Composers: A Most Melodious Fella

Songs just popped into his head. Or so Frank Loesser liked to say. "Of course," he would concede, "your head has to be arranged to receive them. Some people's heads are arranged so that they keep getting colds. I keep getting songs." During a 35-year show-business career, Loesser caught songs by the hundreds and infected millions with his melodious malady. Originally a lyricist, he came into his own as a composer-writer with the rousing Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition and the poignant Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year, both World War II favorites. Then came the series of Broadway musicals that placed him firmly in the company of such show-business greats as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers—Where's Charley (1948), Guys and Dolls (1950), The Most Happy Fella (1956) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961). Based on Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls was Loesser's masterpiece; he ran a perfect string of straight sevens with the hottest musical dice Broadway had seen in years.

Loesser was as single-minded about his work as any compulsive crapshooter. Rising at 5 every morning, he toiled long and hard, pruning his tunes and polishing his words. "For every song I let out," he once said, "there are six in the basket that nobody will ever see." A small (5 ft. 6 in.), tough-talking, chainsmoking man, he reminded some of George Raft, others of a Guys and Dolls bookie. To keep busy in his off hours he took up hobbies (painting, carpentry), and from time to time he expressed the hope that they would help him give up the smoking habit. But he remained a three-pack-a-day man, and last week Loesser died in a Manhattan hospital of lung cancer. He was 59.

Monosyllable Champion. After Cole Porter, Loesser was probably the greatest American composer-lyricist. They were both superb melodists, but Loesser was not as interested in sophisticated word play as Porter. As his producer, Cy Feuer, recalls, Loesser "was a champion of the one-syllable word." As good proof as any is this line from the title song from Guys and Dolls:

When a bum buys wine like a bum

can't afford, It's a cinch that the bum is under

the thumb of some little broad.

It is a song that epitomizes Loesser's direct style. Rarely was his music concerned exclusively with itself. The lyrics came first, and he proved it by the way he wedded his tunes to the rhythms of the words—by the way he always left room in his songs for a good laugh. Loesser also had a knack for turning the harsh into the lyric. While Guys and Dolls was still on its pre-Broadway tour, Loesser became fascinated with a line in Abe Burrows' book and decided to make a song out of it: The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York.