Q & A for Priscilla Meyer about Heartbreaker and her brother, John Meyer
1. Can you tell us about your brother, John Meyer? Growing up, was John always interested in songwriting?
My earliest memory of Johnny is from a summer in a rented house in Westchester County, NY in the late 1940s, when he was 10, and I was 5. He decided to do a “radio show”—we were fans of Fred Allen, Jack Benny, the Lone Ranger. He wrote a script full of parodies, and taught me the words: “I’m as corny as Kansas in August/With a conventional stye in my eye” and other sardonic alterations of lyrics I’ve mercifully forgotten. Uncharacteristically (he was famously at a loss in the mechanical world), he had us build a wooden frame of a 3X3 cube and cover it with tar paper, punch two holes in the front, and insert rolled-up magazines for megaphones. We set up on the lawn, crawled in the back and performed our script for our parents, the cook, maid, chauffeur and nanny who sat on the house porch.
Johnny was always a superb story-teller. He would amuse our parents at the dinner table with tales from school, or later with people he’d met involving work. One unsuccessful interview contained an unflattering depiction of the interviewer, concluding with “And meanwhile he had cuffs on his pants” (at a time when that was considered clunkily out of fashion). At the dinner table Johnny and I developed the habit of whistling some show tune sotto voce whose lyric in the whistled phrase was a comment (negative, satirical) on whatever a parent was saying; it created in me a habit of mind that enjoyed detecting hidden references in literary texts.
In his teen years Johnny enjoyed mischief, some of it mildly malevolent. Once we went with friend Dave to a movie on 86th Street. Johnny observed a stubby crew-cut kid in front of him, whose appearance inspired him to pour some of the Coca Cola he’d bought on the kid’s head. The victim was sitting next to his mother. “Mommy, someone poured coke on my head!” “Shut up and watch the movie.” More coke. “Momeee! Someone’s pouring coke on my head!” “Shut up and watch the movie.” Johnny then emptied the entire remains of his paper cup along with clattering ice cubes all over the kid, whose mother, finally convinced, leapt to her feet and clobbered Dave (who was sitting on the aisle) with her handbag. To my (sane ten year-old) surprise, the usher came over and had us move to seats down front.
Johnny was kicked out of his school weeks before graduation for having horsed around with friends in the costume room of our school theater—the rest of the terrible gang was not. Luckily he managed to go on to high school anyway. He only lasted a year and a half at the University of Chicago, but there he wrote and produced a musical review, “Pheasant Under Glass,” which the family went to see. I retrospectively confuse it with “New Faces of ‘56” for good reason—the mix of songs with short comic or wistful sketches was probably affected by it.
2. You only saw John and Judy together once at your parent’s apartment in New York. Can you describe the encounter?
I came for a weekend visit. When I got there, Judy was in her (my) room; Johnny said “Come on out and meet my sister.” She (allegedly) wanted to do her make-up. An hour and a half went by, no Judy. Johnny went back and managed to bring her out to the living room. We clustered around my parent’s Steinway baby grand. And from there all is shrouded in fog—I don’t recall if she sang. But it made clear how each step of Judy’s day had to be managed by someone.
3. Judy died in 1969 and the book of Heartbreaker came out in 1983. Why did it take so long for John to write it?
It may be that it took him a long time to find a publisher—I don’t remember. But I think his account came in a rush—he generally wrote easily, didn’t complain of being stuck. As he says in the memoir, he was able to promote Judy in a way he was never able to promote himself, and that might have played a role. I don’t think I knew at the time.
4. You come from an academic world whereas John came from a show business one. Did that help or hinder your relationship with him?
Mostly we shared a sense of verbal play and a love of hilarity, as well as song lyrics, movies, family lore. Our enjoyment of people, drawing them out, laughing with them, was part of both our professions to the degree that teaching resembles interviewing, performing, dialogue. True, he viewed academics with some, occasionally deserved, scorn, which led me to send him one of my articles that I thought would show him where our two worlds overlapped: “Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.” He read it, and emailed back that it was “less prolix than your other work,” infuriating me of course.
On the other hand, he knew a huge amount about the many things that interested him. I once told him a hilarious (true) tale of how my husband Bill met Arthur Miller at a gathering, talked at him about nuclear weapons for a bit, and then asked “Are you the Miller in the Psychology department?” “No.” “What do you do?” “I’m a writer.” “Anything I might have heard of?” I can go on, but the point is that Johnny said “Miller has a story about that!” I thought Gads, Bill has gone down in literary history for his absent-minded professorness, and asked anxiously when the story came out. Johnny thought for 30 seconds and said “1968.” Phew. Not Bill then. But I was amazed at Johnny’s recall—I looked it up. It’s called “Fame” and has the same line under similar circumstances: Anything I might have heard of? Johnny’s superb ear had probably retained the phrase as well as the circumstance.
5. You attended Heartbreaker’s theatrical premiere in Glens Falls, New York in 2013. What are your memories of that?
It was a happy family excursion; the photo of us at supper with John before the performance is in the forthcoming Heartbreaker—the Musical. Johnny and the family had had a similar occasion at the performance of Johnny’s The Betrayal of Nora Blake at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, which got rave reviews in Time Out, something I’d never seen in that London mag before.
6. Before John met Judy in 1968, what did you think of Judy Garland?
Johnny had always worshipped Judy’s musicality and persona; he was astounded to have met her so unexpectedly. He knew all the films, lyrics, history. And there he was plunged into it. It was an affirmation of everything he worked on and cared about. As with so much else, I had been learning from Johnny from childhood and didn’t then have an independent view of Judy as a person, but could sing the Trolley Song, the Boy Next Door, etc.
7. What else did Johnny write that Judy fans might enjoy?
When Johnny told me the premise for this Judy book, I admit I thought it was pretty zany: he invents a spy story in which Judy is sent behind Nazi lines to retrieve the original ruby slippers (Operation Ruby Slipper, 2011). I didn’t read it when it came out, but then our kid brother Chris and I decided to write a parody of it for Johnny’s 85th birthday (a family custom was to write/draw/sing comical works on family occasions). The only unmined material at that late point in our sibling lives was Ruby Slipper. So we set about reading it and were wowed by the vigor of his writing and how entertaining the whole book was. Our efforts yielded a five-minute sketch (Operation Floating Kreplach), which we performed for him (I played Woody Allen) and that he considered our finest effort.
8. What did you think of the reception of John’s memoir, Heartbreaker?
I was surprised that anyone could read his heartbreaking account as opportunistic. You have to be very skeptical not to see Johnny’s anguish at his inability to help Judy. And so I was doubly moved to see the entire audience for Debbie Wileman’s 2022 Carnegie Hall performance stand to applaud Johnny when she announced his presence. He was pretty deaf in his final years, and had asked me in advance to elbow him if he needed to stand up, which I vigorously did. He got too little recognition for his songs and books, so to see the heartfelt gratitude the audience felt for his memoir was profoundly moving.