Storyteller

On Mondays a grand and gentle countrywoman drives her station wagon south out of hill-and-meadow farmland. Half an hour or so from her 30-acre estate in Chatham, N.Y., she crosses the outer trenches of Commuterland and hums down the Taconic State Parkway toward Manhattan. Nightclub Singer Mabel Mercer is headed for the East 50s, a neighborhood that has cloistered her special talent for nearly 20 years.

At work in the King Arthur Room, a Broadway-Tudor subdivision of a jazz nightclub called the Roundtable, 59-year-old Mabel Mercer sits with uncompromising posture on the edge of a straight-backed chair, and sings in a style that is studied and admired throughout her profession. Composers sometimes write expressly for her because they know that her interpretation will set a pattern that does service to the song, and a record of Mabel Mercer singing a French ballad is a fixed and required element in every performance of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Consul. Other singers--Margaret Whiting, Kay Starr, Peggy Lee, even the Metropolitan Opera's Eileen Farrell--go back and back again to wonder at the sexless, passive, unembellished Mercer style that goes straight to the heart of a lyric.

Yet her voice is notably undistinguished. "I used to have a soprano," she recalls. "Now it's just a noise. People say 'Why, she can't sing for toffee.' I say I know that--I'm telling a story." What she does have is manner. She is authentic --a natural and commanding talent with a patrician air.

Revived Partridge. Musical playwrights love her because she picks through old shows that did not quite make it, to find songs that can stand on their own, also hunts for good songs deleted from shows before they reached Broadway, e.g., From This Moment On, originally a number in Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate. Songstress Mercer also took The Twelve Days of Christmas, a carol from the Middle Ages, introduced it to her audiences, and helped bring the partridge in the pear tree back to life.

Mabel Mercer's talent rests easily on her famed diction, which comes forth in unruffled English inflections. Born in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, she is the daughter of a Negro father who died before her birth and a white mother who was a vaudeville singer and actress. At 14, leaving a Manchester convent school, she joined her mother and stepfather in a touring family act; after World War I, she moved off to Paris on her own, sang for expatriate crowds at Ruban Bleu, Chez Florence and other Paris spots. In the '305 she settled down for an eight-year stand at Bricktop's on the Rue Pigalle.

Long Stands. Mabel Mercer spent the early years of World War II in the Bahamas, tried several times to get U.S. entry papers. Finally Kelsey Pharr, an American Negro musician much her junior, helpfully volunteered to marry her, and got her into the States (they are still nominally man and wife but do not live together); she became a U.S. citizen in 1952. In Manhattan, long stands once again became her habit. She spent six months at the old Ruban Bleu, then put in seven years at Tony's. In 1949, Tony's was leveled by a wrecking company to make room for a parking lot, and for the next five years she stayed put in the Byline Room, followed that with a two-year engagement at RSVP.

In March, after she finishes her special eight-week ($8,000) appearance at the Roundtable, Singer Mercer goes off on a coast-to-coast nightclub tour, her first in the U.S. "I'm dying to see what the country looks like," she says. Meanwhile, as the country gets a look at her, she has no expectations of triumph. "People have to hear me two or three times before they like me," Mabel Mercer admits. "I grow on them like a barnacle."

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