Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (18 page)

Freedland points out in his book that Congressman John Rankin made a speech denouncing Communism and consisting almost entirely of Jewish names. He read many of the real names of those changed by Jewish performers, as if to implicate some secret agenda, as opposed to not wanting to appear too ethnic for fear of not getting work. Freedland also mentioned Larry Adler, a blacklisted musician who recalled a letter from Rankin that started with the words “Dear Kike,” a derogatory term for Jews, which emanated from the Jewish immigrants who used to sign their name by drawing a circle, rather than an “x” which was too much like a cross. The Yiddish word for circle was keikl, so they became known as Kikes, much as other minorities were given other names, most of which were later considered derogatory.

While Broadway was not a direct target, being much smaller than the Hollywood studios, the effect was felt by the absence of performers and playwrights. However, unlike the studio system, where the Jewish executives were being scrutinized and feared for their own businesses, Broadway producers had greater freedom to hire as they chose. As a result, blacklisting, while having an effect, did not have the same impact as it did in Hollywood.

Nonetheless, the question still persists: were the anti–Communists going after the Jews? While stories of anti–Semitism were less prevalent in the 1950s than they were in the 1930s, there are several valid statements and numbers to support such arguments that the Hollywood Jews were indeed very much a target of the witch hunt and that blacklisting was a means of getting prominent Jews out of the industry, even if only temporarily.

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Jews on Broadway

Mega Hit Musicals

Despite McCarthyism and the Cold War, the 1950s featured some of the most triumphant musicals in Broadway history, and the Jewish influence upon these shows was quite significant.

The decade was ushered in with the smash hit,
Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes
, which opened in December of 1949 at the Ziegfeld Theater. It ran for over 700 performances and featured Carol Channing. Jule Styne, born in London to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, wrote the music for the show. Styne took to the stage at the age of three and learned piano on a rental. By the time he was ten, his family had moved to Chicago, and Styne had become quite accomplished on the piano and was performing with major symphony orchestras. After attending Music College in Chicago, he would embark on a music-writing career. Styne, despite being an early protégé, had his first Broadway hit while he was in his 40s, teaming with Sammy Cahn on a show called
High Button Shoes
starring Phil Silvers.

Two years later, he would collaborate with Leo Robin on
Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes
, from the 1926 Anita Loos novel about the roaring 20s, with Robin providing lyrics. Styne would write music for
Peter Pan, My
Sister Eileen
and
Bells Are Ringing
in the ’50s, and continue a long career writing for Broadway and leaving a legacy of over 1,500 songs including

“Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,”

“Every thing’s Coming Up Roses,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and the Streisand hit from the early 1960s, “People.”

Less than a year after
Gentle Prefer Blondes
, in November 1950,
Guys
and Dolls
opened its run of over 1,200 performances with George S.

Kaufman directing. While the show did enjoy great success, it did not hit Broadway as originally planned.
Guys and Dolls
was originally supposed to be a serious romantic musical based on a short story. However, after Frank Loesser wrote the music, and 11 librettists tried unsuccessfully to pen the lyrics, producers Cy Feuer and Earnest Martin brought in a radio/television comedy writer named Abe Burrows. The result was a musical that evolved into the comedic classic. Burrows went on to win a Tony Award. He also went on to direct Cole Porter’s classic
Can Can
in 1953 and write the book for
How to Succeed in Business Without Really
Trying
, again winning both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize. A prolific writer, 104

5. From Communism to the Catskills

with a knack for comedy, Burrows was also called in as a script doctor on a number of other Broadway shows.

The mega-hit musical of 1951 was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
The
King and I
, with Jerome Robbins as choreographer. The show ran for 1,246 performances. While
Can Can
trumped all musicals from the class of ’53, Weill’s
Threepenny Opera
opened in ’54 and posted more than 2,600 performances, featuring over 200 actors in the show’s 22 roles during its long run. Another major musical of the era emerged in 1955

as an adaptation of the Douglass Wallop novel,
The Year the Yankees Lost
the Pennant
. The story of a middle-aged Washington Senator’s fan who sells his soul to the devil to beat the New York Yankees ran for over 1,000

performances under the name
Damn Yankees
and defied the long-standing theory that a show about baseball would never last. The Jewish team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross supplied the music and lyrics for the show, which featured a book by George Abbott. Learning from their men tor Frank Loesser, the young writing team went from obscurity to success with the song ironically called “Rags to Riches,” a chart-topping hit for Tony Bennett in 1953. They would move on to Broadway in the same year, first with a revue and then with the hit musical
The Pajama
Game
which opened in 1954, featuring the proactive show-stopper

“Steam Heat.” The team moved right to
Damn Yankees,
which debuted on Broadway a year later. Sadly, their collaboration would come to an abrupt end with the sudden death of Jerry Ross at just 29 years of age.

Adler continued a long successful musical career, but never quite enjoyed the notoriety of the two Broadway musicals he had written with Ross.

In 1956, Weill’s
Threepenny Opera
would be topped by a record-set ting 2,717 performances of
My Fair Lady
, directed by Moss Hart and produced by Herman Levin, a Jewish Philadelphia-born attorney who turned to theater in his 40s.

The musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion,
was first offered to Rodgers and Hammerstein, who turned it down. It would later go to the musical team of Lerner and Loewe. The classic story was that of a professor, Henry Higgins, teaching a poor flower girl, Eliza Doo little, how to speak proper English, while making a lady out of her, only to see the student excel beyond the hopes of the teacher. That, however, was only part of the tale. The romance that ensues was the last piece of the puzzle added to Shaw’s original work, and the rest was his-105

Jews on Broadway

tory. After nine years on Broadway, six years on tour, plus a London production, a blockbuster film and several revivals,
My Fair Lady
would clearly be enshrined as one of the legendary shows of all time.

For Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick “Fritz” Loewe it was the crowning achievement in a stunning career. Lerner, born in New York in 1918, and brother of the founder of the Lerner Stores, Alexander Lerner, was the grandson of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. He had an interest in music from an early age, starting to play piano, and taking lessons, at the age five. After his parents divorced, he went to plays frequently with his father, which was something he enjoyed very much. By his teens, Lerner was quite proficient at music and an excellent student. He attended The Juilliard School of Music and Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1940. Lerner went on to write radio advertising but always wanted to try his hand at theater. Just two years later, the opportunity would present itself when he met Frederick “Fritz” Loewe in New York City in the Lambs Club, a theater club established in the 1870s. Loewe, some 14 years older, had already achieved some minimal success on Broadway with a show called
Great Lady
, which ran for a few weeks in 1938.

The son of a well-known Austrian operetta tenor, Loewe came to America at the age of 20 with his father, and, like Lerner, he had started playing piano by the age of five. He had already enjoyed a huge hit song in Europe, called
Katrina
, by the time he arrived in the United States.

His initial attempts to make it as a performer in the U.S. were unsuccess -

ful, so he took on a series of odd jobs while still writing songs in hopes of making a splash on Broadway.

It was the chance meeting of Lerner and Loewe that would set the wheels in motion for this significant writing team that would follow the likes of the great musical teams of the ’30s and ’40s. After two less-than-stellar shows with short runs on Broadway, they hit their stride with
Brigadoon
in 1947, which opened at the Ziegfeld Theater and ran for 581

performances. The unusual story about a couple of tourists who stumble upon a Scottish town that reawakens once every hundred years was a hit largely because of the fabulous Lerner and Loewe score.

After some Hollywood screenwriting success, the duo returned to Broadway with the musical
Paint Your Wagon
, which opened in late 1951

and ran at the Shubert Theater for 289 performances. Then came
My
106

5. From Communism to the Catskills

Fair Lady
, which ran for more than nine years.
Gigi
and
Camelot
followed, the latter having a run of 873 performances, cementing Lerner and Loewe as Broadway legends. Interestingly,
Camelot
did not receive favorable reviews by the critics. In an age long before the Internet or viral marketing, there was one recourse to take following such negative reviews.

Moss Hart, who co-produced the show with Lerner and Loewe, managed to book the stars — Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet —

on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, television’s most important place to be seen.

Lerner and Loewe also went on the show and as a result ticket sales soared and
Camelot
was a hit. It was, however,
My Fair Lady
that immortalized the team of Lerner and Loewe forever.

The second half of this amazing decade for musicals continued with a show called Bells
Are Ringing
which began a run of over 900 performances with Jule Styne, Comden and Green and Jerome Robbins among those credited with creating this hit musical about a friendly phone oper-ator who falls for an unknown caller and ends up romping around New York with him. The star of the hit musical, Judy Holliday, born Judith Turvin, was a Jewish actress and favorite of Comden and Green. Holliday was born to Zionist/socialist parents and grew up with left wing political views that would also lead to her being questioned by the Senate Subcommittee as part of the anti–Communist crusade, resulting in her being blacklisted for several years. Holliday had come to prominence in 1946

in a show called
Born Yesterday
written by Garson Kanin, who had collab -

orated on several screenplays with his wife, Ruth Gordon. Kanin would later direct
The Diary of Anne Frank
and co-direct
Funny Girl
with Jerome Robbins. Holliday had tried making a name for herself in Hollywood before the 1952 blacklisting. The Theater Guild, producers of
Bells Are
Ringing
, was more sympathetic to the plight of such blacklisted performers than many of the Hollywood producers, who were fearing for their own jobs. As a result, the Theater Guild, along with Robbins, who served as director and knew the power of the anti–Communists, was more than happy to cast Holliday in the leading role. She went on to win a Tony Award for her efforts and was later cast in the film version of the musical as well.

While one blockbuster musical typically abounded each year in the

’50s, 1957 saw two shows that would become classics open within two months of each other in the fall.
West Side Story
opened at the Winter 107

Jews on Broadway

Garden in September, and
The Music Man
followed in December at the Majestic. A modern day
Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story
was originally supposed to be
East Side Story
, about an Irish Catholic girl and a Jewish boy. The four Jewish boys at the helm of this production — Leonard Bern stein, Jerome Robbins, Steven Sondheim and Arthur Laurents —

how ever, could not find enough time in their busy schedules to work together in the early 1950s and get the project off the ground. By the time they all cleared their respective schedules, they thought the story about a Polish boy and Puerto Rican girl would be timelier, and so the classic musical began to take shape.

For Stephen Sondheim,
West Side Story
was the huge break he had been hoping would come along. Born in New York City, Sondheim would later move to a farm in Pennsylvania, where he would grow up with his mom after his parents’ divorce. Estranged from his father and wanting nothing to do with his allegedly psychologically abusive mother, Stephen was essentially on his own as he headed into his career as a lyricist. Sondheim’s first work for Broadway,
West Side Story
launched a career that would continue with two more major hit shows,
Gypsy
and
A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. Despite a disastrous flop called
Anyone Can Whistle
, Sondheim went on to team with Harold Prince on several musicals in the 1970s and then continued on his own with hit shows such as
Sweeney Todd.