Sad music makes for a happy life

• Bruce Handy gives John Barry the Vanity Fair treatment.

A lamely titled but still interesting piece about Barry, with plenty of choice bits of gossip:

One night, as it happened—and in the retelling, at least, it seems to have happened every night—Barry was having dinner at the Pickwick Club, the fashionable Swinging London–era restaurant, when Saltzman walked in. This was not long after the Goldfinger album had gone to No. 1, and the producer stopped at Barry’s table. The composer was dining with his new best mates, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp. “Harry was being very nice to Mike because he wanted him for The Ipcress File,” Barry recalls. “And then he just looked at me like I was something the cat had dragged in and said”—Barry here imitates a grudging Saltzman, his voice low and dripping with disdain—“‘Thank you.’ That’s how he said it. And I remember Terry Stamp, he said, ‘You fucking asshole!’ And the whole club, because they were all people in the business, everyone burst out laughing. Because everybody wanted to say that to Harry Saltzman.”

I should note that in alternative tellings of this story, Stamp called Saltzman a “cunt,” but Caine well remembers the evening’s gist—and many others like it. “Oh, every night. Every night we were in the Pickwick Club,” the actor says on the phone from London. “We were in the first great disco—can’t remember the bloody name of it now. The Ad Lib! Terry and John and I would be up there the whole time. We were sort of a trio going around and doing that stuff.” Apparently, the three cut quite a swath through London—Barry, a ladies’ man, “had his share and several other people’s,” as Caine puts it—with Barry further distinguishing himself, even in that peacock time and place, as a notably stylish dresser. “He’d always wear the very latest suits,” Caine says, “but never flashy. He was always … cool, I think, is the word for John. He was always cool, always quiet, and very, very sure of himself. I mean, he didn’t need to impress anybody. If you could write like he did, you didn’t need a red suit, you know?”

What the article doesn't mention is the number of scores he had rejected in his career, particularly during in the 90s, a decade in which his style was practically anachronistic: The Prince of Tides, The Bodyguard, Year of the Comet, Goodbye Lover, The Horse Whisperer, and Playing by Heart were all Barry projects hastily rescored at the 11th hour. Handy does, however, give us an insight into why some of these might have been tossed:

(Not that he himself is always easy on his collaborators: Richard Lester, for whom he scored three films, including The Knack and Petulia, is “rather pretentious,” and Francis Coppola, for whom he scored The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married, “thought he knew more about music than he actually did. And I’m not saying that in a mean way.”)

I must confess that for me, despite being a lifelong film music enthusiast, a little bit of Barry goes a long way. He writes those very English, I'm-sad-and-standing-outside-in-a-rainstorm melodies that, while occasionally quite lovely, tend to run together in my head. I like a lot of his earlier stuff, like the first several Bond scores, Born Free, and Zulu, but somewhere in the 70s it seemed like he just started to go through the motions (Body Heat being one notable exception).

But, on the other hand, he did get to deflower Jane Birkin. Props.