All By Myself

One of the themes of my play about Marilyn Monroe is solitude. And one of the high points of her life, in my opinion, was her support of the career of Ella Fitzgerald. Put those two things together and throw in the fact that the song "All by Myself" by Irving Berlin was both covered by Fitzgerald and is in the public domain, and I have myself a signature song for this play, which I will have Monroe sing.

My version will be done with a single piano though and not be swinging like Fitzgerald's version.

It has been claimed that Fitzgerald was unable to work at the nightclub The Mocambo due to the color bar, but according to the Wiki on Fitzgerald:

It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first Black performer to play the Mocambo, following Monroe's intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers Herb Jefferies, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryan all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according to stories published at the time in Jet magazine and Billboard"

The play MARILYN AND ELLA which I discovered via this Wiki article promotes the notion that Monroe helped integrate the nightclub. What Monroe's intervention - she promised the nightclub owner to show up for Fitzgerald's performances - did for sure was help the career of Ella Fitzgerald.