Читать книгу They're Playing Our Song - Max Wilk - Страница 16

YOU NEVER ask a lady her age. But if your parents grew up singing such songs of the ’20s as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” or “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and your kids are wriggling to “Hey, Big Spender!” and if you know that Dorothy Fields is responsible for the lyrics to those songs (as well as a truckload of other hits in between), then the subject of her age can be dropped and we can concentrate on her amazing career.

“When I was born,” she says, “my family was spending the summer down at the Jersey shore. I must have arrived ahead of time, because I’ve always heard how Lee Shubert and Willie Collier, the actor, who were both good friends of my father, Lew Fields, ran through the streets looking for a doctor or a midwife.”

Perhaps that last word dates Miss Fields’ entrance into the world, but nothing else about her is passé. She’s an attractive woman, so soft-spoken and essentially female (her maid apologized on the phone that Miss Fields couldn’t answer—she was having a pedicure) that it’s almost impossible to realize that this charming lady has been a successful survivor in an essentially masculine jungle, the music business, for more than forty years.

And it’s not only as a top-flight lyricist that she’s left her indelible imprint on our popular culture of the past forty-odd years. Dorothy Fields and her late brother Herbert fashioned the books of Something for the Boys, Let’s Face It, Up in Central Park, Mexican Hayride, and wrote another one called Annie Get Your Gun which still stands as the textbook of musical comedy—that is, what to do right in two acts if you’re planning to have yourself a smash-hit show.

Dorothy Fields

Her roster of songwriting collaborators sparkles with talents: Messrs. Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Burton Lane, Jimmy McHugh, Morton Gould, Harry Warren. (“Wait a second,” she cautioned, “I’m sure you left some others out. Albert Hague, J. Fred Coots, and what about Cy Coleman? He and I are writing a show right now.”)

How did she manage to write successfully with so many complex and disparate men? (“I just remembered, I also wrote lyrics to a melody by Fritz Kreisler, ‘Stars in My Eyes.’”) One lady lyricist, a dozen gentlemen composers. Is there some magic formula she might divulge?

“I don’t know,” she says. “In my case, I guess it just evolved.”

In a milieu where every fourth word is “greatest” and every second word is some grammatical form of “I/me,” the lady’s laconic understatement is refreshing.

We sit in her large and beautiful apartment on Central Park West in that old building, the Beresford, which houses such a large population of successful songwriters that it should perhaps be renamed the Brill Building North.

Had she always wished to be a lyricist?

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” she said. “Pop, of course, was a famous producer,¹ and he didn’t want any of us in the theatre. So out of four, three of us ended up there—Joe, Herbert, and myself! I was married very early; my first husband was a doctor who’s now dead. I taught school, and I was a lab technician. But I’d written a few poems that had been published in Frank Adams’ famous column, ‘The Conning Tower,’ in the old World. I was introduced to a songwriter named J. Fred Coots, and the two of us began writing songs.² We wrote a few bad ones, and, boy, if you’ve ever heard bad lyrics, they were the ones. We went around to all the publishers, and the response I got was, ‘Well, if you’re so great, why doesn’t your father do something for you?’ Which of course militates against you, if you know what I mean.

“Coots introduced me to Jimmy McHugh, and Jimmy, who was professional manager of Mills Publishing Company, introduced me to Irving Mills. McHugh had already written songs like ‘What’s Become of Hinky Dinky Parley Vous?’ and ‘When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,’ and he took a slightly dim view of my talent, but he introduced me to Mills all the same. Mills Music was the kind of firm that when Valentino died, the next day they had a song out, ‘There’s a New Star in Heaven Since Valentino Passed Away.’ When Caruso died, the next day there was ‘A Songbird in Heaven Named Caruso.’ Now, at this time a lady named Ruth Elder was going to fly the Atlantic. So Mills says, ‘She’s going to fly today and we have to have a song. I’ll help you out. I’ll give you fifty dollars to do this if you can do it by tomorrow. I’ll even give you a title—“Our American Girl.” The two lines of verse you have to use are, You took a notion to fly across the ocean.’ I said, ‘Mr. Mills, you don’t take a notion to fly across the ocean!’ Well, anyhow, Ruth Elder never made it, so the song was never published. Then McHugh said, ‘Would you like to do some songs for the Cotton Club in Harlem?’ And I said, ‘I would write for the Westchester Kennel Club. I don’t care what it is!’ So we did a few shows there. Three, I think, before Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler came in.

“We didn’t have any hits. And the curious thing about the Cotton Club was that they had their openings on Sunday nights so that all the stars could come. Big celebrity nights. The night that our show, our first, was to open, they also had Duke Ellington and his orchestra—first time he appeared in New York. We’d rehearsed with a woman—let’s not mention her name. We’d rehearsed her in some nice songs. Opening night, Walter Winchell was there because he was a good friend of my father’s. Huge family table—my mother, my father, my first husband, Joe and his wife, and Herbert. And she came out after intermission and she sang three of the dirtiest songs you ever heard in your life. ‘Easy Rider’³ was mild compared to these songs. My father looked at me and asked, ‘Did you write these lyrics?’ And I was green. I said, ‘Of course I didn’t.’ So Winchell said, ‘You’d better do something about it, Lew.’ So Pop went to the owner, a man named Block—he was partners with a gangster named Owney Madden. He said, ‘If you don’t make an announcement that my daughter Dorothy didn’t write those lyrics, I’m going to punch you right on the floor.’ So they made an announcement: ‘These lyrics of Miss Blank were not written by Dorothy Fields. The music was not written by Jimmy McHugh.’ That was my first experience in theatre.

“And the second was with a man named Harry Delmar, who had a show called Delmar’s Revels. He asked us to do a song about a poor little Brooklyn boy, who was Bert Lahr, and a poor little girl named Patsy Kelly. They’re sitting practically in rags on a cellar step. The song we wrote was ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.’ Well, they did one verse and one quick chorus, and the curtains parted and there were the girls of the chorus, practically nude, dressed as rubies, diamonds, opals, amethysts, sapphires, everything! Next day Delmar said, ‘This is a lousy song. Take it and get out of my theatre.’”

She smiles. “Rude beginnings. R-u-e-d …

“Then Lew Leslie hired us to do a show called Blackbirds of 1928. First, we’d written songs for a show of his in a club called Les Ambassadeurs, on 57th Street, where we had Roger Wolfe Kahn—he was Otto Kahn’s son— and his orchestra, and a lovely lady named Adelaide Hall, who sang. We tried again with that song. Horrible reviews for Blackbirds. Panned. Everybody loathed it. Gilbert Gabriel, who later became a close friend of mine, wrote, ‘And then there was a sickly, puerile song called “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”’ So we waived royalties and the show limped along until Leslie got the idea to do midnight shows on Thursdays. And that became the rage of New York. Everybody went to Blackbirds on Thursday midnights. Woollcott re-reviewed it, Gabriel, everybody re-reviewed it, and it ran for two years! Ran in Paris, ran in Chicago, everywhere. And that ‘sickly, puerile song’ became an enormous hit. Sold over three million copies.”

There were other big hits with McHugh—“Exactly Like You,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Diga Diga Doo”—and an entire show for Florenz Ziegfield with Paul Whiteman and Maurice Chevalier. Then the team went to Hollywood, where they worked on early musicals. What was McHugh like as a collaborator?

“Very facile. Taught me a lot. I sat beside him at the piano and wrote as he composed.”

In the early ’30s Fields and McHugh had “Don’t Blame Me,” “Dinner at Eight,” “The Cuban Love Song,” and, from a 1935 musical called Every Night at Eight, one of their biggest hits, “I’m in the Mood for Love.”

Then came her collaboration with Jerome Kern.

“It’s a curious thing how I started to work with Kern. Of course, he knew my father and he knew my brothers, everybody in the family. He was a little older than I. And I was with RKO. Pandro Berman was producing Roberta, and he asked me if I’d take a couple of days off and work on it. He said, ‘We have a curiously uneven melody of Jerome Kern’s that he’s given us to add to the score; it needs a lyric. It has to be sung by Irene Dunne, who comes down the steps all in ermine for a fashion show, and it can be a love song.’ So I wrote ‘Lovely to Look At,’ which absolutely astounded Mr. Berman. And he had the nerve to shoot this whole sequence without Jerry okaying the lyric! But Jerry loved it. And when he signed with RKO to do a picture with Lily Pons, I Dream Too Much, he said, ‘I’d like to work with Dorothy Fields.’ That’s how e got to be such good friends.

“I always found Jerry easy to work with. We’d sit down at the piano together—first at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, before he built the house on Whittier Drive. He always had next to him on the piano a basket of pencils and a little bust of Wagner. He didn’t play the piano very well—not a great pianist like Arthur Schwartz, or Harold Arlen, or Cy Coleman, who play beautifully. He’d play something he’d written, and if there was an expression on your face that showed you didn’t care for it—he’d react very quickly to what you thought—he’d turn this little statuette around facing away and say, ‘Wagner doesn’t like it.’”

When Wagner did like it, his approbation resulted in some immortal Kern-Fields works. There was not only the score for I Dream Too Much, but the Astaire-and-Rogers hit musical Swing Time; firmly imbedded in that sound track were such lovelies as “A Fine Romance,” “Pick Yourself Up,” and “Bojangles of Harlem.”

“I remember the day at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel we were just planning Swing Time. We had to get a number for Fred Astaire. We couldn’t get Jerry to write down a number that he could do. Jerry went to the bathroom, and Fred took me aside and said, ‘My God, can we ever get a tune that I can dance to? Syncopated?’ And the two of us sat with Jerry, and Fred hoofed all over the room and gave him ideas … and finally Jerry came up with a very good tune, ‘Bojangles of Harlem.’”

And “The Way You Look Tonight,” which won the Academy Award in 1936 for best film song. “The first time Jerry played that melody for me, I went out and started to cry,” she says. “The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.

“Oh, it was a lovely collaboration. Don’t let anybody tell you Jerry was unhappy in Hollywood; he loved it out there. He made an excellent living and he did a lot of good work. And he was never difficult … except perhaps once,” she muses. “This is the only time he ever let me have it. When George Gershwin bought a Cord. Remember the Cord car? It was beautiful.

“We went down to Palm Springs. George started to teach me how to play golf down there. I fell in love with his car, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you get one too?’ So I went out and bought a Cord. I always used very blue pencils to write with, and I had the car painted that bright blue color. I used to drive Jerry to the studio every day, because he didn’t drive. And I drove up in my brand-new bright blue Cord, very proud, to pick Jerry up. There he was, waiting for me. But he became very incensed, the only time he ever lit into me. He said, ‘I won’t drive with you in that vulgar, repulsive car!’ Do you believe I had to take it back and have it painted black?”

A martinet to others, a sharp-tongued man possessed of sharp opinions, Kern obviously enjoyed working with Miss Fields, and the feeling remained mutual. The two wrote another film, The Joy of Living, and were originally slated to do the score for Annie Get Your Gun. Kern’s death ended a joyful collaboration.

“Jerry was wonderful, just wonderful,” she murmurs. “He was always obsessed by hats. Had all sorts of them—jockey caps, captains’ caps, all sorts of funny hats, just like Ed Wynn. One day we were all going to the races at Santa Anita, Jerry and his wife, Eva, me, and Sigmund Romberg— Rommie, the oom-pah-pah boy. He’d been here almost forty years, but he always garbled the language so. Ockie Hammerstein called them Rommieisms. We drove up to the Kerns’, and on this day Jerry came out wearing a checkered cap. Rommie took a look at him and said, ‘Jerry, you look like a race-horse trout!’”

A few years later she collaborated with Romberg on the score of the Broadway show Up in Central Park, for which she and her brother Herbert also contributed a libretto.

“Oh, those Rommie-isms were classic. He had a rehearsal pianist once, a very nice girl, but he insulted her so much. Finally, he blew up one day at rehearsal and yelled, “The trouble with you, Miss, is you haven’t got enough shows behind your belt!’”

Miss Fields departed Beverly Hills in 1939 to write the score, with Arthur Schwartz, of a Broadway musical that satirized Hollywood film-making, Stars in Your Eyes. The stars of this joyfully mad venture were Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante, and anyone who was a witness to the sights and sounds of Merman and Durante dueting the Schwartz-Fields ditty “It’s All Yours,” with Miss Merman aping Jimmy’s inimitable strut-away—complete with hilarious jokes, head-wagging, and hot-cha-cha (“he actually taught her how to do him”)—was party to a titanic display of talent, a perfect meld of material and performers.

Later on, Miss Fields worked with Arthur Schwartz on the scores for By the Beautiful Sea—for which she also did the book with brother Herbert— and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Both shows starred Shirley Booth, and they were, again, happy collaborations. Among their songs are such lovely works as “I’ll Buy You a Star” and “Make the Man Love Me.” And the echoes of Miss Booth singing “Look Who’s Dancing” should inspire a producer to bring the joys of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn back to the stage; its nostalgia quotient was probably a few years ahead of its time.

Collaborating with Mr. Schwartz? “It’s never been anything but a pleasure. Arthur’s very easy to work with, and we’re close friends,” she says.

But Miss Fields’ long career seems top-heavy with pleasant working relationships. Harry Warren, with whom she worked at Metro in the ’40s on a film called Texas Carnival, is another good friend. “We did a couple of songs together. We’d work at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I had a bungalow. You know, Harry has carried on for years about how anonymous he is. With him, it’s always some sort of a mass plot on the part of the world to keep his name hidden. Harry always says, ‘If anybody gets the smallest billing, I get it!’ I remember one day we were on our way to the studio to play our songs, and he said, ‘Now remember, Dorothy, when we get to the Metro lot, you walk three Oscars behind me’—because I had only one.”

That talent for pleasant yet professional working relationships also extended into the more complex and demanding field of musical-comedy librettos. Dorothy and Herbert Fields wrote a string of smash-hit books for Cole Porter: Let’s Face It, Something for the Boys, and Mexican Hayride.

Some of the Fields talent has to have been inherited. Lew Fields, their father, was a tremendous comedy star with Joe Weber. It was in Weber and Fields’ “Dutch” act that “Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady, that was my wife!” first began to convulse audiences. “Growing up, we knew all the jokes. Everybody in the family contributed to a collection, picking them up wherever we heard them, writing them down in a big black ledger. After my father broke with Joe Weber, he became a producer and did musical shows of his own. He discovered Vernon Castle; he brought Blossom Seeley to New York from San Francisco. In 1911 he had five separate hits going!

“We lived in an atmosphere of comedy—jokes, blackout lines, funny routines. My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but when I began to grow up, I got more interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not. And I began to be impressed by what made a good book—how, even if you had a great comic star like my father, you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together. What I learned then still applies, all these years later. If you don’t have a story that will hold the audience, you won’t have a successful show. And as for the songs that go into that book, they have got to move the plot forward. I don’t care how good a song is—if it holds back the story line, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.”

What about Cole Porter? What was it like working with him?

“Wonderful,” she says promptly. “Herbert and I never had any set pattern with Cole. He didn’t care too much about the book. HE came to some rehearsals. But generally he just wrote songs, and he’d rewrite them, and then Herbert and I would have to fit them.

“Oh, I loved Cole. He and Herbie had worked together so many times before—they’d done Fifty Million Frenchmen and The New Yorkers, Panama Hattie and DuBarry Was a Lady—and they were very close friends. So I learned to disregard the way Cole ignored the book. I got used to it. Lots of times he’d read something in a scene we’d written and he’d say, ‘Oh, you two people are so talented!’ And then he’d cop a couple of lines of dialogue from that scene and put them into his lyrics. He’d say, ‘Oh, you don’t need this—you’ll write something else, I’m sure you will.’

“I remember whenever we’d get to Boston to try out one of our shows with him, we loved to go out into the theatre lobby on Saturday afternoons when all of the Back Bay dowagers would come to the matinee. I think it was during the tryout of Let’s Face It, which starred Danny Kaye. Cole and Herbie and I were standing and listening to all the stuff those old biddies were talking about. And right next to us was a very aristocratic old dame. She said, ‘I don’t know how these actors think up all those funny things to say!’ Cole was delighted with her remark. He nudged us, and he said, ‘You see? You Fieldses want to write book?’”

Did she ever find it difficult to retire as a lyricist and bequeath that spot to Mr. Porter?

“Oh, honey, let me tell you, it’s great,” she says fervently. “The book is always the toughest thing to do; one doesn’t need the added responsibility of doing the lyrics, I can assure you.”

She managed the same shift most successfully in 1946 when Irving Berlin wrote both music and lyrics to the Fields’ book for Annie Get Your Gun. On the American musical-comedy scene Annie Get Your Gun almost instantly assumed classic status. It’s been filmed, done as a TV special, played all over the world. (“When it opened in London, the producer made records of the opening night and sent them to us. It’s remarkable. Four sides of nothing but applause and cheers. And on closing night, that British audience wouldn’t let the cast go, they loved them so.”) And just a couple of seasons back Annie was revived in Lincoln Center, with Ethel Merman in her original part.

The last book that the Fields team wrote was By the Beautiful Sea in 1954. By now the lady was back at her lyricist’s station. In fact, her post-Annie period was an extremely busy one. Not only was she busy on Broadway but she was also constantly involved in films—some with Arthur Schwartz and Harry Warren, another with Harold Arlen. In 1959 she returned to Broadway and worked with Albert Hague on Redhead, a starring vehicle for Gwen Verdon. That won the Tony Award for the best musical comedy of the year.

Hadn’t there ever been one of those creative “dry spells”?

“Oh, honey,” she says, “of course. They can happen to anybody. I just seem to manage to write my way out of them. I remember working with Fritz Kreisler, back in the ’30s, when we were doing a picture at Columbia for Grace Moore, called The King Steps Out. Fritz says to me, ‘You know, Dorothy, darling, for months, months, months, nothing comes out. Nothing. Break my heart, and break my head, and break the piano…. ‘ And that was Fritz Kreisler! I don’t care who you are, you hit those patches. Ockie Hammerstein, Irving, we’ve all gone through them.”

The word “through” is the key word. Hammerstein also observed that the professional writer does not wait for inspiration to strike. To that, Miss Fields would add her own footnote; she keeps a book, one in which she records ideas, titles, lines for future reference, random thoughts. And she has a further piece of pragmatic advice: songwriters must not become married to one particular song. “You keep on writing. If the one you’ve written doesn’t work, you write another.”

She has a schedule worked out for audience acceptance as well. “You do a song in a show. Give it four performances. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—matinee and evening. If it hasn’t clicked with the audience by then, take it out.”

A rather ruthless timetable, isn’t it?

“Sure it is,” she concedes. “But remember, when I’m working on songs, I’m still a book-writer. I’m not out to write popular song hits, though I’ve written songs that have become popular; I’m writing a song to fit a spot in the show. To fit a character, to express something about him or her … to move that story line forward. You can’t fool that audience out there. They’ll always tell you whether a song is right or not.” She shakes her head reminiscently. “And they’re not polite about it, either.”

Her work defies easy classification. The score of Redhead was essentially British in flavor, the show having been set in the Victorian period, against the background of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. A few years later, when Neil Simon adapted Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria into Sweet Charity, she and Cy Coleman created a score completely contemporary in its style. That show’s music and lyrics were very close to the hard-rock idiom of the mid-’60s. How did she accommodate herself to that style? The one which Harold Arlen somewhat gloomily refers to as “a percussive era”?

“Well, you must stay au courant,” she says. “I don’t pull myself into a shell like a turtle and withdraw. I go to the theatre, I listen to what’s being played, I get a feel of what’s around. And don’t forget, my collaborator, Cy Coleman, is a very contemporary sort of guy.”

Then what happens is a sort of osmotic process? Composer feeding lyricist, and vice versa?

She nods. “And you have to keep thinking of the situation in the play. Sometimes that gives you an idea for a lyric. Other times the sheer pressure of knowing that you need something will draw it out of you. I remember once during the tryout of Charity in Philadelphia we knew we needed another song for Gwen Verdon, and we wrote her ‘I’m a Brass Band.’ We wrote that in one morning. Here’s what happened. I was living at the Barclay and Cy was at the Warwick. I went over to work with him, and I had the title in my head. I had the first line for it—‘I’m a brass band, I’m a harpsichord’…. We called Bobby Fosse, our director, who lived at the Warwick too. He came up and said, ‘Fine, do it.’ I wrote the lyric and Cy wrote the music, almost simultaneously. We’ve done that several times. I write very fast,” she adds.

“But when we got to Detroit, we had a song called ‘Raincheck’ that was done in the garage scene. And it really was a stinker. We said, ‘Oh, we can’t keep this.’ Not only did we say it, Fosse, everybody said it. So we wrote Saturday afternoon and part of Sunday, and we got ‘The Rhythm of Life,’ which was great for the show.”

Sweet Charity was also remarkable for having in its score “Hey, Big Spender,” which proved to be a show-stopper and went on to become a popular song hit, with attendant record sales and TV and radio plugs. And, as anyone around Broadway will be very sad to tell you, these days you don’t hardly get those any more. A Broadway musical show may run to capacity houses for one or two seasons, but song hits from its score are harder to come by today than a parking space along 45th Street. So if Miss Fields was able to make contact with the record buyers of the ’60s, something she started doing back in 1926, she has to be doing something right.

Perhaps the underlying element of Dorothy Fields’ remarkable span of activity is embodied in the title of one of her own numbers, a song she wrote with Arthur Schwartz for Ethel Merman to chant in Stars in Your Eyes back in 1939. She called it “A Lady Needs a Change.” Here, in her fifth decade of creativity, she’s abiding by her own words, living a life compounded of various parts: loving parenthood, domesticity, auditions, conferences, Long Island summer retreats, rewrite sessions, theatre-going, socializing, public service (she’s long been involved in work for the Girl Scouts and for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies), more rewrites … and pedicures.

And she’s already off on a new tack. She and Cy Coleman have made a musical version of William Gibson’s hit play Two for the Seesaw. “Which is very much in the contemporary idiom of the ’70s—not at all hard rock,” she says, “because that period’s already over. Now there’s a whole new sound. We’re very lucky, Cy and I. Work fast when the ideas flow. We wrote the title song for Seesaw in three hours.”

And if, because of some as yet unforeseen set of circumstances, Seesaw flounders—Broadway being the chanciest, costliest creative crap game ever devised—what then?

“I’ll start another one, what else?” she quips instantly.

Which is something you learned early, and never forgot, if you were Lew Fields’ daughter.