Arthur made several musicals at
Paramount, which put him i touch with the composers who came out from New York.
Our house became a gathering place for them. I had a fine piano, a medium grand
Steinway handmade from pearwood. My mother was always very fussy about pianos
nothing but a Steinway would she ever touch. One night Richard Rodgers, Jerome
Kern, George and Ira Gershwin fought for that instrument, practically knocking
each other down getting to the piano. One would get up and another would jump
in. They played and played. Augustine Lara, the Mexican composer, was there. He
sat in absolute ecstasy at this display of musical wealth. The talent good
Lord! But we really had a musical theater then.
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Dick Rodgers played a beautiful
piano, which is not always true of composers. We had become friends making Love
Me Tonight and stayed friends through the years. I would always see him and
Dorothy when they came out to California. Besides that marvelous Love Me
Tonight score, he wrote a song for Manhattan Melodrama, which, after several
changes of lyrics by Larry Hart, became "Blue Moon," a very New York
song. It has a quality about it that is the city at night. He played those and
other songs at my house always his own songs, of course, vying with his peers
for that pearwood piano.
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Jerry Kern came into my life
while composing that lovely score for High, Wide and Handsome, one of Arthur's
Paramount musicals. He was dear and diminutive, with an impish sense of fun. I
adored him. Sometimes I'd come home from the studio in the evening and find him
sitting on our front porch. He would drive up from his house in Beverly Hills
and just wait for us. Once, planning to surprise me, he climbed into an
enormous ceramic jar on the porch and got stuck. We had one hell of a time
extricating him. Arthur and I, with some of the servants, had to overturn that
heavy thing and pull, coax, and squeeze, nearly breaking his little bones. This
was Jerry, full of whimsical pranks to relieve what seemed a constant flow of
creativity. He worked late at night, which was hard on his wife, a lovely
woman, patient; they all had to be, married to those mad men. As he composed by
an open window one night, a bird's insistent call annoyed him. "Close that
window!" he shouted to his wife. "It's driving me crazy." But
the birdcall came back to haunt him, and, dozens of melodies later, it became
the first seven notes of "I've Told Every Little Star." Beautiful
melodies poured out of him.
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James Kotsilibas-Davis &
Myrna Loy (Myrna Loy ¨C Being & Becoming) 1987
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