"Cocktails for Two"

Sometimes a Song

Sometimes a Song is hanging out in the deep recesses of the brain, and perhaps has been there for decades until something brings it to mind. That’s one of the reasons I decided when we began Word & Song to link my weekly column to Tony’s Word of the Week — to stir my brain cells up a bit and shake out a song I might otherwise not have thought of. Our word this week is “secret,” and that set my mind on a scavenger hunt. Obvious songs came to me first: “Secret Love,” a hit movie and song for Doris Day in 1953, and “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” a hit song for the Beatles a decade later, in 1963, and even “Sweet Marie,” a little theme that runs through the delightful period comedy, “Life with Father,” and is sung quietly by lead actors William Powell and Irene Dunn at the end of a particularly disquieting day. That last is one of my very favorite scenes in cinema, so understated and thoroughly human and simply GOOD it is. The line from “Sweet Marie” that came to mind was this: “Every daisy in the dell/ knows my secret, knows it well/ still it’s not for me to tell, sweet Marie.”

So which of these songs did I choose? Well none of them. And that is because one of the words which figured in our word, “secret,” fired off some neurons or or sent up a smoke signal or did whatever happens to inspire a musical memory, and I had my song, a little gem called “Cocktails for Two.” I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that I likely first heard our melody as background music in a cartoon. Online research (for what that’s worth) doesn’t bear me out on this memory, so I will say that somehow, somewhere, or some way or other I have always just known this song.

I certainly did not hear the “Cocktails for Two” when it was first premiered, in a mostly-forgotten film, “Murder at the Vanities,” in 1934, or when Duke Ellington released it as an instrumental that same year.. Nor did I hear it when it became a huge hit — in fact the biggest-ever hit for Spike Jones and His City Slickers — reaching number 4 in the Billboard Charts in 1944. Jones took a popular song which quietly and cleverly celebrated the end of Prohibition and turned it into a novelty tune with bells and whistles and his band’s usual shenanigans. I also didn’t hear the song in 1957, when Jo Stafford and and her husband, pianist and band leader Paul Weston did their own comic version, with Jo singing horribly off key and Paul playing like a piano plunker working a lounge in New Jersey. (Billing themselves as he musical pair recorded a whole album with (literally off-key) versions of some very good popular songs.) These parodies, of course, could only succeed — as entertainment — because audiences could be depended upon to know the tune and to know what really good music sounds like.

So when did I actually first hear this song? That will have to remain a secret, even to me. But I can say for sure that the composer of this tune was a musical genius named Arthur Johnston, who began his career as a piano-player at movie houses, then moved on to Tin Pan Alley, where he first worked as a song plugger and then as and arranger, and was soon hired by Irving Berlin. You may recall that self-taught Berlin could only play piano in the key of F# (on the black keys), so although he was a song-writing genius, he needed help with notation, with transcribing, and of course with arranging. Johnston was definitely the right man to flesh out Berlin’s tunes. And although he didn’t write nearly as many as Berlin wrote (who did?) he wrote a couple that I’ve always loved, and one in particular which I used to sing to my children when they were small, “Pennies from Heaven.” But that’s a song for another day!

I hope you will enjoy listening to a more or less straight version of “Cocktails for Two,” recorded in 1958 by Keely Smith (then-wife of Louis Prima) and arranged and accompanied by the great Billy May and his orchestra. Once you’ve heard it strait, I hope you will enjoy the Spike Jones extravaganza. And finally if you want to end on a note of sheer sweetness, I hope that you will listen to the very brief clip from “Life with Father.”