Stage & Screen Online

When I was a high school kid living in Evanston, Illinois and dreaming of a life in New York, it was a New York that Betty Comden and Adolph Green helped invent.  A New York filled with witty, literate people who wrote books and plays and songs and sang those songs with brio and lost their hearts in parks and penthouses and especially on neighborhood streets (where passing strangers were always available to be enlisted into an encouraging chorus).  It was a New York accompanied by music by Leonard Bernstein or Jule Styne – jaunty, wistful and optimistic.  It was a New York I imagined as I fell asleep listening to my portable Zenith record changer play stacks of LPs, among them recordings of Comden and Green shows – On the Town, Wonderful Town and Bells Are Ringing.
When I arrived in Manhattan for college, the real city didn’t quite match Comden and Green’s New York.  (For one thing, strangers on the street resist forming spontaneous choruses, unless yelling something unprintable at a cab driver.)  But there were always corners here that did live up to those images, and those were whatever corners Betty and Adolph happened to inhabit at the moment. I served on the Dramatists Guild Council with them for several years.  The Guild is an organization dedicated to the interests of playwrights, composers and lyricists, and the Council and the officers meet once a month during the season to take up issues of copyright, contracts, censorship and education.  Contrary to what some believe, Betty and Adolph weren’t married to each other (Adolph was married to Broadway star Phyllis Newman, who often appeared in Comden and Green shows), but one rarely saw one of them in public without the other, and they always sat together at Council meetings.
I got the impression that they loved being Comden and Green.  Some writers are shy, reclusive or just (to be honest) downright rude.  One approaches these warily or not at all.  They don’t want to be complimented or to be told how much their work means to you.  They like your applause in the theatre and appreciate nice words in the press, but actual contact with the public taxes their ability to maintain courtesy.
That wasn’t the case with Betty and Adolph.  They loved to meet people who loved them.  I remember a book fair held on Fifth Avenue.  Applause Books had just issued an anthology called The New York Musicals of Comden and Green featuring three of their shows, and they sat happily in a booth, chatting with anyone and everyone who came by, signing title pages, telling anecdotes and looking a bit like honorary co-mayors of the street.  And yes, they were delighted to hear about your high school’s production of Bells Are Ringing.
The robustness of their spirits couldn’t quite hide the frailty that age ultimately inflicted on them.  I once set up a seminar on writing musicals for a convention of theatre journalists.  Betty and Adolph were scheduled to appear along with John Weidman and Joseph Stein (writers respectively of Assassins and Fiddler on the Roof.  The program was scheduled for the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway.  What we had all forgotten was that one reaches that stage through a long series of steps down.  The color drained from Betty’s face as she looked at those dozens of steps.  She was of course given the option of demurring.  But no, she insisted on slowly making her way down to the stage.  She had the assistance of a friendly arm (now that I think of it, it may have been mine), but it was far from easy.  She and Adolph found their chairs on the stage and caught their breath, the journalists took their places in the audience, and the two of them gave their usual spirited and delightful performance.  The face that had been pinched with anxiety now glowed because she was where she was supposed to be – on a stage.
Here’s a story they told that day: At one point during the composition of the lyrics for On the Town they were worrying through the structure of a particular number.  It occurred to one of them (they didn’t remember who) that the lyric they wanted to write should have the same pattern as “You Mustn’t Kick It Around,” a Rodgers and Hart song from Pal Joey which begins, “If my heart gets in your way/You musn’t kick it around.”
Betty (or maybe Adolph) said, “Why don’t we start writing this lyric as if it were to go to that tune?”  And so they began  writing, “Carried Away” like this: “I try hard to keep control/But I get carried away.”  (Try singing that line on top of the Rodgers tune and you’ll see it fits.)
When they were finished, they gave the lyric to Leonard Bernstein to set to music.  I asked her, “Did you tell him what tune you wrote it to?” “Oh no,” she said. They didn’t tell him the lyric was based on a pre-existent tune at all.  They just gave him the lyric, and he set it.  Needless to say, except for the structure, the music Bernstein wrote bore no relationship to the Rodgers tune.  And a classic Bernstein-Comden-Green song was born.
After the program was over, the journalists didn’t see the difficulty of the climb back up those stairs.  Reporters around the country posted stories about the session.  The word “legendary” was in all of them that I read.
Another anecdote: Sometime in the Nineties, I arrive at an off-off-Broadway theatre to see a new musical and find Adolph in the lobby.  We start talking about Marc Blitzstein.  (Blitzstein was the  composer-lyricist who wrote The Cradle Will Rock and the American adaptation of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera that was an early off-Broadway hit.)  I mention how much I love Blitzstein’s Regina, an opera based on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. “Wonderful score,” says Adolph.  “Too bad they never recorded it.” “Adolph,” I say, “they recorded it.  I have a copy.” “No, Jeff,” he says, “if they had recorded it, I would have it.” I decide not to challenge him on this.  As it happens, a few days later I’m in Princeton, New Jersey, and I stop by the Princeton Record Exchange, a store stocked thousands of old LPs.  Looking through a bargain bin, I come across a mint-condition box set of Regina on three discs.  Three bucks.  At moments like this, you have to feel there’s a Higher Power, and that it has a sense of timing. Next day, I’m back in New York, and I phone Adolph.  I tell him what I’ve located and that I’d like to find a time to get it to him.  “Ooo,” he says, “what are you doing now?”  And so I walk to the apartment overlooking Central Park West.  His assistant meets me at the door and escorts me to a room filled from floor to ceiling with books and records.  I present him with the recording.  He presses his face to the cover (he’s nearly blind) to see the photo of Blitzstein sitting among the cast, holding the score of the opera.   “What shall we start with?” he says.  I suggest a number from the beginning of the third act called “Listen to the Rain.”  He puts the record on.  It is a song in which the handful of decent characters from Hellman’s tale sit on the front porch during a spring shower and sing of the cleansing power of rain.  At one point, a bass begins a soaring, thrilling melody line to the words, “Consider the rain/The falling of gentle rain ...” And then I’m not hearing one voice but two.  Adolph has begun to sing along.  His voice isn’t as rich as the one on the record, but it is full of feeling.  And I realize he is singing note-perfect from memory something he probably hasn’t heard in more than thirty years.  Yipes.
The number ends.  He shuts off the phonograph and turns to me.
“Marc was a friend,” he says.  And he begins to talk of his early days when he and Betty and a radiant performer named Judy Holliday had a nightclub act that played in Greenwich Village under the name The Revuers.  (Comden and Green later wrote Bells Are Ringing for Holliday.)  Their frequent accompanist was a young man who used the name Lenny Amber who, under his real name, Leonard Bernstein, was responsible for bringing Comden and Green to Broadway as his collaborators on On the Town.
“We had terrific fans,” says Adolph.  And he tells of the night when, after one of their performances, one of their fans – composer Aaron Copland – showed up at the club where they were appearing.  Blitzstein was there, too.  “Aaron says he has something he wants us to hear.  A piece he’s just finished,” remembers Adolph.  So the gang heads over to the nearby apartment of one of them (probably Copland’s, though Adolph wasn’t clear on this), Copland hands Blitzstein a sheef of music, and then the two of them take their places at two pianos and play the piano sketches of Copland’s newest ballet score,  Billy the Kid.
“You know it?” Adolph asks me.
Know it?  Bernstein’s recording of the score is one of the other records that was rarely far from my phonograph during my high school days. And I thought, not a bad deal – for three bucks I got a mental snapshot of New York culture at the height of its golden age.

The last time I saw Betty and Adolph together was their last public appearance as a team.  Every year, the Dramatists Guild hosts a dinner to raise funds for programs and fellowships it sponsors.  As part of this, they give out awards for career achievement.  Naturally, Betty and Adolph won one.  Rather than content themselves with giving acceptance speeches, they performed a piece of material they had written for the occasion.  The number shows what would have happened if Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams hadn’t been protected by Guild contracts from having changes forced upon them by producers afraid of unhappy endings.  The result?  Willie is saved and Blanche goes on a swell cruise.  At that point, Betty and Adolph probably couldn’t even see the audience, but they could certainly feel it.  It was like watching plants bloom under grow lights.  The audience cheered not just the material but the gallantry of the performance.

Adolph died first.  A few days later, for the first time anybody could remember, Betty came to a Council meeting alone.  She stood up to share one of her favorite memories. She and Adolph were playing some horrible nightclub in the early days of their career.  The show was a disaster.  No laughs, no applause, nothing.  They finished the performance to dead silence.  As they were heading backstage after this debacle, somebody out in the loathsome audience, probably out of a sense of irony, clapped two isolated claps.  “Ah!” said Adolph brightly, “they want more!”  And it was all Betty could do to keep him from returning to the stage.
Another story is well known, but worth repeating.  Betty, Adolph, Phyllis and friends went to the movies to see something that turned out to be pompous and dreadful.  At one point, the overwrought leading lady had this line: “Have you ever tasted death?”  Adolph immediately shouted out, “I have.  It tastes like chicken.”
That was the last time I saw Betty.  I heard that occasionally friends came to visit her and sing her songs or discuss theatre, but I wasn’t part of that circle.  She died November 23, 2006.

On Tuesday, September 18, the Majestic Theatre was the site of a special performance featuring a host of Broadway’s leading ladies singing songs by the team.  Quite a line-up – Christine Ebersole, Karen Ziemba, Lucie Arnaz, Stephanie J. Block, Leslie Uggams, Liz and Ann Hampton Calloway, Beth Leavel, Lilias White, and Elaine Stritch, among others.  (I won’t try to count how many Tony Awards they had between them.)  Phyllis Newman performed a number from Subways Are For Sleeping about a Southern girl trying to manage the politics of an Atlantic City beauty contest.  As the enthusiastic applause receded, she casually mentioned she had first done that piece 46 years ago.  (She won the Tony Award, too.)  Then she said that Betty wasn’t the only person who collaborated with Adolph, and she introduced her collaboration, daughter Amanda Green (a talented lyricist herself) who made a case for genes carrying along talent by knocking out “If,” a furious catalogue of romantic outrages committed by her now-dead lover. A clip of Betty and Adolph singing, “Carried Away” occupied the penultimate spot in the line-up.  It was from a TV variety show of the Fifties.  I had only known them in their later years, when Adolph had snowy white hair.  Here he had long, dark hair that flopped back and forth as he threw himself into this song celebrating excess.
Finally, Barbara Cook came out and sang, without amplification, a song that the pair had introduced when World War II was still raging –

“Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to.
Oh well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.”

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR THE THEATRICAL PERIODICAL, DRAMATICS MAGAZINE. THANKS TO THEM FOR ALLOWING US TO REPRODUCE IT HERE.

(c) Jeffrey Sweet 2007