Frank Loesser in TIME Magazine
Author: Richard Corliss
TIME magazine article: When Betty Got Frank
This week Richard Corliss writes a wonderful tribute to Betty Hutton, and a review of her career reviews from TIME. He tells of the rise and fall of the ultimate brassy musical comedienne, and posits that the only match for her as a writer was Frank Loesser (motto: LOUD IS GOOD).
Writes Corliss, "If there was one Hollywood figure who appreciated Hutton's talents, and who matched her drive with his, that would be Frank Loesser. As lyricist or total songwriter he authored dozens of movie hits before graduating to Broadway and composing the scores for Guys and Dolls, A Most Happy Fella and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He's also the subject of a toe-tappingly terrific new bio-doc, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser. But in the '40s he was under contract to Paramount, and there he wrote many of Hutton's signature songs.
They had a lot in common, these two brash kids who, early in life, felt unappreciated for the special talent they knew they had. Betty's railroad brakeman father left their Battle Creek, Mich., home when she was two, and killed himself 14 years later, leaving $100 each to Betty and her elder sister Marion. "Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start," Mrs. Thornburg told TIME in 1950. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister." Marion would become a band singer of moderate repute under the name Marion Hutton. She never achieved her sister's volcanic success. Yet it was Betty whose career was one long, desperate plea for the love she felt she never got at home.
As I wrote in a 1991 TIME tribute, Loesser was born into an educated German-Jewish family that prized classical music; his father was a piano teacher, his brother Arthur a keyboard prodigy and later a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music. To the Loessers, popular music was infra dig, but Frank loved it. Like the cantor's son in The Jazz Singer, or pert Owl Jolson in the Tex Avery cartoon I Love to Sing-a, he had to battle his family's resistance to mainstream pop. Indeed, Loesser's nearly operatic score for The Most Happy Fella might have been his way of saying, Papa, can you hear it? Arthur, can you see it? I made real music!
Not that Loesser was as needy as Hutton; nobody could be. A Runyonesque character like the ones he put into Guy and Dolls, he was the classic little guy buoyed by an irrepressible belief in himself. With oceans of vim and a tough demeanor, Loesser was known to insult co-writers and directors and blow his top at rehearsals. He once got so mad at the way Isabel Bigley, Guys and Dolls' original Sister Sara, was mangling one of his songs that he socked her. Yet under the Cagney bully-bravado shone a big heart and the impulse to help other young composers. Among Loesser's proteges: Jerry Ross and Richard Adler, who did The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, Meredith Willson of Music Man fame and Hello, Dolly!s Jerry Herman.
You can hear all of Loesser's smarts and sparks in Guys and Dolls — fast and forceful, perennially revived and the one period musical that never loses its topicality. That show exemplifies the credo Loesser lived by: "LOUD is good." Which echoes in a comment Hutton made in the TCM interview: "Oh, I couldn't sing good, but boy, I sure sang loud!" Talk about true minds meeting: Loesser was just the fella to put funny words in her big mouth."
read the full story in this week's TIME
Related link (will popup in a new window):
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,16...
