Music: Johnny’s Doll

I’m goin’ to buy a paper doll that I can call my own,

A doll that other fellows cannot steal,

And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes

Will have to flirt with dollies that are real.*

Last week, via the voices of Frank Sinatra and the Mills Brothers, this musical tickler was mooning out of every radio and juke box in the U.S. The top song hit of the month, Paper Doll had a sheet-music sale of more than 500,000 copies and a phonograph-record sale of close to a million. It was proving again that yesterday’s flop may live to be today’s smash, and recalling the story of a very woebegone resident of Tin Pan Alley.

Paper Doll was written 28 years ago, after an unhappy love affair, by an improvident Broadway dance-hall violinist named Johnny Black. The song did not even find a publisher. Black shelved it and went to work on another, the durable Dardanella, which became the rage of 1919 and has been under continuous revival ever since. But, according to Tin Pan Alley’s best-informed chroniclers, luckless Johnny Black sold Dardanella outright for $25, and, when he got around to suing Publisher Fred Fisher, who made a million out of it, netted only $12,000.

In 1922, on the strength of Dardanella’s fame, Black decided to take Paper Doll off the shelf. In his dingy apartment off Times Square he had Publisher Edward B. Marks to dinner, played him the tune on the violin. Marks bought it for $25 advance royalties.

Marks put Paper Doll on the market, but it was still a flop. By the early ’30s Johnny Black had given up music to run a roadhouse near Hamilton, Ohio. Outside this resort in 1936, in a brawl with a customer over 25¢, Johnny Black was knocked down. His head hit the pavement, and his assailant drove off. Three days later Johnny Black was dead.

About a year ago, a Mills Brothers’ (Decca) recording of Paper Doll began to catch on in the jukes. Within 30 days Decca was deluged with orders for 600,000 disks. Publisher Marks wondered what to do with Johnny Black’s royalties. Black hadn’t left a record of any family connections, but someone thought he remembered that his aged father was still alive. Publisher Marks’ manhunt finally tracked down one John L. Black, an 84-year-old living with a half-dozen other people in a cheap boardinghouse in Hamilton, Ohio. By the first of the year his accumulated royalties will run to $19,000.

Sitting in the boardinghouse with his landlady, Mrs. Myrtle Williams, last week, old John L. Black seemed only intermittently aware of his sudden affluence. “Jeez, nineteen thousand dollars!” he muttered. “Hear that, Myrtle? Now we can go on a hell of a bender.”

He continued pensively: “Johnny’s in New York.” “Now, Johnny,” interrupted Mrs. Williams, “you know what happened to Johnny. Why, he died. You know that.” “Oh, that’s right,” agreed John L. vaguely. He spat wide of the bucket again, glanced at the ceiling, where a square foot of plaster was missing. “I don’t remember much about Paper Doll, but I did most of the writing on Dardanella. I gave it to him and said take it and go along with it.”

* Reproduced by permission of the copyright owner, Edward B. Marks Music Corp.