Adolph Green, Broadway Playwright, Dies at 87
By RICHARD SEVERO OCT. 24, 2002
Adolph Green, the playwright, performer and lyricist who in a six-decade collaboration with Betty Comden was co-author of such hit Broadway musicals as "On the Town," "Wonderful Town" and "Bells Are Ringing" and the screenplays for "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon," died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Ms. Comden and Mr. Green wrote the words for much of the Broadway show music written by Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Cy Coleman, André Previn, Morton Gould, Saul Chaplin, John Frank and Roger Edens. Some of the songs were woven so tightly into the fabric of the musical that they were not readily selected by popular singers and thus did not become well known to the general public. Others, however, became standards. They included "Make Someone Happy," "Just in Time," "The Party's Over" and "Never Never Land," with music by Mr. Styne; "New York, New York (a Hell of a Town)," "Some Other Time," "Ohio" and "Lucky to Be Me," with music by Mr. Bernstein.
In addition to their writing, they performed their own material in nightclubs, on concert stages and on television They appeared on Broadway in "A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green" in 1958 and in the revival, in 1977. The reviews were effusively good, and Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, said that they "have never lost their freshness, and it is plainly their intention, growing older, never to grow old."
In show business, where hyperbole can flow thick and fast to describe successful partnerships neither as enduring nor productive as theirs, Comden and Green were beyond adjectives; they were in a category that only they occupied. There was no other team that could match both their quality and productivity over so many years. They were, as The Chicago Tribune noted in 1990, "unchallenged as the longest-running act on Broadway."
Mr. Green was artistically incomplete without Ms. Comden and vice versa. They both knew it and acknowledged it frequently. "Alone, nothing," Mr. Green once told The Washington Post . "Together, a household word, a legend, Romulus and Remus, Damon and Pythias, Loeb and Leopold — Mr. Words and Miss Words."
Mr. Words and Miss Words were so professionally inseparable, so committed to each other, so pleased to have their unique relationship and so happy to talk about it, that many people thought they were married. They were never married and, according to statements they gave to interviewers, never even considered the prospect. Ms. Comden became the wife of a businessman, Steven Kyle, in 1942 (four years after she and Mr. Green embarked on their collaborative effort) and was happy to remain that way until Mr. Kyle's death in 1979. Mr. Green had two unsuccessful marriages before marrying the actress Phyllis Newman in 1960.
Mr. Green is survived by Miss Newman and by a son, Adam, and a daughter, Amanda, both of Manhattan.
Throughout his working life, Mr. Green deferred to Ms. Comden and credited her with being the cause of the team's success. She was always "unforgivably responsible," he told The New York Herald Tribune in 1961. "She is always on time for everything, while I am late for anything. To make matters worse, she invariably appears at, say, producers' conferences, with our latest work of dialogue or lyrics neatly typed and arranged in readable form." He added that "without directly confronting me with my inadequacies, she has always humiliated me fair to distraction. You see, I have lived for years in the shadow of an overwhelming suspicion that all our collaborations have, in reality, been solo efforts, written in toto by Betty alone — an untenable position for me."
Ms. Comden said she wasn't the secret to the team's triumphs; they were. "Everything is together," she explained. "We don't divide the work up. We develop a mental radar, bounce lines off each other." She said that she could not envision a life without the collaboration. Years after it all started, she confessed that "we can still be delighted by something the other says or does."
Styne, who was always pleased with the lyrics they wrote for his songs, called Ms. Comden "realistic" and Mr. Green "dreamistic."
Whoever did what, it was a relationship the critics began raving about in 1938, shortly after a mutual friend named Judy Tuvim, soon to translate her name from Hebrew to English and become Judy Holliday, suggested that they all form some sort of cabaret act. They did, and called it the Revuers. Since they had no money to pay for words and music, Comden and Green created their own, a singular instance in their relationship when they took full responsibility for the music as well as the words.
They opened at the Village Vanguard, a little place downtown owned by Max Gordon (no relation to the rich and famous Broadway producer of the same name). He didn't have a liquor license and felt he needed a little something to entice people to his place, which he saw as one of the last remnants of the Greenwich Village bohemia that had flourished a couple of decades earlier. The Revuers, who included John Frank and Alvin Hammer in addition to Ms. Holliday, Ms. Comden and Mr. Green, opened at the Vanguard in 1939 and, to Mr. Gordon's delight, his business flourished and he was delivered from penury.
A frequent visitor to the Vanguard in those days was a young Harvard graduate named Leonard Bernstein. He hung around so much, playing the piano for the Revuers and so obviously enjoying himself, that the customers thought he was Max Gordon's paid accompanist. There was good reason to believe this, for when the Revuers moved to the Blue Angel, which is what Mr. Gordon called his less bohemian place uptown, Mr. Bernstein appeared there, too, and pounded the piano with great gusto and expertise.
In truth, Mr. Bernstein earned not a dime for his performances. He was an old friend of Mr. Green's, the two having met in 1937 in summer camp. Mr. Green, three years out of De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx and trying to cope with the Great Depression, was trying to be a counselor. Mr. Bernstein, in between semesters at Harvard, was the camp's music counselor and undisputed music authority.
Adolph Green was born in the Bronx on Dec. 2, 1914, the son of Daniel and Helen Weiss Green, both Hungarian immigrants of modest means. He went to public schools, where he wrote poetry and acted in plays and developed a strong reading habit, which was not reflected in his grades.
He quickly became aware of his estimable ear for music, which enabled him to memorize whole symphonies, concertos and tone poems, and he whistled them wherever he went. After he graduated from high school, he took to hanging around the theater district, and daydreamed that one day, he might make a pretty fair character actor.
He met Ms. Comden while he was an undergraduate at New York University, majoring in drama. At the time, he was looking for work in a Depression that seemed to have no end. They were part of a group of young people who were interested in the arts and these associations led to the creation of the Revuers. It was a curious thing about the Revuers: when they worked in one of Max Gordon's places everyone loved them, but when they were booked elsewhere, as in the Rainbow Room, they bombed. Comden and Green began to wonder what would become of them.
"On the Town" was followed by an especially productive period, which included the book for the 1953 Fred Astaire movie "The Band Wagon," with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz.
On Broadway in those years, Comden and Green lyrics were heard in "Two on the Aisle," a Jule Styne musical with Bert Lahr (1951), and the musical version of "My Sister Eileen" called "Wonderful Town," in which they were joined by Mr. Bernstein. That 1953 hit starred Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams. The following year they heeded Mr. Robbins's call for help and revamped "Peter Pan," contributing "Never Never Land" and "Wendy" and assuring that Mary Martin's return to Broadway for the first time since "South Pacific" would be felicitous (1954).
Two years later they teamed up with Miss Holliday, Mr. Styne, Mr. Robbins and Bob Fosse for what many theatergoers remember as one of their finest efforts, creating both the book and the lyrics for "Bells Are Ringing" in 1956. For their old friend Miss Holliday, they polished their particular comic talents — always their strong suit — added some poignancy and wrote such memorable songs as "The Party's Over," "I'm Going Back" and "It's a Perfect Relationship."
Among their other musicals were "Do Re Mi" (1960); "Subways Are for Sleeping" (1961); "On the Twentieth Century" (1981) and "The Will Rogers Follies" (1991). They also wrote the book for "Applause," the 1970 hit Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical starring their friend Lauren Bacall that was based on the film "All About Eve."
They also wrote the screenplay for "Auntie Mame" (1958), which brought them together again with Miss Russell.
Sometimes success didn't appear that way at first. "Singin' in the Rain," for example, did not win rave reviews from all quarters when it was first released. It received only two Academy Award nominations — one for supporting actress (Jean Hagen), the other for its score and songs (mostly the work of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown; Comden and Green wrote the lyrics for one memorable song, "Moses Supposes.") Their screenplay was not mentioned very much, although much later, critics came to regard the movie as one of the best musicals ever made.
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