HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BETTY COMDEN
(May 3, 1917 - November 23, 2006)

This multiple Tony Award winner for such musicals as
On The Twentieth Century and On The Town  was one-half of the musical-comedy duo, Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century.  Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed "Freed Unit" at MGM, Jule Styne  and Leonard Bernstein.

Adolph Green and Betty Comden wrote the musical comedy film Singin' in the Rain.   Perhaps the most notable clip from that iconic film features Gene Kelly literally dancing in the rain with the umbrella declaring his love for Debbie Reynolds.  How many of us have tried to do that because Gene made it look so easy!

Born in Brooklyn, she attended Erasmus Hall High School, and studied drama at New York University.  In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, they formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village.   Due to the act's success, the Revuers appeared in the 1944 film Greenwich Village but their roles were so small they were barely noticed. Back to New York.

Their musicals, Billion Dollar Baby (1945, music by Morton Gould) and Bonanza Bound (which never got to Broadway) convinced them to return to Hollywood and they found work at MGM.       Screenplays included The Barkleys of Broadway,  The Band Wagon and It's Always Fair Weather.   They received three Screen Writers Guild Awards.

  Their stage work of the 1950s also included Two on the Aisle,  Wonderful Town,
Bells Are Ringing, which reunited them with Judy Holliday and Jule Styne. The score, including "Just in Time", and "The Party's Over", proved to be one of their richest.

 They appeared on Broadway in A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, (1958) a revue that included some of their early sketches which they brought back to Broadway in 1977.  Their Hallelujah, Baby! score won a Tony Award. Their final musical hit was 1991's The Will Rogers Follies, providing lyrics to Cy Coleman's music.

Betty Comden was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1981 and the same year she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green were seldom mentioned individually. In an interview with them in 1975, the author of the New Yorker's "The Talk of the Town" wrote that "when Comden and Green are talking or inventing they seem to be one doubly alert person."  They told him that they thought their partnership had survived because they were both happily married to other people. She was married to Steven Kyle; Adolph was married to Phyllis Newman, the actress and director.    Harold Clurman commented on Adolph Green's "ebullient nature" which is somehow "disciplined by Betty Comden's decorous wit". (Nation, 3/11/1978.)  Brendan Gill in the New Yorker spoke of their "acute, affectionately bantering view of human frailty, and that they "have never lost their freshness, and it is plainly their intention, growing older, never to grow old."