Sing, baby, sing
Jane Russell at My Florist Café
By David Cotner 11/26/2008
“The ‘40s were the best time of all…first of all, everyone was behind the guys fighting…the clothes were best and the hairdos were best, and the songs were the best…you don’t have to clap after every one, just let the stories go…”
It’s a packed house, this former secondhand store, and everyone gathers tonight to hear the musical stylings of actor Jane Russell, she of The Outlaw and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (with Marilyn Monroe), the proto-bombshell referred to by Bob Hope as “The two and only Jane Russell.” She’s changed her usual silvery coiffure to the lustrous raven-haired ‘do of the past and she shimmers like mercury, wet silver descending from on-high – or, at the very least, the Santa Ynez Valley, where she makes her home nowadays.
It was for her that Howard Hughes invented the underwire brassiere and it is with her that memories of Robert Mitchum, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe fill the hall tonight. Every memory a time capsule in miniature, each reference – Clark Gable “The Tall Man,” for instance – eliciting whoops and hollers as she mentions it, launching them like fireworks and these are memories made of flash paper; when you’re pushing a century, there is no “take two.”
The songs share the same casual cadence, as in her version of “You Turned the Tables on Me,” Alter & Mitchell’s number from Sing, Baby, Sing: half-sung, half-spoken, great pauses throughout and, sometimes, phrases forgotten.
This way of singing comes refreshingly without artifice, a public image shot through with the kind of honesty that comes only with time. Although it may come off as slightly disingenuous to the more hard-bitten cynics among us, these songs of longing are in fact meant for one’s entire life. It’s easy to think that, at a certain point, a body stops yearning but this simply isn’t so – and while our longer-haired mystics of culture seem to think that they have a monopoly on insight and community, look no further than this senescent sing-a-long –art’s magic is lifelong and abiding, and everyone joins in, nostalgic and joyful for those thrilling days of yesteryear.
She sings “Bye, Bye Baby” by Frank Sinatra and – and then something rather remarkably tasteless happens: the piano player, Peter Clark, urges Russell to sing “Happy Birthday” to the restaurant’s manager – you know, just like Marilyn Monroe did to John F. Kennedy. In itself, that proposition might have come off as trite and vaguely lame – except that tonight marks the 45th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. A flicker of realization crosses Russell’s face and for a largely unshared instant everything becomes remarkably real and surreal all at once. She declines graciously and it’s one of those moments that catch one off-guard so swiftly that the requisite booing of the brutally tactless doesn’t happen. Her performance only lasts a stellar half-hour or so but this jarring moment, like a greasy hair in the middle of an otherwise perfect cupcake, is, quite frankly, almost as timeless as the songs Jane Russell sings.
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