Introduction
1. I later mentioned this broad generality to William McCaffrey, who began his career as office boy in the executive offices of the massive B. F. Keith circuit and ended up booking the showcase Palace, on Broadway. “Absolutely correct,” said he. “Songwriters’ acts were known as ‘And-then-I-wrotes,’ and the audiences loved them. Sang and hummed along with the man up there on the stage. It was early Mitch Miller.”
2. There are two superb exceptions to my thesis about the anonymity of songwriters: Ira Gershwin’s Lyrics on Several Occasions and Oscar Hammerstein’s slim volume Lyrics, both of which are excellent representations of the wit, the thoughtfulness, and the assembled wisdom of their authors.
‘All the Things You Are’
1. Kern was then thirty. After contributing songs to European imports, he had written “They Didn’t Believe Me” for The Girl from Utah, with Michael Rourke. He had become friends with Guy Bolton, a librettist from England. The two men were asked by F. Ray Comstock to supply a show for his tiny 299-seat Princess Theatre in 1915. The first Princess show was Nobody Home. The second, a huge success was called Very Good, Eddie, from which came the lilting song “Babes in the Wood.”
2. Meanwhile Gershwin and Kern were writing “Put Me to the Test,” “Sure Thing,” “Long Ago and Far Away,” and “Who’s Complaining?”
‘Three Little Words’
1. There is a story of a lunchtime discussion at the Metro commissary between Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Ruby wherein Mankiewicz put Ruby to the supreme test. “Let’s assume you’re driving along a mountain road, high up,” he hypothesized. “You see a precipitous cliff with a sheer six-hundred-foot drop. Two men are hanging there, desperate. One of them is Joe DiMaggio, the other is your father. You have time to save only one of them. Which one do you save?”
“Are you kidding?” replied Ruby instantly. “My father never hit over .218 in his life!”
‘Tea for Two’
1. Unfortunately, the show proved to be a flop. After thirty performances, it closed.
2. Eliscu wrote the lyrics of “Without a Song,” “Great Day,” and “More Than You Know” with Billy Rose.
3. The same late great Max Steiner whose film scores in the ’40s for such films as Casablanca and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre earned him Academy Awards.
‘I’m in the Mood for Love’
1. Lew Fields, partner to Joe Weber in one of the great dialect-comedy acts of American show business, later turned to successful production.
2. J. Fred Coots has written such hits (with others) as “Love Letters in the Sand,” “Why?,” “You Go to My Head,” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”
3. “Easy Rider” is a blues song made famous by Bessie Smith.
‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’
1. From the second edition of The Garrick Gaieties, which the team wrote in 1926.
2. The story has been often told of how “My Heart Stood Still” came into being. The two young collaborators were in Paris in 1926, riding in a Paris taxi with two girls. The cab skittered into a truck, and one of the girls blurted out, “Oh! My heart stood still!” From the floor of the taxicab, where the collision had thrown him, his hat jammed over his eyes, diminutive Larry Hart is supposed to have said promptly, “Hey, Dick, there’s a good title for a song!”
3. Students of the craft of lyric-writing should refer to Hart’s “dummy” lyric for “Small Hotel”—that is, the one he wrote before he did the actual song. It went:
There’s a girl next door
Who’s an awful bore,
It really makes you sore
To see her.
a. …
b. …
c. …
d. …
By and by, perhaps she’ll die,
Perhaps she’ll croak this summer;
Her old man’s a plumber,
She’s much dumber.
4. Hart later wrote a set of lyrics for “Lover” that was to turn it into one of the team’s most enduring songs.
5. “Larry was drinking heavily,” wrote George Abbott, the producer-director of that show, “and would be absent for two or three days at a time during the preparation of the show. This didn’t bother me because he was quick as lightning when he was there. If we needed a new verse, he’d pick up a pencil and paper, fidget himself into the next room for a few minutes and then come back with what we needed. I remember that this was how he wrote the verse for ‘Falling in Love with Love’; he scratched it on the back of an old piece of paper while Dick [Rodgers] and I talked about something else.” (From Abbott’s autobiography, Mister Abbott.)
‘The Sound of Music’
1. Hart was quoted at the time as saying, “The dramatic action, the flow of photography, and the humor and pathos of the characters will be inherent in the music. We wrote lyrics and music especially for the camera.”
‘This Was a Real Nice Clambake’
1. William Hammerstein adds, “Some years later Mike Wallace interviewed my father on TV and asked him if he wrote ‘Ol’ Man River’ as a protest song. ‘No,’ replied my father, ‘I wrote it because we needed it for a spot in the first act.’ He went on to explain that he conceived it as a sort of cord to hold together that whole sprawling story. Remember, no one up to that time had ever tried to spread such an expanse of epic drama, covering such a span of time, over the musical stage, and it had to be held together somehow. He felt that the one constant element was the river, and that’s what he wrote about.”
2. “I can never hear those words without feeling a fierce twinge of embarrassment,” insisted Richard Bissell, a licensed Mississippi River pilot. “To ‘tote’ is to pick something up and carry it. A ‘barge’ is a large non-self-propelled boat used usually for the marine transport of bulk cargoes. Nobody in the long history of the Mississippi including Mike Fink, has ever picked up and carried a barge.”
3. Written for the musical version of State Fair, done as a film by 20th Century-Fox.
‘Of Thee I Sing, Baby’
1. The modesty factor again. Mr. G’s “pretty good” refers to such songs of his as “Oh Gee! Oh Joy!” and “How Long Has This Been Going On?”
2. “I was with George almost from the beginning of his career in one way or another,” reports Robert Russell Bennett. “More or less contemporaries, although I’m older than he. He was six years younger than I. But anyway, I kind of raised him from a pup, as far as his orchestra and that sort of thing went. There was another man named Bill Daley, who’s long since dead, who used to sit right down with George and actually taught George a lot more than George could ever learn from any kind of teacher. Because George was not talented as a student. He could not study. Max Dreyfus, who died a few years ago, was George’s publisher. Ran Chappell’s. A marvelous man. Very ambitious for George, as we all were. He sent George down to Artur Bodanzky, who was then conductor-in-chief for the Metropolitan Opera, so George could read scores and study classical, serious music. Bodanzky took him for six months. Then, one night, they were playing pinochle, Bodanzky and Max. ‘Artur,’ asked Dreyfus, ‘how’s my protégé getting along?’ And Artur says, ‘Max, you know even studying requires a certain talent.’
“But you get plenty of examples like that. Abraham Lincoln read just the Bible and Shakespeare and became one of the wisest men in the world. As far as I know, Jesus Christ wasn’t a very big student either. George just came in here with that marvelous message for us, and we’re all very grateful for it.”
‘My Ideal’
1. Miss Merman brought down the house with the rouser “Eadie Was a Lady” by Whiting, De Sylva, and Nacio Herb Brown. Additional songs by Vincent Youmans, including “Rise and Shine,” had been added, but the most lasting song hit from the show was also by Whiting, De Sylva, and Brown, the lilting “You’re an Old Smoothie.”
‘Thanks for the Memory’
1. Paramount was in a state of technological crisis. A disastrous fire had burned down several sound stages in construction, and facilities for making sound pictures to compete with Warners’ Vitaphone were needed. The rugs and carpets and night shooting were a desperate improvisation, the idea of Sam Jaffe, the studio manager.
2. In January 1972, when a friend suggested to Mr. Zukor that, come 1973, he planned to take a stage at the Paramount studio and throw a huge party to celebrate Mr. Zukor’s hundredth birthday, the old gentleman replied, ‘Well, I’ll be around for it … but I’m not too sure Paramount will be!
3. “Luck,” in Mr. Robin’s ever modest definition stands for six years’ worth of such song hits as “June in January,” “Love in Bloom,” “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” and “Thanks for the Memory,” which won the Academy Award in 1938.
4. Frederick Hollander wrote many songs for Marlene Dietrich, including “Falling in Love Again” and “Hands Across the Table.”
‘Make Someone Happy’
1. Miss Holliday, who had captivated theatre and film audiences since her enormous success in Born Yesterday, died a few years after the long run of Bells Are Ringing.
2. Not only was the revival costly to mount, but it proved to be a box-office failure.
‘Lullaby of Broadway’
1. Dubin, a prolific lyricist, had already written “My Dream of the Big Parade,” “Cancing with Tears in My Eyes,” “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” and “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,” among other hits.
2. Studio contracts contained clauses which guaranteed only so many weeks of paid employment per term; the weeks of “layoff” could be exercised at the producer’s option.
‘Moon River’
1. Donaldson, who died in 1947, left behind a catalogue brimming with “standards”— “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Making Whoopee,” “Carolina in the Morning,” “You, You’re Driving Me Crazy,” and dozens of others.
2. Which include “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “Varsity Drag,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Sunny Side Up,” and “If I Had a Talking Picture of You.” The trio flourished in the late ’20s and early ’30s. De Sylva later became a hugely successful Broadway and Hollywood producer; at one point he ran the entire Paramount studio.
3. Note the parallel to the pattern of some of Irving Berlin’s composition, as recounted later by Robert Russell Bennett, who observed, “Irving can’t play it, but he can hear it.”
4. A vastly successful Detroit-based recording company specializing in hard-rock and rhythm-and-blues. Its product is aimed specifically at the under-twenty-fives, those record buyers who allegedly make up the majority of today’s market.
‘Over the Rainbow’
1. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse did the book. The leading role went to Ed Wynn, whose performance as a naïve inventor who develops a gas that will eliminate war was a delight.
2. A Yiddish word, which translates (politely) into “junk.”
‘People Who Need People’
1. Republic, a San Fernando Valley studio, specialized in low-budget “quickies.” Miss Canova’s appeal was rural-based. A Republic executive once said, “City people we don’t need. We make these pictures to play in theatres you never heard of, to people you never met—and the profit is guaranteed.” Republic musicals, usually barnyard-oriented, starred Miss Canova, the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, and Shug Fisher, and in the trade were fondly referred to as “shit-kickers.” Their plots were simplistic to a point where the story often became invisible. But the resultant black ink on the Republic books was not.
2. Isobel Lennart became an enormously successful screenwriter, and wrote the book for Funny Girl on Broadway. Mike Frankovich became the head of production at Columbia Pictures. Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields went on to write such Broadway hits as My Sister Eileen, Junior Miss, and Wonderful Town.
3. Lyricist for a long string of successes, especially with Harry Warren, at Warner Brothers including 42nd Street and the Gold Diggers films.
4. In the score were “Papa, Won’t You Dance with Me?,” “I Still Get Jealous,” and a classic Keystone Kops ballet choreographed by Robbins.
5. A popular night club of the ’20s and ’30s in Chicago.
6. Yiddish for “man,” but meaning someone who has proved himself.
7. Styne is making another very large point. The time he referred to, the ’50s, the McCarthy era of blacklisting, was a nightmarish period in the arts. Films, television, radio, all such public media were subject to acute pressures from self-appointed censors. Talented performers were tried and convicted by shadowy behind-the-scenes figures. Many were hounded out of the country. The New York theatre was one of the few bastions—albeit a shaky one—of constitutional freedoms.
8. See Sammy Cahn’s account of their collaboration, in the next chapter.
9. Six, Mr. Styne: “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Together,” “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” “Let Me Entertain You,” “Some People,” “Rose’s Turn.”
10. Styne refers to It Happened One Night, which Capra made with Gable.
11. Both of whom worked on with Robbins Fiddler on the Roof, and who do agree wholeheartedly.
‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schön’
1. A longtime collaborator of Van Heusen’s on “Swinging on a Star,” “Imagination,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and literally dozens of other song hits, chiefly for Bing Crosby.
‘Tradition’
1. The parallel with The Sound of Music is even more remarkable. Music ran for many yeas, and the film version is a box-office phenomenon. As the late Leland Hayward, one of its producers, was fond of saying (usually as he endorsed profit checks from the show), “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a really good review for The Sound of Music.”
‘Taking a Chance on Love’
1. When George Gershwin died, he was working with his brother on the score for a film called The Goldwyn Follies. At Ira Gershwin’s request, Duke was brought in to complete the work Gershwin had left unfinished.
‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’
1. Adamson, who worked on Hasty Pudding shows while at Harvard, is an extremely gifted lyricist who has supplied lyrics to the work of many other composers: Jimmy McHugh, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and others. He and Mack Gordon wrote the lyric to Vincent Youmans’ “Time on My Hands.”
2. Mr. Lane makes a point which not only applies to Broadway but to films as well. With production costs constantly escalating, producers have come to rely more and more on established creative names as “insurance” on their investments. More often than not, such protection rarely does more than to assure a large advance sale of tickets, and is no protection against an inevitable disaster. (Breakfast at Tiffany’s Dear World; to cite two disasters on Broadway.)
‘Oh, How We Danced’
1. The score was written by Johnny Mercer and Gene DePaul. The film itself is widely considered to be one of the best original musicals ever produced.
2. The addition of voice tracks, music tracks, sound effects, synchronized to the photographed film. The process entails “mixing,” by an engineer, of perhaps half-a-dozen tracks into a balanced whole. “Dubbing” is where a film can be made … or broken.
‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’
1. One of whom was the young Harold Arlen. Americana opened October 5, 1932.
2. Harburg had written, with Duke, “What Is There to Say?” and “I Like the Likes of You” for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, before Life Begins at 8:40, which opened in the fall of 1934. “April in Paris” was born of theatrical necessity. The producer had ordered a set which represented a Parisian scene, and instructed Harburg to write a song that would go with it. Never having been abroad, Harburg went to a travel agent and accumulated brochures about Paris. From them he crafted the lyric.
3. Harburg and Arlen wrote the scores for an Al Jolson picture, The Stinging Kid, and for Gold Diggers of 1937 before they returned to New York with the musical comedy Hooray for What? In 1936 their comedy song “The Song of the Woodman,” was one of Bert Lahr’s great moments in The Show Is On, possibly presaging what was to come when they wrote the score for The Wizard of Oz, in which Lahr played the Cowardly Lion.
4. In discussing the Arlen melody for “Over the Rainbow” a few months ago, Harburg told an audience at the YMHA how his collaborator found the melody for the bridge of the song. Arlen had his first strain, but was searching for the central line (“Someday I’ll wish upon a star … “).
“Harold,” said Harburg, “you know that whistle you use when you call your dog into the house? Try that.”
Arlen had been in the habit of whistling a distinctive trill without being aware of it. The notes to his whistle are embodied in the bridge of the song.
5. “Who else but Harburg,” demanded a critic, “would have dared write a lyric about a sexy leprechaun?” (“When I’m Not Near The Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I’m Near.”)
6. Harburg collaborated with Sammy Fain on the score for Flahooley, a Broadway musical, in 1951.
7. Harburg wrote with Jerome Kern in 1945, when the assignment was the score for Can’t Help Singing, a musical film which starred Deanna Durbin. “More and More,” “Can’t Help Singing,” and “Californi-ay” were among the songs they provided for her.
8. Arlen and Harburg collaborated again on the score for the show Jamaica, which starred Lena Horne in 1957. Their latest song, written on the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King’s tragic death, is called “Silent Spring.”
‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’
1. Loosely translated as “yelling.”
2. The brilliance of Robbins as an overall man of the theatre was to be demonstrated during the out-of-town tryout of Sondheim’s next show, his first as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. “We opened out of town, and it was a disaster, the critics hated it,” Sondheim says today. “Usually, when you have a show that’s in such trouble, you can sense what’s wrong and why it’s not working when you stand in the back of the theatre. In this case, we were totally baffled. Finally, we got to Washington, and we called in Jerome Robbins, whose first comment was, ‘Everything’s fine, but please change the opening number. You’ve got to tell the audience what the evening is about.’ Well, of course the trouble was up front. The opening song was a perfectly charming song that preceded a not-charming evening of low comedy. That’s what led to ‘Comedy Tonight.’ I can remember the last matinee in Washington when we played to fifty people—that’s how disastrous the show was. We put in the new opening at the first New York preview, and it was cheers and laughter the entire evening at the exact same lines that audiences had received in complete silence throughout the show four days earlier in Washington! That’s, again, the difference an opening can make. Of course,” he adds, “it’s also an advantage to have one that’s staged by Jerry Robbins!”
3. If one considers The Sound of Music, Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof, Mr. Sondheim’s point is irrefutable.
‘Guys and Dolls’
1. See an earlier chapter for Jule Styne’s recollections of this collaboration.
2. “Leo McCarey, the director, was once talking to the late Bobby Dolan,” remembers Johnny Mercer, “and he asked Dolan, ‘By the way, what’s been happening to that guy who wrote ‘Two Sleepy People’?” Loesser had been very much around Paramount when McCarey was there.
“‘Oh, Frank?’ said Bobby. ‘He’s in New York.’ Loesser was preparing The Most Happy Fella at that time. Bobby said ‘Loesser’s writing the lyrics and doing the music, he’s also written the adaptation, he’s publishing the score with his own firm, and he’s also going to co-produce the show.’
“So McCarey thought a second, and then he asked, ‘Does he get the girl?’
“Funny thing about that is, Frank did get the girl. He married his leading lady, Jo Sullivan.”
‘Always’
1. For many years the town in which musical shows first try out—the arena where the men are separated from the boys.
2. Goetz wrote such songs as “For Me and My Gal” and “Yaaka Hula, Hickey Dula.” Grant wrote “Arrah Go On, I’m Gonna Go Back to Oregon.” Monaco composed, among other hits, “Row, Row, Row,” “You Made Me Love You,” and “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?” Leslie’s name can be found on such hits as “He’d Have to Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile),” “Oh, What a Pal Was Mary,” “Among My Souvenirs,” and he collaborated with Goetz on “For Me and My Gal.”
3. © 1962 Irving Berlin. Reprinted by permission of Irving Berlin Music Corp.
4. But never lost his sense of humor about it. Many years later he wrote the score for Call Me Madam, to star Ethel Merman. Bill McCaffrey, who represents Art Carney, received a call from Berlin, who was most anxious to hire Carney. “Bill” said Berlin “I’ll tell you what—if you get Carney for us, from now on you can call me Izzy Baline!”
5. Some years later, in an effort to atone for his musical sins, Whiting contritely wrote a song called “My Blue Heaven,” which celebrated the joys of coming home at night to the little woman … her smiling face, the fireplace, etc.
6. Harry Ruby, who, like so many of his fellow songwriters, began his career as a “plugger” for the Gus Edwards Music Company, described his earliest activities. “I knew how to play the piano, and that’s how I got the job. Twenty-five bucks a week. It was a very nice job—only seven days a week, eleven in the morning until one in the morning. Here’s what a plugger had to do. Every one of the publishing companies would have four, five, maybe even ten little offices with pianos. The vaudeville actors, the café performers, and the singing waiters would come in, and we’d demonstrate whatever songs the company was plugging. This was from eleven in the morning until six. At six at night you got into the subway and went home to the Bronx to have your supper—then you came back. Five cents each way—which was a lot cheaper than the sixty cents that a downtown restaurant would charge. Then you met a singer someplace in a café and demonstrated a song. Then you went to the nickelodeons with the illustrated slides—the projectionist up in the booth threw the slides on the screen, while you were downstairs at the piano, playing the song and singing it with the audience. That’s till eleven. Now you make the café and rathskellers! … That’s the way songs were made, back in the 1912-13s.”
7. Woollcott reported that on Berlin’s trip to London, “He hailed a cab at Victoria Station to drive to his hotel. The wisp of a newsboy who opened the cab door for him on the odd chance of getting a penny for that unsolicited attention is probably wondering to this day … why the mad young American that day gave him a sovereign for his pains. Ever afterwards he made a special point of opening cab doors for people who looked as if they had come from America, but the miracle never happened again. Like Dr. Jekyll, he had been working with an unknown ingredient. He had, as it happened, been whistling ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’”
8. Thirty-six years later Berlin was to write the score for the Broadway show Call Me Madam. According to George Abbott, who directed the show, he mentioned to Berlin during the out-of-town tryout that he felt the need for a second-act duet for their star, Ethel Merman, to sing with the juvenile lead, Russell Nype. “Something catchy, like ‘Play a Simple Melody,’” suggested Abbott. “I’ve always loved that song.” At the same time, he conceded that such an intricate counterpoint duet was as difficult to create as anything he could think of.
Berlin disappeared into his hotel room, and went straight to his upright piano. The following day Russel Crouse, co-author of the book, came bleary-eyed into a rewrite conference. Crouse explained that he had the room below Berlin’s and he’d been kept up all night by the tinkling of Berlin’s piano. “But don’t worry,” he said, between yawns. “What kept me awake sounds awfully good.”
Berlin emerged shortly with a completed duet, the scheme of which was exactly what Abbott had suggested. The song was “You’re Just in Love (I Hear Singing and There’s No One There),” and, as performed by Miss Merman and Mr. Nype, it promptly became the second-act show-stopper of everyone’s fondest dreams.
9. An echo of Robert Russell Bennett’s comment.
10. I was once a first-hand witness to this highly tuned inner sonar system of Berlin’s. In the pre-Christmas season of 1942 Berlin was on tour with his second soldier show, This Is the Army. Earlier that year he had written the score for the picture Holiday Inn, and among the songs was the famous Bing Crosby number “White Christmas.” When the Academy Awards were handed out, an Oscar went to Berlin for this lovely ballad.
With Christmas 1942 approaching, with GIs being shipped out to bases overseas, there began to be reports of a strange phenomenon. Armed Forces Radio Service was receiving requests from servicemen all over the world for “White Christmas.” Something imbedded in the words to that song seemed to spark a spontaneous expression of their homesickness in this, the first winter of our global war.
At the request of the news services, Berlin held a press conference in Cincinnati. The reporters wished to know if Berlin thought that his “White Christmas” was on its way to becoming the classic song of this war, much as “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” had registered with the doughboys of 1918.
That, said Berlin, was not up to him to decide. He was, of course, pleased and touched that our fighting men responded to his ballad, but as for posterity, well, only posterity ruled on such questions.
One of the newsmen present asked if Berlin would oblige those assembled by singing “White Christmas.” Berlin obliged. He sat down at his upright piano—his most basic piece of luggage—and proceeded, in his small voice, to sing.
In the film Holiday Inn, Crosby sings the song in a sun-drenched California background. The verse to the song describes the Beverly Hills scenery, cum orange trees and palms.
As Berlin sang this verse, several of the newsmen glanced at each other in almost imperceptible reaction to the words. Beverly Hills, orange trees, L.A.? For GIs in foxholes? It didn’t quite work, did it?
But when Berlin finished his verse and got into the chorus, the universal sentiment of the song filled that small hotel room. When he finished, on that cold December night in Cincinnati, his audience broke into spontaneous applause.
A few moments later, when the last reporter had gone off to file his story, Berlin made directly for the telephone and called New York to speak to his professional manager, Saul Bourne.
“I want you to cut the verse out of the sheet music of ‘White Christmas,’” he instructed. “From now on, that song goes without a verse. That’s an order.”
Which may serve to explain why you can hear that verse when Bing Crosby launches into “White Christmas” on the Late Show. But on the official sheet music of the song, which since 1942 has sold millions of copies, you will not find it.
When I reminded Mr. Berlin of this incident almost thirty years later, it caused him to laugh. “Sure, I cut the verse,” he said. “You know what happened? The music jobbers who handled sheet music all over the country wrote in and complained like hell—they figured we were cheating them out of a verse!”
11. During the darkest days of the Depression, Berlin would be able to salvage his father-in-law’s fortunes with a loan of one million dollars in cash, thereby adding the perfect O. Henry ironic twist to the third act of the story.
12. In the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, 1967, there appeared a note. “Here is Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ as it might have been written by Lorenz Hart. Its authorship in the 1920s is a mystery, although Mr. Berlin advises: ‘I’ve known about this parody. Many years ago, the late Buddy De Sylva, who I think wrote it, sang it to me.’
I’ll be loving you
Always
Both in very big, and
Small ways.
With a love as grand
As Paul Whiteman’s band
And ‘twill weigh as much as
Paul weighs,
Always.
In saloons and drab
Hallways
You are what I’ll grab
Always.
See how I dispense
Rhymes that are immense,
But do they make sense?
Not always.
13. The close friendship of Berlin and Maurice Abrahams, Herbert’s father, dated back to 1908, when the two had written a song called “Queenie, My Own.” Abrahams was a first-rate man of music who often accompanied his wife onstage and rehearsed her orchestral accompaniments when she toured.
14. Some years later in an interview about writing songs, Noel Coward said, “Watch that middle eight! There’s a theme to the melody, always, a main theme. Well, those middle eight bars put it over, they’re the solid core. I say—watch that middle eight. The best exponent of that is Berlin, Irving. That chap is the grandest of the middle-eight boys.”
15. Ever since the early days when he wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the popular Broadway legend about Berlin had it that his enormous output was not solely his but that he was assisted by “a little colored boy,” whom he kept hidden. It was about this time, when Berlin was producing far less than usual, that a Lindy wag stopped him on the street to ask, “What’s the matter, Irving, has the little colored boy been sick?” “No,” snapped Berlin. “He’s dead.”
16. The legend attributes this crack to the late comic Joe Frisco.