An irregular inclusion on Terry Wogan’s breakfast show over the years has been
a quaint song about a girl’s bumbling advances to a date: “Would you like to
stay ’til sunrise? It’s completely your decision.” In spite of the
prettiness of the melody, though, it is clear there is more to the song than
freshman student embarrassment. Wogan is wont to comment: “Here comes that
strange lady again.”
Jarvis Cocker, picking The Lady with the Braid as a Desert Island Disc,
said: “I remember very vividly first hearing this record. I had moved to
London. I was living in this squat and I was trying to put a curtain rail
up. I was listening to the radio and it’s one of those moments where you
have to stop what you’re doing and pay full attention.”
A clue to the song’s subtle power is in the name of the performer, Dory
Previn. She was the wife of André Previn in the Sixties, and worked with him
on music for films such as Inside Daisy Clover, Valley of the Dolls,
and The Sterile Cuckoo – which won her an Oscar. When André left Dory
for Mia Farrow she had a breakdown. One way out of her crisis was
songwriting for herself, not for the movies. She was already in her
mid-forties by the time her first, deeply confessional LP, On My Way to
Where, came out in 1970. “They were all based on true experiences,” she
tells me. “The music I write for films is not. These songs were for me. I
know myself better than anyone else, so it helped me. It was
self-revelation.”
Songwriting as self-helptherapy after a break-up or a breakdown has produced
some of pop’s more startling works. The splendour of Amy Winehouse’s Back
to Black can be pinned on her jagged relationship with Blake
Fielder-Civil. Thirty years previously, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours documented
two disintegrating relationships – within the band, as they were recording –
with trillion-selling melodies such as Go Your Own Wayand Dreams.
Yet the drawn-out demise of Abba’s two couplings, laid bare on 1981’s The
Visitors, produced one of their worst-selling albums; maybe if the
reticent Swedes would admit that songs such as One of Usand the eerie Like
an Angel Passing Through My Room aren’t fictional, they could gain
kudos.
Dory would not back away from admitting that The Lady with the Braid et
al are autobiographical. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t say. I don’t want to
sound like I’m always talking about myself, but I’ve been there. In life and
on stage. I’ve been in mental hospitals, I’ve been up and down those
stairs.”
Her New Jersey upbringing is still audible in her voice. She was born in 1925
and, after a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, decided to become a chorus
girl.
“When I was a kid I was the star of Woodbridge, New Jersey. I thought I could
do the same thing in other towns, so I did. I was a walk-on and each night
I’d add things and get laughs. I was getting more laughs than [main act]
Rust Hills, the comedian. One day he said ‘I wanna talk to you, in my
office.’ I thought he was going to say what a good job I was doing but he
said, ‘Don't do that again, ever.’ He got me fired. I’ve got his picture on
the wall. When I get bum raps I like to hang ’em on the wall!”
Chastened, she took a train to Hollywood in the late Fifties where she landed
a job at MGM. “André was head of the musical department at MGM. We became
partners.
“It was nice. He was a bit miffed when I showed up because in those days women
didn’t know very much, apparently. He said, ‘Show me something.’ So I played
some material I’d been doing – I was very shy about this – and he said,
‘These are good.’
“Like I didn’t know! Next thing we got married.” For a while life was sweet.
“I’m not the kind of person where things happen and everything’s wonderful.
But me and André started fooling around, I asked if he would accompany me,
and suddenly we were doing a movie. We did songs for Judy Garland and men
and women of that ilk. It was wonderful.”
At this point, Mia Farrow arrived on the scene. Dory expressed her outrage in Beware
of Young Girlsa few years later:“She was my friend, my friend/ oh what a
rare and happy pair, she inevitably said/ as she glanced at my unmade bed.”
“André and I were married. But he had a long-term commitment to work, not to
marriage. I understand that. She was young and beautiful and blah, blah,
blah.
“He went to South America or somewhere and got a divorce. It frightened me,
being alone, having to write with people I didn’t know.”
Does she know if Farrow ever heard the song?
“With her ego? Of course she did. She’s probably got the record framed in the
bathroom! It’s OK. These experiences do us a lot of good. I got through.”
Though she was twice their age, Dory Previn made albums that sat well on
sensitive student shelves in the early Seventies alongside the work of Janis
Ian and Laura Nyro. “Who else was I listening to? I was listening to myself.
If your father says you’re not his child, if your mother had terrible
experiences, a life like that is so outrageous . . . you begin to reveal in
songs what you don’t reveal even to your friends.”
Stories surfaced from her memory such as Left HandLost, a song about
being born “sinister” but being forced by the nuns at her school to write
with her right hand. “Yes, they hit me, those darling girls. When you write
a song, you can get an answer to something that’s been bugging you for
years. Over time I’d begin to feel I wasn’t using my correct hand, like I
needed to get a better grasp on a pen, on a word, an idea. It resulted in my
nervous breakdown.”
Like those of Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman, Dory’s songs drew largely on
Americana, leavened with black humour. From the same year as On My Way to
Wherewas John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album, which was
shorter on laughs. The breakdown in Lennon’s case was partly owing to his
split with the Beatles, and he tried primal scream therapy to write songs
such as God, Motherand My Mummy’s Dead.
Maybe it was something in the posthippy 1970s air; Dory Previn’s Twenty
Mile Zone was about an occasion on which she “was screaming in fury and
frustration in the car. This ‘shout’ therapy lead to the unwanted attentions
of the law.”
Lennon’s childhood had been a mess – abandoned by his mother, she was later
killedin a car accident within weeks of them reuniting. Previn likewise had
an alcoholic father. That relationship is recounted in the extremely
unsettling With My Daddy in the Attic.
“He locked my mother and me up in a room for several weeks. He was like a
lover but I wasn’t old enough then to understand. It was tough stuff. Later
I realised it wasn’t just me – I was it for him. My mother was ignored. When
she had another child it was better because she had someone too.”
Even now it seems hard for her to break out of her mental binds. Trying to
explain where she lives these days, she says: “That’s a question that’s hard
for me to answer. I’m where I live. I’m in the country, on a farm, with
horses. Where I live inside myself, that’s quite a different question.”
It seems hard to square this person with someone who could have played
Carnegie Hall with just a piano. “They had to escort me down the stairs, I
was so nervous I couldn’t stand up. I was on stage, alone! Strange? I can’t
begin to tell you... The best part was that I was a strictly raised Catholic
singing on stage to a whole row of nuns. They must have planned it, because
whenI sang Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister? they all got up and walked
out! All in their nunny caps. Everyone started laughing.”
We’re Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx in 1976 is Previn’s
most recent album. Her autobiography, Midnight Baby, was published in
1977, and music took a backseat. In 1997 she was working once more with
André Previn on a piece called The Magic Number, performed by
the New York Philharmonic. This could have felt like “closure”.
Art therapy for Dory Previn now consists of keeping a small pile of books
handy “so that if a thought goes through my head I can look into it to see
if I can make sense of it. I’ve got this Pope encyclopaedia by my bed,
though I’m not religious at all. And The Book of Lilith, which
I love; one called Mind Prophecies, and one of my own to remind
myself that I can do it.”
Yet in spite of all the redraw confession in her songwriting, I start to think
I may have been prying too much. “Listen,” she laughs, a little fiercely.
“The world has delved into my life. It knows all my secrets! That’s what I’m
here for.”
The Art of Dory Previn, compiled from her 1970-72 albums, is out on EMI
