City Cabaret Remembers - Joe Williams

City Cabaret
Remembering...

Those who contributed to our musical portfolio

Burton Lane
(1912 - 1997)

Once there was a royal wedding about a princess named Elizabeth and her prince, Philip. A movie was made based upon the event, Royal Wedding, , starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell as a brother-and-sister song-and-dance team, singing and dancing to the music of Burton Lane, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.

You can catch Royal Wedding now on the classic movie networks, and it's worth a watch. The soundtrack has some of the finest songs on film: "Too Late Now," "You're All the World To Me," and that showstopper, "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life?" which is said to have been written by Lane and Lerner during a 12 minute taxi ride.

Burton Lane died in January 1997, almost 85 years after he was born. And since he began writing songs as a teenager, the years have given us some wonderful music, songs like, "How About You," with lyricist Ralph Freed, from the 1941 Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show-kids film, Babes On Broadway ; the nostalgic, "How Are Things In Glocca Morra," lyrics by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg for the 1947 Broadway classic, Finian's Rainbow; and in 1965, he composed a lyrical melody called "On A Clear Day (You Can See Forever)" with Alan Jay Lerner, for the Broadway play with the same name.

Most of Lane's music was written for Hollywood. He was a high school dropout from New York City, whose idol was George Gershwin. At age 15, he published his first song, "Broken Butterfly," and was hired to write for a revue called, Greenwich Village Follies. At the same time, he became a song plugger.

During the 1920's, he teamed up with Harold Adamson to write for Broadway shows like Earl Carroll's Vanities, Artists and Models, and Three's A Crowd, starring Clifton Webb, Libby Holman and Fred Allen. When Lane and Adamson took a job for the Irving Berlin Music Publishing House, Berlin sent them to Hollywood to sell his music from to the new "talkies". That was in 1933, and Lane and Adamson signed up with MGM for six weeks; in their first movie, Dancing Lady, starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Lane, now age 21, had a hit song with Adamson called, "Everything I Have Is Yours." had been composing for years. He would remain in California, writing songs for over 30 films.

Besides Adamson, Lane wrote with lyricists, Ted Koehler ("Stop, You're Breaking My Heart), Ira Gershwin for the film, Give A Girl A Break, and with Frank Loesser he wrote, "The Lady's In Love With You" for Some Like It Hot, (long before, and unrelated to the Marilyn Monroe film).

In 1940, Lane and "Yip" Harburg teamed up for a Broadway score, Hold On To Your Hats. It was not that memorable, but seven years later they struck gold writing the music for Finian's Rainbow. With songs like "Old Devil Moon," "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love," "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich," "If This Isn't Love," "Look To The Rainbow." Finian's Rainbow was Burton Lane's biggest hit, and writing musical shows was Lane's first love, although films were his main venue until the mid-60's when he teamed up again with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, which became a movie in 1970. Finian's Rainbow had become a film two years earlier.

Burton Lane had done some television work as well, mainly with Dorothy Fields in the '50's, for the TV show Junior Miss. In 1990, Burton Lane wrote the music to "I Can Hardly Wait," lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

Worth mentioning:

Burton Lane earned two Academy Award nominations: "How About You" (Babes On Broadway)
and "Too Late Now" (Royal Wedding).

His musical, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, earned him a Grammy.

Lane served as elected President of American Guild of Authors and Composers from 1957-1966.
He served on ASCAP's Board from 1985 to 1996.
He was elected to the Songwriter's Hall of Fame.

And how about this? Burton Lane is credited with discovering a new young talent in l934. Her name? Judy Garland, and it was she who later introduced the song that earned him his first Oscar nomination, "How About You".

-Elizabeth Ahlfors

Send suggestions and comments toAhlfors@CityCabaret.com