Songs and scores will last forever in musical history
Writer of hits ‘You Gotta Have Heart,’ ‘Hey, there’
Richard Adler, who has died aged 90, packed two hit Broadway shows, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, with several musical numbers that became songbook standards, including You Gotta Have Heart and Hey, There.
He also staged and produced the 1962 New York extravaganza in which Marilyn Monroe serenaded President John F. Kennedy with a breathy rendition of Happy Birthday.
In 1954 Adler collaborated with Jerry Ross on the music and lyrics for The Pajama Game, a light comedy about management-worker relations at the Sleep-tite pajama factory. The score featured one of their biggest hits, Hernando’s Hideaway, a torrid tango which enjoyed chart success both in the United States and Britain.
The pair resumed their professional partnership on Damn Yankees, a 1950s take on the Faustian pact, in which a rabid baseball fan sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for a chance to lead his favourite team to American League glory. The show included the hit songs You Gotta Have Heart and Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.
Both shows ran for more than 1,000 performances, both transferred to London, and both won Tony awards for best musical. Subsequently Adler, working alone, earned a further Tony nomination for the lyrics and music of the African-themed musical Kwamina (1961), a story of interracial love written for his second wife, the British actress and singer Sally Ann Howes. It ran for only 32 performances.
Richard Adler was born in New York on August 3, 1921 and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1943. He served in the Naval Reserve during the Second World War.
Largely self-trained, he composed several symphonic works, including Wilderness Suite, and The Lady Remembers, to celebrate the Statue of Liberty’s centennial. He also wrote two scores for the Chicago City Ballet: Eight by Adler in 1984 and Chicago.
His collaboration with Jerry Ross began in 1950, when the pair signed with the music publishing company owned by Frank Loesser. After writing Rags To Riches, a big hit for Tony Bennett in 1953, Adler and Ross wrote most of the numbers for a revue called John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, featuring Hermione Gingold, Billy De Wolfe and Harry Belafonte.
On Loesser’s recommendation, they were hired to write the score for The Pajama Game the following year. Perhaps the show’s most successful number was Hey, There, a U.S. No 1 hit for Rosemary Clooney, and which reached No. 4 in Britain in September 1955.
Within a matter of weeks, other versions by Sammy Davis Jr, Lita Roza and Johnnie Ray also made it into the charts.
Sometimes Adler drew his ideas from unlikely sources. “I went to the bathroom one day, and when I got in there, I decided: ‘I’m not leaving this room until I’ve written a song about something in the room,’ ” he recalled.
“There were certain things you can’t write about in a bathroom. Then, all of a sudden, the radiator started clanging and hissing.” The result was Steam Heat, the jazzy opening number to Act Two of The Pajama Game. In 1957 the show was successfully made into a film starring Doris Day.
Although Adler and Ross songs sold millions of records, their collaboration ended abruptly with Ross’s death, at 29, from lung disease in 1955.
Thereafter Adler confined his output mainly to orchestral works and advertising jingles and also embarked on a producing career. As well as the birthday celebration for President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962, he produced and staged a show for the White House press corps to mark the visit of the then British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, the same year.
Adler’s Broadway productions included a play, The Sin of Pat Muldoon, and the musical Rex. He was a member of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.
His autobiography, You Gotta Have Heart, appeared in 1990.
Richard Adler divorced his first wife, London-born Marion Hart, in 1958. His fifth wife, Susan Ivory, and three children survive him. A son predeceased him in 1984.