Rodgers and Hart's 'Too Many Girls' - the Early Recordings

For this latest in a series of early recordings from 1930s and 40s musicals, we return to Rodgers and Hart from Cole Porter. The subject is the pair's 1939-40 success Too Many Girls, a typically contrived college caper with a typically tuneful score.

Too Many Girls did not have as many hits as some Rodgers and Hart musicals, but it did boast one enduring favorite ("I Didn't Know What Time It Was") and several other songs that achieved some popularity or at least attracted the recording companies. This collection includes 10 selections, two of them in alternative versions.

From the stage production

The show, combined with the subsequent film, made stars of Desi Arnaz and Eddie Bracken. Marcy Westcott, the heiress on stage, turned into Lucille Ball in the film, and Ball and Arnaz turned into a famous couple. The two other main female roles were taken by Mary Jane Walsh and Diosa Costello on Broadway, Frances Langford and Ann Miller in the movie. (Walsh also can be heard here in songs from Cole Porter's Let's Face It!)

Arnaz, Bracken, Richard Kollmar (Richard Carlson in the film) and the wonderful dancer Hal Le Roy played football players who were hired to watch over the heiress while she was at Pottawattamie College. But none of those performers were asked to make records - nor was Marcy Westcott - so it fell to the cast's Mary Jane Walsh and Diosa Costello to do so.

Marcy Westcott, Diosa Costello and Mary Jane Walsh tend to stricken Desi Arnaz

As was common back then, a minority of the musical's songs attracted the attention of the record labels. Seven R&H songs were heard in the stage show before one was selected for a recording - "Love Never Went to College." Westcott sang the tune on Broadway, but Columbia turned it over to Walsh.

The Smoothies - Charlie Ryan, Arlene Johnson, Little Ryan

Walsh's version (with anonymous backing) is a good one, but I also wanted to include the sophisticated Victor recording by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, with a vocal by the Smoothies. The latter group was earlier known as Babs and Her Brothers, even though there were a series of "Babses" and none of them was a sister to Charlie and Little Ryan, the other members of the group.

Diosa Costello and Desi Arnaz

Diosa Costello, who was Puerto Rican and apparently known as "the Latin Bombshell," had appeared with Arnaz in nightclubs before being cast in Too Many Girls. She performed "All Dressed Up (Spic and Spanish)" on stage as a solo, reprising it with the ensemble. The small Schirmer label engaged her to record it with a band led by Vladimir Selinsky. I don't know for sure if Hart intended the title to be a play on the ethnic slur, but I do believe the term was in use as such back then.

One of the best known songs from the score is "I Like to Recognize the Tune," which Mary Jane Walsh cut for Columbia, again with anonymous backing. On stage this was done by an ensemble that included Walsh.

Costello and Arnaz handled "She Could Shake the Maracas" on Broadway, but Costello recorded it for Schirmer solo, again with the orchestra of Vladimir Selinsky.

Margaret Whiting

The best song in the score is surely "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," sung in the show by Marcy Westcott and Richard Kollmar, but for Columbia by Mary Jane Walsh. Over the years the number has attracted many good recordings, and was interpolated into the Sinatra film of Pal Joey along with three other Rodgers and Hart favorites. One of the best readings is Margaret Whiting's 1946 single for Capitol. If anything, the Whiting aircheck in this collection, from a 1949 Carnation Contented Hour, is even better. She is backed by Ted Dale's orchestra. (The single version is available on this blog in her Rodgers and Hart collection.)

Mary Jane Walsh and ensemble

The final song from the stage production in this set is "Give It Back to the Indians," which Walsh introduced on stage and then cut for Columbia.

Too Many Girls ran on Broadway for six months, then its director, George Abbott, turned it into a film, where Diosa Costello somehow turned into Ann Miller, and Mary Jane Walsh into the well-known vocalist Frances Langford.

Frances Langford serenades Lucille Ball and Richard Carlson 

Rodgers and Hart added one enduring song to the filmed version - "You're Nearer," introduced by Trudy Erwin dubbing Ball, and reprised by Langford and others. Langford's label, Decca, asked her to record the song, backed by Victor Young.

Ann Miller and Desi Arnaz

I've also added the Arnaz-Miller version of "All Dressed Up (Spic and Spanish)" from the soundtrack. This is for archival purposes only - Desi really could not sing.

Hal Le Roy

Finally, I did want to draw attention to the great dancer Hal Le Roy, even though he recorded nothing from the score. He can be seen in a clip from the film online. All his films are worth seeking out - his dancing in them, anyway.

The sound on these items, remastered mainly from Internet Archive needle-drops, is good. The download includes more production photos and ephemera, along with Brooks Atkinson's New York Times review. He found the show "humorous, fresh and exhilarating," but was less impressed by Mary Jane Walsh and Diosa Costello.

Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers

Cole Porter's 'Let's Face It!' - The Early Recordings

That's the young Danny Kaye riding in a Jeep on the Let's Face It! program cover above. He was the motive force behind Cole Porter's 1941 hit show following his breakout performance in Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, which had its opening early that same year. Just nine months later Kaye's name appeared above the title on the Imperial Theater marquee for Let's Face It!

The exclamation point in the title was apparently optional

The book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields was basically a sitcom - three suspicious wives decide to bribe some soldiers at a nearby base to take up with them in a jealousy ploy. The soldiers' girlfriends find out. Complications (and Kaye specialties) ensue.

The cast was a starry one, at least in retrospect. The three wives were Eve Arden, Vivian Vance and Edith Meiser, two of whom became famous. (So did Arden's understudy, Carol Channing.) The soldiers' sweethearts were Nanette Fabray, Sunny O'Dea and Mary Jane Walsh, one of whom became famous (Fabray), and one of whom recorded several songs from the show (Walsh).

Edith Meiser, Vivian Vance and Eve Arden show Danny Kaye the big bucks 

As usual with the musicals of the time, there was no original cast album; however, Kaye did record three of its songs for Columbia, and Walsh did four for the Liberty Music Shop label. As far as I can tell, those four were exactly half of Walsh's total recorded output. Earlier, Columbia had engaged her for four songs from her other notable Broadway appearance, in Rodgers and Hart's Too Many Girls. That 1939 show is coming up in this series.

As was the practice back then, an original cast member's presence didn't mean they recorded the numbers they sang on stage. So for the first item in this collection, "Farming," we have recorded versions by Kaye, who did perform it on stage, and Walsh, who did not. The song was a sendup of the then-current fashion of the elite taking up the rural life, a topic that also inspired movies, an S.J. Perelman book, and latterly television's Green Acres.

Next in running order (at least here; this post covers only a minority of the show's score) is possibly the best known song in the show, "Ev'rything I Love." As the title might suggest, it's a tender song, and a good one. It was certainly the most popular with the record companies: Victor alone had four recordings of it - by Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye, Dinah Shore and Tito Guizar. It has quite a lovely melody, and Liberty Music Shop broke the budget to bring in a chorus to support Walsh in her fine recording. In the show, Kaye and Walsh sang it in duet.

Mary Jane Walsh

Leading the orchestra in Walsh's recordings was Max Meth, who also conducted the theater performances. I don't know whether the stage orchestrations are used here, but I doubt it. In any case, the show's orchestrators were Hans Spialek, Don Walker and Ted Royal, a formidable trio.

I've added a second recording of "Ev'rything I Love" to the playlist because it includes the verse, which I hadn't heard before, and because the disc is by Buddy Clark, who makes frequent appearances around here.

Cole Porter

A contrast with the previous number is "Ace in the Hole," one of Porter's best and a song long beloved by cabaret performers. On stage, Mary Jane Walsh was joined by the other two girlfriends of the soldiers, but she does a solo on record. Her flinty performance of this cynical anthem is a great contrast to the romantic "Ev'rything I Love," as are Porter's clever lyrics:

     Maybe, as often it goes

     Your Abie may tire of his rose.

     So baby, this rule I propose:

     Always have an ace in the hole!

The next song, "You Irritate Me So," is the antithesis of Porter's famous "You're the Top." I've assigned it to the appropriately acerbic Nancy Walker, who recorded it in 1959. On the stage it was a duet between Nanette Fabray and Jack Williams. I imagine the song worked better with two singers flinging Porter's lyrics at one another, but Walker is pretty good, if you can handle Sid Bass' Space Age pop arrangement. When Let's Face It! opened, Walker was appearing a few blocks uptown in Best Foot Forward, her first Broadway role.

Kaye and Arden up the creek with a paddle

In the show, Danny Kaye and Eve Arden sang "Let's Not Talk About Love," but only Danny appears on the Columbia record. (Kaye and Arden had a long affair, according to Kaye biographer David Koenig, but I'm not sure when that transpired.) The song is a specialty both for Porter's clever, topical lyrics, and for Kaye, who indulges his trick of singing complex words as fast as possible. The song was an attempt to replicate his show-stopper "Tchaikowsky" in Lady in the Dark. It works fairly well.

At the time, r(h)umbas set the fashion in dance rhythms, so Porter produced one of his own - "A Little Rumba Numba." Marguerite Benton, who appeared in several Broadway musicals of the time, was the primary vocalist on stage, but did not record the piece. So I've included the contemporary disc by cabaret's Hildegarde, who handles this attractive and unfamiliar song very well. Harry Sosnik's band makes a brave attempt at the rhumba rhythms.

The final Mary Jane Walsh song is "I Hate You, Darling," which presents a typical Porter conceit - "I hate you, darling, and yet I love you so." In the show, she was joined by Kaye, Vivian Vance and James Todd, but she is solo here.

"Melody in 4F" still from Up in Arms

Perhaps surprisingly, the show included two Kaye specialty songs not written by Cole Porter. "A Fairy Tale" and "Melody in 4F" were contributed by Danny's wife Sylvia Fine working with Max Liebman. 

"Melody in 4F" is largely an auctioneer's rapid-fire spiel punctuated by words sketching the travails of the draftee - "Oh the mailman!", "Hiya, doc!" and so on, ending in "1A!" (that is, draft eligible). Much of the effect depended on Kaye's verbal acrobatics and his visual punctuations, so you may want to watch the version he did for the 1944 film Up in Arms (available here). The download includes what was probably a radio aircheck that seems to have been captured shortly after Kaye left the show, to be replaced by José Ferrer, a much different personality to be sure. Danny took Sylvia's songs with him when he decamped. The show closed a month later.

The Pierre Hotel

To complete the set, we have two instrumental medleys from William Scotty and His Cotillion Room Orchestra. The Cotillion Room is presumably the swank venue in the Pierre Hotel on Central Park East. I haven't been able to find any information on Scotty. The actual Cotillion Room bandleader at that time was probably the well-known Emil Coleman. I don't think the name on the label was a pseudonym for Coleman; as far as I can tell, that maestro did not have a recording contract at the time. It may have been the pianist or another member of the ensemble. 

The recorded selections are "Ev'rything I Love," "You Irritate Me So," "I Hate You, Darling," "Ace in the Hole" and "Farming." The polished performances are in the overripe society-band style that the Liberty Music Shop favored. (This is the musical mode that was parodied by the Glenn Miller band in "You Say the Sweetest Things, Baby," recently featured here in the Orchestra Wives recordings.)

Let's Face It! was made into a film in 1943, sans the exclamation point and most of Porter's songs. Danny Kaye became Bob Hope and Mary Jane Walsh turned into Betty Hutton, but Eve Arden remained Eve Arden. From the songs above, only "Farming" and "Let's Not Talk About Love" were retained, along with "Milk, Milk, Milk" and the title song. I don't believe that Hope or Hutton recorded anything from the score; the recording ban was still in effect for most of the year - all of it for a few of the big labels. 

Some of these same recordings were reissued by the Smithsonian in 1979, but the transfers in my set are not from that LP. The Mary Jane Walsh numbers come from my collection and most of the rest from Internet Archive. The sound from the 78s is generally quite good. 

The Smithsonian LP included detailed notes on the Let's Face It! production by Richard C. Norton, which I've included in the download. The package also includes a substantially complete souvenir program, which dates from relatively late in the show's run, after Carol Goodner had replaced Eve Arden. Finally, there are three articles from the New York Times - a story on the opening, Brooks Atkinson's rave review, and a follow-up on the production's history. The latter reads as if it was ghost-written by producer Vinton Freedley's publicist.

Let's Face It! may not be one of Porter's best known scores, but the songs are splendid - characteristic of the composer, varied and worth remembering. The performances by the leads are all you could desire.

This post is the result of a request by old friend David Federman, who wanted to hear some records by Mary Jane Walsh. More to come, David.

Kaye toasts the ensemble