The bad news is, according to my old chum Cameron Mackintosh (producer of Cats, Les Miz, Phantom of the Opera, etc), there'll be no live theatre until next year. The good news is that the milkman is back - as fresh daily dairy delivery direct to your doorstep suddenly seems like an idea whose time has come, after having gone some decades back.
So the good news is I'll no longer have to explain the sole anachronism in a favorite song of mine:
Goodnight, baby!
Milkman's on his way!
Then again, the bad news is everything else in the song is suddenly anachronistic:
Come on along and listen to
The Lullaby of Broadway
The hip-hooray and ballyhoo
The Lullaby of Broadway...
Whatever happened to that?
Aside from mourning the loss of live entertainment and celebrating the return of the milkman, I have another reason for being partial to "Lullaby of Broadway": my book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight never directly mentions the song, except for two oblique references, one on page 152 and the other bang on the front cover:
When a Broadway baby says goodnight
It's early in the morning...
In all the reviews, I believe only one critic so much as mentioned the provenance of the title, and that had to wait till the US edition was released in 1999, when The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley observed:
As its title immediately makes plain, Steyn knows his Broadway musicals well; the title comes from Al Dubin's lyrics for 'Lullaby Of Broadway', from the Hollywood musical Gold Diggers of Broadway, a musical now so obscure that Steyn himself doesn't mention it. Details such as that, no matter how small, Steyn mostly gets right. But on the big stuff he is inconsistent at best, firing off judgments this way and that, hitting the occasional bull's-eye but discharging the occasional dud as well.
Oh, my. Still, this is no time to start nitpicking with dear old Yardley. The only reason I didn't mention "Lullaby Of Broadway" is that I forgot. I'd meant to put it as a quotation right at the front of the book, but I must have been washing my hair or walking the cat the day Faber sent the proofs round and, what with one thing and another, I didn't notice that I'd failed to include it. And by the time the Washington Post review rolled up I'd concluded it was cooler to assume everybody got it. Which was just as well, as the opportunity to demonstrate that he was hep to the allusion was evidently for Yardley the book's chief virtue. I owe the title to the long-serving Literary Editor of The Spectator, Mark Amory, who appended it to a column of mine years and years ago, and it tickled me at the time, and stuck with me. I agree with Ira Gershwin:
A title
Is vital
Once you've it
Prove it.
In the case of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, the title was certainly vital, and I did my best to prove it. It's been very good to me these last twenty-three years. It's also been good to Tony Bennett. A few years back, on The Dennis Miller Show, I mentioned that, just before airtime, my daughter and I had been in Starbuck's and she'd idly picked up that week's Bennett celeb duets CD with Lady Gaga, John Legend, Diana Krall, whoever, and said, "Dad, Tony Bennett's like the duet slut, isn't he?" Hard to disagree. But this one's not bad - made with the Dixie Chicks just before they quit the music biz to wage war on the Bush regime:
As Jonathan Yardley correctly identifies, the words come from Al Dubin, but the tune is by Harry Warren. Who? Well, Harry Warren is probably the most successful songwriter ever to be totally unknown. He's not a household name, but he has a gazillion household songs: He wrote "Lullaby Of Broadway", "You'll Never Know" and "On The Atchison, Topeka And Santa Fe", just to name his Academy Award-winners ("Ah, I use 'em for doorstops," he'd growl - though, as he once told the uni-garlanded Dorothy Fields, "Walk two Oscars behind me"); oh, and also "Jeepers Creepers", "I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo" and "That's Amore", just to name some of his other Oscar nominees; and also "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me", "With Plenty Of Money And You", "You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby", "September In The Rain" and "I Had The Craziest Dream", just to name a handful of his dozens of Number Ones. In the Twenties, he composed big Tin Pan Alley pop hits like "Nagasaki"; in the Thirties, the first of four great American train songs, "Shuffle Off To Buffalo"; in the Forties, the song that earned Glenn Miller the world's first gold record, "Chattanooga Choo Choo"; and in the Fifties, protean Italiano ballads like "Inamorata". In the Sixties, Chris Montez had a hit with "The More I See You", and in the Seventies Art Garfunkel with "I Only Have Eyes For You". In the Eighties, his score for 42nd Street provided Broadway with one of its few homegrown hits on an otherwise Lloyd Webberized Great White Way, and in the Nineties his big orchestral theme from An Affair To Remember did most of the heavy lifting for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless In Seattle. And we haven't even mention "Lulu's Back In Town" or "Serenade In Blue" or "There Will Never Be Another You" - or our Song of the Week #13, that wonderfully evocative slice of Americana, "I Found A Million Dollar Baby (In A Five And Ten Cent Store)".
Between 1935 and 1950, Harry Warren had 42 Top Ten hits. The only other composer to come close was Irving Berlin with 33. But everyone knows Irving and no-one knows Harry. You could understand why, during the Second World War, Warren would occasionally remark, "They bombed the wrong Berlin." ASCAP, the society for composers and lyricists, had a big gala for its star writers at Lincoln Center in New York and, as Warren told Max Wilk, "I arrived in a tuxedo at the door, and the fellow stopped me. He didn't stop the other people. He stopped me. He said to me, 'Where are you going?' I said, 'Where the hell do you think I'm going?' That's the story of my life." Literally. On the very first record of a Harry Warren song - "Rose Of The Rio Grande", recorded by Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra in 1922 - they left his credit off the label.
So why isn't Harry Warren a household name? Well, for a start, too many households already have his name or something similar pinned on their mailboxes, whereas how many Gershwins do you know? Or, come to that, Berlins or Kerns. Harry Warren was born Salvatore Guaranga in Brooklyn on Christmas Eve 1893, and you can't help thinking he'd have been better off sticking with that. But by the time Tuti (as he was known to his parents and siblings) started school, the family name had been Americanized to "Warren", and Salvatore was registered in class as "Harry". Nothing to stop him changing it again, of course. But he didn't. And Ira Gershwin's admonition that "a title/Is vital" goes not just for songs but for songwriters, too. (Harry Warren and Ira Gershwin wound up writing a score for Astaire and Rogers, by the way.)
But there's another reason why he didn't become famous. Years ago, I asked Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady and Gigi and Camelot, why some composers and lyricists were known to the public and others weren't. Leo Robin had just died and I thought it sad that a fellow who'd written "Thanks For The Memory" and "Blue Hawaii" and "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" and (with Harry Warren) "Zing A Little Zong" wasn't more celebrated. And Alan said: "Well, they know the writers who write for the theatre. Because the theatre is a writer's medium. You go to see the new play by so-and-so. But film is a director's and the stars' medium. And so that's why the public doesn't know the songwriters in Hollywood." Warren started in Tin Pan Alley, but dreamed of crossing the tracks to Broadway. Then Wall Street crashed, and put a lot of producers out of business at exactly the same time Hollywood was converting to talking pictures. It proved to be a second California gold rush: For New York songwriters in 1929, "taking the Chief" - the train to the coast - was a welcome escape route from the Broadway drought. That was the year Harry Warren was dispatched to Los Angeles by Warner Brothers to write a handful of additional songs for a film called Spring Is Here. He returned to New York, wrote a few numbers for a couple of revues, but Warners talked him back west for his first full score for what would prove a landmark in film musicals, 42nd Street.
It also marked the beginning of his partnership with Al Dubin, who was born in Zurich but by the time Warren hooked up with him looked like a parody of a Tin Pan Alleyman: a big, big cigar-chomper of a guy. They met at Lindy's. "Al was a large man with an enormous appetite," said Warren. "He loved good food. Eating was an avocation with him, and he spent a lot of time seeking out restaurants." And that wasn't as easy as it sounds in the Los Angeles of 75 years ago. "The railway station was a wooden building," Warren recalled, "and there were very few places to eat. Hollywood looked to me like a small town in South Dakota, and when you finally got to Warners' studio in Burbank it was like being on an Indian outpost."
But 42nd Street was a hit, and then came Gold Diggers Of 1933 and Footlight Parade and Dames, and Warren and Dubin were suddenly the hottest team in town, even if one of them couldn't stand the town. "Al and I were always arguing about the relative merits of New York and Hollywood," he told his biographer Tony Thomas. "I still hated it out here and talked all the time about New York, whereas he enjoyed the California life." That's where "Lullaby Of Broadway" came in. Warren and Dubin were writing the songs for Gold Diggers of 1935, the first picture to be directed entirely by Busby Berkeley, who'd been hitherto confined to just the dance numbers. The plot's something about a summer resort where Dick Powell's the penniless desk clerk, and Gloria Stuart's the heiress he's in love with, and Adolphe Menjou is a maverick Russkie impresario staging a charity show at the joint. Don't worry about it. What matters is the numbers - especially this one:
Come on along and listen to
The Lullaby Of Broadway!
The hip-hooray and ballyhoo
The Lullaby Of Broadway!
That's the line I quote on page 152 of Broadway Babies: "The hip-hooray and ballyhoo." Isn't that terrific? For a guy born in Switzerland, Al Dubin certainly mastered fluent American. When I was a teenager and just starting to pick up on the words of songs, that was one of those lyrics that seemed to offer a glimpse of a whole alternative vernacular universe. Harry Warren had written the tune with no words, no title, no clear idea of what it would be about or how it would be used in the film, but he gave it to Al Dubin and a few days later he got a call. "I know how you still miss New York," Dubin told him, "and this song is just for you. Come on down and I'll show it to you." So Warren drove down to Malibu and Dubin showed him the lyric, a valentine to the New York Harry Warren missed so much:
The rumble of the subway train
The rattle of the taxis
The daffydils who entertain
At Angelo's and Maxie's...
Warren loved it - which is more than Jack Warner did when Harry played it for him. The tune was okay but not all that lullaby-of-Broadway stuff. "Tell Al to write a new lyric," Warner ordered. And for the first time in his life the famously shy Warren put his foot down. "I'll write you a new song," he said, "but I won't divorce this lyric from this melody." So the song stayed. In Gold Diggers of 1935, it's used for a kind of film-within-a-film, a self-contained sequence that goes on forever and ever. If you watch those Warners pictures from the early Thirties now, you realize they were more or less inventing the conventions of the film musical as they went along. Most of the plots were the usual backstage yarns, so the songs were generally performed as songs from a show the characters were rehearsing or auditioning for or going along to see. The curtain would rise and someone would start to sing and next thing you know there'd be hundreds of dancers and vast art deco sets stretching back into the distance and huge geometric patterns of chorines on lily pads opening and shutting their legs like novelty nut crackers and filmed by Busby Berkeley from overhead. And, of course, no real theatre stage, even in the biggest house on Broadway, can offer anything like that. Yet with "Lullaby Of Broadway" Berkeley determined to surpass anything he'd done before. He took his cue from these lines:
When a Broadway baby says goodnight
It's early in the morning
Manhattan babies don't sleep tight
Until the dawn...
Busby Berkeley was the most literal of directors. If you wrote "By A Waterfall", he showed you the waterfall, which seems reasonable. If you wrote "I Only Have Eyes For You", he showed you hundreds of eyes and dozens of lookalikes of the "you", which seems a little weirder. So for "Lullaby of Broadway" he created a vignette drawn from that quatrain: A Broadway baby, played by Wini Shaw, who sleeps all day and parties by night. My old BBC comrade Russell Davies called it "the noisiest lullaby in motion picture history", but that's the point. It's a lullaby for the city that doesn't sleep - or didn't until the Covid closed it down:
The band begins to go to town
And ev'ryone goes crazy
You rock-a-bye your baby 'roun'
Till ev'rything gets hazy
'Hush-a-bye, I'll buy you this and that,'
You hear a daddy saying
And baby goes home to her flat
To sleep all day...
It's a simple swinging tune full of rhythmic energy and repeated notes, but ingeniously constructed. Only after 24 bars of musical partying does Warren give us anything approximating a lullaby:
Goodnight, baby
Goodnight, milkman's on his way
Sleep tight, baby
Sleep tight, let's call it a day
Hey!
And back to the party. Busby Berkeley staged it with Wini Shaw and Dick Powell and hundreds of unrelenting tapping dancers in a demented expressionist nightclub located somewhere round about Rainbow Room height. For once, those cineaste comparisons between the regimented Berkeley choruses and Leni Riefenstahl at Nuremberg don't seem overheated: the dancers are robotic and anonymous, and the song ends with Wini Shaw not calling it a day but sleeping the big sleep, as she plunges from the nightclub window high atop Rockefeller Center or some such to the pavement below. Wow. The sequence is an amazing synthesis - of music, drama, Berkeley's choreography, George Barnes' photography. There's nothing like it. Here's merely the final third:
But at its heart is a great song. The Dorsey Brothers had a Number One with it in 1935, and a generation later Tony Bennett revived it, with some Fifties lyric amendments:
The band begins to go to town
And ev'ryone goes crazy
You rock-a-bye your baby 'roun'
To Ellington and Basie...
On that remake with the Dixie Chicks, Bennett jumbles up his tenses, putting the lyric in the past and introducing a lot of clunky extra syllables - "Manhattan babies didn't sleep tight". But the Chicks aren't bad. In the Seventies, somewhat improbably, the Wini Shaw original, direct from the soundtrack of the movie, made the British Top Ten, and around the same time - on the B-side of her hit revival of "The Continental" - Maureen McGovern did a rather cute double-tracked version of the song beginning with the introduction, "Ladies and gentlemen, the McGovern Sisters!"
Yet the song's greatest moment was still to come. In 1980, at the very end of his life, Harry Warren, a Californian faute de mieux, finally had the bona fide Broadway hit that he'd wanted half-a-century earlier. Gower Champion and David Merrick took the old film of 42nd Street, ransacked the rest of the Warren & Dubin catalogue, and got a big gold-plated New York stage smash out of it. Along the way the librettists Mark Bramble and Michael Stewart wrote what can stake a claim to be the all-time greatest song cue. The plot's the same as the movie - a neophyte gets her big break on the Great White Way: "You're going out there a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!" But there are complications along the way and at one point little Peggy Sawyer determines that showbusiness isn't for her and she's going back to hicksville, and amidst the hi-de-hi and boop-a-doo of the midtown hubbub the crazed director Julian Marsh looks at her and demands to know how she can turn her back on "the two most glorious words in the English language: musical comedy". And then he extends the thought:
Come on along and listen to
The Lullaby Of Broadway!
The hip hooray and ballyhoo
The Lullaby Of Broadway!
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight is an elegy for a lost world, but in the decade since there've been moments when I'm in a joint on the other side of the planet and a pianist will play a Harry Warren tune or a singer will sing an Al Dubin lyric, and you can almost believe the night is young and the milkman won't be on his way for hours:
Sleep tight, baby
Sleep tight, let's call it a day!
Listen to the lullaby of old Broadway!
As for Harry Warren, the song worked out pretty well for him. In 1935, it was nominated for an Oscar - and won, only the second song to be so honored. But some things never change. "At the Academy Award show," he said, "I had trouble getting past the guard."
~If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we have a mini-audio companion, a bonus Song of the Week Extra, midweek on our Coronacopia edition of The Mark Steyn Show - and sometimes with special guests from Mark's archive, including Eurovision's Dana, Ted Nugent, Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits, and Paul Simon.
Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we've done the same for our musical features merely to provide some mellifluous diversions in the Land of Lockdown. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Randy Bachman to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's lyrics, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from house arrest without end.
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you disagree with any or all of the above, feel free to squelch the old hip-hooray and ballyhoo in our comments section. As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges. Please stay on topic and don't include URLs, as the longer ones can wreak havoc with the formatting of the page.
