Interviewer: So, tell me what your late husband, Frank Lesser, was like. What was he like as a man?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: That would take about 48 hours. Do you have enough time? He was a fascinating human being. He, first of all, we all know he was a wonderful composer and lyricist. He started out as a lyricist, he came from a very musical family. His father was a piano teacher and his brother, Arthur Lesser, was a concert pianist and he accompanied the great soprano. I think she was soprano anyway, mezzo or soprano, Schumann-Heinck. So Frank was a rebellious youth, and of course he would not take piano lessons. I mean, if your father teaches piano, you’re not going to take piano lessons, right? But he did a lot of different things, and he wrote. He was a lyricist for quite a few years, many, many years in Hollywood. And his first song that was published was with William Schumon, who later became the head of Lincoln Center. They went into this booth on Broadway, and they recorded and sang this song, and it was called In Love with a Memory of You. Frank spent many, many years in Hollywood and always aimed and wanted to come to Broadway.
Interviewer: Let me interrupt you there. What do you think it was? I mean, he was very successful in Hollywood. I mean he had Academy Award nomination. He could have easily made a lot of money and stayed out there. What was it about Broadway that brought him here?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, I think that Frank was basically a dramatist, and I know that he loved a challenge. And I know his aim was for many years to come to Broadway and do a show. I know he liked that. He liked the immediacy of it. He liked a challenge of writing an entire score. Toward the end of his career in Hollywood, he wrote complete movies. He wrote, you know, a whole score for Betty Hutton, for perils of Pauline. He wrote many, many, a lot of her songs that she sang. And I think he’s always aimed to come back to New York. After all, he was a New York boy. So he wanted to come to his roots. And he was an artist, and I think he wanted really expand his talent in all directions.
Interviewer: Something with the freedom I think here too, wouldn’t you say in Hollywood you’re sort of in a way you’re in control of the studio whereas here you get a chance to do your own thing, no?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, that’s true because Frank wrote a song very early in his career which became very, very famous called The Moon of Manicura. And he, I have a lot of his letters from that period. He was a, wrote letters constantly, wrote letters to everybody. He loved to write letters. He loved words. I would see him in the morning. He would be reading the dictionary of the encyclopedia. He loved word. And he wrote, he said finally if I have to write one. More tropical song, I’ll Kill Myself. Because once he’d had a hit with the moon of Manicura, then they wanted another tropical song. He wrote 13 songs with moon in the title. Indian moon, moon of Bani, ah, you know. So that’s really, I think, that was one of the reasons too. You had to write to order what they wanted.
Interviewer: Broadway.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, you were a dramatist. You were free to write to a script. You could argue and scream and yell and get your way or not get your away. It was a collaborative effort, and he loved that.
Interviewer: Tell me about his, you know, his character. I get the sense that he was pretty hard-boiled, but he was also sort of a softie as well.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Oh, yes, he was. He was a wonderful businessman. He started Frank Music, which is a big publishing company. He put his own songs in it. And then he helped many young writers with their careers. And in turn for that, they would always want to put their music in his publishing company, for instance Jerry Herman. We went down to the village to see Jerry when he first started and Frank. Wanted him in the company and encouraged him and helped him. Charlie Strauss, Meredith Wilson, Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, so many, many young writers. Alfred Urey, who just has a parade on the Lincoln Center, he helped many people, you know, I mean helped them, gave them money so they could eat. There was a young man from Canada called Stan Daniels. That he literally bought an overcoat for because he was cold when he came to New York. I don’t know why from Canada, but he was. And he went to Hollywood and later wrote Taxi and Cheers and everything else under the sun, became big. But he was, he’s a good composer.
Interviewer: Tell me about what Frank was like in rehearsal, working with singers and in the previews and so on.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, I might add about the softie. There’s no doubt that he was a softie by what he wrote. If you listen to the lyric, you know, he was great lyric writer. My heart is so full of you. For Betty Hutton, Apparels of Pauline, you now, I wish I didn’t love you so. You know, you’re still there. I mean, it’s all very, he’s very romantic. And But then he could also figure out he better write a big hit, so he better get a hit in there. So he’d have a hit parade, as we called it in those days, hit, like standing on the corner in Happy Fellow. But that was very nice. He was tough, but he was very, very sweet.
Interviewer: I think you mentioned standing on the corner. You think he purposely said, I need a hit here, and I’m going to write a certain kind of song.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Oh, I’m sure, I am sure of it, yes.
Interviewer: What about the fact, you know, what about his temper? Describe that.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, he had a volatile temper, but it would be over in about two seconds. It was really kind of funny because we had a fight once and we lived in a townhouse for about, raised our two daughters there. And he chased me up the stairs because I gave into the daughter so much. And finally when he got up, he said, I’m going to have your committee where they go, God says, he said, Oh, I’m sorry. But he also, they were rehearsing Guys and Dolls. Abe Burroughs told this story, it’s a good one. And they were re- rehearsing Oldest Established, you know, about Nathan Detroit, and Frank came in and the chorus was all up there singing and he screamed and he yelled and he had fit, you don’t sing my song this way, you’re doing this rum-ba-ba. And as he was hollering and yelling and screaming and gesturing, he was backing out up the aisle the theater. And he went out, and they all stood and went. Well, they started singing and about one minute he came back in, eating an ice cream cone, happy as a clam. He forgot all about it, which he did all the time. He was very funny. He would scream and yell and forget it. It would be right over. It was funny.
Interviewer: You know, Abe Burroughs, and Cy Fuhrer, and Michael Kidd, and your late husband, all sort of Runyon-esque tough guys in their own way.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Oh, completely. And they looked exactly like the characters in Guys and Dolls. I mean, each one of them could have stepped right up on the stage and been that person. They were very tough, Runyon-like characters completely. Abe would do D’s and Doe’s business. And he was very, very literate, knew wonderful words and fabulous book writer. I think Guys and dolls is the perfect show. Everybody says that Guys and doll is the perfect show because the book’s perfect and the music’s perfect. And Michael Kidd was in that group. He was a hilarious sort of, you know, New York guy. They were all New York guys. And Cy Fuhr joins in that. And they used to have tremendous screaming, yelling, fights about every single thing. And, but yet they were very, very good friends and admired. Frank always, he had wonderful quality, by the way. He was never jealous of any writer. Really wasn’t. That’s very, very seldom that happens. He was so happy when someone was good, when someone made something good. And the fact that he helped so many young writers shows that. I mean, I don’t see anybody around today out there helping these kids write to you, very few. So that was a quality that we miss a lot. Oh, well, just as my young daughter dreams today, I wanted to appear as a lead in a Broadway show. I came to New York to go to Juilliard. I was from a small town in Illinois, and I had to get a scholarship because I didn’t have any money. And I didn’t get it. They said, well, I think you’d be better off if you go back to Mounds, Illinois. And I said, no, I’m not going to do that. So I studied music. And the first time I sang at a nightclub, and I was lucky, the first show I got in was the chorus, and I’m going to say at the very end of their run, of course, of Oklahoma. And it was wonderful to go on the stage and see the lights and everything. And I love to sing. And I like the drama. The drama and the singing together is wonderful. Franco, we said, when it’s too much to speak, that’s when you sing.
Interviewer: What was Frank’s motto when it came to volume for singers?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Oh, that’s very famous because the first day that we went in to rehearse Most Happy Fellow on the rehearsal hall door, there was a big sign that said, loud is good. So, and we had to sing loud too because we had a 34-piece orchestra with Happy Fellow because it was very operatic in form and we did not have any microphones like they have today. I mean, you know, it’s easy to sing today, my lord. I don’t know about that. It is much easier. There’s no doubt about it. There were microphones down there and you had to sing. And I had this wonderful, wonderful singer, Robert Weedy, who had sung at the Met and sung opera all over. He was a brilliant singer, superb technician. He could never have sung that role six times. He didn’t do the matinees. Six times a week unless he was a good singer that he was. And the story is that Frank went to San Francisco to hear him sing in Macbeth. And he sat down and chewing gum. So he just liked him. He was always doing something crazy. And he had to go and spend the whole time getting the chewing gum off. But Robert Wheaton got the job anyway. He really wrote it for Lawrence Tibbet. But by the time he had finished it because it took five years to write Most Happy Fellow, Tibet wasn’t It didn’t turn out it was right for Tim, but it was much more tenor. He had to have those ringing high notes that one must have to really make happy fella work and sing, sound wonderful.
Interviewer: Now how would Frank refer to himself in letters and sweatshirts and notes and so on at that time? He would sign his notes in an interesting way.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: He would do all sorts of things. He would sometimes say God. I can’t remember all the things that he did about that, actually, but he was always a
Interviewer: So that’s what I was thinking of. He referred to himself as God in notes.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, he did that because he was, that was a joke, actually. Of course, it was a jokes. But he was very, very particular about how anyone sang his songs. And as a matter of fact, he drove me so nuts telling me everything to do with Happy Fellow that I finally threw a script at him. I just thought, I can’t just, you know, look up here, do this. He was very very finicky. And I know that he did not like the way Frank Sinatra sang. Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and they had a big fight, and I don’t know who won, but I guess it was a draw. But Sinatra said he’d never sing another one of his songs again, so Frank said, I don’t care, don’t. Of course, we all love Sinatra. He’s a brilliant singer, but Frank wanted a special way. By the way, he did sing his songs, again. He called not, oh, I dunno, a few years later and made a new album of Guys and dolls with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. And Frank also quit the show of How to Succeed in Business without really trying, because Rudy Valli wouldn’t sing his song the way he wanted him to. He was just furious. He came home and I said, I think you went a little bit too far this time. But he was determined. And he was just very serious about how he wanted his song sung. As a matter of fact, I have to admit, I thinks he’s sang his songs better than anybody. But composers usually do. They may not have a great voice, but they tell you what you want to hear in that piece.
Interviewer: Is happy to make your acquaintance and I’d very much like to sort of have you set up what happens there and then go to that song so tell me just what was going on right before that song and if you would just if you could give me the first few bars of the song and then we’ll
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, this was the, there had been one, this is the second act. Norstappenfeld was written in three acts. The last act was quite short, but he really had to stop it there. And so it was three act, the second acts, and it opens with the farm and singing and creating the grapes. And Joe and Rosabella have obviously parted. And now the whole second act is the slow but sure romance and makeup and togetherness of Tony and Rosabella. So to get more better acquainted, Rosabela, Tony doesn’t speak good English, he has quite an Italian accent, and she decides to improve his English, will help him improve English. So, he says something and she said, you know, when you, when you meet somebody for the first time, there are special things you’re supposed to say, which you may not mean, but they sound polite as can be. Would you like to learn them? Yeah, he goes, so repeat after me. And then she goes, happy to make your acquaintance. And he goes happy and gets everything wrong. And then she, you know, thank you so much. I feel fine. He tries to say that. Happy to make your acquaintance. And let me say the pleasure. And he, you, know, underneath does that. Frank was very, very good at those double songs. You know, Baby’s Cold Outside. He wrote Tallahassee was a big song he wrote. He really wrote those first two people singing. Other people did it. Irving Berlin did it very well. But Frank had really done it first, and he was good at that, and that’s what it was. And then Cleo comes in, and then it goes into a trio.
Interviewer: And what about if you’d help the same way for the song Big D, which is also from that program? What’s going on in terms of why?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, in the song, Most Happy Fella, this comes. And the song, Happy to Make Your Acquaintance, we find that Toni has invited her friend from the restaurant, Clio, to come up there and get a job and work and to make everything wonderful. This young woman that he’s fallen so madly in love with. And she’s very happy about it. And the girl is from Texas. And there’s this fella on one of the ranch hands that sings the lead in Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by. That tells you he doesn’t have a girl. And they walk past each other on the stage and say, howdy. And then they go, we’ll walk by and say you know what? And then, they go you know, when you, well wait a minute, I’ve got to, see I didn’t sing that song because I can’t remember everything they do. But they, they say, they each say, well you, would you sign mine saying that again? I said, evenin’ man, because he says evenin’, man. Evening, ma’am, you know. Oh, you got a way of saying evening, ma’m. And then that puts me in a something state of mind. And then would you mind saying crazy crystal, crazy crystal. Would you mind say Neiman Marcus, Neiman, Marcus. Hey, you’re from Big D. And then they go on, sing, carry on and dance and everything else. Which Dallas, I have to tell you, liked a lot.
Interviewer: There were four different ones, most happy fella, bells are ringing, Candide and My Fair Lady. I don’t know if you could just give me your impressions of how different those were, and ultimately…
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, the first thing is that My Fair Lady opened three weeks before we opened. That’s bad, very bad, for us. It’s a wonderful musical. It’s wonderful musical I think had we opened first we would have done better because Happy Fellow was definitely a departure. There’s absolutely no doubt about it from the usual Broadway musical. It received wonderful reviews. As a matter of fact, Walter Kerr said that it was almost enough there for two shows. There were 17, more than 17 numbers in the show. Candide was an operatic in form two written by Leonard Bernstein. And I had learned all the music for Leonard Bernstien when he was writing the show because I was in the three-penny opera. And the first time we did a concert version of it at Brandeis University. Leonard Bernstein conducted it. So I knew him very well and admired his work, of course. So I learned all of that. But Candide and Happyfellow were really too operatic, wonderful, stretched the Broadway scene, stretched the music one is going to hear, everything together. They’re both greatly admired. I love, I play Candide, the music to Candide all the time, at that time. The blonde singers that were the young ingenues at that time.
Interviewer: Coming back to this big question, what do you think the Broadway musical says about us as a people or a country? What does it reflect in terms of Americans? Why do we love it so much?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, and why do we do it? Why did we do and do it different than anyone else? Because you would say you start with Romberg, et cetera. But that’s really sort of European in feel, the operetta. And we went one step further, I think, because it has something to do with the fact that we’re a relatively new country. And that we, there’s a lot of vitality here, and that people were free. We didn’t have to stay to any certain form, so we could go anywhere we wanted to go. And they wanted to do something different, I think. Would you say that Gershwin was the first one? I mean, I’m wondering.
Interviewer: I think Cohen, myself.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Yeah, one of those two. And they just didn’t want to do the operetta. That was, although we adore that. We loved the student prints and all that business. Oh, my Lord, I love that. It’s wonderful, but that’s not American. And I think that Cohen and, they started at Gershwin and Ira, George and Ira. They had this, they were Americans. They were New York guys. They had these bourbon energy. I think that’s why no one else seems to be able to do it the same way we do it. No one does it as well as we do, that’s for sure.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about your experience in Three Penny. Tell me very briefly, if you would, the story of how Three Penny was one of the first shows to sort of move off-Broadway to Broadway, wasn’t it? It started, it didn’t really have a successful run, and then it moved, didn’t it.
Jo Sullivan Loesser: No, it didn’t. We opened at the theater. It was called the Theater de Lice. And Mark Blitstein directed it. I had done a piece of Benjamin Britten opera on Broadway called Let’s Make an Opera, which Mark had directed. And Walter Kerr said let’s not. So we didn’t run but about five days with that one. That’s how I became friends with Mark Blitzstein and I. Love him and loved his work, loved him. We opened at the Delice with the author, Lattilena, myself, Charlotte Ray, we had the cast, same cast. We had, we did the piece there at the opening night party. The reviews came in and they were terrible. So it didn’t, needless to say, the party didn’t last very long. We played about two months. We Every year, at the bottom of his review, Brooks Atkinson would say, bring back the Three Penny Opera. That’s really, every review was quite remarkable. So, they did. And the same theater, now it’s a Lucille Arthel because Lucille did produce it then. And she owns a theater now, so it’s called the Lucille and we had the same cast, the same show. And it got great reviews and ran there for five years. Now you tell me. I can’t tell you. It was the same people. It has played at the Lincoln Center with a different translation, which I have to tell you I do not like near as well, and with Raoul Julia played it. I love him.
Interviewer: Who was?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: She was a artist, a very hardworking, brilliant artist. It didn’t matter what time I got to the theater, she was there first. I was always amazed. She was always there. She always did her job, always concentrated. I watched her all the time from the wings. She was wonderful. And she, of course, had this great style that went with this European style. She smoked the black cigarette, you know. It was all quite wonderful. And she taught me my songs. And I said, I thought I was a big deal after first, you know, how you do a 21 or whatever. And I say, Lenya, I’ve got to have another song. And so she took a song out of Happy End called The By-Do-We. It was a Bill Bowles song, and put it in for me, which is very nice, and taught it to me.
Interviewer: What was her relationship, how was she the singular interpreter of his work, what was her connection to Kurt Bob?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: She was married to him, and she did all of his shows in Europe. She played and did a movie of The Three Penny and played all of the shows, Mahogany, everything. And she knows how to sing his music, and you’ve got to watch her, I watch and listen to everything she did when I did that show. It was a style that was extraordinary. I have every record she’s ever made. I am a great admirer of hers. Well, I think that the fact that his brother was extraordinary, a concert pianist, I might add. I’ve heard him play many times and he was brilliant, brilliant pianist and had taught himself Japanese and that’s not easy. And his mother was, spoke about five languages. His father died when he was 17, so I don’t know how much he knew about it. I think he was always. Felt uh… Although he had a fabulous relationship with his brother they both admired each other very much uh… I think that he never i think his mother would have been much happier had he been a doctor uh… But uh… He wasn’t you know and she would uh… I don’t think his Mother would allow herself to give him the credit that she should have. He always was trying to please her, and it wouldn’t work out. And that was hard. It was hard, and I think that he wanted to continue to write and expand his musical abilities, which he studied all the time, by the way, with many people that worked with him. Orchestrators, people that would play the piano well, would put his, he put his own music eventually. He would write out a whole sheet, not just a line, vocal line. He wrote the entire piece, what the orchestra would play, what the chorus would sing. And at the end of his life, he was studying orchestration. So he liked to do everything. And I think he always wanted his mother to say, Frankie, that was a good job, but she didn’t. What are you going to do?
Interviewer: How about his How to Succeed in Business? What drew him to that topic? And why was he so perfectly matched with that show,
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, he didn’t want to do that show at all. He was not interested in doing that show. He was interested. He had, at that time, was in negotiations with Ennui for Time Remembered. He didn’t wanna write another show like that. As you’ll notice with his musicals, he never completes, says, does the same thing twice. You know, they wanted him to write Pajama Game, but he didn’t want to write, write Pijama Game because he’d written, you know, Guys and Dolls. He wanted to write something different. So while he didn’t want to do the show at all, he wasn’t interested in that. But Abe Burroughs was doing the book, and he and Abe were very, very close friends, and they really begged him to write it. And of course, it ends up that he was the perfect one to write. I have to say that he wrote that score in six weeks. That’s pretty fast. He just got it, and I think it’s really hard to figure out how you’re going to get music out of that place. And of of course he never indulged himself in putting a great big singing ballad in the middle of How to Succeed because it wouldn’t work. So he put it at the musical expansion at the end of the first act where Finch sings, you know, he sings a rosemary, it’s a big singing thing and it’s take off on Maria. He did that deliberately, fun. And they gave, it was a big musical chance they had there. But he never. Indulge himself in not going right to what the book should have.
Interviewer: What’s your favorite lyrics of his, what’s your favorite song?
Jo Sullivan Loesser: Well, I think that Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year is a true art song. He wrote that music and lyrics for that. Diana Durbin sang it in Christmas Holiday. It’s really a wonderful, wonderful song. Broadway. I think, well, we all love More I Cannot Wish You. It’s a wonderful song, they wanted to take that out of Guys and Dolls, you know. And Frank said, you touched that. And you’re going to be in a lot of trouble, because I’m leaving.” He had to fight to make them keep that song in. And it’s a wonderful moment when he sings that. I think that and my time of day, because that was his time of the day. He got up four o’clock in the morning. And he wrote then because nobody could talk to him on the telephone. So he had a silent piano that he wrote on. And he would write on this piano and be up at four till eight and work at those hours.
