This song is a primer in magical thinking.

Matt Dennis and Tom Adair wrote ‘Everything Happens To Me’ in 1941. Frank Sinatra’s winsome recording with Tommy Dorsey that same year made it a hit.

Surprisingly, despite the vividness of its story of chronic misfortune, there are far more instrumental than vocal versions. And no movie seems to have incorporated the song into its action.** Three films share its title – a 1938 comedy caper about a by-election in a seaside town starring vaudevillean Max Miller, a 2001 Spanish romantic comedy entitled Todo me pasa a mí adapted from a play, and a 2018 single-shot short about an actor’s terrible audition. Then there is Chissà perché… capitano tutte a me (1980), a supremely How Did This Get Made–able buddy cop drama which teams a preternaturally strong sheriff (Bud Spencer) with a gizmo-toting alien boy (Cary Guffey, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind fame). Its Anglicised title, Why Did You Pick On Me?, is the repeated refrain of the sheriff as the two of them get into scrapes. For exposure to its full range of battiness, including Mary Poppins-esque magical home improvements, Kraftwerk alien villains, and at least one hundred slapstick brawls, it can be seen in full here.

Lucky for my purposes then that the album cover of Chet Baker Sings: It Could Happen To You (1958), on which ‘Everything Happens To Me’ appears, is acutely cinematic. In his review piece about this album and Chet Baker as a cultural icon, John Bergstrom doesn’t love it:

Baker was cool, all right. But he exhibited none of the aggressive, chest-puffing, downright intimidating cool that went with most of the other big names of the day. His coolness was passive rather than active, accidental rather than inevitable, devoid of sexuality. Just look at the flat-out hokey cover art for It Could Happen To You. This guy isn’t dangerous. At least not yet.

Rollneck notwithstanding, Baker’s lupine gaze in that image feels pretty intense to me. It Could Happen To You as 1950s werewolf romcom: seemingly anodyne heartthrob lures unsuspecting dates and turns them; under the light of the waxing crescent moon, he meets his match in this laughing girl, who also happens to be a werewolf. I’d watch it.

Johnny Burke’s lyrics for ‘It Could Happen To You’ (1944) and Tom Adair’s for ‘Everything Happens To Me’ are two sides of the same narrative coin: the one, a story of the exhilarating terror of Cupid’s arrow, and the other, a melancholic account of perpetual adversity in life and love.

The verse – which Chet Baker’s performance excludes, and which is absent from the chart above – begins with superstitious high drama: “Black cats creep across my path until I’m almost mad / I must have roused the devil’s wrath, ’cause all my luck is bad”. (Ella Fitzgerald retains it; following a misleadingly jaunty introduction, so does Billie Holiday.) Dennis’s composition then modulates from minor to major, and Adair’s resigned tale of woe unfolds. Magic is replaced by a thoroughly modern kind of predestination: golf dates made will guarantee rain, card games played will engender inevitable defeat. The wordplay of the phrases “I guess I’ll go through life just catching colds and missing trains” and “I never miss a thing, I’ve had the measles and the mumps” suggest interminable negativity. And it’s always the protagonist’s own fault: “I guess I’m just a fool who never looks before he jumps / Everything happens to me”.

A love affair with the person to whom the song is addressed seemed briefly to present a solution to the “jinx”, but alas: “I’ve mortgaged all my castles in the air”. (I find this artful line really hard to get my head around. Dreams have crashed down to earth as crippling debts? To whom?) For the lost object of desire has cut ties with the hapless character altogether. Dealing with this unhappy turn, the penultimate couplet is legitimately funny: “I’ve telegraphed and phoned, sent an Air Mail Special, too / Your answer was ‘Goodbye’, and there was even postage due”.

The song concludes on a note of fatalism. “I fell in love just once and then it had to be with you / Everything happens to me”.

To be described as someone’s one and only true love, never to be replaced, is classic ‘romance’. But as the narrative plays itself out in Chet Baker’s delicate performance, the protagonist’s misery and self-reproach are all-encompassing and of long duration. The brilliance of the song is in its presentation of the failed love affair as the icing on the cake of this person’s beleaguered life: the mantra ‘everything happens to me’ hints at another, untold story of loss and disappointment.

**Update: actually there are four, a similar miscellany: romantic comedy Playing By Heart (1998) (“if romance is a mystery, there’s only one way to figure it out”), The Guard (2011) (“the FBI are about to discover that things work a little differently around here”), Dolphin Tale (2011) (“inspired by the amazing true story of Winter”), and Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York (2019) (no tagline, but much controversy).