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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now, the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. This is the second of a five-part program paying tribute to composer Harold Arlen. Arlen wrote the classic movie score to The Wizard of Oz and composed countless unforgettable melodies like Stormy Weather and Get Happy. This program was guest-hosted by Ken Bloom and featured commentary by Arlen biographer Ed Jablonski. It originally aired in July of 1982.

[0:44] Paul Lazarus: In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was a look dawn of something shocking, but now God knows anything goes. This is a rare tape that you've gotten from Mr. Arlen that was done, what, on a wire recorder at his house? No, not his house. It was the house of a screenwriter named Sonia Levine, who was responsible for this, let's see, the script of Delicious, a Gershwin musical of no repute, and also another movie called Rhapsody in Blue, which hadn't too much speaking, but she was a delightful, interesting woman who had parties in her home. These were not on wire. These were on little tiny seven-inch discs so that the quality is dreadful. So they would have been somewhere after George Gershwin's death, so I think it was sometime around 1938, and at times I'm surprised at actually what it picked up.

The only thing is, I think it runs out somewhere near the end and it comes up again. Sometimes they turn their faces away from the mics and you can't hear them, but the various people that are heard, let's see now, you hear Ira Gershwin trying to get people to do I Can't Get Started to the point where he even hums it because he figured nobody knew it. You hear Yip Harburg occasionally interrupting, and also there's a man named Doc McGonagall, Harold refers to as Doc, who is the most vociferous and the loudest. He must be closest. I think you also hear Mrs. Arlen, Anya Arlen at one point, asking if they will do Sitting on a Fence, and then I think Ira Gershwin teases her a little about singing an obbligato, because in one of the shows that they had written, Yipper, Ira, and Harold, I think it was Life Begins, I'm not sure, Anya had a little singing role in that where she sang an obbligato, and Ira sings it for her.

So you hear all these people carrying on and having a lot of fun. It's also a rather charming song. The lyric is by Ted Kohler. It's never been published, and it's very typical Arlen. Also, I say it becomes quite a boisterous party. I think near the end it's Yip Harburg who says, we've run out of beautiful phrases. Typical Yip.

[3:07] Ken Bloom: You got the copy here?

[3:08] Paul Lazarus: Yeah, I got it.

[3:09] Ken Bloom: Okay, I'm excited. Wait a minute. When? Why not do that now?

[3:14] Paul Lazarus: No, no, no, I want the rumba.

[3:15] Ken Bloom: Huh?

[3:16] Paul Lazarus: No, not the rumba. What do you want to do, Ira?

[3:19] Ken Bloom: I can't get started with you.

[3:31] Paul Lazarus: Well, what should we do now?

[3:32] Ken Bloom: Sitting on a Fence.

[3:37] Paul Lazarus: Huh?

[3:38] Ken Bloom: Sitting on a Fence.

[3:39] Paul Lazarus: Really?

[3:40] Ken Bloom: Yeah, we like the song and sing it.

[3:42] Paul Lazarus: What's it? What you're talking about, you're right. What is sitting on the fence?

[3:47] Ken Bloom: It's a song, Harold.

[3:48] Paul Lazarus: Oh, it's sitting on a fence. And we joined in the other day on the second chorus, and it's very skeptically, you know.

[3:54] Ken Bloom: Oh, I see. I know, I know. Lanny, how about you? Huh?

[3:59] Paul Lazarus: Oh, Annie, you do an obbligato later.

[4:06] Ken Bloom: Well, it looks like we're stuck.

[4:19] Ken Bloom: Sitting on the fence.

[4:36] ♪ Musical number: "Sitting on the Fence" — performed by Doc McGonagall ♪

[7:27] Paul Lazarus: An interesting thing about the party tape is that these people were all friends. Arlen has home movies of them all swimming together in different pools throughout Beverly Hills, whereas composers nowadays don't seem to know each other very well. I don't think anyone in Beverly Hills knows one another. They have all these police going around and whatnot. No, it's a whole different milieu. Also, songwriters hung around with songwriters, and directors was a whole very stratified kind of so-called culture or subculture. You didn't belong to certain ones unless you got invited to certain parties. After most of these people originally knew one another in New York, because once the musical scene moved from New York because of partly the depression and how the musical theater had shrunken, and suddenly Hollywood became the center with all those Rogers and Astaire movies and Warner Brothers things.

That same group moved out there, and they just continued to be friends. I think it was kind of a New York thing. The move to Hollywood was really not very happy. One of the reasons that Harold got there was the popularity of Stormy Weather led to his doing a score for the movie Let's Fall in Love. He and Kohler couldn't wait until they got back because they got the usual Hollywood treatment. They wrote five or six songs, and three were in the movie. So they were happy to go back to the gangsters that ran the Cotton Club. But eventually it all shrunk here, and they headed back because the contracts were great. But composers were very rarely well-treated. After all, they had starlets. They didn't need these guys, and they had grips.

People who ran the cameras were more important sometimes, and people who had the money. I mean, Harry Warren once told me a story about the time. I think it may have happened to him, but I'm not sure. But it was a songwriter came in, and there was this president of the company sitting there and saying, well, you know, this isn't such a bad song, but I think you ought to change this here, and you ought to change this word there. Now, the guy couldn't read music, let alone English, generally. And so Harry stood up all as high as he could, and he says, what do you mean? What are you telling me? He said, how can you do that? So the studio head looks up at him, he says, because I'm sitting here, and you're standing there.

And that was the attitude. And when Harold moved out there in the 30s, when he and Yip Harburg moved out to do some little things for Warner Brothers, he eventually got to the point where he said, I'll do what they ask, and I'll hope for the best. And that's what he did. But most of the movies he did were really quite insignificant as films. He was lucky he had some good singers occasionally. And the two major movies, of course, was The Wizard of Oz and A Star is Born. But then he did great scores for Blues in the Night, and a lot, just a lot in common with you. Sky's the Limit. Sky's the Limit. So he just decided he wouldn't, especially eventually when we get to it, the problems with The Wizard of Oz.

So he just, you know, he contributed a few songs, and sometimes he'd do a whole score, and just go back there living the good life by the pool and photographing all his friends splashing around and just hanging around with his dog.

[11:10] Ed Jablonski: And his friends. The parties were wonderful, where they'd carry on, have fun. But in general, I'd say most of them were very lucky. I think in the beginning of the Rogers and Astaire thing, Berlin and Kern, the Gershwins are lucky a couple of times. By the time Harold got to Astaire, there was no more Rogers. But is there anything, you say, happiness, this thing called, Joe? Yeah, we're going to hear that first. We're going to hear a recording that Ethel Waters made on The Tonight Show when Steve Allen was the host. And then after that, we're going to play Fancy Meeting You, Dick Powell singing that. Well, Fancy Meeting You was an earlier one from one of the early Warner Brothers movies. It's a lovely song.

Now, our happiness is a thing called, Joe, is rather interesting in the sense that it was a song interpolated into a movie that had originally been a very important and very fine Broadway show. And Vernon Duke was the composer. I think the story is that the reason he didn't add... I don't know why Hollywood has to get a score and then throw half of it away and then get someone else to do it, except to fulfill contracts or something. But I think Duke may have been in the Coast Guard or the Navy or something. So Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote some very fine songs. Happiness, this thing called, Joe, is certainly one of their very best. So if you and your accompanist, Reginald Beender, are ready, we're all waiting for Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe.

[12:41] ♪ Musical number: "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe" — performed by Ethel Waters ♪

[15:48] ♪ Musical number: "Fancy Meeting You" — performed by Dick Powell ♪

[18:11] Ed Jablonski: You are listening to Anything Goes featuring a tribute to composer Harold Arlen. Next, we're going to be hearing In the Shade of the New Apple Tree, followed by some selections from The Wizard of Oz, Over the Rainbow, sung by Mr. Arlen, and If I Were King of the Forest from the soundtrack recording. Ed, why don't you tell us a little bit about The Wizard of Oz and the making of the movie.

[18:33] Ed Jablonski: Well, this is a classic score. Harburg and Arlen got to do this movie a little bit on a fluke. What happened is MGM had bought the rights to The Wizard of Oz as a movie for Shirley Temple. And I think the main leader in the parade for writing the score was Jerome Kern. And so it just happened, though, that Arthur Freed, who was really the musical director, although he was given a somewhat lower title, happened to be in New York and he saw Hurray for What. And in it was a song called In the Shade of the New Apple Tree. And he felt, and he was a very good musician and had written a lot of good songs on his own, so he knew his stuff. He wasn't like the guy who says, I'm sitting here and you're standing there.

So he said, this song has the quality that I feel would carry this whole score, this lightness and this fun and unusual melody and whatnot. So he approached Harold and Yip to do it. And sure enough, they did get the job. However, it turned out that the last, really the last song that was written was Over the Rainbow because they needed one great big splashy song, what Harold felt was a great big one, because he felt all the little ones, he calls those lollipop songs, Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead and all these other things. He said he needed a large one, a grand one. So one day he was driving along Sunset or one of those streets, and all of a sudden he stopped the car and it was near Schwab's Drugstore, a very famous landmark in Hollywood.

He says, Anya, you drive the car. And this melody actually came to him out of the air and he wrote it down on his little jock pad or whatever. And it was what we now know as Over the Rainbow. So he took it and he played it for Yip Harburg and Yip said, What do you mean? He said, This is a song for a little girl in Kansas. He said, It's too big. It sounds like something for Nelson Eddy. And Harold said, I think this is the song. And he said, I'll tell you what, we'll go over to Ira. And let's see what he says, because most lyricists don't like ballads. They like rhythm numbers. It's a patter song in which they can really show off. And so they felt if Ira didn't care for it, then maybe it wasn't such a hot thing.

And after all, Ira loved it. And so Yip wrote the lyric. And the only thing is that it was used to open the movie. And so when it was shown at previews, the people who sat behind the desk said, It's too slow. It starts the movie off too slow. Nobody's going to... They cut it out at least three times. And in fact, when Harold saw it, one version in which the song was totally cut, that's where he really said, From now on, I'm not going to get you. I'm going to take the checks and I'm going to spend them and I'm going to write the songs and forget about it. Well, it was Arthur Freed who went up front and argued and argued and argued and argued and argued until it was left in the final print. And of course, you know, the big joke is it won the Academy Awards the best song of the year.

Whatever that's worth. It was worth something then. I don't know about now. Oh, and the King of the Forest, of course, is a typical Burt Lahr song. They'd known Lahr for years, so they could pattern things for him.

[22:19] Ken Bloom: Wrote a song called "Things" for him, and the Woodman song. It's also a satire on the typical big song that the stuffy bass might sing from a concert hall, with all the quaverings and whatnot. So, what we're going to hear is "In the Shade of the New Apple Tree," Arlen singing it, and that'll take us into "Over the Rainbow" with him singing it, and "If I Were King of the Forest" from the soundtrack.

[22:52] ♪ Musical number: "In the Shade of the New Apple Tree" — performed by Harold Arlen ♪

[24:54] ♪ Musical number: "Over the Rainbow" — performed by Harold Arlen ♪

[28:42] ♪ Musical number: "If I Were King of the Forest" — performed by Harold Arlen ♪