The New York Times: Music Review | Lyrics & Lyricists, by Stephen Holden, November 20, 2009

Because it described Army life during World War II in bebop slang, Johnny Mercer’s “G.I. Jive,” one of the few songs for which he wrote both words and music, usually isn’t regarded as one of his great perennials, although it was a No. 1 hit for Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five in 1944.

It remained for his fellow lyricist Sheldon Harnick to point out its brilliance and to make it the artistic flashpoint of the special centennial tribute to Mercer staged by the 92nd St. Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series on Wednesday evening. Ever the pithy linguistic analyst, Mr. Harnick called attention to an amusing pun in which an exhausted soldier finds himself “countin’ Jeeps” instead of sheep.

Mr. Harnick, who described Mercer as a folk poet and ranked him alongside Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and E. Y. Harburg in his gift for wordplay, sang “G. I. Jive” with a rough swinging exuberance, articulating every zany syllable.

As the music historian Robert Kimball, one of the show’s artistic directors and an editor of “The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer” (Knopf), a beautifully produced new 462-page anthology, points out in his notes to the book, “Many people consider the song the World War II equivalent of Irving Berlin’s ‘Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.’ “

Mr. Harnick was the only performer among the cast of some two-dozen singers and musicians to capture intact the lighthearted glee of Mercer’s comic imagination. He was not helped by the evening’s host, Charles Osgood, whose perfunctory account of Mercer’s life was a lightly annotated list of accomplishments – more than 1,300 song lyrics, 230 collaborators, four Oscar-winning best songs – lacking in color and enthusiasm.

Leading the list of smaller pleasures was the singer and pianist Loston Harris’s sultry, inventively syncopated rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” accompanied by a jazz trio. Marilyn Maye’s robust, jazz-flavored “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” filled up the room.

La Tanya Hall (“Skylark”) and Paula West (“I Remember You”) offered warm, vocally polished renditions of classic Mercer ballads and Barbara Carroll, a sly, elegant “Too Marvelous for Words.”

But even during the traditional Lyrics & Lyricists end-of-evening sing along (“Moon River”) in which the audience joins the performers, the goal of collective euphoria proved elusive.

The New York Observer, by Spencer Morgan, December 16, 2008

Spend a weekend at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue and East 76th Street. You have to listen closely.

Bop, bop bop. Bop, bop bop. Around 8:30, Friday night at the Café Carlyle, home of the legendary late lounge singer Bobby Short, the five-piece band was getting the ball rolling for the room’s new star, Steve Tyrell. He waited for the right moment, then eased the mike from its cradle.

“The look of love is in your eyes,” he sang in a gruff Southern accent. Mr. Tyrell had the look of someone who might have been stout before slimming down. He wore a velvet blazer, starched white shirt and a white polka dot silk scarf. His hair, silvery white, stood up on its own. Two backup singers loomed, a bodacious Asian woman and a lanky black guy with a gray ponytail and an earring.

“Ooooh,” sang the lady.

“Woahhh,” sang the man.

“Say a little prayer for you!” sang Mr. Tyrell.

A decidedly New York woman at the bar snapped her fingers. Her wrists were adorned with bracelets made of silver balls. More silver balls hung about her neck, and a ball on each ear lobe.

“I’m gonna send this out to my friends Les and Julie, I think you guys are out there somewhere,” said Mr. Tyrell, and then worked his way through “This Guy’s in Love With You.” Next was “Walk on By.”

“I haven’t heard this in forever,” said the silver-ball lady.

The room was dominated by men in suits and ties. A shortish fellow with a thick mustache and coarse, swept-back hair that resembled a shoe brush tapped his gimlet glass with a plastic stir stick. The room looked clean, fancy; $150 for a seat.

“I’m going to sing a song I sung in a movie called Father of the Bride, and it changed my life,” said Mr. Tyrell. He said he was going to sing it for Julie Chen, “the most beautiful woman on television. Kim Novak had nothing on you.”

“Hey, would you stop flirting with my wife?” joked CBS president Les Moonves.

Later Mr. Tyrell dropped by the table.

“It’s a Friday night in December,” said Mr. Moonves, “where the economy’s bad and restaurants are half-empty-and this room, which is not an inexpensive room, is still packed. I think it’s terrific for New York, I think it’s terrific for the country, I think it’s terrific for the entertainment business.”

But as Loston Harris, the pianist and singer at the hotel’s Bemelmans Bar, likes to say, the Café is the show but Bemelmans is where it’s happening. Before I could get there, I was struck by a fur hat. Renee Karrat, 32, who works at Ralph Lauren, was in the lobby. She had dropped by the bar after dinner to continue celebrating her brother’s birthday, but it was too packed. They headed off to drink Champagne at a friend’s room at the Hotel at Rivington.

Over at Bemelmans, an elegant old string bean in a tailored blue blazer was huddling with Mr. Harris, speaking in hushed tones. I gathered from Mr. Harris’ eyes that the man might have been speaking gibberish.

Scrunched around a two-top were Chris Singerman, 28, a banker with SwedBank, and a couple of friends. The bank had actually just made a few hires. Mr. Singerman had been talking about spending New Year’s Eve at Bemelmans, “’cause there’s nothing else going on.”

“It’s between this and seeing My Morning Jacket at Madison Square Garden,” said Mr. Singerman, who was swimming in a Carlyle blazer provided at the door. As was his friend Samit Mody, who works in commercial real estate: “You’re either treading water, or you’re not.” They had come on a whim: After a Christmas party at Bilboquet on East 63rd Street, Cate Candler, 32, an executive at Cole Haan, had suggested they continue the merriment at the Carlyle, a Candler family favorite.

There was hardly any standing room around the bar. A slick-looking fellow and a Botoxed blonde were nuzzling among the camel hair and tweed. Ms. Candler said the holiday spirit appeared to be intact at the Carlyle. But, she cautioned, “people take comfort in going out during the holidays because it feels comfortable.”

Was there an added dash of hope in the air?

“I’m hopeful,” said Mr. Singerman. “I have hope.”

“If only these walls could talk, man,” said Loston Harris between sets. “People are saying, we’re escaping, that you help us to take our mind off what’s going on. This is a special clientele. I’m not a stockbroker, but I’m assuming these people are losing tens of millions of dollars-that can’t feel good. There are a lot of cheaper ways to unwind. But they choose to come here because they love the music. People need music now more than ever.”

“This is a place people come to forget-so it’s really hard to tell,” said a dignified bald bartender in a regal vest.

Back at the bar, a gent named Michael, who said he works for a debt restitution firm, said the place seemed unscathed by the recession. He lives in Palm Beach, was in town for a Sunday meeting. He said it’s a buyer’s market for those in the credit trade: Four cents on the dollar instead of ten. “Come to think of it, I think it’s more packed in here than I’ve ever seen it.”

The crowd was getting louder. Eyes turned away from the slick dude and Botoxed blonde, who were back from the night before and being gross.

An investment banker named Sinclair said he liked the candles. He was rubbing the hand of his pretty girlfriend Amanda. “We were just talking about the Titanic and how the ship was sinking and everyone kept partying as the ship sank into that bitter cold water,” he said.

“I’m only buying shotgun shells and potable water,” he added. “And food!” Later, they zoomed off on his Ducati.

Another young couple-she in white spotted fur, he in gray tweed overcoat-made a beeline for the door. I gave chase. Had the young man’s credit card been rejected? Was he itching to splurge on Champagne and hotel sheets? They walked through the revolving door into a vacated yellow cab whose door was left ajar by the previous fare who had already swept into the hotel.

A tinkling sound blew up from the south: Oktay Urga, 24, one month off the boat from Istanbul, sweating under a knit cap, said a couple had paid him $30 to chug them up from 42nd Street in his pedicab.

“This job is not good, sir. It is a lucky job. One day I make 50, the other guy say he make 300. I don’t want this job, but I have to take it.”

He wants to get his master’s in public administration.

“I am Kurdish. It is not good for me there. Every time the teacher looks the exam and sees I am Kurdish, he fail me. They are always watching. They want to kill me.”

Sunday night. On the way uptown my taxi driver asked if I’d heard about the guy throwing his shoes at President Bush. “This is very embarrassing for Bush,” he said. I said that it was more embarrassing for the guy who threw his shoes. As we pulled up at the Carlyle, he said America should feel embarrassed about thinking it was a good idea to go around invading other countries. The awning of the Carlyle was impossibly clean-looking, as if someone had steam-pressed it. A bundled-up elderly couple passed; the woman said to her husband: “I hear even they had a huge sale, and sold everything.”

Inside, Cynthia and Wayne Davis, of Charleston, S.C., were celebrating their 36th anniversary.

“The city is packed! Where’s the recession?,” said Mrs. Davis. She wore a green silk blouse; her wrists and ears and neck glittered with gold and diamonds. She said they come here every year “to fall in love all over again.”

“This is a city of romance and vibrancy and character,” she said. On her fingers she counted off the various department stores she had visited over the weekend, and said the whole time she was asking herself, “Where’s the recession? Now I don’t know if people were buying anything.”

Mr. Davis, who is in “international transportation,” said, “It brings out the best of us. This is the most romantic city in the-“

“He’s the most romantic man in the world. He really-“

“No, but it’s really about the romance and the laughter.”

“Doesn’t he look like Robert Wagner? And don’t I look a little like Shirley MacLaine? She’s my great aunt, you know,” said Mrs. Davis, nodding.

“Yeah, but I love you more,” said Mr. Davis. “I loved you more yesterday, but I think I love you even more today.” One of the gifts he’d purchased for his wife that day was a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“We lit a candle for lost souls,” he said. “Now more than ever is a time to pray for lost souls.”

THE NEXT DAY I spoke with the hotel’s general manager, James McBride, who was in Dix Bay huddling with Rosewood executives about next year’s budget for their resorts in the Caribbean. He said business at the Carlyle was up 8 percent on the year. Last weekend both the $15,000-a-night Empire suite, which occupies both the 28th and 29th floors, and room 1812, where Jackie O. used to live ($5,000 a night), were occupied.

Monday night. Woody Allen on the clarinet at Café Carlyle. The show has been sold out every night this season, just like it has been for the last decade. Tickets are $150; $70 for standing room.

The couple sitting across from me was from Jacksonville, Fla. They visit New York every year. “We finally decided to splurge,” the man said. Earlier that afternoon, he’d bought a sweater, which at 40 percent off was still more money than he would normally have spent on a sweater For dinner, he and his wife each had the $55 Dover sole.

Woody took the stage. Silence as he quickly peeled off a brown sweater and pieced together his old clarinet, his head down. He softly suggested “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” to the banjo player, who passed the message along to the rest of the band. Once the music got going, it didn’t stop, save for a few brief pauses between songs. Woody’s cheeks inflated to what appeared to be half of his body size. The actress Stockard Channing sat staring and smiling.

After the show I spoke with Woody.

“We’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, 35 years or something, 40 years, and we just enjoy playing,” he said. “We’d be happy to play in our living room for ourselves-at least I would be-but the band likes to play for people, so I play for people. “

Anything to say about the recession’s impact on New York?

“I haven’t noticed it yet,” he said. “I’m sure during the upcoming year, it’ll hit, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Mr. Allen, can I just shake your hand?” a woman interjected.

“Sure, but don’t get ink on you.”

I spoke to the great Elaine Stritch, who lives in the hotel in a large, corner, one-room apartment-what would be called a “bed sit”-on the lobby phone.

“Walk up and down Madison Avenue and there are a lot of empty storefronts, places that are for rent, that’s what scares me,” she said when I asked about the recession. But! Sure, some Broadway shows are closing, but that might not be all bad. “We need more shinola and less shit,” she said. “All due respect to the Disney Company, but you know, they could cool it a little.

“I think a lot of people are going to come out of this better off,” she continued. “I think it’ll be good for people to have to go through this and make sacrifices and come out on the other side. And maybe, hopefully, people will start to care a little more about their fellow man than they did before. And they’ll start helping their fellow man and then maybe they can start feeling better about themselves. We’ve got to help each other out, you know, it’s the only way.”

The New York Times, by Corey Kilgannon, October 21, 2008

Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.

She stayed there whenever she was in New York, and adored the regular entertainers like Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt at the Café Carlyle, and the pianist Loston Harris in the lively Bemelmans Bar. She loved the uniformed elevator men and bellmen and the family of longtime staff. She loved that Central Park was only a short block away.

So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.

“The family came to me and said, ‘We want to check her in till the very end,’ ” said Alexandra E. Tscherne, director of residences at the Carlyle. “It was a unique request, one I’ve never had previously. They wanted her set up in one of her favorite places, and they didn’t know how long it would last.”

It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.

Mrs. McDill was youthful and full of energy at 71 and spent her days outdoors gardening and painting, so it was shocking to her three children when she learned at the beginning of August that she had a fast-spreading cancer.

“It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time,” said her son Thomas Gardner.

The family hired 24-hour hospice care, but Mrs. McDill, at least until the very end, was in sufficient mental and physical shape to enjoy her final stay at the Carlyle. The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one of New York’s most luxurious, with a long list of celebrities, presidents and royalty who have stayed or lived there.

Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.

The family hired Mr. Harris to play Mrs. McDill’s favorite songs at her memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue on Saturday. It was a sophisticated, poignant and kick-up-your-heels affair, almost like something out of a Cole Porter song. Mr. Harris played “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Month-to-month suites at the Carlyle are always expensive, but less so during the summer months, when they cost about $17,000 a month.

“It wasn’t a search for extravagance, but a search for comfort. It wasn’t the inexpensive option, but it was the greatest comfort we could afford, so of course we would do that for her,” said Mr. Gardner, chief executive of the Motley Fool, a financial information company he founded with his brother, David Gardner.

Staffers helped her with chores related to her impending death, said Ms. Tscherne, who agreed to sign as a witness to Mrs. McDill’s will and even ran across the street to get a notary public.

The family hired two attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill: Rose Marie Moore and her sister Shirley Innis. In the evenings, Ms. Moore would sing spirituals for Mrs. McDill.

“She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She’d say, ‘Give me the long version, Rose,’ ” said Ms. Moore, who took the subway from East New York to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill.

“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess, and treated me like one.”

Ms. Moore sang “Swing Low” again at the memorial service on Saturday, and family members recalled Mrs. McDill as hardly the demure society type, but more like a Katharine Hepburn character.

After graduating from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, she dreamed of art school, but wound up going to Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., obeying the wishes of her father, H. Gabriel Murphy, part-owner of the Washington Senators baseball team, which later moved to Minnesota and became the Twins.

Mrs. McDill’s first husband was Paul Gardner Jr., a lawyer. After a divorce, she married Jonathan McDill, formerly in charge of cataloging for the Dartmouth libraries. He died in 1998. As a gardener, she took design cues from formal French and Italian gardens and added her own resourceful touches.

She loved the paintings of Henri Matisse and the writing of Mark Twain and Robert Frost. She sold a few paintings but gave away many more. She rarely bothered with computers or cooking.

“It was not that she could not cook, but that she did not,” David Gardner said.

After the memorial service, some of her friends said they were rethinking their own send-offs.

“People came up to me and said, ‘We’re changing our plans for our funeral – we want it to be fun,” Thomas Gardner said. “The only sad thing was that Mom wanted to keep living.”