Lyricist Betty Comden, 89
Posted: Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 11:17 pm
Betty Comden, whose more than 60-year collaboration with Adolph Green produced the classic New York stage musical “On the Town,” as well as “Singin’ in the Rain,” has died. She was 89.
Comden had been ill for a few months and died Thursday of heart failure at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia, said her longtime attorney and executor Ronald Konecky. …
On Broadway, Comden and Green (the billing was always alphabetical) worked most successfully with composers Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Cy Coleman. The duo wrote lyrics and often the books for more than a dozen shows, many of them built around such stars as Rosalind Russell, Judy Holliday, Phil Silvers, Carol Burnett and Lauren Bacall. …
The two were never married to each other, although many thought they were, considering the longevity of their working relationship. …
Green died in October 2002 at age 87. At a memorial for him a few weeks later, Comden recalled their early days as collaborators and then halted before saying: “It’s lonely up here. It was always more fun with Adolph.” …
It was “On the Town,” a musical comedy expansion of Jerome Robbins’ ballet “Fancy Free,” that introduced Comden and Green to Broadway in 1944. …
[At MGM], they wrote screenplays for “Good News,” starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford, and the film version of “On the Town,” which scrapped most of Bernstein’s melodies, replacing them with music by Roger Edens. It even sanitized the lyrics to “New York, New York.” Yet the movie, starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, was a huge hit.
At MGM, Comden and Green also scored their biggest critical success, writing the screenplay for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952). The film placed No. 10 on the list of 100 best American movie of the century, compiled in 1998 by the American Film Institute. … Read full obituary
