“AS I RECALL the story,” said Edward Eliscu, a fellow lyricist and a contemporary of Robin’s, “Leo came to New York intending to become a playwright. It was in the late 1920s, and he had some kind of an intro to George S. Kaufman, who came from Leo’s hometown, Pittsburgh. Kaufman looked at Leo’s plays and he wasn’t too impressed, but he was gentle about it, and he asked, ‘What else have you written?’ Leo said, ‘Well, I’ve written some songs,’ but he was rather shame-faced about it. ‘Let’s see ’em,’ insisted Kaufman, and Leo showed him one, a lyric he’d written called ‘My Cutie’s Due at Two to Two Today!’ and Kaufman immediately said, ‘That’s it—that’s what you should be doing!’”
Kaufman displayed acute prescience about young Leo’s talent, and his judgment has been amply justified by the fellow Pittsburghian’s extraordinary lyrical gift. Promptly after the publication of that first paean to his mythical cutie, Robin went to work with Vincent Youmans and produced, with Clifford Grey, a song called “Hallelujah!” for the show Hit the Deck. And since then he has never given playwriting another thought.
His collaborators over the years include Youmans, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Jule Styne, Arthur Schwartz, Johnny Green, and Sigmund Romberg, who, along with the late Richard Whiting and Ralph Rainger, truly comprise a Blue Book of American composers. But Robin is the first to decry his own contributions and talent. In popular music, a fiercely competitive business famous for its back-biting, jealousy, and ego trips, he is famous for his modesty. According to Leo, whenever one of his works has been successful, it’s usually because of the genius of his collaborator, or because the song was performed by a brilliant talent, or mostly because he “got lucky.”
Leo Robin
These days Leo Robin lives in a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard to Beverly Hills. He’s a diminutive, alert man whose thick shock of hair is only slightly touched with gray. His rooms are crammed with books and records and pipes. When he talks, he puffs constantly on one of his huge Charatans, and he is a pacer. Since he talks, puffs, and paces in a sort of instinctive contrapuntal rhythm, his pipe is constantly going out.
“How did I start with Dick Whiting? This was way back in 1928, and sound pictures were just getting popular. It was the era of the title song, the theme song, and so forth, and then the studios got an idea that they could branch into larger musicals. There was this big demand for song-writers, for lyric-writers, fellows from New York—what they called the gold rush.
“Well, what happened was that I walked into Max Dreyfus’ office one day. Max was the king of the music business, and his publishing firm had the most prestigious, the biggest names under contract. I was a kind of cub lyric-writer around there, just starting in. I was getting an advance of $25 a week or so. I was dabbling in shows, and I’d been lucky enough to be associated with one big hit, ‘Hallelujah!,’ already. But that was all.
“So I walked into Max’s office that day, and he said, ‘How would you like to go to Hollywood?’ Well, I was footloose and free, unmarried as yet, and I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘You’re going to write with a guy named Dick Whiting.’ Well, I nearly fell over, because to me, practically a beginner in the business, the name of Dick Whiting had a prestige and a glamour and an aura that floored me. Dreyfus said, ‘You’ll get such-and-such advance every month, and you’ll live in Hollywood for three months—it’s a three-month contract.’ That three-month contract spread out until I stayed here in Hollywood for over forty years.
“Well, I didn’t know Dick Whiting, and he didn’t know me. So I called him and I asked, ‘When are you leaving, and how do we meet?’ He said, ‘I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago’—he was coming from Detroit—‘and we’ll take the train from there.’ So I get to the Sherman, and I don’t even know what Dick looks like! There I am in the lobby, and it suddenly dawned on me to have him paged. Pretty soon a bellboy brings Dick over and says, ‘Mr. Robin, meet Mr. Whiting.’ Here we are, two strangers, introduced by a bellboy! From that came a very successful and pleasant working experience.
“We get to Hollywood, and, naturally, we register at the Roosevelt— everybody stayed there. We go to the studio the next day, and they say, ‘You’re going to write a picture for a fellow named Chevalier whom we just signed in Europe.’ We’d never heard of him. The name of the picture was … oh, hell, my mind doesn’t really function until midnight,” he complained. Then he contradicted his own statement. “It was Innocents of Paris.
“So, we’re sitting around in the hotel, and Dick is in another room noodling away at the piano, digging for a tune. Finally he hits something, and from the next room I yell, ‘Dick, that’s it!’ And in his usual modest way he says, ‘You really like it?’ That was Whiting. I said, ‘I don’t think you have to look any further.’
“Now, the point is this: in those days, if the girl in the picture was named Susie, you wrote a song called ‘Susie.’ Well, the girl in this picture happened to be Louise. So we called the song ‘Louise.’ Incidentally, when ‘Louise’ became a hit, one of the trade papers ran a list of the hit songs of the week, and they topped it with ‘Louise.’ But through a typo they left the ‘i’ out, so it was billed as ‘Louse.’
“Anyway, it wasn’t lousy,” said Robin, with characteristic understatement. “It turned out to be, as you know, a standard, and Chevalier, God bless him, even sang it on his last television appearance, very recently. He was an amazing guy. Do you know he’d been in correspondence with Eleanor [Richard Whiting’s widow] ever since those days? He loved Dick.
“Chevalier was a very great man, personally,” he said. “I’ve never told this story about ‘Louise.’ You see, Paramount was not prepared to make sound pictures, especially musical pictures. They didn’t even have a sound stage yet. It was a pioneer period, so they took a silent stage, and from the ceiling they hung huge rugs and carpets to deaden the sound outside, because anything rumbling in the street would ruin the take. They didn’t use playbacks in those days; everything was recorded right on the set. Back of those carpets, or behind the scenery somewhere, there was a little orchestra, and the musicians would play, and the guy in front of the camera would sing the song. Well, the time came to record ‘Louise.’ They had to do it in the middle of the night because it was the quietest time. It was probably around two in the morning, when there wasn’t any traffic outside the studio, or inside.1 It was such an important thing for Paramount— their first musical—that on the set there was every important executive of the company, from Adolph Zukor, the president, on down.
“So they start to play the tune, the intro. The director says, ‘Shoot,’ the cameras start, and Chevalier starts singing. He sings to a girl sitting on a garden wall, around them trees and flowers. In his kind of demonstrative style, he sings, ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise,’ and his fingers imitate a breeze. ‘Birds in the trees,’ and he points to the trees, ‘seem to twitter Louise.’ And he goes through the song with these gestures of his that are part of his personality and style. Comes the second chorus, and he sings, ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise,’ and he does the same gestures.
“Now, I was just a novice in the business. I turn to Dick. I say, ‘Dick, that’s wrong, doing the same gestures in both choruses. The second chorus is an anticlimax. It should be the climax.’ Dick says, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ I say, ‘Why don’t you go up to Chevalier and tell him?’ He says, ‘Oh, my God, not me, little me, Dick Whiting. I’d never dare do that. You go up and talk to him.’ I say, ‘Oh, no, not me.’ He suggests I tell Dick Wallace, the director. So I go up to Dick Wallace and I tell him I think this is wrong. Dick says, ‘My God, Leo, this is an international star. You don’t expect me to tell him how to sing a song!’ I say, ‘It’s going to ruin the whole thing if somebody doesn’t tell him.’ He says, ‘Okay, if you feel that way, you go up and tell him.’ The director is giving me orders to tell him!
“Now, I am absolutely nothing compared to this great star. Just a kid starting in. The set is full of these bigwigs. How can I go up in their presence and tell this guy what to do? Well, I had to. I said, ‘Okay, I get fired, but what can I do?’ The song was the sacred thing; it had to be right. It was our first, so much depended on it, and it was being done wrong. So I go up to Chevalier, and I say, ‘Mr. Chevalier, you are a great international artist, and I don’t know very much about the stage or the vaudeville theatre, but here in America we do the songs a little differently than you are doing this, and I think the American public would expect it done our way. In your first chorus you do those wonderful gestures of yours. But in the second chorus you do the same thing. Here in America we first sing the chorus clearly and simply to the girl, then, in the second chorus, if you add those marvelous gestures of yours, it becomes great.’
“He looked at me. ‘Mr. Roban, you are wrong.’ He called me ‘Roban’— French inflection.
“You can imagine how I felt. I nearly went through the floor. I shrunk away, about three hundred feet down the stage, and hid behind a piece of scenery. Now again the orchestra strikes up, and again Chevalier starts to sing, and he gets to the middle of the chorus, and then I hear the director call, ‘Cut,’ and I hear Chevalier say, ‘Roban?’ I don’t answer. Again he says ‘ROBIN!’ Then everybody on the set starts to holler, ‘Leo, Leo, Leo!’ Well, finally I came forward. And here, in front of all these important people, Chevalier says, ‘Roban, you are right!’
“Well, I knew then that he was a great man, because this was his first American picture and he didn’t have to humiliate himself that way in front of all these people. From then on I adored the guy. Because I was a little nothing, and yet, in front of all these people he gave me that moment of satisfaction.
“About Zukor. We had a little office upstairs somewhere, one of the side streets off the lot. You had to walk up a long flight of stairs to get there. One day, while we were sitting there, up the stairs and into our office comes little Adolph Zukor himself. One of the gods, a wonderful man, brilliant. Head of the whole company. Asked if he could please hear the songs that we’d written for Chevalier. So we played them, and he said, ‘These are very good,’ and turning to me, he said, ‘I like your lyrics very much.’ And that’s the first time I heard the word ‘lyrics’ in Hollywood, because nobody there knew what the hell a lyric meant. They’d refer to the words. And I was pleased to know that Zukor was knowledgeable enough about show business to use a word like that. Amazing human being.2
“Then, Lubitsch was making a picture called Monte Carlo. He told us what he wanted. He was the first director that ever wanted the songs integrated into the picture, rather than having them just ‘spotted’ here and there without any real connection with the story. In those days all the producers wanted were hit songs. They realized a hit was great for exploiting a picture and contributed to its success. But Lubitsch wanted his songs to come out of the action of the plot or the situation. In fact, he once used a phrase to me that I’ve never forgotten. I was back in New York, and he sent for me to come out and fix up some lyrics that some other fellows had written. I’m not going to mention their names, but they were very fine songwriters. When I got out here, I said to Lubitsch, ‘Why did you have to send to New York for a guy like me when right here on the Paramount lot you have these other great writers?’ Lubitsch said, ‘I like your style of writing because you don’t turn my characters into performers.’ Isn’t that a great line?
“In Monte Carlo Lubitsch put on what was probably one of the finest musical scenes, from the visual standpoint, ever done in a picture. It was that scene where Jeanette MacDonald runs away. It had to say what the girl, who was a princess, was thinking while she was on that train. Remember how he shot it—her singing? But then he would shoot away from her onto the fields as she was passing, and he picked up the peasants singing the same song. It was a great scene.”
Margaret Whiting adds, “My father had to write train music that would go along with the wheels of the train leaving, and then Jeanette MacDonald started to sing, and she heard the train start to go. My father’s music starts to fill in along with the click of the wheels, and she looks out and sees the peasants and she waves to them, and she suddenly realizes that this is a job that she has to do—to be a princess—and she has to go back. But Leo wrote a fantastic lyric to fit what this woman was thinking. With the music pounding away, Leo has her say, ‘Blow whistle, blow blow blow away, blow away the past. Go engine, anywhere, I don’t care how fast. On and on from darkness until dawn, from rain into the rainbow, fly with me.’ As the momentum went along, my father kept up this whole train of excitement going underneath the words. They worked so brilliantly together: ‘Beyond the blue horizon waits a beautiful day. Goodbye to things that bore me, joy is waiting for me. I see a blue horizon, my life is only begun. Beyond the blue horizon lies a rising sun.’ Exactly what they wanted this woman to think and to say. So simple, so perfect.”
“It had to be simple,” says Robin. “Remember, the audience in those days was not too sophisticated. In those days it was just a habit to go to the movies. People didn’t select, the way they do today. They weren’t so educated. So I had to make the lyric—just as any good lyric should be—understandable at first hearing. You couldn’t go back and say, ‘What did she say?’ They had to get it right away.
“Funny, I remember one day Lubitsch came to me, worried about a scene in the picture. Chevalier is knocking at the door, trying to get into Jeanette MacDonald’s boudoir, and she says, ‘Who is it?’ And Lubitsch asks, ‘Should he say, “It’s I”? or “It’s me”?’ I said, ‘Have him say “It’s me,” because if he says “It’s I” it’s too goddam grammatical, and people will stop, and you’ll lose them there for a second,’ Lubitsch said, ‘You’re right. We’ll say, “It’s me.”’
“Whiting and I eventually broke up. I had to go back to New York because my mother was very sick, and he went to Fox while I was East. We didn’t want to break up that winning combination; it was just circumstances. Then, when I came back—it was when Lubitsch called me to do this little repair job—there was a guy named Ralph Rainger. He was a piano player on the lot, and he came to me and he said, ‘Look, they’re doing a picture here and there’s a chance to write a couple of songs for Bing Crosby.’ It was one of those pictures Paramount did every year with various radio stars—The Big Broadcast of 1935, I think. ‘Why don’t you stay on and write them with me?’ he asked.
“He wasn’t yet established as a songwriter; he’d collaborated on ‘Moanin’ Low’ and some other songs in New York, but he hadn’t made it out here. You know, a lot of piano players sometimes write an occasional song that somebody puts words to. I liked the idea of staying in Hollywood at the time; it was an exciting place. So we write these two songs. One of them was ‘Please,’ which, thanks to Crosby and his power of making songs into hits, became one.
“So Paramount said, ‘Well, you two guys look like you can work pretty well together,’ and they gave me a contract to stay longer. And with Rainger, as you know, I had a lot of luck.3 Thanks mostly to Rainger, and also to my poetic style of writing, we were considered ‘classy’ writers. I can’t think of another word.
“Ralph had very good taste. He had a very good sense of lyric, and he liked the idea of a lyric that wasn’t too conventional in style. He encouraged me to dig for distinctive titles. For example, one day he came in and said, ‘I hit on a little jingle tune, maybe you’ll like it.’ He started to play this thing, one of those kind of bouncy schottisches, and I said, ‘Let me think about it.’ And, as usual, I went out and started to walk around the Paramount lot. That was the way I used to concentrate during the day. When I came back, I said, ‘Gee, I’ve got a great title’—no, not a great one, I never said that. I said, ‘I’ve got a title for that.’ Because I never thought any of those things were great. In fact, my dear wife used to say, if I had the Number One song on the Hit Parade, I would still say, ‘Well, if they’d given me more time, I could have done it better.’
“So I said, ‘I got this title. It’s “June in January.”’ He said, ‘You’re crazy—June in January?’ Sat for a minute, and then he said it again. ‘What a title!’ So he sits down to the piano, and he came up with that great melody for the song. Well, ‘June in January,’ as you know, is still used in headlines, all kinds of places. Whenever the weather out here gets unusually hot in January, all the headlines use the phrase ‘June-in-January weather.’ I get a kick out of that more than I do out of anything else, the fact that a song phrase can become part of a language.”
Can Robin articulate the creative process which results in such fine lyrics?
“No,” he said. “I don’t know how you come by them. A phrase just comes out of the air. In this case, the rhythm of Ralph’s original tune suggested it. I can’t claim any originality. I used to say, someday I’m going to be looking through some old poetry written by some Chinese or Greek three thousand years ago, and I’ll see the phrase ‘June in January.’
“I don’t know where you get ideas for songs. I always did try to reach for a distinctive title. Wasn’t always lucky, but I tried it. Ralph was a very good judge of lyrics. We did a song for another picture; I said, ‘It’ll never be a hit. It’s not a song, it’s a piece of material.’ Ralph said, ‘You’re crazy.’ We bet ten dollars, and I was very glad to pay off. You want to know what it was? Here’s what happened.
“They were doing another one of those Big Broadcast things, and Mitchell Leisen, the director, comes to us and says he’s got a problem. He says, ‘I got a scene in this picture and I’ve had six different writers try to write it, and they can’t I doesn’t work. It’s dull. And last night,’ he says, ‘I got a brainstorm. I thought, why don’t we put that scene into words and music? Maybe the music will keep it interesting; maybe the rhyme will keep it going. These other guys tried it in dialogue, and it flopped.’
“Leisen says, ‘This is a young, sophisticated couple who had been married. And they meet by chance on an ocean liner. I want them to show they are still in love, but they dare not say it. It’s got to be implied. Now, if you guys can write a song like that, fine.’ And I told him, ‘Well, it’s not easy to say “I love you” without saying it. Most songs come right out and hit it on the nose. But we’ll see what we can do.’
“So Ralph and I mulled this thing over for several days. Ralph said, ‘Now, this is a piece of special material. Why don’t you write the lyrics first?’ Ordinarily, he’d do music first. So I wrote some lyrics, brought them to him, he used them as a basis for his melody. We made a few changes, but most of it set the lyric as I had written it. Now, Leisen had said to us, ‘This song is going to be sung by Bob Hope. And while it’s a serious song, a guy like that has to get laughs.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, now what are we going to do? That really complicates it.’ Well, anyway, I finally came up with that completed lyric, and one day about three weeks later we ran into Mitch Leisen in the commissary, and he asks, ‘Where the hell is that song I asked you guys to write? I’m ready to go into production and I need that scene.’ So we said we had something. I said, ‘I haven’t wanted to show it to you yet, because I don’t think there are any laughs in it.’ He said, ‘Let me hear it.’
“We went over to the office. Ralph gets to the piano, and I, in my usual wavering voice, sing Mitch this song. We get about halfway into the second chorus, and I see that Mitch has pulled out his handkerchief and starts to wipe his eye. And I thought, ‘Oh, Christ! What’s this! It’s supposed to be funny, and here the guy’s going to weep!’ Well, we finished the song, and Mitch said, sniffing, ‘No, it’s not funny, but I’ll take it.’”
Leo broke into a reminiscent laugh. “Now the song is going to be in the picture and everybody we played it for—we called in guys from the Paramount music department—every guy cries! One German composer says, ‘Ach, my vife should hear dis song!’ Another guy, little Freddy Hollander,4 he’s wiping the tears out of his eyes like it’s Niagara, he was crying so hard. So we never knew what the hell was going to happen to the song. That’s when I bet Ralph the ten dollars, and I lost, because it became a big hit, and that’s the story of ‘Thanks for the Memory.’”
Not quite. Robin had left out the Academy Award he and Rainger won, and the fact that since 1938 the song has never stopped, and that Hope has always used it as his theme song.
“Well, he started using it on the radio, so I guess he’s stuck with it,” said Leo. “Hope is such a wonderful guy. When Ralph died, in 1942, he spoke about it on his show. He said then, ‘As long as I am on the air, I will always use this song.’ That was his tribute to Ralph Rainger. So, you see, there are some pretty wonderful people in show business.
“Take ‘Love in Bloom.’ Jack Benny was being interviewed lately, and they asked him how come he had to pick that one as his theme song. It’s a serious ballad and, after all, he’s a comedian. He said, ‘I don’t know, it does seem to be all wrong. But when the song was a big hit, I was doing gags with my fiddle on one of my shows, and I played ‘Love in Bloom’ because it was the most familiar song at the time, and it went over very big. So I did it several times again. And each time it went over so well that I finally decided to use it as my theme song. Because it had become associated with me through all those gags.’
“We kept doing things that the publishers used to tear their hair about. You know, the publishers had no faith in ‘Love in Bloom’ at all. They called up and said, ‘Who the hell can sing this? Too rangy musically, and the lyrics are too fancy.’ But, thanks to Jack Benny and a few other guys, and Bing Crosby’s record…. People don’t remember it was written for Bing.
“We used to write all sorts of different songs for Bing, because you could take a chance with him, he could put over anything, no matter whether it was low-down or fancy. We did a picture called Waikiki Wedding that had a song in it called ‘Sweet Leilani.’ We didn’t write that one. The producer asked us if we’d mind; Bing had a friend named Harry Owens who’d written it, and he wanted to interpolate it in the picture. We said, ‘Sure.’ For Bing, we’d have done anything. Anyway, the picture’s just about to start, and Ralph and I are sitting around the office, and I tell him I have a funny hunch about the score—we need a hit song, a simple hit. He says, ‘You’re crazy, we’ve got one in there. The melody is being raved about all through the music department. It can’t miss. ‘Sweet Is the Word for You’— that will be our smash, don’t worry.’
“I said, ‘Ralph, do me a favor. When you get up tomorrow morning’— he usually worked in the morning while I was home sleeping—‘you sit down at the piano, and the first thing that pops into your head, you just write it down and bring it to me, and I’ll write it up.’ That afternoon when I came into the studio, Ralph said, ‘You want to hear the tune that popped into my head this morning?’ I said, ‘Fine,’ and he played it for me. So I took about half an hour, jotted some words down to it.
“A couple of months later the music proofs come from the publishers in New York. They always sent us the sheet-music proofs for corrections and approval. And Ralph is thumbing through them and he okays one after the other, and suddenly he hits this one proof, and he yells, ‘Oh, no!’ I ask him what’s the matter, and he says, ‘I’m not going to publish this song. This will be a disgrace to us. It’s a cheap melody. It’s a piece of crap! It’ll destroy us. We have a good reputation for writing fine things.’
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, the picture’s coming out, you can’t stop it. I’m willing to take a chance with my reputation.’ So finally Ralph gave in and allowed them to publish the song.
“All right, ‘Sweet Is the Word for You,’ which he and the music department thought was so great, sold about forty thousand copies of sheet music, which is a terrible flop. And this other song that he thought was a cheap piece of trash sold probably ten times as much as the other and turned out to be our most performed song, and it still is our most performed song, and the name of that ‘dog’ is ‘Blue Hawaii.’ The public loves it. It’s played again and again, day after day, all these years. It has something that strikes a responsive chord in the people. So sometimes a creator does not recognize the value of his own thing. Just as I didn’t think much of ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ Ralph hated the melody of ‘Blue Hawaii.’”
Would he care to discuss the top-echelon composers he worked with after Ralph Rainger’s tragic death in a plane crash? How about Messrs. Arlen, Kern, Jule Styne, Arthur Schwartz, Johnny Green, Vincent Youmans, all of whom have since supplied him with melody?
“Oh, I’ve been very lucky,” he admitted. “Always had great composers to write to. But you know hot it is. Sometimes you can’t get another guy, so you settle for a Leo Robin.”
Settle? Hardly, when one thinks of Robin’s score, written with Kern in 1945, for the film Centennial Summer, which contained “In Love in Vain.” And another set of fine songs he wrote with Harold Arlen for a film called Casbah, which includes the haunting “For Every Man There’s a Woman” and the rollicking “Hooray for Love.”
“Nothing very big,” he insisted. “I would say that the luckiest thing that happened to me after Rainger passed away was a Broadway show called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
Lucky?
“Oh, yes,” said Leo. “You know, for years there was always a mystique around Broadway that Hollywood songwriters couldn’t ever come back to New York and cut the mustard. Max Dreyfus used to say, ‘How come you Hollywood fellows, when you’re out there, write hit after hit, but when you get back and you write a musical show for the theatre, you come up empty? What is it, Leo?’
“Most of the time Dreyfus was right, you know. Take Ralph and me. We went back once in the ’30s to do a show called Nice Goin’. Didn’t go so nice. We had a young girl playing the lead, she’d just been a sensation the year before in Leave It to Me, singing Cole Porter’s ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ Mary Martin! Now, you’d think that would ensure success, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head. ‘Flop.’
“I think I know why, though. When Ralph was working on that show, he was terribly self-conscious. He’d come from Broadway, but he had started as a piano player, playing duos in the orchestra pit. In the ’20s that was a very popular thing—duets during the entr’acte. Remember how Ohman and Arden played Gershwin? Lovely.
“So I’m sure Ralph had this awe of show business, New York show business, and it was a handicap. He couldn’t write as freely as he would have out on the Coast; he was nervous. Out on the Coast he probably felt he wasn’t subject to the kind of critics there are in New York. So he strained, and as a result he did not do his best. And that may be the answer to Max Dreyfus’ question.”
But two Hollywood expatriates, Robin and Jule Styne, certainly confounded the Dreyfusian rule. Their Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a smash-hit score. Not until Carol Channing did Hello, Dolly! would she have a more successful number than “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The aficionados of first-rate comic lyrics may disagree on the merits of this couplet over that one, and which song will last over another, but it’s generally conceded that Robin’s lyrics for that melody of Styne’s are as bright and sharp and lasting as any of the best of Larry Hart, or of Porter, or, for that matter, of any of the so-called “Broadway guys.”
Leo paced a bit more, puffing on another pipe, and finally shrugged. “Lucky,” he finally remarked. “Blondes got by because it was a great show, an entertaining show, with a great new star. And, remember, it had all the nostalgia of the ’20s that they say today is bringing back the old-style musical. Well, I’ll admit that it may not be simply the nostalgia. I read where Walter Kerr wrote recently about Nanette, ‘It’s not nostalgia alone. It’s because it’s a good show.’”
When Marilyn Monroe did “Diamonds” in the film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it was one of the rare moments in her career that the lady was given a strong piece f comedy material to do, and she did very well with it.
“Funny about that,” said Leo. “I had to change some of her lines because they were censorable. I never thought they were so blue, but when Fox did the picture, we were all still stuck with that fear of censorship out here. I guess today it would be quite tame, compared with some of the things I hear. You know how it used to be? I had a censorship problem once on the lyrics to ‘Thanks for the Memory.’ Can you believe it? Remember the part of the song that went: Thanks for the memory of transatlantic calls, / China’s crumbling walls, / That weekend at Niagara when we never saw the falls, / How lovely it was…. Well, the censor at Paramount came to me and said, ‘Leo, you can’t say that.’ I asked, ‘What’s dirty about it?’ He said, ‘“That weekend at Niagara when we never saw the falls.” Uh-uh.’ So I said, ‘Okay, what can I say?’ He comes back after a while and says, ‘Say, “That weekend at Niagara when we hardly saw the falls.”’ Which I think is dirtier!”
After Blondes Robin wrote another score, this time for the Broadway production The Girl in Pink Tights, which starred Zizi Jeanmaire. His lyrics were fashioned to tunes by the late Sigmund Romberg, and while the score contains such beautiful songs as “My Heart Won’t Say Goodbye” and “Lost in Loveliness” (which title seems, alas, prophetic), the show was far from a success.
“Dreyfus pleaded with me not to do that show,” said Leo. “He insisted that you cannot do a show after a man has died. But I’d promised Rommy that I’d do the show, and after he died I went on with it for sentimental reasons. Max was right, though. It doesn’t work. You simply have to have the composer there with you, working throughout. But I’m not sorry I did the show, because one of the greatest people I’ve ever met in my life was Jeanmaire. Wonderful. Knocked herself out rehearsing and perfecting everything, and completely surprised everybody by the way she could put over a song.”
While he lit still another pipe, it seemed an apt time to ask a leading question of a lyricist whose work is so well used by composers and by a vast public which barely, if at all, recognizes his existence. “If somebody brought you a good musical-comedy book today, would you do it?”
He burst into laughter. “You ask me that? Me, the guy who turned down Funny Girl? See, I thought that book was the same general idea that we’d done in pictures over and over again—the little girl who starts in the ghetto and winds up a star. So I said, ‘What’s new about this? The critics will never buy it.’ And I was wrong. So if somebody brings me a book today— and they have, and I’ve turned down others, believe me—I think I’d hesitate, because I don’t know what will go in the theatre. As a matter of fact, if somebody had told me last year that they were going to do No, No, Nanette, I’d have said they were crazy. Because, remember, I was there when that show was produced originally. I only got to work with Youmans on Hit the Deck because after Nanette he and Caesar had some sort of an argument and Youmans needed a new lyricist, so he settled for me.”
He walked over to the window and stared at the helter-skelter sprawl of Beverly Hills below. “But to answer your question,” he said, “if somebody came to me with a book—yes, if I could get very excited about it and really had faith in it, I’d probably do it. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure for other reasons. I’m not sure I could take living in New York now.”
Is he depressed about the state of music today?
“No, not depressed. Doubtful, maybe, that my style of writing would get very far in this kind of music market. Now, I’m not disparaging the things that the new kids are writing. Some of them are very talented. But they write about the world today, and that world isn’t a very pleasant place. So there aren’t many pleasant songs. There were always songs of what you could call current interest, and there were also songs that were a little bit disagreeable, but they were usually written within the pattern of other songs of the day—you know, the good old thirty-two-bar song. Remember ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ I doubt whether some of the things written today have the quality that song had, or its thrust.
“We’ve had songs about marijuana and dope, remember? They were Harlem songs—‘The Reefer Man,’ ‘Kicking the Gong Around.’ These subjects aren’t new. Maybe it’s just that the conditions are more prevalent today. And the big difference in the songs, as I see it—and I can be wrong—is that the song of yesterday appealed to the general public. Almost everybody could identify with it. The song of today appeals mostly to just one section of the public. It’s aimed at the young, it expresses feelings of the young, and the young can identify. But the over-thirty people can’t. There’s the big difference.
“Today, even the construction of the songs is unconventional, and the language is the sort of language that only the young can understand. I don’t think the kids are writing for anyone except themselves. They don’t really want to reach anyone else. It’s as if they’re saying, “This is a music for us. This is our music.’ I don’t know whether they even reason it out that way. They just—well, these young writers express themselves and react only to what’s going on. And they just write.
“But listen, that is not a criticism of rock-and-roll songs. I don’t want to pan these kids who are writing today. The things they’re writing are at least honest expressions of how they feel, in relation to the conditions of their world, and how they react tot heir own lives and futures. I’m sure you cannot fault these kids for their attitudes. Not the way you could fault some back Tin Pan Alley songwriter back in 1925 who was writing second-rate mechanical songs about how sweet it would be to be back in dear old Dixie with his dear old mammy or his lovely little tootsie-wootsie baby. Maybe he was doing a professional job, but he was peddling a totally false picture. Today these kids are, at the very least, honest.”
There were half a dozen or so discarded pipes stacked in the ashtray between us, and Leo abruptly ceased his pacing. “I’ve really talked enough,” he said. “I warned you before—I don’t make much sense until after midnight.”
So when he wrote “Up with the Lark” with Jerome Kern for Centennial Summer all those years back, the lyric wasn’t autobiographical?
He grinned. “No, not me. Funny about that song. Every now and then I go over the lyric. I like it, but there are one or two spots I’d like to improve. Listen, why don’t we meet again sometime at night when I can really make some sense?”
Morning, noon, or midnight … any time, Mr. Robin.