William Inge Theatre Festival - Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Betty Comden and Adolph Green

< Inge Center Home < Inge Festival Home < Playwright Index < Comden and Green

The following interview transcript with Betty Comden and Adolph Green has been carefully broken down into segments involving a variety of topics. Below each segment is a link to the corresponding video clip. Please attribute research sources to Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William Inge Center for the Arts.
The Revuers
	BC: We were a small group, who finally became an act, you might call it an act. We played mostly in New York, but the thing is that we started in Greenwich Village at the Village Vanguard. AG: Which was owned by a man called Max Gordon, who just died last year, finally, The Village Vanguard is still there. It’s one of the last spots that survived form the 1930s. BC: And it’s a big jazz club, very, very fine music place now, but when we started it was still a place where bohemian poets read poetry and so forth, and then Max wanted to get some young people, and well, you can tell that Judy Holliday, Adolph met Judy Holliday one summer. AG: Yes, and… BC: I knew him before. AG: And I knew Betty from NYU where she was a student, and I was an occasional visitor and a friend, and then Judy, who I barely knew, happened to stumble down the steps of this little club, called the Vanguard, on a rainy night, and the owner was intrigued with her and found out she was interested in theater, and did she have any friends? She said, “Of course,” and she didn’t know anybody. She knew me remotely, and he said, “I’ll put you--get a group, I’ll put you on for one night.” She said, “Oh, fine,” and she spoke to me about it, and I ran in to Betty, and told Betty that we could perform there for a night and get five dollars apiece, and none of our friends would ever have to know about it, or any of our friends. BC: That was very exciting. And then there was another young man I knew from NYU named John Frank who was a good musician, and ran into him on a subway and told him about it, and there was another boy around the theater at the time named Alvin Hammer, and so the five of us sort of congregated loosely, to put it… AG: A very disparate group, there wasn’t any careful weeding out—who will be in it, how will we fit together—it didn’t fit at all, it just was…it just happened. BC: And we started to write because we needed material and couldn’t afford to pay royalties, so we started to write material for ourselves to perform, and we hurled together some kind of an evening…no, no, just separate numbers of different kinds, and even some written by other people at the very beginning. Went on the one night, and then Max wanted us to stay and come the next Sunday night. And then… AG: Kept us on. BC: Kept us on. After a while it was a few nights a week, then it was every night. AG: Suddenly at some point a paper or two wrote us up, there was a review in The New York Times and one in the Post, and there didn’t seem to be any results from this at first, it was still quite empty, and then one night there was a line all the way around the corner, it was incredible. It was like people waiting for a British bus every day, jammed. BC: And they were just people from the theater, and from the literary world, and from all kinds of people from New York, but we had a very distinguished audience, and all sorts of interesting and important people came to see us, and they came again and again, and what we did was we wrote little, little revues, little satirical revues sometimes, one on newspapers, Hollywood,… AG: Theater… BC: theater, and uh… AG: magazines. BC: Different subjects, and had an opening and a closing and numbers, you know, different kinds of songs and sketches, and that was the show. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

On the Town: Fancy Free
	AG: Well, Bernstein and Robbins did the ballet Fancy Free, which was a tremendous hit, and they were approached by many producers, and… BC: The idea of doing a full length show, it didn’t necessarily start out to be anything to do with three sailors, but they were approached to do a full length show and Leonard said that he knew just the people to do the book and lyrics, us, because he knew every word of the revue and he came to see us constantly, and we were very close friends, and he brought Jerry down and the producers, and we got the job, and we owe it to Leonard, and we also decided to write ourselves two parts, and then it finally worked its way up to be three sailors and one day in New York, and it is not…the plot and everything that happens in it is totally different from the ballet. AG: That was much more, I would say, rudimentary, much more simple, one situation. Ours was… BC: a whole story. AG: A whole complex story, yes, which didn’t exist in Fancy Free. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

On the Town: Miss Turnstiles
	BC: Well, at that time in New York, there was a promotion in the subways called Miss Subways, and every month they picked a new girl, and her picture was up with the things that she did, and we just took this idea of having a sailor fall in love with a picture in the subway. AG: Subway, yeah. And then to make a further commentary, which didn’t really play a part in the story proper, or did, actually, was…he thought it was such a glorious thing, but actually she’s Miss Turnstiles for one month, and we had this large number, we saw her become Miss Turnstiles and being fêted, and finally have to step back into the line again, an unknown, anonymous girl once more. BC: The thing though, on the card, were the places she might be, and that was important in the plot, because they got all the clues, the three sailors found the clues on the card, how to find her in New York, which seemed unlikely, but it worked. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

On the Town: Actors Too
	BC: Adolph was one of the three sailors, Ozzie, and I played the lady anthropologist Claire DeLoone. AG: We meet at the Museum of Natural History, and she mistakes me…or not mistakes me, just thinks I’m a throwback to the Pithecanthropus erectus. I’ve been standing in the front, I’ve been stretching like it does. BC: I start to take pictures of him…think he’s a modern equivalent of ancient man…prehistoric man. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

On the Town: The Film
	BC: They felt that the Bernstein music was too advanced, or too obscure, which it isn’t… AG: To be sung by Gene. BC: …to be sung in the movie and all, and then we had to adjust the story somewhat, because Gene played the lead, and he was wonderful, but he was not a little kid from Iowa, so it had to be adjusted. AG: But the thing everyone remembers is Leonard Bernstein’s score and “New York, New York.” BC: Yeah, because the opening is such a thrilling thing in the movie. AG: That dominates the whole feeling of it being the same score, yeah. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

On the Town: A Reunion
	BC: Then Jerry was doing the Jerome Robbins’ Broadway…to reconstruct “You Got Me,” he got us all together. It was fortuitous that Nancy, who lives in California, and Chris Alexander, who lives in Saratoga, were both in New York that day, and so that was four… AG: That was four out of the five originals, and we… Jerry sort of reconstructed the number with us moving around and doing it. It was very exciting. BC: It was just so wonderful. AG: ‘Cause, you know, we’ve suddenly rediscovered it ourselves and felt the moves going through our bodies, you know. BC: And then we were so moved by the experience of just being together and doing this with Jerry, that we didn’t want to split up. I remember we walked out of the building, we went together and had lunch, we just hated to let go. It was a beautiful moment, and Jerry was moved too. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Billion Dollar Baby
	BC: It was a—what do you call—a success d’estimé, that means it didn’t run terribly long, but it was a very, it was a distinguished show. It was about the very end of the 1920s and the crash, ends with the crash. AG: It was a very tough show, we really… BC: Sardonic. It was about the 20s, and nobody felt like laughing about that, it was so close to the 20s and it was not a jolly sort of, gay show. AG: It was a premature show about the 20s. No one had been going around doing the Charleston and jumping up and down. BC: But it was very interesting. AG: As you’ll see from that number last night, it had just brilliant moments. BC: And it’s a show that a lot of people remember, and Hal Prince even says it affected him a great deal. He was very young when he saw it, but there’s something about that kind of show that… AG: It had a sardonic quality, and it was also beautiful to look at. It had big production numbers, but at the same time it was about the seamy side of life. BC: The 20s, the speakeasies, and a girl who wants to get ahead no matter… AG: Ruthlessly. BC: how many people get killed standing in her way, she wants to marry this billionaire, and she does, but she does the very day of the crash, and the end was very…rather heavy end, but it was beautiful. It was the wedding procession and the extra boys running up and down with newspapers saying, “Wall Street lays an egg!” AG: Wall Street…yeah. BC: And she’s up on stage throwing her diamond bracelets around, giving them to her friends, taking off her rings… AG: And her husband is suddenly, hears the announcement, he’s been ruined in the crash, and she’s hurling the jewels and bracelets to the mob, and he’s on his hands and knees trying to pick them up. BC: trying to… AG: And the show ends on a rather… BC: bleak note. AG: bitter note, yes. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Freed Unit at MGM
	BC: We, learned the form easily enough, I mean, that wasn’t baffling to us, you know, because it was just interesting to break things down into shots and scenes that way, but the structure, you have to have a kind of three acts anyway. You know, the developments of a story and then come to a climax, a dénouement, and a windup. So you have kind of the same shape. AG: And we got to love it out at MGM at the Arthur Freed unit, it was different from any other unit around the studio or any other studio. BC: Yeah, Arthur Freed had a real respect for talent. He brought a lot of New York people out, I mean us and Alan Lerner and Fritz Lowe and Oliver Smith and Gene… AG: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Vincent Minnelli… BC: All kinds. So, but, and when…as writers in the unit, we were treated wonderfully. I mean, we realized, unlike other writers, who are really at the bottom of the heap there, and things get passed around to other writers and scripts get reworked, and that never happened to us. Whatever we wrote was the script, we worked it out with Roger Edens and Arthur and read him sections of the…movies, as we went along…then worked with the director, Gene and Stanley, who did our first movie, not Good News but the first one they did together, On the Town. Then they did our other two movies. They directed, I guess, they did… AG: Three pictures. BC: Three pictures, yeah, On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, and It’s Always Fair Weather, and we were old friends, we knew Stanley and Gene from New York, so that was fun. And then Vincent did two pictures for us, Vincent Minnelli, The Band Wagon and… AG: Bells are Ringing. And all the time we had a close relationship with the, with Roger Edens, who was also originally from the theater, and came out in the early 30s and then sort of discovered and developed Judy Garland and then was sort of, just part of the unit. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Good News
	BC: We always wanted to come back to New York and do shows, and we did, so that we never really lived in Hollywood, or went out there just to write pictures. We always came back after and then went out again. So we’re bicoastal. AG: And the first picture was Good News, it was signed by MGM, and we didn’t really know at the time but, because we had someone from MGM, as a matter of fact, a wonderful man called Roger Edens, who worked for Arthur Freed, and Roger was a terrific force in that unit, he had seen Billion Dollar Baby and he thought of us doing this…this 20s. BC: A show about the 20s. AG: Good News. BC: Good News was, you know, a campus football classic written in 1925, and we didn’t know what to do with it at first. It seemed like a strange assignment for us, we thought of ourselves as sophisticated New Yorkers, or whatever we were, but it just seemed odd to be writing this, so we felt a little funny about it. But we changed the plot and made him failing in French instead of astronomy, that we… AG: That was not a big change. But, you know, it was a task for us, ‘cause we didn’t…didn’t seem to be up our alley because we had gotten the names of the sharp, bright satirists, and there it was, this sweet, charming…lovely score, great score, Good News. BC: Yeah, wonderful songs. AG: And eventually we read the script to each other… BC: And said, “That’s it.” AG: And did it. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Barkleys of Broadway
	BC: We were brought out to do our second film by Arthur Freed, and it was supposed to be for Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, and they had just had a big success in Easter Parade and then, Judy got ill, unfortunately, so Arthur said… AG: Arthur said... BC: Arthur said, well, let’s get Ginger and Fred together. AG: Did Arthur say that, or did…we all say that? BC: Well, maybe the whole group of it said it… AG: I think we did. BC: in unison, I don’t know. I don’t remember the scene. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And Arthur wanted a kind of sophisticated story, two people who can’t get along with each other, can’t get along without each other. So we tried to write something, but we had originally started to write it for Judy, and this change in casting didn’t happen until quite late, so we left the picture exactly as it was, about a theatrical couple. AG: I’ve seen it, recently, it’s much more fun than you remember. BC: Than what you think it is, yeah. AG: No, we worked very hard on it and--as we did on every picture--and it seemed like an impossible task, and somehow we managed to weave it out. Oh, we were so excited about writing for Fred Astaire. BC: Oh, just to see him walk in the room. AG: Yes. BC: So that was thrilling. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Two on the Aisle
	BC: We knew Jule Styne just slightly from the coast, and he was part of a very successful, very up there group of teams… AG: he and Sammy Cahn, oh it was just tremendous success. BC: and great friends of Sinatra’s and this whole group. AG: And he’d written thousands of hit songs. BC: The Hit Parade was on, four or five hits every week on the Hit Parade. AG: He wasn’t in the theater, but Dick was in the theater and I’d written…had written Gentlemen Prefer… BC: No, no he wrote Glad to See You was the only… AG: And Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. BC: Not before Two on the Aisle. AG: You bet BC: Okay, I take that back. AG: Yes it was. AG: I’m a… BC: I won’t argue with you. He’s older than me. AG: Yes it was. BC: Oh, he had written…yes, of course, yes of course he had. I remember that now, because I remember they came to us to do Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. We felt we had done a show about the 20s, and we decided we wanted to take a new subject, so we didn’t do it. AG: And it was a big hit show. BC: Oh, big hit, my goodness. AG: He wrote some wonderful songs in it. But then we got to know Julie, and we wrote the show together, it was originally for Burt Lahr and… BC: Lena Horne. AG: …originally for Lena, which was what really drew us into it. BC: It seemed like a wonderful idea, 1951, to do a show with two stars. One black, one white, and absolutely superb, both of them, and we thought, “Wow, what a wonderful…” AG: And Lena was our friend already… BC: We knew her, but she couldn’t…things didn’t work out, so it was Dolores Gray who was just playing in London in Annie, and it was hard… AG: We had many struggles on that show. BC: It was a revue you know, no story. AG: And finally opened and got…we were so…were a little bit self-conscious, and suddenly there was Brook Atkinson saying, “It has wit! It has splendor! It has magnificence!” He pulled out every adjective. BC: I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t see it that way. AG: Every adjective. BC: Burt Lahr was brilliant to work with, I mean really a master. That was fun and also very difficult, very trying. And our work with Jule started, and we immediately loved him and started to have fun, and the first song we wrote with him was called “If,” “If You Hadn’t but You Did,” which is just a brilliant lyric… AG: Which Betty still performs; it’s sort of her number. BC: Yeah, we do it in our show. And, it just sort of took off from there, and we’ve had terrific experiences with Jule ever since. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Singin’ in the Rain
	AG: Well, we didn’t know what the picture was going to be until we went through all the… BC: Songs. AG: ...songs, endlessly. BC: We felt that those songs belonged in the period for which they were written. They were written at just that transitional time when movies were changing to sound from silent films, and they’re terrific songs, but we felt that that would be the best setting for them. AG: So then we got excited because we’re both movie buffs and… BC: Love that period. AG: and we knew it very well, and we didn’t have to go into a great deal of research, not that we’re proud of it, we just made it finally happen for us. BC: We just…well, we just started to write it. We weren’t totally sure we’d have Gene, but we were always writing with Gene in mind. We did get him, and… AG: and we wrote it… I think it was a picture for him and Stanley to direct, Stanley was around a lot… BC: We consulted with him constantly, we kept meeting with him and reading him things and talking things out, running movies with him, we ran movies of the period with him, and we’re very close at that time. And, they had done a superb job on On the Town, it was great fun…but Gene, was just, of course, working on An American in Paris, and that just seemed like such perfection and such a blessed project, and we’d go back to our office after seeing a shoot and we’d say, “Oh God, what are we going to do? AG: We saw a great deal of An American in Paris shot. BC: While being shot, and it was a very, very difficult project, in fact we worked on it for a couple of months and felt we were getting nowhere with it, and we wanted to give the money back and go home because we just felt we cannot whip this, it was just too difficult AG: And finally, we did, we got very excited and started moving ahead, and by the time we finished, we thought it was goddamn good, we really did. It wasn’t…it isn’t hindsight in any way. We were very excited about it. BC: And then when we first saw it, a print of it, we just bowled over, and what they had done. AG: The word flipped works very well for that, yes. BC: And we had also worked in some ideas from…Gene and Stanley knew us from The Revuers days, and we got a couple of the ideas from that, about the out-of-sync stuff that’s in the movie and some of those we had used…referred to in The Revuers acts, so we didn’t have to explain that to them, we had such a shorthand with them, another director might have been totally puzzled by some of the insanity… AG: “What are you up to, what is this?” BC: …but they knew, they could read our minds. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Wonderful Town: The Genesis
	BC: Well, this show is something we came in on rather late in the proceedings. They had had a score that wasn’t working. George Abbott was doing the book with the authors, Chodorov and Fields and he just called us up one day and said, you know, we have five weeks… AG: …five weeks. BC: Can you do this in five weeks, because we lose Rosalind Russell. We need to score. We’ve got the book, we’ve got Russell, you know the words, not the music, and he said, “Can you do it?” So we suddenly thought of Lenny, Leonard Bernstein. AG: Who was just back in New York. BC: And we called him up. AG: Much to our amazement, he wanted to do it. It just happened to be a right moment. BC: We had just sort of finished being on the phone with him when Abbott called back and “Well, is it yes or no?” He’s not a man to wait around, and we started, so we had a very short time to work, and that was exciting and stimulating and we met with Leonard every day and just got to love Rosalind Russell, and… AG: We had a terrific time... AG: it was a niece thing to have to work that rapidly. BC: Deadlines are sometimes just the best things, and… AG: We found a period to put the show in, we found that with the 30s… BC: …which is when those original stories were written. AG: Even though we wrote it in the early 50s, once we had the period we got very excited. BC: And Leonard wrote all…mainly references to 30s music. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Wonderful Town: A Song for Rosalind Russell
	BC: She was out of town already and she came to us and said needed…she liked everything she was doing, very happy, but she needed one more song where she could just come out and establish her character, right away, just like that. MW: She’d have just four notes in it. BC: She said she had only four notes in her voice, so we’d have to write for those four notes… AG: …and it should be a very funny number. “Da-da-da-da-da-da, joke, da-da-da-da-da-da, joke.” BC: So we, out of those ingredients, we cooked up a number for her, and we wrote it and we sang it to her from the hallway. AG: Yes, she was sick, as a matter of fact. BC: She was in bed in the hotel and we stayed out in the hall… AG: Got a piano brought up to that floor, sat outside the room and Leonard played it, we shouted into the room, and she thought it was good, and indeed it was. It was a terrific number. I shouldn’t say so, but it was. BC: It was. AG: It is. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Band Wagon
	BC: Oh, well that’s one of our absolute favorite pictures. The work with Minnelli was so thrilling, and then… AG: Again with Fred Astaire. BC: Fred Astaire, my gosh. AG: And this time we had a special thing with Astaire, because we knew he was no longer a kid, and we were more mature too, and we wrote a part for a man who was possibly over the hill, some of his… BC: Career slipping. AG: …career was finished in Hollywood, and comes back to New York, a man growing old, a very middle aged man having to find his way, and it’s something that could have been tragic and instead was a very light-hearted… BC: …and exhilarating. And again we were handed a pile of music, this time the catalogue of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and they’re wonderful songs, but again we had to think of… AG: It was even more difficult. BC: We had to think of how to use them, because they never wrote much for book shows. Their big things were revues. And we had these various songs, and it wasn’t easy to put into a story. AG: They didn’t belong to any particular period. They were just great songs. Near the beginning of our writing we discovered, I think we really discovered as we were going through old songs that’d never been heard and discovered “By Myself.” That’s a great song. BC: So we opened the picture with that. It was a wonderful find, because it’s a real character song, a situation song that works beautifully, and then we drew on our own lives for a scene where Astaire comes to New York to be in a show written by his two friends, and these friends who’ve written a show meet him at the station, and he comes up the ramp there, and they’re standing there with signs saying… AG: “Tony Hunter fan club.” BC: “Tony Hunter fan club.” And that’s based on the fact that once I went ahead to New York to meet with my husband, who was in the army, and Adolph followed them, he was not feeling great, his mother was ill, and so I went to the station and I had made a sign saying “Adolph fan club” and I was waiting for him there at the rail… AG: I got off the train feeling bedraggled dragging my suitcase and there was Betty with that sign, it was a bit of a lift, I must say. It was terrific. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Peter Pan
	BC: This was something also that we were called in on late. They had opened Peter Pan, we were out in Hollywood writing It’s Always Fair Weather, and we were called up by Jerome Robbins and Leland Hayward. They had a show there with Mary Martin. AG: They were in San Francisco. BC: And wanted us to head up and just have a look at…with Jule Styne, because they were in trouble, they were closing. AG: Right, oh, please continue. BC: And we went up, and we saw a show that wasn’t a musical and it wasn’t working, but we just knew that that was the part for Mary Martin and… AG: Cyril Ritchard was playing Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. BC: We grabbed Jerry and told him, and he said come back and tell Mary this… AG: “Tell them now!” BC: And so we did and so we stayed up there and did some work on it. AG: With Jule. BC: Of course, Jule was with us. And it turned out to be just a terrific experience and a lot of fun. AG: And that was about five weeks in all, there and in LA. BC: Because they came—they moved to LA, and we were working there, so it all, it all worked out. AG: It was going to close, and…which seemed absurd to us, but we sort of…what we did do was sort of make it into a musical comedy featuring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard…it hadn’t quite been that. There was a team of Charlap and Leigh. BC: And they wrote some lovely things, which is certainly in the show. AG: Terrific things. We didn’t want to remove anything that was good at all. BC: Or to take over from them, which we could have done, but it was their first show, we didn’t want to do that, but we did feel that the first thing to work on was to give it an overall theme that would express the feeling of Barrie’s play… AG: And so… BC: and so we wrote “Neverland” for Mary, which was the first thing… AG: Which did become sort of… BC: It’s a theme song, yeah. AG: The motto song of the show. BC: And it’s one of our well-known songs. AG: And we had a great time, we had a wonderful time. We wrote things like the Captain Hook’s waltz for him, which we were very excited about, and then we wrote the duet for them… BC: “Mysterious Lady” AG: Which Mary Martin did a coloratura which we knew she had done in the past, and so we wrote this funny number, which took place in the forest, and we did some editing of the play. BC: We worked with Jerry on the structure. AG: On the structure of the original play, and even wrote in a… BC: Some dialogue. AG: …some dialogue, here, there. BC: Excuse us, Barrie. And it was very joyous, finally. It was such a good show. AG: Jerry did some wonderful work on it. Terrific. BC: So, and it’s a show that plays and plays, all over the world. It’s very nice for us, and it’s a lovely thing. It’s touring right now, you know, with Cathy Rigby. It’s a big, big hit, and it was revived with Sandy Duncan once in between. AG: Which was also a smash. BC: Also a smash. AG: And it plays every year in Japan for several weeks, and it plays all over the world, it’s a great source of joy and a certain amount of… BC: Income. AG: income, yes. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

It’s Always Fair Weather
	BC: And that was the third time we worked with Gene and Stanley and we wrote an original story, which all our other films were too, but this time we wrote the score with André Previn, and there’s one song from it we love called “I Like Myself,” the scene where Gene—do you know this picture?—where Gene roller-skates. And this one is also, I guess, well, we were older, more experienced, and it’s a look at things that maybe we wouldn’t have written about earlier…you know, the corrosive thing that can happen to friendships after some years go by… AG: And selling out, and all kinds of things, yes. BC: And selling out, all kinds of things. The pressure of the business world today, the whole advertising world, the seamy side of sports, it had all kinds of things in it…the beginnings of television. AG: Yeah, right. We wrote one number for Dan Dailey that we’re so proud of, you know, it was sort of a wild takeoff on the phrases of the world of business, and it was called “Situation Wise,” it was all “situation wise” and “saturation wise” and God, we felt so thrilled. BC: All the wises of it…every word was a wise…but it was about three guys who had been pals in World War II and then they promise that they’d meet again ten years later. They were inseparable and they’d saved each other’s lives, you know, and then they’d…their lives really separate, but they remember the day and they do meet, and the story is what happens the day they get together. AG: The beginning of the day is a terrible fiasco. We wrote another thing that we’re very proud of, it’s a scene in a restaurant where they’re sitting and having nothing to say to each other and the string orchestra’s playing (sings “The Blue Danube”) and they each sing “Why did I come? Why am I here?” BC: What is this guy? Did I ever know these people? AG: And they sing it all to “The Blue Danube,” to themselves. BC: It was an interior monologue, of course. AG: Anyway, we do go on about this, but it was a picture we were very proud of. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Bells Are Ringing: Part 1
	BC: It’s one of Jule’s really terrific scores. It has “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over” and “Long Before I Knew You.” AG: Great songs. “I Met a Girl.” Things like that. That was a real prodigious effort, and a labor of love. BC: Well, you know, we had worked with Judy in The Revuers, and this was our reunion by this time…she was a big, big movie star by then, and we had remained close friends and we wanted to write a show for Judy, and we cast about wildly for an idea, and found it looking at the back of a telephone book with a picture of an answering service. AG: With tentacles stretching out all over the city. BC: It seemed like a modern-day heroine, a new kind of heroine. AG: Someone who was living in her little world, but through the phone had connections all over the city. We told Judy about it…naturally, we had to do some writing. We read her several scenes… AG: And she loved it. BC: and she loved it. Then, it was a long…we were writing a movie at the same, and it got stretched out—the writing—over quite a period of time. It was difficult. It was a difficult plot to manage, it was an intricate plot, and… AG: Very complex. BC: complex, difficult, yes. AG: Farce plot, but was…overtones of reality. It was a mixture of many elements that worked, wonderfully. BC: And Judy brought such reality with her. She was also a great comedian, and a satirist, herself, but she had this poignant quality and very believable. She was a genius, Judy. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Bells Are Ringing: Part 2
	AG: The other reason we dwell on this show was because it was a very important moment in our careers and lives, and it was by far the biggest commercial hit we ever had, too, and it’s a show which we poured a lot of love and thought into. It’s really a very intricate plot, but really many, many different elements, which we feel very proud of. BC: Judy, character Judy dominating the whole thing. There’s going to be a performance, a revival of it up at Goodspeed Opera, where they do wonderful things. They did a great job on Wonderful Town. AG: It is going to be done, right? BC: Oh yes, I got the thing in the mail. AG: Oh you did? Great. BC: And they did Wonderful Town last year, superbly. Just absolutely wonderful, and I’m sure they’ll do a terrific job because they do…we’re thrilled to see it again. AG: Wonderful. BC: It gets revived, I mean, it gets played in stock. First year was in-stock. I think the biggest they’d ever had in-stock, the first year it was out after it closed on Broadway. AG: But it keeps being done all the time, and a quality I like that also happens with On the Town is that when it’s done, it’s sort of rediscovered. It has a feeling of spontaneity and invention, and that’s what, with college groups and amateur groups. It’s wonderful. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Bells Are Ringing: Phyllis Newman
	Well, that’s…we met Phyllis, and I met her very definitively, doing Bells are Ringing. It was near…about the beginning of the second year of the show, and we were looking for a standby for Judy, and… BC: She came and auditioned, but it was almost the end of the day. We were about ready to leave. AG: We had already chosen somebody. BC: She came in just the last minute. I mean sometimes you get impatient, or you don’t want to hear the whole scene all over again, but we… AG: Nah, let her go ahead. BC: We didn’t interrupt her, she was just so good. She’s so good. AG: She went on and on, and we had her read some other scenes, we had her sing a lot of songs. She really knocked us out, and Judy said, “Okay.” BC: And she played it several times, and she did wonderfully. AG: We were worried a bit, it was like, gee, maybe she’s too pretty, but those things never used to bother Judy at all. She said, “Great.” ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

A Party With Comden & Green
	AG: And we got smashing notices, especially from Kevin Kelly, who was a… BC: And Elliot Norton. AG: And Elliot Norton, yes, but especially Kelly who was such a tough critic. BC: They were all great. AG: And suddenly we…so we kept on doing it in various cities, and then we opened on Broadway and we…big hit! BC: Yeah, that was great fun. We changed the format somewhat, we made it, instead of three acts, in two acts, and we did other numbers, we added other numbers in. That was terrific. That was great fun. AG: And we still do it, if called upon, at colleges, social functions… BC: Available, and it still goes wonderfully well. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Do Re Mi
	BC: That was starring Phil Silvers AG: …and Nancy Walker. With a book by Garson Kanin. BC: We did the lyrics, with Jule Styne doing the music, and we had another big hit from that, “Make Someone Happy” AG: Yes, it was…terrific score, it really is. Some of Jule’s best songs. BC: And John Reardon, beautiful singer, was in it too, and… AG: He sang “Make Someone Happy” in act two and stopped the show with a ballad at the end with… BC: Nancy Dussault. MW: That is a beautiful song. AG: And so that’s…Do Re Mi was great doing a show with Phil, who was also an old, old friend of ours. BC: He was hilarious. AG: Yes, very. And Nancy…it was a great combination. BC: Nancy we knew from On the Town. AG: Nancy Walker. BC: They were in On the Town together, so it was wonderful being together. AG: She’s one of the great performers of all time, and she really lent such a sparkle to the original, to On the Town. She has such an individual quality of her own. BC: No one else like her. AG: You know, she played a character that could have been a sort of a hoyden and asking to be loved by the audience. Instead, Nancy’s little menacing quality crept through it, and it was just sensational. Plus she sang “I Can Cook Too,” and knocked the house over…but there she was in Do Re Mi years later, and it was a wonderful team, and I think we wrote some very good stuff. BC: Very good material for both of them. It worked well. The show got really good reviews. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Subways are for Sleeping
	BC: Subways was after Do Re Mi. It seemed like…yeah. AG: And that’s when Phyllis…you were asking about Phyllis before, being in that, and she was, and she was. As a matter of fact she won a Tony award finally. BC: It was a tough struggle getting her into the show, I don’t know why. We were plugging for her, we wanted only her. Somehow the producer had something against her, she had to come and audition and audition, and she was perfect for this part. AG: Finally she had to audition just wearing a towel BC: Well you have to say, the character only wore a towel in this famous collection of short stories about people who lived this sort of peripheral existence in New York. There were four main characters, and Phyllis was one of them, playing opposite Orson Bean, and she was…we wrote this number for her, “Shoo-In”…she’s an Atlantic City beauty contest loser, and she sings about her whole experience in this…”I Was a Shoo-In.” It was tremendous, and she did win the Tony, which was very gratifying for everybody. AG: And the show also had some wonderful songs in it, some terrific numbers. BC: Yeah, there’s a song called “Comes Once in a Lifetime” which Tony Bennett recorded and Judy Garland recorded and that’s a really wonderful song. AG: And Betty can sing wonderfully in French. BC: There’s a second chorus of it in French. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Hallelujah Baby!
	BC: Oh, well, the book was by Arthur Laurents, it was his idea, and we again wrote the lyrics with Jule Styne, and it starred Leslie Uggams, and it was the story of a black girl going from 1900s? AG: Turn of the century. BC: To… AG: Today, as it were. BC: Late 60s, I guess. AG: Yeah. It was a very tough show to write. BC: Arthur really took a difficult subject. The changing relationship between black and white in that period of time, and the characters don’t grow any older, so it was realistic and yet fanciful and a very entertaining musical. AG: It had some wonderful numbers in it. BC: Terrific numbers, and the title song, “Hallelujah Baby!” is wonderful. AG: A song called “My Own Morning” was a lovely balladic song, and it had a lot of exciting things in it, and it finally ended up…after the show closed, two months after it closed, it won the Tony award as best show of the year. BC: And what’s insane is that it is Jule Styne’s only Tony. AG: With all the incredible scores. BC: With all the…including Gypsy, and everything. AG: Gypsy and Funny Girl and Bells are Ringing. BC: What happened they were up against things that won…just unbelievable. Just shows you what prizes mean. (laughing) Nothing. AG: Knowing that we’re not against winning Tonys, you know that. BC: Not always. We won a lot of Tonys, we’re very happy about it, yeah. AG: We’ve won five of them, and we’re proud of it. ¹ 56K (Dial-up)