Free I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life by Donald C. Farber

kitchen with Jimmie Jones (James Earl to y’all) and Moses Gunn and a few other uninvited but welcome guests, and we ran out of bourbon. We never ran out of booze. But bourbon was the stuff of choice that night. The author and his wife did not attend the cast party at our house. My recollection is that she left the theatre in a hurry right after the start of the second act.
    What Annie and I didn’t know then, but now know, is that in certain cultures an invitation to a cast party means the cast can bring their friends, relatives, and anyone in the dressing room at the time. But it was fun.
    Frank Loesser
    Frank Loesser was very, very famous when I met him and got to know him. I didn’t know how famous. He wrote the lyrics for many songs, including “Two Sleepy People,” “Heart and Soul,” and “I Hear Music.” He also worked with many famous composers such as Newman, Arthur Schwartz, Burton Lane, and Hoagy Carmichael.
    Frank wrote the music and lyrics for
Guys and Dolls
, a musical with book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and “Blood Pressure”—two short stories by Damon Runyon. A film version was released in 1955 and starred Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Vivian Blaine. Loesser, an avid smoker, died of lung cancer at age fifty-nine in New York City.
    Bob Fosse, who won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for direction and choreography, and was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for his direction of
Cabaret
, called
Guys and Dolls
“the greatest American musical of all time.”
    The Fantasticks
had opened, and Frank loved it like we did. Frank was also putting together a licensing agency called Music Theatre Inc. Frank, brilliant as he was, wanted to own his own musical licensing agency. It was a humble start and Frank wanted
The Fantasticks
for his catalog. It just so happened that at the time my office was located on 42nd Street off Madison Avenue and we lived at 75th Street and Madison. Frank’s office was in the 50s in between my office and my apartment. This made it comfortable for me to stop off on my way home once or twice a week for a number of months to schmooze with Alan Whitehead, Frank’s assistant, and with Frank and to drink their scotch, which they always lavished on me.
    Frank wanted
The Fantasticks
for his catalog for MTI in the worst sort of way, and I certainly didn’t mind drinking his scotch. It took about six months for us to work out the deal for them to license the play. During that time, in addition to becoming friendly with Frank Loesser, this very famous man whom I did not realize was so famous, I also became very friendly with Alan Whitehead, so friendly that shortly after that, he brought Antoinette Perry to our house to help us decorate our Christmas tree. Antoinette Perry was the lovely lady that the Tony Awards were named after. And Frank was so pleased that the years he gave two Christmas parties, one at the Plaza and one at the Warwick Hotel, bless him, he invited Annie and me to both.
    It is so coincidental how our lives are intertwined with people in show business who are related in one way or another. I started teaching a course in theatre production at The New School for Social Research. The course consisted of an hour-and-a-half lesson once a week for thirteen weeks. I met Drew Cohen a few months ago, and he said he wanted to thank me so much for what I taught him at The New School, and in fact he said that I was responsible for his theatre career. Drew Cohen, still a very young man, is now the president of Music Theatre International, the successor to Music Theatre Inc., which Frank Loesser started, and which I helped him start by drinking a lot of his scotch, and oh, yes, by granting him the rights to license
The Fantasticks
as part of his new licensing agency.
    One of the great plays that Frank composed the music for and wrote the lyrics was
How to Succeed in Business Without Really