Dancers in the dark
Benny Green
Dancing in the Dark Howard Dietz (Bantam Paperbacks 75p) No doubt it was shamelessly predictable of Howard Dietz to have entitled his autobiography Dancing in the Dark, but it was rather wise of him too, because he is one of that curious breed whose work is so much more famous than the life that he can lay claim to a kind of spectacular anonymity. 1 very nearly described him as unsung, but that is exactly what he is not ; I doubt if there is anyone left in the western world who does not have on the tip of his tongue at least one or two of Dietz's lines. Something to remember you by, I guess I'll have to change my plan, You and the night and the music, above all the oddly mesmeric phrase which gives his autobiography its title. Dietz also said a few things which a few people have remembered, the most celebrated being his reflection on Tallulah Bankhead, 'A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country,' and the most charming his resi ponse to an executive who accused him arriving late at the office, 'Yes, but I go home early.'
The mere mention of the word 'executive in the context of a troubadour like Dietz raises a few issues. What have office hours to do with the kind of itinerant versifier wit° writes lines like: It might be a fight like you see on the screen,
A swain getting slain for the love of a queen, Some great Shakespearean scene, Where a ghost and a prince meet and everyone ends in mincemeat.
How could it be that a man who raises Ids hat, figuratively speaking, so obsequiouslY to some of the most odious toads of thAe twentieth century, then goes home ail°
writes: • Sing a lament for the plays that fail, A dirge for the shows that fold, A tear on the bier of the flops of the year And the ticket that couldn't be sold! fe
The answer is that Dietz led a double Ii of a nature so contradictory that his career might well be described as schizoid. "i5 daily bread was earned at the MGM studidsii where he was vice-president in charge °las that piffing junk that you and I remember a„ pre-release publicity; his artistic self the; broke off from the main body and wr°t. some of the most literate revue lyrics to b` heard on Broadway during the 'thirties. Asa reminiscer, he has a dangerously charnUage style which, one suspects, makes all tha rogues seem like lovable bit players Runyon comedy. Joe Schenck, one-tiils president of Twentieth Century Fox, 'II quoted as saying, 'If four or five guys tell Po you're drunk, even though you know Y°0 haven't had a thing to drink, the least Y°4 can do is lie down a little while'. I aM twat clear whether Dietz expects us to laugh that, but there is something ambivalent about it which typifies Dietz's attitude towards his paymasters. He is far too intelligent and literate a man not to know that 'a great many of the people he served in the Movie industry would have done well in the councils of the Philistines, and yet the air with which he discusses them is chirpy and What passed for intellectual exercise in bietz's life was performed with that paralYsiag clutch of bores from the Algonquin, anlong people whose idea of drama was George F. Kaufman, of wit Dorothy Parker, °fPhilosophy Alexander Woollcott. And to coMplete the catalogue of toothless lions, t,i,lere was the toothless lion which to this 'lay roars its hollow roar at the start of every ,MGM production. That was Dietz's idea 1no, so he can justly claim that in addition to Putting the words in people's mouths, he was also responsible for the most notorious tjadeMark of the century. At which point I nave to say that none of the peripheral peccadilloes of Dietz's life matters very much, ti_llat we have to wink at the awesome garnage circulated over the years by the engines 9t his publicity department, that we are even Inclined to smile a smile of forbearance At those executives and confess that the central achievement of Dietz's career justifies its aesthetic contradictions. For Dietz belongs to that tiny band of nnetasters whose words, linked to the music nf a collaborator, have a habit of lodging in the brain. There is no mention in the book of tIhe genesis of the best-known of all his Yrics, but Arthur Schwartz, who wrote the rsusic, once told me that Dietz came to him night with a fervent desire to come up tlIth a popular song which said a little more b‘la. n `I love you'. According to Schwartz, h2etz ran his eyes along the spines of the nks on the shelves, spotted one called .Jancers in the Dark and immediately started writing. What is interesting about a fpartnership like Schwartz-and-Dietz is that all its outer shell of metropolitan so,n,saistication, of hard-headed showbiz realism \,34Chwartz graduated for a time to film pronu,ctich), there is in the best work of the 5rtnership a strong streak of sentimental sqkciilness expressed with great professional n' and some poignancy. 'Dancing in the ()ark' is only the most famous of a whole cral3„LIP of songs which explore the impli;."°rIs of loneliness, and it was another inise move of Dietz's to have incorporated ter?, the text of his autobiography, the most i„ nng statements he made in his life, for ance , , that affecting end to By Myself; I'll face the unknown,
I'll build a world of my own,
°-ohe knows better than I myself, An,111 by myself alone. let "IL before anyone laughs at the tautology, Sekilinl study those lines when wedded to A "wartz's melody, and expressed by, say iris:aire, and see how long he goes on laugh tri is one of those men who has con 'Wed generously to the minor pleasures Of life.
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