The Benny Goodman Story (Universal-International, copyright 1955, released 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Benny Goodman Story was clearly intended by its producer, Aaron Rosenberg as a follow-up to The Glenn Miller Story. He made the mistake of rewarding Valentine Davies for the success of The Glenn Miller Story by not only allowing him to write the script solo but hiring him to direct the film as well – “which was not an advantage,” as John Hammond, long-time associate and brother-in-law of Benny Goodman, said rather testily in his autobiography. (Davies went back to writing after the failure of The Benny Goodman Story and never directed another film.) In fact, Hammond’s general feelings about this movie were rather testy, since it was made during a low ebb in their personal relationship. Hammond had first met Goodman in 1932 when Hammond had been hired to produce special hot-jazz recordings for the British branch of Columbia. He’d been given a list of the musicians they wanted, including Goodman, whom he’d never met before but he figured that, in the middle of the Depression, he wouldn’t have any trouble getting them paying work. When he met Goodman and told him, “I have a Columbia recording contract for you,” Goodman’s first reaction was, “You’re a liar, and I know that because I just went to see Ben Selvin [director of popular recording for American Columbia] and he said the company is broke.” Hammond had to explain that the contract he was offering Goodman was for British Columbia, which still had money. Then when the sessions actually happened, Goodman wanted to play pop music because “jazz doesn’t sell anymore,” and Hammond had to explain, “Maybe it doesn’t in America, but it does in Britain, and it’s the Brits who are paying for this.” Hammond also wanted Goodman to use a racially mixed band for the sessions, including Black tenor sax star Coleman Hawkins, but Goodman refused because he said if he used Black musicians, even on records, word would get around and racist white bandleaders would blacklist him. Ultimately Hammond and Goodman worked together for years, and their families became connected by marriage when Hammond’s sister Alice married Goodman in 1942.

But in 1953 Hammond got involved with a concert tour reuniting the surviving members of Goodman’s original band from the 1930’s, with Louis Armstrong as his opening act. Goodman soon withdrew from the tour due to his chronic back injuries (which kept him out of the military draft during World War II) and Armstrong took over, fronting the Goodman band in addition to playing his own sets. When Goodman was ready to return to the tour he demanded that Armstrong be fired, Hammond refused, Goodman fired Hammond and Hammond briefly considered suing Goodman but was talked out of it because it would look terrible for him to sue his brother-in-law. When Universal-International made the deal for the movie rights to Goodman’s life story, it included hiring Goodman himself as clarinet double for whoever got to play him – which turned out to be Steve Allen, television personality and founding host of NBC’s The Tonight Show. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said they had originally considered Marlon Brando – which would have been ludicrous – before hiring Allen because he looked like Goodman and he was a fully professional musician. Unfortunately, Allen’s instrument was piano, so he had to be coached on the clarinet by a man named Sol Yaged (as James Stewart had been coached on how to look like he could play trombone for The Glenn Miller Story by another studio player, Joe Yukl). Ironically, Stewart’s actual soundtrack double for The Glenn Miller Story was trombonist Murray MacEachern, who’d been a real-life member of Benny Goodman’s 1930’s band and appears as himself in The Benny Goodman Story. Because I’m a much bigger fan of Benny Goodman than I am of Glenn Miller and therefore know more about his actual life than I do about Miller’s, the departures from fact in Valentine Davies’s script bothered me considerably more.

It’s true Davies got some things at least mostly right, including the story of how Goodman and his two brothers (there were actually eight Goodman kids, but just three of them became professional musicians) got started. Their father Dave (Robert F. Simon) took the three to Chicago’s famous Hull House settlement, and because he was the oldest Harry (John M. Erman) got the biggest instrument, a tuba. The middle brother, called “Fred” here even though his real name was Irving, got a trumpet (though in the movie it’s a French horn), and as the smallest Benny (played as a boy by David Kasday and a teenager by Barry Truex before he grows up to be Steve Allen) gets a clarinet. Davies also shows the time differences in when Goodman’s star-making radio program, Let’s Dance, aired in different parts of the country; because the program was broadcast from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the East Coast and 7 to 10 p.m. on the West Coast, Goodman’s music had built up a far greater following out west. The program featured three bands – Kel Murray (whose real name was “Murray Kellner” and who appears as an on-screen character, played by Douglas Evans) playing conventional “sweet” dance music; Xavier Cugat playing Latin music; and Benny Goodman playing jazz – and they went on in that order. The film shows each band on a revolving stage that turned so whichever band was on next would face the microphone. Let’s Dance, which generated Goodman’s opening theme song (an adaptation by Josef Bonime and Gregory Stone of Carl Maria von Weber’s 19th century classical piano piece “Invitation to the Dance”), came to an abrupt end six months after it started when the bakers at the series’ sponsor, Nabisco, went out on strike, and Goodman’s band went out on a cross-country tour – and bombed until they got to California, first to Oakland (though that’s not the way it’s depicted in the movie) and then to the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, where to their delight they found an audience ready and eager to hear them play jazz.

Davies’s biggest missed opportunity was his failure to dramatize what was in many respects the most important aspect of Goodman’s career: he became the first white American bandleader to feature Black musicians as part of his stage act. I wrote “American” because a year before Goodman brought African-American pianist Teddy Wilson into his band as a featured attraction, British bandleader Jack Hylton had invited Coleman Hawkins to tour Britain with him for six months. Wilson was as deliberately picked as the first Black musician to play with a white American band as Jackie Robinson would be as the first Black baseball player to join the white major leagues 12 years later, and for many of the same reasons. He was quiet, soft-spoken and college-educated (at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute). Wilson actually joined Goodman’s organization as part of the Benny Goodman Trio along with Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa; when the full band played he had a white pianist, Jess Stacy (also a first-rate musician). Wilson ended up in the movie (playing himself) as Goodman’s regular band pianist after Stacy demanded that he’d only be in it if he could have a speaking part (and, therefore, more money). Given that this movie was made only one year after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled racial segregation unconstitutional – and four years after MGM producer Arthur Freed had been forced to abandon his plan to cast light-skinned African-American Lena Horne as the mixed-race Julie Laverne in the 1951 film of Show Boat when MGM’s distribution department informed him theatres in the South would refuse to show the film if it featured Horne playing a character romantically involved with a white man – I can readily understand how Universal-International didn’t want to go there.

There are other annoying mistakes in the movie, including making John Hammond’s sister Alice (Donna Reed) Goodman’s girlfriend throughout the movie (it ends with Goodman’s ground-breaking 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall – which was not as ground-breaking as Davies’s script makes it seem; hot music had been featured at Carnegie Hall since pioneering Black bandleader James Reese Europe led a concert there in 1912) and ripping off the ending of the 1938 20th-Century Fox musical Alexander’s Ragtime Band (written by the same person, Robert Sherman, who’d written The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the film Davies and Oscar Brodney had ripped off for the ending of The Glenn Miller Story) by showing Alice rushing to get to Goodman’s concert and finally arriving during his last number. At least I give them credit for casting an actor as John Hammond, Herbert Anderson, who looks enough like the real one to get by. The real Hammond had asked for the job of producing the soundtrack recordings, since he worried that Universal-International’s cavernous recording stages would not be adequate to reproduce the sound of Goodman’s old band, but there was still enough bad blood between him and Goodman that Goodman personally vetoed it. Goodman himself was sufficiently dissatisfied with the sound that just four months after recording his music for The Benny Goodman Story he went to New York and did most of the same songs over again for a Capitol album called Mr. Benny Goodman. Part of the attraction for Universal-International was getting to release a soundtrack album for the film on their Decca subsidiary, which ran into a major snag with jazz entrepreneur and record-company owner Norman Granz. Though Goodman was a free agent, many of the musicians in the movie – including the other three members of the Benny Goodman Quartet, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa – were under contract to Granz. Granz had long been after the contract of singer Ella Fitzgerald but hadn’t been able to wrest her away from Decca – until The Benny Goodman Story. Granz served notice that his price for allowing Wilson, Hampton and Krupa to appear on the Decca soundtrack album was getting them to release Fitzgerald from her contract so Granz could sign her – which he did, resulting in the greatest recordings of her career.

One of the other major annoyances with The Benny Goodman Story was the depiction of Goodman and his band playing songs that in real life didn’t exist yet – like Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” heard here in a sequence supposedly taking place in 1935 even though the Basie record didn’t come out for two more years; and Gordon Jenkins’ “Goodbye,” which isn’t played in full by the Goodman band but is heard in solo scenes of Steve Allen as Goodman supposedly playing it during his melancholy moods. (In reality Goodman used “Let’s Dance” as the opening theme of his radio broadcasts and “Goodbye” as his closing theme.) At least the on-screen band was well stocked with musicians who’d actually played with Goodman – as well as Buck Clayton, a Black trumpeter who hadn’t played with Goodman in the glory years but had been featured on Count Basie’s original 1937 record of “One O’Clock Jump” and repeats his solo from that record here; and Stan Getz, who when the film was made had just detoxed from heroin and had played with Goodman, but only in the mid-1940’s, well after the period the film is about. While The Glenn Miller Story is a much more assured movie, The Benny Goodman Story is O.K. entertainment, not the film it could have been but with some oddball bits, including the early scene in which the teenage Goodman tells his classical clarinet teacher, Franz Schoepp (Fred Essler), that he’s about to take a job with a jazz band. “Not you, Bain-ie! Not you!” Schoepp laments. There’s also a neat turn of phrase when Donna Reed as Alice Hammond laments that Goodman is wasting his time with “this unpopular popular music.” I don’t know whether to lament this inelegant phrase or admire its oxymoronicity!