"The Ladies Who Lunch" 50 Years Later

YouTube suggested I might like a video from 1970 of actress Elaine Stritch singing "The Ladies Who Lunch." The song was from a musical that had just opened on Broadway, Company, book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, who composed the song for her character "Joanne."

YouTube was right. It's a good excuse to reflect on this song, that performer, and how the song holds up 50 years later. (See Elaine Stritch's TV studio performance from 1970.)

Before I'd ever heard of Stephen Sondheim or Company, comedian Carol Burnett shocked America by staging this bitter song in the middle of her beloved, folksy, charming TV variety show.  At age 11, I knew she was singing about my mother and my Aunt Blanche, and it wasn't funny at all. For years after, I'd find others impacted by Burnett's serious turn.

Sondheim writes in his memoir Finishing the Hat that "the character of Joanne was not only written for Elaine Stritch, it was based on her" with her "acerbic delivery of self-assessment" (193).

Until I saw this video artifact from 1970, I thought I knew everything about the song. I've heard and seen dozens of performances of the song, and I've accompanied myself singing it a few dozen more. The music has the mid-60s basso-nova feel, with dark coloration in the harmony, and a fun detail in the melody: whenever Joanne repeats the phrase, "I'll drink to that," the notes slide downward with notes out of the key, in a musical expression of inebriation. The lyric is a toast to different kinds of women that Joanne observes - the ladies who lunch, the ones who stay smart, the ones who play wife. In each verse, Sondheim hides an inner rhyme "to give the lines a tautness." I've italicized the syllables that rhyme to show what he means:

Here's to the girls who play wife --
Aren't they too much?
Keeping house but clutching a copy of Life
just to keep in touch.

He explains, "The 'clutch' is hidden, there's no musical pause there, no way of pointing it up, but it's there to help make the line terse, the way the character is" (quoted in Craig Zadan's book Sondheim and Co. 2nd Edition 1986, p.232).

So I cried to see Stritch, some 15 years younger than I am now, perform the lines in ways that bring tenderness out of this "acerbic" and "taut" song. It was a surprise, though I've seen another video of Stritch from around the same time.  It's in the Pennebaker documentary of the original cast's recording. Stritch fails in multiple takes. Everyone else had gone home hours before, and she's there screaming the song at the microphone, looking harried, insecure, ashamed.

This is different. "I'd like to propose a toast," she says, while an off-screen pianist plays the first chords rubato. Stritch is wearing her own signature outfit - a man's dress shirt, leggings. There's that late-60s eye-liner, but no other noticeable makeup; no accessories, no prop tumbler. Hands folded on her lap, she sings, "Here's to the ladies who lunch" the way I'm used to hearing it, as a clarion call. But then she sings softly, "Everybody laugh."

Already, she's laid out her attitude. These women are ridiculous, but she feels for them. They're "planning a brunch" she sings, scowling as if to say, "really?", then clasps her hands to sing softly, "on their own behalf."

This was taped at New York's Channel 13, a low-budget production, without any fancy camera work. The camera moves in on her sarcastic question, "Does anyone still wear a hat?" Her anger picks up as she rips through the girls who stay smart, giving us sarcastic jazz hands for "a matinee," and an-oh-so-serious scowl as her forefingers touch her thumbs -- we're being intellectual, now -- for "a Pinter play," and then an extravagant gesture for "a piece of Mahler's." (Sondheim reveals that Stritch didn't get the reference. She thought a piece of Mahler's would be some kind of pastry. In the full orchestration, Jonathan Tunick quotes a riff from Mahler's 4th after this line.)

She mocks the "ones who follow the rules, and meet themselves at the schools" before mocking her own kind, "the ones who just watch," who take "another chance to disapprove... another reason not to move," screaming "I - I - I - I'll" drink to that.

In the final verse, Stritch conveys strongly what's implied in the lyrics. Mock them she might, but she's with them, too. The camera moves in close on her eyes as she begins the last verse, when the internal rhymes punch up what these women all face together:

So here's to the girls on the go
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know:
Everybody dies!

We've already had several "Everybody" lines: this is the ultimate. Sondheim tops it with a scary grand finale. Joanne commands an ovation, "Everybody rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!" Stritch is uninhibited here, unafraid to sound hoarse, angry, and hurting.

Fifty years later, the song doesn't sound dated. I know these women. Stars keep wringing meaning from it -- Meryl Streep, Audra MacDonald, and Christine Baranski did a Zoom cocktail hour version for Sondheim's 90th birthday. If Mr. Sondheim is reading this, I suppose an update should include a toast to the ladies with jobs.

For now, as for the past 50 years, here's to "The Ladies Who Lunch."

[See my Sondheim Page for much more about the man, his shows, craft, and colleagues. I write about what I learned from interviews with Elaine Stritch and a folk singer, her contemporary Jean Redpath, at Diverse Divas and the Art of Showbiz]