"How to Murder Your Wife' and Other Fatal Attractions

Titling a film How to Murder Your Wife is probably not a maneuver that would succeed today, but in 1964 it was just fine as the name of a farce with Jack Lemmon as the prospective perpetrator and Virna Lisi as the intended victim.

Neal Hefti

Accompanying the action was an entirely characteristic but highly enjoyable, light-hearted score by Neal Hefti. This is the third such '60s score from his pen that has appeared here, following Sex and the Single Girl and Harlow. I'm posting it in response to a suggestion by longtime blog follower woolfnotes.

To fill out today's program, I've added nine "fatal attractions" - singles with "murder" (or in one case, "killing") in the title. Unlike Hefti's swingin' sixties motifs, these numbers from earlier decades cover the blues, jazz, Western swing, vocals and big bands - and even include another "murder" soundtrack theme.

How to Murder Your Wife

Lobby card

As you might expect, the How to Murder Your Wife proceedings were more innocent than the inflammatory title would indicate. The plot is more labyrinthine than I care to explain, but it involves Lemmon as an improbably rich cartoonist - with Terry-Thomas as a valet, no less - who ends up inadvertently married to the amazingly good-looking Lisi. The latter starts spending all his hard-drawn earnings and demanding constant sex, which wears Lemmon to a frazzle. He did have it tough, eh?

Terry-Thomas, Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi

Anyway, his fantasies of getting rid of her make it into his cartoon strip "Bash Brannigan," which star characters that look suspiciously like Lemmon and Lisi. I believe it all works out in the end, although Hefti finishes his score with the dirge, "Requiem for a Bachelor."

Bash Brannigan's fiendish plot

This all reflects the Playboy ethos of the time, and is so dated as to be seeming to come from another world. But there are compensations: Lemmon is always good, Terry-Thomas is perfect, and Lemmon's lawyer is played by the wonderful Eddie Mayehoff, he of the pop eyes and massive underbite. Also, Lemmon's enormous bachelor pad is not in the least dated - it would be in perfect taste even today, almost 60 years later.

Jack Lemmon and Eddie Mayehoff

Hefti's music is well suited to this Richard Quine comedy. You will immediately recognize its resemblance to his other scores of the period, including pre-echoes of the theme to The Odd Couple - another Lemmon opus.

The Other 'Fatal Attractions'

As usual with such compilations, I'll present the constituent parts of the "other fatal attractions" in chronological order.

First we have "Murder in the Moonlight (It's Love in the First Degree)," a contrived title if ever I've heard one, courtesy of the unknown to me but impressively named Ray Nichols and His Four Towers Orchestra, with its nasal vocalist Billie Hibberd. Nichols started recording as far back as 1925; this waxing comes from his final session, in 1935.

Lil Armstrong

"It's Murder" comes from the pen, piano and vocal chords of Lil Hardin Armstrong, by this time (1936) a veteran recording artist, here with her Swing Orchestra. This is a enjoyable piece from Armstrong, soon to be divorced from husband Louis.

Speaking of good music, it doesn't get much better than "She's Killing Me" from Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, with a classic lineup including vocalist Tommy Duncan, fiddler Jesse Ashlock, trumpeter Everett Stover and pianist Al Stricklin, all of whom Wills name checks. The disc is a cover of a 1931 Nichols Brothers effort. Wills recorded his version the day after Hardin's session (September 28, 1936), also in Chicago.

Tommy Duncan and Bob Wills

We move over to London for a 1937 date by American clarinetist Danny Polo and His Swing Stars, a group selected from Ambrose and His Orchestra, where Polo was ensconced in the reed section. "Blue Murder" is a Dixieland-tinged instrumental, a style that Polo and Ambrose's high-toned musicians handle pretty well.

J.B. Marcum

"The Murder of J.B. Markham" is an unusual outing for songwriter-singer Johnny Mercer. This folk ballad was apparently inspired by a field recording captured by Alan Lomax earlier that same year (1937). That was based on the true story of crusading attorney J.B. Marcum, who had been assassinated on the steps of a Kentucky courthouse in 1903. Mercer's record is the only one of our 78s that concerns itself with a real, as opposed to a figurative or fictional murder. His reading is lively but inappropriately jaunty.

From 1941 we have a hard-swinging instrumental, "Murder at Peyton Hall," from the big band of Charlie Barnet. The leader's alto is featured throughout the riff tune, with Cliff Leeman's powerful drums also much in evidence. Neal Hefti later would do arrangements for Barnet (notably "Skyliner"), but this chart is by the bandleader himself. The title's significance, if any, is a mystery to me.

Charlie Barnet serenades his pet Herman

Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh wrote "'Murder,' He Says" as a specialty for the hyper-kinetic Betty Hutton to introduce in the 1943 film Happy-Go-Lucky. Introduce she did; record she did not, at least not until this 1951 version with Pete Rugolo. By that time, the hep lingo had dated, but Hutton's knock-'em-down performance had not. She is far more lively than such genteel vocalists as Dinah Shore, who recorded the song back in 1943. You really only get the full Hutton effect from a video, by the way.

Dimitri Tiomkin

A much different experience is provided by Dimitri Tiomkin's "Theme from Dial 'M' for Murder," the film where Ray Milland tries to murder Grace Kelly (go figure). This Coral single is all that was recorded of the score at the time (1955). It was backed by the composer's far more popular "Theme from The High and the Mighty," which benefited in the film from Muzzy Marcellino's iconic whistling. The hit versions of the latter tune were by Les Baxter and LeRoy Holmes; the composer's own recording (not included here) was a late entry.

St. Louis Jimmy Oden

To complete our "fatal attractions" we have "Murder in the First Degree" by the veteran blues musician St. Louis Jimmy Oden, who was actually from Nashville and worked in Chicago. On this circa 1956 Parrot release, Oden is backed by the band of drummer Red Saunders, who in those days was a busy musician in the Chicago studios.

The How to Murder You Wife LP is from my collection; the 78s are courtesy of Internet Archive with restoration by me. The sound on all the singles is very good, except for some surface noise on Lil Armstrong's record. How to Murder Your Wife had the slightly shrill sonics that afflicted many 60s recordings. I've tamed that tendency a bit.

Jeri Sullivan, Part 2: 'A Song Is Born' and the 1950s

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I looked into the early life and career of Jeri Sullivan, including her radio program, the controversy about "Rum and Coca-Cola" and her Signature records releases.

Part 2 examines her brief career as a movie dubber, then the rest of her career as I've been able to discover, including one of the records she made under the name Jenny Barrett.

First, let's go into some depth about her first dubbing assignment, the 1948 film A Song Is Born, because it is musically interesting even aside from her participation.

'A Song Is Born'

Sullivan had had a screen test, but never had appeared in films except for a 1942 short titled "You'll Have to Swing It," I assume for the song sometimes called "Mr. Paganini," a hit for Ella Fitzgerald in 1936. I haven't been able to locate a copy of this short.

Late in 1947, Sullivan became involved in a feature film for the first time - but not on the screen. She was engaged to dub the singing voice of Virginia Mayo, one of the leads in the Goldwyn musical, A Song Is Born.

A Song Is Born is a remake of the better-regarded Ball of Fire from 1941. Instead of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck as leads, you get Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. In the excerpts I viewed on YouTube (links below), Mayo is better than I remembered, but Kaye is at his most fidgety. The plot is insanely dumb, so I'll not try to explain it. Suffice to say that Benny Goodman, with plastered-down hair and a moustache, is cast as classical clarinetist Professor Magenbruch, who learns to loosen up from such swing savants as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Barnet.

I don't know if the movie's plot does more violence to classical music or pop, but it does manage to introduce several interesting musical interludes that involve Benny, Louis, Lionel Hampton, Mel Powell, Barnet and Page Cavanaugh - and Jeri Sullivan's singing voice.

In 1948, Capitol Records issued a three-record 78 set called Giants of Jazz containing songs from the film (included in the download). The title song ("A Song Is Born") is an edited version of what appears on the soundtrack, but the others were made in the Capitol studio a few months before the film was released in late 1948.

"A Song Is Born," written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul, is a good tune, although clearly inspired by "The Birth of the Blues," a 1926 DeSilva-Brown-Henderson song that was revived for the Crosby film of the same name in 1941.

You see Virginia Mayo; you hear Jeri Sullivan

The album version of "A Song Is Born" is double-sided, but even so was significantly shortened from what appears in the film. On screen, Kaye introduces the Golden Gate Quartet as presenting a "pure Negro spiritual" - which turns out to be a setting of the principal theme of the Largo from Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, which is almost certainly not based on a spiritual (although it was later reworked into the quasi-spiritual "Goin' Home" by one of the composer's pupils). This passage is eliminated from the two-sided 78 version, so when Tommy Dorsey reprises the "Goin' Home" music as his solo, it comes out of nowhere. The film sequence also features drummer Louie Bellson at his most Krupa-esque. And Jeri Sullivan makes her first vocal appearance; she's perfect as Mayo's double.

Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman
and Louis Armstrong

Harry Babasin, Mel Powell, Virginia Mayo and Lionel Hampton
stare in disbelief at Benny's moustache

The next song in the album is a Benny Goodman take on "Stealin' Apples," a song he first released in 1940. The film version of "Stealin' Apples" is in the swing idiom, using Lionel Hampton and Mel Powell as soloists in addition to Benny. By the time Capitol got around to making its recording a year later, Goodman had tentatively embraced the newest jazz fashion, and the version in the album has a bop arrangement, with soloists Wardell Gray and Fats Navarro (identified on the label as Theodore Navarro). Benny fits right in, although his licks are not different from what he might have played in a swing arrangement. This appears to be the only session where Benny employed the very bop-oriented Navarro. Gray was with Benny from May 1948 off and on until late 1949 or 1950.

"Muskrat Ramble" (not on YouTube) is a highly effective Dixieland workout, led by pianist Mel Powell. As early as 1939, Powell was working with Bobby Hackett, George Brunies, and Zutty Singleton, as well as writing arrangements for Earl Hines. He joined Goodman in 1941, then was assigned to Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band from 1943 to 1945. From 1948 to 1952 he studied at Yale University with classical composer Paul Hindemith, and subsequently became a well-known educator and composer himself, winning a Pulitzer Prize while continuing to play and occasionally record jazz. Powell's technique is rooted in the 1920s, but he has his own take on the older style. "Muskrat Ramble" includes lively contributions from the gusty Clyde Hurley and Lou McGarity.

Charlie Barnet appears with a tune called "Redskin Rhumba" (not on YouTube), which he had been using as his band's theme song. It is a Latin version of Ray Noble's "Cherokee," a hit for Barnet in 1939. Here the song is ascribed to Dale Bennett, which I believe is a Barnet pseudonym. Barnet's solo is characteristically noisy.

Now back to Jeri Sullivan. The big number for her (and Mayo) is a fun Don Raye-Gene de Paul song written for the film called "Daddy-O." Sullivan is backed by Page Cavanaugh and his trio in the film and on record, with Al Viola on guitar and Lloyd Pratt on bass. Cavanaugh recorded a different version for Victor backing vocalist Lillian Lane, which can be found on YouTube.

"Daddy-O" bears some resemblance to "Shoo Shoo Baby," a Phil Moore song that was a hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1943. Sullivan's manner is a bit reminiscent of Ella Mae Morse's vocal on her single of "Shoo Shoo Baby," although Jeri's approach is not as down-home as Ella Mae.

The download of the album has been considerably remastered from the version on Internet Archive. I do own the Sullivan record of "Daddy-O" (which was backed by the Barnet side), but was too indolent to transfer it when I had another rip in hand.

The 1950s and 'Jenny Barrett'

Sullivan did so well as a vocal double that you would think more opportunities would have come her way. But only one did - in 1950, she was engaged for the film Love That Brute, dubbing Jean Peters in "You Took Advantage of Me" - and doing it exceptionally well.

Meanwhile, her nightclub career was at a standstill. A Billboard article in 1950 noted that she had started making personal appearances again "after several years of inactivity." In 1952, she could be seen at the Gatineau Country Club in Ottawa (right).

As far as I can tell, her Capitol and Signature releases of 1948 had been her last. Then, in 1953, she made the curious decision to change her professional name to Jenny Barrett - making a fresh start, I suppose.

The newly named singer did snag a record contract with a fledgling firm - Vogue Records (not the picture-disc company nor the French jazz label). Vogue tried to make a splash but didn't last long. Its other artists included Geno Rockford and Fred Darian, so not a well-known roster.

Jeri/Jenny's contribution to the Vogue catalogue - as far as I can determine, her only issue - was a coupling of "He Loves Me" and "Do Me a Favor." I was able to locate a transfer of "He Loves Me" and have remastered it for the download. It's not a successful record, but is fascinating even so. The singer carries on an internal monologue with herself throughout the song, a year before Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were to employ a similar device for "Hey There" in The Pajama Game. But in "He Loves Me," it turns into an overdone and distracting gimmick.

"He Loves Me" was a Sullivan composition, one of several that I've discovered. She also worked with Bob Carroll (possibly the singer) on some songs, and other writers. Guy Lombardo recorded her "('Round the) Christmas Tree at Home" in 1951; it appears on his Jingle Bells LP.

Vogue apparently did not have enough money to stay in business, but it did give Jenny Barrett a fair amount of promotion. She appeared on the cover of the industry publication The Cash Box in July 1953, and was promoting Soundcraft recording tapes at about the same time, looking notably ill-at-ease in both situations. Her photo was also on the "He Loves Me" sheet music.

Post-Vogue, Jenny moved on to the Coral label for four sides that I don't have and that don't seem to be online.

I hate to end with an anti-climax, but I don't have any more information about Jenny Barrett. The only later Jeri/Jerri Sullivan/Sullavan entry that I could locate was in a publisher's Billboard ad from 1960, which has a Jerri Sullivan recording Steve Allen's "This Could Be the Start of Something" for Mark 56 records (right). Is she our Jeri Sullivan? It's hard to say.

Why couldn't Sullivan build on her early success? We can only speculate. One theme, though, is that she seems more relaxed when she is not "out front" - her movie dubbings are much more persuasive than her Soundies, for example. A theme that runs through the early reviews of her nightclub act is that she was not engaged with the audience - although if later reviews are to be believed, that did improve.

The most likely explanation, though, is simply chance. There isn't much that separates a talented singer whose career sputters from a star who achieves lasting fame.

I enjoyed doing this deep dive into the career of a relatively unknown singer. I want to thank two of my friends, musicologist Nick Morgan and author Andy Propst, for inspiring me and suggesting research tools. You were right, Nick - newspapers.com is addictive.

Coda to my last post: our great friend David Federman has concocted a "Rum and Coca-Cola" collection for all of us, with the toast, "Let's all drink to imperialism!" He includes the versions by Lord Invader and Wilmoth Houdini (and their follow-up records), plus the likes of Abe Lyman and Louis Prima, among others. See the comments to the last post for a very limited-time (five days) link.