Michael Kantor: What was it like? How did you get there?
Jerome Chodorov: It’s a good question. My father and mother had their 25th anniversary. We lived in Washington Heights. And we all went down in a taxi, a checker taxi. It had five seats in it, and there were six of us. So I sat nowhere. There was no seat. But I was 14. It didn’t matter. And anyway, we saw a Gershwin musical called Tiptoes with a girl named Queenie Smith. It was dazzling. First musical I ever saw. It was unbelievable. And I thought to myself, how long has this been going on? Without me? Anyway, all I can remember about it is I was dazzled. But why I was, I don’t know. I thought that Queenie Smith was the greatest girl I ever so in my life. And I can’t remember what she looked like today, but she must have been something. She was a star. And she danced. And they told jokes, and I understood all the jokes. I can’t tell you why Tiptoes was a great experience. And the first musical anybody ever sees is always a great experience.
Michael Kantor: And the energy that those performers put off.
Jerome Chodorov: Well, you know, something I can’t really tell you too much about it. All I remember is Fred and Adele’s stare. They were charming and delightful. And Funny Face, I think, was the show. Don’t ask me why and how anymore because I don’t remember. All I can remember is being dazzled again. But those two people were so young and so fresh and so lovely. I never saw anything like it. And I’ve always lamented the fact that Fred and Adele Astaire didn’t stay together. Even though Fred turned out to be a great star, and he was wonderful, I still missed Adele. I don’t know why. Well, you know, there was a great dance team before the Astaire’s called Vernon and Irene Castle, and I never saw them, but I heard all my childhood about these wonderful people. And. They actually, I guess, played in Coney Island in the days when Coney island was not a subway stop, but a trip. Whether Wolcott knew it or not, they made Gershwin as well as Gershun made them. Sounds crazy to say, but what they did with those songs really established Gershon’s greatness. Probably no one else would say that. That doesn’t just happen because a guy’s a great songwriter or a composer. He also has to have the people to do it, the right people.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about Of The I Sing.
Jerome Chodorov: Of the icing so many times I can’t tell you when I first saw it whether I first saw the original I doubt but of the I sing is so far removed from anything else it’s so great and the comedy is so wonderful and a George S. Kaufman and a guy named Mari Riskin who I don’t think is funny I never thought he was funny Well, it must have been Kaufman who did it all. Oh, I shouldn’t say that, because Maury probably did write something. But it was a, listen, it was historic. Nobody ever did anything like that before. Nobody ever satire on politics and got away with it. I mean, you don’t know what those musicals were like in those days. People came on in groups, and they sang a song, and they told a joke, and it went off, and that was a book. And there was no book to speak of. Of the icing was a book and it had a story and it had great ideas and it was wonderful and it was historic and why it isn’t being done all the time I don’t know but it should be.
Michael Kantor: Is there a particular song or number or moment from the show that just rings a bell for you?
Jerome Chodorov: All of this, the whole score was magnificent. There was nothing wrong. No. It’s hard to describe what a revolution took place when Of The Ice Thing happened.
Michael Kantor: Housings cheer
Jerome Chodorov: As thousands cheer, it was a great show, no question about it. Wonderful people. And Ethel Waters was unbelievably great. And the sketches by Morse Hart were witty, great fun. And the review as a, I guess that was one of the last great reviews really on Broadway. Because the review is a very hard form to sustain. You have to start over every time you start with a new sketch or a new song. They have nothing working for you, you have where the musical comedy is good, where the book is working for ya, so there’s a hangover. But reviews, you gotta start every time with a joke, new people, it’s very hard. There were some great reviews of that period and nobody, I guess television and movies knocked them off, as far as I can see. No.
Michael Kantor: Didn’t, as thousands cheer, use a sort of interesting format?
Jerome Chodorov: The format was the newspaper, it was the weather, was I’m having a heat wave, man bites dog, and they had a sketch. It was a great idea, as thousands cheer. It was all based on that idea of a newspaper. I’m trying to remember all the sketches, I can’t remember any of them now.
Michael Kantor: One important one that we’re looking at is one that’s sort of socially important and relevant, which is a song that Ethel Waters sang.
Jerome Chodorov: Yeah, supper time, yeah.
Michael Kantor: Tell me about the impact of a heavy number. That was in the 20s.
Jerome Chodorov: It was very unbelievable that they did it in the first place because you didn’t bring in reality into a musical comedy or a review that was unheard of at that time. And I’m sure a lot of people said to Berlin, you can’t do that, you know, but he did. And
Michael Kantor: Did Ethel Waters really pack a wallop when, what did it feel like when she sang that song?
Jerome Chodorov: The emotion was terrific, to me anyway, I don’t know what the rest of the audience felt. You know, you didn’t mention lynching. And you didn’t talk about, I was not polite to talk about the realities of life in 1930, at 31. It was too grim, too terrible. And yes, the South was mammy and swanny. There wasn’t lynching! She was a great artist, Death of the Waters, she really was. And I’ve always felt that it was very strange Irving Berlin who you didn’t think of as a social writer or you didn’t think of him as a man who stuck his neck out for ideas like that. He must have felt something because he did it. You know, he’s a guy after all. Who was an American patriot, a guy who wrote God Bless America. It doesn’t fit with supper time. However, he did it, and I take my hat off to him. Of the theater project, you know, a federal theater. And then it became a living newspaper and a lot of very social music and sketches. I wasn’t part of it because I was working in Hollywood, but I heard it all and they played it all. And to me, it was a very big moment. Than that. And I tried to write a musical once about it. I thought it was pretty good, but I couldn’t get anybody to do it about Harley Flanagan and the whole theater. And I had a good friend, Mark Blitstein, who made an historic The Cradle Will Rock. As part of the living theater. Wonderful. I’m trying to think of the living newspaper. What I saw and heard seems so relevant then, and now it’s all forgotten. It’s so wrong that it is forgotten.
Michael Kantor: But the point is, unlike in the 20s, where there weren’t 30s. Well, the 30s
Jerome Chodorov: Well, the thirties was a depression, you know, everybody was trying to make a living. It was very hard to do, but actors were getting $15 a week at the WPA and living on it. Writers were getting something not much But to be working was the main thing. To survive was the big thing. We weren’t thinking so much of the art of the theater, believe me. It was, I had known a lot of people who lived in that period. I was lucky, I’d had a job most of the time in pictures. I wasn’t making any big money, but. It was a lot compared to what other people were getting. And the depression was so, you know, in the theater, everybody was working for minimum.
Michael Kantor: Weren’t there bread lines?
Jerome Chodorov: Well, no, there were bread lines, but there was also a lot of interest in the theater. I don’t know, anybody ever tell you about the Gray’s Drugstore downstairs? Ever mention that to you? There was an auction downstairs of tickets. This is 20s and 30s. And people didn’t, if the management didn’t sell out, they sent about an hour before the curtain, they would send over the tickets they didn’t a little like the tickets today in Times Square, but not the same. And you would go down to the basement of the Gray’s Drug Store, and there were counters and men calling out the tickets that were available and how much they were, half price. And you had to figure out how long you could wait as the price went down, as the time got shorter for the curtain. And whether you could make the stage, whether you can make the theater in time for the curtain to rise, it was a big, big question. You waited till the last minute, and for 50 cents you could see a musical. Sometimes no good, but you could it, and you could buy the tickets. Did you get the picture? It was like Filene’s basement with the theater tickets. That’s my fondest memory of the theater in the 30s, that you could go to Gray’s drugstore downstairs. And with a half a buck, you could see a show. There were plays that had been a success and were now dwindling into oblivion. And, you know, they hung on for a month or two. There were place that never quite made it, but were interesting. You wanted to see because of the star or because of what you’d heard about it. I remember there was a Pulitzer Prize play that was a flop. It was written by a guy named Paul Green, who’s no, but he came out to Hollywood because the theater was getting too tough to raise the money for a show, you know? There wasn’t anybody that I know of, no matter how big he was, and I’m talking about people like Robert Sherwood. Sam Bam, and everybody came out to get a Hollywood salary, you know, but particularly songwriters, because you know the Gershwins used to have a show every season, sometimes two, but suddenly that dried up, you couldn’t get the financing, and they came out to Hollywood and they started writing pictures, and that was in the 30s.
Michael Kantor: Were those songwriters like, you know, Rodgers and Harden, Berlin, were they disillusioned? How did they feel about being out?
Jerome Chodorov: They didn’t like it. Hart particularly hated Hollywood. He hated what they did to his songs. He resented it. There’s a Roger’s Heart song called, there’s a great, great score, the best score they ever wrote. And trying to remember the title.
Michael Kantor: Babes in arms.
Jerome Chodorov: Babes in Arms. Babes and Arms had, every song was a terrific song. Hollywood bought it and they used one number. And the guy used his own songs, Arthur Fried. He produced it and he wasn’t going to use their songs, he used his songs. That’s the kind of thing that you couldn’t fight, you know. And Burton Lane, who’s a friend of mine, told me that the songs that they wrote for pictures, they had no control over and had no interest in following up. There was no money involved in it. People used their songs without paying royalties. I mean, it was a bad scene for many reasons, but it was also a place where people could work can do things. So it’s hard to say what really Hollywood did to musicals. You know, 42nd Street, after all, originated in Hollywood. And it’s been done twice as great success on Broadway. But it was a movie, you know, that’s got to face that with great songs. I heard the whole story, and I don’t know from whom. Mark probably told him to me. We were in the army together. We had a lot of time to talk. And you mean the fact that the government closed up the theater. Dangerous characters called Mark Blitstein and Orson Welles. They rehearsed for months and then they couldn’t play it. They took another theater, walked up the Broadway with the audience and found a place to play it and the audience played it. The actors were in the audience singing on cue. They couldn’t perform because it was, oh, ridiculous. It was thrilling. Just to hear about it was thrilling, and I always regretted I wasn’t there.
Michael Kantor: What’s important in a book?
Jerome Chodorov: Well, you know, I wouldn’t say, I, I wouldn’t claim to know, it was just a joke. There isn’t anything that can’t be done if it’s done well enough. I said to a friend of mine who ran the Civic Light Opera in Los Angeles years ago, Ed Lester, a terrific producer, I said, Ed, if I came to you with an idea of a shtetl in Russia. With a Jewish peddler, and he’s got five daughters, and they’re all marrying the wrong guy. What would you say to him? He said, I’d throw you right through the window. You know, Fiddler is the most improbable example of what could make a musical, but it made a great musical. It depends on the people and the talent involved, the genius around it. There is no verboten there. You know, as far as I know, every great show has been a doubtful entry, like Cabaret. On the surface of it, Cabaret is a terrible idea. The rise of Nazi Germany. Homosexual theme in the musical was unheard of in those days. All of this turned into one of the great shows of all time. So how can you say what will be good and what won’t be good? We thought our play, My Sister Eileen, would make a very good musical. It finally came out to be one with wonderful towns. You couldn’t do that today. It was, when we did, when Sister Eilene, there were about 25, 30 people in the cast, you know, you couldn’t get that done today. Oh, it would have had to have been a musical to start with, if you know what I mean. There you can have a cast, singers and dancers, enough of them.
Michael Kantor: What was it like working with Leonard Bernstein on that?
Jerome Chodorov: Well, you know, Lennon, he said to me, when we were doing the show, he says, I can’t write a musical comedy in six weeks. We had to do it because we had Rosalind Russell, we didn’t have any show, you now? We had a habit in six week. And otherwise we’d lose Ross Russell. He said, all of this stuff that I’m giving you, all of it comes from the trunk. That was my… Contact with the lennard bernstein He couldn’t do a show in six weeks. Nobody could do that, you know, a writer, a composer. I guess there are guys who can do it, but not Bernstein. Anyway, that was my contact with Leonard. We didn’t really know what we wanted to have when we got Bernstein, because to us, he was a classical composer, you know? He wasn’t Frank Lesser, who we thought would have been ideal for that show. Turned out fine, but we didn’t think it was going to be. I confess to you. Comden and Green did the lyrics, Bernstein music, and it all worked great. But we were surprised. That’s a big question, I have no idea what it’s, I said, I’ll tell you one thing, it does say we’re a hell of a lot of funny people. That’s true. I don’t think that the French musical ever reflected the French people somehow from what I’ve seen in France, but I haven’t seen too much. And the British people, that’s a very strange thing. You know, the British, the London theater could not produce. A successful musical for years. They relied on Rodgers and Hammerstein and all the American musicals. Gershwin, before him, and Berlin. And suddenly they became. The musical hit. And we couldn’t produce one. I mean, when you think of it, it’s like a reversal of nature. That happened in the last 20 years. And you can’t explain it. Why would that happen? Why did London suddenly produce hits, musical hits, and we didn’t? And for years, they relied on us for all of that.
Michael Kantor: Field foul.
Jerome Chodorov: No, no, I couldn’t afford the Ziegfeld Follies. That was out of my reach. There were a lot of follies and a lot of vanities at those days. Greenwich Village Follie, I could afford, you know. There was a show called that. And Lou Leslie’s Blackbirds, with Dorothy Fields wrote the lyrics for that, I don’t know. Ziegfeld was, that was for millionaires, you know, people had big money to go to, you couldn’t get a good ticket for that, fifty dollars, twenty five dollars, unheard of.
Michael Kantor: Ethel Merman’s first show and she’s teamed with some comedians who you mentioned give us just a flavor of what kind of show was that
Jerome Chodorov: You know, you know, girl crazy. What year was that anyway? I can’t remember now.
Michael Kantor: 30 or 31.
Jerome Chodorov: Ginger Rogers was in that show. Willie and Eugene Howard, who, my recollection, were very funny men. I mean, Willie was. Eugene was the stooge. Like Bobby Clark and McCullough. McCullow was the stooge. It was a funny show with some great songs, and it was completely unbelievable. I mean, musical comedy then didn’t bother with reality or believability. It was just another musical. But it was also Gershwin, and that made all the difference. You know, a great score. But all I remember about it is enjoying it enormously, laughing and having a great time. You know, when I went to a lot of vaudeville as a kid, you neighborhood theater, I remember it was called the Hamilton and Washington Heights, and I saw some great stars in those days. I saw Victor Moore and Littlefield, his wife, hilarious act. Clayton Jackson and Durante, to me, were the greatest comics of them all. I don’t know why I never mentioned them before. Jimmy Durante was absolutely unique.
Michael Kantor: Burt Lahr, see him.
Jerome Chodorov: Burt Law, another great comic. I’m thinking of all of these guys that I loved so, and now I’ve forgotten all of them. Jimmy Durante. I’d learned all of his stuff. I could do it today. I won’t, don’t worry, but I could. To me, Lady in the Dark was an absolute pioneer show of its kind. It was absolute story. You were listening and wondering what’s gonna happen next. It was a detective story, you know? The idea of using psychoanalysis as a musical comedy basis is unbelievable. I went up to Boston with a group of people to see it. Opening night, I remember, thrilled to death. Gertie Lawrence, you know, Danny Kay was in it. Danny Kay stopped the show. And Gerti Lawrence looked at him and she said, oh yeah, you now, that was the look she gave him. And she stopped the shows right after him. It was quite an evening. But Lady in the Dark, it was unique. It was a pioneer show. Absolutely, absolutely fresh and new at the time. Nobody realized how new it was. And an excellent score by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin. But the best thing about it was the book. It absolutely worked. Maybe a simplified version of psychoanalysis. I wouldn’t argue with that, but it worked. Book show for the first time musical comedy really, but I think Lady Nodak was a forerunner of that. I don’t think you can say that Oklahoma broke ground. It did in a way, but Not the way Lady and the Dog did.
Michael Kantor: Fair lady.
Jerome Chodorov: Well, there was very little you can say about my fair lady. He was absolutely, I mean, overwhelming at the time.
Michael Kantor: But did Mossart ever come to you and say, why am I doing this? This is impossible.
Jerome Chodorov: No, he wouldn’t. He didn’t. Not to me, I mean. You know, it’s very funny. Joe Fields and I were offered Pygmalion as a musical by the Theater Guild to do, the book. And I said, I’m not going to fool around with Bernard Shaw. Not me. I’m no interested in that. You can’t rewrite Shaw, but of course Alan Lerner did. He did a wonderful thing. He took the play and cut it down to size. Pygmalion is repetitious. If you ever see it without the music, you will realize that every scene is a repetition of the scene before. Some of them brilliant. But Shaw was interested in selling his idea about speech and about class and how all of this. He did a brilliant job, but my fair lady… I wonder how it would… No, we couldn’t. I can’t think.
Michael Kantor: It’s just, they made it more of a Cinderella story, wouldn’t you say?
Jerome Chodorov: It was a Cinderella story, basically. That Shaw hated the idea of a love story between Higgins and Liza. He tried every way he could to write a new finish, but none of it ever worked because it had to be a love at the finish. As a matter of fact, there are six different endings that Shaw wrote in the play to try and unsell the idea. He even had to marry Freddie, what’s his name? What is Freddy’s last name?
Michael Kantor: Linesford Hill. Linesford Hill.
Jerome Chodorov: Well, he he did he did complain about Rex Harrison who was mean You know and Rex Harrison once said to him listen. You’re the fifth director of the five that they offered me You know he had he had directors choice Rex when he did the show and He was the fifth you tell you kept telling Morse hard of all the people that I could have had, you were the fifth. Whatever that meant, I don’t know. He got fixations of people he didn’t think would, I don’t think he really struggled with her. I saw my personal opinion is that she was great, but he was worried and he was afraid that she wouldn’t make it. And he was always that way before the opening of any show. We had him in director and junior miss. And he said to us, this girl, There’s a girl named Pat Piarden who was playing the lead. He says, she’d never make it. We said, Moss, you’re crazy. She’s great. No, no, she’ll never make. We have to get somebody else. Well, I don’t know why he felt that. She was great. She did do perfect for the part. But I think he was overzealous, I would say that, about casting. And he was a. He knew how important casting was, and I don’t know. Maybe Julie Andrews needed him. I shouldn’t say that he was wrong about that.
Michael Kantor: Tell us about your experience and how it dealt with Broadway musicals in particular.
Jerome Chodorov: Well, you know, we did, my sister Eileen, as Wonderful Town, you know. Wonderful Town was in 1953. And that was the peak of the blacklist. It was a very bad period for blacklisting. Anyway, we sold the TV rights to CBS. Roz Russell was going to be in it. It had been a hit in New York, and Jerry Robbins named and to the Un-American Committee. And the Columbia asked me to take my name off. CBS asked me to take name off the show when he did it as a TV special. And I said, I’ll take it off for $50,000. I don’t know where I plucked that number from. And they looked at me and they coughed and they passed and they didn’t do it. And sure enough, the name was on. And the next day, I said to the CBS guy who was handling it, I said, did you get any reaction of any kind? Anybody telephone or telegram or threaten you? Not a postcard, nothing. I said what is all this business of blacklisting? Who cares? Why do you pay attention to it? No, well, they didn’t know why. I guess Bill Paley knew why. I don’t know, but it’s true that the theater didn’t pay any attention to the blacklist. You couldn’t sell a play at that period with a blacklisted author on it. You suck a nerve. We hate it. Was beyond the pale. You know, we had, we opened in Boston and Ross Russell had been knocked out with a flu. So he opened in boston, very shaky. And the show was very shaky and he called us all together. I remember in the Schubert’s ladies room in Schuvert theater. And he said, I can fix this show. He said, but I have to have carte blanche. And he looked at Leonard and Leonard said. Oh, sure, Joe, he wasn’t gonna write the numbers. Oh yeah, says Mr. Rabbit, said, calm down, Green. He wasn’t going to write the songs. And he looked at me and I said, I wouldn’t give Jesus Christ carte blanche on a show of mine if he came down off the cross. I don’t know where this came from. I just thought, I was so furious at the guy even saying this. And he said, then I’ll walk. And Joe Field said, walk, you son of a bitch, just like that. And he walked around the block, and he came back. He said, let’s go. He called his bluff. And I’ll say one thing about Abbott. He wasn’t a great director, but he was a guy who kept the reins of the show. He really managed to keep everybody in line. He was a dreadful writer. And when he ever tried to put a line in, Joe Fields and I wouldn’t go to the can together. We had to keep an eye on him all the time. So we had to go to can. He went and then I went. So he could stop them. He would put lines. He wanted to take over. Robbins, I never really worked with him. He redid the, I told you, he restaged the show. The numbers in our show, in Wonderful Down, and did a brilliant job. But I never sat down and worked with them on anything.
Michael Kantor: What about George S. Kaufman? What was his genius?
Jerome Chodorov: He was a genius. He was great man in every sense of the word. Just the opposite of George Abbott. He was man of honor. He wouldn’t take credit for something that wasn’t his. Abbott would take credit for anything that he could grab. I mean, and Kaufman. Think I really I really shouldn’t say this but I owe them everything because what was really a rough first draft and made us rewrite it into a hit. I’m talking about my sister Eileen. And how he did it, I don’t know. I never understood how he directed the way he did. He’d go and talk to actors in a very low voice, a whisper. I didn’t hear what he was saying, but he would telling them. And he never raised his voice. You never knew what he doing. But at the end, it was all great. I wouldn’t He kept knocking us out to rewrite right to the end, right to opening night. And after the opening, he said, you know, boys, the absolute, the curtain is a little flat at the end. Can you think of something? And we said to him, George, we suggested something to you, but you said it was a little too wild. He said, what was it? It was, we told him, is the guy’s coming for the floor. In the set. We were lucky enough to have Morse Heart do. But Kaufman was an individual talent, genius that I don’t think has been around in New York for a long time. I doubt it.
Michael Kantor: How did the blacklist, well, what did you think of Oscar Hammerstein and how did the Blacklist affect that work?
Jerome Chodorov: Oscar Hammerstein was one of the nicest men you ever met, and he, in addition, has had the most enormous talent when you think of the songs that he has written over the years, it’s unbelievable. Joe Fields, my collaborator, this is the blacklist was on at the time, was doing a show, doing Flower Drum Song with Hammerstein and Rodgers. And he suggested to Oscar, Work on the book with them. And Oscar said, I don’t think so. And I understood it. They didn’t need a blacklisted writer. They were writing it themselves. It didn’t, it didn’t work. I mean, they did this show. After the show, they sold it to the film and then I did the film with Joe Fields. That was all. I never get any closer than that to it. But we did do the movie and the movie was pretty good, I don’t know.
Michael Kantor: There was some influence of the Black Whist on Broadway.
Jerome Chodorov: Oh yeah, yeah, I had a show that I wrote with Joe Fields and Peter DeVries called Tunnel of Love. They had made a deal with MGM. Theater Guild produced it and they had a deal with MGM a pre-production deal
Michael Kantor: Guess the question is, do you think the Broadway musical will ever have the same vitality that it did, and what’s the future of it?
Jerome Chodorov: It all depends on the composers that come around. When they come around, when the Gershwins and the Berlins and the Rodgers and Hammerstein come back, some kind of Frank Lesser, you know, that’s what happened. If that doesn’t happen, there won’t be a new revival of musical. We haven’t had any of the talent. Where are they? I don’t know. Why aren’t they? Nobody knows. How talent comes and goes, you know? It’s unbelievable, but it’s true. We had the greatest spate of talent in the musical field in the last 50 years, or maybe 75. If you go, if you get, I’ve forgotten about Jerry Kern altogether. He was one of the greatest. I mean, you start to think of all this talent, and there is none today. There’s no, there are no… Composers that mean anything in America now. I mean, popular composers. To me, maybe they are. Maybe I don’t understand music anymore. So I don’t know about rock and roll and what have they done?
