IT IS A SULTRY mid-August afternoon in 1971. Anyone in Manhattan who can get up the price of a ticket or a Kinney car rental has fled the borough for Fire Island, or the Hamptons, Fairfield County, Bucks, or the Jersey shore.
Not Jule Styne. He is in his office. To reach him, take a walk down 51st Street, cross Broadway, and go to the stage door of the Mark Hellinger Theatre. No, there’s nothing playing there; it’s been dark since Coco left months ago. There isn’t even a stage doorman on duty to bar the way. Inside the backstage, dim light, the lingering odor of old canvas scenery and dancers’ rehearsal shoes. The vast stage is bare. This fall it will be filled with the trappings of Jesus Christ Superstar, but today the place is as silent as the waiting room of Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home.
Where’s Jule? Up two flights of the dingy stairs, in a small converted dressing-room suite. There’s a small piano in the corner. The desk is littered with books and manuscripts. And the walls are hung with window cards advertising all his past shows, the hits along with the flops. Gypsy cheek by jowl with Say, Darling, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and High Button Shoes, side by side with Something More, Peter Pan next to Subways Are for Sleeping. It’s a brave display; most show-business people are reluctant to be reminded of their failures. Not Jule Styne.
He’s a short man in his mid-sixties, wearing a pair of slacks and a sport shirt, his sparse hair is grown long in today’s style, and he exudes energy, both physical and verbal. Jule never sits down. The thoughts keep tumbling out of his head in rapid-fire clusters. Sometimes he speaks so rapidly that he changes subject in mid-sentence. “Jule,” remarked one of his friends, “speaks pure Martian.”
Jule Styne
Manhattan has been temporarily evacuated, but on his muggy afternoon Jule is working. He and Bob Merrill, lyricist of Funny Girl, are doing the score for Sugar, the musical-comedy version of the film Some Like It Hot. By putting it into rehearsal, David Merrick rolled the dice (and $700,000 to $800,000 cash) in what gamblers refer to as a very long shot. These days there are few producers who have the guts and the bankroll to try their luck with a musical comedy. You can count on the fingers of one hand the composers who are still gainfully employed writing original music for potential Broadway shows. Jule Styne is one of them.
When this fact is mentioned, Jule shrugs it off as if it were of no importance. “It’s always a gamble,” he says. “If it weren’t, everybody would be doing it. The bigger the odds, the bigger the payoff. So what do you want to know about me?”
Before one can even pose a question, he has begun to talk. Which is par for the course with Jule. (“I’ll tell you what it’s like, working with Jule,” said one of his collaborators. “You’re driving in a small sports car, with the windows closed and the top up, and you’re in the mountains, and you do down a pass at seventy miles an hour, your brakes are locked, you’re skidding— and all the time there’s this hornet inside the car with you, buzzing around your head. That buzzing is Jule!”)
The basic vital statistics are already known. Born in London in 1905. Eight years later his parents moved to Chicago. Of such musical talent was young Jule that at the age of nine he was a piano soloist with the Chicago and Detroit symphony orchestras. By the age of thirteen he’d won a scholarship to the Chicago School of Music. There he amassed a thorough education in harmony, theory, and composition. But instead of following a classical-music career, Jule was seduced by the new rhythms of jazz and pop. He took a job as pianist with various Chicago bands, and played with Phil Spitalny, who had one of the leading dance orchestras of the day. In 1931 he organized his own musical group and began writing songs. One of them was a hit; it was called “Sunday.” Then he came to New York, which, as today, was Mecca.
“I used to be the top vocal coach out of New York—teaching people how to sing the songs, how to use their hands, how to get a charisma, have some relationship with the audience. I did a good job with Harry Richman [a singing star of the early ’30], and Joe Schenck got to know me and my work. He was a very big man in the movie business; sent me out to California to work at Fox, for Zanuck, as a vocal coach for all the people who were in Fox musicals. That was in the mid-’30s when Zanuck had all those people—Alice Faye, Tony Martin, the Ritz Brothers.
“After I’d worked for Zanuck for about a year, he said to me, ‘Jule, you’re in a luxury business. You ought to write songs. Have you written a song?’ ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I wrote two songs back there, but I thought it was square to write songs. I thought old people write songs.’ Zanuck said, ‘No, that is a commodity out here. Coaching people they will eventually do away with, but songs they have to have out here—it’s your secondary asset.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you give me a job here at Fox writing songs?’ He said, ‘Here we only hire $2,500-a-week songwriters. You have to go somewhere else and then I’ll bring you back here.’ So I said, ‘Then get me a job.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I have a good friend at Republic Studios, Moe Siegel, and he’s talked to me. He wants to know how to make musicals, a cheap musical. I told him there is a market for it. So let me call him.’ And Zanuck called him up right in front of me. And he hung up and said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You’ve got to gamble. I gamble. Everybody who wants to do something else has got to gamble. You get $900 a week coaching people, you’re going to get $165 a week over there at Republic, but you’re going to write songs. You’ll be the only one there to write. So just pretend that you’re investing, betting on yourself. You’re a gambling guy, bet.’
“So I went to Republic to write songs, but I found out that plus writing the songs, I had tow ash the sink, wash Roy Rogers and his horse, Gene Autry and his horse—everything. I found out I was walking in the slush with the wagons in their Westerns, I was conducting the orchestra and arranging the music, everything—but songs I’d get to write. I started writing songs, and the Canova there.1 They also had John Wayne at Republic. So they said, ‘Who do you want to write the words?’ I said, ‘Frank Loesser.’ ‘Where’s he?’ ‘Paramount.’ So they made a trade. They swapped John Wayne for a picture to get Frank Loesser; that was the deal. Well, Frank Loesser came over to Republic and I played him some tunes—he hated me because I’d degraded him. He was on his way up at Paramount, and here he drops down to nothing—not to Metro was he loaned out, but Republic! I knew him because I had been loaned out from 20th Century-Fox to Paramount on one of his pictures. But now he said he hated me. He said, ‘Look, I’m here for three weeks. I want to finish everything we have to do in a week—not turn it in until three weeks, but I won’t be here the last two weeks.’ He gave me that kind of big-time stuff. I said all right. He said, ‘Well, play me some tunes.’ So the first song I played him was a tune that went da-da da da da da.” And Styne sings a very familiar melodic refrain in a true, high voice.
“Loesser said, ‘What’s that tune? It has something! Gee, that’s a great song. Shhh! We won’t write that here. I’ll borrow you from here to Paramount. Don’t write that here.’ He was that kind of a schemer. So, later he called that ‘I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby.’ But we weren’t going to write that at Republic. ‘Quiet. Don’t play. Lock that up. I’ve got a picture coming up there in three months. Because of this tune, I borrow you now. Right?’ I said, ‘Gee, that’s great.’ So we wrote the picture Sis Hopkins for Judy Canova. It was much too good a score, a marvelous score, some marvelous songs, but much too good, they didn’t even understand it. We had Gabby Hayes there. If Gabby was eating a piece of watermelon, the song would be called ‘I Like Watermelon.’ Right on the head. Not ‘The Sun is Shining Today and You’re Happy,’ just ‘I Like Watermelon!’ I wrote about 150 songs there. And I learned a lot. Listen, you know who the writers were on the lot then? Isobel Lennart, Mike Frankovich, Jerry Chodorov, Joe Fields2—everybody was learning. You know, we were having a lot of fun!
“But Loesser was responsible for me, because the first song I wrote in the big time was ‘I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby’ and then ‘I Said Yes, She Said No’—in the same Paramount movie! So then I got two more pictures with Frank at Paramount based on those two hits, and we were really going together. I mean, Christ, we just had a great time. And then he went into the Army. When he went into the Army, I asked him who should I write with now. Unashamed, he said, ‘You’ve been spoiled, there’s no one like me.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you want someone like me, don’t get a clever rhymer, because there is a thing called a rhyming dictionary. Anybody can rhyme, you can find a rhyme for anything. But get a guy who can say something clever and warm, because you need warm lyrics for your music.’
“So there was a picture called Youth on Parade that a fellow named Cohen, Al Cohen, was producing. He’s no longer alive. Very nice fellow. And now, when I come back to Republic with two hit songs at Paramount, you know, it’s a whole different ballgame. They now ask me, and now they’re recording there with forty-six men! They never paid a flute $135 for a date before. The music contractor says, ‘Why do we need a flute? We never used a flute here.’ I said, ‘It’s a very important instrument.’ ‘Harps? We’re walking in the mud and you want harps?’ They’re paying $10 a page for orchestration—always paid $3. They were kind of shaken, but they went with me because it must be right. I must be right if I’ve written hit songs with Frank Loesser. Then they said, ‘Why didn’t you write the song hits here? We had Frank Loesser here.’ I said, ‘Because it’s the quality. You didn’t record well enough, you didn’t give it class—but from now on it will be fine.’
“So this producer, Al Cohen, tells me about Sammy Cahn. He had just broken with Saul Chaplin. I’ll be frank, I didn’t want to write with Sammy Cahn because Sammy then was a rhymer. Rather than going back to his plain Jewish ethnic simplicity, he was now going to become Johnny Mercer. And Johnny Mercer then wasn’t fancy, he wrote what he knew. Everybody writes best what they know. Like Al Dubin3 around that time. They all wrote simple. Cohen told me, ‘You know, Cahn is a talented guy.’ I said, ‘Sure, he’s talented, but I just came off Frank Loesser and I want to go further.’ He said, ‘You’ll go further, but I tell you, Jule, he’s good enough for this job, and he needs a job. He’s had a lot of experience—in fact, more than you.’
“I said, ‘You want him, Al? Okay. I’m under contract here by the week, so what I write I don’t get any extra money for. Will Sammy, who’s not under contract, write twelve songs for $1,100? It’s unbelievable.’ He said, ‘Believe me, he’ll write for $400, he wants to work with you.’
“So we sat down and I played Sammy a song; actually, I played him some of the tunes that I started with Loesser for a movie that never materialized at Paramount. And Sammy hears the song and the first thing he says is ‘I heard that song.’ I said, ‘You never heard this song! Only one guy has heard this song, Frank Loesser.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘the name of the song is going to be “I’ve Heard That Song Before”!’ That was the first song I wrote with Sammy—this is about 1942. A tremendous hit. And we had unbelievable success. We went, according to ASCAP [you were elevated from one class to another by performance], from $400 a quarter, $1,600 a year, to Double A—the top rating—in seven and a half years! That’s the amount of hits we had. What it takes some fellows twenty-five years to get, we did in seven and a half—and we never asked for the raises. It was phenomenal. We had as many as three and four songs on the Hit Parade at one time. One time we had the number-one, number-two, number-three songs! It was just hit after hit. Rather embarrassing. I melodically wrote for singers, because I was coaching singers, and I knew, every song I was writing, where the singers would fall apart. Sammy was coming in there with fresh ideas and we just caught on. We started out with ‘I Heard That Song Before,’ tremendous hit. Then we wrote ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time,’ ‘I’ll Walk Alone,’ ‘Victory Polka,’ ‘It’s Magic,’ ‘Five Minutes More,’ ‘Time After Time.’ Oh God, I can’t tell you, but every year we had three or four big songs going all the time. Big ones. Million-copy hits, and two, three-million record singles.”
Jule pauses to catch his breath.
“We got many pictures, clippings of guys overseas, our soldiers when they were taking over. ‘I’ll Walk Alone’ spelled out on a German fence: ‘I’ll Walk Cologne.’ When we landed on the Anzio beachhead, ‘Victory Polka.’ When they came back, ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time.’ While they were away, ‘Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.’ ‘Let It Snow, Let It Snow.’ ‘Time After Time’ was a Sinatra. We wrote a lot of songs for Sinatra, tremendous amount. For Anchors Aweigh we did the whole score … we couldn’t get out of our own way! But writing songs was kind of a professional thing for me. I didn’t have to be inspired because I knew where I was going all the time.
“I began to hate California, because I saw things happening. It was no place where I could rise higher and stay there and move ahead on my own, because it was a belt, it was a factory. Too many people participated. They were scavenging on what I created. By the time it got through, it didn’t make any sense. I saw fellows around me who were big when I came to California and in just a short span of three or four years they were getting less and less. Fellas like Harry Warren. I saw them dismissing him. I saw that. And I didn’t want to be one of those dismissed people, because I didn’t start to write songs until late in my life, until I was thirty-five. You know, it wasn’t as if I started like those other guys when they were twenty years old, back in New York. So I wanted some place to show my talents. Something that would draw on my talents. I knew California didn’t draw on your talents, because you were told what to do. And I decided that the best way was to go to some medium where you either fail or achieve success, but you are betting on yourself.
“I was very enamored of the Dramatists Guild contract here in New York—to think that what I write has to be played unless I decide to rewrite it. I’d met some fellas here, playwrights, and I was enamored of it all. So in California I decided that I must do a show, and we found this thing in the paper, in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times. It shows a Model-T Ford and the whole family. I said, ‘My God, there’s a good idea for a musical, go back to the turn of the century.’
“I got Sammy, who was very reluctant to do the show, because he now had the thing he was looking for. He liked the swimming pool, you know. He was big there, he could go from house to house and play his parodies, and he loved that, but I wanted to get another environment. I finally convinced him to do the show anyhow, High Button Shoes. We got Jerome Robbins and all the big people, and it was a tremendous success.4 A big leap for me. But I knew that I hadn’t succeeded yet, even though there were the two big songs in it.
“And also, in that first show, I worked with George Abbott and Robbins and Oliver Smith and Miles White—it was kind of a class thing. And I learned—oh, did I learn what I didn’t know! In California they would have you believe that you know it all. ‘He’s the best.’ Why? Because I wrote a song? Because you write a hit song for a movie? My God, you had the publisher hammering away, because the publishing company was owned by the movie company, and they hammer away on it! No! There’s more to it! I saw there is something very fascinating to this composing thing. What about those other fellows, Rodgers and Cole Porter? How about that avenue for me? I said, ‘I’m starting late in life, but I’ll give it a try.’ The theatre was kind of a closed shop then, you know—Cole Porter was doing a show, or Berlin was doing a show, or Kurt Weill, or it was Kern, but it was a closed shop. And right on top of High Button Shoes I decided to say here. I decided that I wouldn’t build my career around Sinatra. Why should I build my career around Sinatra? I’d found myself writing out there with Sinatra in my mind all the time; it’s like that, the Hollywood pattern. You get one hit, you write another Dick Powell song, another Alice Faye song. ‘Gee, Alice Faye will sing that.’ Or, ‘I bet Judy Garland will sing that.’ It took me a long time to break away, but finally I said, ‘When Dick Rodgers writes a song, he doesn’t know who’s going to sing it yet. Somebody along the way, but it’s for everybody.’
“I was studying librettos, too, looking at what Gershwin had written, what Kurt Weill had written. I was looking at stuff and examining it. See, the whole thing here in New York—nobody knew what anyone else was doing, they only knew what you were doing when you went to bat. A publisher called me up and said, “Do you want to do a musical for me called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?’ This was right after I’d written Shoes. They said, ‘We know you, you can write the hell out of that period.’ Because in that period I’d been playing piano for Harry Richman and for Fannie Brice, and for many, many stars that came to the Chez Paree,5 you know, so I knew that period well. I knew where it was. So I did it. We cast around for the lead. I said, ‘Listen, I saw a girl in a revue in California that is the greatest Lorelei, and incidentally her revue is coming here next week, Lend an Ear.’ I brought the girl up to an audition; they thought I was crazy. Anita Loos said, ‘It’s got to be a tiny little gold digger.’ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘that’s what’s going to make it different. You’re not going to do it the way you did it ten years ago. This girl will be the caricature of all blondes,’ and it was Carol Channing. I got three or four hits in that thing.
“But then, want to hear something amazing? What really made me? See, you have to be kind of a person here on Broadway, you have to be a mensch6 here too, in New York more than California, ‘cause here they watch you work. It was back during the McCarthy witch-hunt, when the writers in Hollywood, all those talented guys, were blacklisted, not allowed to work or write, that I did Pal Joey. That was the first time I produced a show. Won the Drama Critics’ Award—first time a revival had won it. And this is what made me, now; on top of two hits, this happened.
“When I’m producing Pal Joey, I say to myself, ‘Gee, I worked with Sammy long enough, I know how this ballgame goes in producing, there’s more to it than getting an actor cheaper or a writer cheaper. You’ve got to get the right people. So I got the author, the late John O’Hara, and Richard Rodgers, the composer of Joey, and I find that they don’t speak to each other. Which is a terrible thing. I’m doing a revival and they don’t speak to each other, and what if I want to make a change, a dramatic change or a musical change? At least if they were in good shape, I’d be able to talk to them together. You know, when the show originally opened, Mr. Atkinson of the Times said, ‘You can’t pour sweet water from a sour well.’ He loathed it. Yet Joey was the inside thing, the okay thing, the flip thing with all the gay ones and the sad ones, all the lost souls. So we come to casting. I say, ‘I don’t want the original guy who played the part of the agent, Jack Durant; I want a guy that is really a kind of mod-looking guy.’ I wanted Lionel Stander, and you will never believe what the newspapers did to me personally. They accused me of being a Communist because Lionel Stander took the Fifth Amendment. And I started getting stuff from some guy, must have been a Bircher, sent me magazines and testimonies that prove Stander’s un-American, and Dick Rodgers was being pressured and John O’Hara was being pressured.
“And John O’Hara and Dick Rodgers walked up to me one day—they had had lunch for the first time—and they told me, ‘We hope you will not be intimidated by all this adverse propaganda because the only thing that counts is can Lionel Stander play this part.’ I said, ‘What a thing that is. Thank you, guys, because whether you liked it or not I had no intention of anything else. I’d walk away, give me my money, I don’t do the show. If Lionel Stander misbehaves in the part, he gets fired because he didn’t do his part right, but as far as that other goes, nothing.’ I walked down 44th Street, and I had more fellas slap me on the back. It didn’t dawn on me that it was because I did that. Lionel Stander was still in the part…. Well, I found such enthusiasm, such marvelous things in the theatre, that I couldn’t help but say the theatre is the place.7
“I’d like to skip to another show I produced, Mr. Wonderful. I saw Sammy Davis at Ciro’s when he made his big debut. Twenty-four out of twenty-six performances. I decided to bring this kid to the Street. He wanted to do an evening—first half of the Palace kind of thing. I said, ‘No, you’re a talented little guy. I’m going to try and find something for you.’ Then I go up to the William Morris agency and get Joe Stein—the very kind of fellow who had a heart full of things he wanted to say, but where he was, in TV, he could never even write that kind of joke. Everything there was ‘Be careful or we scratch it out.’
“Anyway, in Mr. Wonderful we had a scene which I think was ironic, because I was in Florida playing in a band in 1927-8-9, and I know how the black thing was going down there. Christ’s sake, they were lynching them and everything else. Georgia, Florida, it was unbelievable. We had a Jewish banjo player in our band, Leo Kaplan, who was taken off the train by a mob of guys because he had a date with some little girl! They just pulled him off the train. Guys came in, we were afraid, we were in a private car, no policeman. They stopped that train right out of West Palm Beach and took this boy off! Beat the hell out of him and left him in the road, and he was picked up and taken to the hospital and sent back. So I know about that.
“In the scene, in Joe Stein’s scene, I said, ‘Fellas, look, this is 1956. There are going to be half black actors and half white actors in this scene.’ The director said, ‘You mean you’re going to have black people in Florida, back then, when you’re doing a period show?’ I said, ‘What’s the difference? There they are now walking along Miami Beach, blacks and whites.’ They weren’t black; they were people. They were tourists. With big sport shirts. And I want to let you know, the critics hated me for that. They knocked this show out, eight for eight. Mr. Wonderful. And because Sammy wore horn-rimmed glasses and spoke in kind of an intellectual manner with Jack Carter, who was his buddy, a white boy who discovered him—that was the story.
“So I got the theatre in my blood, I felt it. My God, I belonged to some kind of society. I found here a very enthusiastic society of creative people and they were giving of themselves and there was a great spirit of something. I came from a company town to an open show, and I said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous that I can come to a place where I say “I am a producer”?’ I couldn’t say I’m a producer in California. ‘What do you mean you’re a producer? We won’t give you a job as a producer.’ So here I’m the producer. I’ve a hit show, Pal Joey. I’m doing what I want, I’m doing the kind of show with Sammy Davis, Jr., nobody else wants to put on. I don’t care if it failed, we got all our money, we didn’t lose any money. Jesus, what a wonderful thing.
“I wanted once in a while to do a movie, but I found that I was in a way ostracized in California because, well, everybody knew my temperament pretty good, because I told off all those guys, including Harry Cohn, with whom I did six pictures, Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn. Zanuck—I must say that was the biggest day in my life, when he hired me back and gave me $75,000 to write the music for a picture as a composer, when he was the first one who gave me a start. It was a movie for Betty Grable. A very bad one. Something about springtime. Leo Robin did the lyrics. Very bad movie. Gwen Verdon was in it, and Shirley MacLaine—she was a dancer.
“I had some very good friends in California, like Sol Siegel and Buddy Adler, and I came back out to work. It’s 1953, and Sinatra is invited to do a movie with Marilyn Monroe, just these two talents, and I’m back working with my old partner Sammy Cahn. I walked in to Sol Siegel. Now, I’m coming off three big hits, Shoes, Blondes, and I’m the producer of Pal Joey. And Sol Siegel doesn’t like me around because I won the Drama Critics’ Award. I’m a producer and I’m a fink. He’s the kind that doesn’t want to take a back seat to me. He figures I’ll probably save my best songs for my next show. I said, ‘Listen, Sol, let me straighten you out. You’re the producer and I’m a Hollywood songwriter and I know how it goes, Sol.’ Well, we wrote this marvelous score which was never done, and the score is finished, and we’re told they are not going to make the film. And Sol calls me in and says, ‘I got a picture that is terrible, I made it in Italy, it’s awful. We need a title song.’ So we write him a song called ‘Three Coins in the Fountain.’ As you know, without the song the picture would have gotten nothing; with the song it got about $8,000,000 or $9,000,000 gross at that time. That was my last collaboration with Sammy and goodbye again.8
“Then I looked over the whole Hollywood thing good again. I had said, ‘I am going to go with a different kind of lyric-writer now. I’m going with the so-called “in” group,’ and I did a revue with Comden and Green, Two on the Aisle. I knew their shortcomings, but I also knew what they gave me. They gave me a lot, too; they added to my cranium, another level. It’s a marvelous thing, what it does, your knowing people and understanding comedy and knowing what people can do. You know, you say, ‘Oh, Bert Lahr is funny.’ But you really don’t know Bert Lahr until you work with him to see how really talented and gifted he is. Tremendous, a classic comedian, not just a fellow who can buy you a cheap laugh with a Gnong, gnong, gnong! I found him to be a man with great, great understanding, and he did a thing to me as great as anything Chaplin ever did. It was grandiose. The character Bert was playing was Siegfried, and we mixed up a finale. Brünnhilde was in a fire up there and Bert walked down and looked at her upstage, and she was screaming to him, ‘Ho yo to ho, ho yo to ho.’ The fire was burning and whatnot, the Rhinemaidens on the side, it was a combination of all Wagner girls, nude in the forest, nude girls in the trees, and Bert walked down, very noble, almost like Richard II, and he looked at the fire and took out a seltzer bottle and put the whole fire out. But with such great dignity; he wasn’t doing just a burlesque act, he played it as if he had a chore, like ‘My God, there’s a fire, and I’ll put it out and save this girl,’ and he just squirted the seltzer out, and he came down and said, ‘And that was that.’ Such a scream I never heard from an audience.
“And so you learn. From Comden and Green I then met Leland Hayward and Peter Pan with Mary Martin, and then I came back with Comden and Green. One day they walked in to me and they said, ‘We gotta see you.’ At my apartment they held up the back page of the telephone book and she says, ‘Answer phones?’ They said, ‘Is this a musical?’ and I said, ‘My God, it is sensational,’ and they sat down and wrote a story of Bells Are Ringing. And then we did a couple of things of lesser importance—but all the time batting.
“I went to bat twice a year. I did two shows every season because I wanted to practice my art. Because I went back to the old days—how did Rodgers and Hart, and how did Gershwin, and how did Kern, how did Cole Porter acquire such a catalogue? Fifteen hundred or two thousand songs, which I hadn’t. How? Because then, in those days, a hit show only ran for four, five months. All of those shows—Ethel Merman in her biggest hit, eight months, and then she started a new one. So I wasn’t doing it for that; I was practicing. I was acquiring, because out of every show, good or not good, comes a song. Like out of Do, Re, Mi came ‘Make Someone Happy,’ which is a giant; out of Peter Pan came ‘Never Never Land.’ Of course, out of Bells Are Ringing came three songs—‘The Party’s Over,’ ‘Just in Time,’ and ‘Long Before I Knew You.’ And from Comden and Green I learned a technique—that in accompanying comedy you had to be a dramatist; the music had to be funny, too. All the Hollywood composers—and I have respect for all of them, Mancini or whoever it might be—they are not dramatists, because when they get a picture, the score has already been dramatized. The director has directed the picture; they are only accompanying the drama.
“In some strange way, all the guys that have made their way in the musical theatre as composers are dramatists, because they have given the character. When you can give characterization, you are a dramatist. So I was growing up with this all the time, layer upon layer of know-how, and then came Gypsy. Of course, that was the biggest kind of landmark that ever was for me. I became the superb dramatist out of that because, God, I mean, to me that was like Traviata—that first act, writing a thing like ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses,’ which was so macabre, with this child thing, and the woman crying, and all that. It was just unbelievable. It was, of course, one of the greatest shows I have done.
“And then came Funny Girl, which brought Barbra Streisand, who scored a tremendous hit. A very big dramatic score, and in it a song called ‘People’ and ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade.’ In the theatre I never go out of my way to write a hit song. When we wrote ‘Just in Time’ in Bells Are Ringing, we didn’t write it for a hit song; we wrote the character, a flip kind of character who was taken out of the gutter by a girl who was actually an answering-service girl who couldn’t be herself but had to be someone else because of the complex psychological problem. And the song happened to fit the situation—it was a comedy situation, mind you. In the scene people were watching them dancing in the park, and they were doing a comedy routine, but the song emerged. And ‘The Party’s Over’ was not written for a hit song, but it happened. In the movies you get assignments only if you write hit songs. Since Funny Girl in ’63, it’s been hard to come by a good libretto.
“The thing I have got to go by, I tell you, with all my dramatic knowhow and everything, is if they don’t understand what I am writing about, then it is for naught. I found that Gypsy was understood. Well, it had four powerful big songs in it.9 And that is what I am supposed to do, not write hit songs but music they’ll remember from that dramatic entity, as they remember an aria of Verdi’s from an opera. You can’t just write special material. You remember nothing in Follies, nothing in Company, nothing in Applause. The point is you shouldn’t try for the popular song, but, indeed, what do you whistle when you walk up an aisle? Out of an opera you remember an aria, whatever it is, you walk up the aisle, the music is playing, yes, it was a beautiful thing, whatever it might be!”
Gypsy was everything Styne says it was, a landmark in American musical comedy, with a near-perfect book by Arthur Laurents, Sondheim’s superb lyrics, and the whole staged brilliantly by Jerome Robbins. But talk about it? No way. Jule has caught his breath and is gone, twenty conversational yards ahead.
“I’ve always done things to prove things to myself. I never wanted to live in a dream and say, ‘Boy, if I had a chance, how I would have done it!’ I said to myself, ‘Jule Styne, take it on.’ Tony Richardson called me and asked if I’d like to score a play, Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui. I said I’d always wanted to score a picture and they would never let me. Yeah, why not? Two hours of music I did, pages and pages. What I used was a Dixieland band and an organ. Took place in Chicago. In Chicago, Dixieland was the thing, and the organ gave it a dramatic tonality, overtones of tragedy. You don’t hold up signs and say ‘Listen to this,’ but it spelled it. I was very satirical. I knew that Mr. Brecht had done it and so I was competing with Mr. Brecht. Some notices said Brecht would have loved what I had done.
“Then, all of a sudden, a certain respect grows, not because of what you did but how you did it, and your understanding. And, incidentally, they always expect more from you. The only trouble with the theatre critics is that if you do something that five years ago they said was sensational, they expect better this time, you are supposed to do better. That is a very tough thing. Like with Irving Berlin, they said Annie Get Your Gun was not one of his best scores. Now, for God’s sakes! Or Cole Porter, they said Can-Can was not one of his best scores. They expected more, my God! But there were five or six hits in each one of those shows I mentioned, so what did they want?
“But I’ll tell you what it does do—it makes you sit up straight all the time when you are working. You become important to yourself. You really do. Even though they don’t like it or they do like it, it becomes secondary to you yourself. There you are, you’re going to work, you’re writing. I write here with a bench and a piano. I give it my all, which I find I cannot do in California. I find some of these younger kids getting together with a dollar and a half, like that movie Joe, where they work and put it together and must work twenty-four hours a day. And that kind of enthusiasm is hardly inspiration, it’s perspiration. I think only amateurs have to be inspired in some ways. You’re a professional, you do your job. The inspiration comes later on when you have already got something and are inspired to make it better, better than it is. Write. When I write a score for a play, just to give you an idea, I write between forty and fifty songs to get sixteen. Sometimes they accept this, and I come back, but I change this, and they say, ‘Gee, this is better,’ or ‘No, we’ll keep the original.’ But I test. I draw on myself. I’m that enthusiastic.
“I want to tell you something. I have done six shows with Jerome Robbins, and if there is such a word as genius, he is the only genius I have met in motion pictures, theatre, or any medium. Truly an ingenious man. All this work in the ballet, and the things he has done such as Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story and Gypsy and all the things—you just pile one on top of the other. Say that he is something very, very special. And the theatre allows you to mingle with these fellows, and discuss with these fellows, and really, whether they use your ideas or not, you can tell them how you feel, and you become part of it. Whereas in motion pictures you have no license to discuss. How can you walk up to any major director and say, ‘Listen, I’d like to tell you something—I don’t think you’re getting all the comedy out of that’? He’d say, ‘Well, do you want to direct the picture?’ The guy says, ‘Get him off.’ I’m talking about the old days especially. Now here, in New York, you say this to a man, and you’re in hearing distance of three or four people. And the lyric-writer comes and says so-and-so, and a choreographer comes to say such-and-such, and it’s a thing called collaboration. There’s a collaboration between an actor and a director; if it works, you get the greatest thing of all time. But if you get that director who says, ‘No, do it my way,’ you’re only getting half of the actor. You know, it’s a Garbo directed by Lubitsch, as against a Garbo directed by someone else like Victor Fleming. It’s McCarey at his best getting that performance going for you—or Capra. It’s nobody at Metro making it with Gable until he came to Columbia, and then there was something going.10 It was nobody getting a thing out of Gene Kelly at Metro until he came to Columbia to make Cover Girl. You know, sometimes it’s the head of the studio that says, ‘Gee, you’re the greatest.’ Like Harry Cohn was mad about Gene Kelly.
“Robbins has always gotten something out of me; he never settled with me, but he’s allowed me to say. He said, ‘Let Jule talk. He’ll say how many things, but he’s intuitively on to something. He may say eight-one things no good, but watch out for the eighty-second thing—it may be the whole play!’ He doesn’t let everybody talk—he can tell whether you know it or not.
“I had the biggest fight with Jerome Robbins on my first show, High Button Shoes. I said, ‘You get Lenny Bernstein or Morton Gould. You have to tell me what you want or I can’t give it to you. Goodbye.’ He’s doing the ballet. He calls me up in about an hour and says, ‘Can you come to my house for dinner tonight?’ So I go and we sit down—no anger or nothing—and he says, ‘I want to play you some records.’ Then he played me a Richard Strauss piece and he played a couple of piano etudes, Scarlatti etudes, and I said, ‘What has that got?’ And he said, ‘Nothing. I thought I would just cleanse the atmosphere.’ Then he said, ‘You will write, probably—because I know you have the greatest sense of humor of any composer I ever worked with, and I have worked with a lot of them like Bernstein, Gould, but you—you have a sense of humor that is unbelievable. Whether you can execute it, I don’t know, but you are damn well going to make a try at it. I want you to write me forty-five minutes of music about a day at the beach—any beach. I am going to be a little more specific than that. You see, when I tell a fellow to write me a ballet, I don’t choreograph—you write me a piece of music, then I choreograph. Lenny did that with me in On the Town and Fancy Free.’ Robbins still does that. Play the music and then choreograph.
“So I said, ‘Will you help me?’ and he says, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you—I will write eight minutes’ worth of the nine characters in the ballet. I will not connect them. I would rather do that because I can connect them however you want to connect them. The entrance music for each character I won’t write. I will do that second. See if I’ve got the characters first.’ He says, ‘Gee, that’s interesting. Might be a good way.’
“Going back to my very beginning, with Frank Loesser, we used to come home and have a few drinks and he would make up some funny songs, not parodies. He had a song called ‘Whatever Became of Minnie?’ ‘Ahoy, Minnie, oh, whatever became of Minnie J. McGee—the Admiral married Minnie, I wonder if she ever did what she used to do for you and you and you and me?’ There was a tune for that, completely forgotten. I used it for the two sisters in the ballet. But the thing that I knocked Robbins out with completely was when I wrote for the Keystone Kops in the ballet. He said, ‘For you to write a thing like the Second Hungarian Rhapsody—my God, for them to be running around with tambourines when they do knee drops, the audience will fall down. It’s absurd!’
“‘Jerry,’ I said, ‘you cannot rewrite Bernstein, you cannot rewrite Stravinsky, it’s that or nothing. If you make like, it’s no good. When guys make like you, it’s no good. If they make an original, that’s fine, but you don’t make like. And so, since it’s absurd, and since it’s Keystone comedy, and since we are looking back in time, I think it is quite wild to use the actual Second Hungarian Rhapsody.’
“Well, that is the first time I ever saw an audience of fifteen hundred people stand up and yell, ‘Bravo.’ The whole audience in the middle of the thing. I never saw anything like it.”
Like something out of the musical Theatre of the Absurd?
“Yes, but the word ‘absurd’ is anything you do wild. It’s absurd, and in going wild, it’s just going over the edge. Once you go over the edge, you can do anything. What’s on the other side of the mountain? On the other side of the mountain is the something we dare not allow ourselves. It borders—it’s between sanity and insanity. And you get a chance—not all the time, ‘cause you don’t want to do it all the time—you get a chance to go wild. But you have to be ready for the occasion. You have to know when to go wild.”
Isn’t he saying that you have to learn all the rules and then start breaking them?
He stands behind his desk. “Yes,” he says after a moment.
But so many of the young people are not much interested in learning the rules, so they have nothing to break. They’re starting in mid-air, so to speak. Would he not agree?
“Even to further what you just said,” Jule says, having caught his breath, “which is right on the head, the people today in the arts have lost one thing. And that goes back to basic roots. They have no tradition, they have no respect, therefore they have no reference. Everything starts from now. Recall—the greatest writings that have lived maybe now four hundred, five hundred years, the greatest dramas, the great things—those people had a recall. Writing is recall. You recall, and then you throw it away and then you write, but you must have some reference to the world, reference to something, respect for someone—you don’t have to be religious, but you have to know that it’s there. Look, my mother died in 1947 and my father died in 1951. I suppose it’s maybe every day, or every other day, that I recollect something in relationship to them, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t tell some story about my father. Always very humorous. Some of it is very touching … so I am a human being.
“I have great respect for tradition. I know that Bach was marvelous. I know that Beethoven was rather a genius and Mozart was terribly talented, and I know that Ravel was something special, and I know those people, and every time I write I say, ‘So-and-so would have liked that music.’ I know who I am. I know where I am, all the time. But people today think they are making something new—and they are the most cliché, the most conforming group I have ever met in my life. Along comes a show called Hair with girl nudes, so they make a hundred nude shows! And that is a generation? Where is its originality? Now they have discovered God all over again. Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s been going on for years. They have been singing that Biblical music since I was a kid in Chicago. Country music? My God, twenty-five years ago when I was writing pop songs, I went across the country in a car and I found out that in Texas they have got a different Hit Parade than in New York. Did I not write country music? Did I not write and have hits with Gene Autry at Republic Studios? Why would Republic make a $220,000 Gene Autry picture? Because they knew they would get $3,000,000 for every one, because they played it in Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It never even came here. Later on, they heard of country music, they brought it here to the cities, there was a market for it. So all of a sudden we discover ‘country music,’ and that is all you will hear, country or rock music. They believe there’s a big explosion, that what they have written is original, when it really isn’t. Because right now we are going through a big transition in music. We are going back to the English language, with the advent of No, No, Nanette, with the coming back of Burt Bacharach’s ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’—which is a 1931 song, believe me, melodic in texture. So where are we? The tragedy of it all is that these kids become twenty-three or twenty-four and what can they refer to? Nudity? Therefore they have nothing to go on, so they go to nostalgia. They go to our time. You go to No, No, Nanette, and you find that sixty percent of the audience are young lions, and they love it!”
Styne is one of the few composers of his age group who is not depressed about the state of contemporary popular music.
“Why be depressed? I love guys like Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. Listen, I discovered Burt when he was playing piano—when I was doing Bells Are Ringing—and I said, ‘Jesus, where are you at?’ Harry Nilsson, a lot of these guys, write good. Whether they can survive, I don’t know. That is their problem, to survive. I wrote my first song in 1927—so now I am writing forty-four years, right? So I have survived forty-four years. My first hit in 1927—‘Sunday.’ Which I got married on. Tremendous song, sold a million copies, bit hit.” He sings a few bars. “My God, in 1963—from 1927 to 1963, thirty-six years—I had the number-one hit, ‘People.’ A whole new generation of new people. For the grandmothers ‘Sunday,’ for the grandchildren ‘People,’ and I’m still writing!
“But the thing is that I have been too hasty. In my anxiety to practice my work as Dick Rodgers and Larry Hart and Cole Porter did, I found myself doing two shows a year up until two years ago. And I have been doing a lot of bad shows, because there aren’t any good books around. But I still practice my art. If you stop for a long time, no good. You have to practice. I don’t care what you write, good, bad, rotten, write a short or long story, notes, a joke, find something, gotta write something. There is manuscript paper all over my house. I’ll write any time. Playing golf this morning, I thought of something I should have done. This is—” he taps his forehead—“the greatest computer in the world. I teach it, and it plays back what I want it to play back. Now, I may forget what I sang to myself on the golf course, but sometime next month, next week, next year, two years, I will remember what I sang, it will come to me as I am sitting down.”
The small dressing-room office is temporarily silent.
“So I have brought you up to date pretty much, haven’t I?” Jule inquires.
All through his reminiscences there runs a remarkable parallel between Styne and his late friend Loesser—both the same kind of man. Both burst out of their early molds and grew and grew—and kept growing.
“We take it on,” said Jule after a moment’s thought. “It’s called taking on challenges. You know, I never thought The Most Happy Fella was a great work, but, by God, I gave Frank credit for taking it on and doing it.”
Styne stares at the wall for a long beat. Then he sighs. “You know, if Frank would have written with anybody, it would only have been with me. In fact, he said so once. ‘You have so much for me.’ And he was right. I feel that one day, even when I die, I will never have been drawn on fully….
“I would say that three very important things happened to me in my life pertaining to writing. To write a song is one thing; for everybody to like it is nothing, even to get it recorded—but you get to meet what you think is the best. First, Robbins. To me, the directorial ability of Jerome Robbins in the musical theatre is untouchable. I think he knows more, I think he knows how to execute more, and he understands. And it isn’t only me—I’m sure Lenny Bernstein would say the same; I’m sure that Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock would say the same.11
“And, remember, I was a vocal coach. I started out being one before I wrote songs. I think the greatest woman singer of my time is Barbra Streisand. I’ll never live to hear anyone else who has so much. I love that voice so much. It hasn’t been drawn on yet; it is an unending chain of events, and they will always reach and give me something new that’s bewildering to me. It’s very exciting to me to live to hear this thing come out of that mouth.
“And the most exciting, the greatest male singer of my time has been Frank Sinatra. There will never be anyone else who makes my music sound as well as he did, male-wise. Now, I have great respect for all the others, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis, and, oh, we go all the way down the line—Tom Jones and all the others—but Sinatra….
“These three people,” he murmurs, “they’re above it. They’re over the mountain a little bit, they’re that very special thing, they’re the Lou Gehrigs and the Babe Ruths, they’re the Palmers in golf. Not just good, they are special.
“I cannot say who’s better than whom in the lyric-writers, because they have all scratched the surface with me equally as great. In other times, of course, there was Sammy Cahn, then there was Frank Loesser, Leo Robin, the late Bob Hilliard, Comden and Green, Steve Sondheim—I adore Steve, a great friend, we wrote Gypsy together. Yip Harburg, Bob Merrill. They are all equally great in their own way, and because they are in their own way, that makes them very special people. One doesn’t write like the other.”
Jule Styne sits down for the first time in the two hours he has been talking this muggy afternoon. “You don’t want anything like—well, advice on songwriting, or something like that?” he asks.
Isn’t that what he’s giving?
“Okay. Cut.” He grins.