They Write the Songs

It was the cocktail aeon in the Elysian Fields, and the composers gathered at Calliope's. "Let whoever will make a nation's laws," said someone for the millionth time, "if I can make its songs." There was a silence. "Who makes Amer ica's songs these days?" asked Stephen Foster. George Gershwin removed his cigar. "No one you know," he said. "Or probably ever will." "It depends what you mean by the word song," observed Jerome Kern mildly.

In 1956 there are plenty of good songs, many of them turned out by the old and not-so-very-old pros who stick close to Broadway--Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer. But the million-dollar "pops" that feed the gluttony of the nation's 550,000 jukeboxes, slip through the hands of its several thousand disk jockeys, and shake the walls of dormitories and rumpus rooms are written for the most part by little-known men. They are more familiar to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Income Tax Division, than to the public.

A gallery of top pop writers with recent hits to their credit: Bob Merrill, 34, who turned out three top-ten hits in 1954-55 (Mambo Italiano, Make Yourself Comfortable and Tina Marie), has now gone Hollywood in a big way with an M-G-M option to produce as well as score five to ten musicals in seven years. For his first, a version of Anna Christie to be called A Saint She Ain't, he has written 16 songs, which he characterizes as "very lofty." Brash Tunesmith Merrill believes cliches are the secret of pop success; he keeps notebooks full of them, from which came his first click, If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd 've Baked a Cake (1950). Bachelor Merrill's income (currently $300,000) does not depend on inspiration: Mambo Italiano was turned out for Mitch Miller, who wanted a dialect mambo for Rose mary Clooney. Tina Marie was ordered by Perry Como, who "wanted a rhythm song." "It's a job and I do it," says Merrill. "I know that if I smoke enough cigarettes and sit long enough, something will come."

Paul Francis Webster, 48, wrote the lyrics and Sammy Fain, 53, the music for the current Oscar candidate, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; Secret Love won them an Oscar in 1954. Webster is a New Yorker who was summoned to Hollywood in 1935 after writing Two Cigarettes in the Dark (with Lew Pollack). After years of turning out lollipop lyrics for Shirley Temple and Bobby Breen, he climbed out of the nursery with I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good (with Duke Ellington). His biggest hit he calls "invisible"--a piece of piety named I'll Walk With God, which seems to make every church social and grange meeting in the country. Teammate Fain (I'll Be Seeing You, By a Waterfall and / Can Dream, Can't I ?) began as a Manhattan song-plugger, filling in with his piano and husky baritone on as many as ten radio stations a day from Brooklyn to Newark for $25 a week. His hits are often cornily wistful, e.g., Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine, That Old Feeling. In the old days, says Sammy, songwriting was easier. "You wrote for singing actors--guys like Jolson and Chevalier and Cantor. They sang with their hands and arms and knees and eyes. But now songs are written for the straight voices."

Dimitri Tiomkin, 56, onetime concert pianist and longtime composer of Hollywood's finest sound tracks, finds it "very flottering but very terrifying" that he has written two pop hits--the High Noon theme (which won him an Oscar) and The High and the Mighty. Says he in his own Russian-English: "All those years I used to do my music, take my monyah and ron for train. Now, since High Noon, when I go in to producer he say: 'Tiomkin, we got to gat hit song for dees picture!'" Tiomkin's latest try: Edna Ferber's Giant. "You wouldn't beleef it!" he exclaims. "To me big publishers say: 'You haf to haf the idea of giant sex--you haf to say "Giant Love" or "You Giant, You."' Can you imogine!" The sexless result ("Where oilfields laugh at angels . . . God made these lonely acres . . .") is a giant valentine to Texas --"kind of a God Bless America, only it's Texas."

Sammy Cahn, 42 (lyrics), and Jimmy Van Heusen, 43 (music), scored together with Love and Marriage (for TV's Our Town), may hit again this year with Tender Trap. Both began in Tin Pan Alley in their teens and turned to Hollywood in their 20s. "My credo," says fast-talking little Cahn, "is the same as Buddy

De Sylva's was: 'I wasn't the best, but I was always on time.' Guys back at Vita-phone over in Brooklyn would come up to me and say 'We don't want it good--we want it by Wednesday.' " Sammy is still giving it to them by Wednesday, and it is usually good. "One day Sinatra walks up to me. 'Hey,' he says, 'how about writing a song called Tender Trap?' Right away I thought of snap."

Al (Mairzy Doats) Hoffman, 53, and Richard Manning, 43, are members of a team that includes their wives, Nancy and Lillian. The men put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door of a room in Hoffman's Manhattan apartment and shut themselves in. "When I want to talk to Al," says Nancy, "I have to use the telephone." They write the tune first, then the lyrics. When a song is born, they play and sing it for their wives. "We call the women our sounding broads. If they like it, that's swell. If they don't like it. we tell them they're crazy." Most recent bestseller of this production line: Hot Diggity.

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