Birthday Girl: The Dame

Insofar as a force of nature can have a birthday, Dame Shirley Bassey is doing so even as we speak - 81 going on eternal.

Birthday Girl: Hallelujah, Betty

Basya Cohen was born 96 years ago today, in Brooklyn.  Over the following nine decades, she turned herself into Betty Comden, one of the brightest lights of Broadway and one of a small handful of people - many of them, like her, self-created, smart, funny women of unconventional good looks - who can be considered quintessential New Yorkers.  And of all the strange and wonderful things I've gotten to do in my own five decades to date, knowing and working with her is one of the two or three things of which I'm proudest.  It wasn't for all that long - three or four projects over five or six years - but I had the incredible good fortune to watch her at work, in tandem, of course, with Adolph Green, and I did my best to make myself both useful and unobtrusive, both of which I think she appreciated.

Eventually I made the decision to leave New York, and that meant leaving behind Miss Comden and the others of her extended circle with (who am I kidding? for) whom I worked.  I decided that as tempting as it was, being the Nice Young Man who helps out in a pinch was not a long-term career strategy, and that all the exciting opening nights and terrific travel, the enviable Rolodex and the easy familiarity with people whom I was raised from earliest childhood to revere, wasn't a trade-off, long term, for one's own life.  It was a wrench, and it's been sad ever since to watch them go, one by one, while I've been on the other side of the world.

Not long ago, though, I ran into someone from those days, a man who is now a Power to Reckon With, in fact, in rarefied circles of High Kultcha.  He was surprised to find me, a former Nice Young Man, way out in the Sandlands, and we had a long and surprisingly philosophical chat over drinks, at one of the silly places here sixty-odd stories up looking out at the sand and dust and distant water.  I told him that, wonderful as it had been, I had seen too many too-old people still trying to be Nice Young Men, and I thought it might be soul-killing.  He looked at me thoughtfully, a look you've seen in the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section, and told me something very nice:  he remembered me, he said, because he was backstage at some rehearsal once, when I was working for a friend of Miss Comden's, a very great figure indeed who was revered for his art and notorious for his fondness for the young and handsome.  He was standing with a couple of the hard-boiled old timers who do the heavy lifting of making art look easy - lawyers, producers, managers, the unsung backstagers - and one said to the other, watching me be a Nice Young Man to, at the moment, a very tetchy and impatient legend, "well, if nothing else, I'm glad he finally hired one who could type."  Meaning, he said, one who wasn't pretty and useless and in it for the room at the Four Seasons or the table at Le Cirque.  "I thought," he said, "You'd probably do fine."

I have.  I still regret Miss Comden, though, and I hope that she had, through those later years, a Nice Young Man to keep things humming for her.  She deserved it.  "Make someone happy," she wrote, "Just one someone happy."  As far as that goes, that's me.

(Hmmmm.  I just checked, and apparently I used the self-same title for a birthday post for Miss C. in 2009.  I stand by it, though, both as a little play on one of her lesser shows and as a fine expression of how I feel about her.)

Birthday Girl: Hallelujah, Betty

The glorious Miss Betty Comden would have been 93 today, and we're all the poorer that she's not.

Broadway fame is funny; in the world I grew up in - country club society in Middle America in that most Middle American of times, the '60s (and there's a paradox for you - it wasn't all Hair, you know), Betty Comden was someone Capital-F-Famous - the name conjuring up all things New York, Broadway, the Great Wide World out there. She was out on the town, read about in the columns with her friends - people like Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall...

I wanted to grow up and be part of that world, and in a way, for a while, I did. They had gotten older, as one does, but there still was a Comden and Green, and they were still pretty much what they'd been. If the world had moved on around them, they didn't mind; they could still get the best table at Sardi's, they still got admiring glances and the occasional ovation when they entered a room. It was nothing but a privilege and pleasure to know them.

Today, even though their most famous works are still very much with us - Singin' in the Rain is more or less the standard movie musical, even for people who never watch such things - they are inevitably receding, turning from the stuff of reviews and gossip columns to citations in memoirs and history books. No matter. Miss Comden is with us always, as she would have liked to have been (like many great dames, she was also surprisingly shy), in her work.

The best of Comden and Green ranks with the best lyrics in the American songbook (and even the quotidian is far above the norm). It's when those lyrics move beyond the comic, the verbal slapstick, to something deeper and more moving that I think we see Miss Comden's hand in the always shared BettyandAdolph brew that the two writers, working together for so many decades, concocted.

I hear her in "The Party's Over", and "Some Other Time", and the song I think she might have liked best:

Make someone happy,
Make just one someone happy,
Make just one heart the heart you sing to.

One smile that cheers you,
One face that lights when it nears you,
One man you're everything to.

Fame, if you win it,
Comes and goes in a minute.
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to?

Love is the answer:
Someone to love is the answer.
Once you found him, build your world around him,

Make someone happy,
Make just one someone happy,
And you'll be happy too.

I got to be backstage once, yonks ago, at a Major Gala Event (in London, darling - oh, I get around). Such a gala, in fact, that the producers had brought on board a legion of hair-and-makeup types to show off the various Great Ladies present to best advantage. I was working, and running about, and one of my tasks was to bring Miss Comden and Mr. Green to the stage, which was always a rather delicate job - neither moved quickly, and both (but especially the latter) were inclined to get caught up in conversations en route.

I found Miss Comden in a corner, staring intently into a mirror. The armor of her Comden-ness - the changeless hair, the slim column of a crepe evening gown - was all in place, and she was ruthlessly finishing off her makeup. Seeing me, she observed, via the mirror, "The poor girl. I couldn't bear to tell her," swiping at one eye with a thick black pencil, "She spent forty five minutes telling me how she wanted to make me look natural," whoosh goes the black pencil over layers of taupe and beige and careful neutral tones, "If I wanted to look natural," out comes a scarlet lipstick, thoroughly applied over the pale coral-pink before she gives herself a final admiring glance, "I would've stayed in Brooklyn."

Aren't we lucky she didn't?

Pick a Card...

...any card, from the dainty hand of silent screen siren Carmel Myers, one of the era's more plausible vamps.

Carmel Myers fun fact: she was a cousin of our beloved Broadway Lady Betty Comden!

And now is the time on the Café Muscato when we namedrop: I know this because Miss Comden told me so herself. We haven't always been stranded out here on the Indian Ocean, you know!