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Forget the Facts, Print the Legend!
B
ack in the Old West, there was a shibboleth lovingly espoused by many frontier newspaper editors which went: If the facts get in the way of a legend, print the legend, anyway! So with that disclaimer, the story goes like this. Just after the beginning of World War II, the famed bandleader Artie Shaw married the soon-to-be equally famous movie starlet, Lana Turner, and off they came to Mexico for an extended honeymoon. In Mexico City one night, they happened upon a little out-of-the-way bistro, where a somber-looking man in his early 30’s (whose name was Alberto Dominguez) was quietly playing a piano. After a while, Shaw interrupted Lana Turner’s monologue about her movie career to ask her to listen to the music. Shaw’s finely-attuned ear had picked up an unmistakable signal: When the song was over, he laid out some money on the piano and asked the pianist to play the song again, and then again. Who had written the song? Shaw asked. The pianist sheepishly raised his hand. Had he written anything else? Again: the same bashful response. And again, after hearing the second song, the same signal. By this time, Lana Turner had joined her husband at the piano and concurred that the two songs were among the loveliest she had ever heard. Then, in impeccable Spanish (Shaw was known to have had a genius IQ and was fluent in several languages), the bandleader asked who owned the songs and had they ever been published? Suddenly, the piano player turned wary and said that if Shaw has some business in mind, he would have to come back the next night and talk to the composer’s grandfather, who handled all of the family business. The following night, Shaw made known his interest in buying a
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El Ojo del Lago / February 2017
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small percentage of the rights to both songs, and a short-term option giving him the right to see if he could get them published, or at the very least, publicized. The grandfather, after a consultation with the youngish composer, mentioned a figure to Shaw. Shaking his head, the bandleader said he would not pay such a sum. Rather cowed, the old man asked what amount he would pay, to which Shaw replied: “I’ll pay you fifty times what you just asked for, and that’s for each song.” Needless to say, the legalities were readily dispensed with the very next day, and Shaw and Turner returned to Hollywood, where the band leader discovered that he was riding the crest of a wave. His brilliant arrangement and recording of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine was selling millions of records. Now, as the movie scripts indicate the passage of time, we DISSOLVE TO: On a hunch, Shaw eventually called a producer friend to tell him about the two songs he had found in Mexico. Could he come over to play them for him? The executive, Hal Wallis, was just finishing up a film and had indicated that he needed a romantic song for one of the movie’s flashback scenes. Hearing both songs, Wallis thought one of them perfect for the film, and promptly bought the onetime film rights, had it orchestrated and put into one of the flashback scenes: a moment in which the two stars of the film are seen dancing in a Parisian nightclub just before the German army marched into the city. The movie was, of course, Cas-