When Harold Arlen returned to California in the winter of 1944, it was to take up again a collaboration with Johnny Mercer, begun some years before. The film they did after his return was an inconsequential bit of nothing titled Out of This World, a satire on the Sinatra bobby-soxer craze. The twist lay in using Bing Crosby's voice on the sound track while leading man Eddie Bracken mouthed the words. If nothing else, at least two good songs came out of the project, ``Out of This World'' and ``June Comes Around Every Year.''

Though they would produce some very memorable and lasting songs, Arlen and Mercer were not given strong material to work on. Their first collaboration came close. Early in 1941 they were assigned to a script titled Hot Nocturne. It purported to be a reasonably serious attempt at a treatment of jazz musicians, their aims, their problems -- the tug-of-war between the ``pure'' and the ``commercial'' -- and seemed a promising vehicle, for the two men shared a common interest in jazz.

Johnny Mercer practically grew up with the sound of jazz and the blues in his ears. He was born in savannah, Georgia, in 1909. His father, George A. Mercer, was descended from an honored Southern family that could trace its ancestry back to one Hugh Mercer, who had emigrated from Scotland in 1747.

The lyricist's father was a lawyer who had branched out into real estate. His second wife, Lillian, was the mother of John H. Mercer. By the age of six young Johnny indicated that he had the call. One day he followed the Irish Jasper Greens, the town band, to a picnic and spent the entire day listening, while his family spent the day looking. The disappearance caused his family to assign a full-time maid to keeping an eye on the boy. But one afternoon Mrs. Mercer met her; both were obviously on the way to the Mercer home. The mother inquired, ``Where's Johnny, and why did you leave him?'' ``There was nothing else I could do,'' the maid answered, satisfied with a rather vague explanation. But Mrs. Mercer demanded more. The maid then told her, ``Because he fired me.''