SONG CYCLE

Ed Lowe 02/16/2005 3:30 am
Melissa Marquais, who was born Melissa Scotto 27 years ago, has entertained a dream of being an entertainer, specifically a singer, since her days at Farmingdale High School.She did not graduate from Farmingdale High School. Her boyfriend at the time, her very first boyfriend, was Eric George Zawasky, a 16-year-old guitar player who had contracted a virus that so weakened his heart that he collapsed and died of a heart attack at school on Oct. 18, 1993. Melissa thereafter could not bear to return to Farmingdale, so she finished her high school career in Seaford. That said, she has ever after pursued a career in music. Currently, she lives in Nashville, Tenn. Her mother, Jill, lives in Farmingdale and works as a paralegal for Geico Insurance. Jill's mother, Norma Schweikert, formerly of Farmingdale, died on Aug. 3, in Clearwater, Fla. A former professional singer herself, Norma was the widow of Ernest G. Schweikert, a songwriter and pianist whose claims to fame included a Broadway musical called Rumple, starring Eddie Foy, Jr. and Gretchen Wyler, about a cartoon character who comes to life to straighten out the life of his creator, and a song recorded by Mike Douglas entitled "Color the Children," composed in 1977 for the infant, Melissa, and her 3-year-old brother, Chris. In one of the weird coincidences of life, the Broadway show opened on Nov. 5, 1956 and closed on Dec. 14, in the middle of a transit strike. The dates of birth of Schweikert's beloved grand-children are Nov. 5, 1974 (Chris) and Dec. 14, 1977 (Melissa). The night before she died unexpectedly, Norma Schweikert exacted a promise from her granddaughter to find Ernest Schweikert's music. "I was confused about whether I wanted to do country and western music or ballads, or whatever, and it just seemed impossible for me to find music that I felt was, you know, for me," said Marquais. "I made the promise, but I figured his music wouldn't be something that would be a fit for me, that could be marketed today. I did ask her, 'Why don't you just send it to me?' She said, 'I can't. He threw it out.' "I said, 'What?' She [Norma] said he had all these cuts from Billie Holiday, Mike Douglas, Sammy Davis Jr. and Perry Como, and the publishing companies hadn't paid him: Theodore Presser publishers, for instance, Zorro Music, Bro 'n Sis and Warner-Chappell, where he had signed a work-for-hire contract, which meant that he would have signed away his royalties. But the big one was the one he wrote for Billie Holiday, 'This is Heaven to Me.' She was on Decca, one of the biggest labels. He never got paid. "You have a man who is a creative genius, and he can't put food on the table. At the time, he was working writing music full-time and was making something like $50 a week. He wound up having a construction company with my uncle, Jeff Schweikert, of Islip. My grandmother told me that, one day, my grandfather got so mad he took the piano bench and dumped out its contents into the garbage. That was all his music. She had none of it. I didn't know that would be my last conversation with her," said Marquais. "She died the next day. "My first step after that was to contact the publishing companies to see if they would give me copies of the sheet music. There were hundreds of songs that my grandfather wrote with a lyricist named Frank Reardon, whom I've heard about for years. The name has been in my family for a long, long time. I think 'Color the Children' might be the only song that my grandfather did not write with Frank Reardon. Frank wrote the lyrics for everything else. "Zorro Music was the first company I contacted. I asked them for the music to 'Color the Children.' I said that, by law, a publishing company is supposed to give quarterly statements. 'Either give me the royalties owed for all that time, or give me back the copyright, and we'll call it a day.' The woman was very nice. I now own the song. I have the original score framed and hanging over my piano. "Anyway, I went after 'This is Heaven to Me,' which he wrote with Frank Reardon in 1949, and Perry Como's 'Somebody Cares,' which was published by Bro 'n Sis. A lot of the publishers had the music, but it's buried. Going back to the 1950s, nothing is computerized. I thought, 'This could take months. This is not the way to go.' I thought maybe I could contact Frank Reardon's kids, if he had any. I also thought they might like to know that the money their father never got for the Billie Holiday song was theirs, but I had no idea where they were from and didn't know anything about them. I had a friend, Tim Daly, who was an investor in my career. He'd done corporate collection for a long time. "I was talking to him online, and we wound up spending weeks on the Internet, and we eventually came up with the name of a man, Kevin Reardon, whom we thought might be Frank's son. I got Kevin Reardon's address and wrote him a letter. I told him about the promise I made my grandmother, and I asked him to please write back, even if he wasn't the son of the lyricist, Frank Reardon, just for my peace of mind. I waited, like, three weeks, eventually figuring I had the wrong guy, but he called me Christmas Eve. "He said, 'That was my dad!' He said, 'I have everything. I've waited my whole life for somebody to come along and do something with this stuff.' He started sending me songs, and when I heard them, I said, 'Oh, my God. My grand-father wrote this music for me before I was born.' The songs suit me perfectly as an artist. It's the only music I've ever heard that's made me cry. Shane Keister and I are recording an album of [my grandfather's] work, and we're going to pitch it to the labels. We had a Super Bowl party, and two of our friends were here, two grown men, who sat in the living room and cried when they heard the songs. One of them said, 'Wow. Up until now, I thought I was a songwriter.'"

Very
and a great read