things you’d ever go through.

WRANGLER: There’s something that I wanted to know about. In the studio system at

that time, the stars that were under contract were groomed, they were, they were dressed by the

studio, they were limousined by the studio, and they made enough money to be able to live like

movie stars. Now when, in the recording industry, you made a song and you were paid $75 for a

side --

WHITING: Some of the people originally got $250 a side, that was advance. So, you might

make --

WRANGLER: But how did --? Now, the record comes out, and suddenly that person is

elevated through that record into a star status --

WHITING: Your contract immediately is changed, for most people.

WRANGLER: How did they make those people look like stars, though? Because some of

them that, must have been living hand-to-mouth.

WHITING: Well --

WRANGLER: I mean, the [movie] studios would make them look like stars when they

went out. I wondered how they would make, make somebody -- I mean with --. Because of your

father and all that stuff, I mean, you [Margaret] were able to live like a star.

35

WHITING: Yes.

WRANGLER: But most people were not. Like Ella Mae Morse was certainly --

WHITING: Well, I don’t know. We didn’t have television then, so we would make

appearances in concerts and disc jockey shows, and it [appearance] didn’t really count until we

had to go to the Hollywood Bowl, or something like that, and then we just hoped our people

would dress.

WRANGLER: Uh-huh?

WHITING: It wasn’t quite like the studios.

WRANGLER: And it wasn’t -- Johnny wasn’t renting limousines for everybody, and

doing all that stuff to make them look like the stars they were supposed to be, and doing --

WHITING: No, not that I know of. No, and we had no wardrobe guys at [Capitol].

WRANGLER: Right.

WHITING: This was a record company, and their business was to make records.

So we got through the, uh, the strike and Johnny’s personality kept going, and Buddy

DeSylva just said, “Well now, let’s see who we’ve got on the lot here that we can record?” Betty

Hutton was his protégée, she came over; we got a record of a guy that sang with a trio, and it was

Nat Cole, and I took it to Johnny and he said, “God, he’s great,” and the thing began to build.

But his personal touch was in all of it until he got very busy writing six pictures.

WRANGLER: Now at the time that Capitol Records was starting, was Johnny Mercer still

a star in his own right? I mean, was he a major star?

WHITING: When Capitol Records started, Johnny Mercer was a great songwriter who’d had a

36

lot of hits.

WRANGLER: But would people, was he a recognizable star like Clark Gable?

WHITING: He was a record star. He was on the Camel Caravan before this, and they knew

him from radio, and they knew his songs.

WRANGLER: But if he walked down the street, he was not mobbed.

WHITING: No, I don’t think so. No, no he wasn’t. That came with television and, ah, being

a hit record singer. Because when he’d do “Strip Polka,” his record came out and everybody

adored him all over the world, all over the country, anyway. And so he would make some

personal appearances, but he was known as a great songwriter. Now, at the time he had Capitol

Records, he started Star-Spangled Rhythm and The Fleet’s In, with the Jimmy Dorsey band and

Helen O’Connell and William Holden. And I mean, and then he made, he had some people

make the records of that picture, and he did some [himself], so, I mean, it went on and on and on,

and he went from one picture to another, and suddenly the world knew him as the great

songwriter and the great recording star.

WRANGLER: When you did recordings in those early days with Johnny, was Ginger

there?

WHITING: Sometimes. Sometimes. I only did one thing with him. But sometimes she

would be there. I told you what I told Chris, when we were at the funeral. She was the ballast

behind him, because when he first came to Hollywood, that was in the early thirties, and he came

out to do a couple of shorts. He was on a train, remember we saw that?

WRANGLER: Um-hmm.

37

WHITING: And he was on a train, and he was sticking his head out of the upper berth, and he

sang a couple of songs that he’d written. And they loved him, but when he came back and

started writing at Warner Brothers, everybody said, “He’s a genius. He’s a genius.” And she

[Ginger], I think, helped him writing with my father. He loved my father, he was over all the

time with my father, playing golf, whatever it was. And I think the fact that my father was such

a, a straight, kind of a nice --

WRANGLER: Funny --

WHITING: -- funny guy, that Johnny just loved that. You know, so that his head didn’t

explode, like Hoagy Carmichael’s did.

WRANGLER: When your father died, did Johnny’s relationship with you change?

WHITING: No, it got better.

WRANGLER: No, I meant, did it change in some way? Did he --

PATON: Can we break here?

WRANGLER: Sure.

[END OF SIDE 2]

[SIDE 3 OF 4]

[Initial comments from Mr. Wrangler and Miss Whiting are omitted from this transcript.]

WRANGLER: Ah, with the show [the Mercer show that Margaret was appearing in that

weekend] -- because, as I said, the thing we tell on the show about, uh, the “roses in the

morning,” about insulting the cat and the maid and everything, and that happened in Jean Bach’s

38

house. But I don’t know any other Garland stories, and I don’t know whether Margaret does.

You [Margaret] told me he was, she [Judy Garland] was the great love of his life.

WHITING: Well, I think she was. He never told me.

PATON: When did they meet? Was it on Harvey Girls?

WHITING: I think that --

PATON: Before?

WHITING: They made a record together called “Friendship, Friendship,” so that was before

she did Harvey Girls. Oh, they just met at parties. I, I have, I really don’t know when and where,

but I, I’d always heard it was a great romance. He liked sex, because, ah, Harry Warren’s

daughter said, “God damn it, when he got a drink he was after everybody, even me.” I said,

“Well --”. That’s really all I know, because I didn’t want to hear that. I never had a crush on

him. I just absolutely --

WRANGLER: Well, it must have been a very paternal relationship with him, because at

the point when, with your father dying that young, and Johnny really almost taking over in, as

your father --

WHITING: He would come, he would come over twice a week and visit. He loved my

mother and he’d call on the phone all the time.

WRANGLER: When I first started writing stuff about Johnny, Margaret would say -- I

would, I went around and interviewed people, and I would come back [with a] story [about him]

and she’d say, “Well, I never saw that side of Johnny. I never knew the dark side of Johnny.”

WHITING: Oh yes, I did.

39

WRANGLER: But you were very reluctant to go into any of that then, because Johnny to

you, I think, was almost a surrogate father.

WHITING: Yes, but he was my hero.

WRANGLER: And I can understand that you didn’t want to --

WHITING: He did so much for me and he was so brilliant. When he wrote those songs and

when he sang those songs and when he told us what to do, he was a genius. And -- we shared

many moments like the, the train thing, which we’ll go into later, about -- that we’ll do tomorrow

night, about [Mercer saying that] “the world is going to end up like this junk yard” [alongside the

railroad tracks]. Now, he cared so much about the world, and people, and that we shouldn’t take

drugs, and we shouldn’t do all these things, these killings and everything that we know and are

surrounded with constantly. He was a man who cared about flowers, and cared about birds, and

cared about nature, and that superseded anything with him. Now when he drank, that’s another

story. He did bad things, he said bad things.

WRANGLER: There’s a story, and I believe Bill Harbach told us -- and it’s so, it’s very –

I’ve got it on the tape somewhere or something, but it was something about somebody at Capitol

being called on the carpet because they were not showing good public relations some way, they,

they were not dealing with people, or that somebody complained that they were impolite. An

A&R man or somebody, and the guy said, “Now wait a minute.” And he did a list of the things

people were doing, and I remember the final line was, “And you got Johnny Mercer down at

some bar insulting everybody, and you’re saying I’m bad public relations?” That he would go

out and just level people [when he drank]. But one thing I, and I do know because Ervin Drake,

40

who I collaborated with --. But he had a couple of times with Johnny, and he said if Johnny was

curt with you, it was not only the “roses in the morning.” He must have harbored enormous guilt

about things he did when he drank, because the next day, or -- he would send you some lovely

gift and things. He, he would sent you, it wasn’t just roses or something to say, “Gee, I’m sorry

for last night”; he would think about something that you would really want --

WHITING: Like a cartoonist’s book.

WRANGLER: Yes.

WHITING: [For] Ervin, because he was a cartoonist.

WRANGLER: Right, right. Something that really would mean something to you, and

he’d go out and really search to find it. To find something special that he knew you’d really

want. And do it for you. So he cared deeply about people. And anybody, that, that drinks is

going to have dark moments. But it’s always been a question. I know Mancini brought it up,

too, whether the dark moments were because of the drinking. [One person] said that sometimes

she felt he used the drinking as an excuse to be nasty. But I never got that from anybody else.

Everybody else I ever talked to said they never felt that, that it was the drinking that made him

nasty, and he, he really felt awful about that kind of thing. Because he generally adored people.

WHITING: Yes, he did. But I don’t think that’s all true. I think Johnny Mercer was probably

unhappy many times in his life, and that that’s why he drank and he took out his hostilities on

people, and the next day he really liked them and he hated the fact that he had done that. So --

[telephone rings; pause in recording]

See, I am filled with thoughts that contradict one another. I think of nights where we

41

went out with Ginger and if he had a few drinks -- he was always nice to me, but sometimes he

was not nice to her. Now, that’s because of the closeness, the fact they’d been married and you

always attack the person closest to you. And she would drink, too, and, and go into submission.

She wouldn’t say anything, and I know she hurt --. I remember a night we went out in the valley

to see some people sing, and he would say things to her, you know, and it made me very

unhappy.

PATON: When was this?

WHITING: Oh, God, this was --

PATON: Roughly?

WHITING: Uh -- maybe in the -- sixties or, probably, the sev-, no, it had to be more than that,

we went to see David Frischberg one night, it would have to be, I guess, around the seventies,

because he died --. And I’d drive up to the house, or they’d come pick me up, and usually, like

when my mother was with us, and we’d go to dinner with Ginger and Johnny and my mother and

myself, everything would be fine. He’d watch it. And he didn’t drink all the time. But he was a

terror when he drank, sometimes. He really insulted a lot of people. Gene Lees wrote his book

in which they talked about “roses in the morning,” and Jo Stafford, and Paul Weston, he’d tell

me that they had a lot of that. And, uh -- I don’t know what Harbach remembers, because he was

his drinking buddy.

PATON: Uh-huh.

WHITING: And so was Bob [Bach]. Bob was a character, and, you know, had been a

producer and things like that of, of What’s My Line or something like that. But I think Harbach

42

was really his favorite guy. And, uh, Harbach could drink, but I don’t think it was ever like that,

but you could probably get some stories about this. But if you drink like that, and you say these

things, that’s what’s on your mind, and you want to say. I’m sure any psychiatrist would say that,

so --. When I went over that day and talked to him about writing with Paul McCartney, he was

very serious, and the love that he had, and the affection that he had that he felt for Ginger came

through for me. That he would rather -- I mean, he could write and still take care of Ginger, but

that [taking care of Ginger] was uppermost on his mind. And in the years when they came out to

Hollywood first, she was a person that leveled him, too. He didn’t go crazy. He might be

drinking or something, but he was, you know, funny and charming a lot, and -- we called him

cute, you know. But underneath that, that must’ve been the unhappiness that he felt because

when he drank he was, ah, not the right guy. And he said all these things, so I think that he

would -- I, I would not say he was the happiest of men.

WRANGLER: Yes, I don’t know --. It was funny when we were working. We worked a couple

of years, working on book versions of this show. We really tried to dig to find whether -- which

came first, the chicken or the egg. Whether it was the drinking that would set up the chemical

imbalance that would bring out, bring out the Jekyll and Hyde side within somebody, or whether

there was really something gnawing at him throughout his life. And we heard so many different

versions, we -- I got to the point where I said, “Look, when people drink they get -- there, there

are nasty drunks and there are --”

WHITING: There’s a reason underlying --

WRANGLER: I imagine so. I did -- I began to feel that there was a lot more made of that

43

dark side than, than -- I thought it was starting to be blown out of proportion. One of the things

that I did learn though, that uh, made it rough on Ginger was that at most dinner parties, it was

the custom to separate a couple.

WHITING: A husband and wife, yeah.

WRANGLER: And one would be put at one table, and another at another table, and nobody ever

wanted to be at Ginger’s table because she was not a stunning conversationalist and Johnny was.

And so all the fun and the laughter was coming from one table and then there was this formal

table over here, and that was a very uncomfortable thing for her, because she knew people

wanted to be at Johnny’s table and uh, and she couldn’t hold up that end of the evening socially,

and that, that must have been a very rough thing for her have to go through.

WHITING: Well, now we talk about -- we jump, because we’re talking about Ginger now, and

influences, we jump to the funeral [Ginger’s memorial service] --

WRANGLER: Oh, yeah. Talk about the Jewish thing and all that.

WHITING: Well, that’s what I was going to say. We jump to the funeral where we were --

WRANGLER: This really is --

WHITING: And, uh, the night before I, I flew down and I had dinner with this gal you’ve got

to interview. The, the gal that played piano and knew --

PATON: Emma Kelly.

WHITING: Yeah. Emma is wonderful. And I went over to see Emma, because she was going

to play piano for my songs, and we sat down, and Bart said, “You mind if I bring the minister in?

Because he wants to know something about Ginger. It’s Ginger Mercer and she was the wife of

44

Johnny Mercer and what more can we say?” So Emma and I started talking to him. “What was,

what was she like? What kind of flowers did she like?” I said she loved roses. She loved all

flowers. And Emma said something and [they asked] “What, how did she dress?” I said she had

a darling figure and she was very fashion-conscious and wore gorgeous clothes. “Well, what did

she like to do? What was her favorite book?” And I came up with this thing that Anne Baxter

and Anthony Hopkins had done called Charing Cross [?], and I said, “I know that was her

favorite book because she not only told me, but she took me to see the play in New York.” “Um,

what, what else about her?” I said, “Well she loved the symphony in, in Los Angeles, and she

gave money to the symphony, and [I know] she used to go because I went with her a lot. She

loved the music, she loved art, she loved painting, she would go to all the museums.” “And uh,

well, now what about coming here [to Savannah]?” said the minister. I said, “Well, she would

come for two or three days,” and Emma said, “Yeah, I would see -- I didn’t know Ginger well.

met her, and she would come in with Johnny Mercer here, and she would spend a couple of days

and then she’d leave and she’d go on to Brooklyn with her family.” And she said, “I never really

felt that Ginger was at home here.” And we kept talking and talking, and finally we realized that

Johnny’s mother didn’t like her because she was Jewish. So that was, you know, “We, we

mustn’t say that,” but that was --

WRANGLER: If they’re going to do it in the archives, these are things they need to know.

WHITING: No no, no no, yes yes. But I mean, we were --

WRANGLER: Oh, you mean at the funeral. [laughter]

WHITING: Yes, [we] weren’t going to say that at the funeral. So, so we talked about it and I

45

said, “Isn’t that -- I never thought of that.” Because Johnny never -- he loved his mother, and he

wanted always to go home to Savannah. That was home to him. But he said, would say,

“Ginger isn’t going”, or “Ginge,” he’d call her “Ginge.”

WRANGLER: You also told me, when you came back from the funeral, that people had said to

you down there that they thought she was snobbish.

WHITING: Well, it was because she didn’t feel at home with the Southern people there,

because his mother didn’t like her because she was Jewish, and neither did they. There was a

tremendous thing in Savannah about the Jewish people.

WRANGLER: About everything, you know --

WHITING: About everything, but I never knew this. [The following sentence is omitted from

the transcript.] And the woman who took me to the airport said, “Oh, I’m Jewish and I’ve gone

through hell here.” So that would make him feel he can’t go home as much, because he didn’t

want to leave Ginger. But he wanted to go home. So then he’d have to go home alone and make

up excuses of why she wouldn’t come. She didn’t like it because they didn’t like her. So that

was one thing he probably had to consider and think about all his life, ever since he met her.

PATON: Did his family or relatives and friends from Savannah come west much that you

know of? Did they visit California?

WHITING: Uh, I, I don’t recall his mother ever being out there. I may be wrong, but I don’t

recall the mother coming.

PATON: What about brothers and sisters?

WHITING: Ah, his friend that he loved, that he wrote “Moonlight,” that he wrote “Moon

46

River” about, was his cousin Walt, and Walt got a job at Capitol, worked for us. But that was,

that was “Huckleberry Friend,” was the moon. But they were Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and

they just went up and down those bogs and, and they just loved it together, they had a ball as

kids.

[The next section of the interview is omitted from the transcript. During this part of the

interview, Ms. Paton inquires about the Mercer’s children. Miss Whiting and Mr. Wrangler

indicate that they were adopted. The children’s names are Mandy and John Jefferson.]

WHITING: [Getting back to the dark side,] it was there, and [I think] the reasons why were

the fact that he never wrote a successful Broadway show and [he was afraid of growing old.]

[Comment from Mr. Wrangler is omitted.] I don’t know that this dark side existed in the

beginning.

WRANGLER: In the early days. I don’t, either.

WHITING: I really don’t, because I was a kid, and I just remember all the happy times with

him.

WRANGLER: I know that Ginger said -- because Ervin and I asked her this question. We went

out to interview her again for the show, and that’s when I had some really rough times with

Ginger. But she said that the times when they were truly happy was when they were first out in

Hollywood, the first few years.

WHITING: When they met daddy and mother.

WRANGLER: Yes, that’s when, that’s when they were truly happy. She said they, from there on

in, it was not.

47

WHITING: Well, they belonged to a club. They did a lot of things, they went to a lot of

parties and he was, you know, he was the young king. And they -- and this [the club] was called

the, uh, March --

PATON: Is that the Westwood? The Westwood Marching and Chowder Club?

WHITING: Yes.

PATON: Scrapbooks turned up in this month’s --

WHITING: Yeah. And Johnny Burke, and Johnny Mercer, and everybody else in the world

was -- Bing, and everyone, was at this party. And Johnny -- the two lyric writers, Johnny Burke

and Johnny Mercer, got stoned, they were so drunk. And they found themselves, in full make-up,

because they went as, ah, black face, in prison, in jail the next morning, because they were picked

up by the cops and thrown in there. Then --

WRANGLER: I never knew this story.

WHITING: [Phrase omitted] Oh, God, it was awful. But they said, “Never again.” But they

would write for the minstrel show, and they would write these brilliant things, and they both

landed in jail, which I think is funny.

WRANGLER: Very funny.

WHITING: Um -- just trying to see what else comes [to mind].

WRANGLER: Well --

PATON: Getting back to the -- this kind of circles back to the start of the question. At the

Mercer house, if you came as a guest, say you came for Saturday night, or, you know -- on what

basis did they entertain once, once they were settled in Hollywood?

48

WHITING: It was very casual. He was usually in a shirt and didn’t dress up, and she always

looked very nice, and they had servants passing hors d’oeuvres and we’d sit down and have a

wonderful dinner, or as they did in Hollywood a lot, and at their house, they would have a buffet.

And they’d have roast beef and vegetables and everything. And we’d sit around, and then

everybody would get up and sing. There’d be a piano player, or we’d have quiet, quiet meals

with them, where we’d, we’d go out to Chasen’s.

PATON: Now this “we,” this is you and the Mercers.

WHITING: And my mother, and the family.

PATON: It was a family type --

WHITING: Yeah, we’d go out, we’d always go on Thursday nights as a pack.

WRANGLER: Were the [Mercer] kids ever included in part of that?

WHITING: Not that I know of. I don’t remember the kids, hardly at all.

WRANGLER: Uh-huh.

WHITING: They were around the house but they never meant anything to me, which --

WRANGLER: Is indicative of something, though.

WHITING: I remember him bringing me a copy of the song, he said, “I’ve written this for

Mandy – ‘Mandy is two, Mandy is three,’” and Phil Silvers wrote the melody, I think, and they

sang it. But I remember Jeff distinctly at my house the night we did or [were] soon about the, do

the “Y” [YMHA Lyrics and Lyricists Mercer show]. But that was New York. And I really didn’t

see much of him, he was a tow-headed kid, you know, with the blond hair. And I saw more of

her [Mandy] because she was married to a pianist and Johnny would use him. [Final sentence

49

omitted.]

PATON: So you wouldn’t go over on Thursday and the kids would be rolling around on the

rug and --

WHITING: No. I don’t really remember that. We’d go over there for dinner sometimes,

but mostly we’d go out. Like every Thursday night, we’d go out to dinner. We’d go to a place in

Santa Monica called Maxie’s. The Swiss Chalet. And daddy would go, you know, and I was

about seven or eight. Then we’d go, my mother, myself, and Barbara, we’d go with the Mercers,

you know, because that’s where daddy used to go and we’d, we’d -- the kids were never with us.

PATON: And this would have been in the forties, fifties?

WHITING: No, no, no, no. This would be, ah, see my father died in thirty-eight, thirty-nine,

so it could have been in thirty-six and --

PATON: And then you continued going with the Mercers, after --

WHITING: Oh, yeah, we’d go after my father died. And we’d, we’d always go to Chasen’s,

we loved that. He’d [Mercer’d] come to the house every Saturday night, to my house, because

we had singing and music. And we’d go out a lot and we’d go to the movies and all that kind of

thing, but I don’t remember a lot at his house. Now, that’s the first house. Then we’d go to

Christmas parties and different parties up at the Bel-Air house, and they had, they were a little

chic-er and, uh -- everybody was --. His agent was the top agent. What’s the, the guy’s name

that had the parties?

WRANGLER: Swifty Lazar.

WHITING: Yeah. Swifty Lazar was his agent, and they had some wonderful people there, but

50

not like the stars had, where they had the creme de la creme. He’d have his friends come. So it

was really kind of simple, and, and there’d be singers he liked, and people he liked, and -- but not

Joan Fontaine, or Olivia de Havilland.

WRANGLER: But the people that would be included in his Christmas cards that he would

send.

WHITING: Yes, yes, yes.

WRANGLER: Those people would be there. It always seemed to me that when you

looked at the prolific amount of material that Johnny turned out, I mean, you start with the, the

songs in the shows then the, the things he would do on a daily basis, plus the business stuff, plus

letters he wrote that must have gone on and on. And the stuff that he did, you know, he must -- I

never thought that the guy ever had time to do anything except write. I mean, if you wrote

twenty-four hours a day, every day -- it would be about the amount of material that Johnny

Mercer turned out over his life. And it just seems like so much. I can’t imagine that he was ever

doing much more than writing.

WHITING: Well, he’d get up in the morning, and he’d have his breakfast, and he’d be playing

music, and he’d go outside and feed the birds, which -- that was his daily activity. Then he’d sit

out on the porch and he’d look at them playing golf on the Bel-Air course, and he loved that.

And then he might go over and hit some golf balls into a bucket, or he’d have a game that he’d

play with, or he was writing a picture, so he’d go into his studio and he’d cut himself off and sit

there and write. And then he’d have a regular dinner at home or he’d go out to Chasen’s, you

know. And he loved an Italian place that we used to go and he used to take her [Ginger] [there]

51

all the time. Um, Mattie’s, Matteo’s.

WRANGLER: Oh, yeah.

WHITING: In Westwood.

WRANGLER: Yeah.

WHITING: And now, what does it say about Hollywood --? Well, we know the funeral, and

that they weren’t there.

But I mean, well, there were a lot of people [who said] "I was, I was away, I couldn’t go

to the funeral, I was working." But we did, in New York, we did the tribute to him [Mercer’s

memorial service] and we had everybody there, and Irving Berlin gave us a theater. But --

PATON: So this is Johnny’s [memorial service]?

WHITING: This is Johnny’s now. And they tell me that everybody, my mother told [me] that

it was a wonderful ASCAP thing. And they all drank a glass of wine to him because of “Wine

and Roses,” which was sweet. I don’t know who all was there. I’m sure Mancini was there, and

all of his collaborators and people like that, but I feel she was very unhappy at times.

PATON: Ginger.

WHITING: Yeah. With him. Because he was the star and she wasn’t, and she would have to

sit in the background while he did things, you know, and as Jack so aptly put it, she knew a lot of

things about wonderful things, but she had trouble getting them out sometimes, and she was like

a little mouse. She was dear and charming, but he had the great personality, so it took a long,

long time to get to know her. But she was very aware of my grandmother and what she could do

for Blossom, and Ellie, and they would sit and talk and, and everything. But she was not a

52

woman’s woman. She didn’t sit around and play cards. She’d shop, she’d do this, she’d do that,

and she found her world, I guess, through the kids and everything, but she was not a woman to go

on her own and do many different things. She’d go to the opera, she’d go to the symphony, she’d

go to the museum, she’d do things like that. She’d go to the market, she’d be ready to go with

him if he needed it, and always, always, when he wrote the song, even before the composer, she

heard it first. He wanted what she knew and what she knew about songs, and she knew about

him, to tell him that it was okay.

PATON: Now, she played piano. I asked her once what she did before they met. I said,

“Now,” we sort of squeezed this in over the dinner table, “What did you do –“

WRANGLER: Well, she was a dancer.

PATON: Well, she was a dancer when they met, but she just sort of told me that she and her

sister had been trained as pianists, and that she had wanted to be a concert pianist. So I asked

Lidia while I was out there in December, “Did she ever play?” Lidia said, “No,” but Lidia also

said that one of the last things she said before she died was, “When I come back, I’ll play for

you.”

WHITING: I’ve never seen, I never heard of --

PATON: Did she ever play [piano] with Johnny?

WHITING: Never.

PATON: When he was writing, did she ever, or --

WHITING: No.

PATON: -- when he sang?

53

WRANGLER: I never even heard that she played the piano.

WHITING: No, I didn’t either.

PATON: That’s why I’ve been, partly, so curious about what else I might not know,

because I simply asked her [what she did] and she looked stunned --

WRANGLER: What a strange thing to say.

PATON: -- that anybody would ask. I said, “What, what did you want to do?” And she

said, “Me?” And she said, “Oh, I wanted to be a concert pianist.” And then things happened and

we couldn’t [continue the conversation] --

WHITING: I would remember if I ever heard her play piano. I never saw her sit down, ever. I

knew she liked music, she knew about music, but I never, ever, saw her play the piano. She

never did at our house, she never did at their house that I know.

PATON: Well, Lidia said she didn’t in the years Lidia was there.

WRANGLER: Well, somebody that wanted to be a concert pianist -- [you] would think that they

would steal moments when they were alone and stuff to play.

PATON: You would think so.

WRANGLER: Huh, that’s --

WHITING: That’s funny, I never thought of that, I don’t think I ever knew that.

WRANGLER: I love the line, “When I come back, I’ll play for you.”

PATON: Yes.

WRANGLER: It’s a marvelous line.

WHITING: I don’t, I don’t recall that at all, nor do I, I don’t think he could even, you know,

54

put notes, play that much.

WRANGLER: When Johnny died, I think that she felt that as the keeper of the flame, that

she was going to come into a more important position than she might have been in when Johnny

was still alive. I got that impression. That, uh --

WHITING: -- finally she would get her due.

WRANGLER: Right. That she was going to no longer -- that she was Johnny Mercer

from that point on in. And ah, ah --

WHITING: She didn’t know I was warming up in the wings. [laughter]

WRANGLER: And, of course, she got ill, soon, but she, I think that she felt that, that she

was going to, now, she was going to be able to be somebody very special. And one of the things

that did happen was when Johnny died, people stopped coming to the house.

WHITING: Absolutely.

WRANGLER: It was a, it was a, it was a gradual thing, but they -- she would call to invite

them to dinner, to things and stuff. And it started trickling off until they just, people were too

busy. And they just would refuse to --

WHITING: I’m not sure that she had -- [tape ends]

[SIDE 4 OF 4]

WRANGLER: Are we going on?

PATON: Yes.

WRANGLER: But he did say that, that people just stopped coming around.

PATON: I wondered.

55

WRANGLER: And that she was left alone, and that there was suddenly no identity.

WHITING: Well, they did a lot of that to my mother, too.

WRANGLER: Did they?

WHITING: And yet mother had a lot of friends, and he---

WRANGLER: And she had such a strong personality.

WHITING: I know, but they---

WRANGLER: Hollywood has that, that’s --. Hollywood wives, that it’s famous for that,

that without the star, you are nobody. The women that have divorced stars and everything have

realized being in that treacherous position, where it means you, suddenly, you are without

meaning as far as Hollywood is concerned. It’s a very cruel town that way and, uh, I think that

Ginger expected that a lot of Johnny’s friends were hers as well, and realized that they were not.

WHITING: They weren’t. Uh, that happened to my mother a lot. But Johnny and Ginger --

but it was always Johnny who called. He was with us, and my mother had a lot of friends that

she knew, you know, but the Hollywood people --. And that did happen to her, I know that,

because she was alone a lot. Now Marc comes into the picture.

PATON: Marc Cramer?

WHITING: And I don’t know what Marc was after. I don’t know if he loved her. They’d

known each other a long time, but it was a saving grace for Ginger that he came along and

brought her everywhere, you know, and came down to Atlanta a few times and we were there.

And -- he just did some drinking things, but she was used to that. But I think she, she really

needed him. And the fact that he was there, he would take her, he would travel with her and

56

everything, gave her a lift.

WRANGLER: And she was more the star when she was with Marc because she would --

where she went, when she traveled, was generally to a Johnny -- included a Johnny Mercer

concert or something, where she would be in the audience and be introduced. And that was all

part of that “now I’m going to be the star.” And Marc was “Mr. Johnny Mercer” in a way, you

know, or “Mr. Ginger Mercer.” And then -- so it turned around for her, to a certain extent, I

think. Because I watched her be very, very bossy with, with Marc from time to time, things she

could have never done with Johnny, and say, “You do this, you do that.” I watched her do that

several times. And I think that had a lot to do with it. She would show up, and I remember

when we were traveling with this Mercer thing, every city we played in, she’d fly in with Marc,

be in the audience, to be introduced.

WHITING: And that was good for her.

WRANGLER: Sure.

WHITING: That was very good for her.

WRANGLER: And, and I think that Marc was willing to let her, [to] become “Mr. Ginger

Mercer” for her, and it meant so much to her to be a star.

WHITING: But the amazing thing is when we would talk and we’d be together at dinner with

Marc, and we’d go someplace, or I [would go] with her, it was “Marc this, Marc that,” then all of

a sudden it was, it was kind of like “When Johnny and I did this,” and it was always mostly

Johnny. And of course, this doesn’t tell you about Johnny

WRANGLER: No.

57

WHITING: But it does tell you about --

WRANGLER: You need to move on to another question.

WHITING: -- the other part. So the [Mercers’] house -- we were invited, I went there a lot

alone, as I got older. Either one of the houses, I was up there a lot with him, and with her, and

we’d go out. We’d go to dinner, and include my mother, and --

PATON: There was a house at Newport Beach.

WHITING: Oh yes, and I was down there with them sometimes.

PATON: That was in-between the first house and the final house?

WHITING: Well, they had the house in Newport Beach for quite a while --

PATON: Okay.

WHITING: And I think they also, I may be wrong, maybe that was the second house, but I

think they also may have had the, the Bel-Air house. I’m, I’m not sure. But I was down there,

and I remember one night – I’d drive down to see them all the time, and I saw the kids there.

PATON: Newport Beach?

WHITING: Yeah, Newport Beach, they were there in the sand and the sun and everything.

And one night he says, “Hey, we’re going to hear a new band.” We went over to Balboa, and it

was Stan Kenton, and he signed him on the spot. So --

WRANGLER: So that was during the ten years when he was still, still --

WHITING: He was happy. He loved, he was happy in Balboa, he was happy in Newport

Beach.

WRANGLER: That’s got to be somewhere between forty-two and fifty-two because that’s when -

58

- it was the ten years that he was actively involved with Capitol.

WHITING: He loved that. From forty-one, because that’s when we started. He liked to sail,

he liked the water, that made him feel good. But he was looking for people, he was going to bars

listening to singers, and so on and so forth. I can’t tell you that much about the life at home.

PATON: Um-hmm.

WHITING: It was always pleasant. Nice dinners. We’d sit around, we’d talk. He told me the

most amazing thing one night. I said, “How did you happen to write—“and this was a few years

before he died, we’ll say in the seventies. “Johnny, what gave you the inspiration to write the,

‘The Days of Wine and Roses’?” And he said, “Well, come here.” We left the room where the

piano was, like the piano was there, and then we went around the corner, and we turned the

corner into the bar, and there was a wall. And he said, “I had come from the studio and I was

asked to write this lyric to ‘The Days of Wine and Roses.’” I said, ‘What in the hell am I going

to write? Oh my God, what am I going to write?’ I was leaning against the wall, I said, ‘How

can I write “the days of wine and roses, laugh and run away, like a child at play?”’” And he

recited the whole thing, and he said it came to him just like that. Two sentences. And he said, “I

was never, I, it just poured out of me. I have no idea. I labored over it later. But the song came

to me first, the words came to me, leaning against that, that wall, looking in at the bar.”

PATON: Do you think that any of that grew from his own experiences in drinking?

WHITING: I’m sure.

WRANGLER: Well, yeah and also that whole period of the “door marked nevermore,” is

“Moon River” as well; it’s all about lost innocence, lost youth. Lost romantic, lost romance,

59

every – “When The World Was Young,” all those songs. And that – there’s a whole series of

them that go through, that really are saying exactly the same thing. It’s really -- you go through

that door as a child, and once you go through it, it’s over and you can’t go back and ain’t it a god-

damn shame. You know --

WHITING: There must have been a great love in his life, that none of us knew; maybe it was

Judy. I don’t know about anybody else. I’d heard that he’d been with Jo Stafford, but that was

par for the course for stories, because he was very close to her and he was very close to Paul.

[The next section of the interview has been omitted from this transcript.]

WRANGLER: What else did you have, that you have, that was anything else we could --

PATON: We covered it.

WRANGLER: Oh, good.

PATON: I wasn’t expecting to have this much time.

WRANGLER: Oh, I’m so glad.

WHITING: The house, the house, the houses --. One was charming -- white, sweet, small,

fun. One was at the beach, and it was wonderful shopping around there, and that was very merry.

The house in Bel-Air, it had many, many memories for me of many kinds. The day when I went

to talk to him about John Lennon, uh -- some [memories of] picking him up and taking, maybe

driving him some place. [Final sentence is omitted from this transcript.]

WRANGLER: Uh-huh. There was -- you found the place warm, the house? Sunny, I

guess it was, and, and --

WHITING: Sunny, sunny, because Laguna, or wherever the hell it was, sunny, and water, and

60

beautiful. The little house, with the white fence.

WRANGLER: The first one, yeah that one.

WHITING: Was, was -- He didn’t have that much money.

WRANGLER: That’s when, talks -- when she [Ginger] talks about is her favorite time.

WHITING: Yeah. The house --

PATON: He mentions it in his autobiography, and that’s why I wanted to -- because the

other houses--

WRANGLER: Oh. Was that where he talks about the mink coat too -- I think?

PATON: Right. “It’s our first house,” and then after that, there’s -- you don’t hear about

the home anymore. So I thought I’d ask.

WRANGLER: Uh-huh.

WHITING: No, we’ve got to figure out --. He loved looking on the golf course, because we

used to sit there and we’d watch people play. And he’d come up the hill to greet me sometimes,

and when Alec Wilder came out to meet him, he said, “My God, he’s feeding the birds,” because

-- he had done this chapter on Johnny about “Bob White” and all the different bird songs, and

there he was, he [Wilder] walked down the hill to see him and meet him for the first time, and he

said, “My God, he’s feeding the birds. It’s true!” But, uh --

PATON: There was a Palm Springs house too, right?

WHITING: Oh yes, oh yes, he liked that. He liked, he liked Palm Springs, there were a lot of

buddies down there, he could play golf down there, and everybody used to hang out. Now that’s

strange --

61

WRANGLER: Well, you never talked to me about the Palm Springs house.

WHITING: Well, it was very nice. I, I’d go down to Palm Springs and I’d be over there, and

I, I don’t remember that much, but I was down there with him and we’d go out to dinner and

we’d do everything. [Comments by Miss Whiting and Mr. Wrangler have been omitted at this

point in the transcript.]

WHITING: In trying to do my work that I do, and Johnny -- I mean, I can certainly say I’m not

the keeper of the flame, but he was such a wonderful man to me and to so many people, that if I

can pay him back in any way --. And I’m very proud to be the president of the [Mercer]

Foundation now, because it’s putting me in a place where I’ve never been, and that’s where I’m

meeting these people that we are going to give money to eventually and the different charities

and why she [Ginger] had picked them --. Because I’m sure some of them were influenced by

him. And it’s just a different world for me to do this, for the moment, but I just, I’m trying to

figure out how that could be, you know. Why that could be?

WRANGLER: Well, it’s so hard to know, I mean, how --. Whoever knew about Danny

Kaye and Laurence Olivier? I mean, you know, when that came out and people -- which was

common knowledge in Hollywood, but people started to realize that it is not indicative, really, in

any of their work or anything. So --

WHITING: Not at all.

WRANGLER: -- there, you know. And I started to think about people and I was thinking

about Larry Hart, and I was thinking well, his lyrics, often you see a torture of a man and --which

I don’t see in Johnny’s lyric. But don’t know whether I would have been able to read that out of

62

a Larry Hart lyric. So maybe, you know -- I don’t know. It’s just that one person makes a

statement like that, who is kind of, of fag-hag in a way, and I just, I’m not so sure that she really

knows that for the truth.

WHITING: I’m not either, and I just wondered again --. There was a melancholy strain to

Johnny sometimes, and I knew it. And it was like that day when he was sitting by the fire, it was

not the Johnny I knew. He was sweet, he was charming, he opened his heart and he was joyous

for the moment that Paul had wanted him to write with him, because I think he felt at that

moment that much of his talent was gone. That it was over, because he was writing the one song,

you know, a year.

[The following comments by Miss Whiting and Mr. Wrangler are omitted from this transcript.]

PATON: Well, we can -- what we’ve seen at the archives -- he just seems to be just a very

complex man and very, extremely private person.

WHITING: Yeah.

PATON: In terms of the core of himself.

WHITING: Yes, yes.

PATON: I think I mentioned to one or both of you about the lyric writer who came to look

at the lyrics. She was in town for a conference, and someone brought her by to look through his

lyrics. She teaches lyric writing, or did at the time, at [college]?

WRANGLER: I’m not sure, tell us.

PATON: Uh, it’s a woman; I can’t remember her name.

WRANGLER: No, I’m not sure you told us this.

63

PATON: And she looked through his lyrics, and all the way through, she said, “I can see, I

can feel the rhythm, I know what he was working to even though the melody is not here.” And

she said, “You know, it’s so interesting about his lyrics that he doesn’t divulge himself.” She

said [with] most lyrics writers, there are themes, and she listed a few current lyric writers and she

said [for instance] falling stairs turn up in one of them, and different, different topics and

different ideas. And she said, “He doesn’t, you don’t see that to that extent.”

WRANGLER: Well, he was a chameleon, but I do see lost youth, lost innocence, constantly.

WHITING: “A day of wine and roses.”

WRANGLER: Wanting to return to a gentler time.

WHITING: Time, time --

WRANGLER: Yeah, that was, that’s when --

WHITING: “When the world was young.”

WRANGLER: You see that so often in his lyrics. But, but as you said, he could write with

anybody and so it’s like “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when he breaks your heart.”

Well, you know. [telephone rings]

WHITING: I think we go now.

[END OF SIDE 4, END OF INTERVIEW]