The Wall Street Journal-20080202-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Baby- He-s Gold Inside- Composer Frank Loesser Might Not Be a Household Name- but His Music and Lyrics Still Glitter
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Baby, He's Gold Inside; Composer Frank Loesser Might Not Be a Household Name, but His Music and Lyrics Still Glitter
Full Text (1530 words)Frank Loesser
By Thomas L. Riis
Yale, 332 pages, $40
FRANK Loesser isn't as famous a songwriter as Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, but, unlike them, he's apparently responsible for this whole clash-of- civilizations thing. A few decades back, a young middle- class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:
"The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . ."
Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight- Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was "Baby, It's Cold Outside," written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film "Neptune's Daughter." Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.
I'm a reasonable chap, and I'd be willing to meet the Islamists halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like burqas for women, nuking the Zionists, beheading the sodomites and whatnot. But you'll have to pry "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without Frank Loesser and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" would be very cold indeed.
Loesser isn't a household name, but he wrote household songs ("Two Sleepy People," "Heart and Soul") and household shows ("Guys and Dolls," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"). Had he enjoyed a typical American life-span, he'd have keeled over in the late 1980s. Instead, he died of cancer at 59 four decades ago, and as a personality is something of a blur even to showbiz buffs. Somewhere or other, I have a demo record he made of the songs he wrote for the film "Hans Christian Andersen." Once you've heard Loesser growling: "The king is in the altogether / But altogether, the altogether / He's altogether as naked as / The day that he was born," the Danny Kaye version will always seem weedy and insipid. Loesser sounds like a gangster who's somehow managed to infiltrate the palace.
The gangster in the palace is now the hustler in the conservatory; he's the scrappy ambitious subject of Thomas Riis's "Frank Loesser," the fifth entry in Yale University Press's important and valuable "Broadway Masters" series of musicological studies. Loesser is an unusual choice for the series when you consider that his quartet of predecessors are Richard Rodgers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg. All four are far more obviously "composers," men who think in staves. Loesser is a songwriter: He started in the early 1930s as a Hollywood lyricist who fitted words to other men's music and somewhere along the way discovered that he no longer needed the tune guy and could handle the whole thing in-house. But it seems to me his approach to the entire business is the opposite of a Romberg or Lloyd Webber:
First, Loesser had a genius for song ideas -- "I'd like to get you / On a slow boat to China." That was an expression used by poker players to refer to guys who lost steadily and reliably. Not until Loesser did anyone think: "Hey, there's a love song in this."
Second, he also appreciated, as Mr. Riis notes, what his brother, Arthur, called "the power and pleasure that comes from well-chosen words." In "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?," the "well-chosen words" are: "Ah, but in case I stand one little chance / Here comes the jackpot question in advance." Loesser was sure enough in his choices to know you could put a slang phrase like "jackpot question" on those dreamy notes and make it seem the height of romantic love.
Third, he understood how "well-chosen words" should be sung, which is why eventually he no longer needed anyone to supply the notes. If you listen to, say, Dinah Shore or Peggy Lee or k.d. lang sing "I Wish I Didn't Love You So," the plaintive ache in that title phrase is one of the very best unions of words and music in the repertoire.
My sense of Loesser is that, unlike a Lloyd Webber, he comes at the music from the song idea and how best to serve it. Mr. Riis has a fascinating section on "Loesser and Counterpoint," in which he notes the number of contrapuntal tunes in the composer's catalog: "Contrapuntal," at least for Broadway's purposes, means two or more singers singing different things on top of each other. For example, Loesser's marvelously inspired opening to "Guys and Dolls" -- the "Fugue for Tinhorns" -- has a trio of gamblers each boasting that he's "got the horse right here." In a way, it's a brilliant musicalization of the source material -- a "Broadway fugue" is the perfect musical equivalent of the stylized vernacular Damon Runyon used in the stories that inspired the musical. But Loesser is not driven by the same motivations as Bach.
Mr. Riis hits on a much more illuminating term when he refers to Loesser's fondness for "interruptive duets." In "Guys and Dolls," Adelaide and Nathan Detroit finally get their big love song, after a fashion. She unleashes a blizzard of machine-gun nagging: "You promise me this / You promise me that / You promise me everything under the sun." But then the small-time, no-account crap-game promoter interrupts her twittering with a big broad legato protestation: "Call a lawyer and / Sue me, Sue me / What would you do me? / I love you."
Which is the point: Basic boy-meets-girl but tailored to the specifics of this particular boy and girl. Mr. Riis compares "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to "Mozart's celebrated seduction duet 'La ci darem la mano'" and calls it "a model of monomotivic development." But you feel Loesser got closer to it when he said he liked to write songs in "concurrent speech." In other words, whether Mozart works better as a "seduction duet" depends on who's got whom on whose bearskin rug, but clearly "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a seduction duet rendered in the American vernacular, in musicalized "concurrent speech."
Thomas Riis is the Joseph Negler Professor of Music at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and, as you'll have gathered, his is a scholar's approach -- heavy on the tonic pitches and plagal effects and ostinatos. He wraps up his disquisition of "Guys and Dolls" with the critic Walter Kerr turning to his wife, Jean, halfway through the first act and saying: "Am I wrong or isn't this the greatest musical we've ever seen?," at which point you find yourself thinking that the Riis prose might benefit from occasional lapses into the Kerresque. Still, the professor gives us a solid overview of an underappreciated talent. I would have liked a little more on the pre- Broadway years. (Set to Burton Lane's melody, the word "nonchalantly" in "Moments Like This" -- "Nonchalantly, we dine and we dance" -- conjures an entire era.) But Mr. Riis's work will be invaluable for anyone seeking to understand an American composer whose stature will surely increase over the decades.
The musical genius in the family was supposed to be Frank's brother, Arthur, "the apple of his parents' eyes," who became a concert pianist and wound up at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Asked for insights into his kid sibling's great success, Arthur was wont to sound faintly snippy: As a teenage pianist, he said, Frank "acquired a habit of letting his torso go into light spiral tantrums while playing. I understand that this type of bodily symbolism used to be quite de rigueur in representative boogie-woogie circles."
By contrast, writing to Arthur as a young man struggling for a break in the music biz, Frank was under no illusions about his "trade": "I said 'trade.' It is no art. I found that out. It is all contact, salesmanship, handshaking, etc. -- not a bit different from cloaks and suits or any other industry."
And yet from his trade Loesser made great American art. The artist in him expanded the bounds of our musical theater, and the tradesman in him knew when to just get on with it. To return to a number I mentioned earlier, let me end with Loesser and the all-time greatest verse to any popular song:
There is no verse to this song
'cause I don't want to wait a moment too long
To say that . . .
I'd like to get you
On a slow boat to China . . .
Brilliant.
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Mr. Steyn is the author of "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" and "Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now."
