APRIL IN PARIS? YOU'RE KIDDING!

WHO WROTE THIS S***?

          

 Chestnuts on Place Dauphine. (My first home in Paris was on the left, behind the first-floor balcony with the dark railings.)

People often ask, "What's the best time to come to Paris?" 

           Before I moved here, I'd have said, "Well, I suppose, April" - not from conviction, but simply because the song April in Paris is so ubiquitous that it could be the city's theme. 

           A jazz listener since adolescence, I'd grown up with it, and taken its sentimental imagery for granted. Doing a little digging, I found that it comes from an obscure 1932 Broadway show, Walk a Little Faster. The composer was Vladimir Dukelsky, who chose, understandably, to sign himself "Vernon Duke". The lyrics were by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, who wrote Over the Rainbow but also Lydia, the Tattooed Lady, with its catalogue of body art made memorable by Groucho Marx:  "Here's Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon/Here's Godiva but with her pyjamas on," not to mention "Here's Nijinsky, doing the rumba./Here's her social security number."

           April in Paris didn't aspire to that degree of invention. Its first few lines - "April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees" - didn't even rival another Duke/Harburg collaboration, Autumn in New York, with its sly couplet "Lovers that bless the dark/On benches in Central Park."        

           I asked a French journalist friend for his opinion of the lyrics. He wasn't impressed.

           "Had this type ever been to Paris?"

           "Duke lived here for years," I said. "He wrote a ballet for Diaghilev; was a friend of Prokofief. But I don't know about Harburg."

           " 'Holiday tables under the trees'," he said. "Those are hardly unique to April."

           He was right. A blizzard needs to be blowing before café owners, who pay the city for the use of the sidewalk, grudgingly take in their tables and chairs.  Some provide blankets for clients to wrap around themselves and keep serving even when the unprotected parts start turning blue.

           "And as for 'chestnuts in blossom'", he went on. "April's too early; they don't really come into flower until May." He had a sudden thought. "You know why any cliche - an old joke, say - is called a 'chestnut'?  There used to be an ancient marron in the Tuileries that was the first to flower every spring. Some reporter was lways sent to write a piece about it. Usually it was the stagiere."  Obviously, he'd once been such a trainee himself. "A horrible job. What can one say that hasn't been said a thousand times before? So…. a chestnut!"   (I suspected there were rival explanations but wasn't ready for an argument.)

           Why would Harburg write something that so inaccurately described a city the composer at least knew intimately? Was it simply because "April in Paris" falls more agreeably on the ear than "March...", "May...", "June..."  or "July in Paris"?

           It may all have been the fault of writer Dorothy Parker, a friend of Harburg.  A cynic's cynic, and a mistress of acid word-play - "If all the women at this party were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised" - Parker was a poetess of the glass-half-full persuasion. Life to her was one long disappointment, its pain assuaged by liberal applications of gin and sex.

           According to one account, she was within earshot when Vernon Duke suggested Robert Browning's Home Thoughts from Abroad as a theme for a song.  Was there a tune, he wondered, to be had from this dithyramb to the English spring, with its famous first lines "Oh, to be in England/Now that April's there"?         

           Through her fifth martini, and darkly, Parker saw nothing appealing about England in April. The fogs, the rain, and, my dear, the people!  

           But France... Now that was something else.

           "Oh, to be in Paris," she murmured, "now that April's there." 

           And from this bitter soil a song germinated?  Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?