MIKE LEVY ON FRANK LOESSER
Frank Loesser and his wife and musical partner Lyn in “ Baby its Cold Outside’ their own personal song.
Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Lerner and Lowe, Jerome Kerne, you have heard of them all ,right? So what became of the reputation of the brilliant subversive and utterly original Frank Loesser ? How can a talent so successful in his day ( the sign outside his Hollywood office had the SS in his name inscribed like dollar signs Loe$$er) and so famous in his memory ( Guys and Dolls anyone?) be so overlooked?
The Cambridge Critique’s own Mike Levy gave a corruscating talk this week about this wise-cracking genius of a songwriter; it just deepened the mysterry of his disappearance from the canon of New York creatives in the music industry.of the twentieth century. How can someone this talented get so forgotten?
Frank was born into the kind of Jewish family very unlike the struggling immigrant background of so many of America’s most brilliant composers. His was a cultivated milieu, his father was a music teacher and his elder brother trained to be a professional musician. Frank just loved showing off - but he could pick out a popular tune on the piano when he was four years old. It didn’t get him much credit in his own family and he tried all his life to win the approval of his severe mother and thwarted elder bro. At sixteen Mr. Loesser suddenly died - he choked on a melon ( Frank would never eat one for the rest of his life) and the kids had to get out and get a job. Brother Arthur the rising star at 20 years old took to music lessons, and Frank worked in factories and offices, all the time doing what he loved to do, creating songs. On one day he came home with a hundred dollar notes and threw them in the air, Hollywood style. No one approved but he was soon such a hit he earned $100 a day and was recruited into a musical song writing school, devoted to turning out hits.
They didn’t have to wait long for Frank. He had already put his mark on music indelibly with “Heart and Soul’ immortalised as the favourite of every piano learner , and he began to turn out hit tunes memorable and less so . Frank and his co-author Irving Actman contributed five songs to The Illustrator’s Show which only ran for a few performances but created the impetus for Frank to find more collaborators and write for a series of films in Hollywood throughout the 1930s.
After the Americans entered the war in 1941 Frank was conscripted as a soldier - in the role of composer to the Army. ‘He never went anywhere ‘, Mike remarked drily, ‘more arduous than Florida’ but his big wartime hit was Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition.
‘It was not just his singular success with popular hits that makes him so remarkable as a composer. He initiated a complex style. It is conversational, relaxed and very tricky to sing’ Mike told his audience, ‘and Frank began to believe he could write both music and lyrics . He was right.’
The 1940s were probably his creative heyday. Frank wrote the incomparable musical ‘Guys and Dolls’ an achievement unsurpassed in the creative world.of the musical The opening is so unusual, so offbeat it took its backers’ breath away. Three fast-talking bookies compete to attract punters for their sure fire winning horse, Mike observed, and the result is almost operatic and certainly very demanding in its musical structure. The rest of Guys and Dolls reveals Frank’s comedy flair from the oft jilted fiancée who sings about her psychological cold, to the rumbustuous Sit down you’re rocking the Boat’ and the slick Luck be a Lady. Frank drew on his own gambling obsessions to create a musical like no other and on his genius for arrangement, to fashion a show which often sounded as demotic and street-wise as the New York low life characters Frank had gotten to know.
Always longing for acceptance from the rather stand-offish family who never appreciated his talent, Frank spent the next four years writing his masterpiece The Most Happy Fella. It wasn’t a flop and it did contain some well known today numbers - Standing On the Corner and more. It really should be re-revived Mike implied as it is both quasi- operatic and disturbing . It just didn’t really fly.
Frank bounced back with How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying which won a Pultizer prize and even now feels remarkably prescient - the film must be available and the the show was revived last with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role.
Frank also worked with Danny Kay on the film, Hans Christian Andersen with such fabulous winners as Ugly Duckling, The King is in the Altogether, Thumberlina and Copenhagen - a song I did think was a lot older than 1952.
But Mike brought Frank right up to date with a fun discussion of his hit song Baby it’s Cold Outside written for Neptune’s Daughter a film of 1949. In a post MeToo world, it has caught the eye of censors for its provocative inisistence of the man in the duet . This ruckus is in fact a resurection of a 2004 debate about the song, discussed in Rolling Stone if anyone cares to look it up, and asserts that the suspicious sounding question ‘ ‘What’s in this drink’ is a reference to the rage for cocktails, and a predictably facetious line the answer to which would be ‘ lots of alcohol’ , not anything more sinister. However Mike revealed another hilarious side to the song when he played the film clip of a role reversal in the same film where the seducer is the woman and a reluctant man is not-very-convincingly attempts to leave. Frank wrote it initially for his wife and himself to sing to their departing guests at parties (what fabulous fun that sounds) and Lyn - a tall blond to Frank’s 5’1'‘ stature, felt it was very much their own number. It’s somehow now a Christmas song and the debate goes on, but when you’ve seen the second switcheroo version, it is more entertaining than ever.
Full credits to Mike Levy who showed clips, played snatches of melody and even sang all night long.
Thank you for reviving the memory of a clearly outstanding overlooked hero of modern popular culture.
