Midweek Music Break/What’s in a Song: “Makin’ Whoopee”

[Sheet music from the original Broadway show. Note implication that
“whoopee” just refers to a cowgirl’s yell: yeah, right.]

Over the weekend, a couple of TV experiences converged to drive this song into my head:

On Sunday, we watched the great Otto Preminger-directed film of 1959, Anatomy of a Murder. Jimmy Stewart plays a defense attorney for a confessed killer, an Army lieutenant played by Ben Gazzara. The killer was driven to it impulsively — so goes his defense — when he learned that his wife had been beaten and raped by the murder victim.

At one point, the lieutenant’s wife (Lee Remick) takes the stand in his defense. Although the prosecution has argued strenuously (albeit ineffectively) to keep the rape out of the testimony, they can’t help trying to turn it to their advantage. Lead prosecutor George C. Scott, practically leering, compliments the wife on her cute little dog (who’s just made a courtroom appearance), and then attempts to paint her as a tart who dresses and acts in a way almost guaranteed to lure men from the straight-and-narrow path of chivalry and honor. He calls attention to her beautiful hair, her tight clothes, her drinking, her playing pinball, her occasional disregard for even common everyday decencies like wearing underwear—

Jimmy Stewart leaps to his feet to object. Your Honor, he demands rhetorically, is the assistant Attorney General from Lansing pitching woo, or is he going to cross-examine?

The Missus and I snickered: pitching woo. Like, huh? woo???

But in fact the synaptic groundwork had already been laid in my head. Earlier, I’d watched an episode of the late SyFy show, Eureka. In this episode, the beautiful-but-tough-as-nails deputy sheriff, named Jo Lupo, suddenly starts behaving out of character. In particular, she reveals a sudden (and heretofore unrevealed) interest in the nerdy assistant-to-geniuses named Fargo. During a karaoke session in the local cafe, as Fargo plays the piano, Jo — in a slinky gown — goes into a rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee”… crawling around on the piano, and concluding with a kiss.

That scene in Eureka, red dress and all, was so close to another — Michelle Pfeiffer on the piano, Jeff Bridges at the keyboard, in The Fabulous Baker Boys — that it had to be intentional.

So I already had the song in my head. And then (as one does) I started to poke around on the Internets…

Written by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson for the 1928 Broadway musical Whoopee, the song took its title and signature phrase from popular culture of the day. In his columns, Walter Winchell used it often as a coded way of saying what we might today call fooling around. (He claimed to have invented the phrase, but no one seems to know this for sure. I’ve seen etymological references which date back to the mid-19th century, but they all refer to the operative word in its exclamatory sense — like something, yes, which a rodeo cowgirl might cry out in excitement at the height of— wait, that came out wrong…)

It seems to me that Walter Donaldson must have had fun writing the lyrics. Most of the rhymes seem so easy and unforced, so natural, without being facile — popping into the middle of lines as well as at the end. (In this way, it reminds me of “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”)

With its innocent-but-not-too-innocent message, the number was a natural fit for Eddie Cantor. The performer, generally a little too weirdly comic for my taste, managed to put the lyrics over with the barest hint of salaciousness in his delivery. The song and the show were popular enough that their Broadway run wrapped up early for the making of a film version in 1930.

(Above right, Cantor in (a) a typically mugging publicity shot… and (b) as he appeared in the film while singing “Whoopee.” Producer Sam Goldwyn added an exclamation point to the film’s one-word title — maybe hoping to pass it off as a cry of joy than as the, well, the subject of the film.)

At the outset, “Makin’ Whoopee” ostensibly functioned as a cautionary note from one guy to (probably) another guy. Most performers no longer sing the introductory verse, though:

Ev’ry time I hear that march from Lohengrin
I am always on the outside looking in.
Maybe that is why I see the funny side
When I see a fallen brother take a bride.
Weddings make a lot of people sad,
But if you’re not the groom they’re not so bad.

Without those lines, the song is not only tighter and of course shorter; it also suddenly becomes suitable for unisex delivery. And when women sing it (see: Pfeiffer’s Susie Diamond, in Baker Boys; see: Deputy Lupo, in Eureka), the tune invariably turns into something of a tease. Makin’ whoopee brings trouble, they seem to say… and yet, goes the implication (with a wink and an upraised eyebrow and a slither along the piano lid): Maybe there’s a possibility that you and someone nearby (me?) might, you know, hmm?

If you’d like to see Eddie Cantor himself singing the song, in the 1930 film, of course the clip is on YouTube. I think I’ll start off here, though, with a duet by Danny Thomas and Doris Day, who co-starred as Gus Kahn and his wife Grace LeBoy Kahn in 1951’s bio of the songwriter, I’ll See You in My Dreams. It’s a classic early-’50s musical interpretation, sort of cutesy — cheery piping flutes and all — with not a hint of the dangling-bait twist which many later singers gave it.

[Lyrics, including the intro verse (which Thomas and Day, like most, don’t sing here)]

A few years after that film, Frank Sinatra (and others) came along, still asserting the song as a wry guy-to-guy “Watch your step!” warning:

[Below, click Play button to begin Makin’ Whoopee (Sinatra). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:07 long.]

Pianist Art Tatum — in his outstanding trio with Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich — took a coolheaded stroll, at once leisurely and snappy, through the melody at about the same time Sinatra did; the wonderful jazzstandards.com site says of this performance:

Virtuoso pianist Art Tatum [teamed up] with a number of great instrumentalists. Over a three-year period, from 1954-1956, Art recorded “Makin’ Whoopee” with three great players: Benny Carter (alto sax), Lionel Hampton (vibes), and Buddy DeFranco (clarinet). The results are magnificent. Each version is taken at a different tempo, and each guest musician brings a different approach to the table. But perhaps the most impressive and swinging is the one with Hampton, partly because of the fabulous brush work by drummer Buddy Rich (who hated brushes!)

[Below, click Play button to begin Makin’ Whoopee (Tatum). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:04 long.]

But then… well, then Julie London: Her signature breath-in-the-ear voice and delivery removed all doubt (if there were any left) that the number serves equally well to (a) warn about the dangers of makin’ whoopee and (b) invite the listener to make it after all:

[Below, click Play button to begin Makin’ Whoopee (London). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:43 long.]

Seductive lyrics aside, “Makin’ Whoopee” has been a popular tune for adaptation. Not all of these may have been intentional: Yoko Ono settled out of court a lawsuit which pointed out the heavy — pretty close to note-for-note — similarities between Kahn’s tune and Yoko’s “Yes, I’m Your Angel.” And not all of the “quotations” have been direct; at least one source says that a little one-minute number from Aaron Copland’s Three Moods — the last one, called “Jazzy” — borrows pretty liberally from “Makin’ Whoopee.” And (should I say “of course”?) those of us of a certain age remember the Pepsi-Cola jingle, introduced in 1961 and sung by Joanie Sommers:

The title itself has shown up in some of the oddest contexts. Among them: the minor-league hockey team from Macon, Georgia — the Whoopees.

But I think I’ll give Eddie Cantor the last word, since I robbed him of his more famous contribution to “Makin’ Whoopee’s” history. This comes from a little later in the Whoopee! film: