Sadie Vimmerstedt was a fifty-something grandmother living in Youngstown, Ohio in 1957, and she had a serious dislike for Frank Sinatra. It wasn't his voice she didn't care for, but rather the fact that several years earlier, he had left his first wife, Nancy, in order to chase (and eventually marry...and then divorce) actress Ava Gardner. Mrs. Vimmerstedt thought it was shameful that Sinatra had abandoned the wife and children who adored him so that he could make a fool of himself panting after Hollywood's reigning sex goddess.
One day, thinking about what Sinatra had done, words suddenly came to mind: I wanna be around to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart. She decided that would make a great opening for a song. But as she wasn't very musical herself, and had never written a song in her life, she concluded it would be wiser to let a professional take over. For her choice, she went straight to the top.
Johnny Mercer isn't as well remembered these days as such contemporaries as Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter still are, which baffles me. He wrote some of the greatest tunes in the 'Great American Songbook', including "Hooray for Hollywood", "That Old Black Magic", "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and "Moon River", among dozens of others. He was also a major recording star himself in the 1940s, wrote the songs for several Broadway musicals, and was nominated for no fewer than 18 Academy Awards for his film work (winning four Oscars over the course of his career). Oh, and in his spare time, he co-founded Capitol Records, and discovered Nat King Cole. But while he remains in relative obscurity these days, in the Fifties, he was as well known as almost any entertainer in America. Mrs. Vimmerstedt decided he would be the perfect songwriting collaborator. She wrote Mercer a letter, sharing the opening lyric she had come up with, and explaining the inspiration for the song.
She then addressed the envelope to:
Johnny Mercer
Songwriter
New York, NY
That's right, she didn't even have an actual address for Mercer, she just had faith it would find him. Keep in mind that, then as now, New York was home to several million people. Unfortunately at the time, Johnny Mercer wasn't one of them. He had actually moved out to California back in the 30s.
This is exactly the sort of mail that is destined for the Dead Letter Office, almost never to find its recipient. But miraculously, Mrs. Vimmerstedt's faith was well-placed; an employee at the NYC Post Office saw the letter, and knew that Mercer was living on the West Coast. He forwarded the letter to Los Angeles, hoping that his counterparts there could get it to Mercer. And they did! Like I said, Mercer was a star back then, and the mailmen knew where he lived.
Johnny opened the envelope, read the letter, agreed that it was a good opener for a song, and a good premise overall...and then he put the letter in a desk drawer and forgot about it for a year or two. But then one day when he had nothing else to do, Mercer happened to open the drawer, rediscover the letter, and decided to actually write the rest of the song.
Mercer wasn't one for sticky sentimentality (after all, the inspiration for his brilliant, soul-wrenching "One for My Baby" was in fact himself, written in the painful wake of the end of his love affair with Judy Garland. He wouldn't even give himself a happy ending in his own song!), so he avoided the treacly trap of turning the song around in the final stanza and having the singer welcome his unfaithful lover back. No, this was a song about sticking the knife in, and deep. It was an anthem for everyone who had been wronged by love. As far as I'm concerned, it might very well be the first punk rock song. It's a loss to us all that the Ramones never got around to covering it.
I want to be around to pick up the pieces
When somebody breaks your heart
Some somebody twice as smart as I
A somebody who will swear to be true
As you used to do with me
Who'll leave you to learn
That misery loves company, wait and see
I mean, I want to be around to see how he does it
When he breaks your heart to bits
Let's see if the puzzle fits so fine
And that's when I'll discover that revenge is sweet
As I sit there applauding from a front-row seat
When somebody breaks your heart
Like you, like you broke mine
Honorably, Mercer gave Mrs. Vimmerstedt co-credit along with 50% of the royalties, which were enough to let her retire and pursue her lifelong dream of traveling the world. It also made her a minor celebrity in her own right, and for a while she kept busy giving newspaper interviews and appearing on radio and television talk shows. It was a dizzying pace for her, and after a few months she wrote another letter to her songwriting partner saying, "Mr. Mercer, I've just got to get out of show business...it's exhausting!"
The song was recorded by a number of artists, but it achieved it's first real and lasting fame in 1963, when Tony Bennett recorded what is today still acknowledged as the definitive version:
A great performance of a great song, truly.
(And for the record, Sinatra did his own version in 1964, with Count Basie and his band. Whatever the inspiration, Frank wasn't about to let that stand in the way of singing a good song.)
