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"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"

The movie includes several Rodgers and Hart songs that were not written for Pal Joey but interpolated into the movie from previous Rodgers and Hart shows:

These extra songs give Joey (read Sinatra) the opportunity to sing numbers as part of his nightclub act that will be sure fire audience pleasers; and, of course, Frank, using Nelson Riddle arrangements, delivers them splendidly.

About the Show and Movie Pal Joey and the Introduction of "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."

Show: Pal Joey (music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart, book by John O'Hara, directed by George Abbott) is a show based on a series of short stories by John O'Hara, stories first published in The New Yorker. It features the anti-heroic heel, Joey, a nightclub performer and womanizer who is willing to exploit anything and anybody to get what he wants. Pal Joey is often viewed as a break through musical because of its portrayal of unvarnished characters in a no-holds-barred plot with a gritty noir setting as opposed to the romanticized and sentimentalized figures and stories (when there was a story at all) common to virtually all previous musical comedies.

Pal Joey opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York Dec 25, 1940, and closed Nov 29, 1941. It was staged in London's West End in 1954 and 1980 and was revived on Broadway in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008, as well as in a New York City Center Encores! production in 1995.

Ed. Note: For complete original cast and Broadway revival production details, visit IBDB. For more show details including plot synopsis, view the Wikipedia article.

"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (alternate title: "Bewitched") is performed in the original 1940 Broadway production of Pal Joey by Vivienne Segal playing Vera Simpson, a wealthy but bored, society matron who uses her husband's money to spice up her life. She sings the song not too long after she has met the title character, played by Gene Kelly in his only major Broadway role. Joey Evans, an entertainer in a less than classy Chicago nightclub, has developed an interest in an innocent young woman, Linda English (See "I Could Write a Book."), played by Leila Ernst, but gives her short shrift soon after meeting Vera and realizing how useful she can be to him. Vera sees him as a possible toy to play with but is affected by his considerable charm, and it doesn't take long for their mutually self-centered interests to get intertwined in an affair. Before she knows it Vera is financing a glitzy new nightclub for him, Chez Joey, and while she is buying him a new wardrobe in a custom tailor shop, sings "Bewitched." The song reflects her ambivalence about her new circumstance: She is more or less pleased with herself that she is still able, at her age and "after one whole quart of brandy," to awake "like a daisy"; but self-critical knowing full well that "he's a fool," albeit an irresistible one, who has put her "on the blink." In other words, instead of just having the good time she was after discovers she is "bewitched, bothered and bewildered."

In the next scene (the last scene of Act I), Kelly/Joey along with the company dance a ballet to the rearranged music of "Bewitched."

For Frederick Nolan, Hart's biographer, the song is "the sensuous soliloquy of an older woman musing on the debatable charms of her kept lover (Nolan, 274, hard-bound ed.). For Thomas Hischak, Hart's lyric "is, perhaps, the most cynical and jaded he ever wrote" (Hischak, Musical Theater Song, p. 29).

Vera reprises the song at the end of the show after she has dropped Joey, they have gone their separate ways, and she realizes she is "bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more."

In the much altered 1957 Hollywood version of Pal Joey, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" is performed by Rita Hayworth (dubbed by Jo Ann Greer), and Joey is played by Frank Sinatra. Even though she was dubbed, Hayworth's performance was, according to critic Chris Ingham writing in 2005, still effective, because "she smolders and smarts beautifully, performing 'Zip' and her implied post-coital 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered' to teasing perfection" (Rough Guide to Sinatra, p. 303).

The Hollywood version has been softened and sanitized to the point where the gritty noir qualities of the show have been reduced to virtual insignificance. First Vera is converted from being the cheating wife of a wealthy man to a more palatable rich widow. Second, a Hollywood ending is created in which the rivals Linda and Vera team up to make sure that Joey, the man they both wanted, lives happily ever after with Linda. In the show's ending, all three characters accept the existential fact that none of their relationships has a chance of going anywhere.

"Bewitched," along with the other great standard from Pal Joey, "I Could Write a Book," were fated not to become hits until long after the show opened. Just before the opening a major dispute between ASCAP and radio broadcasters kept the songs from being exposed to a wide audience at a time when they would have benefited from the publicity associated with the show. The dispute was settled in Feb. 1941, but only in 1950 did "Bewitched" finally emerge as a hit with seven versions making the top twenty on the Billboard charts. The song's rebirth pretty much coincided with a Columbia studio recording of the show issued in 1950 in which Vivienne Segal (the original Vera) and Harold Lang sang the leads. It was the success of this studio album that eventually led to two new productions of Pal Joey, first on Long Island with Bob Fosse playing Joey and then to the the highly acclaimed Broadway revival in 1952 with Lang and Segal.

There is an "Original Cast" album for the 1952 revival of Pal Joey issued by Angel records (not shown), but Segal and Lang are replaced on the album by Jane Froman and Dick Beavers.. The substitutions took place because of contract conflicts between Columbia Records, which owned the rights to Segal, and Capitol Records, which owned the rights to the "cast album." The original Columbia studio album was reissued (with two bonus tracks) as a CD by Sony in 2003, and is the only album featuring the lead singers who actually went on to perform the roles on Broadway in the highly acclaimed 1952 revival. (The reissued 1950 Columbia Studio CD is shown at left.)

Brooks Atkinson, reviewer for The New York Times, then as now the newspaper whose reviews most influenced the fate of Broadway shows, was not prepared for a musical to be set in such a gritty corner of society as the world cheap nightclubs and dubbed the story "odious." He certainly appreciated many aspects of the production especially the Rodgers and Hart songs but underscored his rejection of the show itself by asking, "Although Pal Joey is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?" (Block, Rodgers Reader, 68-70).

Other reviewers were more positively disposed. Wolcott Gibbs of The New Yorker wrote, "I am not optimistic by nature but it seems to me just possible that the idea of equipping a song-and-dance production with a few living, three-dimensional figures, talking and behaving like human beings, may no longer strike the boys in the business as merely fantastic" (Musical Stages, p. 201).

Gene Kelly also entered into the debate over the musical by commenting to the newspapers on the character he played: "Joey isn't bad; he just doesn't know the difference. He's an ignorant, low class bum with nothing but good looks and a good line." But Kelly also observed that in his view Larry Hart was, in distinction to Rodgers and John O'Hara, the only member of the writing team who really understood "they had created something that was a tour de force, bringing a new kind of seriousness to the musical theater." That knowledge, however, did not help Hart when, as Kelly relates, the lyricist at an after-the-opening party at his home "burst into tears and went into his room" when he heard the Atkinson review read to him over the phone. To emphasize the lyricist's despair, Kelly added, "We couldn't get him to come out." (D. Hart, Thou Swell, p. 146-147).

A week after the opening, Richard Watts, then drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune, mounted a defense of Joey--the show as well as the character.

Pal Joey is a sardonic and entirely accurate picture of the type of creature reared in the ugly life of the minor cabarets, and I think that, in my limited way, I have investigated these night clubs carefully enough to attest to the letter-perfect correctness of Mr. O'Hara's reporting. Yet, even though he is a pretty miserable specimen, Joey is by no means unbearable as a musical comedy hero. There is something so naive about his cheap caddishness, he is so essentially an innocent boob, the simple prey of any smart operator, and, above all, he is so guilefully played by Gene Kelly, that moral judgment becomes suspended and he emerges as an object for Olympian amusement rather than hatred. In particular, it seems to me so pleasant to see believable human beings, even if not admirable ones, in a musical comedy for a change that I think the utterly credible Joey should be accepted with gratitude. (reprinted in D. Hart, Thou Swell , p. 154)

It is worth noting that in the twelve years between Pal Joey's original production (1940) and its first revival (1952), public and critical opinion dispensed altogether with the idea of the show being too "real." Rodgers writes in his autobiography, "With Vivienne Segal looking not a day older and again playing the feminine lead, and Harold Lang now in the title role, [the 1952 revival of] Pal Joey was greeted as the freshest, most exciting musical of the season." And in his review, Brooks Atkinson admitted that although he hadn't liked the show the first time around he could see now that it "was a pioneer in the moving back of musical frontiers for it tells an integrated story with a knowing point-of-view. Brimming over with good music and fast on its toes, it renews confidence in the professionalism of the theatre." Gibbs confirmed his 1940 view, writing, "Standards have apparently changed because up to now I have met nobody who found anything embarrassing in the goings on" (Musical Stages, p. 202).

Richard Rodgers wrote in his autobiography that he and Larry Hart, employed a technique in writing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" that is "particularly effective in comedy numbers--the contrast of a flowing, sentimental melody with words that are unsentimental and self-mocking: 'Lost my heart, but what of it? / My mistake I agree. / He's a laugh, but I love it / Because the laughs on me.' At the end of the show, we used the melody again, but now the lyric expressed the reverse.

Romance--finis Your chance--finis Those ants that invaded my pants--finis-- Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered no more!" (from Musical Stages , p. 201)

Some of the most penetrating comments about "Bewitched," especially about Hart's lyric come from Philip Furia. He is interested in how the self-mocking words Vera sings in "Bewitched" work so well in their ironic clash with the flowing sentimentality of Rodgers melody. The irony is extended by how "a jaded lover" at first feels reborn through her relationship with a new young man but eventually falls victim to the triumph of cynicism over both romanticism and sexual ardor. She has had a good look at her "half-pint imitation" of a lover and finds that romance as well as lust is a sham:

Wise at last, My eyes at last are cutting you down to your size at last-- bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more.

Furia calls "Bewitched" "Hart's own swan song . . . the last conceivable turn one could give to the theme of lost love."

A performance that captures the ironies Furia describes above
is from
"An Evening With Patti LuPone" (1997?)
The McCallum Theatre, The Bob Hope Cultural Center, Palm Desert, California.
(Patti Lupone played Vera in the City Center Encores! production of Pal Joey, NYC, 1995)

The best (and best known) of [ Pal Joey's ] plot numbers is 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." Typical of Hart, it depicts love as a purely physical sensation that overwhelms all other human behavior. Typical of Rodgers, the tune is based on coyly simple steps, adding an innocent charm to its blatantly sexual confession. The essential trick of "Bewitched" is its contrasting long and short lines, anchored by Hart's patented triple-rhymes on the repetitive word "again." The "againness of this song, its delight in repetition, is its most striking musical, verbal, psychological, and comic trait. This is not a new sensation for Vera but one that she feels again and again and again: Vexed again, perplexed again, Thank God I can be oversexed again: Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I. (Mast, p. 179, hard-bound ed.)

Geoffrey Block and Meryl Secrest agree that Rodgers music and Hart's lyric match each other in portraying Vera's obsession with Joey. Hart does it by giving her, as Block puts it, "a lyric with "thrice-repeated [rhyming words] to conclude the first three lines of each A section [e.g. "Sweet again, / Petite again, / An on my proverbial seat again"] before delivering the 'hook' of the song's title, 'bewitched, bothered and bewildered,' to conclude each A section" while Rodgers complements Hart's repetition in the A section with "an equally repetitive musical line, the note B ascending up a half-step to C" and then turning it upside down in the B section emphasizing Vera's obsession, while providing a "welcome musical contrast to the repetitive A sections"

The two authors disagree, however, as to whether Hart's lyric was written after Rodgers music as it usually was, or the other way around--as it was when Rodgers wrote with Hammerstein). Block feels that although it might seem as if Rodgers' "musical characterization of Vera's emotional state" with its's "uncanny" correspondence to the pattern of Hart's lyric would have had to have meant that Rodgers wrote the music after having seen the words, he concludes that the team wrote in its usual order and the correspondence derives from Hart's "special sensitivity to Rodgers' music." (Block, Enchanted Evenings, p. 109).

Secrest, on the other hand, observes that although Rodgers usually wrote the music before Hart penned the lyric, in the case of "'situational numbers'" such as "Bewitched," Hart "blocked out the lyrics first and Rodgers came up with exactly the right melody to match" (Secrest, p. 214, soft cover ed.).

Alec Wilder is the dissenter here. Although he calls Hart's lyric including the verse "brilliant," and is usually enthusiastic about Rodgers music, he calls Rodgers' contribution to "Bewitched" "so notey" and adds that his principle device "comes to a negative fruition" finally coming off as "a contrivance": He admits this may be his problem not Rodgers but goes on to explicate:

In the main strain Rodgers uses more thoroughly than ever before his device of keeping a set of notes and moving the rest of the melody. In this case his anchored notes are b and e . The rest of his melody moves up from e to f to g to g sharp to a , between each of which we hear the b and the c . And even after the a , he repeats the b and c again. (Wilder, p. 216, hard bound edition)

Wilfred Sheed also renders a split decision in favor of Hart, but not based on the contribution of either to the song itself, which he sees as a felicitous draw. Rather, what concerns him is the personal behavior of each at this point in the history of their collaboration. Hart was becoming less and less dependable (dependability never having been his strong suit) "disappearing for days on end . . . scribbling his lyrics on envelopes and cocktail napkins and fraying any enchantment his increasingly prickly partner had ever felt for him."

Nevertheless, Sheed is sympathetic to Hart not to Rodgers, whose "whip," he says, "was never far from Larry's back." The critic suggests that he himself would have behaved like Hart had he been treated so. Sheed goes on to speculate that probably the only thing keeping the two together at this time was "the imperturbably high quality of these lyrics." According to Sheed, Hart dashed off the lyrics to "Bewitched" and other songs at this time, a time he dubs Hart's "nightmare years," suggesting that disappearing for days on end was just what Hart's craftsmanship called for, and as if to prove that the artist within him was ultimately just as serious and indomitable as the one inside Richard Rodgers." (Sheed, page 168)

Click here to read the lyrics for "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"
as sung by Ella Fitzgerald--including a version of the verse.

Michael Feinstein uses the verse of "Bewitched" as an example of just how important this portion of a song can be. The verse is constructed, he notes, "to set-up and amplify" what comes in the chorus and that the verse for "Bewitched" is "essential to the enjoyment of the song because it says so much about the character in the show and foreshadows what's to come later on in the plot." Feinstein "guarantee[s] that once you've heard the verse sung before the chorus, you'll always miss it if it isn't sung the next time you hear 'Bewitched'." ( Michael Feinstein. Nice Work If You Can Get It: My Life in Rhythm and Rhyme . New York: Hyperion, 1995, p. 295. ) Of course, you may also be confused because there are two versions of the verse, the published version in which the first four lines are: After one whole quart of brandy, Like a daisy I awake. With no Bromo Seltzer handy, I don't even shake. or the version from the published script of the show: He's a fool and don't I know it-- But a fool can have his charms; I'm in love and don't I show it, Like a babe in arms. ( Hart and Kimball , p. 272-73) Ella in her classic 1956 Rodgers and Hart Songbook album begins with the "brandy' verse but six years later in a live performance at the Crescendo in LA, now on her Twelve Nights in Hollywood album, begins with the "I'm a fool" opening. She doesn't omit the other version on either recording, however, including it between subsequent refrains. Ella and "Bewitched " Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Rodgers And Hart Songbook (studio album, 1956, arrangements and orchestra conducted by Buddy Bregman) Ella Fitzgerald Live at the Opera House Chicago and Los Angeles, 1957 (above performance, Chicago) Ella Fitzgerald live at the Crescendo in Hollywood, 1962 (from the album Twelve Nights in Hollywood ) Paul Smith piano.; Wilfred Middlebrooks, bass, Stan Levey, drums.) And it's worth noting that in the second quatrain of the verse, where the singer calls the man she is singing about "a half-pint imitation," it is almost impossible not to think Hart is being self-referential--given his habit of self-deprecation, his despairing attitude toward love--and his own height, just five foot even. Ella takes liberties with Hart's words in her various recordings of "Bewitched," as do many performers of this song, omitting, substituting and replacing words and lines to suit vocal needs, to make lyrics inoffensive to certain audiences, etc. For example, where Ella sings, "Couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep when love came and told me I shouldn't sleep," Hart's words were, "Couldn't Sleep / And wouldn't sleep / Until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep--." Patti LuPone sings the original version of these lines in her concert performance shown above . On the surface, it might appear that someone, probably not Ella, thought the original was too risque for her audience, yet later on she doesn't hesitate to sing, "Horizontally speaking he's at his very best," which is at least as blue as singing about "where [she] shouldn't sleep." Philip Furia credits the delayed popularity of "Bewitched" to the bowdlerized lyrics found in the later releases of the song, especially beginning around 1950 in which other lines were also changed such as "worship the trousers that cling to him" to "long for the time I cling to him" ( Furia , 124) Gerald Mast notes some of the song's blue lines are "as delightfully raunchy as theater songwriting had ever been." These were more often than not sung each night as encores due to the song's popularity, and so are not included in the published lyric. Many have been lost but Mast has retrieved this one: Slipped again, Flipped again, My chastity belt is unzipped again. ( Mast , p. 179) The eventual popularity of the song is ironic in light of what Vivienne Segal told Jan Clayton and Samuel Marx: "None of us really knew what we had in 'Bewitched.' It was in the wrong spot during rehearsals; I was singing it early in the show. I got them to move it back, but even then it created no sensation at our Philadelphia tryout. No one yelled for encores, so Larry wrote no extra verses for me to sing." This caused a problem when the show opened in New York on Christmas night, 1940, because the more "sophisticated" audience, according to Segal, demanded an encore for "Bewitched," but she had nothing prepared. Just in time, however, she recalled a couplet Hart had written early on but discarded: Dumb again, Numb again, Like Fanny Brice singing "Mon Homme" again.* Segal recalled that, realizing the need, Hart quickly wrote more, some of which like, Vexed again, Perplexed again, Thank God I can be oversexed again-- were kept in and became part of the published lyric. Apparently the audience for Pal Joey on Broadway in 1940 was more tolerant and "sophisticated" than the perceived world of American sheet music buyers, for whom many of Hart's controversial lines were excised or at least cleaned up. (Samuel Marx and Jan Clayton. Rodgers and Hart Bewitched, Bothered and Bedeviled . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976., p. 242, 245) . *Geoffrey Block reveals that some of these early versions were found in John O'Hara's typescript of the 1940 libretto with crossouts and penned in substitutions (presumably by Hart). He suggests it was a good idea to have discarded the lines with the obscure references to Fanny Brice and "Mon Homme" ("My Man"-- originally a French song by Maurice Yvain and Channing Pollock), a song which she sang in two Ziegfeld shows in 1920 and 1921 because they might have been lost on the 1940 audience. Block goes on to note that the final published version of the these lines must have been revised again because they did not appear in the O'Hara typescript: I'm dumb again And numb again, a rich, ready, ripe little plumb again-- Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I ( Block , p. 108) .

Notes

Questions

What is Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered?

The movie includes several Rodgers and Hart songs that were not written for Pal Joey but interpolated into the movie from previous Rodgers and Hart shows:

How should Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered be cited?

Cite this page as ""Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video," Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/b/bewitched_bothered_f.html

Which Cafe Songbook pages are related?

Also read "I Could Write a Book" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/i/i_could_write_a_book_f.html); Cafe Songbook Glossary of Terms (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/misc_pages/glossary.html); "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/i/i_didnt_know_what_time_p.html); "There's a Small Hotel" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/t/theres_a_small_hotel_p.html).

Cite this page: "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/b/bewitched_bothered_f.html