The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  Sondheim, in common with Bacharach, Strouse, Coleman, and Kander, had a significant musical education. That distinguished them from the older group of composers, and, in fact, from most of their peers. Over the years, writes author Philip Ennis, “the nature of musical literacy changed. New York publishers could no longer impose the standard of competency in reading and writing music on composers or performers as a prerequisite to participation.” Indeed, Bacharach, who was a skilled jazz pianist and had studied with the classical composers Darius Milhaud, Henry Cowell, and Bohuslav Martinu˚, couldn’t manage to find any success at the Brill Building in the early fifties. He earned his keep as an accompanist and conductor for performers like Vic Damone, Steve Lawrence, and the Ames Brothers, a vocal quartet from Malden, Massachusetts, whose lead singer—brother Ed—would go on to a solo career and costar in the 1960s TV series Daniel Boone as Daniel’s Indian sidekick. The brothers had a huge hit in 1953 with “You, You, You,” the numbing inanity of whose melody was matched only by the repetitive banality of its lyrics. (Opening stanza: “You, you, you / I’m in love with you, you, you / I could be so true, true, true / To someone like you, you, you.”) Bacharach would listen to demos and play the sheet music of songs submitted for the Ames Brothers’ consideration, most of which took “You, You, You” as a model. Repetition was the most obvious quality to emulate, as in such subsequent 1953 records as “My Love, My Love” (Joni James), “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” (Karen Chandler), “Love Me, Love Me” (Bobby Wayne), and “Baby, Baby, Baby” (Teresa Brewer, who had previously scored with “Music! Music! Music!”). It occurred to Bacharach that he could go back to the Brill Building and churn out five of those a day. But it didn’t work. He went a year and a half without selling anything. Carolyn Leigh said she wasn’t even interested in trying to write a song with him; when he played a demo for Connie Francis, she picked up the needle after eight bars. “It looked simple,” Bacharach later recalled. “But writing something simple that sounded maybe a little derivative, or accessible, was not so easy or acceptable to me.”

  It was another throwback to the pre–golden age Tin Pan Alley, the sense that songs were just material. Tunes and lyrics were simple and formulaic, and success was a matter of luck, romance (up to and including payola), and serendipity—coming out with an approach or gimmick that tickled the public’s fancy at just the right time.

  Dick Adler was no Burt Bacharach. Although his father, Clarence, was a noted concert pianist, Dick, in a somewhat self-defeating act of rebellion, eschewed the instrument and all musical training. That proved awkward when he decided to become a songwriter, but he seemed to solve the problem by following the example of his friend Bob Merrill, the composer of “The Doggie in the Window” and “Mambo Italiano,” picking out his melodies on a toy xylophone. Clarence Adler had introduced his son to the only one of his piano students who wrote popular music, Phil Springer, and Springer and Dick teamed up on a couple of minor successes in 1950—the countryish “Teasin’” and an “answer song” to “Good Night, Irene” called “Please Say Goodnight to the Guy, Irene” (the lyric went on: “and let me get some sleep”), which Adler claimed would eventually sell 750,000 records. A long dry spell followed, however, and he hoped that he could turn things around by working with a new partner, an even younger man named Jerry Ross, who had come out of the Yiddish theater, where he’d been billed as “the boy star.”*

  Adler was prone to giving himself compositional challenges—writing a song about the rain, about hands, about the distance between two people, and so forth. One day he took the xylophone, a pencil, and some paper into a room in his apartment for what he described as “the ultimate.” He closed the door and told himself he wouldn’t leave until he’d written a song about something that happened in the bathroom.

  Time passed. Then more time passed. Then the radiator started to hiss. Within a few minutes Adler had plunked out a melody and written the words to a rhythm number he called “Steam Heat.” (“The radiator’s hissin’, / Still I need your kissin’ . . .”) For the next few days he worked on the song with Ross. The pair managed to get an appointment with Mitch Miller, then in his last weeks at Mercury Records. After they played “Steam Heat” for the Beard, he said he wouldn’t be able to take it on. But he thought there was something to the song. “Save it for a show,” he said.

  That notion increasingly made sense to Adler, who had grown up enamored of Broadway musicals and, before the war, acted with the Group Theater. Broadway had it all over Tin Pan Alley in terms of artistry and prestige. FAnd so he was excited, at about the same time as the failure with “Steam Heat,” when Manie Sachs, Miller’s predecessor at Columbia Records, offered to set up a meeting with Frank Loesser. After the war, Loesser had returned to Hollywood for a peacetime stint that was brief but long enough for him to write both music and lyrics for a group of first-rate songs: “(I’d Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China,” “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?,” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which won the 1949 Academy Award for Best Original Song.* Then he reinvented himself. In 1949, George Abbott, still the prince of Broadway a decade after he met Livingston and Evans, had written the book for a proposed musical based on a Victorian farce, Charley’s Aunt, and had lined up Ray Bolger to star. He and the producers, Ernest H. Martin and Cy Feuer, asked Loesser to write the lyrics for the show, to be called Where’s Charley? That appealed to Loesser, who had never really cottoned either to the California climate or the Hollywood ethos. “Writers out there were stymied in what they could do,” said his widow, Jo Sullivan Loesser, “because you were under contract and they would tell you to write two songs for this movie and another for that one. It didn’t matter if it was from your inner soul or what have you, you had to write a song.”

  The plan was for Harold Arlen to write the score, but Arlen was unavailable. Loesser got the job, the production was a hit, and that led to another music-and-lyrics assignment for Feuer and Martin: an adaptation of Damon Runyon’s comical fables about the New York underworld. The production that resulted, Guys and Dolls, was one of the greatest theatrical successes of all time, both commercially and artistically. Best of all was Loesser’s score, which represented the apogee of twentieth-century American theatrical songwriting. His songs were integral to character and story—from the inspired opener, “Fugue for Tin Horns,” through the comic tours de force “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat,” “Take Back Your Mink,” and “Adelaide’s Lament,” through the finale, “Marry the Man Today.” Those and other numbers served their purpose so well that they really couldn’t be divorced from the show, but other Guys and Dolls songs proved strong enough to stand on their own. “If I Were a Bell” has become a vocal and jazz standard; “I’ll Know” is a ballad worthy of Rodgers and Hammerstein; the less well-known “My Time of Day” is a haunting, minor-key tone poem; and Frank Sinatra turned “Luck Be a Lady” into a nightclub show-stopper.

  Guys and Dolls would go on to sweep the 1951 Tony Awards and run for 1,200 performances. Loesser used his success, in part, to become a cheerleader, idea man, and mentor for songwriters. He wanted, in Jo Sullivan Loesser’s words, to “improve the breed.” In 1951 he advised his Hollywood friend Meredith Willson to write a musical based on the memories of his small-town Iowa youth, which he always talked about. Six years later, that germ of an idea had turned into The Music Man; Loesser got a production credit. Loesser encouraged a couple of young songwriters, Robert Wright and Chet Forrest, with their idea for a musical based on the compositions of the Russian composer Alexander Borodin. In 1953 the show, Kismet, became a Broadway hit as well.

  Loesser even agreed to an audience with an eighteen-year-old kid whose mother knew someone who knew him. He sat Jerry Herman down and said, “I want you to play everything you’ve ever written.” The kid played piano and a friend of his from their neighborhood—a girl named Phyllis Newman—sang. When they were finished, Loesser told th
e boy, “I want you to tell your parents I think you should try songwriting. It’s a tough field, but I think you can make it.” Then Loesser drew a picture of a train with a caboose and said, “This is what makes a good song. The locomotive has to start it. The caboose has to finish it off. Those are the bookends. Then you fill in different colors for the cars in the middle.”

  Herman, who would write words and music for Hello, Dolly! and many other shows, later recalled, “It was such a graphic, beautiful lesson about how to write a song. It stayed with me forever.”

  One more story of an audience with Loesser. Dave Frishberg, a St. Paul native and a jazz pianist, had come to New York in 1957, at the age of twenty-four, and immediately began getting work as a sideman. For a year and a half he was the singer Carmen McRae’s accompanist. When that gig ended, he realized that because he couldn’t sight-read, he was at a disadvantage in picking up work accompanying singers at auditions and rehearsals. He determined to learn to read, and in so doing studied the canon of the Great American Songbook. “I became a song fan . . .” he said later. “I wanted to know everything I could about the people who wrote them, how those people wrote, when, what helped them write.” And that process of discovery inspired him to start writing songs himself. “I had a couple friends who were songwriters at the time,” he recalled, “and they said, ‘These are good. Take them to Frank Loesser.’

  I left them at his office, and one day the office called me to say that Loesser liked my stuff, especially a song called “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue,” and wanted to meet me and talk about songwriting. So I went down there and met with him for an hour or so in his office. He sat there and chain-smoked and so did I. He didn’t want to talk about music, he wanted to talk about lyrics. I admired him as a lyric writer, of course, but I was knocked out with his music writing. I thought he was a wonderful, audacious composer and when I tried to talk music with him, he said, “Look, I don’t want to talk music. I’m not a musician. I’m a word guy.” . . . He was looking at my songs with me, he was giving me this masterful advice. It was wonderful.*

  Of course, Loesser’s efforts on behalf of other songwriters were not wholly or even mainly disinterested. His years of experience in the industry had taught him how lucrative publishing rights could be. Hoagy Carmichael observed: “Frank always wanted to be Irving Berlin.” In the forties he started a company called Susan Music, named after his daughter, to publish his own songs, and in 1950 he hired some of Berlin’s lawyers and started a more extensive publishing concern, Frank Music Corp. Loesser secured the rights to Kismet and plugged the score so hard that, even before the show opened, thirty-six separate recordings of its songs were released; “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “Stranger in Paradise” were the big winners. Frank Music was also in the market for one-off songs, and would have significant successes in the mid-fifties with “Unchained Melody” and “Cry Me a River.” Loesser saw writers as students, to some extent, but more so as investments. Dave Frishberg said, “I never got the feeling that he was taking me under his wing. I thought that he saw dollar signs in what I was doing. Not that that’s a bad thing. I used to take my songs to that office and they would, quote, publish them—which meant they would take the copyright and put it into their file cabinet.”

  It was by no means guaranteed that Loesser would be enthusiastic about a songwriter, or even sign him on, as Sheldon Harnick discovered. Harnick had enrolled at Northwestern University near his hometown of Chicago after his World War II service, earning money by playing violin in a sweet band. Inspired by the success of an actress classmate named Charlotte Rae (born Charlotte Lubotsky), he had come to New York and met his hero, Yip Harburg, who advised him to concentrate on lyrics and leave music writing to a collaborator. At one low point Harnick asked a friend who had done choreography for Loesser if she could arrange for a meeting. “She said, ‘Sure,’” Harnick recalled. “I called Mr. Loesser, and he said, ‘I’m going to California for five weeks. Call me when I get back and you can play for me.’ I sweated out those five weeks. I was desperate. Finally I called his office, and his secretary said, ‘I’ll tell Mr. Loesser you’re on the phone.’ She came back and said, ‘Mr. Loesser knows your work. You don’t have to come in.’ I was just crushed. Just desolate.”

  In 1951 the young songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were able to get through the door via the Manie Sachs connection. They played their limited repertoire, and Loesser liked one countryish song, “The Strange Little Girl,” enough to offer them a contract: a $500 advance for the song and $50 a week each, against future royalties. Frank Music’s efforts led to nine performers recording “Strange Little Girl,” including Red Foley, Cowboy Copas, Hank Williams, and Eddy Howard, whose version reached number twenty-eight on the charts. But then “Tennessee Waltz” became a sensation, and that, according to Adler, for the moment satisfied the national demand for country tunes.

  Adler and Ross soldiered on. Loesser secured the team a meeting with George Abbott, but Abbott didn’t like what he heard enough to proceed with a show. The meeting, and the disappointing result, was repeated the following year. The team did manage to get some jobs writing special material for the young Eddie Fisher, a heartthrob being hyped in some quarters as the next Sinatra (and one of the few male singers who wasn’t Italian). Talking to Fisher, who had grown up poor and had famously been plucked from obscurity by the venerable entertainer Eddie Cantor, gave Adler an idea. He and Ross produced a sort of Neapolitan bravura ballad called “Rags to Riches.” Bypassing Loesser, they brought it directly to Mitch Miller at Columbia. Miller took the song, changing a couple of chords (“something that didn’t bother us much,” Adler recalled, “because we knew that Mitch suggested a change in almost every song he took”), and produced a record sung by Tony Bennett with “a driving, full-blooded brass choir arrangement by Percy Faith.”

  At first the record went nowhere. But then, as Adler recounts in his autobiography, he decided to become his own song plugger and personally talk up the record to disk jockeys in half a dozen big cities. The big catch was Bill Randle, number one in Cleveland and one of the most influential DJs in the country. Adler pitched him a wacky idea: play the song on the air six times in a row. Improbably, Randle agreed. The result was reminiscent of what had happened with “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” and “Peg o’ My Heart.” That weekend the song went to number one in Cleveland and eventually hit number one in the country, staying on top of the Billboard charts for eight weeks in a row and, according to Adler, selling two million copies.

  “Rags to Riches” was Adler and Ross’s ticket to a theatrical job: providing most of the music for a revue, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, which opened on Broadway in December 1953. (Cy Coleman, Bart Howard, and a young calypso singer named Harry Belafonte also wrote material. The performers included Belafonte, Polly Bergen, Hermione Gingold, Larry Kert, Tina Louise, and Monique Van Vooren.) Revues, a staple of the 1920s, were in the midst of a revival, thanks in large part to the periodic New Faces shows produced by Leonard Sillman. His 1952 edition was the most successful of all and helped launch the careers of performers Paul Lynde, Eartha Kitt, and Carol Lawrence. Contributing sketches was a young comedy writer who still called himself “Melvin” Brooks, and contributing music and lyrics was Sheldon Harnick, whose song “Boston Beguine” was a show-stopper for Alice Ghostley. That led to a call to Harnick from someone at the music publishing company Hill & Range, but the audition didn’t go well. “I had a portfolio of revue songs and pop songs, and I played them all,” Harnick recalled. “They said there were ‘too many ideas’ in my revue songs. As for my pop songs, they said—and I swear this is true, ‘Listen to the crap around, that’s what we want.’” That wasn’t something he was willing, or in fact able, to do. “I had to recognize for myself that I was not Irving Berlin,” he said. “I didn’t have the common touch. There are rare writers like Berlin who manage to write songs of common elegance. I knew I didn’t h
ave that talent, so I felt that what I could hope for, eventually, was to write something for the theater that would also find popular acceptance.”

  Harnick kept contributing to revues, including Two’s Company, with Bette Davis, and Shoestring Revue (which introduced Chita Rivera, Dody Goodman, Beatrice Arthur, and Arte Johnson), and made extra money by writing for television and for the big trade shows put on by companies like Buick, the National Biscuit Company, and the Milliken fabric company. (“They made me solvent,” he said.) All the while he was waiting for the moment when he could have a Broadway show of his own.

  The New York revues were AAA-level farm teams for the Broadway musical. One narrow notch below were the summer revues put on by two mountain resorts, Green Mansions in the Adirondacks and the Tamiment resort in the Poconos. Entertainment at the latter had been presided over for years by Max Liebman; in the early fifties he hired the songwriting team of Jerry Bock and Larry Holofcener straight out of the University of Wisconsin. (Later in the decade, Richard Rodgers’s daughter, Mary, and lyricist Marshall Barer would develop the musical Once Upon a Mattress at Tamiment.) Sheldon Harnick worked at Green Mansions, as did an aspiring classical composer named Charles Strouse, who, like Mitch Miller and Alec Wilder, had studied at the Eastman School of Music. Until his symphonies were performed, Strouse had been trying to make ends meet by playing the piano in jazz combos and taking on what he remembered as “many humiliating jobs at restaurants where nobody listened to me.” Another job had him playing piano at ballet rehearsals for seventy-five cents an hour. “My first split consciously with serious music,” he recalled, “was when this guy came up to me at a dance class and said he had a job to write dance music for the revues, and would I be the pianist. I had won a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony, I was working on a two-piano sonata and thought to myself, ‘Gee that sounds like fun.’ A lot of pretty girls.” At Green Mansions, Strouse and a lyricist he met there, Lee Adams, started writing songs for the weekly shows, which featured all-new material performed by Carol Burnett, Don Adams, and other young singers and comics. One of their numbers was on the theme of comedy and tragedy; they called it “Put On a Happy Face.”