BREAKING INTO the Broadway turf as a professional lyricist for a musical comedy usually involves a.) talent; b.) endless self-confidence and patience; and c.) willingness to write, audition, and rewrite for anybody you can find who’ll listen to your stuff. You can short-cut them all by having a rich aunt in Boonton, New Jersey, who’s willing to provide most of the backing for your first production, but that’s usually only a one-shot venture. After your cousins have had your aunt committed, you’re left with a simple choice. Is it Broadway, or should you go after gainful employment?
In the past twenty years or so, it’s become even more sparse around 45th Street. Getting your lyrics onto a stage, and having them sung past next Saturday, can only be compared to Eliza crossing the ice … in August. As fast as she makes it to the next floe, it melts.
Lee Adams, a modest man in his mid-’40s, is an authority on the stamina quotient it takes to hop and skip across those vanishing ice-floes. He wears very conservative clothes, keeps regular work-hours, and would easily be taken for a Fairfield County executive type, rather than for what he earns a very good weekly living at—the writing of lyrics for Broadway shows. He and his partner, Charles Strouse, provided the score for the long-run hit Applause! But for twelve lean years, the pair struggled to establish themselves as professional songwriters. “From 1949 to 1960,” Adams says, with feeling. “That is how long it took before we got our first real break, with Bye, Bye, Birdie! Luckily, neither Charlie nor myself were married at the time. The only reason I didn’t actually starve was that he lived at home—and we could eat there. Twelve years his parents subsidized us with food!”
Lee Adams
Adams grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a town not noted for its population of songwriters. What got him started with a yellow pad and a pencil and the desire to rhyme a couplet?
“Cole Porter,” he says. “I was kicked right in the head at college when I heard the record of Kiss Me Kate. Heard that score and I said, ‘That is what I want to do.’ I was a journalism major at Ohio State—got my M.A. at Columbia. But from the time I heard Porter’s lyrics, I knew that was my ambition. I never realized how long it took Porter to get tot hat plateau. All I knew was that score was—and still is, for me—just about the best ever. Others I’ve heard are great, but I think Porter is the top guy. Genius. Could write everything—the most sophisticated songs, and also a ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’”
“While I was still at Ohio State, I’d written a college show called Howdy Stranger. Then I came to New York. Met Strouse. I showed him my stuff. I thought it was really high class writing. He played it all over, sang it. ‘Well,’ he said to me, ‘it’s really impossibly bad.’”
Adams laughs. “Here was this young kid, five years younger than I! ‘What do you mean?’ I yelled. Well, he told me what he meant. Explained what was bad. Ripped it to shreds … and then I got really pissed off. Slammed out…. But later, I got to thinking about it, and I thought, ‘There’s an honest guy. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m not quite Cole Porter yet!’ So we began working together.”
The Adams-Strouse collaboration faced an even rougher future than that of most neophyte teams. “Tougher, because we never aimed at pop songwriting,” says Adams. “We always tried to write for the theatre. We don’t know to this day how to write a pop hit. But that was by design. We found out early that a lot of people don’t make it in the theatre because they come in and try to write a show and they have no theatrical background— they have only songwriting experience. That’s simply not enough. You cannot just sit down and write a bunch of unrelated songs for a show—or drag stuff out of your trunk and say ‘Here, let’s try this song in that spot.’ You have to stay around the theatre, you have to learn what works on stage, and what doesn’t. Very, very hard. I suppose the only thing that kept me hanging in there for twelve long years was liking to do it—and gradually learning how to write for the theatre. Because, believe me,” Adams says, “that is a very slow, painful process.”
In the early ’50s, Adams and Strouse were fortunate enough to make it to one ice-floe—the Borscht circuit summer camp—before that talent incubator vanished. “Charlie got a job at Green Mansions as a rehearsal pianist,” he says, “and the following summer he took me along. We were up there for three summers—and that’s where we really began to learn to write. Great training—you see, we had to write a show for each Saturday night—a full scale revue. They had a set designer, a costumer, a full orchestra—a marvelous operation. They’d do plays on Wednesday nights, ballet on another, opera excerpts—and Saturdays, the original revue. A whole company of actors and writers. Sheldon Harnick worked up there before we did—so did Harold Rome. Do you know who was in our company with us? Don Adams and Carol Burnett. Everybody was learning. We got $250 for the summer, and all the sour cream we could eat!
“Charlie and I did all sorts of scratch jobs in between. For years, we worked for club acts, writing special material for them. There’s a swell job,” he says, sardonically. “If you get paid, you’re lucky. A lot of actors still owe us money from fifteen years ago. It’s incredibly tough to write special material, but you learn your craft that way.
“I had all sorts of other odd jobs to keep myself going. Once, Mel Brooks, who was an old friend, was producing a show for Polly Bergen on television. He made me an offer: If I’d work two weeks for free, and they thought I was good and liked what I did, then he could get me on for a couple hundred dollars a week. How could I say no? I figured it was a big chance. So I went to work for the two weeks. Mel’s a funny guy, and we’re good friends. Later we did a show called All American—not a hit, but we’ve still remained friends….
“At the end of the second week, Mel said, ‘You’ve been very good. I think it’s all right. I’m going in to the regular weekly meeting and I think I can get you on.’ He went into the production office, and I waited outside. In a little while, Mel came out with a funny look on his face. I said, ‘Mel, I know—you tried…. ‘ He said, ‘No—I’m fired!’
“Oh, I had some funny jobs,” continues Adams, who can look back on his early struggles with the same sense of humor that has obviously sustained him ever since. “One of my friends at ABC created a job for me. I would come in there to the news department on Saturdays and Sundays— he knew I was broke and starving. He gave me $15 a day to do traffic and weather reports. I had a little form and I would type up these reports and they’d put them on the air in the newscasts. I’d come bursting into the studio and hand them to the announcer, and he thought I was coming from some special weather and traffic center newsroom, right? Well, I was getting weather reports from the telephone weather service—which anybody could do by dialing it—and I was making up the traffic reports! I was supposed to call the AAA, but their line was always busy! After a while, I knew exactly what the metropolitan traffic would be like at certain times, and I’d make them up. We got away with that for almost six months.
“Charlie and I have never had any song hits—not really hits. Up at Green Mansions we wrote a song called ‘Once Upon a Time.’ It’s become a good standard for us. We had it in a show up there. Don Adams was in the show—he met his wife while he was up there, and that became their song. Don used to say to us, ‘That’s a great song, fellows. Someday, that’s going to be a big hit!’ Marvelous guy. Then he was making $80 for the summer. ‘Someday, that’s going to make it!’ he insisted. The years went by, and then we had our second Broadway show—All American—and we put that song into the score. By now, Don was working with Perry Como, on television. We met him on the street one day. He said, ‘I see you put my song in the show. It’s going to be a hit!’ Well, nothing happened to the show, or the song, because the show lasted a big four months. But on began to badger Perry Com to hear our song. He kept after him. He finally got Como to hear it, and record it. And after the Como record, the other singers began to sing it. It became a big standard … and it was Don who made it for us. Now, when we see him, he says, ‘You see? I told you so!’”
Adams and Strouse continued their precarious journey; the revue as an entertainment form was rapidly disappearing. “Some of our things were done at the Pittsburgh Playhouse—that’s the theatre where Charlie Gaynor had done so many shows. It’s where the original production of his Lend an Ear began. We had things in Ben Bagley’s Shoestring Revue and material in a revue called Catch a Star. We sold material to a producer in London; he was doing the last of those English revues that used to be such a staple of the theatre there. All of that is finished now,” Adams sighs. “Matter of fact, I don’t know where a writer would start today in the theatre. Off-off-Broadway, maybe—wherever that is. Only Carol Burnett does revue material on television. Fifteen years back, there were all sorts of different shows where young people could get started. Gone today, all gone. For guys from our age on up, there’s really no more pop song business, either. All the young kids today write their own stuff, perform it, and they all have their own publishing firms. It’s a whole different scene.”
Bye, Bye, Birdie, in 1960, was Adams and Strouse’s first real break. “I was working on a magazine called Pageant,” says Adams, “as a copy editor. I’d get to the office every morning around six or seven. The editor would come down the hall around nine and he’d be so impressed—I’d be in there writing. What I was doing were the lyrics to Birdie, which was a hit. A big fluke, you know—a complete ‘sleeper.’ We opened with about seventeen dollars in the box-office. It was everybody’s first show. The producer, Ed Padula, Gower Champion the director—his first book musical. Dick Van Dyke, our star, had been in a revue for a couple of months, but it was his first musical show; all of us made it with Birdie. And I guess it was just in time for us,” he adds, “because I don’t see anybody around today on Broadway who’d be willing to take chances like that any more … unless it’s Hal Prince, perhaps, who’s the only producer left who’ll gamble on relatively unknown talent.
“Birdie was marvelous for us. Our song ‘Put n a Happy Face’ became a standard. Not just a hit, a hit is a song that shows up in the Top Ten on the charts, but a standard is one that goes on for a long time, being played and sung over and over again. ‘Put on a Happy Face’ was used as the theme-music of The Hollywood Palace on television for six years—that’s a big help, believe me. That constant performance adds up; at the end of each year, ASCAP sends you a check based on your performances. It can get you over lean years….” Which were still ahead.
The next Adams-Strouse score for All American was a flop, but by now the team was sufficiently established to continue following the precarious Broadway path. They worked on another musical, Superman—also a flop—and they wrote the score for Golden Boy, which had a successful run, with Sammy Davis, Jr. playing the led in the adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play. And then, several years ago, they went to work on Applause, which was to star Lauren Bacall. It was based on the film All About Eve, and it had a long and profitable stand at the Palace on Times Square.
“It’s a really difficult job, working on a book musical,” says Adams. “First of all, you have all those different talents coming together, each one with his own ego-problems, and they all have to be subordinated to one thing—the show, and what’s good for it. If all those chemistries don’t make a proper blend, you’re in terrible trouble.
“Very little of what we write ever ends up in a ‘trunk.’ So much of what we write has to be part of the character we’re writing for. When I work on a musical, I end up very much involved with the book writers; on Applause it was Betty Comden and Adolph Green. We have to weave our stuff into the fabric of the show. We wrote songs for that show right up to the opening. Four of the best songs we wrote aren’t even in the show. They didn’t work. One of them is my absolute favorite—it was a song for the actors, in which they expressed their own attitudes toward their careers. It went:
We trade our lives for just some good reviews,
We’re ‘Smash’ in New York Times, ‘Terrific’ Daily News,
We do our show, and what does it all mean?
We’re grateful when we get ‘Just swell,’ Cue Magazine,
The words we love are not from our lover,
But words some stranger writes,
Fond caresses from newspaper presses,
Will warm you on winter nights,
So hold me close, and whisper soft to me,
‘Perfection,’ CBS—‘Just lovely,’ NBC …
“It said everything I could think of about that rueful world of the actor—everyone loved it. But whenever we did it in the show, it stopped the forward motion of the book. We tried it in several places. No use. Ron Field, the director, finally called a meeting, and he said, ‘Do I have to say it?’ We knew. It came out….
“But that’s something you never know ahead of time. It’s part of writing for the theatre. You write a whole batch of songs and see which of them works with your audience. Of course,” he adds, a trifle edgily, “there’s another thing that bugs me. You open a show with ten, twelve songs, the critics come in and see it once, and then write reviews. I ask you, how is it physically or intellectually possible for anybody, even a composer, to hear that many new songs at once, and instantly judge which one is good, and which one is bad? But hell, that’s one of the gauntlets you run that go with the territory.
“My trouble is,” he admits ruefully, “I don’t know any other way to earn a living. Writing lyrics is a very strange thing to get into,” he says. “First of all, it’s being what every writer is, which is masochistic. But it’s even worse than that. It’s getting your kicks out of miniaturization. I think it was Oscar Hammerstein who said that it’s the same sort of psyche that leads a man to want to engrave The Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. It’s that sweating-down process, that distillation, that drives most writers up the wall. Certain people like that paring-down. Me? I’d be petrified by the immense sweep of a novel—such a frightening project to contemplate. But to work within the confines of a lyric—to get an idea, and be able to capture it in 32 bars … that’s a kick. Very challenging, very tough. And I’m hooked.”