(Includes: Baby Dream Your Dream * Big Spender * Charity's...)
Includes: Baby Dream Your Dream * Big Spender * Charity's Theme * I Love to Cry at Weddings * If My Friends Could See Me Now * I'm a Brass Band * I'm the Bravest Individual * The Rhythm of Life * Sweet Charity * There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This * Too Many Tomorrows * Where Am I Going * You Should See Yourself.
Dorothy Fields was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films.
Background
He was born in Allenhurst, New Jersey, the daughter of Lew M. Fields and Rose Harris. Her father, born Lewis Maurice Schoenfeld, was famous as a member of the comedy duo Weber and Fields, but left performing in the year of Dorothy's birth to become a successful Broadway impressario.
Although Lew Fields cautioned his children against pursuing careers in the theater, Dorothy's two older brothers, Joseph and Herbert, also became successful on Broadway, the former as a writer and producer, and the latter as a writer and Dorothy's sometime collaborator.
Education
Dorothy Fields graduated in 1923 from the Benjamin Franklin School for Girls in New York City, where she excelled at English, drama, and basketball, and had her poems published in the school's literary magazine.
Career
After her father quashed her attempt to land an acting job with a stock company in Yonkers, she worked as a teacher and laboratory assistant, while continuing to submit her verses to magazines.
Through McHugh she got a job as a lyricist at Mills Music, Inc. , where one of her first assignments was to write the lyric for a tune commemorating aviator Ruth Elder's attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Fields later referred to herself as "Mills Music's fifty-dollars-a-night girl, " because she was paid fifty dollars for each lyric she composed.
In 1927 Fields received sole billing as lyricist for a revue at Harlem's Cotton Club that featured Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. The following year she and McHugh wrote the song "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, " which was dropped from the revue Revels of 1928, but found a home alongside another soon-to-be-popular Fields-McHugh number, "Diga Diga Doo, " in the all-black hit, Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928.
After this initial success, the Fields-McHugh team collaborated on International Revue (1930), a flop despite two enduring songs, "Exactly Like You" and "On The Sunny Side of the Street. " The family of jazz pianist Thomas ("Fats") Waller maintained that Waller, not McHugh, actually composed the melodies to "On the Sunny Side of the Street, " "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, " and others, and sold them to McHugh for a nominal fee. In any case, however, it is undisputed that Fields is the lyricist.
From 1930 to 1939 Fields worked in Hollywood, first with McHugh, with whom she wrote songs such as "I'm in the Mood for Love" and "Dinner at Eight" for the movie musicals Love in the Rough (1930) and Every Night at Eight (1935), and then with Jerome Kern. Kern and Fields first worked together on Roberta in 1935, and subsequent collaborations included I Dream Too Much (1935), Swing Time (1936), and Joy of Living (1938).
Other Kern-Fields songs from this period that have gone on to become standards include "Lovely to Look At" and "A Fine Romance. "
She then collaborated with her brother Herbert, with whom she had already worked on screenplays and the short-lived musical Hello Daddy (1928), and on the books for three Cole Porter hits: Let's Face It (1941), Something for the Boys (1943), and Mexican Hayride (1944).
In 1945 Dorothy and Herbert Fields wrote the book for Sigmund Romberg's Up in Central Park. Her lyrics for the show included "Close as Pages in a Book. "
In 1946, Fields approached Oscar Hammerstein with her idea for a musical based on the life of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hammerstein agreed to produce the show, and Kern and Fields were contracted to write the songs. When Kern died before they were able to begin work on the project, Irving Berlin was hired to replace him.
Berlin wrote both music and lyrics for Annie Get Your Gun, but Dorothy and Herbert Fields contributed an excellent book. The finished product, starring Ethel Merman as Annie, ran 1, 147 performances. It remains one of the most popular shows in the repertoire.
The following year, she wrote several fine lyrics to Arthur Schwartz's melodies for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She scored two films with composer Harold Arlen, Mr. Imperium (1951) and The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), then returned to Broadway to work with Schwartz again on By the Beautiful Sea (1954). Herbert Fields died in 1959, while Redhead, the show they were working on with composer Albert Hague, was having its out-of-town tryout.
Although not a great show, Redhead captured the Tony Award for Best Musical in a lean year for Broadway theater. Her penultimate musical, Sweet Charity, written with composer Cy Coleman and librettist Neil Simon, was the biggest hit of the 1965-1966 season.
Songs such as "Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now" proved that Fields, despite her advancing age, had not lost her knack for up-to-the-minute slang and phraseology.
Fields's work habits were highly disciplined. Typically, she would spend eight weeks researching, discussing, and making notes on a project, before settling into an 8:30 A. M. to 4:00 P. M. daily work routine. She worked at a bridge table in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and preferred to write with pencil on a yellow legal pad. She kept notebooks in which she copied passages from Dryden, Shaw, and Thoreau; unusual synonyms for commonly used words; humorous proverbs; rhyming phrases; odd-sounding words; and anything else that might come in handy in writing a lyric.
Personality
Tall, slender, and well dressed, with chestnut hair and hazel eyes, she spoke well and was active in charitable causes throughout her life.
Connections
On July 15, 1939, Fields married David Eli Lahm, a clothing manufacturer. They had two children before his death in 1958. The same year, she returned to New York to work with composer Arthur Schwartz on the musical Stars in Your Eyes.