Happy birthday to the composer Charles Strouse, who this Thursday, June 7th, turns a somewhat improbable ninety. I say "improbable" because his most famous works - the shows and films Bye Bye Birdie and Annie, and even his rock'n'roll girl-group hit "Born Too Late" - brim with the spirit of youth. On the other hand, there's always his somewhat lyrically cranky backward glance for Archie and Edith on "All In the Family" ("Didn't need no welfare state... Gee, our old Lasalle ran great"). Nevertheless, this particular Strouse has outlived all the multitudinous Johanns of the Strauss family, not to mention Oscar Straus, composer of The Chocolate Soldier, which for a while rivaled The Merry Widow as the operetta Silver Age's blockbuster hit. You can still see Charles out and about hither and yon doing his and-then-I-wrote act, and, if he chances to pass through your town, don't miss him, because he's droll and charming as he recounts the highs and lows of the composing life.
The Strouse blockbusters never go away: There was a black version of Annie in multiplexes a couple of years back, and almost everyone I know in my corner of the North Country, from my makeup artist Rachel to my youngest kid, has been in a school production of Bye Bye Birdie. I can't speak for Rachel's production, but my son's, in Eighth Grade, was a bit iffy. Still, for a few weeks, it was fun to drive around and, every time Jack Jones or Louis Armstrong or Matt Monro or some such came on the radio singing "A Lot to Livin' To Do" or "Put On A Happy Face", hear my boy bellowing lustily along.
Why does Bye Bye Birdie make such a reliable school show? Because it's an authentic rarity: As the American musical matured through the Forties and Fifties, what it gained in dramatic heft it lost in youthful spirit. The King And I, My Fair Lady, Gypsy are all great shows, but not young shows. When Birdie opened in April 1960, it had an unaffected energy barely glimpsed on the Great White Way since the Twenties. "Everything about the musical," wrote Kenneth Tynan (mentioned in an entirely different context here) in The New Yorker, "was filled with a kind of affectionate freshness that we have seldom encountered since Mr Rodgers collaborated with Mr Hart on Babes In Arms" - the original "Hey, let's put on a show!" show from over twenty years earlier.
One reason for the different sensibility is that Birdie was a contemporary musical. By 1960, most of the big shows were set anywhere but America in the here and now - Edwardian London, 19th century Siam, 9th century Baghdad... But in 1957 Edward Padula decided he'd like to produce a show "about teenagers". "A teenage musical with a difference," he said, the difference being that these would be nothing like the Sharks and Jets of West Side Story, but a sunnier, more wholesome bunch, as you could kinda tell from his title: Let's Go Steady. A couple of book writers came and went. A young Michael Stewart (who would go on to Hello, Dolly! and 42nd Street) was hired to rewrite. And Padula was this close to signing mega-bankable director Gower Champion - except that Champion thought the story still needed "something more".
The "something more" it needed promptly turned up on the front page of the newspapers: Elvis Presley was drafted, and on September 22nd 1958 sailed to Germany for 18 months with the United States Army. Padula's musical now had a very topical peg: the impact on a group of teenagers in Sweet Apple, Ohio, of the drafting of a big-time rock'n'roller, Conrad Birdie. Let's Go Steady became The Day They Took Birdie Away, and then Goodbye, Birdie, Goodbye, and finally ...well, you can pretty much figure that out.
For the songs, Padula turned to Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, and by the end of April 1960 they were the toast of the town and the hot new talent on Broadway. In fact, they'd been cold old talent writing together, with very little to show for it, for over a decade. At one point in my life, I used to interview Charles Strouse fairly regularly for one reason or another, on radio and TV. He was a very gracious man, considering I was a dork who asked idiot questions. At our very first meeting, apropos his relationship with Lee Adams, he said that a writing partnership is a lot like a marriage. Then he looked at me. "You're not married, are you?"
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"Well, you're a young guy. Alone in New York. You seem to be having a swingin' time." He waved his hand airily. "Don't worry, the producer can cut that bit out."
For some reason, the producer didn't. But I can still hear him saying it in that wry, self-deprecating baritone. At any rate, Charles's point was that a lot of the stresses in a marriage don't come when you're young and penniless, but as you acquire wealth and status, and both parties grow in not always compatible ways. In 1960, a lot of success lay ahead for Strouse & Adams - hit songs like "Once Upon A Time", shows like Golden Boy, the above-mentioned TV theme for "All In The Family". And then in the early Seventies, after one failed London musical, about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, they drifted apart.
In contrast, from their first meeting in 1949 to the opening of Bye Bye Birdie, they stuck together through thin and thinner, even though they had no particular reason to. Until Birdie hit the big time, Adams had a day job as a magazine editor, and Strouse served as in-house pianist to Frank Loesser. Loesser was both lyricist and composer of Guys And Dolls, but he wasn't a very accomplished piano player, and he liked to have an amanuensis on hand. He referred to Strouse as his "little colored boy": To adopt Ted Heath's demurral as Lord Privy Seal, Charles was neither "little" nor "colored" nor a "boy" - he was, in fact, 30. But Loesser was making a mordant allusion to the ancient rumor that Irving Berlin kept a "little colored boy" in the back room to write all his songs.
Rock'n'roll was new to America in 1958, and even newer to Broadway, and Strouse didn't seem the obvious guy to write in that vernacular. He had studied with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, and had no particular interest in Elvis or Bill Haley. So he researched the subject, and he did a good enough job. "Our problem," he said, "was to satirize a kind of music - rock'n'roll - that was so new it was hard to maintain a perspective about it, as we could, say, the Charleston or swing. And not only did we have to satirize it, we also had to use the form for real musical value. In 'The Telephone Hour', we did a kind of fugal development, with real rock'n'roll harmonies and rhythm. In 'One Last Kiss', we satirized it by going overboard, the way we imagined our singing idol, Conrad Birdie, would do it." Other songs were less consciously rocky ("A Lot Of Livin' To Do") but still in a pop form. And, for the grown-ups' point of view, there was "Kids":
Why can't they be like we were?
Perfect in every way
What's the matter with Kids today?
And we should give a tip of the hat to this rhyme:
Why can't they dance like we did?
What's wrong with Sammy Kaye?
What's the matter with Kids today?
That's a good example of what Strouse calls the "journalistic" detail in Lee Adams' lyrics.
While researching rock'n'roll for the purposes of writing a show score, Charles Strouse wound up with a genuine rock'n'roll chart hit. One day early in 1958, Strouse and Fred Tobias were the only two guys to turn up on time for a poker game. Fred was the son of Charles Tobias and nephew of Henry and Harry Tobias, a trio of old-time Alleymen who, between them, wrote "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree", "It's A Lonesome Old Town", "No Regrets", "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days Of Summer", and a bunch of other hits. While waiting for the rest of the boys to arrive for the poker game, Fred Tobias and Charles decided to knock out a song. Fifteen minutes later, they had:
Born Too Late
For you to notice me
To you
I'm just a kid
That you won't date
Why was I Born Too Late?
A few months after the poker game, a girl group called the Poni-Tails put it on the B side of their single, and then a Cleveland disc-jockey decided he preferred the flip side, and Charles and Fred's song wound up getting to Number Seven. Strouse was really born too early for rock'n'roll - June 7th 1928, as we've noted - but "Born Too Late" sold enough to keep him in pocket money while he was waiting for his wannabe producer, Ed Padula, to find an investor willing to write a check big enough to get Bye Bye Birdie into production. He still sings it today. Tim Rice and I were talking about the song eighteen months ago, and Tim mentioned he'd heard Charles warble it during his cabaret act at the Pheasantry in London, just before giving a shout-out to Tim for making the song a hit (which isn't true, as Tim was still in short pants back then. But he did buy the record).
I don't know what Charles Strouse would have done for a rock'n'roll encore, but fortunately his moribund Broadway project rose from the dead. One day, Strouse & Adams were called in to perform their score for Mr Slade Brown of the Brown National Bank of Orange, Texas. Mr Brown liked what he heard, wrote a check for $75,000 there and then, and Bye Bye Birdie was on its way.
Years earlier, Strouse & Adams had spent the summer of 1953 at Green Mansions, a summer theatre camp in the Adirondacks. They had to write one new revue a week and, in the course of churning out song after song after song, Strouse rattled off a few bars for a sketch about comedy and tragedy. When it was over, it occurred to him that that little musical fragment wasn't bad, so he filed it away for possible future use. Charles has done this all his career - Eine kleine trunkmusik, as his contemporary Cy Coleman used to call it, and few trunks brim with as much re-usable material as Strouse's. So, six years later, he dusted off his summer-camp fragment for Bye Bye Birdie. To play the role of Conrad Birdie's manager Albert, Ed Padula had signed a gangly newcomer called Dick Van Dyke, and this song was supposed to be his Second Act showstopper. Conrad has been booked on "The Ed Sullivan Show", and Albert is at rehearsal checking everything's just so, beginning with the microphones. Then he asks the crew to try out different colored spotlights. And, as the spots pick out those distinctive Dick Van Dyke features, he sings:
Gray skies are gonna clear up
Put On A Happy Face!
Brush off the clouds and cheer up
Put On A Happy Face!
And next thing you know the Ed Sullivan stagehands are joining in, and a cast of dozens are prancing all over the stage, and the crowd's demanding 33 encores.
That was the theory. But, at the show's tryout in Philadelphia, there was just a smattering of applause. Nor had the crowd forgotten their indifference by the end: When the cast took their bows, Dick Van Dyke received the least enthusiastic reaction.
As my younger, idiot self asked Charles Strouse many years ago, in the feeblest of feeble questions: "How did you feel?"
"I knew the song had to go," he said, briskly and professionally. It was killing Dick Van Dyke, and he couldn't bear to see it.
But Marge Champion, wife of the director and his former dance partner, felt differently: It wasn't the song, it was the staging. She proposed moving it earlier, to Act One, and having Dick sing it as a chin-up number to two little girls who are depressed that Conrad's shipping out with the army. And then Dick and the girls would do a little tap dance, and the simple charm of the song would be revealed for one and all.
Strouse was aghast. As I mentioned earlier, he'd studied with Copland and Nadia Boulanger, and the idea of making his Broadway debut with anything so crassly obvious as a corny tap-dance with cute moppets horrified him. He insisted again that the song be cut.
But Marge Champion got her way - and everybody loved it. And, actually, the song makes more sense for Dick and the girls than it ever did for Dick and the stagehands:
Pick out a pleasant outlook
Stick out that noble chin
Wipe off that full-of-doubt look
Slap on a happy grin!And spread sunshine
All over the place
Just Put On A Happy Face!
A couple of years back, when Charles Strouse came to write his autobiography, he called it, naturally, Put On A Happy Face, and opened with a Hollywood vignette. As the headline in Variety put it:
Columbia Jets Birdie Boys To Coast To Pen New Title Song
1960: Bye Bye Birdie was a hit on Broadway. 1961: It was a smash in London. 1962: Columbia Pictures were making the movie version, having paid what was at that time a record one million dollars for the rights. So Charles opens his memoir lounging by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, checking out the gals, and reflecting on Bye Bye Birdie as the light at the end of what had been a very long tunnel. And in mid-reverie over the speakers there suddenly came Tony Bennett:
Gray skies are gonna clear up
Put On A Happy Face!
Brush off the clouds and cheer up
Put On A Happy Face!
It's a perfect scene to open Strouse's book, but I have to confess a certain antipathy to Mr Bennett's famous recording. He sings:
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy
It's not your style
You'll look so good that you'll be glad
You decided to smile!
...and thereby muffs an ingenious rhyme. What Lee Adams actually wrote was:
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy
It's not your style
You'll look so good that you'll be gladja de-
cided to smile!
"Tragedy"/"Gladja de-" is just marvelous. It's what they call apocopated rhyming (Lorenz Hart did a lot of it: "Beans could get no keener re-/ception in a beanery.") Years ago in London, there was a spectacularly awful rock musical called Time produced by Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five. It was some sort of space opera featuring, as the intergalactic deity figure, a giant hologram of Laurence Olivier's head with a nostril in the wrong place. It descended from the heavens, as I recall, in a kind of space-age Fabergé egg. Don't ask me why. At any rate, at one point somebody wails the deathless lyric:
Tragedy
Is a malady.
As I left the theatre on the first night, a TV interviewer put it to me that this was rather a profound thought. I replied that, be that as it may, it was a horrible rhyme, and that every true Bye Bye Birdie fan knows that "tragedy" rhymes with "gladja de-". I regret that Tony Bennett, for six decades now, has never been among their number. However, when he re-recorded the song for his inevitable 80th birthday celebrity duets album, his singing partner James Taylor got it right. (Things go less well with Bennett and Rosie O'Donnell.)
Perhaps one of the most charming qualities of that Bennett re-make is that James Taylor reminds you of the song's great strength: it's what Betty Comden liked to call a "singable song" - not just one you enjoy hearing professionally performed, but one that's just great to join in on. "Put On A Happy Face" is less a spectator sport than a participation sport, which is why it's a great favorite for teachers and classes of real, non-Equity kids. It's one of those songs that has a perfect ease: it seems to sing itself - although, obviously, a guy who knows what he's doing with it helps. But everyone from Blossom Dearie to the Supremes has sung it - and why wouldn't they? It's a hard song to say no to. Just a few years ago, Dick Van Dyke re-recorded it with a group called the Vantastix. (He sounds much as ever; it's not entirely clear what they bring to the table.) In the 1970s little Jimmy Osmond sang it in a Kool-Aid commercial, and for once you want to say, "Keep drinking the Kool-Aid." Oh, and it was used less appealingly in a medicinal advertisement:
Cold sores are gonna clear up
Put On A Happy Face!
My favorite commercial use of the song was a British make-up ad from the late Eighties: A young woman staring straight to camera as if into a mirror and applying her lipstick and liner as an instrumental version of "Put On A Happy Face" played out in time to her nose-wrinkles and lip-purses. Wonderful.
Strouse & Adams have come a long way since that opening night - notwithstanding a clumsy 1981 sequel, Bring Back Birdie, that flopped on Broadway after just four performances. I would guess weekly TV exposure brought Adams' lyric to "Those Were The Days" into more homes than ever heard "Put On A Happy Face". And Annie was an even bigger Broadway blockbuster for Strouse than Bye Bye Birdie. But this is where it all began for them - at the Martin Beck Theatre in April 1960. We will have another Strousian for you next week, and we are glad to see that on this ninetieth birthday Charles still has a hap-hap-happy face of remarkably youthful mien. It's an easy song to mock, but I notice that, whenever folks do (as in the "Simpsons" episode where Homer & Co sing it to Ned Flanders) they can't quite disguise that they're really enjoying themselves. By the end, you don't have to put on a happy face. The song's done it for you. So take off that gloomy mask of tragedy - it's not your style:
And spread sunshine
All over the place
Just Put On A Happy Face!
~Charles Strouse is one of many legendary Broadway composers from Leonard Bernstein to Andrew Lloyd Webber Mark talks to in his acclaimed romp through a century of showbiz, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. Personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
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