U.S. city erupts over official song

Press, 4 May 1984, Page 14

U.S. city erupts over official song

From

JOHN HUTCHISON

San Francisco — this captious city, beset by large real problems, likes to quarrel over small invented issues. The municipal transportation system is wracked with costly scandal; a billion-dollar reconstruction of the antiquated sewer system is years behind schedule and millions over budget; what was once one of the world’s greatest seaports has lost out to nearby harbours; and San Francisco was recently described as the nation’s biggest psychiatric clinic. But the liveliest row going on right now is over the city’s official song. The mayor, several councillors, the presiding judge of the Superior Court, and assorted priv-, ate citizens are taking sides, urged on by the mischievous media. One faction believes that “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” officially adopted in 1969, should be dropped over the side and replaced with “San Francisco,” title song of. the 1936 earthquake-and-fire film which starred Clark Gable and Jeanette McDonald. A provocative newspaper writer started the skirmish. He called for the change and describes “I Left My Heart” as a “sentimental piece of infantile drool about little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars.” That tore it. “This is a sentimental town and the song evokes its essence,” said the judge. In 1969, he was a councillor, and it was he who sponsored the adoption of the song. < He is not taking kindly now to being called by the newsman one of the “cabbageheads” who lumbered the city with it. A present-day councillor noted more for his political agility than for his singing talent, seized the issue with relish, siding with the iconoclastic writer. Rollicking, he called the proposed replacement. Right in character with the robust spirit of the city. He essayed a bar of it while being interviewed on television, and fell miserably short of the rendition by the late Miss McDonald. Mayor Dianne Feinstein said she will veto any action to change the song. “They play it when I get off the plane in foreign countries,” she said, with satisfaction. She has asked the singer, Tony Bennett, who has made the song his trademark, to belt it out. at the reopening in June of the cable cars, shut down for two years for repair. Bennett, who has sung the song so many times that he is often taken for a San Francisco native, actually left his birth certificate in New Jersey. He is not here right now, and is presumably telling some other city in song where he left his heart. But when be finds out what’s going on here, he may hit high C.