Happy birthday, Cole Porter

It is the birthday of Broadway and movie composer Cole Porter (1891), whose hits such as “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and “Night and Day” remain among America’s favorites. Porter’s work spanned five decades from the 1920s. Here’s Porter in a rare recording of his hit “You’re the Top.”

Happy birthday, Archibald MacLeish

It is the birthday of writer Archibald MacLeish (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, for his collection Conquistador (1933), and for his collection Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1953) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for his free-verse play J.B., a modern version of the biblical story of Job. JB also won a Tony Award for best play. MacLeish was greatly influenced by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and is considered a traditional modernist. His best-known poem is Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). It includes a line that states the modernist poetic philosophy: "A poem should not mean/but be." As a young man, MacLeish left the law firm he worked for and went to Paris in 1923, joining literary and artistic expatriates such as John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. He reorganized the library, making it more efficient and enabling it to meet the needs of the nation. He expanded the library's budget and helped focus its mission to collect materials expressing the life an achievements of the people of the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was the target of such anti-Communists as Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. To detractors he said, "No one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves."

Happy birthday, playwright Russel Crouse

Russel Crouse

It is the birthday of Broadway playwright Russel Crouse (1893), whose 32-year writing partnership with Howard Lindsay produced some of the most memorable Broadway shows of all time, including the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes (1934), the long-running Life With Father (1939), The Sound of Music (1960), and State of the Union (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Crouse was born in Findlay, Ohio, and became a reporter at the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune at age 17. He served in the Navy during 'World War I, and afterward he worked on New York newspapers, including a column for the New York Post. He became head of the publicity department for the Theatre Guild in 1932 and wrote his first Broadway play in 1933. it was a collaboration with humorist Corey Ford that resulted in the musical comedy Hold Your Horses.

In 1934, he teamed up with Howard Lindsay to adapt a play originally written by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse called Anything Goes. The original story was about a shipwreck and the wacky characters who survived it. However, before the show began rehearsals, the luxury cruise ship Morro Castle caught fire and burned off the coast of New Jersey and 137 people died. The show's producer asked Lindsay and Crouse to revise the libretto to eliminate the shipwreck. Instead, the story became the madcap adventures of people on an ocean liner bound for London. The show, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, became a hit. It was the beginning of a three-decade collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, that also produced the librettos for Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue (1936), Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam (1950), and Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music (1959).

Life With Father was based on the autobiographical novel by writer Clarence Day Jr. about his A-personality father, who demanded perfection of his family. The Lindsay-Crouse play ran for seven years (3,224 performances) on Broadway, setting the record as the longest-running non-musical in Broadway history. At the beginning, the play starred Howard Lindsay and his wife, Dorothy Stickney.

Ås Broadway producers, Lindsay and Crouse, presented the now-classic comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1940), a play about a pair of murderous elderly sisters. Playwright Joseph Kesselring originally conceived the play as a dark drama but Lindsay and Crouse convinced him that it would work better as a comedy. It was Kesselring's most successful play.

Philip Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story

Philip Barry

It is the birthday of playwright Philip Barry (1896), who wrote his best-known work, The Philadelphia Story, especially for his friend Katherine Hepburn. Barry was educated at Yale and studied drama at Harvard. He wrote comedies about high society, circles within which he moved, and he had several Broadway successes. Hepburn starred in a film version of his 1928 play, Holiday, which skewered materialism. In the late 1930s, Hepburn's career was on a downturn. She had had a string of box-office flops and was looking for a winner. (She had been turned down for the role of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind.)  Barry was working on an idea for a play inspired by a prominent young Philadelphia socialite who had married a classmate of his.  She was Helen Hope Montgomery, a free-spirited daughter of a Philadelphia investment banker and a highly visible member of the WASP Main Line society. Hepburn liked Barry's idea and helped him shape it from the story of a prominent family under siege from the press on the eve of their daughter's second wedding to the story of the daughter's transformation from an ice queen to a vulnerable real woman. Hepburn's ex-boyfriend, Howard Hughes, put up a large share of the money for the production. It opened in March 1939 to appreciative audiences and rave reviews. Hepburn had chosen to take 10 per cent of the gross instead of a salary. The show made more than $1.5 million. Hughes bought the film rights for Hepburn and she sold them to MGM for $250,000 and the right to choose the director and leading men. She wanted Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable (who weren't available) so she chose Cary Grant and James Stewart. The film adaptation was an enormous box-office success, and was nominated for several Oscars, though the only ones who won were James Stewart for Best Actor and Donald Ogden Stewart for Best Screenplay. Barry's play was adapted again as the 1956 musical High Society, starring Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, with the music of Cole Porter. The movie was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1998.

Russel Crouse's collaboration won Pulitzer

It is the birthday of playwright and librettist Russel Crouse (1893), who teamed with Howard Lindsay for 27 years to write Broadway comedies and musicals. Their play, State of the Union (1945) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1946. The play concerns a fictional Republican presidential candidate who has an extramarital affair. It was adapted for a Frank Capra film in 1948. Crouse and Lindsay also rewrote the libretto for Cole Porter's hit Anything Goes (1934). They also wrote the librettos for The Sound of Music (1959), Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue (1936) and Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam (1950) and Mr. President (1962), as well as the play Life with Father (1939).