Fran Landesman (1927–2011)

Fran Landesman launched her career as a jazz lyricist in St. Louis in the 1950s. A native New Yorker, she was married to St. Louisan Jay Landesman. In 1952, Jay and his brothers, Gene and Fred, opened the Crystal Palace, a lush nightclub furnished with crystal chandeliers and other décor from the Landesman family antiques business. Six years later they moved the club to a more spacious building in what was becoming known as Gaslight Square, the area around the intersection of Olive and Boyle Streets that was a lively magnet for artists, musicians, hipsters, and beatniks. Tommy Wolf, a local composer and pianist who played regularly at the Crystal Palace, wrote the music for many of Fran’s songs. One of their compositions, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” became a jazz standard recorded by numerous artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and later singers such as Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones.

Born Frances Deitsch, the daughter of a New York City clothing manufacturer, Fran met her future husband in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. At that time, Jay Landesman, a writer, was living in New York and editing Neurotica, a literary magazine that published early work by Allen Ginsberg and other members of the “beat generation.” As a hip young couple, the Landesmans mingled with famous or soon-to-be-famous writers, including Jack Kerouac. They married in 1950, and a year later they moved to St. Louis, where they poured their energy into the Crystal Palace, a nightclub and theater featuring brass and crystal chandeliers and hip entertainment by jazz and folk musicians. Over the next several years the club raised St. Louis’s standing in the performing arts by attracting emerging stars such as Streisand, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May.

The Landesmans hired Tommy Wolf, a World War II veteran, as the resident pianist. His fans were jazz afficionados who used words like “pad” (apartment) and “hung up” (emotionally confused). Fran approached him with a question about T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” which begins with the words “April is the cruelest month.” She asked him how he would say the same thing in beatnik language. When he had no answer, she said, jokingly, “Spring can really hang you up the most.” Fran’s little joke became the title of a song and the beginning of a decade of musical collaboration with Wolf.

In 1959, Wolf and the Landesmans teamed up to produce The Nervous Set, a musical based on Jay Landesman’s unpublished, semi-autobiographical novel. The show, a satirical yet loving evocation of the beat generation, opened in March and played for packed houses at the Crystal Palace. One of the show’s twenty songs, “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” served as an elegy for the Landesmans’ New York literary circle, including Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, who was a St. Louis native. Robert Lantz, a Broadway producer, saw the show and restaged it in New York, but it ran for only twenty-three performances. 

Barbra Streisand appeared in a revue called “Caught in the Act” at the Crystal Palace in April 1961. According to Frank Hunter, a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the revue featured “three boys and a girl, all of whom are young, frothy, and full of jazz.” Two of the boys were the Smothers Brothers, Tom and Dick, soon to become a famous entertainment duo, and who had appeared already on the television show Tonight StarringJack Paar doing stand-up comedy while playing guitar and bass. Streisand, according to Hunter, was “a chic singer with a wide-ranging voice.” She was eighteen years old at the time, and three years later she starred in the hit Broadway play Funny Girl. In 2009 she released an album titled Love Is the Answer, which included “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.”

In the early 1960s, Gaslight Square changed from a haven for beatniks to a magnet for tourists. On February 10, 1959, a tornado blasted through the streets in the Olive-Boyle area, leaving many buildings in shambles. The Crystal Palace suffered damage, but quickly recovered. Some of the older businesses, including several antique shops, left the area, and new businesses replaced them. Publicity after the tornado drew a new crowd of curiosity-seekers to the area, which was officially named Gaslight Square in 1961. In 1963 the Laclede Gas Company installed actual gas lamps. New forms of entertainment, including strip clubs and dance clubs, moved in and catered to a different, younger, less-sophisticated crowd. Tommy Wolf and his wife, Mary, left St. Louis and moved to California. The crime rate surged. By 1967, Laclede was turning off the gas lamps, and five years later Gaslight Square was history. The Crystal Palace had closed in 1964, and Fran and Jay Landesman and their sons, Cosmo and Miles, resettled in London, the new hot spot for hip music.

Fran wrote and performed an impressive number of new songs, but struggled to build an audience. Bob Dorough, a jazz pianist and singer who was a member of the Army Band during World War II, had appeared at the Crystal Palace in 1960, and a few years later he showed up in London and reconnected with the Landesmans. In 1966 he recorded a demo album called In the Words of Fran Landesman / In the Style of Bob Dorough, produced by the Richmond Organization (TRO). One year later, TRO published a songbook with the same title. Dorough later found success writing and singing kid-friendly songs for the television series Schoolhouse Rock! while Fran’s career languished in the background.

As a lyricist, she worked with another, more famous television personality, Steve Allen, who was also a prolific composer. Allen hosted his own prime-time network show from 1956 to 1961 and a syndicated late-night show from 1962 to 1964. In 1967 he recorded a demo album, Seven Songs by Steve Allen, produced by TRO. Four of the songs featured Fran Landesman as lyricist. Allen had a peculiar habit of using pseudonyms; for example, in 1959 he released an album called The Discovery of Buck Hammer, on which he posed as a deceased musician by that name. In 1968, TRO published sheet music for “A Man Who Used to Be,” composed by “Jeremy Fitch” (actually Allen), with lyrics by Fran Landesman. Robert Goulet recorded the song on a 1986 album titled Would You Dance with This Man? The song, like much of Fran’s work, was sad and reflective. The first verse posed a question:

Would you dance with a man

Who used to be handsome,

Used to be dashing,

Used to be brave

Now he isn’t so old

But somehow he’s slipping

Still he’s got something

Someone could save

In Landesman’s lyrics, love was a complicated thing. Her marriage to Jay was also complicated. The Landesmans lived a bohemian lifestyle, and each of them had a string of love affairs. They promised only that they would never lie to each other. The marriage endured, and so did Fran’s devotion to her work. Jay became a publisher so that he could see his wife’s poetry in print. Her books of poetry, published between 1975 and 1997, included Is It Overcrowded in Heaven, More Truth than Poetry, The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Other Verse, Invade My Privacy, The Thorny Side of Love, Rhymes at Midnight, and Scars and Stripes. The Landesmans’ personal and artistic partnership ended in 2011 with Jay’s death in February and Fran’s in July of the same year.

A New York Times obituary appeared under the headline “Fran Landesman, Lyricist with a Bittersweet Edge, Dies at 83.” By the time of her death, “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” had been recorded by such artists as Roberta Flack, Petula Clark, and Rickie Lee Jones, joining “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” as a jazz standard. In the US edition of the Independent, Michael Horowitz praised the breadth and depth of Fran’s work. She left behind an enormous collection of songs, including a nostalgic verse, set to music by Tommy Wolf, titled “A City Called St. Louis” that ended with this stanza:

And so I went across the ocean,

I’ve tried a lot of scenes and yet,

There was a city called St. Louis

That I just can’t forget

That I just can’t forget.