Bob and Me

I was very flattered in 2016 when Bob — if you knew Robert Gottlieb, you never called him anything but “Bob” — sent me a copy of his new memoir, “Avid Reader,” with a bookmark directing me to open it at page 356. There it was, immediately after his account of the writing and editing of Bill Clinton’s “My Life,” roughly five paragraphs about my professional and personal relationship with Bob. He tells it better than I could, but basically we met because he had read my 1989 book, “Jazz Singing,” around the time that he rediscovered the so-called Great American Songbook and those who sing it. He was picking up some albums in the Jazz Record Center on West 26th Street and asked proprietor Fred Cohen if he knew me; as it happened, my father Herb was in the shop at the time. Next thing I knew, I was talking with Bob over lunch.The mention of “lunch” in the context of Bob is a peculiar thing. Nearly every obituary I have read makes a point that Bob was not the typical editor who lived to schmooze with A-list celebs over an expense account-funded meal at Del Frisco’s with multiple martinis; that he was much too hard working to waste time with such social niceties. Wilfrid Sheed, the great essayist, whose final book was also about the American songbook, told me that he never worked with Bob because, “The only thing an editor is really good for is to take you to lunch, and Bob doesn’t do that.” Maybe it was just the period in which I knew him, but Bob and I had lunch easily a hundred times. It was always the same: I’d meet him at his townhouse on East 48th Street, we’d talk about whatever book that we were working on for roughly a half hour, and then go out to lunch at a coffee shop around the corner for an hour or so after that. My favorite memories of Bob always revolve around food and music. Bob was a little more varied in his selection of his luncheon fare, but as for me, I could never pass a Greek coffee shop without ordering the lamb gyro. At one point in the mid 1990s, we drove out to the annual Jazz Record Collector’s Bash in New Jersey, and he told me an elaborate story that didn’t make it into “Avid Reader.” In the early 1950s, he undertook a transatlantic cruise on a luxury liner (the Queen Mary?) and was impressed by the opulence but appalled by the excessive waste; in those days, ships were simply dumping the leftover food overboard. Anyhow, as he was in the middle of describing these over-the-top haute cuisine meals he had enjoyed in formal dinnerware four decades earlier, we happened to pass a local fast food joint and his eyes lit up as he exclaimed, “Buffalo Wings!”Bob came into my life just when I needed him most; I was in the middle of finishing my 1995 book, “Sinatra! The Song is You” for Scribner’s, and the editor who acquired it left for a better offer at another house. I was essentially without an editor, and was desperate to get the book finished in time for the deadline of Sinatra’s impending 80th birthday. Bob graciously stepped in, and when I offered to compensate him with a collection of 30 or so Sinatra CDs (don’t ask me how I happened to get a duplicate set), he accepted. Bob edited that book, line by line. My strongest memory is that there were two chapter endings to which he objected. For the chapter on Sinatra’s “nosedive” period of the early 1950s, I wanted to end with a play on the phrase, “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” which I reworked as “the ballet ain’t over till the swan dies.” Bob chuckled, but he wanted to cut it. The other was the end of the chapter on Sinatra and one of his key musical directors, the arranger Billy May. I wanted to end with, “no other collaborator helped him sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs over the world,” in a play on Walt Whitman. I fought for both endings, but ultimately the swan remained and Uncle Walt was vanquished. Going forward, whenever we disagreed on anything, Bob would always counter with, “I let you keep your swan, so forget it!” (Twenty years later, when I prepared an expanded edition of “The Song is You,” I restored Walt Whitman to the last line of the Billy May chapter. I never did tell Bob.) The key years of our own collaboration were roughly 2000 to 2017, when we conceived and executed three books, “Stardust Melodies” (2010), “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers” (2010), and “The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums” (2017). We spent most of our time discussing and arguing over singers: he loved Anita O’Day, Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor, and Della Reese, but was lukewarm on Peggy Lee and June Christy. We both adored Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, and, no surprise, Sinatra and especially Ella Fitzgerald. We were listening to one of the inevitably rare albums by the lesser-known Little Jimmy Scott when I mentioned to Bob that Scott was appearing the next week at the Iridium. He was so shocked and delightfully surprised that such allusive literal living legend could actually be experienced in person. The other concert I vividly remember taking him to was Aretha Franklin at one of her last appearances at the JVC Jazz Festival. Bob tended to disappear during the summer months, usually hiding out in his house at Miami Beach, which, even more than his 48th Street townhouse, contained a vast collection of kitsch; the centerpiece was a lamp which extended out of the mouth of a small alligator. I told Bob I hoped that it wasn’t a real baby alligator that had been killed and stuffed to make a lamp, but Bob said, “I don’t know, but I had to have it.” It was during one such August, around 2001, if memory serves, that the announcement came that President Clinton had signed with Bob to do his own autobiography, published in 2004 as “My Life.” The advance was $15 million, which was reportedly the largest ever paid by a publisher. The news made the headlines but Bob, who was not interested in such attention, hid out from reporters and celebrity journalists in Florida. For years, like most of Bob’s friends, I clamored for the chance to meet Mr. Clinton, but never got the opportunity. That was, until I had learned that Bob had also served as the editor for another best seller, that essential self-help book, “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life.” From that point on, whenever I saw Bob, I said “Forget about meeting Clinton, can you hook me up with Miss Piggy?”

Bob and Me

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