Jazz Review

Jazz Bird

With a second album, of songs by Johnny Mercer, in the stores, McCorkle and Ingham realized it was time to move to New York. They landed gigs at two of the top jazz spots of the moment, the Cookery, in Greenwich Village, and Michael's Pub, on the East Side. Rex Reed, then a Daily News critic, raved about the Warren and Mercer albums, and a new McCorkle recording received a Grammy nomination. Jacqueline Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, called to congratulate her and made sure the new album was in the front window of Doubleday's anchor bookstore at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue.

But the struggle to make it took a toll on Susannah's personal life. In 1980, she left Ingham, by then her husband, and moved to an apartment on the sixteenth floor of their building, the Parc Cameron. "She was tough about her career," says Ingham, "but she wasn't tough-skinned. An argument would really leave her undone."

In 1981, during a gig in Schenectady, Susannah was interviewed by Dan DiNicola, a reporter for the local CBS television station and a jazz enthusiast. "I was taken with her work the first time I heard her," he said later. "Usually in jazz, the emphasis is on the feel and the swing, the improvisation, and there is almost a disdain for the lyrics." But when McCorkle sang, he saw people who usually ignored the lyrics stop and listen. "When they heard her," he said, "they'd say, 'Oh, my God, that's what that song is all about.' "

He was also taken with Susannah. Three years after they'd met, she moved to Schenectady. They purchased a thirties stucco bungalow that she took pleasure in decorating after their marriage, and she developed deep relationships with DiNicola's three grown children.

Eventually, DiNicola landed McCorkle a contract with Concord, a small but well-regarded jazz label, and a regular gig at the Algonquin. Pouring herself into tight gold lamé, she sold out the Oak Room with her entertaining patter and fresh takes on classics like "If I Only Had a Heart" and "There's No Business Like Show Business." She also championed contemporary writers like Dave Frishberg ("My Attorney, Bernie") and Fran Landesman ("Feet, Do Your Stuff"). She had a particular affinity for bossa nova and made Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Waters of March" -- a jazz Rite of Spring full of jagged, antiphonal images -- her personal anthem.

DiNicola brought her the warmth, attention, and closeness she had yearned for her whole life. But none of it enabled Susannah to conquer the bouts of depression that had plagued her since childhood. In 1990, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo surgery, reconstruction, and radiation, she felt even more desolate (though in public, she became a poster girl for cancer survival, wearing revealing outfits and performing for cancer patients).

Increasingly, she worried about her biochemistry. She had seen depression torment her father, and while Susannah was in Europe, her sister Katy's illness grew so severe that she ended up homeless. Although Katy later entered a residential program and found medication that kept her stable, Susannah refused any contact with her. "She never could adjust to having this in her family," Maggie says. "She wrote my dad off and she wrote Katy off. I think she was so fearful of becoming like them that she couldn't face it."

Although McCorkle had always commuted between Schenectady and New York, her stays at the Parc Cameron grew longer after her cancer surgery, and by 1999, she and DiNicola had amicably split up. Susannah created a new, compartmentalized existence. When she felt too depressed to see anyone, she relied on e-mail, screening phone calls with her answering machine; when she felt like socializing, she arranged to be a weekend houseguest at Rex Reed's country home or another friend's place, always bringing house gifts and good cheer.

She wrote a series of erudite articles for American Heritage on popular composers and singers, including Irving Berlin, Ethel Waters, and Bessie Smith. In 1999, she decided to use the journals that she had kept in Italy as the basis for a memoir or possibly a novel. At the same time, she became involved with Dan Moran, a dentist and poet who lived on Shelter Island. "She had this incredible romantic streak," Moran recalls. "The first time she came out here, I had a handful of daffodils in my hand and she pressed one in a book.

"She seemed so cocky and suave and sexy onstage," Moran adds. "People expected that from her, and I did for a while." What he found instead, he says, was a wounded girl who felt that she was over the hill. "I didn't see her being really up very often." The relationship ended after just seven months. Once again alone, McCorkle fought against the feeling of being swept under. But every day, she race-walked in Central Park. At Lincoln Center, she led music workshops for children. She went to plays, films, museums, and lectures, and ate dinner with friends.

A few weeks before her last Algonquin gig, McCorkle stopped taking her antidepressant, saying she didn't need it in order to continue "staying positive" and complaining about the medication's side effects. She consulted a homeopath, then latched on to a new project: redoing her apartment. Walls that had always been standard-issue New York white turned sage green, light blue, and, in the kitchen, bright yellow, red, and blue.

Nevertheless, nothing seemed to be going right for her. In December 2000, her mother had a heart attack and Susannah flew out to California. Plunging in, she spoke to her mother's doctors, lined up home care, cleaned and rearranged. In the spring, she asked Mimi for a loan, telling her that she had savings but needed cash. Mimi initially said yes, but a few days later, she announced that because of limited resources, Susannah's earning potential, and her other daughters' needs, she was changing her answer to no.

Susannah was devastated. Concord had already told her of the plan to release a compilation of her best recordings instead of springing for a new one. It was hard to argue with the numbers: Only one of Susannah's albums had sold more than 10,000 copies, and that was in 1993. "We had invested a lot in her, and we weren't seeing growth," says Concord president Glen Barros. "The people making decisions in retail stores don't look at the musical aspect. They just want to make a certain amount per square foot."

McCorkle had also learned that after eleven years, she would not be singing at the Algonquin the next fall. It was a bitter and unexpected blow, for she had been manager Arthur Pomposello's first act when he took over the Oak Room. "She was exactly what was needed," he recalls. "She made me look like Ziegfeld."

Pomposello insists that McCorkle turned down his offer to sing in a new jazz series in the summer. But to her, being bounced from the prime season marked her a has-been. Typically, she related one bit of bad news to one friend and another piece to another, but she didn't say enough to anyone, not even to Thea Lurie, to cause serious alarm.

Instead, Susannah simply withdrew. Four days before the end, she promised one concerned acquaintance that she would take the Tegretol just prescribed by a psychopharmacologist. The next day, she went race-walking with Linda Fennimore, a violinist who had once been paralyzed from a spinal injury, and asked for some of her positive energy. Although the day was gray, McCorkle kept her sunglasses on; behind them, Fennimore says, she thought Susannah was crying. When they finished their walk, Susannah asked Fennimore to keep going. "I think she was trying to pull herself out," Fennimore says. "She asked me, 'How do you do it?' Almost the last words she said to me were, 'I can't climb out of this one.' "

Today, Susannah McCorkle has entered the pantheon of artists who achieve their greatest recognition after a violent death. Sales of her recordings spiked immediately after her death, selling out at stores in New York and San Francisco. Most Requested Songs, released in August, reached No. 5 on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Chart, the highest spot she ever attained, and all her recordings remain in print.

On the anniversary of McCorkle's death, Thea Lurie was roused from a deep sleep by her lost friend.

"I'd left the radio on that night," Lurie says, "and I was awakened at five by her singing 'Feet, Do Your Stuff.' It was a little eerie at first, but then it was wonderful to hear a song where she sounded so happy and upbeat and buoyant."

As always with a Susannah McCorkle recording, the lyric came through true and clear. It's a song about leaving.