The closest I ever got to Betty Comden was in 1979, when I just missed a matinee of ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the musical that she wrote with life-time collaborator Adolph Green and composer Cy Coleman. When star Imogene Coca took time off, Betty Comden filled in. A friend of a friend who saw her that week, commented that she looked "petrified."
She was probably out of practice. In the Thirties, she and her pals Judy Holliday and Adolph Green wrote comedy sketches and song parodies because it was their only way to get on stage -- a very small stage at a cabaret, "The Village Vanguard." Holliday went on to become a beloved star, but Betty and Adolph kept getting turned down for performing gigs while they were chosen for writing scripts. When their buddy Lenny Bernstein asked them to write a musical play based on his ballet FANCY FREE, they wrote ON THE TOWN with parts for themselves.
From that time on, they were writing scripts and lyrics. In Hollywood, they wrote the script for that epitome of movie musicals, SINGING IN THE RAIN. On Broadway, they wrote scripts for the kinds of shows that filled theatres in the 50s, when costs were low, front row seats cost under $12, and creators were putting shows up and taking them down at a rate of one or even two per year. That is to say, these shows were flimsy and disposable, fun and light, not built to last. Does anyone remember their Fifties and Sixties shows SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING? DO-RE-MI? FADE IN, FADE OUT? BONANZA BOUND? Comden and Green wrote most often with Jule Styne, and none of their shows has been revived except PETER PAN and BELLS ARE RINGING (short-lived revival in '02). Another show with Bernstein, WONDERFUL TOWN, had more success, but only marginally, two years ago. By the late Sixties, Comden and Green's style seemed dated. Their attempt to be "with it" was a musical with an all-black cast starring Leslie Uggams, HALLELUJAH, BABY -- not a good experience, Styne said, years later. They wrote script-only for a big hit, APPLAUSE.
But Comden and Green weren't nonplussed. At least in public, they always remained the wide-eyed college graduates who were being allowed to play theatre with the professionals. I saw them on a Public TV talk show with composer-conductor Andre Previn, when they gleefuly challenged him to name any symphony by any composer, and they would be able to perform the tune of the third movement (usually the least flashy and least remembered part). And they did.
I got to know them through an LP called "A Party with Comden and Green," a Christmas present from Mom and Dad in 1977. In their "Party," recorded live, they joke through a retrospective of their career. The mood turns a bit more somber when they introduce some new material for a revue they wrote with Cy Coleman. Evidently, that revue was focused on the world of the near-future. For it, they wrote lyrics for a dissonant waltz called, "The Lost Word":
What was that word they wrote songs about?
Wrote poems about?
What was that word that made strong men weak?
And weak men strong?
...What was that word like a lightning flash,
That could change a life at first sight?
It's a lost word, from a lost world,
A powerful word from a lost world.
It had magic. It had music.
But it's vanished away. . .
I always guessed that this song expressed the regret of three Broadway vets who were feeling that America had passed them by. They wrote the lyric in the mid-70s, seeing how our culture had turned cynical about all our institutions including marriage. Obviously, the works of Stephen Sondheim spoke to such disillusionment. (They admired Sondheim unabashedly, and, in 1985, performed in an all-star symphony orchestra performance of his FOLLIES).
Through all this time, Betty and Adolph were happily married (not to each other), and they met every morning from the early 1940s to his death in 2002. Betty remembers that they would discuss possible projects, or just gossip. Eventually, with composer Cy Coleman, they found their footing again, under direction by Sondheim's collaborator Harold Prince, to create ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, in which they re-imagined the nineteenth century operetta as a smart, glittering Art Deco farce. The oversized characters sang big-voiced songs with lush orchestrations. Even the love duet "Our Private World" was really a display of the two leads' narcissism. Later, the three collaborated again on THE WILL ROGERS FOLLIES, which made no impression on me when I saw it in 1992 (I think).
Of all the lyrics they wrote, a few remain as standards, and a few more are standards among the cognoscenti. "Just in Time" and "The Party's Over" from BELLS ARE RINGING, with "Make Someone Happy" from DO-RE-MI are in the first group, as "Lucky to Be Me" and "Lonely Town" are in the second.
But Comden and Green's "special material" numbers are what make them special, and those, alas, can be appreciated only in context. A song for a lead-foot woman cabby seducing the tourist sailor away from his outdated guide book. . . a dance for down-on-their-luck stock investors. . . a French lesson that turns into a love at first sight. . . a duet for the back-up singers of a sister trio ("The Banshee Sisters") whose lead singer has run off with all the words . . . an actress with two scripts in hand, choosing between the roles of a gin-soaked divorcee or saintly Mary Magdalene. . . a roomful of people with nothing in common trying to make "nice talk." These flights of fancy were their specialty.
These were hard-working, self-disciplined people whose work always expresses one thing: the joy they took in making it. In words that Betty Comden wrote and also sang with Adolph Green:
Fame, if you win it,
Comes and goes in a minute.
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to?
. . . Make someone happy,
And you will be happy, too.
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