As World War II raged, Hollywood turned to nostalgia of a simpler, safer time. A common theme in movie musicals portrays young performers trying to find success in the entertainment business.  A successful wartime example, Hello Frisco, Hello came loaded with dozens of songs that had been hits at the turn of the century. The team of Harry Warren and Mack Gordon provided one original song, “You’ll Never Know.” Introduced by Alice Faye, it immediately became a hit and won the 1943 Oscar for best original song.

Let’s look at the movie, the song, Warren, Gordon, and Faye.

The story of Hello Frisco, Hello

Hello Frisco, Hello is about a struggling troupe of entertainers in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Johnny Cornell, its ambitious leader, has his eyes on success in the more affluent Knob Hill district. Its girl singer Trudy Evans is in love with Johnny, who hardly notices.

So the audience sees the troupe onstage doing their acts and backstage interacting as real people. Everyone knows Johnny and Trudy will break up early on and get back together at the end. Johnny works his way up, owning better and better clubs, until he meets Bernice Croft, a rich heiress. He dumps Trudy to marry Bernice and become owner of the San Francisco opera house.

Heartbroken, Trudy accepts an offer to perform in London. She becomes famous and wealthy. Meanwhile, Johnny and Bernice divorce and Johnny is reduced to working as a sideshow barker.

Trudy returns to San Francisco for a new show. By that time, Johnny has reopened his old club and has stubbornly refused to reach out to Trudy. Other members of the original troupe engineer a reunion. tricking Johnny into performing onstage with Trudy. And there, finally, Johnny realizes that Trudy is his true love.

Here’s a video of the movie’s first musical number. It depicts a show at Johnny’s club. Johnny sings “Hello Frisco” to Trudy over the telephone. They are on opposite sides of the stage. Then, with Johnny off the screen, Trudy sings “You’ll Never Know” the first of three times. The physical distance between the two and Johnny’s absence from the screen as she sings foreshadows the entire plot.

Trudy sings “You’ll Never Know” again when she hears of Johnny’s marriage to Bernice. And, of course, the song Johnny and Trudy sing together at the end is “You’ll Never Know.”

“You’ll Never Know”

If the tune sounds a bit like the bugle call, it’s no coincidence. Warren told a friend,

You know my big Academy Award song, “You’ll Never Know”? Well, it wasn’t entirely original – I did a little steal on that one.  Songwriters always borrow a few bars here and there.  I don’t know how the hell it came to me but I was thinking about the notes in a bugle call and dammit if it wasn’t just what I wanted to get “You’ll Never Know” started.

The bugle call is “First Call.” In the army, it is used to assemble the buglers who will soon play reveille. The navy uses it five minutes before raising the colors in the morning and lowering them in the evening. Under the name “Call to the Post,” it has been used before horse races since the 1850s.

Unlike any of the familiar popular songs that appear throughout the film, the words of “You’ll Never Know” are integrated both with the on-stage and off-stage parts of the story.

The raging war, of course, never intrudes on the film’s plot, but it wasn’t far from anyone’s mind. As Warren explained,

The song was a problem to write because it had to serve two purposes. It had to fit into the period setting and sound like an old ballad, and yet we wanted to write a song that would express the feelings of all the war’s separated lovers. Luckily we came up with something that managed to do just that. We didn’t think too much about it until we happened to play it at a party and people immediately started to listen and sing it. It had that certain “something” we all strive for.

About Harry Warren

Harry Warren’s bio starts like that of so many other songwriters. He was the child of Italian immigrants and taught himself how to play piano, accordion, and drums. He dropped out of school to start a musical career. Warren became a staff pianist and song plugger for a Tin Pan Alley publisher and graduated to writing Broadway songs. Along the way, he changed his birth name, Salvatore Guaragna, to the more American-sounding Harry Warren.

His story diverged from the commonplace in 1933, when he started to work for Warner Brothers as the first American songwriter to specialize in writing for movies. He moved to 20th Century Fox in the early 1940s. “You’ll Never Know” was his second song to win an Oscar.

Warren’s other famous songs include

• I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store
• We’re in the Money
• Lullaby of Broadway (winner of his first Oscar)
• September in the Rain
• Chattanooga Choo Choo
• Serenade in Blue
• There Will Never Be Another You
• The More I See You
• On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe (winner of his third Oscar)

About Mack Gordon

Mack Gordon was a Polish immigrant, born Morris Gittler. As a boy soprano, he started in show business in a minstrel show and became a singing comedian in vaudeville. After he learned to write lyrics, he went to work first for Paramount Pictures and eventually for 20th Century Fox. Besides Harry Warren, he collaborated with other notable songwriters such as Jimmy Van Heusen, Vincent Youmans, and James Monaco.

My research has turned up some pretty harsh criticism of Gordon’s lyric. It provides no story and little imagery. Wilfred Sheed notes that Gordon’s work “offers an advanced lesson in why good song lyrics don’t have to be great poetry.” He goes on to acknowledge that Gordon had “a wonderful ear for the regular phrases people were using that year.” I would note that, in this song, anyway, he did not select the kinds of cliches that so easily get dated.

“You’ll Never Know” is the passionate heart cry of a jilted lover. The lines, “you ought to know, for haven’t I told you so—a million or more times” strike kind of a false note. If someone has no better way to demonstrate love than repeated words, why should anyone be surprised if the other drifts away or stalks out?

But the lines that makes the whole lyric work are the next two: “You went away and my heart with you. I speak your name in my every prayer.” The movie and song came out in wartime. “You’ll Never Know” expressed the sentiment of myriad women who had to say goodbye as their husbands, sons, fiances, and fathers went away to war. And it was women who seemed to respond to the song most intensely.

About Alice Faye

Alice Faye, born Alice Jeanne Leppert, dreamed of starring on Broadway from an early age. In fact, she was dismissed from her role as a dancer in “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” when the producers learned she was only 13!

In 1931, Rudy Vallee starred in “George White’s Scandals,” and Faye was hired as a dancer. Vallee heard one of her recordings during a cast party. Greatly impressed by her rich contralto voice, he asked her to join him on his nationally syndicated radio show. Later, he arranged for her to co-star with him on the film version of “George White’s Scandals.”

Faye signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox, which at first tried to turn her into a singing version of Jean Harlow. She bleached her hair and imitated Harlow’s persona until the new studio head Darryl Zanuck had other ideas. With her natural hair color, she started to take on good girl roles.

Fox gave her a very busy schedule. She starred in four movies just in 1937. In 1943, she starred not only in Hello Frisco, Hello, but also The Gang’s All Here. Her relationship with Zanuck began to sour amid rumors that he was grooming Betty Grable to replace her. In 1944, she rejected several projects Fox sent her way

She had shown her ability to act in more dramatic parts and wanted more of them. She finally signed for “Fallen Angel,” directed by Otto Preminger, in 1945. Zanuck decided that her performance conflicted with the new image he had in mind for her. Most of her work, including her song, wound up on the cutting room floor.

She refused to fulfill the rest of her contract. At the height of her fame, she drove away from show business in a huff.

Some other singers who have recorded “You’ll Never Know”

Hello Frisco, Hello was released in theaters on March 11, 1943. By the end of the year, five recordings of “You’ll Never Know” had appeared. Best remembered now are the ones

Dick Haymes and Frank Sinatra. These recordings came at the height of the musicians’ strike, so they have vocal groups backing up the soloist instead of the usual band.  Faye sang the song in the 1944 movie Four Jills in a Jeep, but never recorded it as a single..

Since then, many recording artists have sung it. In 1955, it was the first song that then 13-year-old Barbra Streisand recorded. Others who recorded it in the 1950s include Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Eddie Arnold, and Johnny Mathis.

A record by The Platters shows up in many lists, but they recorded a different song with the same title. Eartha Kitt and Al Martino, among many others, recorded “You’ll Never Know” in the 1960s. Bernadette Peters’ 1980 recording even includes the verse.

In 2017, “You’ll Never Know” appeared twice in the film The Shape of Water: Faye’s version from the 1943 sound track and a recording by Renée Fleming and the London Symphony Orchestra, lip-synched by Sally Hawkins.

To my surprise, every recording I have found keeps the song as a slow ballad. The tune (if not the words) probably would have worked in a swing version. But if any band played it that way, it doesn’t appear to be on YouTube.

Many “standard” songs have undergone drastic changes of rhythm, tempo, and even meter in various recordings. “You’ll Never Know” apparently hasn’t. But that’s just fine with everyone who enjoys it.

Sources:

Alice Faye / John Charles, Turner Classic Movies
America’s songs: The stories behind the songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley (Routledge, 2006)
Harry Warren / Songwriters Hall of Fame
Hello Frisco, Hello / Turner Classic Movies
Mack Gordon / Songwriters Hall of Fame
You’ll Never Know / Café Songbook