"LET’S FALL IN LOVE" (1933)

When Harold Arlen composed the music for "Let’s Fall in Love" in 1933, he literally was falling in love. The prior year, while working on a song for Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1932, he had met seventeen-year-old model and actress Anya Taranda, a member of the cast. Earl Carroll was a Ziegfield-like showman who produced Broadway revues noted for their salacious humor and for having the most scantily clad showgirls on Broadway. Carroll advertised that his shows had "The Most Beautiful Girls in the World," and Taranda fit that mold. A striking blonde ten years younger than Arlen, she was one of the original Breck Shampoo girls and her profile appeared in magazine advertisements and on bottles of Breck Shampoo. Arlen became infatuated with her, but his innate shyness, combined with her beauty and her renown as the Breck Girl with a face more recognizable than his own, caused him to need time to work up the courage to ask her for a date. Once he made the first move, their romance led to a marriage in 1937 that lasted until Taranda’s death in 1970.
Arlen and lyricist Ted Koehler were working as a songwriting team on Broadway in the early 1930s, writing for Cotton Club revues and other Broadway shows, when they received an offer from Columbia Pictures to write songs for a film musical tentatively titled Let’s Fall in Love. Arlen was at the William Morris booking agency when he first learned of Columbia’s offer, and there he jotted down a few bars of melody for a song that he gave the same title as the film, "Let’s Fall in Love." When he informed Koehler of the offer, they both agreed that it would make for a nice change and signed a contract that stipulated they were to spend five weeks in Hollywood and to arrive there by October 1, 1933.
Arlen and Koehler traveled to Hollywood by train, since neither was enamoured of air travel. In his biography entitled Harold Arlen, Edward Jablonski described their cross-country train trip: "…they took the classic route to Hollywood, boarding the celebrated Twentieth Century at Grand Central Station, then changing to the Chief in Chicago. …They virtually had the Chief to themselves. Only the conductor and porter, the latter to announce mealtimes with chimes, materialized from time to time. They also had the observation car to themselves, causing Arlen to fret. With all that privacy, they could do some work on the songs for Let’s Fall in Love en route during the eighteen hours it would take to get to California. "Could have brought a portable organ," Arlen complained to Koehler, who was quite happy viewing the scenery and saving his cells. One lunchtime, when the porter came to summon them with his chimes, Arlen commandeered the instrument to play around with the jot he had written at the Morris. At that moment, it was all they had, for without a script they had no idea of the musical content of the film, or even if Columbia would want a song entitled "Let’s Fall in Love." Nonetheless, when they arrived in California, on time, they had an almost finished title song." As soon as his job was complete in Hollywood, Arlen hurried back to New York to be reunited with Taranda. His cross-country phone bills had been staggering during the weeks he was away.
The film "Let’s Fall in Love" was released in December of 1933 and its title song was sung first by Arthur Jarrett with piano accompaniment and then by Ann Sothern with a full orchestra. Critics gave the film lukewarm reviews, but its songs fared better. Alec Wilder in his book American Popular Song said, "The title song, "Let’s Fall in Love," was one of Arlen’s loveliest. And so is the gossamer verse. ...There it was, one of those marvelous melodic lines that lived a life of its own." The New York Tribune critic deemed "Let’s Fall in Love" "particularly good." The public agreed, and the song appeared in the pop charts three times in 1934, with a recording by Eddy Duchin and His Orchestra peaking at first place, followed by recordings by Fred Rich (#8) and Harold Arlen himself (#19). The song’s last trip to the charts was in 1967 with a recording by the vocal duo Peaches and Herb, which peaked at #21. It may be surprising that a recording by Arlen would appear in the pop charts, but Arlen had begun his musical career as a pianist and singer. At the age of fifteen he led a band named The Snappy Trio that played the red-light-district cabarets (despite the whole band being underage!) in his native city of Buffalo, NY, and his dream was to be a performer rather than a composer. Even after his fame as a composer eclipsed that as a performer, he continued to make recordings, especially of his own compositions.
Lyricist Koehler was particularly well suited to working with Arlen. In his book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia describes how Koehler was "...one of the few lyricists who could skillfully set music that used the extended, driving phrases of jazz and blues..." Furia goes on to describe how "Let’s Fall in Love," even though it was written for a film rather than a Cotton Club revue, "...has the same brassy pugnacity of their nightclub songs, as Koehler turns the cliches of romantic proposal into an aggressive sales pitch with rhetorical questions –
Why shouldn’t we fall in love?
Urgent deal-clinchers –
Let’s take a chance
And dangling bargains –
We might have been made for each other"
Arlen and Koehler may have seemed made for each other when it came to writing songs like "Let’s Fall in Love," but when they returned from Hollywood and went back to writing for the Cotton Club, their collaboration ended after the 1934 revue. Arlen began working with lyricist Yip Harburg and Koehler went back to Hollywood, where he worked with various composers.
"Let’s Fall in Love" has become a jazz standard covered by a wide range of artists. Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra made well known recordings, but one of the most notable recent versions is by the WICN Artist of the Month for June, Diana Krall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrNnmuyDqc