Her song “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’’ - whom she described as “drifting through the town, drinking up the night, trying not to drown’’ - was recorded by Roberta Flack, Petula Clark, Rickie Lee Jones, and, in an instrumental version, the pianist Keith Jarrett. With music by Tommy Wolf, It became a jazz standard.
Another song she wrote that became a standard - but, like “Sad Young Men,’’ never a hit - was “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.’’ It sprang from Ms. Landesman’s asking jazz musicians to put T.S. Eliot’s phrase “April is the cruelest month’’ into their own words. Its music was also composed by Wolf. Bette Midler and Sarah Vaughan were among the many who sang it.
Ms. Landesman also published five volumes of poetry, some of it raw.
Ms. Landesman, 83, died July 23 at her home in London. Her death was announced on her official website. She left an epitaph, something she said on more than one occasion: “It was a good life, but it wasn’t commercial.’’
Frances Deitsch was born in New York on Oct. 21, 1927, attended Temple University in Philadelphia and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and fell in with the group that came to be called the Beat generation. She thought Kerouac was “the best-looking man I’ve ever seen,’’ and the feeling seemed mutual. He and Allen Ginsberg serenaded her with bongos. “Be my girlfriend, I’m so lonely,’’ Kerouac pleaded.
But she ended up marrying Jay Landesman, who published Neurotica, a magazine that gave the Beats a platform while seeking to explore America’s “inner darkness.’’
“He’ll make a good first husband,’’ she decided.
They were wed for 61 years; Jay Landesman died at 91 in February. They had a remarkably open marriage in which each occasionally brought partners home to sleep in separate bedrooms. Everyone then had breakfast together. Their teenage sons, Cosmo and Miles, were appalled.
