Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Next day, with Alice back at my bedside and fiddling with her tape recorder, I said, “I’m not sure Max and I deserve a chapter in your book. We were never Goffin and King, or Leiber and Stoller.”

“You were different, you were a Brit.”

“Who married a girl from Greenwich Village.”

“She was a folk singer,” Alice said, as if I didn’t know. “How romantic.”

“And I was a lyricist whose sole claim to fame was the words to a Cliff Richard B-side. Patty and I met in a club in Soho at the end of the ’fifties. I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was so lovely, so intense.”

“You wrote songs with her?”

“At first. Not a good idea, we both realised in the end. You can’t work with someone you’re passionate about. She was a wannabe Joan Baez, but my heart belonged to Tin Pan Alley. After I followed her to New York, I had a couple of breaks, grabbed a short-term contract with Famous Music. It went from there.”

A dreamy look came into her hazel eyes. “What was it like in those days, working in the Brill Building?”

“One thing it wasn’t, was glamorous. Eleven floors of offices and every one housed a music publisher. Each company had its writers’ rooms, stuffy cubicles with just enough room for a beat-up piano and a couple of chairs. The windows didn’t open; it was hell working with a guy like Max who smoked nonstop.” I coughed to make the point. “I ought to sue, don’t you think? That place surely killed me.”

“You all kept changing partners.”

“Sure. I’d write with one guy in the morning, another in the afternoon. That’s the way it worked. But there was something about Max’s melodies. They seemed to make a better fit with the words I wrote. Bobby Vinton liked our songs, Jay and the Americans gave us a Top Thirty hit. It went on from there. Before long the two of us were a team.”

“You met Lorna Key at a recording session, so the story goes.”

“It’s a true story,” I said. “There was an Isley Brothers session and we had a song on the date. She was one of the girls singing in the background. You couldn’t help but notice her. Even in pigtails and jeans, she was gorgeous. Her voice was raw; even as a kid she was a chain-smoker. Her lungs must have been in worse shape than Max’s, but it wasn’t her lungs that he was interested in. He said she had potential. Nice euphemism, huh? He wanted her to start recording our demos. I went along with it, even though I never cared much for her sound. Subtlety was never her strong point.”

Alice glanced at her notebook. “Soon she signed with Kapp Records.”

“Yeah, Lorna thought she’d become a star, but the truth is, Max pulled strings. They were married the week before her first single came out.”

“ ‘Eternally.’ ” Alice smiled and crooned the chorus:

“For as long as there’s a deep blue sea,
For as long as there’s a you and me,
I will love you eternally.”

I shifted under the bedclothes. “I never claimed to be William Shakespeare.”

She glanced over her shoulder, caught the puzzled frown of the nurse walking into the ward. In the bed opposite, old Arthur gave a toothless grin and tried to mime applause with his wasted hands.

“It has a hook,” she said. “I’ve been humming the blessed thing all day. Can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

“Ah, the potency of cheap music.”

“Lorna’s voice was stronger than mine.”

“She belted it out,” I agreed. “Though that wasn’t what it called for. ‘Eternally’ is a tender love song. But Lorna, she didn’t do tenderness. You talk about murder. Well, she murdered ‘Eternally.’ It was always a favourite of mine. For once, the words came before the music. I’d written it for Patty, a token of our love.”

“I like the melody,” she said. Not altogether tactfully.

“Max was a smart writer. He’d switch time signatures, come up with ten-and-a-half-bar phrases, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Lorna couldn’t handle it. She’d stumble over the tricky bits; we did a dozen takes and then settled for the second. I thought it was lousy, kept asking how you can rasp a love song, but Max said it was wonderful.”

“He was besotted with her.”

“That’s what people forget. And you know something? He was proved right. That song went straight into the charts at number twenty-nine. Almost made it to the Top Ten. Lorna Key never had a bigger record.”

“The publicity must have helped. Her marrying the composer.”

“Sure, the press lapped it up.”

“Did you resent that? Max was always the one in the public eye, not you. Radio announcers used to talk about Max Heller songs, forget they were written by Heller and Jackson.”