Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Moon River’
When I was a kid, “Moon River” was part of the atmosphere. For several years in the early sixties it was ubiquitous, a persistent favorite on middle-of-the-road radio and on TV variety shows, de rigueur for every “pop” singer, one of those grownup survivors in a rock & roll world.
It was introduced in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Audrey Hepburn, with Henry Mancini’s melody and Johnny Mercer’s lyrics. Mercer had been one of our top lyricists for over twenty-five years by this time, but with changing musical tastes the hits were fewer and further between. Most of Mercer’s best-known songs, like “I’m Old Fashioned” and “Too Marvelous for Words,” were written for films, but he also wrote a number of songs as stand-alone pop tunes in the Tin Pan Alley mode, for instance “Skylark,” with Hoagy Carmichael, as well as the occasional Broadway show score, most notably with Harold Arlen. In the fifties, as the market for standards was waning, Mercer turned to penning English lyrics for foreign songs, most notably “Autumn Leaves.” By the early sixties he was once again writing great film songs, in partnership with Mancini, but these were usually just the title tunes, not complete scores for musicals. Both “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” were Oscar winners. “Charade” was nominated.
It was Andy Williams who scored the big hit with “Moon River.” Now I know there are people who will argue that Williams was a great singer, but I find his white-bread voice and interpretations utterly vapid. The meeting of his voice and this song may sound pretty to some ears, but to me the performance says absolutely nothing, and the schmaltzy backing choral group adds artery-clogging insult to injury. Granted, I’m a jazz guy, but when I hear the Williams version I wonder, what is this song about? Why is this guy singing it? I scratch my head, clueless.
It was only after seeing Audrey Hepburn sing it in the film that I understood what the song is all about. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s ditzy, gold-digging party girl who drinks and sleeps her way around New York’s café society, and whose sophisticated, devil-may-care veneer is the scab on the soul of a wounded country girl, deep country, who had escaped a loveless marriage to a much older man, a cradle robber played by the future Jed Clampett. Hepburn strums a guitar and sings the song on Holly’s Manhattan window ledge; in the context of the story, Mercer’s poetic, impressionistic lyrics come into focus.
It’s a sylvan, romantic idyll for Holly, caught between the hillbilly husband of the past and the wealthy cads of the New York present, a vision of the innocence she was denied and a wide world of promise. It’s a short song, but it says so much; in context, it’s really heartbreaking. And it was genius on the part of the film’s producers to keep Audrey Hepburn’s voice in the film when it was standard practice to have “real” singers dub the voices of actors. The wistful reading in Hepburn’s wispy voice is a stealthy gut punch.