In Remembrance: Betty Comden

     Betty Comden, the Tony Award-winning Broadway lyricist who co-wrote the screenplay for Singing In The Rain, has passed away on November 23, 2006 in New York City, NY. She was 89.

     Born Elizabeth Cohen on May 3, 1917 in Brooklyn, NY, Comden studied drama at the New York University. Changing her last name, she joined the Washington Square Players in the mid-1930s, where she met her future writing collaborator Adolph Green. The two joined with Judy Holliday and several others to form the cabaret act The Revuers, a show featuring comical and satirical skits and songs. A young Leonard Bernstein would often accompany the group on piano. The show premiered at the Village Vanguard in 1939 and was successful enough that they were coaxed to Hollywood to appear in the 20^th Century Fox musical comedy Greenwich Village (1944), though they ultimately received a few scant moments of screen time.

     Returning from Hollywood, Comden and Green were contacted by Bernstein who wanted them to adapt a ballet called Fancy Free that he had been developing with choreographer Jerome Robbins into a Broadway show. The result was On The Town, a comedy about three young navy seamen who have a 24-hour shore leave in Manhattan. In addition to writing the show’s book, Comden and Green wound up in the show’s cast- he as one of the sailors and she as an anthropologist that one of the sailors fall for. The two writers collaborated on numerous other Broadway shows including Wonderful Town, Peter Pan, Bells Are Ringing, Subways Are For Sleeping, Applause and The Will Rogers Follies.

     Comden and Green returned to Hollywood when MGM Studios hired them to write the 1947 silver screen adaptation of the stage show Good News. They then collaborated with writer Sidney Sheldon for the original musical The Barkleys Of Broadway (1949), which reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on screen, before adapting their On The Town for director Stanley Donen.

     The pair’s next assignment at MGM was to build a story around several of the popular songs owned by the studio. The result was Singing In The Rain, perhaps the greatest musical to emerge out of Hollywood’s golden age. Setting their story during the turbulent time that filmmaking was transitioning from silents to talkies, the pair interviewed many studio workers who lived through that period and incorporated many of their stories into the final screenplay.

     The next two screenplays Comden and Green would work on – 1953’s The Band Wagon for director Vincente Minnelli and 1955’s It’s Always Fair Weather for Stanley Donen – would earn the pair Academy Award nominations for Best Writing- Story and Screenplay.

     Despite their success, Comden and Green didn’t stay in Hollywood much longer. They only worked on three more screenplays- Auntie Mame (1958), Bells Are Ringing (1960) and What A Way To Go! (1964). Although they wrote no more screenplays, they did adapt the film All About Eve (1950) into the Broadway musical Applause in 1970 which starred Lauren Bacall.

     In 1984, Comden returned to Hollywood for a small on-screen appearance as Greta Garbo in Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks. She also had a small role in James Ivory’s Slaves Of New York (1989). Comden and Green also wrote the lyrics for the song "Mamushka" for The Addams Family (1991).