Mark Steyn tells the story of “One For My Baby”:
The text is Johnny Mercer, of course. But did you know he wrote it about Judy Garland? They’d been having one of those affairs that are born doomed.
And, just as Mercer had finally decided to ask his wife Ginger for a divorce, Walter Winchell came on the radio and announced that Judy had eloped to Vegas with the composer and bandleader David Rose. (…)
Garland’s rising star would have been badly dented by revelations of an affair with an older married man, so Mercer was unable to talk about his great lost love — even in a song about getting a load off your chest.
Instead, he wrote a song about talking about a lost love that never does actually talk about it…
