seen at the Film Forum, in a remastered version

The movie begins with this quote from Emily Dickinson:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog – 
To tell one’s name – the livelong June – 
To an admiring Bog!

And so we learn of Artie Shaw’s relationship with his celebrity, he who taught himself first the saxophone, then the clarinet. After dropping out of school, he made his living up to 1929, when he was 19 years old, writing commercial music to promote products. Bored with this work, he began playing with real musicians, and became a famous band leader, with great hits– the first being his recording of the Cole Porter classic, Begin the Beguine, which led to his celebrity. The swing era was kind to Artie. Jitterbug dancing craze made him extremely popular, which led to his ditching the whole thing. He did not like being surrounded by morons including dancers who rushed the stage and nearly knocked out his teeth with their vigorous kicking.

For Artie Shaw was first and foremost an intellectually curious man who had no truck with those lesser mortals interested only in losing their minds over their dance partners. He could be difficult. Ask one of his eight wives, most of whom were actresses, including Evelyn Keyes, who spoke candidly of Shaw’s overbearing personality, but who obviously still held some affection for him. Mel Torme looked up to him but knew better than to cross him.

Shaw was credited with hiring Billie Holliday, breaking a color barrier, in the 1930s, to sing in his band, when they were both very young, and not used to navigating the deep south with its segregation policies. 

Shaw’s ambition was to be a writer. Whenever he could he would quit music, and move to a rural location, where he would be surrounded by books, and write. His first book, The Trouble with Cinderella, was an autobiography. He wrote several novels as well.

The movie gives a chronology of Shaw’s life up through the 1980s, when Brigitte Berman originally made it, and afterward received an Oscar for Best Documentary Film in 1985. Early years get the most detailed treatment, up to and including the war years, when Shaw enlisted in the navy. His heavy schedule, and questioning mind, brought on a nervous breakdown, and subsequent psychoanalysis to understand what made him want to continue living.

Always restless, when he came back to the United States from his station in the Pacific, he took up music again, and had a bit of a resurgence until he wanted to include a string quartet in his swing orchestras. This did not always work with audiences who longed for the old pop hits of his youth. By the 1950s when he was interrogated at the House on Un-American Activities, he had grown so disillusioned with his country that he moved to Spain, and built a house on a cliff overlooking the sea. 

He never seemed to suffer poverty. From one beautiful farm house to a house on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, to a calm country manor in Connecticut, Shaw’s restlessness shows itself in his constantly starting, and then dismissing bands, moving from one coast to another, marrying one woman after another. The one constant in Shaw’s life, besides his pronounced talent to play the clarinet, was his curiosity about everything. His houses always contained huge libraries of books that he had read. When he took up fishing in Spain, he built a special room that contained not only his fishing gear, but his library of books about fishing. Evelyn Keyes, his last wife, explained how you could ask him anything about fish, and he could tell you. She also remarked how fish were located in beautiful places, explaining how Shaw’s restlessness and love of fishing went hand in hand.

I wanted to see this movie because I love the recordings I have of Shaw’s music, especially his clarinet playing. As one of his band mates described it, it had a fatter tone than Benny Goodman, with whom he had a brief rivalry during the swing era. Watching the crazed jitterbugger, I wondered what propelled them to such speedy moves, and thought it must have had to do with getting out of the Depression. Dancing your way to great music thanks to Artie Shaw must have been extremely satisfying.