Interview with Ervin Drake December 13, 1996

Popular Music and Culture Collection

Johnny Mercer Oral History Project

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CITATION:

Ervin Drake, M142, Johnny Mercer Oral History Project, Popular Music & Culture Collection, Special Collection and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, GA.

INTERVIEWEE: Ervin Drake INTERVIEWER: Chris Paton LOCATION: Atlanta, Georgia DATE: December 13, 1996 MANUSCRIPT NUMBER: M142 ACCESSION NUMBER: M96-14

TAPE 1 of 1 Side A PATON: This is a test to see if the tape recorder's working. I'm Chris Paton. Today is Friday,

December 13, 1996, and I'm here with Mr. and Mrs. Ervin Drake. And if this all works, we will proceed with the interview. [Pause.]

[Horns honking in background.]

Oh, we'll have honking horns. This happens every time I do one of these.

DRAKE: No trumpets, please.

PATON: No trumpets. I've had railroad trains. It's been kind of amazing. A friend of mine said, 'There is no such thing as a quiet room.' And having done this, at this point, I believe him.

Birds! I came back with birds on my recording.

So, we are asking everybody, as a starter question, how they came to know Johnny Mercer.

DRAKE: Well, I first knew Johnny Mercer without his knowing me. He was what I refer to as one of my early teachers in the craft of songwriting. You see, when I started, there were no helpful groups that we have nowadays. For instance, nowadays, the Songwriters Guild of America gives classes in songwriting. So does ASCAP. So does BMI. So does the Songwriters Hall of Fame. I'm on the board of that organization, and I know very well how active it is in that area, too. I'm on the board, also, of the Songwriters Guild of America. 1

But, nowadays, we do believe that you may shortcut the time of development and maturity to ultimate fruition of an acknowledged writer by giving instruction and discussing things. And where a group of peers of that young writer will sit around and very freely criticize, sharply criticize, maybe even offer suggestions as [to] how to go; and, slowly, there's a roundness that emerges. And as a result of this, people who came out of it, for instance, were people like Kander and Ebb who wrote

Cabaret for Broadway, and Bock and Harnick who did Fiddler on the Roof. BMI was very early in their development. And what I had at that time, and what all of us had, were the examples set by writers of our time. We could take either the more commercial Tin Pan Alley form or we could take the very bright young talents that were coming along, like Johnny Mercer.

Prior to Mercer, it was Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter, and the Gershwins that I listened to. But when Mercer came along with a totally different bent, I recognized that instantly. You could not help [but notice it]. You could hear the humor in 'Pardon my southern accent -- I love y'all.' And you could hear it in 'Lazybones, lying in the shade,' et cetera, which was his first mammoth hit. And you recognized that this was an authentic voice, not only of the South, but of humanity. And, as I say, I learned a lot from 'On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen,' and 'Bob White,' and 'Weekend of a

Private Secretary,' prior to his great -- to the great ballads that he wrote like 'Dream' and 'Moon River' and all those other things which won him many awards. That was my first meeting with Johnny

Mercer, the meeting which did not take place on his part, only on mine.

The next time that I actually saw the man in any kind of action was in a restaurant called Jack

Dempsey's, that great prize fighter who used to sit in the window so everyone would see him and come in. But it was a place that music types -- publishers; song pluggers, in those days; songwriters

-- would come down there, and we had a watering hole around the bar.

PATON: This was in New York?

DRAKE: In New York, that's right, in Tin Pan Alley. It was then called the Brill Building. It was -- incidentally, the ground underneath the Brill Building is owned by the Crown of England.

PATON: Oh, really?

DRAKE: Yes. They own a lot of territory here. It doesn't matter that we threw them out originally. They came back and bought it up.

PATON: About what year was this, approximately?

DRAKE: This was -- it must have been about '48, '49, or '50 -- right around that time. And I

remember seeing -- somebody said to me, 'Hey, there's Johnny Mercer!' I said, 'Where?' 'The fellow

with that hat.' I said, 'Oh, that coconut-looking straw hat, that color, with the wide puggery,

flamboyantly-colored band?' They said, 'That's -- ‘I said, 'Gee, that's -- wow!'

Now, none of us had the temerity to go over and say, 'Hello.' He would -- knowing him later

on, he would have loved it! And we would've told him how much he meant to us and how he had

freed us from so many of the proscriptions of publishers all those years, all the things we were

forbidden to express, because he brought along a conversational, a ‘the man-on-the-street’ approach.

Although of course, in his case, the man on the street was endowed with a much greater imagery and

resource of imagery and the language which was always true to what he was saying. He never went

astray. Everything was right on the nose for what he was going for -- and yet surprising. He pulled

his little surprises on the way.

And I've always felt that Frank Loesser, who was there at the same time -- but I've always felt

that Frank Loesser was greatly influenced by Johnny Mercer in his first years, and that when Frank wrote a song like 'Small Fry' with Hoagy Carmichael -- incidentally, one of Johnny's first collaborators -- that it was in a sense engendered by Frank, who did not come out of the South.

Frank came out of New York City, and that kind of talk is something, I think, he picked up because of John.

But they were both great writers, and they were later to work together when Johnny recorded some of Frank's material. In any case, that, as I say, again, was a first sighting of the great man on my part. But it was to be some time before I was actually to meet him.

Then I became aware of the fact that he and Buddy De Sylva, another great songwriter, but who chose to become head of Paramount Pictures, got together with a marketing expert who owned his own shop in Los Angeles, his own record shop, Glenn Wallichs, and the three of them got together and formed Capitol Records. And Johnny was -- I think he had that first hit recording of

Capitol Records. He was writing like crazy then. He wrote 'G.I. Jive,' which was a hit for them, and,

oh, many, many others -- later on, 'Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.' And, generally, he recorded his

songs first. He also, very unselfishly, recorded the work of others, like Johnny Burke, who wrote a

great deal like Frank -- like Johnny, I mean, although not from the Southern perspective at all.

Now, I don't want to belabor the Southern part because Johnny was cosmopolitan, and though

he had that as a major resource, as his own ethnic bag, he was a world figure. And when he did

Johnny Burke's 'Personality,' you could have sworn that Johnny had written -- or that it was written

especially for him. It was the same kind of conversational writing. I knew Johnny Burke, too. So

that I got to revere that.

And there was a time that I found early on that Johnny almost recorded a song of mine before

I'd even seen him anywhere. It was brought to him by a man named Enoch Light, who fell in love with a song I wrote called 'There Are No Restricted Signs In Heaven.' And I mention this because I want to show you Mercer's bent as a human being. And it's a story about people waiting on line at the gates of heaven to be admitted. And I wrote this in a conversational way, having been influenced by the great Mr. Mercer, and I wanted to reach all the people because I felt I had a message worth telling. And I didn't want it to seem a 'message,' so I did it with a boogie-woogie tempo and very conversationally, and I referred to things in it like 'wearing jeans' -- that kind of thing -- in 1945.

And Johnny fell in love with the song when Enoch showed it to him -- I didn't even know he had shown it to him -- and said he wanted to record it. To give you an idea, it started with:

Knocka, knocka, knock-knock, knock-knock --

Folks were knocking at the pearly gates.

Knocka, knocka, knock-knock, knock-knock.

Asking about the rooms and 'bout the rates.

Ole St. Peter, official greeter, he was present to let them in.

A few looked down 'cause their skin was brown,

but Pete he hollered with a great big grin:

"Welcome, welcome, there are no restricted signs up in heaven. --

There's no selected clientele!"

-- and so forth. Johnny thought that was a wonderful thing, and he wanted to record it.

Then, Enoch called me sometime later, Enoch Light, and he said, 'I'm sorry Ervin. Johnny

can't record it.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Well, I showed him "Restricted Signs."' I said, 'You didn't tell me that.' [He said]: 'No, I wanted to try to get it first before telling you.' I said, 'Why couldn't he?' He said, 'Well, he showed it to his partner, Glenn Wallichs, who is a businessman. And Glenn said to him, "John, the way things are in this country, if you record that song -- we're a brand new company. We will lose our total Southern distributorship. And that will be the end of Capitol

Records."' Now, were that today, Mr. Mercer would not have been told that or wouldn't have paid it any mind. At that time, it was life or death for a new company. And he couldn't do it. But that was almost meeting him, because he met me through that song.

PATON: Um-hmm.

DRAKE: But he was very interested in writers. He was a very generous man. The mere fact that he sought other writers' material -- he didn't try to keep the whole thing under his hat, the way singer-writers do these days. Today they have vertical structures. Not Johnny Mercer. Johnny was a world type. He wanted everything that was good. He was for it. If it wasn't good -- and he wrote about that in a poem, later on -- he set forth part of his own philosophy of life and this planet.

But in any case, I was upset about that, but then Golden Gate Quartet did it, and it did get out to the world.

I mentioned his generosity to other writers. At one time, he wrote me a letter in which he said, 'I'm sitting here -- ' he said, 'I've been trying to do some writing, but I also had the radio on, and one of our local stations is playing [the] Perry Como recording of 'Father of Girls,' which you wrote.'

And he said, 'It's a wonderful song.' He said, 'I really love it, and I had to let you know. J.M.' And I thought, 'Wow. You don't get that!'

For instance, Frank Loesser had a little more competition in him [laughing]. When a show of mine, What Makes Sammy Run, opened, and I had -- one of the songs I had in it was called 'A Room

Without Windows' -- 'A room without windows, a room without doors' -- and so forth and so on. I got a call from Frank. And he said -- I said, 'Hi, there.' He said, 'About that song of yours, "A Room

Without Windows."' I said, 'Yes?' He said, 'Where were you raised? In a billiard academy?' Now, see now, Johnny could never have brought himself to say -- he would have said, 'Gee, I'm sorry I never thought of it.'

As a matter of fact, Cole Porter and I had the same publisher at that time, and he told the publisher that in his -- he was then an ailing man; he was not going to be with us for more than another year -- and he said to him, this Mr. Herman Starr: 'Herman, you know I've had a feeling that if I were active right now, I might have written that song.' So you can see that there were certain people who were above that kind of competitive thing that human beings have for each other. They were satisfied to be themselves, do what they did. Each moved in his or her own orbit, and recognized the good that surrounded them coming from others.

Another thing that Johnny did once: I think this was engendered by the fact that I was in his home one night, and he had gotten a little, you know, three sheets to the wind. And he abruptly left the dinner table leaving Ginger Mercer and me together, and he went off to the bedroom to sack out

[laughing]. So I was going home shortly thereafter. And I'd been home about a month when I got a big package, and it just said, 'Johnny Mercer, Chalon Drive, Bel-Air.' And I opened it up, and I said,

'What could this be about?' And it was a book of drawings. I had told him -- now, he never told me -

-. That's another thing. I mean, he was a modest person to a ridiculous extent. When I had told him

that I had been a functioning cartoonist, and I had studied painting and etching and lithography and all that, drawing from the cast and drawing from the anatomy -- the human anatomy and all that -- he

never once said to me that he had this intuitive, because he didn’t study it, this intuitive ability. I

later was aware of some of his watercolors, and they were simply wonderful. The mere fact that he expressed that without academic information is incredible. But then he had no academic information when he started writing songs. So he'd never mentioned that. But he was aware of me, so he wrote,

'Dear Ervin, in recognition of your many talents, I thought you'd enjoy this book. It's a book of caricatures by David Levine, and I know that you're going to find as much in it as I have.' He said,

'By the way, I had to go foraging through -- when I was in New York, last -- I had to go foraging through some of the warehouses on the other side of the Hudson River in Hoboken looking for remaindered copies of this book because the publisher no longer had it in stock, but I found it!'

Imagine the trouble that man went to. And I thought to myself, part of it was because he left dinner

in the middle, and his Savannah hospitality couldn't live with that. I found that most interesting.

PATON: How did you get to know him better? You said that you first met when you sent him

a song, and he liked it.

DRAKE: Oh, well. At that time -- this was in the early and middle '70s -- I got to know him

much better because --. Well, actually I'd known him because he twitted me when I was in his home.

And I think it was in 1968, and I had a show. I’ve mentioned What Makes Sammy Run, which ran

for a few years, but I didn't mention something called Her First Roman, in which I did an adaptation of the Bernard Shaw classic, Caesar and Cleopatra. I had done the adaptation of the book and the score, and the Shaw estate was wild about what I'd done or they wouldn't let me proceed with it,

because they were very strict in their control.

Nonetheless, there are these funny things that happened in the course of the presentation of the musical, which is like --. Presenting a musical is like building an aircraft carrier. I mean, it's that complex. And then you hope it's going to float and the planes can get off and return safely as a result of what you've done. And putting together a musical has all of those pitfalls. It's not when you are working by yourself or with the collaborators. It's when you start getting involved with a first director and a second director, and a first choreographer and a second choreographer, and a nervous producer, and the sets that stick or don't fit the theater, and all of those things and a first night audience, out of town, that's seeing it before you've had a run-through. And the out-of-town critics were angry because they are expecting you to be in shipshape ready for them.

So, with all these alibis I'm giving you comes the fact that it failed. It ran just three weeks.

So when I saw [laughing] Johnny the next time, he started kidding me about it. And, I said, then:

'Hey, wait a minute. Let's review your record on Broadway.' And he said to me, he said, 'You know,' he said, 'sometimes I have the feeling that I'm just not cut out for Broadway.' I don't know if anybody else has told you about this. But he said -- I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, it's a very special kind of writing for Broadway, something that Alan Jay Lerner has and something that Steve

Sondheim has.' Because he was very aware of who was on the landscape. He said, 'I don't know that I have it. I'm okay for songs by themselves for movies, but what has developed in the theater is quite different from when I first came around to the theater. And I don't know that I should really be trying so hard.'

But he did. And he certainly had a big hit in Li'l Abner. And he had -- I mean, the work that

he did -- that he and Harold Arlen did for St. Louis Woman is one of the greatest scores you'll find on

Broadway. Things like 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' and -- I forget what it was that Pearl Bailey did.

PATON: 'A Woman's Prerogative.'

DRAKE: That's right. 'A Woman's Prerogative.'

PATON: That's one of my favorites.

DRAKE: Yeah, absolutely, yes. It was kind of early expression of that. So I mean he couldn’t

get --[chuckling] -- of course he had that mischievous side, too. Which, I mean, if you don't have that, you don't have anything. There's got to be a little slyness, a little putting other people on. He could do that but without really meaning to hurt. He was not a hurtful person.

And -- that was in his own home, too --. But I got to really know him in the course of meetings of the council of the American Guild of Authors and Composers, AGAC. I would come out -- I would visit a couple of times a year just to be with the west coast council. It was while I was president that we had enlarged. Formerly, we didn't have a council on the west coast. And I insisted that we divide the country up and I anticipated that Nashville would become part of the picture in years to come. And I insisted that we reserve a Nashville seat as well as several west coast seats and

New York seats. But Johnny was on the council.

PATON: About when was this?

DRAKE: This was in [the] early '70s.

PATON: Okay.

DRAKE: '73, '74, '75. So I would see him there. But I'll tell you this: He was remarkably quiet during those meetings. He did not particularly like any kind of business, even the transaction of

business about songs and our discussion about publishers, our discussion about the copyright for that. He didn't feel that the guild was qualified to get into the copyright fight. He said, ‘No.’ He trusted ASCAP. He felt that ASCAP should take care of that. And we had a disagreement on that.

But that was okay. Fortunately, fellows like Henry Mancini did see it my way and Johnny Green --

and they came into Washington with me. So did Eubie Blake, Marvin Hamlisch, and people like

that. But John was conservative, and he knew the way the structure had been since he first got in. He

was an early member of ASCAP. And he trusted it completely. He trusted the then-president,

Stanley Adams, and wanted nothing to interfere with what Stanley saw as his jurisdiction, his

bailiwick. But they were only friendly disagreements. You didn't have hateful things with Johnny

Mercer. He wasn't that kind of human being.

And I learned to love Ginger Mercer. She was a very proper lady. It's hard, in retrospect --

you know, she never discussed her early days, about having been a chorus girl, an actress on

Broadway, and outgoing, and then becoming almost like -- [chuckling] almost like an early Puritan,

you know. She was really a very proper, circumspect woman. And I will say this: that when John

finally left us, she guarded, she protected his memory. And she thought that the Foundation, the

Johnny Mercer Foundation, was a really important thing to construct, so that what he achieved in his

lifetime could be bestowed upon those who were less fortunate and on worthy [?] institutions. And

she was remarkable in her instincts about that, and really saw it through, and I have to admire John's

choice of a life partner as well as hers.

But in those years, I really did get to know John even better. Before that we had been

songwriters kind of kicking around, and, you know --.

PATON: Did you ever -- he was mostly in Los Angeles, but he was sometimes in New York.

DRAKE: Yes.

PATON: Did you ever see him when he was in New York? Every go out for a drink or go see a show?

DRAKE: Yeah, when he was in on Saratoga, I saw him then. I'd seen him a couple of times before. He was sometimes also in not having to do with a show. And we did -- we did see each other, yes. But we were, you know, everybody was busy doing his or her own thing. And so you didn't get too clannish. I was in their Park Avenue apartment on a couple of occasions. And

[laughing] he referred once to the fact that -- I forget what the line was now, but about the place being so small.

PATON: Somebody told me that it was fairly small.

DRAKE: Right, yes it was. And gloomy.

PATON: Really?

DRAKE: Yeah. They lit it up, but the place itself was gloomy. But it was only a pied-a-terre for them when they were in town, which was not that much of the year.

PATON: Right.

DRAKE: And it was situated beautifully, and theirs whenever they wished it. There would have been no sense having a townhouse here.

PATON: Let me ask you something. You mentioned that you were involved with the

Songwriters Hall of Fame.

DRAKE: Yeah.

PATON: Were you involved at all at the time [that] it was just founding? Because we were given to understand that Mercer was very much involved in, or -- promoted that very much --

DRAKE: Oh, indeed.

PATON: -- around 1970, when it was first starting out?

DRAKE: He was one of three people -- he was one of three people who put it together. He and a publisher named Abe Olman and another publisher named Howie Richman. Howie is still with us.

He is the one who survives. And three purposeful, honorable men who had a very good idea. But, you see, again, Johnny was not a fellow for presiding over businesses, and he viewed this also as business. And he couldn't wait, after a few years, he called upon Sammy Cahn because he knew that

Sammy did have that bent, and he knew that he'd be good for making the Hall of Fame advance, making it larger, and ultimately getting a museum for it.

The grim joke is that we still don't have a physical museum. Nonetheless, Sammy was a good choice, although, you see, John did not run it in an autocratic way. He did it in a very hands-off way. Sammy was [laughing] -- he was the autocrat of the breakfast table [laughing), the lunch table, and the dinner table. And I had run-ins. I never had a run-in with John. I had run-ins with Sammy many, many times [laughing]. Sparks would fly. Margaret Whiting was once present during one of them. She thought we'd take to fists. I said, 'You don't know songwriters. We fight with words.'

But Johnny was president only, I think, four or five years, and then Sammy came aboard.

Was there some other part of the question?

PATON: No, we were just a little bit curious about it.

DRAKE: Yeah. I must tell you a story that he once told me. Oh, wait. First of all, I want to

tell you -- I referred to it before -- it was that mischievous and sly sense of humor. Now, despite being a giving man, he was human. And he had written a lyric to a tune for a film. And they didn't tell him that they were making a sweepstakes out of this. They were submitting it to other lyric writers. I don't know if anybody has referred to this.

PATON: No.

DRAKE: Well [laughing], this was at his home -- and it was a song that came out and came to be known as 'The Shadow Of Your Smile.' I don't think he loved the fact that somebody else beat him -- he probably felt that he had a much better lyric, though I don't know what his lyric was. And he said to me, 'By the way, "The Shadow Of Your Smile"; doesn't that kind of suggest the faint mustache on a lady's lip?' [Laughing.]

That's how he got even. He told me a little story about, an early story about when he was a kid in New York. He was about seventeen years old, and he had always loved the earlier music. He played a little bit of ukulele. He used to play that when he was a kid in Savannah. And he could accompany himself. And he told me about coming across Charles K. Harris, a famous old songwriter.

Charles K. Harris was an industrious writer. He had his own little printing plant, he’d sold --.

I mean, he didn't trust anything to anybody else. He took care of everything. So Johnny once got an appointment and went up to see Charles K. Harris at his office. And he said, 'Mr. Harris, I love your song "After the Ball."' And Harris said, 'Would you like to have a copy?' And he said,

'Oh, I'd love to have a copy!' And he said, 'Well, sure, I'll give you one right here.' And, with that, he cranked out a copy. He printed it for Johnny. And then he said, 'Would you like me to autograph it

for you?' 'Oh, Mr. Harris, I would treasure that!' And so he autographed it and he handed it to him and said, 'That will be two dollars, please!' [Laughing.]

Among the -- talking about the younger songwriters that he --. He was individually counseling two different people, a young woman named Marilyn Keith and a young man named Alan

Bergman. And he was intuitive, certainly. You can tell it by his lyrics. And it occurred to him that they would make a wonderful team, and so he put them together. And then they got married later on.

And they're now known as 'The Bergmans,' and Marilyn Keith Bergman now sits as the president and CEO of ASCAP, and Alan [is] her consort. They still write together actively, and it's been -- it was a wonderful marriage. Johnny didn't just make a marriage between words and music. He also did it between people.

PATON: I'm going to turn this [tape] over.

DRAKE: Sure.

PATON: -- if we can pause just a minute.

[Recording ends on Side A -- Recording of interview continues on Side B.]

Side B

DRAKE: Oh, I must mention that -- this is a piece of silliness on my part, but I thought it was

[chuckling] --. I'm a golfer. Not a great golfer, but a golfer. And I couldn't help but notice, when I

sat on the veranda with them, that the Bel-Air Country Club had this wonderful golf course. I don't remember which hole it was, but one of them, the tee was just below the Mercers' home. And if anybody shanked a shot, the ball would invariably wind up either breaking a window or at least resting on the floor of the terrace. [Laughing.] We had to duck a couple of them while we sat there.

That was part of it. But they took it with very good humor. They had to have anticipated that before they moved in. They knew. They just hoped the level of golfing would pick up over the years. But it was amazing all the golf balls that lay around there. They could --you know, he was supplied for a year. He never mentioned whether he was much of a golfer himself. He never told me that.

PATON: We have a caricature. It's in the exhibit. You'll have to look. It's a drawing of him and then people have drawn him doing different things --

DRAKE: Yes.

PATON: -- singing and songwriting and whatever. And there's a picture of him golfing. And the little caption under it, I think, is something like 'Hold still, ball!' or something like that.

DRAKE: He drew that?

PATON: No, he didn't. Somebody did it for him.

DRAKE: I see.

PATON: I think he said that Margaret's father tried to get him into golfing --

DRAKE: He was great. Richard Whiting was a great golfer. That's something else. He played.

He was scratch -- he played in the low 70s. That's a totally different kind of talent. I don't have that.

For me, it was a feat several times in my life when I broke 90. Okay? Now, you get the level of my game. But I don't think Johnny had that kind of lust. Golfing, I think, was something that eluded him.

PATON: He talks in his autobiography a little bit about, you know, I think there's a few comments in there. But the comment that stood out most to us was that based on the success of 'Too

Marvelous for Words,' that he and Richard Whiting felt confident enough to sit around the pool and

throw rocks at the blackbirds, which bothered Mr. Whiting a lot, and, you know, kind of be comfortable, attend parties, and that kind of thing.

DRAKE: Yeah, but Richard Whiting was -- he was a great golfer. That's it, which you probably spotted --

PATON: I know there's a story that Mr. Whiting dropped a firecracker behind Johnny when he was teeing off.

DRAKE: He did those things all the time. Yeah, that was a 'Gotcha!'

PATON: Uh-huh.

DRAKE: We hate 'gotchas' in golf. And I never knew Richard Whiting, but --

PATON: Sounds like he was a real sketch.

DRAKE: Huh?

PATON: He sounds like he was a real sketch.

DRAKE: Oh, yeah, yeah. But I've never gone for the practical joke. I -- I feel there is a little

hostility in practical jokes.

PATON: Mercer said he gave Ginger a pipe.

DRAKE: Yes, that's right. I wonder what kind of comment that was [laughing]. We shall not

touch it.

PATON: We will not touch it. We just accept it as fact.

DRAKE: I'll tell you one thing, one dramatic moment in my life touching on my late friend, was

when I was on the west coast, about 1975. I think it was the early summer. I held a meeting at the

home of one of our members, one of our west coast council officers. I think he was vice president of

the west coast -- John Green, who wrote 'Body and Soul' and many, many others -- 'Coquette.' Gee,

I'm at a loss now, but 'I Cover the Waterfront' was another one. 'Easy Come, Easy Go.' He wrote a lot of wonderful, wonderful songs, which -- he kind of gave up his own compositional activity by becoming head of music for MGM; and he loved that life, and he loved scoring the various films. Of course, he did great scoring -- Raintree County, he did the scoring for, and he did Oliver over in

London. Johnny was cut out for that. I mean, Johnny Green was cut out for that.

Oh, Johnny Green hated it if I said to him, as I did once or twice, I said, 'Pardon me, which way is the john?' He said, 'Don't ever refer to that room by my name!' [Laughing] Mercer would never have said that.

Anyway, we were at this meeting, and I had noted that Mercer was unusually quiet. He was there with Ginger. And I conducted this meeting, and there was a lot of stuff to accomplish. And it was at this point that I was pushing so heavily getting the Guild, which had never been politically motivated, into trips we were to ultimately make down to Washington, which needed funding. And for that, I'd gone to Richard Rodgers, and when I thanked Mr. Rodgers for giving me the time and the

money -- at that point, Richard Rodgers had had a laryngectomy, and he could only whisper, and he

leaned forward, and he said [whispering], 'No, thank you!' He understood what we were about to do,

and he was not tied down to those feelings that Johnny and Hoagy Carmichael had about ASCAP

being the whole thing. And the estate of Otto Harbach, who had been a president of ASCAP, and of

William Hammerstein -- pardon me, of Oscar Hammerstein, his son Billy, who was a friend of mine.

They all pitched in, and they were the first --they were the beginning of that. And I tried to get total

support from the west coast.

I got it from fellows like Ray Evans and Jay Livingston and Jack Lawrence who then lived out there. We had them all into New York and to Washington, D.C., rather, later on, trying to get that bill through, and we were successful in '76. We got the new copyright law. But Johnny held firm to his steadfast relationship with then-President Adams. But that was okay. That was simply a difference of philosophy.

But as we rose to leave Mr. Green's home, he and Bonnie's home, I started toward the door,

Johnny got up with Ginger, and he took a couple of steps forward, and then he pitched forward.

And, fortunately, I have a very fast response; and I caught him before he hit the floor. But it didn't seem like a normal incidence. He hadn't tripped. He just fell. And, then, I hung back, and he got up and he excused himself as though it was nothing at all. And he tried to make nothing of it. And then he and Ginger left, and I followed. And then he leaned against a tree, and I heard him say to Ginger,

'Gee, I feel awfully sick. I don't know what this is.' And I left, and I still didn't know what it could possibly be, because, you know, things like high blood pressure can produce that kind of thing.

There are so many things. I had no idea it was symptomatic of the one dread thing that he suffered from and that was to kill that great mind. I mean, after all, he was only 66. He had so much more to give the world in every way. And I hated that as a -- as a goodbye. I really did.

PATON: Did you see him much after that?

DRAKE: No, not really.

PATON: This would have been not too long before he had surgery, then.

DRAKE: No, and then, later on, in '76 -- I was part of a group. I spoke [at] a theater in New

York, I forget which one now, but there was a whole big group of fellows like --. Well, all of us

turned out for it. And, as president of the guild, I spoke and as a friend. And, I'm pretty sure Carl

Rowan spoke at that time. He made a wonderful statement about growing up and the influence that

Mercer's songs had on him. And --

PATON: This was the memorial service that was held [for Mr. Mercer] --?

DRAKE: That's right, yes. Jimmy Rowles was there. He played -- and he had written that thing with Johnny about that -- that lion.

PATON: 'Frasier.'

DRAKE: 'Frasier,' yeah. And there was, gee, a man, who was a real chronicler of Tin Pan Alley

and show music -- Alec Wilder was there. So it was quite a group of knowing writers and so forth.

And it was a touching thing because you knew this was not just a tribute. That everybody there had been touched by Johnny Mercer and wanted to impart that love, [to] express it, as if it was he himself was on hand, was palpably there, and they were telling him that. And I guess a lot of people who believe in those things believe that he was there. In any case, that was the last time, in a sense, that I saw Johnny.

PATON: So you didn't visit the house or anything after they moved him home from the hospital?

DRAKE: No.

PATON: Apparently, there were very few people. Bill Harbach appears to be --

DRAKE: Well --

PATON: -- and Mrs. Mercer's -- Red Cramer, who became Mrs. Mercer's friend later, apparently visited a little bit.

DRAKE: Yeah, Marc, yeah. Well, we saw a lot of Marc and Ginger in the ensuing years; and we did a lot of talking, you know, about Johnny. Oh, there were other subjects, but a lot about

Johnny, and, also about what could be done about the image and so forth. And I'm not only for the image of Johnny Mercer, but I feel that with his passage, his departure, as that of Cole Porter, and

Rodgers and Hart, and Hammerstein, and Kern, and Berlin, and all those people, we've lost a terribly important part of musical history in this country.

I do believe that the pop song in our time is becoming the classic music of our country and of the world. I'm not sure that what has followed it will have that same kind of lasting quality, but I do hope that that kind of music stays in our memory and in our lives so that we never lose what Johnny

Mercer and his contemporaries contributed. And that's why I'm a part of the Johnny Mercer

Foundation. I'm trying, in every way, to see to it that this is perpetuated. I think it's remarkably important. I think it's being entrusted with a certain responsibility, to hold the floodgates against the barbarians [chuckling]. That will be very unpopular with people who think that there is only progress as things go on and that those of us who they see as hanging back and clinging to a past.

That doesn't disturb me at all. That is really the way I feel.

PATON: I have a question for you that's different than questions that we've asked other people, and you may not have an answer. But we've been noticing more and more over the years, as we become more and more familiar with Mercer's lyrics, how very, very good he was at writing the woman's point of view. Margaret has used some of these in her work, but you've got 'A Woman's

Prerogative.'

DRAKE: Yes.

PATON: 'He Didn't Have the Know How, No How' -- which was a title that I had forgotten until we had to find something for somebody, and that turned up.

DRAKE: Did he --? I wrote a song called 'No How' also.

PATON: Really?

DRAKE: Yes, it was used on television on a special. Oh, it was in -- when they presented the

Broadway show High Button Shoes, the score of which had been written by Sammy Cahn and Jule

Styne, because the sponsor was somebody called -- I think it was [the] Buick or Oldsmobile division

of GM. And they had a song they called 'Model T Ford,' and they said, 'We can't use that.' They said

to me, 'Will you write a song?' And I wrote a song called 'No How,' that was performed by Hal

March and Joey Fay. And they did it beautifully. But I had no idea that --

PATON: Well, it's not quite 'No How.' It's 'He Didn't Have the Know How, No How.'

DRAKE: Oh! Mine was 'No How':

PATON: This [title] has a little more to it.

DRAKE: 'You're born with the know how.'

PATON: Yes, this man wasn't, evidently.

DRAKE: I see. Right.

PATON: And, then --

DRAKE: See, that was his mischievous approach.

PATON: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Margaret’s using one in her shows called 'I Fought Every Step of

the Way.'

DRAKE: Oh, yes.

PATON: It's quite wonderful.

DRAKE: Oh, yes.

PATON: And then we've been sorting through the copies of things that came in in part II [of the

Johnny Mercer Papers], and there's a whole series called 'Celia's Lament.'

DRAKE: Um-hmm.

PATON: And, then, 'Celia's' -- there are three parts to it. I can't remember the first one. But

'Celia's Consternation,' is one of them.

DRAKE: Um-hmm.

PATON: 'Celia's' -- I think it's 'Supplication'; 'Celia's Desperation.' And this is all over a

woman who is desperately wishing to lose her virginity. And, of course, she realizes the pickle she's

in --

DRAKE: [Laughing]

PATON: -- because she still has it; and men don't want women who have it, except they do

want women who have it. So that's the consternation. And, then, she prays for assistance with this,

and, then, there's desperation that follows.

DRAKE: Yes. And there's no divine intervention in this part?

PATON: I don't know. I think it might be from Foxy. I haven't figured out exactly -- It's clearly

from something, and so there's -- there's obviously more to the story.

But we've just been noticing how very well that he captures -- sometimes in silly ways and

mischievous ways, and sometimes in more serious ways -- the woman's point of view; and just,

we've been kind of fooling around with this and wondering if anybody, you, for instance, as a

songwriter, and someone who knew him, might have any insight into how he came to have this understanding?

DRAKE: Well --

PATON: Even in humorous songs -- I mean, there's some depth underneath there.

DRAKE: I would think that any writer of real talent, unless severely constricted with certain social -- with warped social attitudes -- would have to feel the universality of the male and female

point of view, even though, you know, that 'women are from Venus and men are from Mars.' I think

there's -- and a lot of people who do a little heavier thinking than I do, by custom, feel also that there is an awful lot of Venus in the men and an awful lot of Mars in the women. So that you are writing -

-. And when Mercer wrote a thing like 'Days of Wine and Roses,' I mean, he's making a statement that either a man or a woman can make. And it was made for a film in which there was a double problem, wasn't there? Between the man and the woman --

PATON: Yes.

DRAKE: -- when it came to alcoholism. Something he knew something about. Umm -- so I think that unless he were called upon to write -- to make a real woman's statement --

PATON: It may simply be that the shows that he had to write for had women who had issues to express, and that being very good at expressing issues --

DRAKE: For good reason, because Broadway, as far back as I can recall, in the musical form, relies upon -- more heavily upon the female star than upon the male star. And, therefore, there you are sitting with that. I mean, when Alan Lerner wrote 'Words, Words, Words' and goes into 'Tell

Me,' that's a female thing. And 'Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait,' because of the

blindness and intransigence of that man, Henry Higgins, and her feeling at first inferior and then rising to it, and then telling him off, even though in his absence. And I think Hammerstein has dealt with that also, when Nellie Forbush sang in South Pacific, not just 'I'm going to get that man right out of my hair,' but, more subtly, at another point. Well, or, in The King And I, when Anna Leon-Owens sings about -- and when one of the king's wives sing about him, when she sings, 'Hello, young lovers

. . . I've had a love like yours' --

PATON: Yes.

DRAKE: And then when the the king rises [?]: 'And then he'll do something wonderful,' she sees him for what he is.

PATON: All right.

DRAKE: So all of these people understand it from both ends of it, and look at the remarkable writer, like Dorothy Fields, who took the other side, and could write from the man's point of view.

You know, I think that truly talented people, they must be endowed with sensibility and sensitivity and instinct, just the intuitive quality that I attributed to Mercer earlier is there and will not be denied, and, given the opportunity, will be expressed.

PATON: Um-hmm.

DRAKE: And, certainly, as one of our greatest practitioners, he expressed it very beautifully.

PATON: Absolutely.

DRAKE: Yeah.

PATON: I need to be absolutely sure I get you to lunch on time. So we'll need to stop here --

DRAKE: Okay.

PATON: For this session.

DRAKE: Um-hmm.

PATON: And I want to thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.

DRAKE: It's really my pleasure to talk about Johnny Mercer.

PATON: And I look forward, perhaps, to speaking again in the future.

DRAKE: You bet.

PATON: Thank you.

[Interview concludes at this point.]