December 2: Adolph Green, Singin’ in the Rain

Song lyricist Adolph Green was born in the Bronx on this date in 1914. Green collaborated on words and ideas with Betty Comden for more than six productive decades, and worked as a team with numerous melody-makers to create show tunes (and librettos and screenplays) for Broadway shows and movies that included Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, Jerome Robbins’ On the Town, The Barkleys of Broadway (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, The Bells Are Ringing, and many others. Green won twelve Tony Awards and induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980. Among the jazz standards he and Comden created were “Make Someone Happy,” “Just in Time,” “The Party’s Over,” and “New York, New York.” The pair, writes the New York Times, “were so professionally inseparable, so committed to each other, so pleased to have their relationship and so happy to talk about it, that many people thought they were married.” Green died at 87 in 2002, Comden four years later at 89. To see them in 1956, reminiscing and casually performing, see below. “He was brilliant, very funny and knowledgeable on myriad subjects. Certainly music was one of them, but also movies, poetry. He was an intellectual man.”—Betty Comden