Two Melodies for the Price of One

Based upon the Broadway musical, Call Me Madam, which opened in 1950, 20th Century Fox adapted the show to make the 1953 movie, starring Ethel Merman, Vera-Ellen and Donald O’Connor.  According to wikipedia, the plot revolved around Merman’s character, a socialite widow (Sally Adams) named as Ambassador to a fictitious country named Lichtenburg and was very loosely based on the real life story of a Washington, D.C. hostess and Democratic Party fundraiser, named Perle Mesta, who was appointed Ambassador to Luxembourg in 1949.  While the score written by Irving Berlin is not as good as the one he wrote for Annie Get Your Gun, it provides wonderful material for the person playing the press attache, Kenneth Gibson (Donald O’Connor in the movie).  We are presenting both of those songs, one in the last post and one here.  Because of a contractual dispute between RCA and Decca, Ethel Merman was unable to perform her role on the original cast album.  Thus, we have no historical record of her singing “You’re Just in Love” with Russell Nype, the man who played Kenneth Gibson on Broadway.  We do have the movie performance between Merman and O’Connor, so we will stick with the movie performances.

During tryouts before the show hit Broadway in 1950, Merman insisted that the comedic song, “Mr. Monotony” be dropped from the musical.  Something was needed to take its place, and so Berlin wrote another one of his famous “dual melody” songs, one melody in counterpoint to the other.  Berlin first used this technique in 1914, when he wrote “Play a Simple Melody” for his first revue, Watch Your Step (1914).  The song successfully uses two melodies, where one melody plays in counterpoint to the other.  One melody is a regular song; the other is syncopated.  The two melodies are sung separately and then sung together.  For Call Me Madam, Berlin created a waltz-like tune for Kenneth Gibson (to explain why he was feeling so moody and listless), juxtaposed with Sally Adam’s upbeat diagnosis in a syncopated format (“you’re not sick, you’re just in love”).  We feature “Play a Simple Melody” elsewhere on this site, sung by Bing Crosby and his son, Gary.

For this post, we are going to provide an outtake from the movie, featuring Merman and O’Connor singing “You’re Just in Love.”