Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:41 PM by Gene

Here we were talking about how WFMU's blog had gotten into a punkified rut when one of its contributors (best known for very bad mp3 transfers of stand-up comedy albums on his blog) runs an interesting piece about the LEGENDARY late-night disaster that was The Jerry Lewis Show, and for an honorary cherry he tops it off with a link to an American Heritage interview with Rudy Vallée, who must have been some piece of goods but we would gladly have loved to have known him -- especially when he laid into Frank Loesser, who almost unintentionally revived his career after years of bad movies:

Have you considered doing another Broadway show?

Not really. Broadway is too much of an asphalt jungle. Not that I can’t handle myself in the infighting. It’s now fairly well-known how they tried to dump me from the cast of How to Succeed. The songs I had been given were corny and almost amateurish, which was the way composer Frank Loesser had intended them to be for my role as the tycoon, J. B. Biggley. Nobody understood that I didn’t need any rehearsal of these simple songs. I had introduced songs on my radio shows, to twenty million listeners, that sometimes I had only run over once, and I refused to sit in a small, hot rehearsal room and sing the goddamned songs for three or four hours steadily, which was what Loesser had all the cast do with his songs. Loesser started the ouster, and about two weeks before the out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia, I got the word that they wanted me out of the show. My contract was for fifty-seven weeks, which figured out to around ninety thousand dollars. They offered me forty thousand to get out. I knew that if I insisted on full payment of the contract, I couldn’t legally work at anything else for a year. But I was terribly hurt and humiliated. They had chased me for months to do it. “Nuts!” I told my agent. “I want the full fifty-seven weeks. I’ll take it and sit on my ass. The hell with them.” I don’t know whether it was the thought of paying me all that money or what, but they decided to let me stay. When the show opened and people started asking what casting genius had picked Rudy Vallée for the role of old J. B. Biggley, they all bowed their heads graciously.

No, they don't make stars the way they used to.

P. S. This is the same Frank Loesser who was so insistent on reprising his songs in Guys and Dolls his director George S. Kaufman retorted, "If you reprise the songs I'll reprise the jokes." They don't make composers and directors the same way either.