The Most Snappy Fella

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Born into an erudite New York City family in 1910, Loesser for a while seemed the least likely to succeed. His father Henry was a respected piano teacher. After being widowed, his mother Julia translated and lectured on modern literature. His elder half brother Arthur was a pianist and musicologist who ultimately headed the piano department of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Friends of the family were surprised that Frank, not Arthur, achieved top musical renown; they affectionately called him the "evil of the two Loessers."

In 1931 he teamed with William Schuman -- later a distinguished classical composer and president of Lincoln Center -- to write songs and skits for vaudeville and radio performers. "He was an intellectual," Schuman recalls, "who'd go to the ends of the earth to hide that from anybody. Altogether brilliant." He moved on to Hollywood in 1937, fashioning bright novelties for comedy and dramatic actresses. Marlene Dietrich memorably mooed See What the - Boys in the Back Room Will Have, and Bette Davis croaked the wartime lament They're Either Too Young or Too Old. It was all 'prentice work for a man who would become one of Broadway's great sketch artists, whose songs could propel the story even as they stopped the show.

Loesser the Hollywood lyricist was Mr. Do-It-All. He wrote torchy stuff for gangster dramas and sarong songs for Dorothy Lamour. When collaborating, Loesser usually devised the lyric first, along with a "dummy tune" to suggest tempo and rhythm. Jimmy McHugh could compose a long, languid melodic line for Let's Get Lost because Loesser had compressed the intensity of new passion into the narrowest meter: "Let's defrost/ In a romantic mist./ Let's get crossed/ Off everybody's list."

World War II made Loesser a complete songwriter. Eager to contribute an anthem to the infantry, he wrote Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and this time the dummy tune became the published song -- and a big hit. When he returned to movies, writing pile-driving boogie-woogie (Rumble Rumble Rumble) and patter songs (Can't Stop Talking) for hyperactive Betty Hutton, he had the credit he wanted: songs by Frank Loesser.

Too many songs, George S. Kaufman thought. "Good God," muttered the director of Guys and Dolls during the volatile rehearsals, "do we have to do every number this son of a bitch ever wrote?" You bet, when every number is a small ruby; the first act alone comprises its own Top 10 eternal hit parade. The ballads If I Were a Bell and I've Never Been in Love Before and the up- tempo Fugue for Tinhorns and A Bushel and a Peck distinguish any musical. But the savor of Guys and Dolls is in Loesser's capturing of the Damon Runyon Broadway wit, and by extension the unique pizazz of big-town America. No one had put a medical dictionary to music and turned it into a declaration of psychosomatic desperation, as in the nonpareil Adelaide's Lament. Nobody ever heard a love plaint like Nathan Detroit's: "All right already, I'm just a nogoodnik./ All right already, it's true. So nu?/ So sue me, sue me, what can you do me?/ I love you."