I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-Six

All through the 1960s, as I had told Dinah, I stayed hard at work on my own songwriting. I had no end of melodies tumbling around in my head. The big objective I faced was to find the right lyricists who could come up with words that fit my notes. I had pretty good success in blending with Peggy Lee and Johnny Mercer as lyricists, but I needed more people who had a poetic touch with words. And over the years, I found a few guys with the right credentials.

Bill and Sue Comstock in their '52 Jag.

Bill Comstock was one of them, a man with whom I was to write dozens of songs. Bill came into the business as a singer. He made his career in different vocal groups, and since he had a good jazz sense, he ended up with the Four Freshmen at the beginning of the 1960s. The Freshmen had been around since the middle 1940s, a group of guys who came under a heavy Stan Kenton influence. Taking Kenton's example, the Freshmen did farout things, singing inventive harmony and arrangements. No other vocal group I knew of was trying anything so harmonically advanced in those early days, and the Freshmen became huge in popularity. They toured with Kenton, recorded for Capitol Records and played a lot of good venues across the country.

    Bill Comstock joined the Freshmen when he replaced the original second tenor in 1960, and right around then, I began to run into Bill. All of these meetings happened in Vegas when I was playing in the main room of one of the hotels with Lena or some other singer, and the Freshmen were working the lounge in the same hotel. I found Bill to be an all-round smart guy, someone very good with words. We hit it off as friends, and pretty soon, we began writing songs together.

    Early on, we wrote a song called Summer Has Gone. One of us, Bill or me or someone entirely different, thought of Doris Day as a singer who was suited to the song. But how did we get to Doris? The answer was a familiar one to me: we got to Doris by way of my friend Rosemary Edelman. Doris was managed by her husband Marty Melcher (the guy who was later found to have swindled Doris for millions of bucks), and Melcher had an assistant named Bobby Crystal who happened to be a friend of Rosemary's. Proceeding along that route, Summer Has Gone reached Doris. She loved the song, and a recording followed.   

    Then we tried another song on Doris. At the time, she was shooting a movie called Do Not Disturb. We heard that the movie had some Parisian scenes, so we wrote a Paris-type song we called Tout Va Bien. This time, for reasons Bill and I weren't aware of, our song got rejected. But someone at the Mills Music Publishing Company, probably a son of the company's founder, Irving Mills, suggested we take Tout Va Bien to Maurice Chevalier. We got together with Maurice when he was performing in a theatre in the round in Los Angeles. On stage at the time, he looked no more than fifty years old; in person, back in his dressing room, he looked about 150 years old. He may have been near the end of his long career, but he loved Tout Va Bien, and he eventually performed it on television in his last TV special in 1967.

    When Bill and I were talking to Maurice in his dressng room on that only occasion we met him, he told us to send him more songs.

    "And you know," he said with a twinkle, "they don't have to be songs about Paris."