 DOROTHY FIELDS
Born Allenhurst, New Jersey July 15, 1905
Died New York, March 28 1975
Dorothy Fields was the first woman to be elected to the Songwriters' Hall
of Fame
Dorothy Fields' father was Lew Fields, the bully-boy half
of Weber and Fields, a highly successful 'Dutch comic' act on the vaudeville
circuit. They claimed to have originated the classic exchange: 'Who was
that lady 1 saw you with last night 'That was no lady, that was my wife.'
In the year she was born, Lew Fields had a row with his long-time partner
an quit the stage. By the time Dorothy was attending the Benjamin School
for Girls her father was a producer of musicals with friends including
Cole Porter Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Lew
had gone respectable and did not want his daughter to become either an
actress or a lyric writer; her second choice of career was a profession
he considered unladylike. Not easily put off, Dorothy sent some of her work to Jimmy McHugh, a
staff writer at Mills Music. McHugh was impressed and suggested they write
some songs together. The result was enormous hits such as 'I Can't Give
You Anything But Love, Baby' and 'On The Sunny Side Of The Street'. With
these successes under their belts, Fields and McHugh headed for Hollywood,
where they wrote songs for a series of forgettable movies. Then, in 1935,
she caught the eye of top composer Jerome Kern.
The stage show Roberta was being turned into a movie vehicle for
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, and Jerome Kern had written a new piece
of music to introduce a fashion parade. The only problem was that no-one
knew how to make the music into a complete song. Fields came up with the
lyric which became 'Lovely To Look At', which pleased Kern so much he
asked her to collaborate with him on his next project, I Dream Too
Much, starring Lily Pons.
They went on to write four films together, but unquestionably their finest
score was for the Astaire/Rodgers movie Swing Time, one of the
classics of movie musicals, with songs including 'Pick Yourself Up', 'A
Fine Romance' and the beautiful 'The Way You Look Tonight'.
In 1939, Dorothy Fields went back to New York and, with her brother Herbert,
wrote the books for three of Cole Porter's hits of the 1940s, Let's
Face It, Something For The Boys and Mexican Hayride. But her
own pet project was a starring vehicle for Ethel Merman, based on the
story of Annie Oakley: the show was called Annie
Get Your Gun.
She had persuaded Kern to come East to work on the score, but the project
had only just got under way when Kern suffered a fatal heart attack. He
was replaced by Irving Berlin, a man who always wrote his own lyrics.
That is the reason why Dorothy Fields' only credit on one of the biggest
of all Broadway musicals is as co-librettist.
With A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1951) Dorothy Fields began to show
the beginnings of a more colloquial style. This show was a story about
ordinary people and she made sure not to give them unrealistically poetic
language to sing.
Working with Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields' career got a fresh wind. She
stepped easily into the seedy world of the Fan-Dango Ballroom and the
musical Sweet Charity
- surely as far from Fred and Ginger as one can get? Her last hit
song was from her second collaboration with Coleman, Seesaw
(1973). Fittingly, it was entitled 'It's Not Where You Start, It's
Where You Finish'.
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