Judy Holliday

1. What's The Rush
2. Loving You
3. It Must Be Christmas - Cabaret Christmas
4. The Party's Over
5. It's Bad For Me
6. Supper Time
7. Pass That Peace Pipe
8. I've Got A Right To Sing The Blues
9. Summer's Over
10. Blue Prelude

April 10-17, 1961

 LINER NOTES

So this recording is unique in Judy Holliday's career. As opposed to her two "cast" albums (stage and screen) of Bells Are Ringing, it presents her in the role of a songwriter.

Four of the pieces - "What's the Rush," " Loving You" (my own personal favorite), "It Must Be Christmas" and "Summer's Over" - boast lyrics, and very neatly-turned ones, too, collaborated on by the singer and Gerry Mulligan, and set to music by Mulligan, with whom she began writing songs between the takes of Bells Are Ringing.

I referred to a poignant quality in this recording p It was taken down, by the way, by MGM Records in 1961 at the Olmstead studios, New York, but was never released by the company - and it is a layered quality.

The Mulligan band, in what so far as I know is its only recorded outing in support of a singer, is a formidable one consisting of three trumpets, three French horns (one is in the hands of the versatile Gunther Schuller), two clarinets (the players double on sax), one oboe, one flute (also interchanged with sax), two trombones (one played by valve trombonist Bobby Brookmeyer), piano (Bernie Leighton), bass, drums (Mel Lewis) and of course, the leader on baritone sax. The battery of first-rate arrangers included Ralph Burns, Bill Finegan, Al Cohn, Brookmeyer and Mulligan. Its work, while distinguished itself, is invariably complementary to the intimate, lightly floating, pure voice of the soloist.

Besides the Holliday-Mulligan selections, there's the bouncy, infrequently heard, but altogether engaging Cole Porter number "It's Bad For Me," from Gertrude Lawrence's London vehicle Nymph Errant; Irving Berlin's "Lazy," a perfect match of words and music, as well as his dramatic "Supper Time," which Ethel Waters introduced in the classic revue As ThousandsCheer: Harold Alren's "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues," written for the 1932 Errol Carroll's Vanities in the period when the composer was collaborating with lyricist Ted Koehler ("Stormy Weather," Ill WInd") on the Cotton Club revues; "Pass That Peace Pipe," a Roger Edens-Ralph Blane-Hugh Martin addition to the DeSylva-Brown-Henderson songs for the 1947 film version of Good News; Gordon Jenkins and Joe Bishop's "Blue Prelude," and, quite naturally, "The Party's Over," the Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green standard from Bells Are Ringing, a piece that supplanted "Goodnight, Sweethreart" as the closing song at prom dances before rock supplanted everything else.

Interestingly, the master recordings were on three tracks, whcih have been mixed by Mulligan and the current producer of the recording, Hugh Fordin, with results that sound as though the singer and the band had gotten together in the studio just the other day.

- Douglas Watt

Judy Holliday and the
Gerry Mulligan Orchestra

January 16, 1960

 LINER NOTES

The problem with the script was simply that the stage show did not lend itself to a screen adaptation. Comden and Green opened it up and added scenes, but their screenplay not only became overlong but also lost the qualities it had before the footlights. It was neither fish nor fowl. The alternative was to transfer the original to the screen, a procedure that Freed had always rejected in the past.

Now it was already August and contractual obligations had to be met. Freed had no recourse but to send the production on its way, Minnelli, Krasner, Ames and a second unit went to New York to shoot exteriors and backgrounds. Meanwhile, Freed tried to establish some kind of communication with Judy Holliday, which was not too easy. She was exceedingly unsure of herself and of what she was to do in the picture and stayed that way throughout the shooting. Freed tried to make her more comfortable by casting the man in her life, Gerry Mulligan, currently in production in The Subterraneans. Even that didn't ease the situation.

1. Loving You
2. The Party's Over - "Bells Are Ringing"

April 10-17, 1961

 LINER NOTES

From the first few notes of"Trouble Is A Man", it's apparent that Judy Holliday was a bear of very little voice but with both heart and smarts to spare. And though Streisand fans won't agree, I find listening to someone who's all soul and no chops preferable to the other way around (wait for Sinatra, Bennett and Day to find both).

No, not a lot of voice, but technique for days. Just as there's more to acting than having a rich and resonate voice, there's more to singing than being able to hit notes. A consummate actress, Holliday mastered the technological challenges of whatever medium she was involved in, stage (theatrical or nightclub), screen or recording. She uses the microphone and the studio as collaborators, applying reverb, for instance, to help sustain key notes, while the strings distract attention from difficult passages and aurally liquid-paper over rough spots. Still, even up to her neck in Glenn Osser's strings, Holliday is completely open and vulnerable. It's been said that the central irony of Holliday's life is the contrast between the real life Holliday and the character (singular, not plural) she played in her shows and films. Holliday was a hard core intellectual, who possessed an I.Q. score that those who chart such things objectively ranked in the genius level. Holliday also spent most of her time in the company of the elite of New York's theatre, music and art literati.

However, in Holliday's first important show, Kiss Them For Me (1945), she created a dumb-blonde character so convincing and so endearing-half Gracie Allen and half Eliza Doolittle -it was at once a blessing and a curse. Refining the dizzy dame into Born Yesterday's 'Billie Dawn', Holliday parlayed the character into an Oscar for her first movie leading role. Perhaps the greater irony would be that having achieved this, with as much raw brain power as Holliday had and as finely as she honed it, she could never outwit the barons of Broadway and Hollywood into letting her do anything besides variations on Billie Dawn.

Holliday's mother later claimed that she entered labor with Judy while watching Fannie Brice in a Ziegfeld show (on June 21, 1921), a sort of spiritual passing the torch from the great funny lady and tragedienne songstress of one generation to the next. Her biographers make much of her parents' separation, interpreting this as signifying, to the already-shy six year-old girl, her father's rejection of her. Deep in to Holliday's adult life, they say, she was never able to recover from the blow to her psyche, which accounted for Holliday's lifelong failure to accept herself as the desirable and talented person she was to everyone else.

An insatiable reader all her life, Holliday became attracted to the theatre early in childhood, although she perpetually lacked the confidence to think of herself as someone people would want to look at on stage. Instead, she envisioned herself as a writer or director, although she was forever vague about exactly what she wanted to direct and didn't set about seriously writing a full-length text until very late in her short life. Her first job in the vicinity of the boards came as a telephone operator for Orson Welles's and John Houseman's Mercury Theatre, an experience she drew on for Bells Are Ringing. Although she summoned the courage to audition for Welles, he dismissed her because of her high-pitched lower east side accent. Yet even as the boy genius laughed hysterically at said pipes, it somehow never occurred to him that millions of other people would laugh equally hard and that it would become one of the major keys to her charm.

In the summer of 1938, Holliday encountered Adolph Green at an adult resort -a less glamorized and more Jewish version of the one Ginger Rogers frolics about in Having a Wonderful Time. That fall, she met the politically aware nightclub entrepreneur Max Gordon when she came in from out of the rain and into the Village Vanguard. Bringing Green and Gordon together, Holliday provided the catalyst of the collaboration that started as the Revuers and eventually evolved into one of the musical world's standout teams, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Food and sleep may have been rare commodities, but Holliday's five or so years as a Revuer may have been the happiest of her life, giving her the opportunity to participate in the creation of the group's satirical sketches and numbers.

The Revuers performed in clubs all over New York, even recording (for Musicraft) and briefly landing a radio spot, but were never quite destined to make the big time. Receiving a spurious offer to appear in a B-movie, they headed for Hollywood, and eventually filmed two routines for 20th Century-Fox's Greenwich Village which ended up on the cutting room floor. Mega-mogul Darryl Zanuck expressed interest in Holliday but not the rest of the troupe, and her fellow Revuers had to plead with her to stay and take Fox's offer of a year-long contract. Ultimately, all she got for her year was a few shots in Something For the Boys and Winged Victory (both 1944), neither of which did anything for her career.

Back in New York, it was just a matter of treading water and avoiding creditors until something broke for her. Early in 1945, she found the right part in the Billie Dawn prototype she played in Kiss Them For Me, but not the right play. Kiss Them didn't last long on Broadway, but it gave critics and producers alike their first good look at Holliday, which became important when playwright and director Garson Kanin needed a replacement for the leading role in Born Yesterday. He had written the play as a vehicle for Jean Arthur, who had actually gotten as far as an out-of-town opening before realizing it wasn't right for her. Rushed in as a last minute substitute, Holliday had three days to learn the role - and then created such a sensation that she had three years to perfect it on Broadway.

Of course, that didn't assure her the chance to repeat said performance in the film version. Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn, that oftentimes brutally crude studio boss who had inspired (right down to the name) Kanin's crooked junk baron Harry Brock in Yesterday, purchased the play with Rita Hayworth in mind. Kanin and Holliday, however, campaigned so vigorously (similar to the way Sinatra would with Cohn for From Here to Eternity) for the role, that they developed a supporting part for Holliday in Kanin's current film, Adam's Rib at M-G-M, as an elaborate screen test to attract Cohn's attention.

Yet even after Holliday had beat out such competition as Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve to win the Best Actress award for Born Yesterday, she would never be a "movie star". Cohn brought her back over the next few years for five more films, The Marrying Kind (1952), Phffft! (1954), It Should Happen to You (1954), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), and Full of Life (1956). However, they never gave her anything to do that she hadn't done in that first film, and as a result she never became a box-office draw on the level of the ladies she had out-acted in the Academy's eyes back in 1950.

Holliday's brief career would ultimately be bookended by two major triumphs, Born Yesterday and Bells Are Ringing. With her Hollywood career ostensibly over, old friends Comden and Green created one of Broadway's all-time great musical epics for her. Bells rung around Ella Peterson, a switchboard operator who gets her telephone cord tangled up in her clients' lives, gradually intertwining them with each other's and ultimately her own. Drawing from an excess of riches in a talent pool that also included composer Jule Styne, director Jerome Robbins and choreographer Bob Fosse, Bells became one of Broadway's biggest blockbusters.

Bells also earned her a final fling in Hollywood-the movie version being a dud at the time and still liked only by those who never caught any of the 924 performances given on Broadway. Holliday's last five years included two flop shows, Laurette and Hot Spot, and an attempt at writing a musical comedy in collaboration with Gerry Mulligan. Unfortunately, she lost many precious months to battling two separate attacks of cancer, the second of which she finally succumbed to on June 7, 1965, two weeks before her 44th birthday.

Back in 1956, Bells had brought Holliday to Columbia Records where, coincidentally, her husband David Oppenheim had been heading the classical A&R department for several years. Another classically-oriented gent, Goddard Lieberson, the executive in charge of all matters musical at CBS, personally produced the Bells Are Ringing original cast album in December 1956, just a few weeks after the opening of the show. One of the first to be recorded in stereo (although not released in that format until 1959), the Bells album soon became one of the biggest sellers in that then-lucrative area and apparently whetted Lieberson's appetite for more Holliday on vinyl.

The resulting album, JUDY HOLLIDAY: TROUBLE IS A MAN (recorded in March 1958), was not to enjoy the same kind of mass-market success, becoming instead a much sought-after collectible. Lieberson had assigned contract arranger Glenn Osser the task of swaddling Holliday in strings, much as he was best known at the time for doing for Jerry Vale. However, TROUBLE was Holliday's album from the start and the repertoire of neglected gems (mainly from unrevived shows and revues) reflects her keen, eclectic tastes; one friend remarked that Holliday seemed to know the lyrics to every song ever written, especially those which originated in musical shows.

Holliday wasn't a great musician herself, but she understood the medium far more keenly than many a big belter with perfect pitch. Both of the leading men in her life, classical clarinetist and would-be composer Oppenheim and cool colossus Gerry Mulligan, were important musicians. Further, her travels within New York's various cliques of musical intelligentsia had led her to most of the composers represented on the album, most closely to Leonard Bernstein and Alec Wilder. She had originally nominated the offbeat Wilder as her composer of choice for Bells Are Ringing, but he settled for lending one of his best songs, "Trouble Is A Man", as the title and lead off tune for Holliday's album.

Appreciating music, even to a remarkably sharp degree, isn't the same as being able to create it, yet Holliday's singing draws on the same strengths as her acting. Feminist film theory might interpret Hollywood's reluctance to put the "real" Judy Holliday on screen as another example of Tinseltown's promulgating the mental midgetry of the fair sex. Yet even cast as a lunkhead, Holliday has more depth than that. Holliday's roles are never just about being dopey, but about character transformation, nevermore explicitly than in Born Yesterday wherein Billie Dawn slowly metamorphizes from idle and addle-brained airhead to the realm of the socially and politically conscious. In the words of Holliday's Yiddish parents (she was Jewish, but only on her mother's and father's sides), Billie/Judy modulates from meshugana to mensch.

As a singer, Holliday approaches each text like a miniature vignette of character revelation and transformation. Each of the twelve songs becomes an intimate voyage of selfdiscovery, with tragic consequences in "Trouble Is a Man", "How About Me" (the verse of which was inexplicably deleted from the original mono pressings) and "Lonely Town", or more optimistic in "What I Was Warned About' and 'Ride On A Rainbow'. On 'Am I Blue' and "I'm One of God's Children' (heretofore associated with Jack Teagarden), Holliday and Osser recreate an old-timey, two-beat atmosphere, allowing Holliday to shield her hurt with a transparent screen of jaunty defiance. On "I Got Lost in His Arms' the excitedly breathless Holliday is alternately confident and timid. "Lost" and "Rainbow" enhance Holliday's voice with a subtly understated male choir, who also contribute to the humor of "An Occasional Man" by coming on like a line of fey chorus boys throwing the leading lady around.

The multi-levelled "Occasional Man" and "Confession" capture Holliday the ace comedienne using song form as an extension of what she more often would do within a spoken monologue. Osser's intentionally dry orchestration functions as straight man on "Confession", Holliday demonstrating the actor's credo that comedy is never funnier than when it's played like the most serious thing in the world. "Occasional" displays Holliday's sense of rhythm as well as humor, using a stop-time one-line break spoken in true Brooklynese hey as the punchline. Here as everywhere else, timing, texture and attitude count for more than vocal athletics.

Asked how she managed to survive tragedy after tragedy in her life, until the final one that felled her, Holliday's answer was "adversity strengthens". The 12 songs she recorded for Columbia in 1958 therefore capture, as she might have said, one mighty strong broad. Strong as she is tender, resilient as she is vulnerable. And one hell of a convincing actress, no matter what medium she's working in.

-Will Friedwald
Jazz Singing (Collier Books)