April 7th , 2005

  Some people are good at what they do. Other people are better. Bobby Short was the best. Preserving the art of the Great American Songbook was his life’s work, and nobody did more for the cause. When cabaret queen Mabel Mercer, his friend and sometime musical partner, died in 1985, he remarked sadly, “Half of the legacy is gone. I don’t know if I can carry the whole burden alone. These shoulders arze elegant, but very narrow.” But he inherited Mabel’s throne and made Cole Porter, Noel Coward, the Gershwins, Vernon Duke, Irving Berlin, and Cy Coleman more popular than ever.
  When he died unexpectedly last week at 80, he drove the final nail in the coffin lid of sophisticated popular music, but I believe the purity of what he contributed to the world of popular music will still mean something. He relentlessly pursued “do” when everybody said “don’t” and in a world where music has largely been replaced by jerks, groans, and flat falsetto screams programmed by IBM computers that have regrettably gone mad, Bobby Short sang about love—the one thing that will never become camp. Pity the saloon singers who elect to follow in the footsteps of his patent leather shoes.
  For the poor son of a coal miner from Danville, Ill., he learned fast. Robert Nahas, his best friend and the co-executor of his estate, says “Bobby came out of the womb attached to a grand piano.” He could never read a note of music, but he learned to play stride piano at the age of 9, ran away from home at 10, and landed in New York at 13, quickly becoming the darling of café society. Time passed before he found a permanent perch at the swank Café Carlyle, but it was home for 40 years. From the beginning, he did not hang out with the cats. He loved to sing and play black anthems by Lil Green and Fats Waller, but was more at home with the Blue Ribbon 400 than the Harlem jazzbos who frequented the old Cotton Club. Wags sniffed that nobody ever bothered to tell him he was black. Oscar Levant once remarked that “Bobby Short is a white man wearing heavy pancake.”

  His apartment was filled with trophies and awards, a testament to the fact that he was an easy person to honor at charity benefits. His society clientele were the high rollers who could afford to write $10,000 checks. Yet he successfully straddled several worlds and remained a darling of jazz purists from Sugar Hill, matrons from Park Avenue, and tourists from Little Rock. Bobby Short at the Carlyle was a signal every year in the Apple that spring had arrived. In the past few years, even after rap and rock relegated real music to museum status, a visit to hear Bobby Short sing From This Moment On at the Carlyle was as de rigueur on a trip to New York as a tour of Ground Zero.
  Wherever Bobby appeared, he brought back an era of sophistication for an audience of visiting movie stars from Beverly Hills, faded glamour girls in their last 40 pounds of unhocked Bulgari, and aging Esquire covers who never wandered far past Fifth Avenue except to set sail for Europe. Full of the old paprika, he always gave them what they wanted: nostalgia and romance and take-home tunes they could hum. He was always worth the check. A soignée dresser and an eager consumer of the best that life had to offer, Bobby was often accused of being too “swellegant” for words, but although he drank the most expensive champagne and hosted the most lavish balls and spent half of the year at his villa in the South of France, a stone’s throw from the exclusive Moulin des Mougins restaurant, his three favorite words in the culinary legerdemain were “macaroni and cheese.”

  I never attended a Bobby Short dinner party that didn’t serve fried chicken or meat loaf and mashed potatoes. And while it is impossible to imagine an elevator operator on his guest list, his snobbery had charm. He rubbed elbows with kings and queens, yet he told me one of the greatest events in his life was the night he took Alice Faye to the Café Carlyle. He played for her while she sang You’ll Never Know seated at the table. He never recovered.
  Conversely, he was in high dudgeon the night he was invited to sing for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Nixon White House. When Bobby was told he and his musicians would be served coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen, he was on his way to the exit door when suddenly they appeared—the royal couple, escorted along the corridor to the state dining room by Richard and Pat Nixon. They spotted Bobby, broke stride, ran to the kitchen door, swept him up in their arms, and dragged him into dinner, leaving a mortified first family with their mouths wide open. It was one of Bobby’s proudest moments.
  One more anecdote. One cold winter weekend, when we were both house guests at Claudette Colbert’s house in Barbados, Bobby and I were walking on the beach (a sight you didn’t want to see) when we passed one of those second-rate surfside motels that cater to the worst kind of British tourists. On the wooden deck, a pudgy woman red as a boiled lobster was waving frantically with one of those floppy straw hats you buy in Caribbean airport lounges. “She knows us,” I said. “Oh, god, ignore her…too tacky for words,” scowled Bobby, whose eyesight was so bad he sometimes mistook C.E.O.’s for head waiters. I moved closer. “My god, Bobby,” I yelped. “It’s Judi Dench!” His mood did an about-face. We took her home for tea.
  He suffered from neuropathy, but although he limped to the piano on a cane, the minute the lights hit him, Bobby Short had sparkle and spruce. He made 32 bars sound like an overture. He made noises about retiring from show business, but he had just signed a new contract at the Carlyle. At Chita Rivera’s opening a few weeks ago, he was in agony but we all thought it was the neuropathy. When she introduced him, he got a standing ovation, and glowed with Cheshire-cat satisfaction.
  The Wednesday before last, he was diagnosed with an irreversible blood count of white cells and died from leukemia five days later. Hours from death, he was still humming and running lyrics in his head for his next CD of Fred Astaire songs. His treasured legacy of books, song sheets, arrangements, Duke Ellington records, big-band orchestrations, and other historically significant musical memorabilia will go to the Smithsonian, Lincoln Center, and a dozen of the charities he generously supported. He left specific instructions that no memorial service was to be held. That was the one part of his last will and testament that seemed unlikely to be honored. Above all, Bobby Short could never resist a good party.

  For sewage in a cocktail shaker, there is Oldboy, a noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking. Directed by Chanwook Park, a film festival “comer” in this nation of emerging cinematic shlock, a cheerful drunk named Dae-su Oh disappears from a phone booth and is sealed in a room for 15 years. Injected with drugs and forced to sleep every night with Valium gas that hisses through vents in the walls, he has no idea where he is, who locked him up, or what he did to deserve such a fate in the first place. He keeps track of the time he’s imprisoned in this hole by etching a tattoo on his body for every year.
  Suddenly, he’s released in a field from inside of a steamer trunk, more confused than ever. What follows is an extended two-hour nightmare in which he tries to track down his abductors by tracing the chopsticks from the takeout food they fed him in his cell, while the voices of his torturers contact him on cell phones and computer chat-room websites.
  What is going on here? Nobody knows. Meanwhile, he defeats an entire gang of killers with a knife sticking out of his back. He eats a live eel. A severed hand rips out a man’s teeth, one by one, with a hammer. Blood flows, there is much vomiting and incest, and more screams than you find in Japanese kabuki.
  It’s part kung fu, part revenge-theme Charlie Chan murder mystery, part metaphysical Oriental mumbo-jumbo—all of it incomprehensible. Dae-su Oh is played by Min-sik Choi. I walked out at the point where he grabbed a pair of scissors and cut his tongue off in blood-splattering close-ups. Obviously the actor is still in one piece, but I’d be willing to bet there’s some poor cow somewhere in Pusan who can no longer moo.