The Bear Missed the Train: In Defense of Earworm
by Lee Israel
May it please the Court. I would like to review the highlights of a wrongful-death action brought by the surviving children of Harry Gopnik, a much decorated veteran of World War II, against my clients, Tempo Perdu, a trio of close-harmony girl singers, who are best known for their nostalgic forty-five-minute set, Stroll Down Memory Lane: A Tribute to the Fabulous Andrews Sisters!! As you are well aware, having heard the opening statement of my worthy opponent, the set closes with a zesty rendition of “Bei Meir Bist du Schön.” It is alleged that is was Harry’s exposure to the song--performed at The Kosher Klubhouse, the entertainment venue of Hobson’s Choice, an assisted living community here in Boca Raton--that caused a recurrence of the earworm, which had harried Harry for more than sixty years and eventually chivvied him into a suicidal encounter with Amtrak’s southbound Silver Meteor.
For those of you too young to remember, the Andrews Sisters’ recording of “Bei Mir” was the trio’s first big hit and it swept the country in the 1940s. The Yiddish title, sung throughout with merciless repetition, translates “to me you are beautiful.” Some musicologists consider it the first linguistic crossover song, and at the height of its popularity there was some discussion in the Jewish community about whether the song was “good for the Jews.” Would the Yiddish lyric alienate? The consensus was that it “couldn’t hurt,” and that in any case, an overwhelming preponderance of Christians -- and even some of the more assimilated Jews -- heard the lyric as “My Beer, Mr. Shane,” or, more commonly, “The Bear Missed the Train.”
You are probably familiar by now with the term “earworm” (called der Orhwurm in Stuttgart and chicletede ouvido, “ear chewing gum,” by Portuguese fisherman). The malady is a form of intrusive cognition that causes its victims to replay mentally a musical fragment, for days, weeks, even, as in poor Harry Gopnik’s case, decades. Earworm can present only in the head of the afflicted, or it can break out as humming, and sometimes as “low singing.”
Thomas Jefferson was the most famous victim of earworm. According to Joseph I. Ellis, author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, our third president hummed obsessively, whether riding, reading, or alighting from his phaeton. His ex-slave Isaac testified that one could “hardly see him anywhere outdoors, but that he was a-singin’.”
Sigmund Freud was another renowned sufferer. Though his indifference to music is storied, many of his patients, “Little Hans” among them, contended that Freud, sitting behind them in the treatment room, frequently hummed or low-sang. Hans recalled that there was “only one song … something about a straw.” Marta Shul, in her landmark What Was Freud Humming? claims that Freud’s vaunted indifference was a defense mechanism to cover his musical hypersensitivity, and that the snatch the old man sang was probably the 19th-century folk song “Turkey in the Straw.” Shul writes: “I’ve always believed that Freud ‘caught’ that song from an adored American nanny, whom he called Fiddle. Nanny-to-boy transmission was not uncommon.”
Harry was first exposed to his nemesis “Bei Mir” in 1945, as a young lieutenant stationed in North Africa, when the song was performed by the touring Andrews Sisters for him and hundreds of other cheering GIs. That night Harry wrote in his diary (Exhibit 1), “They’re fun babes and seem very nice, though LaVerne looks shorter in person; Maxene,, the only brunette, sings high-harmony and could pass for Jewish.” He went happily to bed with the catchy song playing in his head along with reveille, and woke to taps with the tune still there. As you’ve heard from plaintiffs, snatches of the song in one guise or another never left him. Not so his third wife, Rebekah, whom everyone called Sally. She split three years ago, soon after an episode at a Wagner festival in Bayreuth, when Harry low-sang Bei mir bist du schön,/please let me explain/Bei mir bist du schön,/again I’ll explain,/Bei mir … throughout “Pilgrim’s Chorus.” The Gopniks were ejected at the first intermission.
After Sally left Harry, he tried everything to dislodge the pitiless worm from his head: talk therapy, electric shock, hypnotism, even pharmaceuticals. A neighbor finally suggested exorcism: “Jesus, Harry, you’ve goddamned done everything else. Talk to Rebbe Schma. What can you lose?” But Schma was on his annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and not due back in Boca for three weeks. Desperate for relief, and at the any-port-in-storm stage, Harry contacted the local Catholic diocese. Luckily, the diocese was experienced in musical possession, having performed, in 1936, a simultaneous exorcism of nine parishioners who’d been infected with the Rinso White commercial--Rinso White, Rinso Bright/Happy Little Washday Song, which had been performed by a very young Beverly Sills on the radio soap Big Sister. (Newspapers would refer to the afflicted parishioners as “the washday nine.”) A young priest, Kieran Corrigan, one of the few such specialists still making house calls, was dispatched to Harry’s residence.
The exorcism lasted less than three hours, with none of the gaudy athleticism of the Linda Blair/Max van Sidow dust-up. Harry lay on his bed, left ear up, the better to receive the holy water which Corrigan intermittently sprinkled while directing various adjurations at the indwelling worm, e.g., “model of vileness,” “accursed invader,” “vile seducer full of lies and cunning.” My worthy opponent has recounted the very dramatic details. The occupying worm tried desperately to hold on to “Bei Meir,” filling the room slyly with various other catchy tunes from the same era: Bibbidi-bobbidi/ Bibbidi-bobbidi; Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream (bung bung bung bung);Lollipop lollipop/Oh lolli lolli lolli. Corrigan stood firm even in the face of the creature’s vile, “Yo, Padre, Irving Berlin shagged ya mother.” No youngster and no match for the priest (a graduate of Juilliard), the creature finally came slithering out of Harry’s ear--a brownish-red wriggling thing, no bigger than a fingernail, wheezing almost inaudibly the entirety of “Bei Mir Bist du Schön,” as recorded by the Andrew Sisters for Decca on Nov 24, 1937. And Harry Gopnick, the appellants have told you repeatedly, felt a quiet, a peace that he hadn’t experienced since the earworm had first invaded his skull.
To sum up, Your Honor, the plaintiffs are alleging that Harry’s peace was altered and transgressed, that he was re-infected with “Bei Meir”--only weeks after the exorcism--during my clients’ performance at the Kosher Klubhouse (which the plaintiffs have characterized as “a veritable Petri dish of musical contagion”), and that driven to despair with the reoccupation of his mind, he offed himself. We will show, however, that it was precisely this absence, this void, this putative peace that opened Harry, 82 years old, to the real enemy within … to thoughts of his own mortality: le réveil mortel. We will bring to the stand Julian Barnes and Woody Allen, who will tell you that Harry was truly blessed those distracted sixty-odd years; that the mind can deal with only one thought at a time: so “a melody played in a penny arcade” trumps obsessive thoughts of black holes and personal extinction. And we will leave you finally with the specter of poor, bereft Harry Gopnick, unaware that he had become immune to all earworms – just days before his encounter with the Silver Meteor, chasing a Mr. Softee Ice Cream truck through the streets of Boca Raton, in a vain attempt to replace “Bei Meir Bist du Schön” with anything, even the dreaded chimes from hell:
The Cream-i-est, Dream-i-est/ Soft ice cream/You get from Mis—ter—Softee.
Lee Israel's Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger is published by Simon & Schuster. She has written biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. (The New York Times Book Review called her memoir "slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous," August 3, 2008.)
