Michael Kantor: So from the operettas of Vagabond, King, and Rosemary, how did we get to the musical place?
Betty Comden: Well, coming into the musical theater we have today from operetta, most important things happen because of individuals. I mean, if you have people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern come along, then you have Showboat, which was certainly a turning point. Still a great operetta if you want to call it, and still one of the great musicals with a superb, a wonderful story, and a great, great score, wonderful acting roles, and… And very much of a unit. And then, of course, Rodgers and Hart coming along. I think Pal Joey was the most unusual show. It was a turning, I mean, it certainly affected my thinking about the theater, that here was a story about a terrible person, and it was very sophisticated and very strong, and it great fun, wonderful entertainment, and beautiful things in the score. And that was another step. I think it happens because individuals come along that make the difference, or today Steve Sondheim has changed the theater so much with his brilliance.
Michael Kantor: So many of both Broadway shows, from George M. Cohan to your work to even Rent, have to do with New York. Why is New York, and even Broadway itself, a great place to set a musical?
Betty Comden: Well, New York is an extraordinary place. It’s the best. I only want to live here and work here. It’s continually surprising, it’s full of energy and craziness and has every element of life that you’d want to be able to put into a story or into a song right here. But there have been some good shows about the prairies. Let’s not underwrite, under what? Undervalue the prairie. But New York is a constant inspiration.
Michael Kantor: So, carried away. Excessive characters, what was your inspiration?
Adolph Green: Ah, well, as simple as we had these two characters and we knew we needed a number. It was our first scene together and we tried to figure out in terms of what the action of the scene was and we came up with an idea that was led to carry it away. Describe the essence of it.
Betty Comden: Well, because we were playing these excessive, exaggerated people who had extreme reactions to everything. And in a musical, the ideas for the numbers come from the characters or the situations or both. And we needed a number when we first met to find out we had this thing in common. And a person who is excessive might express him or herself operatically. So it’s a rather operatic number because opera is an excess of art.
Adolph Green: But oddly enough, when Lenny liked what we had written in the beginnings and he was looking for a tune, he started, and these things happen like in the movies, Lenny started playing a major song, rather gaity, and he said, oh, that’s not the right feeling, and I said, let’s try it in the minor key, and that was it. Moments happen like that. Like in the movie biographies.
Michael Kantor: I read that you originally took the lyric line from another shot of pal joey you know that’s oh no that’s right tell me about that
Betty Comden: Well, it was just the pattern of it. See, we hadn’t done anything like this before in our lives. And a lot of people do this, actually, find it kind of a dummy pattern and then put your words right. The song was You Mustn’t Kick It Around from Pal Joey, which had a big influence on us.
Adolph Green: I try hard to keep control, but I get carried away.
Betty Comden: Oh, that’s our words to it, but the song went, If you’re bored with this affair, you mustn’t kick it around. If my heart gets in your hair, you musn’t kick around. So that was just the pattern of where the words fell in the rhythm, and we used that.
Michael Kantor: And give me just a hint of what it ended up becoming, in terms of the care of the.
Adolph Green: A very wildly insane, funny song of passion. Carried away, carried away. We get carried, yes, carried, ah-ha! Bum, bum, bum.
Michael Kantor: And there you are.
Adolph Green: Oh, you want to know what some of the verses are or what the lyrics are?
Michael Kantor: The beat-up-la-da-boom, that was it. How about New York, New York? Obviously, an anthem for all of us on your answering machine. Where did that come from?
Betty Comden: Well that’s what the show was about New York. I mean it was we made a list of places in New York all the places we wanted the story to go to and it was of course about three sailors it was a day’s leave but it was also about the city yeah and we’ve got as much about the city as we could in so naturally there had to be an anthem a song about New
Michael Kantor: Favor me if you would with maybe a verse or two of New York, New York. Would you be so kind?
Adolph Green: One day here and not another minute to see the famous sights We’ll find the romance and danger waiting in it. We need the Broadway lights So we pair on our chests so what we like the best of the nights. Sights! Sights, nights. New York. New york, a visitor’s place A hell of a town. A helluva town.
Betty Comden: And the box is up and the battery is down.
Adolph Green: That is down the people right in the holy ground New York, New York. It’s a hell of a town and etc.
Michael Kantor: Another song that I understand had a really interesting conception and genesis was Just in Time. Tell me about how that song came to be. Tell it, Betty. Set up what show it was.
Betty Comden: The song, Just in Time, came from Bells of Ringing, which we wrote for Judy Holliday, who was our old colleague and friend.
Adolph Green: And of being reunited after all these years.
Betty Comden: We decided to write a show for her and the composer was Julie Stein.
Adolph Green: A very gifted, a very gifted and rather cuckoo fellow, and a lovely, lovely guy.
Betty Comden: The song just in time happened, we was thinking maybe there should be a song in the show using very few notes, like a Vincent Newman’s tune or something, and Julie said, do you mean like this, dee da da, ba dee dah dah dah, ba dah dah da dah, yeah, something like that’s So he developed the whole thing, and he played the whole chorus through, but we didn’t have any lyrics for it, we didn’t know what it should be.
Adolph Green: Well, Julie got very fond of that song. He would play it at parties and people would crowd around loving it.
Betty Comden: And it was just da-da-da.
Adolph Green: I don’t know what’s the name of it.
Betty Comden: We never thought we’d top that lyric. But then as usual as I was saying about shows that the songs have to come out of a situation, we found a situation in our book where the young man feels that this girl has come along and changed his life.
Adolph Green: At a very desperate moment, it suddenly came from nowhere.
Betty Comden: And the words fit the music, and suddenly we have a song.
Adolph Green: That is it.
Michael Kantor: Great. Tell me about On the Town got great reviews with one exception. What happened
Adolph Green: Oh, oh, we’re talking about John, I mean the critic of the Daily News, John Chapman, yes. Well, Betty and I were so excited. It was about an hour after the curtain had gone down and we picked up a New York Times and a review was already in. It must have been two hours. And it was one not since the golden days of Oklahoma has something like this. Oh, Well, we knew it, we were made, it was… Just terrific. And then we picked up, we were just swimming and flying in ecstasy. We picked up Daily News. John Chapman’s headline was, On the Town Dull of Boar. And our faces sank somewhere down to the equator.
Betty Comden: It was a terrible moment, but we did what I guess only young people would do. I know of no other case that anyone did it, young or old. We decided to get in touch with him, so we did. We wrote him a letter and we spoke to him on the phone and we said, could we have lunch? And we had lunch with John Chapman and we said, you know…
Adolph Green: He was a very sweet guy.
Betty Comden: Nice middle-class looking gentleman. Why didn’t you like our show? What was the matter with it? He said, would you come and see it again?
Adolph Green: But first he said, I didn’t like it. I was at the show, I wasn’t drunk, nothing, I was not on anything, I just was a very normal person watching the show and I hated it.
Betty Comden: We said please see it again and he did and a few weeks later we picked up the Daily News and there was this headline.
Adolph Green: There was this headline that went across two pages, you know, words, words made good eating was that said
Betty Comden: And a wonderful rave for the show, he said, I don’t know whether I had a fight with my wife or I ate something wrong. He said, no, what was the matter with me? This is a wonderful show. Yes. And I don’t think that’s ever happened in the history of the theater.
Adolph Green: Yeah, I am too, yes.
Michael Kantor: You mentioned the working in Hollywood. Help me understand that in general, how do you compare writing for the Broadway musical versus the Hollywood musical?
Betty Comden: Well, in the theater, the author has much more control. We have a dramatist’s guild, and we have, you know, certain rules, and we’re protected.
Adolph Green: When once the show opens of success, you get royalties every week.
Betty Comden: Of course now, the writers are participants. In the days when we were writing movies, we worked on salary. And people come up to us and say, my god, singing in the rain is on all the time. You must be getting so rich. We don’t get a penny out of singing in rain. You know, we just, we wrote it, we took our salary and had to go home. And that’s it. So there’s a difference. But now writers and directors participate.
Adolph Green: Oh, I agree.
Betty Comden: We worked in a unit at MGM, which was more like doing shows than most people’s experiences.
Adolph Green: Arthur Freed, and Arthur somehow got attracted, went after people in the theater to come out there and work, and he had an assistant who was very important in the whole thing, a gentleman called Roger Edens, who was a very good musician, and had great theatrical I didn’t. I think Roger had a lot to do with some of the people coming there, but anyway, you know, Gene Kelly came right from there, Vincent Minnelli, director Allen Lerner.
Betty Comden: And us.
Adolph Green: Yes.
Betty Comden: So we have a little more to say about things than most authors, most writers in Hollywood. We never had another person put on our screenplay. We never have any rewrites done.
Adolph Green: That was good. That was very unusual. Almost all of them were released. Very unusual.
Michael Kantor: Without going into the specifics of the show, I know you worked with Irving Caesar.
Adolph Green: We didn’t work with him, we worked for him.
Michael Kantor: But he was of a generation which wrote songs to sort of make a hit. Describe the difference between his generation of songwriters and your generation.
Adolph Green: Irving, he isn’t a good one to pick on for, not that he doesn’t have talents, he did. And he enjoyed Gertrude and wrote Swanny back in 1919.
Betty Comden: And he wrote Tea for Two, of course, for No, No, Nanette, which was a wonderful song. But you’re talking about two different things. There were people who write songs, who write, it used to be called Tin Pan Alley. They were not connected with shows or movies. And they were just big songs that came out of Berlin. Mainly wrote those until he then began to write some shows.
Adolph Green: Shows.
Betty Comden: But, you know, there’s a different feel to be a pop songwriter. I wish we had written some songs that were not connected with shows. We just don’t happen to have done that.
Michael Kantor: Okay, great. Tell me, here’s a question that we’re asking everyone. When you think of the Broadway musical, and feel free to just chime in whatever comes to mind, what adjectives do you find describe the Broadway music?
Adolph Green: Well, what it should be.
Betty Comden: It should be exhilarating.
Adolph Green: Jubilant
Betty Comden: Yeah, make you feel good, even if it’s sad.
Adolph Green: Yes. And. Not just filled with color, but purpose and shape. And the general thing does make you, should make you leave the theater feeling somehow uplifted, very uplifted. If not, you haven’t succeeded.
Michael Kantor: How would you compare, how is Julie Stein different as a composer from Leonard Bernstein?
Betty Comden: Very different. Everybody we work with is a complete individual. They’re all eccentric, aren’t they? All a little bit crazy, as I think you have to be to be a composer, but very different. Julie came from the pop song department of music.
Adolph Green: Tremendous!
Betty Comden: Very successful.
Adolph Green: Composer. He and Sammy Kahn wrote dozens of smash songs.
Betty Comden: But by the time he got to write for the theater, he was a dramatist. Someone who writes for the theater composer has to be basically a dramatists. And Leonard certainly was that because the show is the important thing and the composer is as much of a dramatistic as the people who write the words.
Adolph Green: Or it should be like that, so quite often it isn’t. But Julie had a- Talking about Julie, all that is true. Yeah, and Julie did have a feeling for theater, too. Wonderful.
Betty Comden: And Sy Coleman too, with whom we worked. Yes, yes.
Adolph Green: Julie, that we had especially happy times, we’d laugh at certain stuff, and Julie thought it was instinctively playing games about Kajderdath all the time. And we enjoyed him and he enjoyed us a great deal.
Michael Kantor: When when when people ask you this question uh… What comes first what do you how do you answer question what comes for words or music
Adolph Green: Press comes a prayer.
Betty Comden: Well, someone said the Czech, but that’s…
Adolph Green: Yes
Betty Comden: But it doesn’t come that way. The book comes first. That the ideas for the songs come out of the situation, out of character, almost all the time. And that’s…
Adolph Green: And the better the book, the better chance the show has to be a really worthwhile endeavor.
Betty Comden: There’s never been a successful show where the book was bad. Never, no matter how great the scores are. When you go over some of the great Gershwin scores, Rodgers and Hart scores, and Berlin scores, if the books were weak, and they very often were in the early 30s, then the shows were not good. The scores remain. We have these wonderful songs, but the book is extremely important.
Michael Kantor: As I ask Betty to describe you, I’m asking you, describe Betty and how are you different?
Adolph Green: Oh, that’s a pretty difficult question to answer. How do I describe her? I still think Betty is a beautiful woman. She has an inner beauty that shines through. And she has, to me, her looks have stayed. And certainly, she radiates intelligence almost instantly. And uh… I think she’s always going to look wonderful and very much her own kind of looks. I wouldn’t have a specific adjective to describe them.
Michael Kantor: No, that’s fine. Do you think she, you know, as a woman in your field, faced challenges that maybe men didn’t have to face because she was a woman?
Adolph Green: Oddly enough, Iberia said this herself, she didn’t have to face the fact that she was a lady. That never came up as a problem. And the only problem was getting jobs and doing the shows and pictures. But being, I mean, sometimes it would, very occasionally we were invited to a bit of whimsical gallantry. As they would. Want to kiss a hand, sort of, a lady, and she’s a real lady too, but that was as far as making comments on it.
Michael Kantor: Oh, okay, yeah. Remember the first time we’re asking everyone this question, that you heard the word Broadway as a child. What did it mean to you?
Adolph Green: Well, it instantly became that place. It wasn’t going to be a place so much of theater, because with all the lights, you know, Broadway, Mazda, and there’ve always been songs about Broadway. Duh-duh-duhh-du-du, the lullaby on Broadway. In fact, I was growing up by the time that came on, but there are millions of, and there was both the glamor and then. Also it came through songs, there’s a broken heart for every bulb on all Broadway, there was that feeling too. It was just not adventure and excitement, but bad things could happen. And also a thing like the Zeke Felt Follies, in your mind you’d see them dancing all over Broadway, these half-naked and beautiful ladies. It was a legendary place. And as a kid, the first time I walked down there for a night, I wasn’t solemn. I wasn’t scared. And I was exhilarated. There it is. I’d never seen anything quite like it. And it was, it did have, I mean, the lighting was more primitive then, but… The excitement was very large. It was great. But I didn’t know too much about the theatrical traditions then. It’s just the tradition of the place itself. I did think all theaters were on Broadway, which they weren’t and aren’t. Some, but the big legitimate houses are not on Broadway itself, but in the side streets. But you eventually… Walk into the middle, into Broadway itself, and sometimes it’s unpleasant even to be on it, jostling in people and feeling strange things going on that you don’t know about. But it’s still an exciting place that it can feel exhilarating.
Michael Kantor: Tell me again, you’re describing Broadway and lights. What is…
Adolph Green: Oh, well, that’s the first picture anybody gets, I hear, about Broadway. You can get in a Mazda, oh boy, those signs, and essentially what you see at first, along with it, if you haven’t been there, you have is that exhilaration, excitement, coming somewhere, and great things might happen there, and also danger. I think, like any place that has… Glamor of its kind, danger is always there. Lurking. I don’t, I barely know what it means, but there used to be, we even wrote a song, a sort of comic song about a girl who came to Broadway and she fell in love with the wrong guys. You know, a dangerous place for young girls. It was one of the feelings. These men with mustachios could promise them great careers. And they’d see Broadway, oh, it’s gonna happen to me and it doesn’t. It was a, Broadway has a mythical quality, but as theater of all kinds, it fulfills the dream. As theater is happily surviving in spite of the usual warnings that the theater is dying or the theater’s dead, and that’s gone on. Relatively speaking forever, and the theater’s always come back. They’ve come back now from first from motion pictures, so that’s gonna finish them off, and talking pictures, who’s gonna want to go to the theater? They can see people talking and close up for a quarter, and then came television, and oh, but the theater has survived in its canoe through all these things, and I think it will.
Michael Kantor: Great. Let me just go back on your comments about Betty before you were describing how beautiful and stunning she is. Tell me about her creative talent.
Adolph Green: A creative challenge? Many economists’ creative talents I refuse to assess, because if I really tried to, I’d feel as if I was just someone sitting there with the person who was really doing it. She’s a very creative person, as I think she has proved, and is just a wonderful accident of how We came together as theater associates and became writers, and here it is. And it’s true that our theatrical association, Betty and myself, is by far the longest-running career in the history of the theater. That is true.
Michael Kantor: Bravo. Last question, two questions. Cradle will rock. What made it great?
Adolph Green: Cradle or rock? Oh, how does the subject come up?
Michael Kantor: What made it a great show?
Adolph Green: I had terrific excitement and I mean Mark Blitzstein’s Cradle of Rock, is that what you mean? Of course. Well, there’s so many things associated with that, as many people have gone into. How the government wouldn’t let it go on, it was considered too dangerous politically. You know the story. Oh, now they got a piano and the back of a truck. And grow up to it. It was a Jolson Theater on 59th Street and 7th. And the audience and cast all walked up. And the show took place with the actors jumping up in their seats and doing, because they weren’t allowed on stage, but it was very thrilling.
Michael Kantor: Great. One last question. What makes a great song?
Adolph Green: What makes a great song? Ooh, ooh, that’s a really difficult question.
Michael Kantor: What are your favorite songs?
Adolph Green: Favorite song Betty and I think about a favorite and from on the town. Oh, well, I will catch up some other time The song we love very much
Michael Kantor: How did that go?
Adolph Green: 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. Et cetera. And it’s something that we found moving about it and still feel moved by it. It’s in the show. It’s the end of the day with the sailors and the girls. And it takes place in the subway. The feeling of how, what a brief moment life and joy can be, it’s, there it is, we’ve had it in a few hours, in one day. And we are, who knows if we’ll ever see each other again, as they’re in the song. And a feeling of great tenderness among these people that they, when they woke up that morning, never realized what’s gonna happen to them.
Michael Kantor: Thank you, thank you, thank you both so much.
