Word: tunesmithing
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Married. Lisa Kirk, 23, singing show-stopper (Always True to You in My Fashion) of Cole Porter's smash Broadway musicomedy hit, Kiss Me, Kate; and Hollywood Tunesmith Robert (It Is Better to Be by Yourself) Wells, 26; he for the second time; in Manhattan...
...first ten years at it he netted only pretzel money from his 150 songs. He lived by playing the saxophone in Chinese restaurants and beer parlors. In 1945, after he had peddled and pushed Till the End of Time into a hit (with help from Chopin and Tunesmith Ted Mossman), he decided that he had the formula: "Writing the song is only 10% of it; the rest is purely business...
Last year Kaye dug into his trunk for a song he had worked on seven years ago with Lyricist Fred Wise (Misirlou) and Tunesmith Sidney Lippman (Chickery Chick). They had never been able to sell it. Growled publishers: "Sounds like an old-fashioned tap routine," or "Who wants to sing the alphabet?" His collaborators almost lost hope, but Buddy kept plugging. He persuaded M-G-M Records to record it just before the Petrillo ban; when M-G-M finally released it last December, Buddy spent $1,000 carting the record around to half a dozen cities, badgering disc jockeys...
...story is about a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith (Melvyn Douglas) who gets caught in some badly directed crossfire between two Manhattan songbirds (Maureen O'Hara and Gloria Grahame). When Maureen suddenly loses her voice, she and Douglas discover Gloria, a seductive salesgirl with a gold-plated larynx. Under their high-pressure salesmanship, Gloria's voice soon belongs to a radio network, a gilded Manhattan nightclub and the admiring U.S. public. But Gloria is not easy to manage. She is finally the victim of a shooting scrape that lands Maureen in the clink and then in a fadeout clinch...
...Regulated Life. Born to wealth and bred to spend it, Cole Porter has shown such zest as tunesmith and playboy during most of his 55 years that many an admirer thinks of him as a brilliant dilettante. Actually, as Kiss Me, Kate proves better than any of his previous work, he is one of the most thoroughly trained musicians among U.S. popular composers. He is as painstaking a craftsman as any. He is no less rigorously professional in his approach to what his good friend, Actor Clifton Webb, calls "the perfectly regulated life...