Howell: The hunt for the elusive Judy Bridgewater
A quest for the mystery pop singer of Never Let Me Go follows a winding path that leads to Bob Dylan, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin.
Judy Bridgewater - real or imagined? Peter Howell finds out.
ByPETER HOWELLMovie Critic Thu., Sept. 30, 2010
My hunt for the mysterious Judy Bridgewater began, as detective stories often do, with a package left on my desk.
It contained a cassette tape, something you don’t see much anymore. Even rarer: it was a music album,Songs After Dark, by the torch singer Judy Bridgewater.
“Cool!” I thought. “New tunes!”
Then I remembered that Judy Bridgewater isn’t real. The album is also fake, although it looks genuine, right down to the track listings: “Wanted,” “Dance With Me,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Light Over The Hill” and “Crying Over You.”
The album cover shows an elegant woman lounging on a settee, a cigarette with holder in her hand, as she stares a come hither (or get lost) look.
Bridgewater andSongs After Darkare part of the elaborate fiction ofNever Let Me Go, a 2005 sci-fi novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro that is the basis of Mark Romanek’s affecting new film by the same name.
The singer and the album become the fascination of Kathy H., the story’s central character, played by Carey Mulligan.
Closer inspection revealed the cassette to be a thumb drive containing promotional materials forNLMG. It’s one very smart promo.
I started to get the same longing Kathy H. gets forSongs After Dark. I wanted to hear Judy Bridgewater sing those tunes. And who was the person playing her on the album cover, which also appears in the movie?
Google and Wikipedia weren’t much help, but I did turn up a Japanese website, created by anNLMGfan: “Who is Judy Bridgewater?” A rough translation revealed speculation the name might be an amalgam of Judy Garland and Dee Dee Bridgewater, singers of similar vintage.
The fan also thought that Bridgewater could be based on Stacey Kent, an American jazz singer based in London. Some fast Googling clicked three cherries on the slot machine: Ishiguro is a fan of Kent’s, and he co-wrote four of the songs on her 2007 album,Breakfast On The Morning Tram.
This same album also has a song … drum roll, please … titled “Never Let Me Go.” Curiously, it’s credited to Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, not Ishiguro. Curiouser still, Kent doesn’t sing the song in the movie.
But could she have been the inspiration for Judy Bridgewater? I tracked down Ishiguro by email and asked him.
“No, she’s not based in Stacey Kent!” Ishiguro replied.
“I imagined a torch singer from the ’50s, someone like Julie London. The cassette tape Kathy finds in the story is of an old album from back then …
“Just to correct you about the song ‘Never Let Me Go’ … That’s an old standard from the ’50s, and has been covered most famously by pianists such as Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, though less frequently by singers (Dinah Washington has recorded it). I think Stacey chose to include it on the album because lyrically it fitted with the other songs, and perhaps (I’ve never quite established this) because she associated it with me. I think her version of the song is very moving.
“Just to make things even more confusing: that’s not the same song as the ‘Never Let Me Go’ heard in the film or alluded to in the novel!”
It’s true: the song heard in the film, sung by Jane Monheit, was written by Luther Dixon.
Ishiguro shares my fascination with Judy Bridgewater andSongs After Dark.
“I know what you mean about that cassette. I remember visiting the set of The Cottages (a location inNLMG) before the crew had arrived, and it was eerily complete and familiar. There was a musty bedroom upstairs, with every small detail complete, and that cassette was at the bedside.
“I, too, marveled at the wonderful attention to detail and wanted to hear those other songs. As far as I know, the song titles, like the cassette, are the invention of the brilliant production designer, Mark Digby, who went about everything with a passionate care that bordered on the fanatical.”
Indeed. But here the story enters the “realms of the bizarre,” as Ishiguro put it. I mentioned to him that the woman onSongs After Darkis posing very like the woman on the coverBringing It All Back Home, a 1965 Bob Dylan album. The woman on Dylan’s disc was a mystery figure until years later, when she was revealed to be Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s manager.
Ishiguro joked: Maybe it’s the same woman on both albums! It’s not, but here’s a weird coincidence he offered:
“Incidentally, Dylan and Joan Baez regularly sang together a song called ‘Never Let Me Go’ on their Rolling Thunder Revue tour (of 1975-76), and you can hear it on various bootlegs from that time. But again, this isn’t the song Kathy listens to!”
The song Kathy hears, by the way, is the only one with the “baby” reference that is significant to the book, but not the movie.
My intense Googling about Ishiguro also turned up another amazing fact. A true Renaissance Man, he’s also a screenplay writer. He penned the original draft ofThe Saddest Music in the World, a 2003 film by Canada’s Guy Maddin about a weird song contest sponsored by a beer baroness, played by Isabella Rossellini, who uses beer-filled glass prosthetics in place of her severed legs.
I’d always thought the film was entirely Maddin’s creation, and that of his co-writer George Toles, but Ishiguro provided the creative spark. He was originally going to make the film with Atom Egoyan. And that’s a whole other story. (See sidebar.)
Still, the mystery remains as to who the woman is on the cover ofSongs After Dark. Anna Perelman, a publicist for studio Fox Searchlight, managed to get me the name of the actress who plays Judy Bridgewater.
It’s Rae Baker, a British actress best known for her stage and TV work. She was in a London stage version ofDirty Dancingand is known to Brits for her role as a chopper-riding detective onThe Bill, a popular TV cop series.
One final mystery. I noticed on the cover ofSongs After Darkthat Bridgewater appears to be sitting in front of a large blurred Oscar statue. Is it a coincidence, or an omen?
“Is that an Oscar behind Judy?” Ishiguro wrote back, his smile evident across the wire.
“I don’t even dare go there!”