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    Ebb rallied to become valedictorian at DeWitt Clinton High School. When he informed his mother that he wanted to become a writer, she replied "that and a dime would get me on the subway." She convinced him to enroll instead at New York University (NYU) to study accounting. "Accountants never starve," she counseled him. At age 18 he proposed marriage and was accepted, but the young lady broke off the relationship to marry a dentist. Ebb remained a lifelong bachelor. Ebb attended both NYU and Columbia University, where he changed his major to English literature and earned a Master's degree in 1957. He supported himself by working as a trucker's helper for a hosiery company. He worked a midnight shift authorizing credit in a department store. He also did a stint as a baby shoe bronzer. Upon graduating, Ebb headed West with a portfolio of short stories he hoped to sell to the movies, but he was unable to get steady work. Within a year he returned to New York and took a job selling giftware for his uncle. "From the back I looked exactly like Willy Loman," Ebb recalled in his interview with Rowes. But he yearned to be a songwriter. "One night," he told Thompson, "I was pouring my heart out to a friend, a lady trumpeter named Patsy Vamos. I was telling her about how much I loved the musical theater and wished to be a part of it. But I didn't have a notion how to do that." Vamos introduced him to a professional songwriter named Phil Springer, who agreed to take Ebb on as a student. Their first song, "Heartbroken," was recorded by Judy Garland. "It was a rhythm song that suited Judy because it had some real belt notes in it. "I'm very fond of belt singing as most people know," Ebb told Thompson. Garland's recording bombed, but another early Ebb and Springer song, "Santa Baby," became a hit for Eartha Kitt. Over the next several years Ebb wrote for nightclub acts, revues, and for the satirical television show THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS. A Life-Changing Partnership In the early 1960s music publisher Tommy Valando introduced Ebb to pianist and choreographer John Kander. Both men were smarting from recent failures (Ebb had written lyrics for the Off-Broadway musical "Morning Sun," a flop, and Kander had composed music for the Broadway play, "A Family Affair," also a flop). There was an instant rapport between the two. "We came to each other fresh from our failures," Ebb told a Kennedy Center interviewer. "It was a case of instant communication and instant songs." They composed their first song together, "Perfect Strangers," on the spot. Kander told PEOPLE magazine: "A musician is supposed to improvise, but it's almost unheard-of for a lyricist. Yet Fred can improvise in rhyme and meter the way I can at the keyboard." Kander and Ebb's first hit was the song "My Coloring Book," introduced by Kaye Ballard, made popular by Sandy Stewart on THE PERRY COMO SHOW and recorded by Barbra Streisand. Streisand introduced Kander and Ebb's "I Don't Care Much" in 1963. Kander and Ebb next collaborated with Richard Morris on "Golden Gate," a play that did not open in San Francisco as planned, but did so impress influential director-producer Harold Prince that he asked the pair to write the songs for the Broadway musical, "Flora the Red Menace." "Flora," a satire on bohemians, was set in 1930s Greenwich Village and marked the Broadway debut of seventeen-year-old Liza Minnelli, who would become Ebb's friend and frequent muse. The play opened to fairly tepid reviews and closed after 87 performances, but it netted Minnelli a Tony award for outstanding actress. The day after "Flora" opened in May 1965, Prince met with Kander and Ebb to make plans for their next project, "Cabaret," a musical adaptation of John Van Druten's play "I Am a Camera," which in turn was based on Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories."
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