Sisterhood

14: Baby, It’s Cold Outside (1949)

This song mixes things up.

Frank Loesser wrote the duet ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ in 1944 as a novelty party piece that he and his wife Lynn performed for friends at their housewarming. The song’s incongruous appearance in the romantic comedy Neptune’s Daughter (1949) garnered it an Academy Award and a clutch of other recordings in the same year by popular music and jazz greats – Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan, Margaret Whiting & Johnny Mercer, and Dinah Shore & Buddy Clark among them. Sixty years on, the song’s account of seduction fuels hot takes on sexual politics like no other. ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’: cute celebration of wintry flirtation, or vile dramatisation of sexual coercion?

The lyrics give us a couple who, in the score, are each assigned the nicknames ‘Wolf’ and ‘Mouse’. Gesturing to the bitter weather and his cosy living room’s roaring fire, the guy keenly insists that his gal should stay. Hyper-alert to the reputational consequences of such a choice, she invokes nosy neighbours and all her family members eagerly awaiting her chaste return – the most judgemental being her “maiden aunt”, whose “mind is vicious”. The story ends merrily with the Mouse’s seeming capitulation, the two singers delivering the song’s title lyric harmoniously together.

The contemporary debate about the song’s power dynamic has become frenzied. In 2018, an array of North American radio stations went so far as to ban it, one DJ making the assessment that “in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place”. In a similar vein, John Legend not uncontroversially adapted its lyrics with Natasha Rothwell for a 2019 #MeToo-responsive recording with Kelly Clarkson – who herself had previously recorded the song with Ronnie Dunn in 2013.

This fraught scene has given rise to some really amazing writing. I concur with Chris Willman’s hilarious view, which opens his 2018 survey piece for Variety:

There is one group, and one group only, that should be crusading against the performance of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ in public: vicious maiden aunts.

For Willman, Zoey Deschanel and Will Ferrell’s shower-scene performance in Elf (2003) is the fountainhead of the song’s becoming “ubiquitous almost to the point of torture” – a suggestion in interesting historical accordance with Amelia McDonell-Parry’s 2018 article for Rolling Stone. There, she writes that current critique of the song’s sexual politics first got underway in 2004. She refers to a truly brilliant 2016 Tumblr post by a “former English teacher/nerd”, who argues that the now-incendiary lyric “Say what’s in this drink?”, penned in 1944, was “a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol”. This writer concludes:

it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.

Unlike clickbait determined that ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ should be either one thing or the other, the best recordings of the song find similar both-and depth.

Admittedly, Frank Sinatra’s performance with Dorothy Kirsten fully embraces predation: it features a cartoonish spoken word section in which, in Pepe Le Pew-style, he locks her in his house and swallows the key. But Carmen McRae and Sammy Davis Jr’s increasingly funny version gives us a boss female protagonist. Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton’s is also packed with jokes. Like its fairytale fantasy video, Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews’s is almost psychedically hyperbolic, topped off with Matthews commenting “Bloody freezin’, innit?” in a broad Welsh accent.

Plus there are plenty that flip the heteronormative script, assigning the Wolf to the female vocalist, or presenting two male or female singers – Caroline Pennell, She&Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), Kelley Jakle & Shelley Regner, Nathaniel Rateliff & Julie Davis, John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John, the version from Glee. Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox delightfully substitutes a tap dancer for the Wolf. In this context, rewritings of the song seem quite baffling. As I receive it, John Legend’s adaptation presents a controlling guy and an anxious girlfriend – similarly, Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski’s. (The comments on the Legend YouTube video are golden.) It’s notable that in both of these versions the Mouse’s lyrics remain largely unaltered.

In Neptune’s Daughter, the song’s first public outing was in fact performed with and without role reversal.

A comedy of mistaken identity, the film hinges on hot ‘South American’ masculinity and sexuality being compared to ‘North American’ schlubby haplessness, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of feminine conduct. Swimming champion turned swimsuit designer Eve Barrett (Esther Williams) is anxious to protect her man-obsessed sister Betty (Betty Garrett) from herself – in particular her yearning for José O’Rourke (Ricardo Montalban), the captain of the South American polo team (yes, all of South America). Betty confuses masseur Jack Spratt (Red Skelton) with José, and commences an aggressive programme of seduction, much to Jack’s initial terror. Meanwhile, Eve tackles José, and he cultivates her misapprehension that Betty is dating him.

The song takes place mid-way through the film, improbably on a “warm summer’s evening”, and contrasts the two couples: Eve sidestepping José’s wolfish overtures, and Betty ardently pinning Jack to a couch. The scene quickly segues to ‘Jungle Rhumba’, an extended dance number orchestrated by Xavier Cugat, an exoticising proxy for what Betty and Jack may or may not be getting up to.

It’s a strange, not unproblematic film. But with its pantomimic cross-dressing, presentation of desire, and a decidedly homoerotic massage scene between José and Jack, Neptune’s Daughter both establishes and messes with Eve’s opening gambit: “men are men, and women are women, and, well, that’s just the way it is” – as do the richest interpretations of Loesser’s ingenious song.

7: What’ll I Do (1923)

This song is saudade itself.

What'll I Do 2

Its story of love on the rocks was penned by Irving Berlin, with the champagne-fuelled assistance of Dorothy Parker on its last two lines. Addressing their (soon-to-be) estranged lover, its protagonist contemplates a lonely future absent of their company. In this future, the other person is a long way away, in the arms of another. All that is left is a photograph and castles in the air. It is the definition of ‘”a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present”‘.

In a fascinating piece for The Atlantic, David Schiff talks of how Irving Berlin’s tunes ‘have a verbal tag and tell a story’, instilling in ‘common American phrases the nervous musical impulse of the modern city’.

Like many other Irving Berlin compositions, this song is deceptive in its simplicity. ‘What’ll I do?’ is its lyrical foundation. The boxy end rhymes of its two verses give a sense of stability – ‘divine’/’mine’, ‘mended’/’ended’, ‘bliss’/’kiss’, ‘descending’/’ending’ – which the choruses proceed to entirely undo. Internal rhymes surge through the choruses like gentle waves, softly eroding what formerly seemed secure. ‘What’ll I do when you are far away / And I am blue, what’ll I do?’ The only lines that lack these repeated internal rhymes are those reflecting on the protagonist’s memento – ‘What’ll I do with just a photograph / To tell my troubles to?’ The ebb and flow of the song’s emotion comes to a temporary moment of stillness with this melancholy image.

It’s been recorded numerous times in vocal and instrumental versions, very often with sentimental strings, as in Frank Sinatra’s 1947 performance. The major key and waltz time sit in a sad tension with the song’s sorrowful lyrics. But desolation and abandonment are not all there is to it. For example, Sarah Vaughan’s 1964 recording, arranged by Benny Carter, is razor-sharp.

What’ll I do? Immediately go on holiday, pound a bunch of drinks, and plot exuberant revenge. Vaughan’s sleek arpeggios are not really about pining. In this devastating live performance on her television show, Judy Garland makes an inspired lyrical adjustment following what seems like a pronunciation misstep: ‘What’ll I do when I am wondering how / You feel just now, what’ll I do?’ Chet Baker’s psychedelic interpretation, recorded in 1974, conjures a parallel universe. It’s beautiful, but I find it deeply antagonising: to me, this protagonist seems to be gaming his interlocutor.

I can’t remember how I first came to know ‘What’ll I Do’, but it’s highly likely that it was via the opening credits of the BBC sitcom Birds of a Feather, in which it is performed by co-stars Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.

The series had originally used for its own credit sequences Bill Atherton’s recording for the opening credits of The Great Gatsby (1974), directed by Jack Clayton. The choice of ‘What’ll I Do’ for The Great Gatsby is itself a reference to the song’s own genesis: as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, Irving Berlin ran with a set that ‘often partied at the Long Island Gold Coast estate of Herbert Bayard Swope (a figure whom many believed to be the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby)’.

Atherton’s tender vocals accompany a gradual close-up on a newspaper clipping – Mia Farrow as Daisy – and a tracking shot of the dissolute, photograph-bedecked luxury of Gatsby’s mansion. The revised Birds of a Feather credits are likewise accompanied by the sweetness of strings, and a selection of photographs. But these are of the series’ two sisters, now cohabiting following the imprisonment of their husbands for armed robbery. And they are photographs of the two actors, taken at various stages of life, that appear to be genuine: Quirke and Robson had grown up together.

For both opening and closing credits of Birds of a Feather, only the first and last choruses are used, stripping the song of romantic association. It is possible to hear reference to the incarcerated husbands. But in juxtaposition to the photographs, it becomes much more prominently about the sisters’ relationship, and the sadness of their former separation through the process of adult life. The cinefilm that graces the closing credits is excruciatingly poignant – from one child’s impossible attempt to feed ice-cream to her bear, to their final wave to the camera, running up the grass into the future. It’s an extraordinary visual gesture to the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.