Visit https://ebookultra.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

The Man That Got Away The Life and Songs of

Harold Arlen First Edition Walter Rimler

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-man-that-got-away-
the-life-and-songs-of-harold-arlen-first-edition-
walter-rimler/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookultra.com

Here are some suggested products you might be interested in.
Click the link to download

Who Killed Che How the CIA Got Away with Murder Michael
Ratner

https://ebookultra.com/download/who-killed-che-how-the-cia-got-away-
with-murder-michael-ratner/

George Gershwin An Intimate Portrait 1st Edition Edition

Walter Rimler

https://ebookultra.com/download/george-gershwin-an-intimate-
portrait-1st-edition-edition-walter-rimler/

Marginal Man The Dark Vision of Harold Innis 1st Edition

Alexander John Watson

https://ebookultra.com/download/marginal-man-the-dark-vision-of-
harold-innis-1st-edition-alexander-john-watson/

Our noise the story of Merge Records the indie label that
got big and stayed small 1st ed Edition Merge Records

https://ebookultra.com/download/our-noise-the-story-of-merge-records-
the-indie-label-that-got-big-and-stayed-small-1st-ed-edition-merge-
records/
Man of the People The Life of John McCain 1st Edition Paul
Alexander

https://ebookultra.com/download/man-of-the-people-the-life-of-john-
mccain-1st-edition-paul-alexander/

Clean Green and Lean Get Rid of the Toxins That Make You
Fat 1st Edition Walter Crinnion

https://ebookultra.com/download/clean-green-and-lean-get-rid-of-the-
toxins-that-make-you-fat-1st-edition-walter-crinnion/

Josephine Lang Her Life and Songs 1St Edition Edition

Harald Krebs

https://ebookultra.com/download/josephine-lang-her-life-and-songs-1st-
edition-edition-harald-krebs/

How the Earthquake Bird Got Its Name and Other Tales of an
Unbalanced Nature First Edition H.H. Shugart

https://ebookultra.com/download/how-the-earthquake-bird-got-its-name-
and-other-tales-of-an-unbalanced-nature-first-edition-h-h-shugart/

Martini man the life of Dean Martin 1st Cooper Square

Press ed Edition Martin

https://ebookultra.com/download/martini-man-the-life-of-dean-
martin-1st-cooper-square-press-ed-edition-martin/
The Man That Got Away The Life and Songs of Harold
Arlen First Edition Walter Rimler Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Walter Rimler
ISBN(s): 9780252039461, 0252039467
Edition: First Edition
File Details: PDF, 4.23 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
THEMANTHATGOTAWAY

TheLi
feandSongsof

HA
ROL
DARL
EN
WALTER RIM LER
 the man that got away

Rimler_text.indd 1 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 music in american life

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.

Rimler_text.indd 2 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 the man that
got away
The Life and Songs
of Harold Arlen

walter rimler

university of illinois press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

Rimler_text.indd 3 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 © 2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rimler, Walter, author.
The man that got away : the life and songs of Harold Arlen / Walter Rimler.
pages cm — (Music in American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03946-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-09757-7 (e-book)
1. Arlen, Harold, 1905–1986. 2. Composers—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
ml410.a76r56  2015
782.42164092—dc23 [B]  2014049421

Rimler_text.indd 4 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 For Vivian Wills

Rimler_text.indd 5 4/20/15 11:21 AM

Rimler_text.indd 6 4/20/15 11:21 AM
 Lights are bright,
Pianos making music in the night.
And they pour champagne just like it was rain.
It’s a sight to see,
But I wonder what became of me
—From “I Wonder What Became of Me”
Words by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen

Rimler_text.indd 7 4/20/15 11:21 AM

Rimler_text.indd 8 4/20/15 11:21 AM
 Contents

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Buffalo, NY 5
Chapter 2. New York, NY 10
Chapter 3. “Get Happy” 16
Chapter 4. The Cotton Club 20
Chapter 5. Anya 27
Chapter 6. “Stormy Weather” 31
Chapter 7. On Broadway with Ira and Yip 40
Chapter 8. “Last Night When We Were Young” 45
Chapter 9. Marriage 50
Chapter 10. Death of Gershwin 56
Chapter 11. Hooray for What! 62
Chapter 12. The Wizard of Oz 68
Chapter 13. An Itinerant Songwriter 76
Chapter 14. Writing with Johnny Mercer 82
Chapter 15. “One for My Baby” 88
Chapter 16. “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” 97
Chapter 17. St. Louis Woman 102
Chapter 18. Descent into Misery 108

Rimler_text.indd 9 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Chapter 19. “She Was Sweet and Adorable and Then She
Went Mad” 114
Chapter 20. A Star Is Born 120
Chapter 21. House of Flowers 127
Chapter 22. In Search of Fame 136
Chapter 23. An Opera 140
Chapter 24. Two Debacles 148
Chapter 25. The 1960s 152
Chapter 26. Waiting 164

Acknowledgments 179
Notes 181
Index 197

Illustrations follow page 96

Rimler_text.indd 10 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 introduction

In October 1984, Harold Arlen was in his eightieth year, a widower, sick with
Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer and unable, without assistance, to
leave his apartment in the San Remo building on New York’s Central Park
West. Formerly lively and gregarious, he was spending these last days—and
sometimes nights, as well—watching TV from a lounge chair, his social
life limited to visits from his friend and biographer Edward Jablonski, his
brother Jerry, and Jerry’s wife, Rita, and phone conversations with Irving
Berlin. Berlin, in his nineties, placed a daily call to check up on him, com-
miserate with him about aging, cheer him with jokes, let him know which
Arlen songs he’d heard on the radio and television, and complain about
the fact that their careers had been upended by a generation of rock and
rollers—the Beatles in particular—whose songs had pushed theirs off the
airwaves.
At the beginning of that month, he’d received an invitation from Paul
McCartney to attend a party in celebration of the purchase by McCartney’s
company MPL Communications of the publishing rights to Arlen’s songs. In
his reply he wrote, “I deeply appreciate your invitation to sit at your table,
but regret that my health at the moment makes that impossible. However, I
send sincere personal best wishes. Your work over the years has fascinated
and excited me. And I would like you to know that ‘Michelle’ is one of my
favorite songs.”1 After the event, McCartney wrote back saying he wished
Arlen had been there, and added, “It means a lot to me to be appreciated
by people like yourself, as I am a great admirer of your work.”2
Arlen hadn’t been dissembling when he praised McCartney. But he hadn’t
been pleased when blues-based rock and roll replaced the amalgam of jazz
and European operetta that had been the Tin Pan Alley style—his style. In

Rimler_text.indd 1 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 2 i n t roduc t ion

an interview in the early 1970s, he’d referred to current popular music as

“that farkakteh stuff.”3 On the other hand, he’d also said that rock and
roll was “good for the kids. They have a good beat. If this makes the kids
happy that’s great . . . the public somehow selects some good music right
in the eye of the hurricane of every passing tornado of a fad. Don’t worry
about it. Music somehow grows on people who can improve their taste.”4
He was correctly predicting that what had happened in the 1920s, which
began with “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and ended with “More Than You
Know,” would happen again in the 1960s, which began with “Itsy Bitsy
Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and ended with “Let It Be.”
McCartney’s admiration for Arlen was also genuine. He’d gotten into
music publishing when told he could buy the rights to “Stormy Weather”—a
song Arlen had written with lyricist Ted Koehler in 1933. His father, James
McCartney, had been a musician with his own group, Jim Mac’s Jazz Band,
that played standards from Arlen’s era, and McCartney knew and loved
those songs. He wrote something in that vein himself when he was sixteen,
a time when Arlen’s style was still in vogue. This tune later appeared on
the Sgt. Pepper album as “When I’m Sixty-Four.” After that, each Beatles
album featured one of what he called his “Astaire songs.” And the other
Beatles had a similar fondness for this music. George Harrison would pass
the time playing Hoagy Carmichael songs on his ukulele. John Lennon, as
he penned the group’s first number-one single, “Please Please Me,” drew on
wordplay from “Please” (“Please lend your little ear to my pleas”), written
by composer Ralph Rainger and lyricist Leo Robin in 1932. After the Beatles
broke up, McCartney put out a feeler to Arlen’s old lyricist, Johnny Mercer,
asking if they might work together. Mercer had never been comfortable
with the music of the new generation and he said no, citing his wife’s health
problems. Had he said yes, McCartney would have found himself right at
home working alongside a great poet with a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality.
Because Mercer was not only a songwriter, but a successful singer and a
cofounder of Capitol Records, he, like McCartney, was a well-known man.
Arlen wasn’t. No other songwriter so accomplished was so unfamous. The
reason for this lies in the history of twentieth-century song—a history that
Arlen and McCartney, between them, encompassed. For Arlen, playing,
singing, and arranging for a band had evolved into a songwriting career,
which in his time meant being a garret artist—if one substitutes the word
penthouse for garret. He composed at a piano, either alone or with his lyricist
beside him, and when a number was finished, it was given to performing
artists who made the commercial product. Lennon, McCartney, and Har-

Rimler_text.indd 2 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 i n t roduc t ion 3

rison evolved within their band, so as they wrote they continued to perform
and arrange, and when they found themselves with free rein in Abbey Road
studios, they combined their writing, singing, instrumental, and arranging
skills to capture on record definitive performances of their songs. “Stormy
Weather” was associated with Ethel Waters and later with Lena Horne, but
“All You Need Is Love” was the Beatles, and if anyone else wanted to top
their version—well, good luck.
In his 1979 book Yesterdays, Charles Hamm wrote about the change that
came to popular music in the mid-1950s when rock and roll ended the long
dominance of Tin Pan Alley.5 Hamm points out that the difference wasn’t
simply two different musical wellsprings. It was also the change from notes
on a page to sounds in a recording studio. In a studio, the new writers did
their own instrumentation. They learned to think in terms of sound—a
job that had previously been left to specialists who could write orchestral
scores. The stunning guitar chord that introduces the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s
Night,” like the opening clarinet whoop of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue,
proclaimed Here I am! in a way unavailable to composers working under
Tin Pan Alley constraints.
No one who records an Arlen standard uses the piano arrangement he
created for its sheet music. Arrangers fashion the score and in doing so
become co-composers. There isn’t any Arlen counterpart to “Yellow Sub-
marine,” where the song is its sound and the sound comes from its compos-
ers—with each goofy ad lib integral to the whole. The Beatles ushered in
an era that still continues, where popular songs are works of performance
art created by groups making use of electronics in studio recordings. It will
be up to future generations to decide if the music of today measures up to
the Beatles and if the music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Carole
King, and Marvin Gaye measured up to what Arlen and the writers of his
era accomplished. If the Tin Pan Alley style imposed limits on songwriters,
it also concentrated their gifts. Instead of orchestrating his songs or creat-
ing them as studio performances, Arlen zeroed in on melody, harmony, and
rhythm—ingredients that are always the heart of pop composing—and he
became a very great songwriter, perhaps the best.
In this book we will see him at work in his era, composing “Over the
Rainbow,” “Stormy Weather,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Between the Devil
and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “Blues in the Night,” “One for
My Baby,” “My Shining Hour,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or
Come Shine,” “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” “The Man That Got Away,”
and “A Sleeping Bee,” to name a few. We will come to know a man whose

Rimler_text.indd 3 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 4 i n t roduc t ion

work was in the public eye while he himself was not. Even among the musi-
cians, singers, fellow songwriters, and aficionados who venerated him, his
personal story was and still is barely known. He didn’t have the fame of
his predecessor and contemporary Irving Berlin, or his successor Paul Mc-
Cartney. But his work affected people just as much. The story of his life,
which he led with humor and dignity against a backdrop of tragedy, helps
us understand what it was like to create timeless songs in the age of the
great American songbook.

Rimler_text.indd 4 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 1

Buffalo, NY

He came to music through his father, Samuel Arluck, who was a cantor in
Buffalo, New York. The elder Arluck thought enough of his son’s singing
to give him a spot in the synagogue choir, where the boy made his debut
at age seven. Shortly after that he performed his first solo, which he nearly
botched due to an attack of stage fright—a problem his father solved by
stepping on his foot.
Samuel Arluck was a no-nonsense fellow. By the age of twenty he’d already
begun his career, singing in a small congregation in Louisville, Kentucky.
When another job offer came his way, he jumped at it even though it was
from the equally small Clinton Street congregation in another midsize town,
Buffalo. It’s not clear why he wanted the new job, but he took it even though
that meant rushing into marriage. The temple elders in Buffalo required that
their cantor be a married man, so the twenty-one-year-old Arluck had to
find a wife. He did that by going to Cincinnati, where he knew a woman,
Celia Orlen, who was the same age as he and, like him, an immigrant from
Vilna, Poland—although they hadn’t met there but in the United States when
he’d been in Ohio on a cantorial singing tour. There is no evidence they’d
been more than passing acquaintances. Given her illiteracy, they couldn’t
have had a correspondence. But he found this dependable Orthodox woman
acceptable, and she was pleased by his offer. Soon they were standing under
the canopy in her home, her rabbi officiating, with none of his relatives
present. Then they went to make a life together in an unfamiliar town.
A year later, on the evening of February 14, 1905,1 Celia gave birth at
their home on 389 Clinton Street to a boy whom she and Samuel named
Joseph. In the early morning hours of February 15, a twin, Harry, arrived.
Harry was injured by a forceps delivery and lived just eight hours. When
he died, Joseph was renamed Hyman (the H in memory of his brother) al-
though his parents often called him Chaim—Hebrew for “life”—or Hymie.

Rimler_text.indd 5 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 6 ch a p t e r 1

He would be Hyman Arluck for twenty years until, as he began making a

name for himself in music, he made his name literally, by changing Hyman
to Harold and joining the first syllable of Arluck with the second of Orlen,
his mother’s maiden name, to get Arlen.
Six years after his birth, the family became complete with the arrival
of another son, whom the Arlucks named Nathan but called Julius and
nicknamed Udie. These name changes were never explained, but it wasn’t
uncommon for Eastern European Jews, especially those who had lost infants,
to superstitiously switch names around in order to fool evil should it be
stalking their children.
The cantor did well at the Clinton Street shul and by the time of Udie’s
birth had moved to the larger Pine Street Synagogue and bought a duplex
within walking distance of it, at 65 Pratt Street. The Arlucks lived down-
stairs and rented the upstairs to Anderson and Minnie Arthur and their
three children, a black family. The neighborhood was mostly Jewish, but
African Americans were moving in, and goodwill prevailed between the
groups. The Arluck and Arthur children were in and out of one another’s
homes and attended the same school, Bennett Park #32, which had been
the first in the city to integrate. To her dying day, Minnie kept a mezuzah
on her door, given to her by the cantor. It was a friendship that, according
to George K. Arthur, a grandson, “made Arlen feel at home among African
Americans and with their music.”2
As a boy Arlen collected dance band records. When he was a little older
he went downtown to hear live jazz. His father wasn’t pleased by these
musical choices but was himself at least partly to blame. “I hear in jazz and
in gospel my father singing,” Arlen later recalled.
He was one of the greatest improvisers I’ve ever heard. Let me tell you a story
about him. I brought home a record of Louis Armstrong, I don’t remember
now which it was. My father spoke in Yiddish. And you have to remember, he
was brought into this country originally to Louisville, Kentucky, so he must
have picked up some of the blacks’ inflections down there. Anyway, I played
him this record, and there was a musical riff in there—we used to call it a “hot
lick”—that Louis did. And my father looked at me, and he was stunned. And he
asked in Yiddish, “Where did he get it?” Because he thought it was something
that he knew, you see.3

Young Arlen was attracted not only to jazz, but to show business. He
and a neighbor, Hymie Sandler, showed up at vaudeville houses on amateur
nights to compete for prize money—as comedians. They did pretty well,
too. Arlen also earned money on his own as a pianist at the Gayety The-
atre burlesque house on Pearl Street, which featured a troupe called Billy

Rimler_text.indd 6 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 buffa lo, n y 7

Watson’s Beef Trust (“Beef” referred to the size of the female strippers, who
were advertised as weighing between 170 and 225 pounds). And he played
piano in movie theaters. One of them had a pipe organ, whose pedalboard
was a mystery to him, which meant he could play no bass notes. But he
pleased the audience anyway. “I loved to walk up the aisle after I’d finished
my playing,” he recalled, “or to sweep off the bench to take a bow.”4 That
this theater also featured a troupe of vaudevillians made him enjoy the job
all the more, especially as he’d become infatuated with one of the singers.
“She was a little above burlesque,” he recalled. “And she reeked of the most
glorious perfume—cheap perfume, maybe—but it was wonderful! What a
thrill when she took me around backstage and introduced me.”5 It was at
around this time that he became a clothes hound, spending much of his
money—and he was earning a fair amount—on silk shirts and bell-bottomed
trousers. He would iron the pants himself to make sure the cuffs had perfect
edging.
He was amiable, fun-loving, and well liked. His cheeks still had their
baby fat, his thick black hair rose in successive waves, and he had blue eyes
and a slim, wiry build. He was attractive to girls. While still in grade school
he had his first romance—with a dark-haired beauty named Lily Levine.
They were still going together when they moved on to Hutchinson High.
This bothered her parents because he was, he said, determined to become
a musician—not the respectable kind with a dependable income like his
father, but the sort who ended up playing piano in joints. Moreover, music
was making him ignore his homework and cut classes.
His parents were no less concerned and didn’t hesitate to tell him. This,
plus their problems with each other, caused him to spend less and less time
at home. The cantor considered Celia “a naturally nervous and sick woman
. . . You have to know or guess how to answer her in order not to get her
excited because after all, she is always right.”6 According to Arlen’s friend
and biographer Edward Jablonski, Celia felt dominated by Samuel and in
turn dominated her sons and others. Once, when she was visiting her next-
door neighbor, Mrs. Sandler, one of the Sandler boys was so engrossed in
his comic book he failed to return her greeting, so she retaliated by giving
him and all the Sandlers the silent treatment. It went on for weeks until the
cantor told her to stop it.7
These family difficulties made Arlen decide at the age of fifteen to run
away from home. One Friday evening as his mother was lighting the Sabbath
candles, he slipped out of the house and headed to the waterfront, where
he and a friend had arranged to board a ship and work as galley hands. A
couple of hours later, choppy seas made his friend seasick, leaving Arlen

Rimler_text.indd 7 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 8 ch a p t e r 1

to do both their jobs. That was enough for them. They jumped ship the
next day, and after wandering aimlessly and penniless for a few hours in
Detroit they gave up. With the help of a sympathetic train conductor they
made their way back to Buffalo, where Arlen faced more recriminations.
For the next five years he stayed put, but all that time he was working on
a more realistic getaway—forming and joining bands, making his way up
the musical ladder until he could get to New York City.
The way there began with his first group, the Snappy Trio. He was its
singer, pianist, and booking agent. Hymie Sandler became the drummer. An-
other friend, Teddy Meyer, played violin. Of the three, Arlen was the only
real musician. He hadn’t had much formal training—some classical piano
lessons, which he quickly abandoned—but he was a fine instinctive pianist
and a gifted singer, and he had a real feel for jazz. Because of him, the group
always had gigs. The first was at a tavern called the Maple Leaf Cafe, where
they earned $35 a week plus tips. This went on for six weeks until the new
year, 1920, ushered in Prohibition—causing the Maple Leaf and places like
it to shut their doors. Undeterred, the trio got work in downtown vaudeville
houses where they made even better money—as much as $60 a week plus
tips—doing four shows a day, seven days a week. One job was in the town of
Gowanda, ninety miles to the south, where they played at a Grange Hall dance.
The promoters had insisted that the band include a saxophone, a problem
Arlen solved by borrowing a clarinet, inserting a kazoo into the mouthpiece,
and producing a sound good enough to fool—or charm—his audience. To
keep the jobs coming, he joined the Buffalo Musicians’ Union, Local 43. It
was a white union, blacks having been relegated to their own Local 533.
Still, whites and blacks sat in with each other’s bands, and there was a lot
of musical cross-pollination. Work was plentiful; there were speakeasies and
theaters all over town in the early 1920s. “If you couldn’t get along with the
leader or members of one band,” a current union official says of those days,
“you could kiss them off, go across the street, and get another job.”8Arlen
and Sandler quit Hutchinson High, and while their friends who’d remained
were getting by on allowances in the twenty-five-cents-a-week range, Arlen
was buying the first Model T Ford in his neighborhood.
This was his life in the early 1920s as he approached his own twenties—a
pianist, singer, and bandleader who was becoming well known in Buffalo.
The Snappy Trio turned into a foursome when they added a real saxophon-
ist. That made a name change necessary, and they became the Se-More Jazz
Band. With two more members, they renamed themselves the Southbound
Shufflers—with no imminent plans to travel south, only a job on a summer
excursion boat, the Canadiana, that sailed east to Crystal Beach, Ontario.
When Sandler left the group to join the New England Six, another of Arlen’s

Rimler_text.indd 8 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 buffa lo, n y 9

friends, also named Hyman, entered the picture. This was Hyman Cheiffetz,
whose ambition was to become a song lyricist. He talked Arlen into writing
the music for his first song—the self-published “My Gal, My Pal (Won’t You
Come Back to Me).” It’s an old-fashioned waltz with old-fashioned words
(“My Gal My Pal life’s not the same dear without you / I pray for you each
day and never again will I doubt you”). On the cover Arlen identifies himself
as Harold Arluck, using his new first name for the first time. The lyricist
also made a name change, spelling his first name “Hymon.”9
Not a single copy was sold. So Arlen didn’t feel he’d found his calling.
It seemed to him that improvisation was where his creative talent lay—in
his own solos and in those he wrote for the rest of the band. He made his
living playing popular songs but played them as a jazz musician, paying
little attention to the fact that Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin were turning
pop song composing into an art form. He was more excited by the singers,
instrumentalists, and arrangers who were also taking artistic flight. His
favorite group was the Original Memphis Five, whose personnel included
the Dorsey Brothers and pianist Frank Signorelli. He made his first trip to
New York City to hear them in a Brooklyn dance hall, and “when they
came off the stand,” he recalled, “I stood there with as much awe as if the
president of the United States had just finished speaking.”10 Shortly after
that he accepted an offer to join the Yankee Six, an up-and-coming group
favored by Buffalo’s college crowd. When five new musicians were added,
one of them, Dick George, teamed with Arlen to become the ensemble’s
featured duo-piano team. The Buffalodians, as they renamed themselves,
were now the city’s premier group, heard often in its poshest nightclub,
Geyer’s Restaurant and Ballroom.
Arlen’s parents watched all this with foreboding. To stop his son’s slide,
the cantor asked a friend, Jack Yellen, to talk sense into him. Yellen was a
Polish-born member of the Pine Street congregation and, as a journalist for
the Buffalo Courier, a respected citizen of the community at large. But he had
another occupation, one that took him downstate to Tin Pan Alley, where
he wrote song lyrics. He’d already had one hit, “A Young Man’s Fancy,” and
before long he and composer Milton Ager would write “Happy Days Are
Here Again” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” It would seem that the cantor had made
a curious choice in asking Yellen to be his intermediary, but if anyone could
tell the boy about the pitfalls ahead of him it was this man—who knew the
business well and who was called “Napoleon” around Broadway because of
his gruff, bullying personality. Yellen tracked Arlen to a roadhouse named
Minnie’s, heard him at the piano, and immediately phoned the cantor to
say, “It’s all your fault. He’s going to be a musician.”11

Rimler_text.indd 9 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 2

New York, NY

In 1924 Cantor Arluck was offered a position with a prestigious synagogue,

Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, New York, and he, Celia, and Udie
moved to a house near Syracuse University. Not long afterward, the Buf-
falodians were booked by their agent into a restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio,
and then it was on to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and, in the spring of 1925,
New York City.
Harold, who had only recently been excited by downtown Buffalo, was
now playing the Palace Theatre in Times Square. The Buffalodians were
booked there for two weeks and then moved to Gallagher’s Monte Carlo
Restaurant at 51st and Broadway, which had a downstairs cabaret featur-
ing a gangly comic dancer named Ray Bolger. Bolger and Arlen had already
met when they shared the bill at Geyer’s in Buffalo. Now they became good
friends. Each was intent on remaining in New York and making it big, so
they chipped in on the rent for an apartment in a rooming house on West
57th Street.
In later years, Bolger would talk about how Arlen kept him up at night
as he worked at the piano on band arrangements and how, rather than be-
ing bothered by this, he’d been fascinated to hear the man thinking aloud
musically. The two stayed up late discussing their ambitions. Bolger had
been intent on a stage career going back to 1917, when he saw Fred Stone
leap “out of a haystack looking just like a scarecrow” in a play called Jack
O’Lantern.1 But Arlen was still pondering his ultimate goal. Did he hope
to make it as a pianist in a city glutted with virtuosos? Or did his future lie
in creating dance band orchestrations? He certainly had a gift for instru-
mentation—one that had already led to a friendship with one of his heroes,
Fletcher Henderson, whose recordings he’d collected and who was leading
his band at the Roseland Ballroom, not far from the Monte Carlo. When

Rimler_text.indd 10 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 n ew yor k , n y 11

Henderson heard the Buffalodians, he asked Arlen to do an arrangement

of “That’s Dynamite” for him, which Arlen gladly did. But Arlen wasn’t
looking to make a career out of such work. It was laborious and kept him
in the shadows, out of the spotlight. Nor did he want to be a bandleader
like Henderson; while heading the Southbound Shufflers he’d grown tired of
handling their bookings, scheduling, and payroll—jobs he wasn’t especially
good at. He told Bolger his goal was to make it as a singer.
The decision crystallized one night at the Silver Slipper nightclub. After fin-
ishing a show with the Buffalodians, he’d headed there for some after-hours
entertainment, and when the orchestra struck up “I’m Coming Virginia”—a
song he loved because of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet solo on the recording
by Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra—he impulsively took the stage,
grabbed a microphone, and sang the vocal. Then, to his amazement, he saw
that Beiderbecke himself was in the audience; not only that, this musician,
whom he idolized, crossed the dance floor, walked to the bandstand, and
said to him, “Great, kid!”2 “Holy Jesus, that meant so much to me!” Arlen
later recalled.3
In May 1926 the Buffalodians recorded six songs for Columbia Vita-
Tone, and Arlen was the featured vocalist on two: Irving Berlin’s “How
Many Times?” and “Baby Face” (music by Harry Akst, lyrics by Benny
Davis). These and later recordings leave no doubt that he was a first-rate
singer. Music critic Will Friedwald has written that, while his voice would
sometimes go very high, making him sound like “one of the stratospheric
tenors of the era,” it could also be “warm and deep” and “sizzling and
lusty.” He was, Friedwald, concluded, “ahead of the curve,” along with Bing
Crosby, Cliff Edwards, and Hoagy Carmichael, “as an early example of a
white vocalist influenced by black jazz styles.”4 Crosby himself was a fan,
writing in a 1947 letter, “I’ve always considered him one of the best stylists
I’ve ever heard.”5
He certainly would have recorded more with the Buffalodians had the
group not suddenly imploded. The end came because of an incident one
night in May 1926 while they were playing a gig at the Monte Carlo in
Manhattan. There are two differing accounts of this event, given by Arlen
to different people at different times. The first was a contemporaneous letter
that he wrote to his bandmates under the heading “Happening’s [sic] of the
Day.” Affecting a Yiddish-style Brooklyn accent, he recounted the evening’s
events. A fight broke out onstage between the band’s leader, violinist Jack
McLaughlin, and Arlen’s co-pianist, Dick George. “Von void led to anoder,”
Arlen wrote, “un d Dickey says to Mackey, ‘Vot do you know about direc-
tion’ and Mackay says like a brave leader, ‘Oh, shut up.’ The great part

Rimler_text.indd 11 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 12 ch a p t e r 2

about it was he said it at the same time that he was playing, dat’s what I
call marvelous. Den Dickey not being afraid of catching cold says, ‘Come
on outside.’ And the boys from the band at dat time could say that Mackey
was even hotter there than he was when he played Columbia Records.”6
More than thirty years later when he told Ed Jablonski about the in-
cident, he put its location not in Manhattan but at the Monte Carlo in
Rockaway, New York. In this version the dispute was between McLaughlin
and himself. He’d done something to tick McLaughlin off. He couldn’t re-
member what it was, but it might have been his onstage capering—maybe
he’d taken too many bows after a vocal or done some unwelcome singing
during McLaughlin’s violin solo. Whatever it was, McLaughlin gave him a
withering look, Arlen responded with more jokes, and when the bandleader,
enraged, charged him, Arlen ran offstage, out of the hall, and into the streets,
where McLaughlin cornered him—and here is where this account becomes
less believable than the other one—only to knock himself out by running
face-first into Arlen’s two upraised defensive fists. What isn’t in doubt is
that McLaughlin quit the Buffalodians soon after and that Arlen declined
a request by the others to take over. The band was finished.
But he wasn’t out of work for long. Arnold Johnson asked him to join his
orchestra. They were a step up from the Buffalodians, working at higher-
class clubs and sometimes as the pit band for Broadway shows. Johnson
wanted Arlen as an arranger, but Arlen had joined so he could take the mi-
crophone during the Johnson Orchestra’s weekly radio broadcasts from the
Park Central Hotel. Singing over the airwaves allowed him to reach a wide
audience, one that included his parents and brother, who tuned in regularly
from Syracuse. He also did the entr’acte singing in a Broadway revue. He’d
rise from his piano in the orchestra pit and croon “I’m on the Crest of a
Wave” (his own arrangement of the DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson song)
while the audience, ignoring him, returned noisily to its seats for the second
half of George White’s Scandals of 1928. This was not to his taste, so he left
Johnson to become Frances Williams’s onstage accompanist in a vaudeville
act at the Palace. She was one of the stars of the Scandals and had become
his girlfriend. When that job ended, he auditioned for Broadway producer
Jake Shubert. Jake and Lee Shubert were feuding brothers who spoke to each
other only through an intermediary, yet they managed to work together to
produce musicals that appeared in the theaters they owned on Broadway and
all over the United States. Shubert ignored Arlen as he sang and played, so
he walked out. After that there was a job in another vaudeville revue—but
he realized he was spinning his wheels.
He had never entirely given up composing after “My Gal, My Pal.” He
wrote two more songs the following year, 1925. In 1926 he composed a

Rimler_text.indd 12 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 n ew yor k , n y 13

piano piece called “Minor Gaff (A Blues Fantasy)” in collaboration with

fellow Buffalodian Dick George. It achieved some success: the Tennessee
Tooters (aka the California Ramblers) recorded it, and it was published by
Mayfair Music Corp., which credited Harold Arluck on the cover. Another
piano piece, “Buffalo Rhythm,” came out in 1927, written jointly with
two fellow Buffalodians. It was published by Landmark Music, Inc. and
recorded by bands led by Jack Hylton, Ted Wallace, and Johnny Ringer.
In 1928 came a song, “Jungaleena,” and a third piano work, “Rhythmic
Moments,” which was composed solely by Arlen (again as Harold Arluck)
and published by Shapiro, Bernstein and Co. Music. The pace picked up in
1929. In February of that year he was at a party when he met Lou Davis,
a wholesale meat dealer who wanted to get into show business and talked
Arlen into a songwriting partnership. One of their efforts, “The Album of
My Dreams,” was recorded by superstar Rudy Vallée, which brought in
good royalties. Encouraged, he teamed with a more experienced lyricist,
Charles Tobias. When their song “Can’t Be Bothered with No One but
You” failed, he moved on to lyricist Jack Ellis, with whom he wrote four
songs, none successful, although one, “Rising Moon,” gave the first hint of
his way with a bluesy ballad. But these were desultory efforts; he wasn’t
thinking of himself as a professional songwriter. He hadn’t paid attention
to, much less studied, the evolution that had been going on in songwriting
during the decade that was now coming to a close. Nor had he noticed the
new ideas that were changing the structure, content, and ambitions of the
American musical.
Then, in May 1929, he was hired by one of America’s great songwriters
for a role in what promised to be a landmark musical. The play’s tentative
title was Louisiana Lou, and its composer was Vincent Youmans. The crag-
gily handsome Youmans was from a well-established, well-to-do New York
family. He’d grown up in Larchmont County and studied engineering at
Yale before the lure of a career in music became irresistible. He was a fine
pianist. At a party in New York he was introduced to Sergei Rachmaninoff,
who, upon hearing Youmans at the keyboard, asked to be taught his style.
Youmans was pleased by the prospect of giving those lessons, although they
never came off, and grateful for Rachmaninoff’s praise for his songs. By
1929 those songs had achieved a remarkable sophistication. He’d helped
pioneer a composing style that became a model for the emerging Ameri-
can songbook: taking a brief melodic phrase and building a succession of
variations on it, each supported by its own distinctive harmonization. He
used this technique to create up-tempo songs like “Tea for Two” as well as
heartfelt ballads such as “More Than You Know”—the latter a song he had
just written for this new show.

Rimler_text.indd 13 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 14 ch a p t e r 2

When Arlen met Youmans, American popular songwriting was in its

liftoff moment. Some prodigious new talents, inspired by Jerome Kern and
Irving Berlin, had come on the scene. Not that Kern and Berlin were relics.
Berlin, at forty, had recently penned “Blue Skies” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,”
while Kern, three years his senior, had, with Hammerstein, created Show
Boat in 1927—the best musical then yet written. Now the field included the
Gershwin brothers, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Duke Ellington, Cole
Porter, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, Harry Warren, Vernon Duke,
Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, Hoagy Carmichael, Burton Lane, and
E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. “Our tribe of songsmiths,” Harburg later called them.7
They socialized, tried their songs out on each other, and cheered one an-
other along. Ira Gershwin staked Harburg—his onetime school chum—five
hundred dollars to get him started in the business. Berlin gave Cole Porter’s
stalled career a boost by taking out a newspaper ad to praise one of his
shows. Porter would later send Johnny Mercer “little encouraging notes and
telegrams when he admired something new I had written.”8 George Gersh-
win took many fledgling songwriters under his wing, including Ann Ronell,
Kay Swift, Burton Lane, and Vernon Duke. Duke also received encourage-
ment from Kern, who could be fearsome but who, in their publisher’s office,
walked over and said, “You may think it odd and I’m not in the habit of
saying such things, but I’m crazy about your music—it’s new and it’s fresh.
Believe it or not, I’m under your influence. Good day to you.”9
It seemed that everyone was in everyone else’s corner—the exception being
Youmans, especially when it came to Gershwin. They’d been born within
a day of each other in September 1898, and when they got together Gersh-
win, the elder, would affectionately call Youmans “Junior,” while Youmans
referred to Gershwin as the “Old Man.” Despite all his success, Youmans
was envious of Gershwin, who was held in awe by musicians and the pub-
lic alike, not just as a songwriting wonder but as a composer of concert
music. When asked in the 1970s if there was any jealousy among the great
songwriters, Arlen said, “Yes, Vincent Youmans. Every time he heard a new
Gershwin song, he said, ‘So the son of a bitch thought of it.’”10
Youmans, too, had concert hall ambitions, but his current aim was to
become top man on Broadway. Louisiana Lou would be his answer to Show
Boat. He assumed complete control over it. He was the producer, publisher,
librettist, and composer. He even bought his own theater. Unfortunately,
he wasn’t cut out to be a manager. Even when sober he had a tough time
getting along with people, and his drinking excesses were amazing even to
other alcoholics. A recent marriage had done nothing to lessen his woman-

Rimler_text.indd 14 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 n ew yor k , n y 15

izing. Nor did his feverish ambition bring him joy as it did for his nemesis
Gershwin—only bitterness, mistrust, and anger.
Youmans hired Arlen to play a black singer-pianist called “Cokey Joe” and
perform a song titled “Doo-Da-Dey.” For this Arlen had to darken his face
with burnt cork, Jolson-style. When the show, renamed Great Day!, developed
problems during tryouts in the summer of 1929, Youmans gave him a second
assignment: notating the score, which was constantly changing. Arlen did
this without complaint and was also amenable when Youmans sent him as
an emissary to his lyricists, Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu. Youmans’s usual
method of collaboration was to hand his writers a lead sheet and walk away.
But Arlen stayed in the room with them, playing the tunes over and over again,
as many times as they wanted. Since his stage role was minor and required
little preparation, he could take on yet another task. In July, during rehears-
als for the New York premiere, Fletcher Henderson, who was the show’s
rehearsal pianist, fell ill and asked Arlen to substitute for him. Arlen obliged.
This meant repeatedly playing a song while the choreographer and dancers
worked out the steps. Arlen would cue the assembled with a conventional
two-bar piano vamp—the customary da-da-d’-dah-dah-DA!—but it became
so boring to him that he began improvising variations on it. One variation
took the music into a dip that created a melodic twist that caught the atten-
tion of the dancers and members of the chorus. They gravitated toward the
piano as Arlen continued to toy with the phrase. It was as if they wanted to
be present at an event—a blessed event, as Arlen later came to see it.
He would always believe that this, his first great tune, had been given to
him—a gift that included not just the music, but the fortuitous circumstances
surrounding its arrival. After all, if others hadn’t recognized what he’d hap-
pened on, he might have let the idea slip by. And those others included not
only the dancers and singers, but two composers whose opinions counted
a lot with him. One was Will Marion Cook, who had composed “I’m Com-
ing Virginia” and was Great Day!’s choral director. The other was Harry
Warren, a Brooklyn-born son of Italian immigrants (his birth name was
Salvatore Antonio Guaragna), now in his midthirties, who’d composed
the hit “Nagasaki” and was about to produce one of the great catalogs in
American popular song. Warren encouraged Arlen to finish the tune, saying
he knew just the man to write the lyric. That man was paunchy, balding,
easygoing Ted Koehler, a thirty-five-year-old former vaudeville and movie
theater pianist. Koehler met Arlen at the offices of Warren’s publisher, where
he listened to the now completed tune, asked Arlen to play it again, and
then said, simply, “Get Happy.”

Rimler_text.indd 15 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 3

“Get Happy”

“Get Happy” was accepted by Koehler’s publisher, who offered Arlen fifty
dollars a week if he would bring his future songs to them. This money al-
lowed him to get a place of his own—a first-floor apartment in the fifteen-
story Croydon Hotel on East 86th Street. It also let him bow out of Great
Day!, which had received terrible reviews in Philadelphia and more bad
notices on Long Island. After a rocky start on Broadway, it would be finished
off by the Wall Street crash.
Arlen, in contrast, was doing well. Each day he’d take a two-mile walk
from 86th Street to his office, which was a small room upstairs in the Strand
Theatre on Broadway. There, as the summer of 1929 waned, he and Koehler
went to work on new songs as they waited for “Get Happy” to make a splash.
Songwriting, it turned out, was going to be his career. But it was an
uncertain profession, more so than performing. He could always count on
being able to sing and play the piano, but would he always be able to write
great songs? For the first time in his musical life, he wasn’t sure he could
do what was required. If good ideas came along, he knew he could make
something of them. That had happened after the initial inspiration for “Get
Happy” when he wrote the bridge—or release—with its dreamy harmonies
(“We’re headin’ ’cross the river”). But what if the inspirations didn’t come?
He had no idea where they were from, except that it was someplace beyond
his control, maybe outside himself. Still, the experience of writing a great
song was so exciting that this had to be the way to go. “When he gets to the
piano,” said lyricist Yip Harburg, “it’s a feeling of witchcraft. He’ll spit three
times and almost talk to the chords, talk to God. He does it humorously,
but behind the humor are all sorts of superstitions and beliefs.”1 According
to theater critic John Lahr, Arlen invoked “his unconscious through prayer.
Before he began his day’s work at the piano, he lowered his eyes, brought his

Rimler_text.indd 16 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 “get h a ppy” 17

hands together, and put himself in a worshipful state of mind.”2 Ira Gershwin
said that Arlen “had an almost supernatural belief in inspiration.”3 He took
to carrying a folded sheet of music manuscript paper with him wherever
he went. If an idea came, he’d stop what he was doing and notate it. He
called these notations jots, and always set his jot book in front of him on
the piano when getting to work.
Songwriting changed his life in other ways. For the first time he thought
analytically about his work. He studied the compositions of contemporary
songwriters, looking into their stylistic conventions and innovations, how
they constructed and harmonized their melodies, how they tailored their
work for specific purposes and performers. He took lessons in theory and
harmony from Simon Bucharoff, a Russian-born composer of opera and
orchestral works. He gave thought to the nature of the creative process and
what philosophers had written about it and about the lives of artists. He
wanted to know how to comport himself with dignity given the environ-
ment he’d be working in. He would be creating commercial products for
a commercial market, he knew, but he had no doubt that his music would
be art. Late in life, when asked by writer Gene Lees if he’d been aware in
the 1930s that he was writing art music, he “looked at me for what seems
in memory a long moment and then said, softly, ‘Yes.’”4
As he read, he copied meaningful passages and quotations into a journal.
“When your daemon is in charge,” one entry reads, “do not try to think
consciously.” “Drift, wait, and obey” is another.5 From Marcus Aurelius:
“Let every action be directed to some definite object, and perfect in its way.”
From Arnold Bennett: “Mind control is the first element of a full existence”
and “Self respect is the heart of all purposefulness.” From Rilke: “Nobody
can counsel and help you, nobody—there’s only one single way—go into
yourself.” From Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
From Aristotle: “No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.”
On a scrap of music paper he counseled himself: “The less a man says
whose [sic] admired by the public the longer will he be admired.” And: “I
do not like the spirit of competition. There is something very uncomfort-
able about it.” He tried in his reading to give himself the education he had
missed when he quit school. In one notebook he listed vocabulary words
to learn: poignant, seductive, incomparable, atrocious, exquisite, exotic,
exhilarating, bombastic, neophyte.6 His readings, however, did not include
fiction; he showed no interest in stories or their construction—an omission
that would eventually affect his ability to choose worthy Broadway projects.
But the two big questions that confronted him at the moment were where
his song ideas would come from and how they could best reach an audience.

Rimler_text.indd 17 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 18 ch a p t e r 3

He himself had always gotten jobs and landed on his feet. But now he had
to worry about his creations, and that was different. Would “Get Happy”
find success? Would it do okay?
Once again, Ted Koehler stepped in. He was able to place the song in
a show called Nine-Fifteen Revue through his connection to singer Ruth
Etting. Earlier in the decade he’d championed Etting as she made the transi-
tion from costume designer to singer, and then she had become a star in the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. Now, as the headliner of Nine-Fifteen Revue, she
was happy to return the favor and sing the new Arlen–Koehler song. The
revue’s producer was twenty-four-year-old Ruth Selwyn, a singer and dancer
who was, with this show, becoming the first woman producer on Broadway.
Not that she was new to the business; she had appeared in several George
White’s Scandals revues and was the wife of veteran Broadway producer
Edgar Selwyn. Thus she was able to attract some big names to the project.
Ring Lardner was one of the writers. George and Ira Gershwin contributed
a song.
But the show did badly. It lasted just seven performances. In reviewing it,
the New York Times overlooked “Get Happy” and summed up the revue by
saying: “General Sherman was wrong. There are worse things than war.”7
On opening night, February 11, 1930, two members of the chorus stumbled
and fell to the floor. Etting premiered the gospel-style “Get Happy” wearing
a bathing suit in front of a beach backdrop—an incongruous set devised by
choreographer Busby Berkeley. So Arlen’s inspired melody, which was his
first to be performed on Broadway, had a disappointing debut.
But its publishers had faith and rushed it into print, making sure the at-
tractive Etting was on the cover, and it caught on with jazz and dance bands
and became a source of substantial royalties for Arlen and Koehler. It also
brought Arlen face-to-face for the first time with the Gershwin brothers.
They’d contributed a song, “Toddlin’ Along,” to the Nine-Fifteen Revue,
and their musical Strike Up the Band tried out in Boston side by side with it.
When George heard “Get Happy,” he told Harold it was “the most exciting
first-act finale I ever heard.”8 This was the beginning of a close friendship
between Arlen and both Gershwins, as well as the beginning of George
Gershwin’s fascination with Arlen’s music—heady stuff for Arlen.
And “Get Happy” had yet another result. During the Boston tryout of
Nine-Fifteen Revue, a producer named Earl Carroll came to see the show. At
the time, Carroll was one of the three most successful producers of Broad-
way revues. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. worked the high end, spending whatever it
took to make his shows opulent and, once in a while, thought-provoking
(he had produced Show Boat). The middle ground was held by George

Rimler_text.indd 18 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 “get h a ppy” 19

White, a former Ziegfeld dancer who had formed his own long-running
series of revues. He was a good talent scout and had helped start the ca-
reers of Helen Morgan, W. C. Fields, and Bert Lahr, among others. As
with Ziegfeld, his bread and butter was the chorus line. The George White
Girls were not as elaborately outfitted as the Ziegfeld Girls, but they were
dressed. Earl Carroll, on the other hand, took the low road. He was a tall,
gaunt, and ascetic-looking man, described by one writer as looking “like a
Methodist preacher,”9 who enticed audiences into his theater with young
women who were barely clothed. He’d opened his own theater at 50th
Street and 7th Avenue in 1922 but tore it down in 1931 to replace it with
a much grander place, designed to resemble an Art Deco skyscraper. His
credos about feminine beauty were everywhere, even on the backs of sheet
music. The measurements he favored were height: 5'5"; weight: 118; neck:
12"; bust: 34½"; and wrist: 6". He also attracted customers with publicity
stunts. The most famous occurred in 1926 when he threw a lavish party
in his theater for a paroled murderer and potential backer, Harry Kendall
Thaw. The highlight was an ingénue sitting naked in a bathtub filled with
contraband champagne. It made headlines, as did Carroll’s subsequent trial
and six-month incarceration for perjury.
Upon hearing “Get Happy,” Carroll offered Arlen and Koehler a contract
to write songs for his upcoming revue Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1930. They
gladly accepted the assignment, and it was during the run of this show that
Samuel and Celia Arluck came to New York City to visit their son. Already
taken aback by his name change (the cantor, in letters to his son, would
always sign them, simply and hugely, “Arluck”), they now found themselves
sitting in the Vanities audience at the New Amsterdam Theatre10 as an Arlen–
Koehler waltz, “One Love,” accompanied a fan dance by the otherwise naked
Faith Bacon. They also saw a scene that tried to pass off nude women as
mannequins (a ruse that did not fool the vice squad). If this weren’t enough,
they learned about Harold’s romance with Frances Williams—a non-Jew.
Arlen did as he had done as a boy: he weathered their displeasure, avoided
a confrontation, waited the situation out, then returned to what he’d been
doing. And the Arlucks, as always, stopped short of rejecting their son. They
could tolerate flings such as this, as long as there was no talk of marriage.
Marriage was the important thing. It was essential that he marry within his
faith and raise his children as Jews. At the moment there was no need for
them to worry. The romance with Williams was cooling down.

Rimler_text.indd 19 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 4

The Cotton Club

By 1930, the days when Tin Pan Alley publishers sold their songs to trav-
eling entertainers were coming to an end. Vaudeville was nearly finished.
Radio wasn’t yet a dependable hit-making medium—in fact, writers and
publishers were wary of broadcasting, believing it adversely affected record
sales by giving away what the audience should have been paying for. Hol-
lywood musicals had been a passing fad and, although their second heyday
was coming, it was still several years away. So the best chance for a song’s
success was to be in a well-received stage show. From there it could make
its way into band repertoires and onto recordings.
Stage shows were either revues or book musicals. Revues sometimes had
unifying themes, usually topical satire, but mostly consisted of unrelated
sketches. Book musicals, on the other hand, had plots and characters and
told stories through music and lyrics. In the 1910s Jerome Kern teamed with
writers Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse to create a series of literate, witty
musicals for the little 299-seat Princess Theatre, and those shows pointed
the way to what was gradually becoming the modern American musical.
By 1930 the strongest push in that direction was from Rodgers and Hart.
Unlike Arlen, Richard Rodgers hadn’t started off playing in a band. Nor
had Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Berlin, or Youmans. From the outset they were
songwriters, each focused on writing for the stage. At the age of nine, Rod-
gers traveled alone by subway to the Standard Theatre at Broadway and
91st Street, where fifty cents got him a seat in the balcony. At thirteen he
saw Very Good Eddie at the Princess Theatre and became “a Kern worship-
per.”1 A year later he talked his older brother into taking him to Columbia
University’s annual Varsity show, which was where he met Lorenz Hart
and Oscar Hammerstein II. In 1919, at seventeen, he teamed up with Hart,
who was seven years his senior and had already given a lot of thought to

Rimler_text.indd 20 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 t h e cot ton club 21

the future of the musical. Rodgers and Hart were ambitious not just for
themselves and their songs, but for their shows. “When I get an idea for
a song,” Rodgers told an interviewer, “I can hear it in the orchestra; I can
smell the scenery; I can see the kind of actor who’ll sing the song and the
audience sitting there listening to it.”2
Arlen was different. He’d given no thought to Broadway musicals or
their future. He’d been content in the vaudeville and burlesque houses on
Pearl Street in Buffalo and even happier in the nightclubs of Broadway and
Harlem. He and Koehler didn’t present themselves as a Rodgers and Hart–
type team. They were a couple of jazz-loving songwriters and were pleased
to take as their next assignment a floor show called Biff-Boom-Bang at the
Silver Slipper—a saloon whose principal proprietor was Owney “Killer”
Madden.
Composer Jimmy McHugh described Madden as “a lean, hard, quiet
man with black hair, piercing blue eyes and a rather cute Irish face” who
possessed a “bear-trap mind’ and “flintlike executive ability.”3 Madden had
gone into the business of purchasing nightclubs and using them as fronts for
the sale of bootleg liquor made by his Phoenix Cereal Beverage Company.
He bought several nightspots in addition to the Silver Slipper. One was
the Club Deluxe in Harlem at Lenox and 142nd Street, which he renamed
the Cotton Club and decorated as a southern plantation, complete with
“white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave
quarters.”4 The black waiters wore red tailcoats and served an upper-class
white clientele. African Americans were not permitted through the front
door—W. C. Handy, known as “the Father of the Blues,” was turned away
as his music was playing inside. But blacks were welcome as entertainers,
and the Cotton Club’s roster of performers was at least the equal of anything
Broadway had to offer: Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Fats
Waller, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Dorothy Dandridge, the Nicholas
Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, and on and on. Not that
Caucasian performers were excluded. The shows were produced, directed,
and emceed by a white vaudevillian, Dan Healy, and most of the songs were
written by whites. For a time McHugh and lyricist Dorothy Fields provided
the numbers, but they quit when Fields balked at having to write material of
a requisite raunchiness. With their departure, the proprietors looked to Arlen
and Koehler. Their score for the Silver Slipper hadn’t produced anything
big, but one song from that show, “Shakin’ the African,” made the owners
think they would do a credible job writing the next Cotton Club revue.
There were two productions a year at the Cotton Club, one in the spring,
the other in the fall. And there were two shows a night, the first at midnight

Rimler_text.indd 21 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 22 ch a p t e r 4

and the second at 2:00 a.m., timed to accommodate theatergoers looking

for cabaret fun after Broadway shows had let out. Brown Sugar (subtitled
BlackBerries of 1931) was the fall 1930 offering. It featured fifty chorus
girls who could sing and dance, were at least 5'11" and had “high yaller”
or caramel-colored skin. The headliners were singer–tap dancer Cora La
Redd, singer Leitha Hill, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which had been
resident there since 1927. Arlen and Koehler’s job was to supply torch bal-
lads, rhythm numbers, comedy material, and specialty songs with lots of
sexual innuendoes and drug references. The Cotton Club paid Arlen $100
a week plus free meals. This, when added to the $50 a week he was getting
from his publishers as well as royalties from “Get Happy” and other songs,
made for a comfortable income at a time when many were being sucked
into the quicksand of the Great Depression.
Arlen was embarrassed by a lot of the material he had to write for this
show, especially one double-entendre song called “Pussy.”5 Although Koehler
didn’t mind having his name attached to the song, Arlen, probably thinking
of his parents, insisted that it and others like it not be published. Yet he
enjoyed his Cotton Club work—and was especially glad to hang out with
the performers in their subterranean dressing rooms, singing and laughing
with them, entertaining them with impersonations of the mobsters who ran
the place. Then he’d go back upstairs and take advantage of the privileges
afforded him as a white man: the front entrance, the restaurant, the bath-
room. It wasn’t difficult for him to get along with the gangsters. He didn’t
spend a lot of time with them but was amiable in their presence and pleased
to say yes whenever Madden offered him a lift home in his luxurious—and
bulletproof—Duesenberg.
Nothing much came of the Brown Sugar score, although Arlen recorded
one of its songs, “Linda,” with the Red Nichols Band and it was, as com-
poser-critic Alec Wilder observed, the first to use what would become an
Arlen trademark—the sudden octave jump. Because it and the other songs
fit the Cotton Club’s style, the team was invited to return to write the next
production, due in the spring of 1931.
In the meantime Jack Yellen—the man who at Cantor Arluck’s behest
had followed Harold to Minnie’s Roadhouse—heard “Get Happy” on the
radio as he was taking a shower in his Manhattan apartment, and he found
the song so insistent he bought the sheet music. On the cover was the name
Harold Arlen, which his intuition told him was the boy Hyman Arluck,
who couldn’t be talked out of a musical career. Yellen and Arlen were both
habitués of Lindy’s Deli, a restaurant on Broadway near 51st Street that
attracted notables from show business, journalism, the underworld, and

Rimler_text.indd 22 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 t h e cot ton club 23

politics. It was particularly favored by people who wrote and promoted

songs. Singer Dolly Dawn recalled: “When you came in to the left there
was a bar where all the song pluggers would stand, their foot upon the rail
and one elbow crooked, and they’d be watching for what celebrities came
in. They’d pounce on them and go right into their pitch.”6
At Lindy’s, Yellen buttonholed Arlen and told him—he didn’t ask—that
they were going to write a Broadway show together. Arlen demurred. He
already had a lyricist, he said, and they were set to write another Cotton
Club revue. But Yellen kept at it. He’d been thinking about a show that
would feature his own lyrics and the comedy of Broadway veteran Lou
Holtz. Yellen and Holtz would be co-producers, and Yellen and another
comedian, Sid Silvers, would write the script. He urged Harold to come to
his nearby office and sign a contract to write the music. Arlen got out of it
by making an appointment for a later date, which he didn’t keep. But his
affection for Lindy’s made it easy for Yellen to find him again. And by that
time the lyricist had heard another Arlen song—“Hittin’ the Bottle” from
the Earl Carroll show as recorded by Duke Ellington—that made him all the
more eager to work with him. This time Yellen got Arlen to sign the contract.
Harold may not have wanted the job, but he recognized the opportunity.
Yellen’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” had just been introduced in a lav-
ish MGM musical called Chasing Rainbows and was becoming popular. A
Broadway production with his name on it would attract notice.
When Koehler learned that Arlen had a new partner, he didn’t make a fuss.
He was a rarity in show business: a calm and happy man. During Cotton
Club rehearsals he liked to help the carpenters build sets. In the evenings
when others were nightclubbing, he was home in Brooklyn with his wife
and daughter. Unlike Arlen, who kept himself trim and fit and dressed fas-
tidiously, Koehler was rumpled, pudgy, and exercise-averse. When writing
lyrics he would flop onto a sofa and lie motionless for hours, pen in hand.
But he was, Arlen knew, a gifted lyricist who, when presented with a good
melody, could find the words inherent in the notes.
Yellen wasn’t in Koehler’s league as a lyricist and not at all like him in
personality. Jumpy, always in motion, never comfortable, he’d summon
Arlen to his apartment and pace about proposing and discarding ideas as
if he were chain-smoking them. He’d leave the bathroom door open so he
could call his thoughts out from the john. Incessantly, he urged Arlen to
work harder, faster. Harold, he said, “would write a tune, then stand in the
corner and pray for the next one!”7
When the show, You Said It, tried out in Philadelphia, Yellen realized it
wasn’t very good. It had an unoriginal plot about college life (a rich student

Rimler_text.indd 23 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 24 ch a p t e r 4

and a poor one vie for the dean’s daughter) and a weak script. But his as-
sertiveness saved the day. On a trip home to Buffalo, he and his wife went
to a vaudeville show that featured Lyda Roberti, a pretty and dynamic
immigrant from Poland whose way of pronouncing the “h” sound as “ch”
(as in chutzpah) struck audiences as very funny. Yellen told her she had to
be in his show, and when she said she preferred her current success to the
iffyness of Broadway, he gave her the same treatment he’d given Arlen and
got the same results. She joined You Said It and saved it. The way she sang
“hot” in the song “Sweet and Hot” brought down the house. It became
such a showstopper that it kept the play afloat for a respectable 168 per-
formances—this despite poor reviews. Brooks Atkinson of the New York
Times belittled the production and, of Arlen’s music, said only that it kept
“Louis Gress’s ‘rhythmonic orchestra’ blowing hard.”8 Years later Yellen
would dismiss You Said It, calling it “a lesson in what not to do.” As for his
brief collaboration with Arlen, he admitted: “I could see he was destined
for better things than I could give him.”9
Then, in the spring of 1931, came the premiere of Arlen and Koehler’s
second Cotton Club production, Rhyth-Mania, and with it, Arlen’s takeoff as
a songwriter. Two of the new songs were every bit as good as “Get Happy.”
One was the up-tempo “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Arlen
later recalled its genesis: “One day I kept thinking of the steady beat of Bill
Robinson’s tap-dancing at the Cotton Club, for whom I was composing
songs at the time, and before I knew it I was myself tapping out the melody
of ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.’”10 The song is a wild musical
ride filled with melodic leaps and key changes as Koehler’s lyric compares
being in a romantic relationship to life aboard a shaky boat.
The second great song from Rhyth-Mania, like “Get Happy,” began with
a eureka moment. One day during the winter of 1930, Koehler was at work
in Arlen’s apartment in the Croydon Hotel when Arlen became restless and
decided to take a walk—first to Lindy’s and then to the offices of the Cotton
Club’s music publisher, Mills Music, on West 46th. He’d developed what
would become a lifelong habit of walking from his residence (wherever
it happened to be) to the offices of his publisher (whoever that happened
to be) so he could, as he liked to put it, “schmooze with the boys.”11 He
loved to walk in New York City, no matter the season or the weather. If
he was caught in a downpour he’d hurry with childlike glee from awning
to awning. In summers he’d cool off by standing under theater and hotel
marquees to get blasts of chilled air from their lobbies. On this occasion he
urged Koehler to come with him. The lyricist, however, was not interested
in walks, especially not when it was cold, and certainly not for two miles.
Somehow Arlen prevailed, and as they headed downtown he teased his

Rimler_text.indd 24 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 t h e cot ton club 25

partner by picking up the pace, turning the walk into a march, and play-
ing an imaginary trumpet. Then he hummed a tune that sprang from the
rhythm of his steps. Intrigued, the lyricist suggested words to go with the
new melody. By the time they reached their destination they had “I Love a
Parade,” which quickly became a standard. Every subsequent Cotton Club
show was called the Cotton Club Parade.
In the summer of 1931, a pianist friend of Arlen’s, Roger Edens, offered
him a gig as an accompanist in a vaudeville show. It was at the prestigious
Palace Theatre and featured an up-and-coming star, Ethel Merman. A year
earlier she’d made her Broadway debut in the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy, wow-
ing everyone by holding a note in “I Got Rhythm” for sixteen bars. Now,
just prior to opening at the Apollo Theatre in the 1931 edition of George
White’s Scandals, she had time to try a vaudeville act. She began the show
by singing to the piano accompaniment of Edens and composer Johnny
Green (who had recently written “Body and Soul”). Then Lyda Roberti and
Arlen took over for a set that included “Sweet and Hot.” And then Merman
returned with Edens and Arlen as her accompanists.
She loved to make “a stylish entrance to open her act,” Edens recalled.
“She always had a cape or a jacket that matched her gown and would sing
the first song wearing this cape. During the applause she would take the
cape off and place it on top of Harold’s piano. Before one matinée perfor-
mance Harold and I decided to liven up the proceedings by leaving a little
memento for Ethel when she left her cape on the piano.”12 That memento
was a note that read, “Your left tit is hanging out.”13 This sent Merman into
a gale of laughter that puzzled the audience as she didn’t let them in on the
joke, although they must have realized it was a good one when, after she’d
gained control and finished her set, they heard her laughing again, this time
backstage. She retaliated the next day by putting a message of her own on
Arlen’s piano: a single red rose threaded neatly through a jock strap. Then
she upped the ante by giving Arlen an over-the-top introduction to the
audience, telling them that this young man was about to play some of his
many “immortal” songs. For a few days Arlen was stumped for a comeback,
but then he and Edens figured out how to respond: they went ahead and
played a selection of immortal songs—by Kern, Berlin, Romberg, Youmans,
Rodgers, and Gershwin, ending with Merman’s signature “I Got Rhythm.”
As Arlen later recalled, “The audience didn’t know the difference; they ap-
plauded.”14 This show, which they did four times a day, was so popular it
went into a second edition at the Hollywood Theatre.
Arlen continued as a performer for a while, getting together with violinist
Joe Venuti, guitarist Eddie Lang, and clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey to sing eight
songs for the Parlophone label. His performances on “Pardon Me, Pretty

Rimler_text.indd 25 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 26 ch a p t e r 4

Baby” (composed by Vincent Rose) and “Little Girl” (music and lyrics by
Francis Henry and Madeline Hyde) have, according to Will Friedwald, “all
the amorous energy that both songs require, in a way that has less in com-
mon with pop singers of the time and more with jazzmen like Armstrong
and Red Allen.”15
By the end of the summer of 1932 he was back to composing. He and
Koehler went to work on the fall edition of the Cotton Club Parade. But
they were interrupted when Earl Carroll asked them for a few songs for
his upcoming Vanities of 1932. The Vanities from the year before had in-
troduced “Goodnight, Sweetheart” (music by Ray Noble, lyrics by Jimmy
Campbell and Reg Connelly), a song with a sentimental “Auld Lang Syne”
quality. Carroll wanted another like it, but instead Arlen and Koehler gave
him “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”—whose solemn beat, like a New Or-
leans funeral procession, would make it a mainstay for New Orleans–born
Louis Armstrong. As it was sung in the show, Carroll’s newest collection
of young women undulated in the background. One was a seventeen-year-
old blue-eyed blonde who had recently won a high school beauty contest
and was also working as a model. She was Anya Taranda, the daughter of
Russian immigrants and a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Arlen,
ten years her senior, fell in love with her.

Rimler_text.indd 26 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 5

Anya

Although Anya appeared onstage in flimsy outfits and modeled for pho-
tographers in leopard-skin tops with plunging necklines, she was shy. She
dreamed of show business fame but didn’t train as an actress or try out for
parts. She’d taken ballet but never danced professionally, not even when
she was in a chorus line, except to do a step or two or sway back and forth.
She liked to sing, but not in a nightclub or to a theater audience. Her best
moments as a performer came at parties, when Harold and his songwriter
friends listened as she vocalized in a small, if ingratiating, voice. She was
beautiful and sweet and the first person who’d ever loved him unreservedly.
She lived with her parents and twelve-year-old brother in an East Harlem
apartment. Her father, Frank Taranda, was a machine operator in a shirt
factory. Her mother, Mary, cleaned office buildings. Anya’s modeling and
stage show income helped defray their household bills. We don’t know
much about this family, except that tensions between Frank and Mary
eventually led to their divorce and his remarriage. We do know they were
less than pleased by her romance with Arlen, partly because of the ten-year
difference in their ages, but mostly because he was Jewish. Anti-Semitism
was pervasive in the United States in the 1930s. In New York, where Jews
made up a significant portion of the population, universities and profes-
sional organizations locked them out or admitted them by quota. Classi-
fied housing ads in the New York Times specified “Christian only.” Harold
therefore had to face her parents’ antipathy to him while, at the same time,
he and Anya were leery of how his parents would react to her—a Russian
Orthodox woman who made her living by appearing half naked in public.
Would they regard him as an apostate who’d taken up with a harlot? If he
married her, would they dismiss him from their lives? In Orthodox Jewish
households such reactions were common.

Rimler_text.indd 27 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 28 ch a p t e r 5

As he considered the problems that would come from his relationship with
Anya—an affair that was serious from the start—Harold also had to deal
with his brother. Twenty-year-old Udie, who’d adopted Arlen as his surname
and exchanged Julius for the more masculine Jerry, appeared at the Croydon
late one rainy evening, saxophone in hand, looking for a place to stay. He
wanted to play in a band, sing, and write songs like his brother. He was a
decent enough musician. He’d sung in the synagogue choir, had taken music
lessons, and was proficient on violin, sax and piano. But Harold knew he
didn’t have a big talent and that he was in for rough times should he try for
success in New York. He advised Jerry to go back to Syracuse, where he could
look after their parents. Jerry would have none of that. He believed he could
make it. He was young, confident, energetic, and handsome—taller than his
brother, broad-shouldered and photogenic. They differed in personality, too.
Harold shrank from confrontation. Jerry was volatile. Each was a drinker,
but alcohol made Harold silly, while Jerry was liable to lash out.
Harold took him in. Improved finances had made it possible for him
to move into a posh apartment on the Croydon’s tenth floor, and he had
plenty of room. Anya was often there, too. Being underage, just seventeen,
she had to be careful. She would sometimes enter the Croydon accompanied
by a chaperone who’d then slip away. Because she and Jerry were unable to
establish a friendship, the atmosphere became strained. More tension came
when a fourth person arrived on the scene. This was a friend Jerry had made
during a brief stint at the University of Syracuse. Born Edward Chester Bab-
cock, the young man was now calling himself Jimmy Van Heusen—having
picked his new name as he watched a shirt manufacturer’s truck pass by. He
and Jerry had become a songwriting team. Jimmy was a gifted composer,
but he let Jerry write the music while he handled the words.
As these people were getting acclimated to their new living and work
situations and to one another, Harold got a call from lyricist E. Y. “Yip”
Harburg. He and Harburg had met two years earlier when both were at
work on the 1930 edition of Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Now Harburg was in
a spot. He’d accepted an invitation from the Shubert brothers to write a
revue, Americana, with Vincent Youmans. But Youmans preferred book
shows to revues and had bailed out, taking his $2,500 advance with him.
While the Shuberts were busy trying to get their money back—they filed a
case against him with the Dramatists Guild—Harburg took charge of the
production. Time being short, he replaced Youmans with three composers.
One was Jay Gorney, a refugee from Czarist Russia. Another was Herman
Hupfeld, who’d written “As Time Goes By” the year before. The third was
Harold Arlen. Since a lot of lyrics needed to be written in short order, he
hired a young southerner, Johnny Mercer, to help him out.

Rimler_text.indd 28 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 a n ya 29

Yip enjoyed running the show and was especially pleased that it gave him
an opportunity to write scenes as well as lyrics. The idea for one sketch
occurred to him as he passed a breadline that was, he recalled, “owned by
William Randolph Hearst. He had a big truck with several people on it
and big cauldrons of hot soup, bread. Fellows with burlap on their shoes
were lined up all around Columbus Circle and went for blocks and blocks
around the park, waiting.”1 Harburg turned this into a skit about compet-
ing breadlines, one owned by Hearst and the other by a rival newspaper
publisher, Ogden Mills Reid.
He, Mercer, and Arlen worked together on one song for the show, “Satan’s
Li’l Lamb.” Thus the first time Arlen worked with either of these men, he
worked with both of them. Their song was a blowout production number
in the brassy style of the Cotton Club. But it was overshadowed by Harburg
and Gorney’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which became an enormous
success and the anthem of the Great Depression. Harburg’s lyric was more
powerful for being questioning rather than angry. But he was angry. He
believed the nation had, as presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt put
it, abandoned “the forgotten man.”
Like Arlen, he’d grown up in an Orthodox Yiddish-speaking home. The
Arluck and Hochberg (Yip’s birth surname) households were also alike in
the way the parents superstitiously changed the names of their children to
protect them from evil. Because six of Yip’s siblings died before he was born,
his mother asked a visiting rabbi to tell her how to keep him safe from the
unseen forces that had taken the others. He advised her to alter the boy’s
given name, Isidore, which she did by using the letter E which stood for El,
the rabbi’s first name.2 The Y came about when, in calling him to dinner
one night she shouted, “Yipsel!”—Yiddish for “little squirrel.” He is the one
who changed Hochberg to Harburg.
Both his parents worked in sweatshops, and he and his siblings grew up
in a sixth-floor cold-water flat near the docks of the East River. For a bed
he’d push two chairs together. In winters he went to the public library near
Tompkins Square to get warm. These privations turned him into a political
leftist. When his older brother, Max, whom he idolized, died of cancer at the
age of twenty-eight, he became an atheist. As a lyricist he was a polemicist.
But he wrote with a gentle touch, humor, and a flair for fantasy. He’d gone to
high school at Townsend Harris Hall, where alphabetical seating placed him
next to Ira Gershwin, who, as he, loved the work of W. S. Gilbert. One day
Ira amazed Yip by telling him that Gilbert’s poetry had been set to music. To
prove this he took him home—the Gershwins lived in a brownstone apart-
ment on Second Avenue at Fifth Street that Yip considered “swank”—and
put HMS Pinafore on the Victrola. Yip later recalled hearing “lines I knew

Rimler_text.indd 29 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 30 ch a p t e r 5

by heart. I was dumbfounded, staggered. Gilbert and Sullivan tied Ira to me

for life.” They became a writing team, signing their high school newspaper
articles “Yip and Gersh.”3 At City College they continued to collaborate,
working on a newspaper column called “Gargoyle Gargles.”
Harburg was nine years older than Arlen, but they began their careers as
songwriters at around the same time, when Harburg was well past thirty.
For years Yip had watched in frustration as others did what he wanted to
do—usher in the era of great American theater music. He was stuck on the
sidelines supporting himself and his parents as well as a son and daughter
who lived in California with relatives of his former wife. He did this by
running his own business, an electrical supply company, which did very
well until, as he told it, “that beautiful Depression of 1929 came along and
knocked the hell out of my business. I found myself broke and personally in
debt for about fifty thousand dollars, my name on all sorts of contracts that
I had never read or cared to. All I had left was my pencil.”4 At that point,
Ira urged him to write lyrics, gave him five hundred dollars to get started,
and introduced him to composer Gorney.
By the end of 1932, after just four years as a lyricist, Yip had worked
with twenty-five tunesmiths—as he looked for one who had a quality he’d
seen so far only in George Gershwin: a “typically American approach . . . a
combination of Hebrew and black music.”5 When he met Arlen, he found the
one he’d been looking for. It was more than music; there was also something
about the man that touched Harburg. Singer Michael Feinstein, who knew
Harburg, described him as “very gentle in how he would treat a soul if he
saw they were fragile or tender in some way.”6 And this gentleness came out
in his solicitous attitude toward Arlen, who was, Yip said, “always rather on
the depressed side . . . although he laughed vociferously as almost a protest
to his sadness.”7
Of the trio who wrote “Satan’s Li’l Lamb” in 1932, Harburg and Arlen
would write together again later that year. But it would be nearly ten years
before Arlen’s second collaboration with Mercer. Like Arlen, Mercer was
an accomplished singer, and his big goal in life at this point was to become
another Bing Crosby. When Crosby left his singing trio, the Rhythm Boys,
which performed with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, Whitman asked Mer-
cer to reconstitute the group. Mercer went to Jerry Arlen, whom he knew
through Harold, and asked him to join. The opportunity thrilled Jerry, but,
as Mercer later explained it, “we were all baritones and our harmony left a
lot to be desired. Before one week was up, we had our two weeks’ notice.”8

Rimler_text.indd 30 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 Ch a p t er 6

“Stormy Weather”

In early 1933, Anya, having just turned eighteen, moved in with Harold at
the Croydon. It wasn’t common in those days for unmarried couples to live
together, not even among Arlen’s permissive set. There was a greater stigma
in this than in marrying, divorcing, and marrying again—the more usual
route taken by show people. It seems certain that Anya would have said yes
had Harold asked her to marry him. She was devoted to him, and he to her.
He would never again fall in love with another woman. Composer Johnny
Green “doubted that Arlen ever had a date with anyone else”—something
we know to be untrue, given his intense romance with Lily Levine, his affair
with Frances Williams, and relationships to come much later in life. But,
being a conservative man by nature, he wouldn’t have cohabited with Anya
had he been able to marry her without fear of his parents’ reaction. This
seemed the best option, and it was accepted by his friends, although Ira’s
wife, Leonore, pressured them to tie the knot. As for Anya’s friends—she
seems not to have had any. Without Harold, she was, except for her parents
and brother, alone in the world.
Yip Harburg was also having relationship problems. He’d had fallen in
love with Jay Gorney’s wife, a fact he openly proclaimed in love poems,
including one, “To Edelaine,” that was published above his signature in
Franklin P. Adams’s New York Tribune column “The Conning Tower.” And
he was having problems in a professional relationship, as well. He’d been
working with Russian émigré composer Vernon Duke, who, as it turned out,
equaled Yip in volatility. Duke was a symphonic composer from Kiev who’d
escaped the Russian Revolution and immigrated to the United States. In New
York he looked up George Gershwin, who Americanized his name—he’d
been born Vladimir Dukelsky—and got him started in the songwriting trade.
That Duke and Harburg accomplished anything together is remarkable

Rimler_text.indd 31 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 32 ch a p t e r 6

given what Yip described as “my pumpernickel background and his orchid
tunes.”1 Nevertheless, in late 1932 they managed to write “April in Paris.”
Yip had set his sights on Arlen. But Arlen and Koehler were still a going
concern. A few weeks after Americana’s opening came the premiere of the
fall 1932 Cotton Club Parade (Twenty-first Edition), for which they wrote
“I’ve Got the World on a String”—another Arlen jazz tune loaded with
melodic and harmonic surprises. Other songs in the score were tailored
to the needs of the Cotton Club and its star, Cab Calloway, who liked his
numbers to have call-and-response “hi-de-ho”s and lots of drug references.
He’d had a big hit the year before with his own “Minnie the Moocher,”
so Arlen and Koehler gave him “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day” (“a
hundred thousand hoppies / Went over to China picking poppies”) as well
as “The Wail of the Reefer Man.”
But Harburg found a way to work with Arlen again when producer Billy
Rose asked him to provide a song for a new dramatic production, The Great
Magoo. This was a play about the seamy, phony side of show business life,
and Rose wanted the song for one of its characters—a disillusioned carnival
barker who, despite all his cynicism, has fallen in love. The concept and
the character appealed to Harburg, as did the fact that just one song was
needed. That meant he could turn to Arlen without appearing to horn in
on Koehler. Arlen obliged with a frolicsome tune to which Harburg fitted
a lyric that was at first called “If You Believe in Me” and later “It’s Only a
Paper Moon.” Here Harburg expressed his worldview: “It’s a Barnum and
Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be / But it wouldn’t be make believe
/ If you believed in me.”
Although it is clear in retrospect that an Arlen–Harburg partnership was
starting up, neither man immediately abandoned his other commitments.
Harburg was asked in early 1933 to write lyrics for the first Ziegfeld Fol-
lies to be produced after Florenz Ziegfeld’s death, a project that reunited
him and Vernon Duke for the last time and resulted in “I Like the Likes
of You” and “What Is There to Say?” Arlen returned to Koehler for the
Twenty-second Edition of the Cotton Club Parade. In this score they came
up with an obligatory raunchy song, “I’m Lookin’ for Another Handy Man,”
which was in the same vein as “Pussy” (“He must be handy all around /
And know just how to turn my damper down”). But they also wrote two
standards. One was “Happy as the Day Is Long,” a syncopated up-tempo
song with adventurous harmony and cheerful beat-the-Depression slogans
(“Just a pocket full of air / feelin’ like a millionaire”). The other started off
as a three-note riff that seemed perfect for a hi-de-ho until it took a sad turn
that made it incompatible with Calloway’s jocular style. By the time it was

Rimler_text.indd 32 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 “stor m y w e at h e r” 33

finished—written in a single afternoon—it was a lamentation. Calloway, it

turned out, wasn’t going to be in the show; he would be on tour. So another
vocalist had to be found.
Everyone who heard this new song, “Stormy Weather,” remarked on its
power. The Cotton Club’s producer, Ted Healy, and its manager, Herman
Stark, felt that no one on their roster could do it justice, so they looked for
someone on the outside. It happened that Ethel Waters was back in town,
having quit the Al Capone–owned nightclubs of Chicago, and she was the
perfect choice for this sorrowful new song. Born to a teenage girl as the
result of rape, raised in poverty in a small Pennsylvania town, married to
an abusive husband at thirteen, she’d begun her career singing in a travel-
ing carnival and then made it big in New York as a blues singer who was
also effective with popular songs. Healy and Stark arranged for her to hear
Arlen and Koehler demonstrate “Stormy Weather,” and she listened, loved
it, and agreed to do it—so long as the Cotton Club paid her more than
they had ever paid any other performer, a stipulation that was granted.
Not only was “Stormy Weather” her kind of song, it came at the right time
for her. Her second marriage was falling apart, and the words and music
struck home. On opening night, the audience demanded twelve encores.
Her recording with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra topped the charts and
eventually entered the Grammy Hall of Fame. Arlen also recorded “Stormy
Weather,” and he did it first, singing with the Leo Reisman Orchestra. This,
too, was a best-seller, but Waters’s version included the dramatic twelve-bar
“Interlude” (“I walk around, heavy-hearted and sad”), which was missing
from Arlen’s record and is still omitted from many performances. In her
autobiography, she explained her success with the song this way: “I was
telling things I couldn’t frame in words. I was singing the story of my misery
and confusion, of the misunderstandings in my life I couldn’t straighten out,
the story of the wrongs and outrages done to me by people I had loved and
trusted.”2
“Stormy Weather” is loved throughout the world. Many think of it as
a folk song—one that’s always been around. But musicians tend to see it
differently—as an example of artful, even tricky, song construction. The
opening (from “Don’t know why” to “Stormy Weather”) is three bars long,
not the usual four, which, according to Alec Wilder, “caused a degree of
consternation in the rhythm sections of bands as they had been conditioned
by years of playing strict eight-measure phrases.”3 When Wilder asked Arlen
about this he was told, “I didn’t break away consciously. It fell that way. I
didn’t count the measures till it was all over. That was all I had to say and
the way I had to say it. George Gershwin brought it up and I didn’t know

Rimler_text.indd 33 4/20/15 11:21 AM

 34 ch a p t e r 6

it. He said, ‘You know you didn’t repeat a phrase in the first eight bars?’
And I never gave it a thought.”4 But there were repetitions—not repeated
phrases, but frequent appearances of Arlen’s original three-note motif. It is
heard five times in the first eight bars.5 This is an improvisational style of
composing, one favored by jazz musicians, and by cantors as they chant at
worship services. Arlen presumably absorbed it from both, especially from
his father who was, he said, “the greatest theme-and-variations man I’ve
ever known.”6 And there was one more unusual feature of this song’s con-
struction: its overall length. The line “Keeps raining all the time” repeats,
bringing it in at thirty-six rather than the standard thirty-two bars—forty-
eight if the “Interlude” is included.
Oddly enough, Harold never took much pride in “Stormy Weather.” The
most he ever said in its favor was that it was “strong.”7 Decades after it was
written, at a birthday party for him given by composer Burton Lane and
his wife Lynn, when Lane went to the piano and played “Stormy Weather”
Arlen whispered to Lynn, “You know, I never liked that song. I never thought
it deserved to be the hit that it was.”8 He wasn’t joking. He said the same
thing to Wilfrid Sheed, calling it a throwaway. It was, he said, “a song I
could have mailed Monday or Tuesday. It wasn’t anything special.”9
But the royalties were special. And another beneficial consequence was
Arlen’s friendship with Irving Berlin. The renowned composer-lyricist had
come to the Cotton Club to hear Ethel Waters sing “Stormy Weather” and
scout her for his and playwright Moss Hart’s upcoming revue As Thousands
Cheer. Waters’s recording had provided him with an unexpected windfall
because the flip side had an obscure ballad of his, “Maybe It’s Because I
Love You Too Much,” sung by Fred Astaire.
Berlin and his wife Ellin now included Harold and Anya in their social
circle. The older composer addressed Anya fondly as Anyusha, and many
years later, in a poem written for Harold and Anya’s thirty-third and final
anniversary, he referred to Ellin as their matchmaker. He saw in Anya a
lovely, gentle, and trusting soul. In Harold he saw a decent, convivial, and
kindred man—kindred not only in talent, but because each was the son of
an immigrant cantor, although Berlin’s father, Moses Baline, unlike Arlen’s,
hadn’t been able to adjust to his new surroundings. He ended up, as Berlin’s
biographer Laurence Bergreen put it, a lost soul “in a trance of alienation
and drudgery.”10 Israel Baline, the youngest of six children, had to fend for
himself on the streets of the Lower East Side, enduring a depth of poverty
that only Harburg among his songwriting friends could have understood.
But Berlin and Arlen were alike in that each had grown up in a Yiddish-
speaking household, begun his career as a singer, and reached the heights

Rimler_text.indd 34 4/20/15 11:21 AM

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
sotapäälliköiden tapaan asettuivat talon jokaiselle ovelle, viitsimättä
edes peitellä vihamielisiä aikeitaan.

Palvelijoina esiintyvät miehet pihalla ja käytävissä ja vaateliaat

mestarit salissa eivät Fritzin mielestä ennustaneet mitään hyvää.
Siksi olikin hän soittanut kellon rikki.

Kummastumatta, valmistuksitta Balsamo astui saliin, jonka Fritz

jokaiselle vieraalle tulevana kunnianosoituksena oli asianmukaisesti
valaissut.

Hän näki nuo viisi vierastaan istumassa nojatuoleissa, eikä kukaan

heistä hänen tullessaan noussut. Kun hän, talon isäntä, oli ehtinyt
heihin vilkaista, hän tervehti kohteliaasti. Vasta silloin nousivat
vieraat, vastaten juhlallisesti hänen tervehdykseensä.

Hän asettui nojatuoliin heidän eteensä, huomaamatta tai olematta

huomaavinaan läsnäolevien omituista ryhmitystä. Nuo viisi nojatuolia
muodostivat todellakin muinaisajan tuomioistuimia muistuttavan
puoliympyrän puheenjohtajineen ja kaksine lisäjäsenineen tämän
kummallakin puolella. Omassa nojatuolissaan Balsamo taas
puheenjohtajaa vastapäätä oli sillä paikalla, joka kirkolliskokouksissa
tai preettorien oikeussaleissa osoitettiin syytetylle.

Balsamo ei aloittanut ensimäisenä puhetta, kuten hän olisi tehnyt

jokaisessa muussa tilaisuudessa; hän katseli ympärilleen, tarkkaan
näkemättä, yhä sen tuskallisen puutumuksen vallassa, joka oli
äskeistä iskua seurannut.

— Sinä näyt ymmärtäneen meidät, veli, — lausui puheenjohtaja eli

oikeammin se, joka istui keskimäisessä nojatuolissa — Mutta kovin
kauan sinä viivyttelit, ja me neuvottelimme ja olisiko lähetettävä
sinua noutamaan.

— Minä en käsitä teitä, — vastasi Balsamo koruttomasti.

— Sitäpä minä en uskonut nähdessäni sinun meidän edessämme

ottavan syytetyn paikan ja asennon.

— Syytetyn? — sopersi Balsamo epämääräisesti, kohauttaen

olkapäitään. — Minä en käsitä, — toisti hän.

— Aiomme opettaa sinut käsittämään, eikä se lienekään vaikeata,

jos saan uskoa kalpeata otsaasi, sammuneita silmiäsi vapisevaa
ääntäsi… Luulisi, että sinä et kuule.

— Kyllä minä kuulen, — vastasi Balsamo ravistaen päätään

ikäänkuin pudistaakseen siitä ajatukset, jotka häntä kiusasivat.

— Muistatko, veli, — jatkoi puheenjohtaja, — että ylihallitus viime

tiedonannossaan ilmoitti sinulle erään veljeskuntamme tukipylvään
suunnittelemasta kavalluksesta?

— Kenties… kyllä… en sitä kiellä.

— Sinä vastaat niinkuin levottomalta ja häiriintyneeltä

omaltatunnolta saattaa odottaa. Mutta tyynny… älä menetä
rohkeuttasi; vastaa niin selvästi ja täsmällisesti kuin vaikea ja
vaarallinen asemasi vaatii. Vastaa minulle niin varmasti kuin meidän
vakuuttamiseksemme luulet tarvitsevasi, sillä me emme ole tulleet
tänne ennakkopäätöksin tai viha mielessä. Me edustamme lakia, ja
se puhuu vasta sitten, kun tuomari on syytettyä kuulustellut.

Balsamo ei vastannut mitään.

 — Toistan sinulle, Balsamo, ja kerran antamani varoitus vastaa sitä
varoitusta, jonka taistelijat antavat toisilleen ennen hyökkäystä: minä
aion hyökätä sinua vastaan laillisilla, mutta voimakkailla aseilla;
puolustaudu.

Kun läsnäolijat näkivät Balsamon kylmäverisyyden ja

liikkumattomuuden, katsahtivat he toisiinsa jokseenkin
kummastuneina ja loivat sitten silmänsä puheenjohtajaan.

— Kuulithan, mitä sanoin, Balsamo? — kysyi viimemainittu.

Balsamo kumarsi myöntävästi.

— Olen siis vilpittömänä ja hyväntahtoisena veljenä varoittanut

sinua ja antanut sinun aavistaa kuulusteluni tarkoituksen. Sinua on
valmistettu, pidä puolesi, minä aloitan uudestaan.

— Tuon ilmoituksen jälkeen, — jatkoi puheenjohtaja, — yhdistys

antoi viiden jäsenen toimeksi valvoa Pariisissa sen henkilön hommia,
joka meille oli ilmiannettu kavaltajana.

— Hankkimamme tiedot eivät suinkaan ole epäilyksen alaisia;

saamme ne tavallisesti, kuten itse tiedät, joko asiallemme uskollisilta
apureilta ihmisten joukossa tai varmoista merkeistä elottomissa
esineissä tai myöskin pettämättömistä oireista ja enteistä niissä
salaperäisissä sommitelmissa, jotka luonto toistaiseksi on ainoastaan
meille paljastanut. Nyt oli eräällä meistä ollut sinua koskeva ilmestys.
Tiedämme, että hän ei koskaan ole erehtynyt; olemme siis olleet
varuillamme ja pitäneet sinua alituisesti silmällä.

Balsamo kuunteli tätä kaikkea osoittamatta mitään

kärsimättömyyden tai edes itsetietoisuuden merkkiä. Puheenjohtaja
jatkoi:

— Ei ollut helppoa vakoilla sinunlaistasi miestä; sinulla on pääsy

kaikkialle avoinna; sinun tehtävänäsi on hiipiä kaikkialle ja hankkia
itsellesi jalansijaa kaikkialla, missä vihollisillamme on asumus tai
missä he harjoittavat jonkinlaista valtaa. Sinulla on käytettävinäsi
kaikki luonnolliset apuneuvosi, jotka ovat äärettömät, sekä ne, jotka
yhdistys antaa sinulle asiamme edistämiseksi. Kauan olemme
häilyneet epävarmuudessa nähdessämme luonasi käyvän sellaisia
vihollisia kuin Richelieu, rouva Dubarry ja Rohan. Sitäpaitsi pidit
viime kokouksessamme huoneustossamme Rue Plâtrièren varrella
puheen, ja se oli täynnä taitavia käänteitä, mitkä saivat meidät
uskomaan sinun näyttelevän osaa, imarrellessasi tuota
parantumatonta sukukuntaa, etsiessäsi niiden seuraa, jotka me
koetamme hävittää maan päältä. Olemme jonkun ajan sallineet
käytöksesi salaperäisyyttä onnellisen tuloksen toivossa; mutta
vihdoin on harha hälvennyt.

Balsamo säilytti liikkumattomuutensa ja kylmäverisyytensä, joten

puheenjohtaja jo alkoi käydä kärsimättömäksi.

— On kolme päivää, — sanoi hän, — siitä kun lähetettiin viisi

vangitsemismääräystä. Hra de Sartines pyysi ne kuninkaalta, ja hän
antoi ne täytäntöön pantaviksi heti kun ne olivat allekirjoitetut. Vielä
samana päivänä esitettiin ne viidelle tärkeimmistä asiamiehistämme,
jotka ovat hyvin hartaita, hyvin uskollisia Pariisissa asuvia veljiä.
Kaikki viisi pidätettiin; kaksi heistä vietiin Bastiljiin, jonka kirjoihin
heidät merkittiin salaisina vankeina, kaksi taasen syöstiin
Vincennes'n tyrmään ja yksi sijoitettiin Bicêtren epäterveellisimpään
koppiin. Tunnetko sinä nämä seikat?

— En, — virkkoi Balsamo.

 — Sepä on omituista, kun otamme huomioon ne suhteet, joita
sinulla on valtakunnan mahtavien kanssa. Mutta vielä omituisempaa
on, että…

Balsamo kuunteli.

— Että hra de Sartines'lla voidakseen vangituttaa nämä viisi

uskollista ystäväämme täytyi olla silmiensä edessä se ainoa
kirjelappu, jossa luettavasti on mainittu näiden viiden uhrin nimet.
Tuon kirjelapun lähetti sinulle ylineuvosto vuonna 1769, ja sinun
itsesi oli otettava vastaan uudet jäsenet ja heti osoitettava heille
ylineuvoston heille määräämä asema.

Balsamo ilmoitti kädenliikkeellä, että hän ei muistanut mitään.

— Tahdon auttaa muistiasi. Kysymyksessä olevat viisi henkilöä

olivat osoitetut viidellä arabialaisella kirjaimella, ja nuo kirjaimet
vastasivat sinulle annetussa paperissa näiden viiden uuden veljen
nimiä ja salamerkkejä.

— Saattaa niin olla, — virkkoi Balsamo.

— Sinä siis tunnustat?

— Kaikki, mitä tahdotte.

Puheenjohtaja vilkaisi jäseniin kiinnittääkseen heidän huomionsa

tähän tunnustukseen.

— No niin, — jatkoi hän, — tuossa samassa luettelossa, ainoassa,

ota huomioosi, joka olisi voinut saattaa veljet vaaraan, oli vielä
kuudes nimi. Muistatko sen?
 Balsamo ei vastannut mitään.

— Se nimi oli: kreivi de Fenix.

— Totta, — myönsi Balsamo.

— Miksi siis, kun noiden viiden veljen nimet ovat joutuneet

vangitsemiskäskyihin, miksi siis vain sinun nimeäsi kunnioitetaan,
hellitään ja mielellään kuullaan lausuttavan hovissa ja ministerien
odotushuoneissa? Jos veljemme ansaitsevat vankilan, ansaitset sen
myös sinä. Mitä voit siihen vastata?

— En mitään.

— Ah, minä arvaan huomautuksesi. Sinä sanonet, että poliisit ovat

omilla salaisilla keinoillaan urkkineet noiden vähemmän tunnettujen
veljien nimet, mutta että heidän on täytynyt kunnioittaa omaasi,
lähettilään, mahtavan miehen nimeä. Vieläpä väittänet että ne eivät
ole edes osanneet epäillä tätä nimeä.

— Minä en väitä yhtään mitään.

— Sinun ylpeytesi elää kunniaasi kauemmin. Poliisi ei ole saanut

tietoonsa noita nimiä muuten kuin lukemalla ylineuvoston sinulle
lähettämän salaisen tiedonannon, ja kas tällä tavoin ne ovat saaneet
sen lukeakseen: Sinä olit sulkenut sen lippaaseen, eikö totta?

— Eräänä päivänä lähti luotasi nainen kantaen tuota lipasta

kainalossaan. Vakoilijamme huomasivat hänet ja seurasivat häntä
poliisiministerin asunnolle Saint-Germainin esikaupunkiin. Olisimme
voineet ehkäistä onnettomuuden heti alussaan; sillä ottamalla
lippaan ja vangitsemalla naisen olisimme jälleen hankkineet
itsellemme lepoa ja varmuutta. Mutta me tottelimme
perussääntöjemme määräyksiä, ne kun käskevät kunnioittamaan
niitä salaisia keinoja, joilla eräät vihityt uskovat palvelevansa
asiaamme, vaikka nuo keinot toisinaan näyttäisivätkin kavallukselta
tai varomattomuudelta.

Balsamo näkyi hyväksyvän tämän väitteen, mutta teki sen niin

pienellä eleellä, että ilman hänen aikaisempaa liikkumattomuuttaan
sitä ei olisi huomattukaan.

— Tuon naisen onnistui päästä poliisiministerin asuntoon, — sanoi

puheenjohtaja; — hän antoi lippaan, ja kaikki tuli ilmi. Onko se
totta?

— Aivan totta. Puheenjohtaja nousi.

— Kuka oli tuo nainen? — huudahti hän. — Kaunis, intohimoinen,

kiintynyt sinuun ruumiltaan ja sielultaan, sinun hellästi rakastamasi,
yhtä älykäs, yhtä taitava, yhtä notkea kuin joku pimeyden enkeleistä,
jotka auttavat ihmistä menestymään pahassa. Lorenza Feliciani on
sinun vaimosi, Balsamo!

Onnettomalta pääsi epätoivon kiljahdus.

— Olet kai todistettu syylliseksi? — sanoi puheenjohtaja.

— Tehkää johtopäätöksenne, — virkkoi Balsamo.

— En ole vielä lopettanut. Neljännestunti hänen tulostaan

poliisiministerin luo saavuit sinne itse. Hän oli kylvänyt kavallusta;
sinä tulit korjaamaan palkkion. Hän oli kuuliaisena palvelijana
ottanut rikoksen tehdäkseen; sinä tulit komeasti päättämään
häpeällisen työn. Lorenza poistui yksinään. Sinä epäilemättä kielsit
hänet etkä tahtonut antautua vaaraan seuraamalla häntä. Sinä lähdit
voitonriemuisena rouva Dubarryn kanssa, joka oli kutsuttu sinne
kuulemaan suustasi maksun edellytyksellä tekemäsi ilmiannot… Sinä
astuit tuon porton vaunuihin, kuten venemies astui egyptiläisen
syntisen Marian mukana alukseen. Sinä jätit hra de Sartines'lle
paperit, joilla hän saattoi syöstä meidät turmioon, mutta sinä toit
mukanasi lippaan, joka olisi voinut koitua omaksi turmaksesi meidän
piirissämme. Onneksi me näimme; Jumalan valo ei puutu meiltä, kun
sitä tarvitsemme…

Balsamo kumarsi mitään virkkamatta.

— Nyt voin tehdä johtopäätökseni, — lisäsi puheenjohtaja. —

Kaksi syyllistä ovat ilmiannetut veljeskunnalle: toinen on nainen,
rikostoverisi, joka kenties viattomana, mutta silti tosiasiallisesti on
vahingoittanut asiaamme paljastamalla salaisuuksiamme: toinen olet
sinä, mestari, suurkopti, sinä loistava säde, joka olet ollut kyllin
raukkamainen piiloutuaksesi naisen selän taakse, jotta kavallusta ei
niin selvästi huomattaisi.

Balsamo kohotti verkalleen kalpeat kasvonsa ja loi asiamiehiin

katseen, josta säkenöi kaikki se tuli, mikä kuulustelun alusta asti oli
kytenyt hänen rinnassaan.

— Miksi syytätte tuota naista? — sanoi hän.

— Oh, tiedämme, että yrität häntä puolustaa; tiedämme, että

rakastat häntä epäjumaloivalla rakkaudella ja että hän on sinulle
kaikki kaikessa. Tiedämme, että hän on sinulle tieteen, onnen ja
rikkauden lähde; tiedämme, että hän on sinulle hyödyllisempi ja
arvokkaampi kuin koko maailma.

— Te tiedätte sen? — virkkoi Balsamo.

 — Niin, me tiedämme sen ja me rankaisemme sinua paljoa
ankarammin hänen kauttansa kuin iskemällä sinua itseäsi.

— Jatkakaa… Puheenjohtaja nousi.

— Tällainen on tuomiosi: Josef Balsamo on kavaltaja; hän on

rikkonut valansa; mutta hänen tietonsa ovat tavattoman laajat ja
veljeskunnalle hyödylliset. Balsamon täytyy elää sen asian puolesta,
jonka hän on pettänyt; hän kuuluu veljeskunnalle, vaikka onkin
kieltänyt toverinsa.

— Ahaa! — huudahti Balsamo synkkänä ja tuimana.

— Alituinen vankeus suojelee veljeskuntaa hänen uusilta

kavalluksiltaan, samalla kun yhdistyksellä on tilaisuus saada
Balsamolta kaikki se hyöty, jota sillä on oikeus vaatia kaikilta
jäseniltään. Mitä Lorenza Felicianiin tulee, niin kauhea rangaistus…

— Malttakaa, — virkkoi Balsamo suurenmoisen tyynellä äänellä. —

Unohdatte, etten ole puolustautunut; syytetyn pitää saada tilaisuus
puhua asiassaan… Yksi sana riittää minulle, yksi ainoa asiakirja.
Odottakaa silmänräpäys; menen noutamaan lupaamani
todistuskappaleen.

Asiamiehet neuvottelivat hetkisen keskenään.

— Oh, te pelkäätte, että tappaisin itseni? — virkkoi Balsamo

katkerasti hymyillen. — Jos olisin sitä tahtonut, olisin sen jo tehnyt
Tässä sormuksessa on kyllin myrkkyä surmatakseni teidät kaikki, jos
sen avaisin. Tai pelkäättekö pakenevani? Antakaa sitten jonkun
seurata minua, jos haluatte.

— Mene! — sanoi puheenjohtaja.

 Balsamo poistui hetkiseksi; sitten kuultiin hänen raskaasti astuvan
portaita alas jälleen. Hän tuli saliin, kantaen olallaan Lorenzan
jäykistynyttä, kylmennyttä ja kalvennutta ruumista, jonka valkoinen
käsi oli riipuksissa.

— Tämä nainen, jota minä epäjumaloitsin, tämä nainen, joka oli

aarteeni, ainoa omaisuuteni, elämäni, tämä nainen, jonka väitätte
kavaltaneen, — huudahti hän, — tässä hän on, ottakaa hänet!
Jumala ei ole odottanut teitä rankaisijoiksi, hyvät herrat, — lisäsi
hän.
 Ja salamannopealla liikkeellä hän antoi ruumiin lipua käsivarsilleen
ja vieriä matolle tuomarien jalkojen juureen, joita vainajan kylmät
hiukset ja hervottomat kädet heidän syvässä kauhussaan hipaisivat,
samalla kun lamppujen valossa nähtiin lumivalkeassa
joutsenkaulassa ammottava kaamean punainen haava.

— Julistakaa nyt tuomio, — sanoi Balsamo.

Peljästyneet tuomarit parahtivat hirveästi ja pakenivat huimaavan

kauhun vallassa ja sanomattomassa hämmingissä. Pian kuultiin
hevosten hirnuvan ja tömistelevän pihalla; portti narahti
saranoillaan, ja sitten seurasi äänettömyys, juhlallinen äänettömyys,
joka jälleen palasi kuoleman ja epätoivon seuralaiseksi.

33.

Ihminen ja Jumala.

Sillävälin kun juuri kertomamme kauhistava kohtaus oli Balsamon

ja viiden mestarin välillä, mitään ei näennäisesti ollut muuttunut
muualla talossa. Vanhus vain oli nähnyt Balsamon palaavan luokseen
ja vievän oitis pois Lorenzan ruumiin, ja tämä uusi toimenpide oli
johdattanut hänen tietoisuuteensa kaiken, mitä hänen ympärillään
tapahtui.

Nähdessään Balsamon nostavan ruumiin hartioilleen ja menevän

takaisin alikertaan hän luuli, että tämä oli viimeinen, ikuinen
hyvästijättö miehelle, jonka sydämen hän oli särkenyt, ja hänet
valtasi hylkäämisen pelko, tehden kuoleman kauhut moninkertaisiksi,
eritoten hänelle, joka oli kaikkensa ponnistanut kuolemaa
välttääksensä.

Tietämättä, missä tarkoituksessa Balsamo poistui, tietämättä mihin

hän meni, hän alkoi huutaa:

— Akharat, Akharat!

Se oli Balsamon lapsuudennimi, ja hän toivoi, että sillä yhä oli

suurin vaikutusvoima omistajaansa.

Mutta Balsamo laskeutui yhä. Alas päästyään hän ei edes

muistanut kohotuttaa laskuovea, vaan katosi kauaksi käytävään.

— Haa, — huudahti Althotas, — sellainen on ihminen, sokea ja

kiittämätön eläin! Palaa, Akharat, palaa! Ah, sinulle on kalliimpi tuo
naurettava esine, jota nimitetään naiseksi, kuin minun edustamani
inhimillinen täydellisyys! Sinä annat enemmän arvoa elämän
palaselle kuin kuolemattomuudelle!

— Mutta ei! — huudahti hän hetkisen kuluttua. — Se lurjus on

pettänyt mestarinsa, kuin halveksittava rosvo on hän leikkinyt
luottamuksellani. Hän pelkäsi minun jäävän henkiin, minun, joka
tieteessä olen häntä niin paljoa etevämpi. Hän on tahtonut periä
melkein jo päättämäni vaivaloisen työn hedelmät; hän on virittänyt
minulle ansan, minulle, mestarilleen, hyväntekijälleen. Voi sinua,
Akharat!…

Ja vähitellen kiihtyi vanhuksen kiukku, hänen poskensa saivat

kuumeisen hohteen; melkein sulkeutuneet silmät elostuivat jälleen
synkästä fosforihehkusta, muistuttaen niitä valoja, joita lapset
kuoleman pyhyyttä pilkaten asettelevat pääkallojen silmäkuoppiin.
 Sitten hän huusi:

— Palaa, Akharat, palaa! Varo itseäsi! Sinä tiedät, että tunnen

tultasynnyttäviä loihtuja, jotka herättävät yliluonnolliset henget.
Gadin vuorilla olen loihtinut esiin saatanan, hänet, jota itämaalaiset
tietäjät nimittivät Phegoriksi, ja pakoitettuna nousemaan
kammottavista kuiluistaan saatana näyttäytyi minulle. Samalla
vuorella, millä Mooses vastaanotti lain taulut, olen haastellut niiden
seitsemän enkelin kanssa, jotka ovat Jumalan vihan lähettiläitä.
Pelkällä tahtoni voimalla olen sytyttänyt seitsenhaaraisen kynttilän,
jonka Trajanus ryösti juutalaisilta. Varo itseäsi, Akharat, varo itseäsi!

Mutta hän ei saanut mitään vastausta.

Silloin hämmentyivät hänen ajatuksensa yhä enemmän ja

enemmän.

— Etkö siis näe, onneton, — sanoi hän käheällä, korisevalla

äänellä, — että kuolema uhkaa temmata minut kuin jonkun
tavallisen luontokappaleen? Kuule, sinä voit tulla takaisin, Akharat;
en tee sinulle pahaa; tule takaisin! Minä luovun tulen
esilleloihtimisesta, sinun ei tarvitse peljätä pahoja henkiä, sinun ei
tarvitse peljätä niitä seitsemää kostonenkeliä. Minä luovun kostosta,
ja kuitenkin voisin lyödä sinut sellaisella peljästyksellä, että
menettäisit järkesi ja tulisit kylmäksi kuin marmori, sillä minä osaan
pysähdyttää verenkierron, Akharat. Palaa siis, en tee sinulle mitään
pahaa; mutta päinvastoin, näetkös, voin tehdä sinulle paljon hyvää…
Älä hylkää minua, Akharat, vaan huolehdi sensijaan elämästäni, niin
kaikki aarteeni, kaikki salaisuuteni ovat sinun. Toimita niin, että saan
elää, Akharat, hoivaa minut elämään opastaakseni ne sinulle.
Katso!… katso!…
 Ja hän osoitti katseellaan ja vapisevalla sormellaan tuhansia
esineitä, papereja ja pergamenttikääröjä, joita oli hajallaan tässä
huoneessa.

Sitten hän odotteli, herkistyen kuuntelemaan, kuinka voimansa

yhä enemmän uupuivat.

— Ah, sinä et palaa, — jatkoi hän; ah, luuletko, että minä tällä
tavoin kuolen? Luulet kai, että kaikki jää sinulle tämän murhan
tehtyäsi, sillä sinä juuri minut tapat! Hullu, sittenkin vaikka voisit
lukea käsikirjoitukset, jotka ainoastaan minun silmäni osaavat tulkita,
vaikka henki antaisikin sinulle parin kolmen vuosisadan pituisen
elämän sekä minun tietoni, sanalla sanoen kyvyn käyttää näitä
keräämiäni aineksia, niin et, sata kertaa et, kuitenkaan tule
perillisekseni! Pysähdy, Akharat; tule takaisin, Akharat, tule edes
hetkiseksi, vaikkapa vain ollaksesi saapuvilla tämän talon
perikadossa, ollaksesi katselemassa komeata näytelmää, jonka
sinulle valmistan. Akharat, Akharat, Akharat!

Hän ei saanut mitään vastausta, sillä tällävälin Balsamo vastasi

mestarien syytökseen näyttämällä heille murhatun Lorenzan ruumiin;
ja hyljätyn vanhuksen huudot kävivät yhä vihlovammiksi, epätoivo
kahdisti hänen voimansa, ja hänen käheä ulvontansa tunki käytäviin,
levittäen kauhua kauaksi kuten kahleensa katkaisseen tai häkkinsä
rautaristikon särkeneen tiikerin karjunta.

— Haa, sinä et tule takaisin! — mylvi Althotas. — Haa, sinä

halveksit minua, luotat heikkouteeni! Mutta kyllä minä sinulle näytän.
Tulta, tulta, tulta!

Hän ulvoi nämä huutonsa niin raivokkaasti, että peljästyneistä

vieraistansa vapautunut Balsamo havahtui syvästä surustaan. Hän
otti Lorenzan ruumiin jälleen käsivarsilleen, nousi portaita ylös, laski
taakkansa sohvalle, missä se kaksi tuntia aikaisemmin oli levännyt
unessa, ja asettuen laskuluukulle kohosi äkkiä Althotaan silmien
eteen.

— Ah, vihdoinkin, — huudahti vanhus riemuissaan, — sinä

pelkäät! Sinä olet nähnyt, että kykenen kostamaan puolestani; sinä
olet tullut, ja oikein siinä teitkin; sillä hetkistä myöhemmin olisin
sytyttänyt tämän huoneen tuleen.

Balsamo katsahti häneen olkapäitään kohauttaen, mutta

alentumatta virkkamaan sanaakaan vastaukseksi.

— Minulla on jano, — huusi Althotas, — minulla on jano! Anna

minulle juotavaa, Akharat.

Balsamo ei vastannut mitään, ei hievahtanutkaan; hän katseli

kuolevaa ikäänkuin nauttiakseen hänen kuolinkamppailunsa
jokaisesta sekunnista.

— Kuuletko, — ulvoi Althotas, — kuuletko sinä?

Sama äänettömyys, synkkä katselija pysyi yhä yhtä

liikkumattomana.

— Kuuletko, mitä sanon, Akharat? — kirkui vanhus niin kovalla

äänellä, että olisi luullut hänen raatelevan rikki kurkkunsa
raivatakseen tietä tälle vihansa viimeiselle purskahdukselle. —
Veteni, anna minulle veteni!

Althotaan piirteet muuttuivat nyt nopeasti Ei enää ollut tulta

katseessa, vaan ainoastaan kamala hornan kiilto; veri oli paennut
poskilta, liikuntakyky oli lamautunut, hengitys melkein tauonnut.
Hänen pitkät jäntevät käsivartensa, joilla hän oli kantanut pois
Lorenzan kuin lapsen, nuo pitkät käsivarret kohosivat ylös, mutta
hervottomina ja kelmumaisina kuin polyypin raajat. Kiukku oli
kuluttanut ne vähät voimat, mitkä epätoivo hetkiseksi oli elvyttänyt.

— Haa, — virkkoi hän, — haa, en kuole mielestäsi tarpeeksi

nopeasti! Sinä tahdot tappaa minut janoon! Haa, sinä ahmit silmilläsi
käsikirjoituksiani, aarteitani! Luulet niiden olevan käsissäsi! Mutta
malta, malta!

Ja tehden äärimmäisen ponnistuksen Althotas otti nojatuolinsa

pielusten alta pullon ja avasi korkin. Kun sen sisältö joutui ilman
kanssa kosketukseen, syöksähti pullon suusta liehuva liekki, jota
Althotas levitti ympärilleen kuin taikaolento.

Heti syttyivät vanhuksen nojatuolin ympärille pinotut

käsikirjoitukset, huoneeseen kasatut kirjat ja suurella vaivalla
Kheopsin pyramiidien kätköistä ja Herkulanumin ensimäisistä
kaivauksista haalitut pergamenttikääröt tuleen, leimahtaen nopeasti
kuin ruuti. Tulimatto levisi marmorilattialle ja esitti Balsamon silmille
jotakin niitä hornan liekehtiviä pyörteitä muistuttavaa, joista Dante
puhuu.

Althotas kaiketi oletti, että Balsamo ryntäisi liekkien keskelle

pelastaakseen tämän ensimäisen perinnön, jonka vanhus hävitti
itsensä mukana. Mutta hän erehtyi; Balsamo pysyi tyynenä ja
eristäysi liikkuvalle laskuovelle, jotta liekki ei voinut häntä saavuttaa.

Valkean loimu verhosi Althotaan, mutta sensijaan että olisi

peljästynyt vanhus näytti olevan oikeassa elementissään, ikäänkuin
liekki ei olisi häntä polttanut, vaan pikemmin hyväillyt, samaten kuin
se hyväilee vanhojen linnojemme päätykoristeihin veistettyjä
salamantereja.

Balsamo katseli häntä yhä; liekki tarttui laudoitukseen ja

ympäröitsi vanhuksen kokonaan; se kiipesi valtavan tammisen
nojatuolin jalkaa pitkin ja, ihmeellistä kyllä, vaikka se jo kärvensi
siinä istujan alaruumista, tämä ei näkynyt sitä tuntevan.

Päinvastoin tämän ikäänkuin puhdistavan tulen kosketuksesta

kuolevan lihakset kadottivat vähitellen pingoituksensa, ja tavaton,
levollinen kirkkaus laskeutui kuin naamio hänen kasvonpiirteilleen.
Ruumiistaan irtautunut iäkäs profeetta näkyi tällä viimeisellä
hetkellään olevan valmis nousemaan tulivaunuillaan taivaaseen. Tällä
viimeisellä hetkellä kaikkivaltias henki unohtaen aineen ja varmana,
ettei sillä enää ollut mitään odotettavaa, kohosi voimakkaasti niihin
ylempiin ilmapiireihin, joihin tuli näkyi sitä nostavan.

Tästä hetkestä alkaen Althotaan silmät, jotka lieskan ensi

hohteesta näkyivät saaneen eloisuutensa takaisin, suuntautuivat
johonkin epämääräiseen, etäiseen, mikä ei ollut taivasta eikä maata,
vaikka ne ikäänkuin tahtoivat puhkaista näköpiirin. Tyynenä ja
kohtaloonsa alistuvana, eritellen jokaista aistimusta, kuunnellen
jokaista tuskaa ikäänkuin viimeistä maallista ääntä, vanha tietäjä
kumahdutti jäähyväisensä elämälle ja toivolle.

— Kas niin, — sanoi hän, — minä kuolen ilman kaipausta. Maan

päällä olen omistanut kaiken, tuntenut kaiken, kyennyt kaikkeen,
mikä ihmisvoimille on sallittua. Olin vähällä saavuttaa
kuolemattomuuden.

Balsamo purskahti kaameaan nauruun, jonka kolkko kaiku

havahdutti vanhuksen.
 Silloin singahdutti Althotas hänelle liekkien lävitse, jotka hunnun
tapaan häntä verhosivat, hurjaa majesteetillisuutta ilmaisevan
katseen.

— Niin, olet oikeassa, — sanoi hän; — on jotakin, mitä en ollut

ottanut huomioon. En ollut ottanut huomioon Jumalaa.

Ja ikäänkuin tämä mahtava sana olisi juurineen riuhtaissut sielun

hänen ruumiistaan Althotas vaipui taaksepäin nojatuolissansa. Hän
oli antanut takaisin Jumalalle sen viimeisen huokauksen, jonka hän
oli toivonut voivansa Jumalalta pidättää.

Balsamo huoahti; ja koettamatta pelastaa mitään kallisarvoisesta

roviosta, jolle tämä toinen Zoroaster oli laskeutunut kuormaan, hän
palasi alas Lorenzan luo ja irroittaen pontimen antoi laskuoven
kohota takaisin kattoon, missä se asettui paikoilleen ja peitti hänen
silmiltään tuon äärettömän, tulivuorenaukon tavoin kiehuvan uunin.

Koko yön roihuivat liekit hirmumyrskyn lailla Balsamon pään

päällä, hänen tekemättänsä mitään niitä sammuttaakseen tai niitä
paetakseen, niin tunnoton oli hän kaikelle vaaralle Lorenzan
jäykistyneen ruumiin ääressä. Mutta vastoin hänen odotustaan tuli
sammui kulutettuaan kaiken, nuoleskeltuaan paljaaksi tiiliholvin,
jonka arvokkaat koristukset se oli hävittänyt, ja Balsamo kuuli
viimeisen tohinan Althotaan viimeisten ulvahdusten lailla vaimenevan
valitteluksi ja haihtuvan huokauksiin.

34.

Jälleen maan päälle.

 Richelieun herttua oli makuuhuoneessaan asunnossansa
Versaillesissa juoden vaniljasuklaata hra Raftén seurassa, joka esitti
hänelle joitakin tilejä. Herttuan ajatukset kohdistuivat hänen
kasvoihinsa, joita hän tutki etäämmällä olevasta kuvastimesta,
kiinnittämättä suurta huomiota sihteeriinsä enemmän tai vähemmän
tarkkoihin laskuihin. Äkkiä ilmaisi rasahdus vastaanottohuoneesta,
että joku oli tekemässä vierailun, ja herttua kiirehti nauttimaan lopun
suklaata, samalla kun hän levottomasti katsahti ovelle. Oli aikoja,
jolloin hra de Richelieu vanhojen, keimailevien naisten tavoin oli
haluton vastaanottamaan vieraita.

Kamaripalvelija ilmoitti hra de Taverneyn. Herttua olisi epäilemättä

jollakin verukkeella siirtänyt ystävänsä käynnin toiseen päivään tai
ainakin toiseen tuntiin; mutta tuskin oli ovi avattu, kun tungetteleva
vanhus ryntäsi huoneeseen, ojensi ohimennen sormenpään marskille
ja riensi heittäytymään tavattoman isoon, mukavaan nojatuoliin, joka
tömähti pikemmin sysäyksestä kuin hänen painostaan.

Richelieu näki ystävänsä kiitävän ohi niiden satumaisten olentojen

lailla, joihin Hoffmann sittemmin on saanut meidät uskomaan. Hän
kuuli nojatuolin narskahduksen, kuuli valtavan huokauksen ja kääntyi
vieraansa puoleen sanoen:

— No, parooni, mitä uutta? Sinä näytät synkältä kuin kuolema!

— Synkältä, — vastasi Taverney, — synkältäkö?

— Niin, peijakas, ei se mielestäni ollut mikään ilon huoahdus,

jonka äsken päästit kuuluville.

Parooni katsahti marskiin ilmeellä, joka merkitsi, että niin kauan

kuin Rafté oli saapuvilla tuota huokausta ei käynyt selittäminen.
Rafté ymmärsi, vaikkei ollut kääntänyt päätänsäkään, sillä herransa
tapaan hän vilkaisi aina välillä kuvastimeen, ja käsitettyään asian hän
siis hienotuntoisesti poistui.

Parooni seurasi häntä silmillään, ja kun ovi jälleen sulkeutui hän

virkkoi:

— Älä sano synkkä, hyvä herttua; sano levoton, kuolettavan

levoton.

— Pyh!

— Totisesti, — huudahti Taverney pannen kätensä ristiin, — älähän

tekeydy noin kummastuneeksi. Nyt olet jo melkein kuukauden ajan
tyynnytellyt minua välttelevillä vastauksilla, sellaisilla kuin: "En ole
tavannut kuningasta" tai: "Kuningas ei ole minua nähnyt" tai
myöskin: "Kuningas on minulle närkästynyt". Tuhat tulimaista,
herttua, ei sillä tavalla vanhalle ystävälle vastata! Kuukausi,
käsitähän toki, tuntuu jo iäisyydeltä!

Richelieu kohautti olkapäitään.

— Mitä hiidessä pitäisi minun sitten sinulle sanoa, parooni? —

vastasi hän.

— Totuus tietenkin.

— Totuudenhan jumaliste olen sinulle sanonut; sitähän, jumaliste,

olen toitottanut korviisi! Sinä vain et tahdo sitä uskoa, siinä kaikki.

— Kuinka, sinäkö, joka olet herttua ja pääri, Ranskan marski ja

ylikamariherra, tahdot uskotella minulle, ettet ole tavannut
kuningasta, vaikka käyt joka aamu pukeutumis-vastaanotossa?
Joutavaa lörpötystä!

— Olen sen sinulle sanonut ja toistan sen vielä; uskomatonta,

mutta totta, kolmen viikon aikana käyn minä, herttua ja pääri,
Ranskan marski ja ylikamariherra joka päivä aamu-vastaanotossa…

— Eikä kuningas puhuttele sinua, — keskeytti Taverney, — etkä

sinä puhuttele kuningasta? Luuletko saavasi minut nielemään
sellaisen valheen?

— Voi, paras parooni, sinä käyt nenäkkääksi; rakas ystävä, sinä

syytät minua valheesta aivan kuin olisimme neljääkymmentä vuotta
nuoremmat ja tahtoisimme haastaa riitaa.

— Mutta tästä raivostuu, herttua.

— Ah, se on toista! Raivostu vain, ystäväiseni, raivoissani olen

minäkin.

— Sinäkö raivoissasi?

— Niin, ja syystä kyllä. Sillä sanonnan sinulle, että sen päivän

jälkeen kuningas ei ole ollut minua huomaavinaankaan, sanon
sinulle, että hänen majesteettinsa on alati kääntänyt minulle
selkänsä! Ja joka kerta kun katsoin velvollisuudekseni hänelle
viehkeästi hymyillä, kuningas on vastannut hirveällä irvistyksellä!
Sanalla sanoen olen väsynyt olemaan Versaillesissa pilkattavana!
Kuule, mitä olisi minun mielestäsi tehtävä?

Taverney pureskeli epätoivoisesti kynsiään marskin näin

haastaessa.
 — En käsitä tästä mitään, — virkkoi hän vihdoin.

— En minäkään, parooni.

— Luulisi tosiaan, että kuningas huvittelee sinun

levottomuudellasi; sillä miten onkaan…

— Niin, sitä minäkin ajattelen, parooni. Miten onkaan…

— Kah, herttua, meidän on koetettava päästä tästä pulasta, on

yritettävä jotakin taitavaa keinoa, jonka avulla kaikki selviää.

— Parooni, parooni, — vastasi Richelieu, — on vaarallista kiristellä

selityksiä kuninkailta.

— Niinkö luulet?

— Niin. Tahdotko, että sanon sinulle erään asian?

— Puhu.

— No niin, minä aavistelen jotakin.

— Mitä sitten? — kysyi parooni ylpeästi.

— Kas nyt, sinä heti suutut.

— Enkä mielestäni syyttä suutukaan.

— Älkäämme siitä sitten sen enempää puhuko.

— Päinvastoin, puhukaamme; mutta selitähän.

— Sinut on paholainen riivannut selityksinesi! Se on jonkinlaista

monomaniaa; ole varuillasi.
 — Olet sinä hauska veitikka, herttua; näet kaikkien
suunnitelmaimme keskeytyvän, näet selittämättömän pysähdyksen
asiaini kulussa, ja neuvot minua odottamaan!

— Minkä pysähdyksen? Anna kuulla.

— Ensiksikin, kas tässä.

— Kirje?

— Niin, pojaltani.

— Ahaa, everstiltä.

— Kauniilta everstiltä!

— No, onko sielläkin jotain tapahtunut?

— On tapahtunut, että Filip myöskin on lähemmäs kuukauden

Reimsissä odottanut kuninkaan hänelle lupaamaa nimitystä, mutta
sitä nimitystä ei ole kuulunut, ja kahden päivän päästä rykmentti
lähtee matkalle.

— Oh peijakas, lähteekö rykmentti?

— Lähtee Strassburgiin. Jos siis Filipin valtakirja vielä viipyy kaksi

päivää…

— Niin?

— Kahdessa päivässä Filip on täällä.

— Ymmärrän, poika-parka on unohdettu; sellainen on tavallista

tämän uuden ministeristön järjestämissä virkatoimistoissa. Olisinpa
minä ollut ministeri, niin valtakirja olisi jo lähetetty!

— Hm, — jupisi Taverney.

— Mitä sanot?

— Sanon, etten usko siitä sanaakaan. — Miten niin?

— Jos sinä olisit ollut ministerinä, olisit lähettänyt Filipin hiiden

kattilaan.

— Oh!

— Ja hänen isänsä myös.

— Ohoh!

— Ja hänen sisarensa vielä kauemmaksi.

— Sinun kanssasi on hauska jutella, Taverney; sinä olet säteilevän

nerokas; mutta lopettakaamme tähän.

— Omasta puolestani en pyydä parempaa; mutta poikani ei voi

olla samaa mieltä! Hänen asemansa on sietämätön. Herttua, sinun
on välttämättä tavattava kuningas.

— Mutta senhän joka päivä teenkin, kuten sinulle sanoin.

— Ja puhuteltava häntä.

— Heh, ystäväiseni, kuningasta ei puhutella, ellei hän itse ryhdy

puhuttelemaan.

— Hänet on siihen pakoitettava.

 — Mutta enhän minä ole paavi.

— Sitten, — sanoi Taverney, — minun täytyy tehdä päätökseni ja

puhua tyttärelleni; sillä tämän asian laita ei ole oikein, herttua.

Nämä sanat vaikuttivat taikavoimalla. Richelieu oli tunnustellut

Taverneytä; ja hän tiesi hänen olevan yhtä periaatteeton ja
turmeltunut kuin nuoruudenystävänsä herrat Lafare ja Nocé, joiden
oiva maine oli säilynyt täydellisenä. Hän pelkäsi liittoa isän ja
tyttären välillä; hän pelkäsi jotakin, mitä hän ei oikein kyennyt
itselleen selvittämään, sanalla sanoen jotakin, mikä saattaisi hänet
epäsuosioon. — No, älä pahastu, — tyynnytti hän; — minä yritän
vielä kerran. Mutta minä tarvitsen verukkeen.

— Sellainen sinulla on.

— Minullako?

— Epäilemättä.

— Mikä se olisi?

— Kuningas on antanut lupauksen.

— Kelle?

— Pojalleni. Ja tätä lupausta…

— No?

— Sopii hänelle muistuttaa.

— Se kelpaa tosiaan tekosyyksi. Sinulla on se kirje?

 — Niin.

— Anna se minulle.

Taverney veti kirjeen nuttunsa taskusta ja ojensi sen herttualle,

suositellen hänelle rohkeutta ja varovaisuutta samalla kertaa.

Tuli ja vesi! — huudahti Richelieu. — Kyllä me nähtävästi

menettelemme järjettömästi. Mutta saman tekevä, kun viini on
laskettu, täytyy se myöskin juoda.

Hän soitti kelloa.

— Tahdon pukeutua, ja valjastuttakaa vaununi, — käski herttua.

Sitten kääntyen Taverneyhin: — Aiotko viipyä niin kauan kuin
pukeudun, parooni? — kysyi hän levottomin ilmein.

Taverney ymmärsi, että hän kovin pahoittaisi ystäväänsä, jos

myöntäisi.

— En, paras toveri, se on mahdotonta, — sanoi hän; — minulla on

jotakin toimitettavaa kaupungilla. Mainitse minulle kohtauspaikka
missä vain.

— No linnassa sitten.

— Olkoon menneeksi, linnassa.

— On muuten välttämätöntä, että sinäkin näkisit hänen

majesteettinsa.

— Luuletko niin? — virkkoi Taverney ihastuneena.

 — Minä vaadin sitä; tahdon, että omin silmin vakuuttaudut
lupaukseni täyttämisestä.

— Enhän minä sitä epäile; mutta kun kerran tahdot…

— Sopiihan se sinulle yhtä hyvin, häh?

— Kyllä, totta puhuen.

— No, odota minua sitten lasiparvekkeella kello yhdeltätoista

sillävälin kun käyn hänen majesteettinsa luona.

— Olkoon niin, hyvästi!

— Ei mitään kaunaa, paras parooni, — sanoi Richelieu, viimeiseen

asti tahtoen välttää hankkimasta itselleen vihollista miehestä, jonka
mahti vielä oli tuntematon.

Taverney astui jälleen vaunuihinsa ja läksi yksinään ja

mietiskelevänä pitkälle ajelulle puutarhaan, sillävälin kun Richelieu
kamaripalvelijoittensa huostaan jääneenä kaikessa rauhassa
nuorenteli itseään, mikä tärkeä toimitus vei Mahonin mainehikkaalta
ja voitokkaalta sankarilta kokonaista kaksi tuntia.

Se oli kuitenkin paljoa lyhempi aika kuin mitä Taverney mielessään

oli edellyttänyt siihen kuluvan, ja täsmälleen kello yksitoista näki
tähystelevä parooni marskin vaunujen pysähtyvän Palatsin
ulkoportaitten eteen, missä vartioupseerit kumarsivat Richelieulle
lakeijain saattaessa hänet sisään.

Taverneyn sydän pamppaili rajusti; hän keskeytti ajelunsa ja asteli

hitaasti, paljoa hitaammin kuin hänen kiihtynyt mielentilansa olisi
sallinut, lasiparvekkeelle, missä hyvä joukko vähemmän suosittuja
hovimiehiä, upseereja anomuskirjeineen ja kunnianhimoisia pikku
aatelismiehiä seisoskeli kuin kuvapatsaat liukkaalla parketilla, varsin
sopivalla alustalla tämänlaatuisille onnettaren kosiskelijoille.

Taverney sekoittausi huokaillen väkijoukkoon, mutta kuitenkin

pitäen huolta, että sai valituksi itselleen ikkunakomeron, mistä olisi
marskin tavattavissa tämän palatessa hänen majesteettinsa luota.

"Oh", mutisi hän hampaittensa välistä, "että täytyy olla

karkotettuna näiden maajunkkarien ja likaisten töyhtöniekkojen
joukkoon, minun, joka kuukausi sitten tuttavallisesti aterioitsin hänen
majesteettinsa pöydässä!"

Ja hänen rypistyneiden kulmakarvojensa alla heräsi useampi kuin

yksi häpeällinen epäluulo, joka olisi saanut Andrée-paran
punastumaan.

35.

Kuninkaitten muisti.

Lupauksensa mukaan Richelieu oli rohkeasti mennyt asettumaan

hänen majesteettinsa näkyville juuri sillä hetkellä, kun Condén
prinssi ojensi hänelle paidan. Kun kuningas näki marskin, kääntyi
hän niin äkillisellä liikkeellä poispäin, että paita oli pudota lattialle ja
prinssi aivan kummastuneena hiukan peräytyi.

— Anteeksi, serkkuni, — sanoi Ludvig XV osoittaakseen prinssille,

että tämä tuima liike ei tarkoittanut häntä.
 Richelieu puolestaan käsittikin varsin hyvin, että kiukku kohdistui
häneen. Mutta kun hän oli saapunut varmassa aikomuksessa tarpeen
tullen esille loihtiakseen kaiken tämän suuttumuksen, jotta saisi
vakavan selityksen, hän muutti rintamaa, kuten oli tehnyt Fontenoyn
luona, ja asettui paikalle, minkä kautta kuninkaan oli kuljettava
työhuoneeseensa.

Kun kuningas ei enää nähnyt marskia, hän alkoi vapaasti ja

ystävällisesti keskustella. Hän pukeutui, ehdotti metsästysretkeä
Marlyyn ja neuvotteli kauan serkkunsa kanssa; sillä Condén
prinsseillä on aina ollut suuri maine taitavina metsästäjinä.

Mutta sillä hetkellä, kun hän kaikkien muiden poistuttua oli

menossa työhuoneeseensa, hän huomasi Richelieun miellyttävässä
asennossa valmistelevan tenhoavinta kumarrusta, mikä oli nähty
Lauzunin ajoista asti, ja hän, kuten muistamme, tervehti ylen
mestarillisesti. Ludvig XV pysähtyi melkein hämillään.

— Vielä täällä, hra de Richelieu? — sanoi hän.

— Niin, sire, valmiina teidän majesteettinne palvelukseen.

— Mutta ettekö sitten lähde Versaillesista?

— Neljänkymmenen vuoden aikana, sire, olen harvoin poistunut

täältä muuten kuin teidän majesteettinne asioissa.

Kuningas pysähtyi aivan marskin eteen.

— Antakaahan kuulla, — virkkoi hän, — teillä on minulle jotakin

asiaa, eikö niin?

— Minullako, sire? — sanoi Richelieu hymyillen. — Mitä se olisi?

 — Mutta, lempo soikoon, tehän ahdistelette minua, herttua! Enkö
sitä olisi huomannut?

— Niin, sire, rakkaudellani ja kunnioituksellani; kiitos, sire.

— Oh, te ette ole minua ymmärtävinänne; mutta te ymmärrätte

minut oivallisesti. No niin, minulla, muistakaa se, herra marski, ei ole
teille mitään sanottavaa.

— Eikö mitään, sire?

— Ei yhtään mitään.

Richelieu turvautui mitä täydellisimpään välinpitämättömyyteen.

— Sire, — virkkoi hän, — minulla on aina ollut onni sanoa itselleni

sielussani ja omassatunnossani, että hartauteni kuningasta kohtaan
on ollut epäitsekästä; tärkeä seikka, sire, niiden neljänkymmenen
vuoden kuluessa, joista teidän majesteetillenne mainitsin. Eivät edes
kadehtijani voi väittää, että kuningas koskaan olisi minulle mitään
antanut. Siinä suhteessa maineeni onneksi on horjumaton.

— No, herttua, pyytäkää, jos jotakin tarvitsette, mutta pyytäkää

pian.

— Sire, minä en tosiaan tarvitse mitään, ja tällä hetkellä rajoitun

rukoilemaan teidän majesteetiltanne…

— Mitä?

— Että suvaitsisitte vastaanottaa kiitokset…

— Keltä?
 — Sire, eräältä, joka on kuninkaalle suuressa kiitollisuudenvelassa.

— Mutta sanokaa sitten suoraan!

— Eräältä, sire, jolle teidän majesteettinne on osoittanut

erinomaisen armon… Ah, kun on saanut kunnian istua teidän
majesteettinne pöydässä, kun on nautinnokseen kuunnellut
hienoaistista ja henkevää keskustelua, hurmaavaa iloisuutta, jotka
tekevät teidän majesteetistanne jumalaisen pöytätoverin, silloin, sire,
ei sitä koskaan unohda, vaan tottuu sitä mielihyvällä alati
muistelemaan!

— Te olette liukaskielinen imartelija, hra de Richelieu.

— Oh, sire…

— Lyhyesti, kenestä te puhutte?

— Ystävästäni Taverneystä.

— Ystävästänne? — huudahti kuningas.

— Anteeksi, sire.

— Taverneystä! — toisti kuningas eräänlaisella kauhulla, joka kovin

kummastutti herttuaa.

— Mitäpä sille voi, sire! Vanha toveri… Hän pysähtyi

silmänräpäykseksi.

— Mies, joka on yhdessä minun kanssani palvellut Villarsin

johdolla.

Hän pysähtyi vielä.

 — Tiedätte, sire, että tässä maailmassa on tapana nimittää
ystäviksi kaikkia niitä, jotka tuntee, kaikkia niitä, jotka eivät ole
vihollisiamme; se on kohtelias sana, johon useinkaan ei paljoa sisälly.

— Vaarallinen sana, herttua, — jatkoi kuningas katkerasti: — sitä

sanaa on säästellen käyteltävä.

— Teidän majesteettinne neuvot ovat viisauden käskyjä. Hra de

Taverney siis…

— Hra de Taverney on siveetön ihminen.

— Kah, sire, — myöntyi Richelieu, — kautta ritarikunniani, enkö

sitä aavistellut!

— Mies, jolta puuttuu hienotuntoisuutta, hra marski.

— Mitä hänen hienotunteisuuteensa tulee, sire, en puhu siitä

teidän majesteetillenne; vastaan vain asioista, mitkä tiedän.

— Mitä, ettekö mene takuuseen ystävänne, vanhan toverinne

hienotuntoisuudesta, miehen, joka on kanssanne palvellut Villarsin
johdolla, vieläpä miehen, jonka olette minulle esitellyt? Totta kai te
hänet tunnette!

— Hänet itsensä kylläkin, sire; mutta en hänen

hienotuntoisuuttaan. Sully sanoi kantaisällenne Henrik IV:lle, että oli
nähnyt hänen kuumeensa poistuvan viheriäiseen viittaan puettuna.
Minun täytyy nöyrästi tunnustaa, sire, että en ole koskaan tiennyt,
millaisessa puvussa Taverneyn hienotunteisuus esiintyy.

— Sitten, marski, minä sanon sen teille; hän on ilkeä ihminen, joka
on näytellyt häijyä osaa.
 — Oh, kun teidän majesteettinne sen sanoo…

— Niin, monsieur, minä sen sanon!

— Hyvä, — vastasi Richelieu, — tuolla puheella teidän

majesteettinne karkoittaa kokonaan hämmennyksen!. Ei, sen
myönnän, Taverney ei ole mikään hienotuntoisuuden esikuva, olen
sen kyllä huomannutkin. Mutta käsitättehän, sire, että niin kauan
kuin teidän majesteettinne ei ole suvainnut minulle ilmaista
mielipidettänne…

— Kuulkaa sitten, herraseni: minä inhoan häntä.

— Ah, tuomio on julistettu, sire. Onneksi miespoloiselle, — jatkoi

Richelieu, — on hänellä vaikutusvaltainen puoltaja teidän
majesteettinne luona.

— Mitä tarkoitatte?

— Jos isä on onnettomuudekseen suututtanut kuningasta

— Kovin.

— Sitä en kiellä, sire.

— Mitä sitte sanotte?

— Sanon, että eräs sinisilmäinen ja vaaleakutrinen enkeli…

— En käsitä teitä, herttua.

— Ette tietenkään, sire.

— Mutta kuitenkin tahtoisin teitä käsittää, sen tunnustan.

Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookultra.com