by Ben Yagoda
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac had only a modest run, but by Adler and Ross’s next meeting with Loesser and Abbott, they possessed a theatrical track record. This time, after hearing their dog-and-pony show, Abbott said, “I think you’re ready.” Not long after that, he hired them to write the score for a musical with the unlikely subject of a strike in a sleepwear factory, due to open in the spring of 1954. The title was going to be The Pajama Game, and there ended up being a perfect spot, right at the beginning of the second act, for “Steam Heat.”
• • •
Carolyn Rosenthal was a Bronx girl who had attended Queens College and NYU and who, in 1951, found herself working as a typist, copywriter, and secretary who “couldn’t take dictation.” She dreamed of becoming a songwriter and would scribble lyrics in her odd hours. One day she dialed a wrong number and reached a music publisher who agreed to take a look at her work, and liked it enough to sign her to a contract. She affiliated herself with BMI (the only real choice for a writer just starting out), adopted the professional name Carolyn Leigh, and over the next few years had a few songs recorded, each written with a different composer and none a big seller: a Jo Stafford B side called “Just Because You’re You,” a rhythm and blues song that charted for both Lucky Millinder and Rosemary Clooney, and “What Happened to the Music,” a Teresa Brewer novelty song, cowritten with Robert Sadoff and the veteran Nacio Herb Brown, that decried “all those crazy sound effects” in current pop music.
In 1953 the publisher Tommy Valando hooked Leigh up with yet another composer, a jazz musician and arranger named Johnny Richards, who’d written a kind of impressionistic, syncopated melody that needed words. When she got the assignment, she’d just come back from a visit to her father, who was in the hospital with a heart ailment. The experience gave her the inspiration to write a lyric called “Young at Heart.” The song was a slight thing, really, but her words had a lightness and precision that boded well for her future—as well as some nifty internal rhymes that tipped their hat to the tradition of Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. (“You can go to extremes with impossible schemes / You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams.”)
Not long after that, Leigh ended her arrangement with Valando to go freelance. She also had a new, permanent—or as permanent as these things could be—partner, a young man from Philadelphia. “His name is ‘Moose’ (actually, Morris—but he prefers the nickname) Charlap,” Leigh had written in November to Robert Marks, one of the publishers who seemed to be falling over each other in pursuit of her. “We’ve written eight songs in eight weeks and sold every single one—with some already recorded and others, the Lord willing, scheduled for wax.”
Charlap, a native Philadelphian, was a compact five feet, five inches tall; the nickname “Moose” was ironic. He was not yet twenty-five—two years younger than Leigh—and was a prodigy of sorts, at that time ASCAP’s youngest member.
Their work together was “a lot of fun,” Leigh went on. “Makes real United States money, too, which never ceases to surprise me. (I still wonder, when I get a check that I can bank or cash, just why anyone in his right mind would want to pay me for a piece of paper with a few words and hieroglyphics on it that gave my partner and me so much pleasure to create!)”
She heard from all quarters, including Howie Richmond, who had no fewer than seven publishing companies listed on his letterhead. He had been referred to Leigh by George Marlo, who more than two decades back had turned down Jack Lawrence’s “Play, Fiddle, Play” and was now on the staff of BMI. “If you are not tied up ‘exclusively’ with any other publisher,” Richmond wrote, “would be most grateful to you for the opportunity to hear any songs you feel are best suited for our type of exploitation. Strongly suggest these be unique, different types of songs, particularly novelties.”
Inevitably, Leigh and Charlap’s success brought them to the attention of the grand Broadway mentor. The initial connection came through Frank Loesser’s wife, Lynn, “who promptly decided that we would be the new protégés of his firm . . . with a new Broadway show in the offing. Whether this will turn out to be more than a lot of talk, I don’t know, but it sure makes for happy dreamin’.” The Broadway show would come through other channels, but the team did sell a couple of songs to Frank Music Corp.—one, “First Impression,” recorded by a talented young singer named Eydie Gormé—and Leigh got a nice note from Loesser himself, who said he was “wonderfully impressed” with her progress and looked forward to the day when she joined ASCAP and could enter into a continuing arrangement with the firm. Yet another encouraging development in yet another medium: she and Charlap were getting steady work writing songs for the variety show Jackie Gleason hosted on CBS television. They were offered a contract with the show, but they turned it down because the deal meant signing on with the Gleason publishing firm.
Things were especially busy on the recording front in late 1953. That was because James Petrillo was threatening yet another strike by his AFM against the record industry. (The big one of 1942 had been followed by a briefer action six years later.) “The general picture is one of ‘make hay while the sun-, etc.,’” Leigh wrote to another publisher. “Victor has been cutting day and night, everything and anything that vaguely resembles a song, and every artist they can pin down long enough to sing a few notes into a mike. Decca and Coral, on the other hand, have announced that neither of them will cut anything for the entire month of December. As for Columbia, well, nobody but The Beard really knows what is happening there, although half of the music business says he’s loading up on sides and the other half says he isn’t.”
Petrillo and the record companies came to an agreement in early January, and soon after that “Young at Heart” found its way to Frank Sinatra, who, cast off by Columbia and the Beard, had just signed a modest contract with Capitol. Leigh and Richards’s song was one of his first recordings there, in an elegant strings-with-flute arrangement by Nat Cole’s close collaborator Nelson Riddle. Sinatra’s voice was back in shape and the song was in his sweet spot. The record was released in February 1954 and reached number two on the charts, Sinatra’s biggest success in seven years and the beginning of his comeback as the dominant singer of his era. It made Leigh’s name as well. Within a week of the song’s release, Variety reported, she got calls from seventeen publishers asking her to supply lyrics to melodies they owned.
That spring, Sinatra was filming a movie with Doris Day based on the 1938 film Four Daughters. It had no title until the success of Leigh and Richards’s song inspired Warner Bros. to name it Young at Heart—that, despite the fact that it was a rather bleak story of depression and attempted suicide. For an estimated $15,000, Tommy Valando sold Warners the rights to “unlimited usage” of the tune. At that point, Billboard reported, it had sold 350,000 copies—an impressive figure in a supposedly post-sheet-music age. Leigh’s share of that, according to a statement from Sunbeam Music in August, was in the neighborhood of $3,500—that is, 1 percent. In addition, there was a quarterly payment from BMI of about $1,200 for radio play, plus her “mechanical” payment for recordings by Sinatra and others—plus her 25 percent share of the Warners payment.
In May 1954, as “Young at Heart” was reaching its peak position on the charts, The Pajama Game opened on Broadway. It got rave reviews, ultimately won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and ran for 1,063 performances. Dick Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs “Hey There” and “Hernando’s Hideaway” became number-one hits, and “Steam Heat,” as recorded by Patti Page, reached number eight. The team of Abbott, Adler, Ross, and choreographer Bob Fosse followed up precisely a year later with another huge hit, Damn Yankees, which was also named Best Musical and also had a better than 1,000-performance run.
In November 1955, Jerry Ross died from the lung disease that had afflicted him for years. He was twenty-nine. Variety, in commemorating his passing, credited him and Adler with paving the way for “the current crop of young songsmiths who h
ave been getting their first crack at the legituner field. (Previously, legit producers had turned for the most part to the old pros for score assignments, leaving newcomers little chance to break into Broadway shows.)”
As examples of “the current crop of young songsmiths,” Variety mentioned two teams. The first was Jerry Bock and Larry Holofcener, who, having graduated from Tamiment, were preparing a Broadway show called Mr. Wonderful for Sammy Davis Jr. The second was Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh. Just after the release of “Young at Heart,” the actress Mary Martin and her husband and producer, Richard Halliday, were driving on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. The song came on the radio. The theme of the lyrics fit in too perfectly with the production the couple was planning, a musical adaptation of Peter Pan, with Martin playing the part of Peter. The next day Halliday tracked down Leigh and phoned her in her apartment. As she told a New York newspaper:
“He said, ‘Are you busy now?’ He should have seen me—in my robe, drinking a cup of coffee. He said that he and Miss Martin had heard my song the night before, and right away Mary had said that she wanted whoever wrote those lyrics to do the music for her new show, ‘Peter Pan.’
“Naturally, I thought somebody was kidding. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. So I arranged to call him back at his office, and I did and it was him all right.”
She and Charlap wrote a couple of songs on spec and had a meeting with Martin, Halliday, and the director, Jerome Robbins, a well-respected choreographer who had worked both in ballet and on Broadway, where he was a George Abbott protégé. He and Abbott had ended up codirecting The Pajama Game; Peter Pan would be his first solo credit. Leigh, who had seen only one Broadway musical in her life, was nervous. She sang one of her lines to Robbins: “If I can live a life of crime, and still be home by dinnertime.” That got a nod of approval from him, and the team was hired.
As work on the show continued, Robbins would develop some reservations about Leigh’s lyrics, based on his sense of her as a creature of Tin Pan Alley rather than the stage. He confided to Edwin Lester, Martin and Halliday’s coproducer, that he was concerned about “the tendency of Carolyn’s to always write toward the hit record rather than the situation of the show. She shies away from using Peter and Wendy’s names or specifics that might make the song unusable in general context.”
History has answered Robbins’s doubts. Leigh and Charlap wrote a half-dozen outstanding songs for the production, which was scheduled to begin its out-of-town tryout in San Francisco in July. None became a hit record, and although Peter’s and Wendy’s names aren’t prominent in any of them, all were true to the characters and the show: “Tender Shepherd,” “I’ve Gotta Crow,” “I Won’t Grow Up,” “I’m Flying,” “Hook’s Tarantella,” and a haunting ballad called “When I Went Home,” in which Peter recalls peeking in on his childhood home to find “that somebody else / Was sleeping in my bed.” But history can take a long time to make up its mind. At the time of the San Francisco opening, Variety was unimpressed with the production as a whole and called the score “dull . . . with lyrics to match.” The producers knew something needed to be done, and their answer was to make Peter Pan more of a full-fledged musical than the play-with-music it had been. Rather than call on the novices Leigh and Charlap to generate new songs, they brought in a trio of Broadway and Hollywood veterans: Jule Styne for the music and the team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the lyrics. They had about a week to add new material for the Los Angeles opening in late August.
It was an awkward situation. Leigh and Charlap were on-site and still part of the team, but there were the three newcomers barricaded behind a closed hotel-room door, from which continually emerged the sounds of typing, singing, and muted conversation. Comden, Green, and Styne ended up being credited with a half-dozen songs of their own. One of them stuck in Leigh’s craw. In J. M. Barrie’s original book, Peter Pan’s realm is called “Never Land”—and, for the sake of cadence, the lovely song the new team came up with had an extra word, “Never Never Land.” “We were told to stick to the book,” Leigh complained to her agent, “and forget about writing Hit Parade songs for the show.” Still, almost all of her and Charlap’s songs stayed, with the notable exception of “When I Went Home”—even though Variety’s review of the Los Angeles premiere had singled it out as “the second act socko number.” Martin told Charlap that it had to go because it was “just too sad.” (The song has been recorded only once, by Michelle Nicastro, on Lost in Boston, a 1994 album featuring notable songs cut from Broadway shows.)
The final version of Peter Pan was a happy mix of the two teams’ contributions, and by the time the company hit New York, everyone recognized that good things were in store. Moose Charlap told his future wife, the singer Sandy Stewart, that Richard Rodgers dropped in on a rehearsal one day. After listening for a time, he told Charlap, “My boy, you have not written a score, you’ve written an annuity.” The show opened in October to universal raves, including Walter Kerr’s in the New York Herald Tribune: “It’s the way Peter Pan always should have been and wasn’t.”
Peter Pan could have had a long Broadway run, but Lester and Halliday had accepted an offer from NBC to put the production on live television and stipulated that the show would close by the time of the broadcast. It aired on March 7, 1955, and was seen by an estimated 65 million people: “the largest audience,” according to Collier’s magazine, “ever assembled for anything at any time.”
Richard Rodgers was right: with multiple TV airings in the future, record sales, and never-ending revivals, Peter Pan would be, for all five songwriters, the gift that kept on giving. But for the time being, Leigh’s remuneration was relatively modest. She got an advance of $4,000 for her lyrics, against a payment of 1 percent of the box-office take—roughly $500 a week for a twenty-two-week run; her share of the TV rights was $5,000.
And as successful as Peter Pan was, it didn’t lead to other Broadway offers for Leigh and Charlap—one significant reason being that, as of the show’s premiere or shortly afterward, there was no more Leigh and Charlap. According to the singer Sandy Stewart, who married Charlap in 1957, there was no enmity; the team dissolved because Frank Loesser signed Charlap to develop musicals with lyricist Norman Gimbel, whom he’d signed on to the Frank Music Corp. stable. (That team ultimately reached Broadway in 1958, with a flop called Whoop-Up.)
The change didn’t slow Leigh down. It was a moment when songwriters assiduously played the field, and no one played it more enthusiastically than she. She had a particular affinity for working with older writers; over a period of just a couple of years, she collaborated with such veterans as Sammy Fain, Harold Spina, and Jerry Livingston, plus one younger man, Larry Coleman.*
Most of those composers were affiliated with ASCAP, and as Leigh gained success and experience, her associates in the business knew she was contemplating a switch. Early in 1954, Robert Marks, of his father Edward’s BMI publishing firm, mentioned to her his “hope that you haven’t gone ASC’HAPPY so that we can still have a hit tune together.”
Leigh replied: “No—I haven’t yet gone ‘ASC’HAPPY’ . . . and I don’t know that I ever will. But I haven’t come to that and many other bridges yet—so quote me not, either way.”
As she later described it, what finally brought her to the bridge was the experience of attending BMI’s annual banquet to receive a prize for “Young at Heart.” She later told a reporter that she looked around at the other award winners: “At least one of them, I knew, hadn’t written the songs he was to receive an award for. He was just a blind for the real writer, an ASCAP member reduced to this in order to live. Others weren’t even using their real names. And the songs! ‘Sh-Boom,’ I remember, and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ were two of those which also received awards. What pride could I have in being in that company? . . .
“Anyway, it may sound crazy, but while I was sitting there waiting for the chairman of the board of BMI to c
all out my name and present me with an award, I resolved to get out of there.”
That may be true, but there were also practical reasons to go to ASCAP. Opportunities like the one held out by Loesser couldn’t be pursued so long as she was with BMI. In addition, ASCAP had decreed what Variety termed a “nix” on Broadway collaborations between its members and BMI writers. In May 1955, the publication reported that Leigh had “ankled BMI.” According to the society’s complicated rules, Moose Charlap was slated to get 75 percent of the performance money from Peter Pan. “Miss Leigh frankly attributed her pending switch,” Variety commented, “to the fact that she could no longer find ASCAP writers who will work with her as long as she is a BMI writer.”
An ASCAP publisher, Edwin Morris, set Leigh up with Max Liebman, who had taken his Tamiment revue skills to television, most successfully with Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Emboldened by the TV success of Peter Pan and inspired by the example of Kismet, Liebman was in the process of mounting a series of live television musical “spectaculars,” including The Merry Widow, Heidi, and The Great Waltz; he hired Leigh to provide lyrics to classic compositions in the public domain. The productions weren’t especially successful with the critics or the public, and Leigh grew frustrated. “I am fed up to the roots of my curly locks with dead composers, and want something done about it if I do any more shows for Max,” she wrote to Livingston while working on Marco Polo. “The music is to be based on the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, who, I discover, outside of ‘Scheherazade’ [sic] (which I don’t want to use because it’s too obvious) never wrote more than two consecutive notes of melody in his life.