COME RAIN OR COME SHINE.(Harold Arlen's composition)

The composer Harold Arlen, a dapper man whose songs brought something both dashing and deep to the Republic, liked to tell a story about the time he danced with Marilyn Monroe. "People are staring at us," Arlen whispered to Monroe. "They must know who you are!" she replied. The joke, as Arlen knew, was on him. Although his catalogue included "I've Got the World on a String," "That Old Black Magic," "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)," "Get Happy," and "Over the Rainbow"--which was voted the twentieth century's No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America--Arlen was virtually anonymous. "Who's Harold Arlen?" Truman Capote asked in 1953, when it was suggested that he collaborate with the composer on the musical version of his short story "House of Flowers." In 1955, at a concert in Cairo partly devoted to American music, five Arlen songs--"Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," "Ill Wind," "Blues in the Night," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," and "Stormy Weather"--were billed, without attribution, as American "folk songs." Even this year, which happens to be the centennial of Arlen's birth (he died in 1986), at a celebration for a postage stamp honoring the late lyricist E. Y. Harburg, with whom Arlen wrote a hundred and eleven songs, including the score for "The Wizard of Oz," no one thought to even mention Arlen.

If Arlen's name is not on the American public's lips, his songs are in our hearts. "Harold's best is the best," Irving Berlin said. The songwriter and historian Alec Wilder, in his canonical book, "American Popular Song," warns himself at the beginning of his chapter on Arlen, "I must guard against over-enthusiasm." He goes on, "If the story was true that George Gershwin was his hero"--it was--"then as far as I'm concerned, the pupil surpassed the teacher. . . . I respect Gershwin, but I envy Arlen." Gershwin himself respected Arlen, whom he called "the most original of all of us." Unlike the music of most of his contemporaries, Arlen's harmonic flair and his melodic opulence were not influenced by Europe; instead, they grew out of the liberating principles of American jazz. "He, more than any of his contemporaries, plunged himself into the heartbeat of the popular music of his youth, the dance band," Wilder writes. "He had that crazy jazz going," Johnny Mercer, one of Arlen's collaborators, told Walter Cronkite in a nineteen-sixties TV special on the composer. "George's jazz was mechanical compared to Harold's." Mercer continued, touching his solar plexus, "Harold's was right from in there."

Arlen's sound also incorporated the Jewish wail and the wail of the blues. Across the decades, it found its most eloquent expression in the mouths of black performers: Ethel Waters, Dooley Wilson, Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, and, especially, Lena Horne, whose lengthy collaboration with Arlen began with "As Long as I Live," which she performed at the Cotton Club in 1934, when she was sixteen. Arlen and the lyricist Ted Koehler wrote five Cotton Club revues in the early thirties; their songs--among them "That's What I Hate About Love" and "Kicking the Gong Around"--were introduced to the world by the bands of Cab Calloway, Jimmy Lunceford, and Duke Ellington. Ethel Waters, who did twelve encores after singing "Stormy Weather" on the opening night of the 1933 "Cotton Club Parade," referred to Arlen as "my son"; she considered him, she said, "the Negro-est white man I know."

Unusually for a songwriter, Arlen was also a great interpreter of his own work. His sexy, pliant vocals, one wag said, were "like someone singing with his fly open." Bing Crosby considered him "one of the best stylists I've ever heard." Even Noel Coward, with his punctilio for diction and display, wrote to Arlen, "I'm here to tell you that I would rather hear you sing your own songs than anybody else."

"Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel," Arlen said. "It just breathes the air of freedom." But his liberating songs, full of buoyant triumph, are also imbued with a sense of loss. The bittersweet began almost at Arlen's birth, in Buffalo, New York, on February 15, 1905: his twin brother died the following day. Throughout Arlen's life, his parents, the fine-voiced cantor Samuel Arluck and his wife, Celia, refused to acknowledge him by the American first name he adopted. To the family, to his close friends, the survivor of the Arluck twins was always Chaim, the Hebrew word for "life."

From the age of seven, Arlen sang in the choir at his synagogue, where he was a constant witness to his father's musical virtuosity. "Pop had a perfect genius for finding new melodic ...