These Foolish Things and the Missing Link
There is a song called “These Foolish Things”, written in the mid-1930s. To many modern people, this is just a terribly old-fashioned song, no longer of any interest whatsoever. Personally, I think that the full song – rather than the abbreviated versions usually recorded – is an extremely fine piece of romantic poetry.
It has been recorded by scores of singers over the last ninety years. When I play it myself on guitar, I use the full version as recorded by Bryan Ferry back in 1973 (on his album, also called “These Foolish Things”). When they wrote songs in the 1930s they did not write them for guitar players: they wrote them for vocalists, for piano players, for dance bands. This gave me a bit of flexibility in working out the chords to use. (For anyone who wants some “strict” jazz chords, the song is indeed a bit of a jazz standard and there is a splendid lesson on a chord melody version by Sandra Sherman (“GuitarVersum”) on YouTube.)
I’m not sure about this, but I doubt whether anyone else has recorded a complete version with all of the verses and bridges of this song since the 1930s. The other singers tend to butcher its romantic beauty a bit, to make it fit into a shorter song – they skip a few verses or they shove bits of two verses together, and miss out a bridge or two altogether. Sometimes they just had to change something, either because it would have been ridiculous – e.g. Bing Crosby recorded it without the section about “the song that Crosby sings”, of course – or out of some combination of creative license, disrespect and arrogance – e.g. when Sinatra recorded it, during his relationship with the actress Lana Turner, he changed the line “the smile of Garbo” to “the smile of Turner”. You might disagree and regard that as him being romantic of course.
The song was written by Eric Maschwitz (although it sometimes shows his Hollywood showbiz name, which was Holt Marvell), with the music by Jack Strachey. They also wrote “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”. A claim has been copied and pasted all over the internet that there was a third composer of “These Foolish Things”, called Harry Link. This is at best a massively exaggerated misunderstanding, and at worst a lie, as I shall explain in a moment.
Now I don’t know much about Harry Link, who might have been a first-rate splendid bloke in person. But I think it’s just wrong to give co-creator credit to someone who did not deserve it. Imagine if you’d added, or altered, a couple of brushstrokes in the background of “Starry Night”, and claimed that it was painted by Vincent Van Gogh and you.
The background here is far more culturally and historically fascinating than you might expect. Maschwitz was a significant figure in the early days of the BBC and the Radio Times. He was given the OBE for services to broadcasting in the mid-1930s. He was an actor and screenwriter for Hollywood as well, his path crossing with all sorts of famous names, including Gielgud, Cary Grant, Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich.
He had a romance with a British cabaret singer called Jean Ross, who became the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood’s character of Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret” of course. He also had a romance with the first Chinese-American Hollywood star, Anna Mae Wong. (No, Bruce Lee wasn’t the first Chinese-American Hollywood star!) Rumour had it that one of these relationships inspired the writing of These Foolish Things. Maschwitz himself denied this in his autobiography, “No Chip on my Shoulder”, although he might possibly have been being diplomatic and not wanting to upset his wife Phyllis. (He had previously been married to the actress Hermione Gingold.)
In World War II he was in the Secret Intelligence Service. He went back to the BBC after the War and ended up on a planning committee which knocked around ideas for a new science fiction series – which ended up creating Doctor Who.
It’s a huge shame that his autobiography, despite being such a slice of cultural history, is not only out of print, it’s virtually impossible to buy for love or money. I thought about appealing through the publishers for a re-issue, but the original publishers were Herbert Jenkins Ltd, who merged with another publisher in the 1960s to form Barrie & Jenkins, who were then taken over by Hutchinson. They were taken over by Century and then by Random House, which is now owned by Bertelsmann, an enormous German multinational. The idea of tracking down, through that tangle, any individual who had responsibility for such a dubious idea, or any interest in it without evident large dollar signs attached, seems like a seriously futile endeavour. I’ve read a library copy, tracked down from another city via inter-library lending, and went to the trouble to photocopy every page before it had to go back, as I thought I’ll never get the chance to buy one.
This autobiography does not even mention the existence of anyone called Harry Link. (I’ve got a copy of the sheet music from decades ago, which also does not mention Harry Link.)
So, what happened, as far as we can tell, and how did Link get into the picture?
Way back, in about 1934, Maschwitz and Strachey were asked to write a song for a singer called Joan Carr. Maschwitz said in his autobiography:
“One Sunday morning in my flat in Adam Street, only half-recovered from six eighteen-hour days in the studios, I sat in pyjamas, unshaven, considering the problem of a song for pretty Miss Carr. Cole Porter in the musical play Anything Goes had recently broken new ground with a cynical rhythmic ditty entitled “You’re The Top”; his formula, which has since become known as the “catalogue song”, might, it seemed to me, be applied in a more romantic vein; every one of us must have small, fleeting memories of Young Love. By some accident I hit upon the title “These Foolish Things” and, then and there, between sips of coffee and vodka, I drafted out a verse and three choruses of a song…
By lunchtime… I had dictated my verses over the telephone to Jack Strachey and agreed to have a drink with him the same evening in St John’s Wood and listen to the setting. When I heard the melody I was, I must shyly confess, bitterly disappointed in it. Nor did Jack care for the title; he wanted to call the song “These Little Things”!
But it aroused no special interest and, though Jack and I were very anxious to see it published, no publisher would oblige… We put it into a West End revue: still it failed to set the musical Thames on fire.
One day the manuscript copy, by that time somewhat dog-eared, attracted the attention of Leslie Hutchinson (famous as “Hutch”), the West Indian singer, who found it lying on top of my office piano. With characteristic enthusiasm he sang and played it through, took an immediate fancy to it and agreed to record it. From the day his record appeared the song was made; artistes all over the world clamoured to be allowed to sing it…”
- No Chip on my Shoulder, (pp. 78-79, 1957), copyright the Estate of Eric Maschwitz.
In the book, “Lives of the Great Songs” (edited by Tim de Lisle, Penguin 1994), the chapter on These Foolish Things simply includes this:
“(As for the mysterious third name on the credits, the missing Link: Harry Link was an American whose name also crops up as co-composer of Fats Waller’s “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling”. Presumably he had something to do with sprucing up “These Foolish Things” for the US market, though it’s hard to tell what. Maybe he was just good at royalties.)”
- 1994, copyright Robert Cushman
Anyway, after Hutch turned it into a successful song, it then got put into a Broadway show called Spread it Abroad, where it was sung by Dorothy Dickson in a hugely praised performance.
This was in 1936. That attracted the attention of Irving Berlin, who by that time was a bit more into making money out of the music business than writing songs himself. Harry Link worked for Irving Berlin in music publishing. Well, there’s a line in the song “these things have haunted me, for you’ve entirely enchanted me”, which you can just about get by with in a British accent, but which just would not work on the other side of the Atlantic (with the short “a” in enchanted just not rhyming with an American-sung “haunted” – to sing “enchaunted” would have sounded just pretentious and really phoney. So, for American singers, Harry just took that out, or just repeated or anticipated the other bridge section that uses “these things are dear to me, that seem to bring you so near to me”.
I understand the practical need for that. Nevertheless, I really don’t think skipping a couple of lines even begins to justify calling you a co-creator. Singers change round verses and choruses and so on all the time – it’s called “arranging”. It’s not called “writing”. I don’t think it’s right that Link is given this kind of credit all over the internet. However fine and upstanding a citizen he may have been.
I have seen an alternative claim on the internet, that after Berlin bought the American rights to the song in 1936, he – or Link, under his instructions – “added two bars to These Foolish Things, making it conform to the standard 32 bar format of most popular songs of the time”. (This is on greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/t/these_foolish_things.html, which points out that Link wrote his own songs and even re-wrote the lyric for one of Berlin’s own songs, with his permission.)
I don’t understand that claim. I can not identify these extra bars by listening to any of the versions I know about. The original sheet music I have, in fact, once we ignore the introduction, actually has 28 bars in the repeated refrain, not 30, so even if extended by 2 bars it seems to me it still wouldn’t have been 32 bars long.
Anyway, great classic song, terrific background story, shame about the unobtainable biography and about people getting dubious credit!