When Harold Arlen returned to California in the winter of 1944, it was to take up again a collaboration with Johnny Mercer, begun some years before.
The film they did after his return was an inconsequential bit of nothing titled Out Of This World, a satire on the Sinatra bobby-soxer craze.
The twist lay in using Bing Crosby's voice on the sound track while leading man Eddie Bracken mouthed the words.
If nothing else, at least two good songs came out of the project, "Out Of This World" and "June Comes Around Every Year".

Though they would produce some very memorable and lasting songs, Arlen and Mercer were not given strong material to work on.
Their first collaboration came close.
Early in 1941 they were assigned to a script titled Hot Nocturne.
It purported to be a reasonably serious attempt at a treatment of jazz musicians, their aims, their problems -- the tug-of-war between the "pure" and the "commercial" -- and seemed a promising vehicle, for the two men shared a common interest in jazz.

Johnny Mercer practically grew up with the sound of jazz and the blues in his ears.
He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1909.
His father, George A. Mercer, was descended from an honored Southern family that could trace its ancestry back to one Hugh Mercer, who had emigrated from Scotland in 1747.

The lyricist's father was a lawyer who had branched out into real estate.
His second wife, Lillian, was the mother of John H. Mercer.
By the age of six young Johnny indicated that he had the call.
One day he followed the Irish Jasper Greens, the town band, to a picnic and spent the entire day listening, while his family spent the day looking.
The disappearance caused his family to assign a full-time maid to keeping an eye on the boy.
But one afternoon Mrs. Mercer met her;
both were obviously on the way to the Mercer home.
The mother inquired, "Where's Johnny, and why did you leave him"?
"There was nothing else I could do", the maid answered, satisfied with a rather vague explanation.
But Mrs. Mercer demanded more.
The maid then told her, "Because he fired me".

With her son evidencing so strong a musical bent his mother could do little else but get him started on the study of music -- though she waited until he was ten -- beginning with the piano and following that with the trumpet.
Young Mercer showed a remarkable lack of aptitude for both instruments.
Still, he did like music making and even sang in the chapel choir of the Woodberry Forest School, near Orange, Virginia, where he sounded fine but did not matriculate too well.

When he was fifteen John H. Mercer turned out his first song, a jazzy little thing he called "Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff".
If his scholarship and formal musicianship were not all they might have been, Mercer demonstrated at an early age that he was gifted with a remarkable ear for rhythm and dialect.
From his playmates in Savannah, Mercer had picked up, along with a soft Southern dialect, traces also of the Gullah dialects of Africa.
Such speech differences made him acutely aware of the richness and expressivness of language.

During the summers, while he was still in school, Mercer worked for his father's firm as a messenger boy.
It generally took well into the autumn for the firm to recover from the summer's help.
"We'd give him things to deliver, letters, checks, deeds and things like that", remembers his half-brother Walter, still in the real estate business in Savannah, "and learn days later that he'd absent-mindedly stuffed them into his pocket.
There they stayed".

This rather detached attitude toward life's encumbrances has seemed to be the dominant trait in Mercer's personality ever since.
It is, however, a disarming disguise, or perhaps a shield, for not only has Mercer proved himself to be one of the few great lyricists over the years, but also one who can function remarkably under pressure.
He has also enjoyed a successful career as an entertainer (his records have sold in the millions) and is a sharp businessman.

He has also an extraordinary conscience.
In 1927 his father's business collapsed, and, rather than go bankrupt, Mercer senior turned his firm over to a bank for liquidation.
He died before he could completely pay off his debts.
Some years later the bank handling the Mercer liquidation received a check for $300,000, enough to clear up the debt.
The check had been mailed from Chicago, the envelope bore no return address, and the check was not signed.

"That's Johnny", sighed the bank president, "the best-hearted boy in the world, but absent-minded".
But Mercer's explanation was simple: "I made out the check and carried it around a few days unsigned -- in case I lost it".
When he remembered that he might have not signed the check, Mercer made out another for the same amount, instructing the bank to destroy the other -- especially if he had happened to have absent-mindedly signed both of them.

When the family business failed, Mercer left school and on his mother's urging -- for she hoped that he would become an actor -- he joined a local little theater group.
When the troupe traveled to New York to participate in a one-act-play competition -- and won -- Mercer, instead of returning with the rest of the company in triumph, remained in New York.
He had talked one other member of the group to stay with him, but that friend had tired of not eating regularly and returned to Savannah.
But Mercer hung on, living, after a fashion, in a Greenwich Village fourth-flight walk-up.
"The place had no sink or washbasin, only a bathtub", his mother discovered when she visited him.
"Johnny insisted on cooking a chicken dinner in my honor -- he's always been a good cook -- and I'll never forget him cleaning the chicken in the tub".

A story, no doubt apocryphal, for Mercer himself denies it, has him sporting a monacle in those Village days.
Though merely clear glass, it was a distinctive trade mark for an aspiring actor who hoped to imprint himself upon the memories of producers.
One day in a bar, so the legend goes, someone put a beer stein with too much force on the monacle and broke it.
The innocent malfeasant, filled with that supreme sense of honor found in bars, insisted upon replacing the destroyed monacle -- and did, over the protests of the former owner -- with a square monacle.
Mercer is supposed to have refused it with, "Anyone who wears a square monacle must be affected"!

Everett Miller, then assistant director for the Garrick Gaieties, a Theatre Guild production, needed a lyricist for a song he had written;
he just happened not to need any actor at the moment, however.
For him Mercer produced the lyric to "Out Of Breath Scared To Death Of You", introduced in that most successful of all the Gaieties, by Sterling Holloway.
This 1930 edition also had songs in it by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin, by E. Y. Harburg and Duke, and by Harry Myers.
Entrance into such stellar song writing company encouraged the burgeoning song writer to take a wife, Elizabeth Meehan, a dancer in the Gaieties.
The Mercers took up residence in Brooklyn, and Mercer found a regular job in Wall Street "misplacing stocks and bonds".

When he heard that Paul Whiteman was looking for singers to replace the Rhythm Boys, Mercer applied and got the job, "not for my voice, I'm sure, but because I could write songs and material generally".
While with the Whiteman band Mercer met Jerry Arlen.
He had yet to meet Harold Arlen, for although they had "collaborated" on "Satan's Li'l Lamb", Mercer and Harburg had worked from a lead sheet the composer had furnished them.
The lyric, Mercer remembers, was tailored to fit the unusual melody.

Mercer's Whiteman association brought him into contact with Hoagy Carmichael, whose "Snowball" Mercer relyriced as "Lazybones", in which form it became a hit and marked the real beginning of Mercer's song-writing career.
After leaving Whiteman, Mercer joined the Benny Goodman band as a vocalist.
With the help of Ziggy Elman, also in the band, he transformed a traditional Jewish melody into a popular song, "And The Angels Sing".
The countrywide success of "Lazybones" and "And The Angels Sing" could only lead to Hollywood, where, besides Harold Arlen, Mercer collaborated with Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Richard Whiting, Walter Donaldson, Jerome Kern, and Arthur Schwartz.
Mercer has also written both music and lyrics for several songs.
He may be the only song writer ever to have collaborated with a secretary of the U. S. Treasury;
he collaborated on a song with William Hartman Woodin, who was Secretary of the Treasury, 1932-33.

When Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen began their collaboration in 1940, Mercer, like Arlen, had several substantial film songs to his credit, among them "Hooray For Hollywood", "Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride", "Have You Got Any Castles, Baby?", and "Too Marvelous For Words" (all with Richard Whiting);
with Harry Warren he did "The Girl Friend Of The Whirling Dervish", "Jeepers Creepers", and "You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby".
Mercer's lyrics are characterized by an unerring ear for rhythmic nuances, a puckish sense of humor expressed in language with a colloquial flair.
Though versatile and capable of turning out a ballad lyric with the best of them, Mercer's forte is a highly polished quasi-folk wit.

His casual, dreamlike working methods, often as not in absentia, were an abrupt change from Harburg's, so that Arlen had to adjust again to another approach to collaboration.
There were times that he worked with both lyricists simultaneously.

Speaking of his work with Johnny Mercer, Arlen says, "Our working habits were strange.
After we got a script and the spots for the songs were blocked out, we'd get together for an hour or so every day.
While Johnny made himself comfortable on the couch, I'd play the tunes for him.
He has a wonderfully retentive memory.
After I would finish playing the songs, he'd just go away without a comment.
I wouldn't hear from him for a couple of weeks, then he'd come around with the completed lyric".

Arlen is one of the few (possibly the only) composer Mercer has been able to work with so closely, for they held their meetings in Arlen's study.
"Some guys bothered me", Mercer has said.
"I couldn't write with them in the same room with me, but I could with Harold.
He is probably our most original composer;
he often uses very odd rhythms, which makes it difficult, and challenging, for the lyric writer".

While Arlen and Mercer collaborated on Hot Nocturne, Mercer worked also with Arthur Schwartz on another film, Navy Blues.
Arlen, too, worked on other projects at the same time with old friend Ted Koehler.
Besides doing a single song, "When The Sun Comes Out", they worked on the ambitious American-Negro Suite, for voices and piano, as well as songs for films.

The American-Negro Suite is in a sense an extension of the Cotton Club songs in that it is a collection of Negro songs, not for a night club, but for the concert stage.
The work had its beginning in 1938 with an eight-bar musical strain to which Koehler set the words "There'll be no more work;
there'll be no more worry", matching the spiritual feeling of the jot.
This grew into the song "Big Time Comin'".
By September 1940 the Suite had developed into a collection of six songs, "four spirituals, a dream, and a lullaby".

The Negro composer Hall Johnson studied the American-Negro Suite and said of it, "Of all the many songs written by white composers and employing what claims to be a Negroid idiom in both words and music, these six songs by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler easily stand far out above the rest.
Thoroughly modern in treatment, they are at the same time, full of simple sincerity which invariably characterizes genuine Negro folk-music and are by no means to be confused with the average 'Broadway Spirituals' which depend for their racial flavor upon sundry allusions to the 'Amen Corner', 'judgement Day', 'Gabriel's Horn', and a frustrated devil -- with a few random hallelujahs thrown in for good measure.