Deep in My Heart (MGM, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on last night (Tuesday, December 30) my husband Charles came home from work early in time to watch the next film in the final night of Turner Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to Merle Oberon: Deep in My Heart (1954). It was produced by Roger Edens (his first solo effort as a producer) and directed by Stanley Donen. Deep in My Heart was a biopic of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg (José Ferrer) – the film represents him as a native of Austria but he was actually born in Nagykanizsa, Hungary. Romberg’s real name at birth was Siegmund Rosenberg, and he moved to the U.S. in 1909 at age 21 to escape anti-Semitic prejudice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after he had previously studied violin and composition in both Hungary and Austria. Deep in My Heart was a late film in a cycle of composer biopics that had actually begun with films based on the lives of George M. Cohan (Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942) and continued with films about George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, 1945), Cole Porter (Night and Day, 1946), Jerome Kern (Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Words and Music, 1948), and Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Three Little Words, 1950). Romberg was a somewhat problematical choice for this sort of film because he wasn’t U.S.-born, nor was he raised here (as Irving Berlin was), and though he was capable of writing ragtime songs his real métier was operetta. In the film Sigmund Romberg is working as a piano player and bandleader at the open-air cabaret (with a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, courtesy of MGM’s art director, Edward C. Carfagno, and set decorator, Arthur Krams) owned by Anna Mueller (a fictional character played by American-born opera singer Helen Traubel, who was often mistaken for German because of her name and her opera specialty, Wagner). A rather slimy agent named Lazar Berrison (David Burns) shows up at Mueller’s café and offers to sign Romberg to a songwriting contract, saying he has an “in” with Broadway producer J. J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon). Romberg is tempted but Mueller suggests instead that he approach Shubert directly, and Shubert buys one of his songs, “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise.”

He promises Romberg it will be the first-act finale of a new revue starring Gaby Deslys (played by ballet star Tamara Toumanova and sung by Betty Wand) – a legendary enough performer that at one point MGM musical producer Arthur Freed briefly considered making a biopic about her, with Judy Garland in the lead. But when the show opens, Romberg is appalled that his deep, rich, sensitive ballad has been turned into an elaborate hootchy-kootchy number. Shubert and his assistant Bert Townsend (Paul Stewart, best known as the slimy butler in Citizen Kane) convince Romberg that he should let them handle the “artistic end” (which becomes a recurring catch phrase in Leonard Spiegelgass’s script, based on a Romberg biography by Elliott Arnold) and should just crank out songs for them as needed. Romberg has a secret weapon in his arsenal: the script for an operetta called Maytime by Rida Johnson Young, who had previously written operettas with Victor Herbert. Maytime is a tear-jerker about two young people, a man and a woman, who are prevented by social prejudices and class differences from getting together, though in the final scene their grandchildren meet, fall in love, and marry. (It was later filmed by MGM in 1937 as the third and best of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy musicals, but Young’s original plot was thrown out and only one song, “Will You Remember?,” from Romberg’s score was kept.) Romberg makes a ton of money off the awful shows he writes for Shubert, but his friend and fellow regular at Ana Mueller’s, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), sets up a lunch date with Shubert’s hated rival, Florenz Ziegfeld (Paul Henried, of all people), to trick Shubert into producing Maytime. Maytime is such a huge hit that Shubert opens it in two New York theatres at once, and Romberg insists on producing his next show, Magic Melody, on his own.

Magic Melody is a total flop, and Romberg goes begging hat-in-hand to Shubert for another chance. Shubert engages him to write a new musical for Al Jolson called Jazza-Boo, and in order to write it undisturbed Romberg, Townsend and lyricist Ben Judson (Jim Backus) take a cabin at the Saranac Lake resort in upstate New York and agree that none of them will shave until the work is done. (Jazza-Boo is strictly fictional but Romberg did write a number of shows for Jolson, including Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad, and Bombo, though the best-known song from Sinbad is “Swanee,” a song by the young George Gershwin that Jolson heard elsewhere, bought the rights to, and stuck in the show in the middle of its run. It was Gershwin’s biggest hit during his lifetime and the song that established his career.) While at Saranac Lake Romberg has a meet-cute with the woman he will marry, Lillian Harris (Doe Avedon), despite opposition from her imperious opera-loving mother (Isobel Elsom). Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly get together to write The Student Prince (1924), a smash hit based on the old German play Old Heidelberg about a prince who goes to Heidelberg to study, falls in love with a barmaid, but has to give her up when his father dies and he has to return home to assume the throne. It’s a huge hit and so is Romberg’s next operetta, The Desert Song (1926), inspired by an anti-colonial rebellion by the Riffs, Arab natives in Algeria who fought the French regime. The Desert Song is Romberg’s first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II (Mitchell Kowall). Years go by and Romberg’s music starts falling in popularity as younger audiences start wanting jazzier songs, though a swing version of “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” starts becoming popular and gets played on the jukebox at Anna Mueller’s café (ya remember Anna Mueller’s café? Ya remember Anna Mueller?) The younger crowd at Mueller’s loves it – one young woman even calls it “slurpy,” which it takes Romberg a while to realize is a compliment. Dorothy Donnelly gets a sentimental but beautifully acted death scene, and at the end Mueller and Townsend convince Romberg that the way to revitalize his music is to give a concert of it at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, with Romberg himself conducting. The concert is a triumph and brings the film to a happy ending.

Like previous musical biopics, Deep in My Heart features a lot of stunning (or wanna-be stunning) production numbers on Romberg’s songs. The two songs from Maytime, “Will You Remember?” and “Road to Paradise,” are drenched in Viennese apple blossoms and sung passably by Jane Powell and Vic Damone. José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney get to do a duet called “Mr. and Mrs.” from a 1922 show called The Blushing Bride – appropriate because Ferrer and Clooney were Mr. and Mrs. in real life as well. (They divorced in 1967 after they had five kids, one of whom, Miguel Ferrer, became an actor in his own right, mainly on TV. Since George Clooney’s father was Nick Clooney, Rosemary Clooney’s brother, George Clooney and Miguel Ferrer were cousins.) One of the best numbers in the film is “I Love to Go Swimmin’ with Women,” from a Romberg show called Love Birds (1921), featuring Gene Kelly dancing with his original partner, brother Fred Kelly. (Kelly got his start in an act with his brother, as Fred Astaire had started with his sister Adele, but this is the only film footage we have of the two Kellys together.) The Student Prince is represented by William Olvis singing “Serenade” in a properly stentorian manner, but to my mind the one singer who’s ever done real justice to this song is Mario Lanza, who recorded it three times. Two were for RCA Victor record releases (one in 1951 and one just before he died in 1959 so RCA could have a stereo version), and one was in 1953 as the soundtrack for a projected film in which Lanza was to have starred. Unfortunately, Lanza was as much a primo don (the male version of a prima donna) off screen and on, and he refused to diet for the role, so he was replaced by Edmund Purdom, who mimed to Lanza’s records. The Desert Song is even more oddly represented; Ann Miller gets to do a novelty song called “It,” based on Elinor Glyn’s concept of … well, her various definitions of what “It” meant were all over the map and frequently self-contradictory. One thing she insisted on was that “It” was not a euphemism for “sex appeal” and anyone who thought that was cheapening her concept, but of course “It” entered the language as a euphemism for “sex appeal” and that’s how it’s presented here in Edward Smith’s lyrics for Romberg’s song.

The other big number from The Desert Song is a medley of “One Alone” and “One Flower in Your Garden,” but its presentation here is almost totally off the wall. In the original the two songs are heard back to back and become a debate over the relative merits of polygamy (represented by Arab character Sid El Kar singing “One Flower”) and monogamy (represented by The Red Shadow, who leads the Riffs but is secretly Pierre Birabeau, son of the French commander – don’t ask). In this version the female lead, Margot Bonvalet, sings “One Alone” while “One Flower” is heard only as an instrumental, and Margot is danced by Cyd Charisse (stunningly) but sung by Carol Richards (less stunningly). There’s also a preposterous number called “Your Land and My Land” from a Romberg operetta called My Maryland (1927), with book and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly and based on Clyde Fitch’s play Barbara Frietchie (1899), sung in his usual sledgehammer style by Howard Keel and apparently representing the Union and Confederate troops coming back together at the end of the Civil War. New Moon (1928), which MGM had already filmed twice before (with Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett in 1930 and Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in 1940), is represented by “Lover, Come Back to Me” sung by Tony Martin and Joan Weldon and “Stout-Hearted Men” sung to Romberg privately by Helen Traubel as Anna Mueller to get his spirits back up after his latest show has been rejected by producers as too out of date. In the final Carnegie Hall sequence Romberg sings a surprisingly beautiful and heartfelt rendition of his song “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” – and the singing is Ferrer’s own. He’s quite moving, and the song’s position at the end reinforces its autumnal quality (the lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1935 show The Night Is Young are definitely those of a man looking back at a rich, full life: “When I grow too old to dream/Your love will live in my heart”).

Though Romberg wasn’t really a jazz writer, a lot of his songs, particularly “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” and “Lover, Come Back to Me,” have become jazz standards. We have one person in particular to thank: Artie Shaw. Alone among the big swing bandleaders of the 1930’s, Shaw was looking to expand the horizons of the jazz repertoire. His breakthrough hit was Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” (1938), which a lot of other jazz musicians had dismissed because its melody was 108 bars long instead of the usual 32 (a song that long was nicknamed a “tapeworm”) and they didn’t think anyone could remember a chord sequence that long to be able to improvise over it. Shaw in particular raided the operetta world for song material, including “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” and “Lover, Come Back to Me” as well as Rudolf Friml’s “Indian Love Call” and “Jungle Drums,” and that paved the way for other jazz versions of “Softly,” including the Modern Jazz Quartet’s (1952), Sonny Rollins’s (1957), John Coltrane’s (1961), and Albert Ayler’s (1962).