The Letters of Frank Loesser
Broadway’s golden age and Frank Loesser Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
Do you recall those musicals from the golden age of Broadway and their evergreen songs? Have you heard Frank Sinatra’s rendition of the 1944 Christmas hit Baby It’s Cold Outside? Were you ever entranced by Danny Kaye’s performance in the 1952 film Hans Christian Anderson, and his interpretation of those magical songs, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘Thumbelina’, ‘The Inch Worm’, ‘Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen’ and ‘Anywhere I Wander’? Did the 1950s song ‘if I Were a Bell’ from Guys and Dolls put a spring in your step? Perhaps the melodies ‘On a Slow Boat to China’ and ‘I’ve Never Been in Love Before’ have tugged at your heartstrings?
If so, you’re familiar with a tiny smidgin of the musical heritage that composer and lyricist Frank Loesser has bequeathed to our world. Aside from his celebrated and globally successful Guys and Dolls and Hans Christian Anderson, Loesser wrote the music and lyrics for several critically acclaimed musicals, including How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Most Happy Fella, and The Music Man.
Celebrated in the United States and acknowledged internationally for his melodic invention and superb lyrics, with glossy productions on both sides of the Atlantic, Frank Loesser was also a prolific letter writer, corresponding with the great names that lit up Broadway through its golden decades. His letters are, preeminently, an honest expression of his cultural Jewish identity and family background, as well as an insightful evocation of his creative and artistic life and frenetic lifestyle. They also comprise a record of his astute business connections and enterprises in music publishing and his generous mentoring of other composers and lyricists with whom he interacted, giving timely advice in lengthy communications. Altogether, his letters reflect his multifaceted life, his love for his many friends, and his respect and affection for his wide circle of professionals in the musical theatre sphere. His correspondence also reflects the changing times and many challenges to which he adapted with mercurial speed.
The Letters of Frank Loesser are edited by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield and an authority on Broadway; and Cliff Eisen, professor emeritus of music history at Kings College London. Together, they have amassed a definitive compilation of Frank Loesser’s letters, exhaustive in its scope and monumental in size, totalling 646 pages. This tome will delight music historians, producers, students and scholarly aficionados of the great age of American musicals and its dazzling cast of personalities in musical theatre and ancillary industries. These letters constitute primary sources that bring readers as close as possible to the main cast of well-known and lesser-known characters, as well as the stars and starlets who shone in Loesser’s firmament.
Frank Loesser’s daughter, Susan Loesser, describes this book as ‘A tribute not only to Frank Loesser but to the inner workings of Broadway’. She adds that the cast of The Most Happy Fella gave her father a gift engraved ‘to Frank: God, genius, and monster’. The ‘monster’, however, is absent in this correspondence; Loesser is consistently kind and, while brutally honest, is never cruel and is a salutary critic of performances and productions. This book reveals Loesser as warm, affectionate, cordial and exhaustively supportive of his many mentees, while thriving as an obsessively gifted and brilliant musician, and an equally driven and talented businessman.
There are early letters to family members such as Loesser’s older half-brother, the renowned classical pianist Arthur Loesser, Frank’s mother Julia and his first wife Lynn; letters to friends including celebrities such as Groucho Marx, Sammy Davis Jr, Cole Porter, Rosalind Russel and Frankie Lane; and detailed observations, instructions and notes to assorted business associates and connections in the musical theatre world at home and abroad. The latter features correspondence with luminaries such as Richard Rogers, Harold Prince, Samuel Goldwyn, Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Hoagy Carmichael and Jerome Robbins. These can be brief but there are also extremely lengthy letters, which are consistently cordial, correct, honest and direct, and generally signed off with love.
In an age when the inbox has replaced the post-box, Frank Loesser’s epistolary relationship with his family, friends and professional clients and associates seems monumental. Through his letters, he comes alive, engaging animatedly with his world and now, through this book, with new generations of Broadway enthusiasts. This book is less a ‘selection’ of letters than a comprehensive and major compendium of Loesser’s correspondence that speaks to his passion and professionalism, his superb gifts as a composer and lyricist, his wide-ranging personal connections and business contacts; and his generosity in nurturing, through expansive letters, his many friendships and trusted connections. Not all the letters are of comparable interest—I failed to engage with the letters covering commercial contracts and dealings but recognise that these reinforce his competency in that sphere and might well appeal to readers with different and specific business and production interests.
On 28 July 1969, aged 59, Frank Loesser died. His obituary in the New York Times quoted his friend William Schumann, ‘You can’t be condescending about Frank’s musical genius. He was one of the greatest songwriters the United States has ever produced. His songs were authentic Americana’.
There are eight pages of archival photographs, which include the souvenir program for Loesser’s army musical Skirts: An All-American Musical Adventure in 15 Scenes. The caption notes: ‘As well as writing songs for patriotic films and shows, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, on 7 December 1941, Loesser wrote “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”, one of the most popular Second World War songs’, which sold more than 2.5 million recordings and more than 759,000 copies of the sheet music. The editors, who have kept their linkage text between letters to a minimum, provide detailed and informative footnotes throughout, as well as a useful index.
The Letters of Frank Loesser
Edited by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and Cliff Eisen
Yale University Press, New Haven and London
2025
