Styne, Jule (originally, Stein, Julius KerWin)

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Styne, Jule (originally, Stein, Julius KerWin)

Styne, Jule (originally, Stein, Julius KerWin) vibrant English-born American composer and theatrical producer; b. London, England, Dec. 31, 1905; d. N.Y., Sept. 20, 1994. Styne reversed the usual pattern for popular composers of his time: Starting his career as a full-time songwriter relatively late, in his mid-thirties, he wrote successfully for the screen, then turned to a lengthier and even more successful stay in the theater. In Hollywood he collaborated frequently with Sammy Cahn and occasionally with Frank Loesser, producing such popular movie songs of the 1940s and 1950s as “I’ve Heard That Song Before,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” and the Academy Award-winning “Three Coins in the Fountain.” On Broadway, working with Cahn, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Stephen Sondheim, and Bob Merrill, among others, he wrote the music for 16 musicals between 1947 and 1993, including Funny Girl, Gypsy, and Bells Are Ringing. His shows featured such standards as “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and “People.” He was particularly adept at writing for particular performers, such as stars like Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ethel Merman, and Barbra Streisand.

Styne’s parents were Russian immigrants Isadore and Anna Kertman Stein; in England his father ran a butter-and-egg store, and when the family moved to Chicago in 1912, he became an egg inspector. Styne began piano lessons at six and became a prodigy. At nine he was studying with Esther Harris of the Chicago Coll. of Music, and at nine he performed as soloist with the Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis symphony orchestras. By his early teens, however, he had turned to popular music and begun to play in local bands. He first tried writing music at 16, and in January 1927 he enjoyed a national hit with “Sunday,” recorded by Cliff Edwards among others. (Music and lyrics were credited to Styne, who actually wrote the music, Ned Miller, who wrote the lyrics, Chester Conn, who polished the lyrics, and Benny Krueger, who led the band in which Styne was playing at the time and arranged for the song to be published.) He married Ethel Pauline Rubenstein in September 1927; they had two sons, and Styne later collaborated with the older one, Stanley. The couple divorced in 1952.

Styne organized his own band in the spring of 1932, at which time he was forced to change the spelling of his last name to avoid a conflict with Dr. Julius Stein, head of MCA, his booking agency. In 1934 he moved to N.Y., where he became a vocal coach. Singer Harry Richman hired him as accompanist and conductor in 1936, and in 1937 he went to work at 20th Century-Fox in Hollywood as a vocal coach to such stars as Alice Faye and Shirley Temple. Soon he began contributing occasional songs to films, starting with Kentucky Moonshine, released in May 1938. In 1940 he was hired as a songwriter by Republic Pictures, a low-budget studio concerned largely with turning out B movies, mostly Westerns. He quickly amassed numerous film credits. His first movie song to attract attention was “Who Am I?” (lyrics by Walter Bullock) from Hit Parade of 1941, released in December 1940 and nominated for an Academy Award.

Styne’s music was featured in more than two dozen Republic films released in 1941. Though he did not enjoy any hits from this hastily written material, the period was notable for his first collaborations with Frank Loesser. He moved to the more prestigious Paramount studio, where Loesser worked, and they wrote two songs that became Top Ten hits before being used in the July 1942 release Sweater Girl:“I Said No!” recorded by Alvino Rey and His Orch., and “I Don’t Want to Walk without You” recorded by Harry James and His Orch. Among Styne’s Republic films of the year was Sleepy-time Gal, which featured “I Don’t Want Anybody at All (If I Can’t Have You)” (lyrics by Herb Magidson). The song belatedly became a minor hit for Charlie Barnet and His Orch. in December 1944.

Also in 1942, Styne met and began to collaborate with Sammy Cahn. Their first film together was the December 1942 Republic release Youth on Parade, which featured “I’ve Heard That Song Before.” In a recording by Harry James, the song became a million-seller and the biggest hit of 1943; it was Styne’s second to be nominated for an Academy Award. His third was “A Change of Heart” (lyrics by Harold Adamson), included in Hit Parade of 1943, which Republic released in April 1943.

Styne and Cahn had an independently published Top Ten hit in January 1944 when Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters took the war-themed “Vict’ry Polka” into the Top Ten. Their next hit also reflected war sentiment. “I’ll Walk Alone” was featured in the all-star film Follow the Boys, released in April; Dinah Shore, who sang it, recorded it for a #1 hit, and it brought Styne his fourth Oscar nomination.

Styne and Cahn inaugurated their songwriting relationship with Frank Sinatra by writing the songs for his July 1944 film Step Lively, but they spent much of the year working on their first stage musical, Glad to See You (Philadelphia, Nov. 13, 1944), which closed during tryouts. (In June 1945, Jimmy Dorsey and His Orch. had a Top Ten hit with “Can’t You Read between the Lines” from the score.) They returned to film with the Kay Kyser vehicle Carolina Blues, released in December 1944, which generated two hits: “There Goes That Song Again,” taken into the Top Ten by Russ Morgan and His Orch., and “Poor Little Rhode Island,” recorded by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians and later adopted as R.I.’s state song.

Styne and Cahn led off 1945 with the independently published “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week),” which Frank Sinatra made into a Top Ten hit. Their next film was Tonight and Every Night, starring Rita Hayworth, which was released in March and featured the Oscar-nominated “Anywhere.” Anchors Aweigh, starring Sinatra and Gene Kelly, came out in July and was one of the top grossing films of the year; its Styne-Cahn score included the hit “What Makes the Sunset?” recorded by Sinatra, and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which gave the songwriters a second Academy Award nomination for 1945. In November the independent song “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” went to #1 for Harry James; Bing Crosby, backed by Les Paul, also topped the charts with it.

In 1946, Styne and Cahn were the primary songwriters for four films, but all their hits for the year came with independent songs. “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” topped the charts for Vaughn Monroe and His Orch. in January and went on to become a standard of the holiday season; “Five Minutes More” was a #1 hit for Frank Sinatra in September; and Sinatra took “The Things We Did Last Summer” into the Top Ten in December.

Styne and Cahn wrote the songs Sinatra sang in It Happened in Brooklyn, released in March 1947. Sinatra had a Top Ten hit with “I Believe” and a chart entry with “Time after Time.” The songwriters then turned to their second stage show, High Button Shoes, which became the longest-running musical of the 1947-48 season, playing 727 performances.

Returning to Hollywood, Styne and Cahn signed a three-picture deal at Warner Bros, and wrote the songs for the June 1948 film Romance on the High Seas, the movie debut of Doris Day, who had a Top Ten hit with “It’s Magic,” Styne’s seventh Oscar-nominated song. Eddy Howard also had a minor hit with “Put ’Em in a Box, Tie ’Em with a Ribbon (And Throw ’Em in the Deep Blue Sea)” from the film. Two Guys from Texas, released in August, featured “Ev’ry Day I Love You (Just a Little Bit More),” a minor hit for Vaughn Monroe. It’s a Great Feeling, released in August 1949, brought Styne another Academy Award nomination for its title song.

From this point on Styne worked primarily in the Broadway theater, though he still did occasional film work. Sammy Cahn stayed in Hollywood, and Styne teamed with Leo Robin for his next musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing, which opened in the fall of 1949 for a run of 740 performances. He produced the cast album, which reached the Top Ten and featured “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Styne turned to theatrical production with the unsuccessful musical Make a Wish (N.Y., April 18, 1951), with songs by Hugh Martin; he continued to produce stage works through the 1960s, scoring successes with a revival of Pal Joey (N.Y., Jan. 3, 1952) and Mr. Wonderful (N.Y., March 22, 1956), starring Sammy Davis Jr. His next stage effort as a composer was the revue Two on the Aisle (1951), his first collaboration with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, which ran 279 performances.

The release of the Jane Froman film biography With a Song in My Heart in April 1952 led to a revival of “I’ll Walk Alone,” which Froman sang in the movie and recorded for a chart hit, though the most successful rendition was Don Cornell’s Top Ten version. Styne’s next musical, Hazel Flagg (1953), based on the film Nothing Sacred and with lyrics by Bob Hilliard, had an unprofitable run of 190 performances, but Eddie Fisher had a chart hit with “How Do You Speak to an Angel?” The show was adapted into the 1954 film Living It Up, starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, meanwhile, was released in July 1953 and was among the most successful movies of the year; starring Marilyn Monroe, it retained only three songs from the stage version, but the soundtrack album was a Top Ten hit.

Styne reunited with Sammy Cahn to write the title song for the May 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain. Frank Sinatra sang the song on the soundtrack, but the Four Aces had the biggest hit with it, topping the charts and selling a million copies; on his ninth try, Styne finally won an Oscar with it. He had another filmrelated hit in October, when Don, Dick ’n Jimmy scored with “That’s What I Like,” which he and Bob Hilliard had written for Living It Up. That same month he and Comden and Green had half a dozen songs, among them “Never Never Land,” in a new musical version of Peter Pan (N.Y., Oct. 20, 1954), starring Mary Martin, which had begun with a score by Mark “Moose” Charlap and Carolyn Leigh. Though the show had only a modest initial run on Broadway, it had a successful television broadcast and is revived frequently.

Styne’s next full-fledged musical score, again with Comden and Green, was for Bells Are Ringing (1956). By the time the curtain opened for the first of the Tony-nominated show’s 924 performances in November, Tony Bennett had scored a chart entry with “Just in Time”; Doris Day followed in December with “The Party’s Over.” The cast album also reached the charts. Styne next worked with Comden and Green on the backstage musical Say, Darling (1958), which ran 332 performances and included “Dance Only with Me,” a Top 40 hit for Perry Como.

Styne was brought into Gypsy (1959), a musical based on the autobiography of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, after its star, Ethel Merman, objected to having Stephen Sondheim, then an untested composer, do the music. Sondheim, who had previously written lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music in West Side Story, was retained as lyricist. The result was the most critically acclaimed work of Styne’s career: the show ran 702 performances and earned a Tony nomination; the cast album stayed in the charts more than two years and tied for the Grammy Award for Best Cast Album; and the score included “Small World,” a Top 40 hit for Johnny Mathis and a Grammy nominee for song of the year, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and “Let Me Entertain You.”

Styne and Comden and Green wrote two new songs for the film version of Bells Are Ringing, released in June 1960; the resulting LP earned a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album. Styne next collaborated with George David Weiss on songs for the N.Y. amusement park Freedomland; Johnny Horton had a chart entry with one of them, “Johnny Freedom,” in July. Styne’s next stage musical, again with Comden and Green, was Do Re Mi, a satiric look at the music business. The songwriters demonstrated their expertise on the subject by achieving a chart entry from the score with “Make Someone Happy,” recorded by Perry Como, just as the show was opening in December 1960. Do Re Mi ran 400 performances and earned a Tony nomination for best musical; the cast LP charted for five months and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Cast Album; “Make Someone Happy” was nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy.

Styne and Comden and Green followed a year later with Subways Are for Sleeping. It was a failure, with a run of 205 performances, although the cast album spent a couple of months in the charts. Styne married British model Margaret Ann Bissett Brown on June 4, 1962; the couple had two children. A film version of Gypsy was released in November and the soundtrack album became a Top Ten hit. Styne had a rare independent chart entry in November 1963 with the civil rights anthem “Now!” (lyrics by Comden and Green), recorded by Lena Home.

Funny Girl, a musical based on the life of singer/comedienne Fanny Brice, for which Styne collaborated with Bob Merrill, had a long gestation period, but when it finally opened in 1964 with Barbra Streisand in the lead role, it became the composer’s most successful show, running 1, 348 performances and earning Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Score. The cast album hit the Top Ten, went gold, stayed in the charts a year, and won the Grammy Award for Best Cast Recording. Streisand reached the Top Ten with her recording of “People,” which earned a Song of the year Grammy nomination. She also charted with an unused title song for the musical.

In May, Styne’s first original movie musical in nine years, What a Way to Go!, was released. With lyrics and screenplay by Comden and Green and starring Shirley MacLaine, it was among the year’s most successful films. The same month, Styne and Comden and Green had another stage musical on Broadway, Fade InFade Out, starring Carol Burnett; Styne also coproduced. It ran 271 performances and the cast album made the charts. In the fall Styne took on the job of director for the Sammy Fain/Alan and Marilyn Bergman musical Something More! (N.Y., Nov. 10, 1964), also writing several songs with the Bergmans, but the show was a flop.

Styne and Merrill’s television musical, The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood starring Liza Minnelli, was broadcast during the 1965 holiday season. Chris Montez had a Top 40 revival of “Time after Time” in the fall of 1966, and the Styne/Comden and Green television musical I’m Getting Married starring Anne Bancroft was broadcast in March 1967. Styne’s next stage musical followed in April, when he and Comden and Green mounted Hallelujah, Baby! starring Leslie Uggams. It ran 293 performances and won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Score; the cast album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Show Recording.

Styne and Bob Merrill wrote a new song called “Funny Girl” for the 1968 movie version of their stage show. When it was released in September it became the highest grossing film of the year, with a million-selling soundtrack LP; the song earned Styne his tenth Academy Award nomination. The Tymes revived “People” for a Top 40 hit, and Diana Ross and the Supremes recorded an entire album of Funny Girl songs.

Styne worked on several musicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only successful one being 1972’s Sugar, written with Bob Merrill and based on the film Some Like It Hot. It ran 505 performances and earned a Tony nomination for Best Musical and a Grammy nomination for Best Cast Album.

Styne’s subsequent successes came with revivals and remakes. Lorelei, a new version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing and with some new songs written with Comden and Green, toured the U.S. in 1973 and ran on Broadway for 320 performances in 1974. A revival of Gypsy starring Angela Lansbury ran in London in 1973 and moved to N.Y. in 1974. (There was another Broadway revival starring Tyne Daly in 1990, and a TV version with Bette Midler in 1993.) Also in 1974, Sammy Cahn performed on Broadway in his own revue, Words and Music, using many Styne-Cahn compositions. Styne himself performed a nightclub act in 1977. Barry Manilow revived “I Don’t Want to Walk without You” for a Top 40 hit in 1980.

Styne taught at N.Y.U. in the 1980s and accompanied Michael Feinstein in the recording of the singer’s Jule Styne Songbook album in 1991. He also worked on several musicals, notably Bar Mitzvah Boy with Don Black, which had a short run in London in 1978 and was produced Off-Broadway as Song for a Saturday in 1987, and, with Bob Merrill, The Red Shoes, which made it to Broadway for five performances in 1993. He died of heart failure at 88 in 1994.

Works

(only for works for which Styne was a primary, credited composer are listed): FILMS: Sing, Dance, Plenty Hot (1940); The Girl from Havana (1940); Melody and Moonlight (1940); Hit Parade of 1941 (1940); Melody Ranch (1940); Ridin’ on a Rainbow (1941); Sis Hopkins (1941); Sheriff of Tombstone (1941); Angels with Broken Wings (1941); Puddin’ Head (1941); Nevada City (1941); Rags to Riches (1941); Ice Capades (1941); Sailors on Leave (1941); Mountain Moonlight (1941); Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942); Sweater Girl (1942); Priorities on Parade (1942); Sleepytime Gal (1942); Youth on Parade (1942); The Powers Girl (1943); Hit Parade of 1943 (aka Change of Heart; 1943); Shanty town (1943); Johnny Doughboy (1943); Salute for Three (1943); Thumbs Up (1943); Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943); Step Lively (1944); Carolina Blues (1944); Tonight and Every Night (1945); Anchors Aweigh (1945); Behind City Lights (1945); Tars and Spars (1946); Cinderella Jones (1946); The Kid from Brooklyn (1946); Earl Carroll Sketchbook (1946); Ladies’ Man (1947); It Happened in Brooklyn (1947); Romance on the High Seas (1948); Two Guys from Texas (1948); It’s a Great Feeling (1949); The West Point Story (1950); Meet Me after the Show (1951); Two Tickets to Broadway (1951); Double Dynamite (1951); Macao (1952); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); Living It Up (1954); My Sister Eileen (1955); Bells Are Ringing (1960); Gypsy (1962); What a Way to Go! (1964); Funny Girl (1968). STAGE (all dates refer to N.Y. openings unless otherwise noted): High Button Shoes (Oct. 9, 1947); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Dec. 8, 1949); Two on the Aisle (July 19, 1951); Hazel Flagg (Feb. 11, 1953); Bells Are Ringing (Nov. 29, 1956); Say, Darling (April 3, 1958); Gypsy (May 21, 1959); Do Re Mi (Dec. 26, 1960); Subways Are for Sleeping (Dec. 27, 1961); Funny Girl (March 26, 1964); Fade Out—Fade In (May 26, 1964); Hallelujah, Baby! (April 26, 1967); Darling of the Day (Jan. 27, 1968); Look to the Lilies (March 29, 1970); Sugar (April 9, 1972); Lorelei (Jan. 27, 1974); Words and Music (April 16,1974); Bar Mitzvah Boy (London, Oct. 31, 1978); The Red Shoes (Dec. 16, 1993). TELEVISION: Ruggles of Red Gap (Feb. 3, 1957); Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962); The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood (Nov. 28, 1965); I’m Getting Married (March 16, 1967); The Night the Animals Talked (Dec. 6, 1970).

Bibliography

T. Taylor, J.: The Story of Composer J. S. (N.Y., 1979).

—William Ruhlmann