Music: 1935 East of the Sun, West of the Moon | Diana Krall Live in Paris 2002
Video: 1920s & 1930s Hidcote Manor Garden | Gloucestershire | by Lawrence Johnston
1930s playlist: t.ly/TxIW
Primary source: Hidcote - A Garden for All Seasons (2011)
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011...
"Johnston was a keen plantsman, which took him on plant-hunting expeditions to South Africa in 1927 and Yunnan in 1930, yet he marshalled his plants with the eye of a painter. He insisted on using only the best forms, and on planting them thickly to keep out the weeds, but he also believed in using plants to create artistic effects - harmonies and contrasts.
At Hidcote, tender plants and annuals fleshed out more permanent plantings. The bold plantings in his red borders, white garden and cottage garden have become modern classics, much studied and copied. . . .
How can we account for the immense popularity of Hidcote today and its reputation as one of the most influential of modern gardens? Part of the answer lies in its mystique. . . . Although it was open for charity two or three times a year, Hidcote became one of those gardens that everyone in the horticultural world knew about but almost no one had seen. Its importance assumed almost mythological proportions. . . .
Hidcote remains popular with the visiting public because its component parts are individual garden rooms, each offering a lesson that can be adapted for much smaller gardens. The Hidcote style became the very model of late-20th-century gardening-scaled down grandeur, introspective, full of interesting plants but thickly, opulently planted and arranged in such a way as to engage the creative eye of artistically inclined garden-owners. . . .
After the Second World War, Johnston decided to spend more time [at Serre de la Madone, his house in Menton, Côte d'Azur]. Friends suggested that he should give Hidcote to the National Trust, but he couldn’t afford to endow it, and the Trust had never before acquired a property for the importance of its garden alone. Nevertheless, the Trust accepted Hidcote in 1948, and Johnston retired to Serre de la Madone, where he died on April 27, 1958."
(www.countrylife.co.uk/gardens...)
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"Royalties continue to pour into the Triangle Club from every playing of 'East of the Sun (and West of the Moon).' This song, written by Brooks Bowman ’36 for the 1934-35 Triangle show, Stags at Bay, has become an American classic.
Brooks was Princeton’s answer to Yale’s Cole Porter. And Porter recognized his genius. Just a few months before Brooks’ sudden death at the age of 23 in 1937, Porter gave him a personal introduction to the brightest luminaries on New York’s Tin Pan Alley.
Another case of genius recognizing genius was the way F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 immediately recognized Brooks’ talent. In 1935, after seeing Stags at Bay, Fitzgerald wrote him a letter calling him the brightest spot in the show, 'both as actor and composer.' (F. S. F. then went on to suggest a few changes to make the song 'suitable' for singing in Palmer Stadium.)
Fitzgerald’s praise must have sounded sweet to Brooks, sweeter than the academic honors he received in philosophy. After all, he had transferred to Princeton from Stanford mainly to sing and dance in McCarter Theatre.
Brooks flourished here. Besides Triangle, he sang in the Glee Club, wrote for the Tiger, and did well enough as a student to think of going on to Harvard Law School to prepare for a career as a crimebuster. . . .
After graduation, he decided to stick with the stars and write songs for Warner Bros. in Hollywood. So he went West, starting out at the then glamorous salary of $100/week - even though he really didn’t know how to play the piano - and he rented 'a one-room apartment with a lovely blue carpet and blue curtains and white and silver wallpaper' for $37.50 a month. Soon after his arrival, Hoagy Carmichael called him to come over to his apartment on Sunset Blvd. to write some lyrics for a tune he had just composed. So they stayed up all night hammering out 'You and Romance and Me.'
But Brooks wasn’t really made for Hollywood. When his old Triangle friend, Bill Borden ’37 (a real piano player), came out for a visit, Brooks proposed they return East as a song-writing team: Bowman on words and Borden on piano.
Impressed by the mounting popularity of 'East of the Sun,' a New York music publisher accepted their first collaboration with enthusiasm. He told them to come by Monday to sign the contract and collect their advance. But Brooks died on that Saturday, crushed in a car against a stone wall near Poughkeepsie. - Frederic Fox ’39"
(Princeton Alumni Review, 2 Oct 1973, reprinted in paw.princeton.edu/article/pri...)
18 май 2023
