RETIRED FROM BROADWAY

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30278, 2 November 1963, Page 8

RETIRED FROM BROADWAY

Loewe Now Behind Gold Curtain

[Specially writtea for "The Press’’ by JOHN NKWNBAM] FREDERICK LOEWE, composer of the x world’s most successful musical, “My Fair Lady,” has turned his back on Broadway. Now 62, the architect of some of the best-loved “symphonies” of Tin Pan Alley is a devoting his" future years to one project—B seeing that Frederick Loewe takes life easy, i

Without a single relative, the greying, heavy-set five-foo-taeven-inch Loewe has made himself inaccessible by phone for three years. In that time he has not reed a single letter, preferring to pay a secretarial staff to handle aU his mail and financial matters. “I will never write another note,” he vowed this week in a renewal of a promise he made when his last smash-hit, "Camelot,” opened on Broadway about three years ago. “I've used by wealth to build a Gold Curtain for my friends and myself against those things which are upsetting." Struck down by a heart attack in 1959, Loewe struggled through to finish “Camelot” Since then nothing has been heard from the man who gave the world not only "My Fair Lady," and “Camelot’ but also “Gigi,” “Paint Your Waggon," and "Brigadoon." He has gone into virtual seclusion since the attack. “How often do you have to be tapped on the shoulder?” he said at the time.

Life In Luxury

But Loewe is living high on the millions he earned on the great white way, globetrotting from his villa, luxury yacht and RollsRoyce on the French Riveria, to his lavish New York penthouse and magnificent hilltop winter home in Palm Springs. California. >

He has become a big player at the gaming tables where: “I know they love me here for my money, not for myself.

“It’s terribly impressive," he said in a rare interview as he passed through New York. "I am a member of the small circle of big suckers. It’s like becoming a member of the aristocracy. It’s not just a question of losing large sums of money .You must know how to lose gracefully. “You must never be loud or drunk. You must always be kind to the casino and you must always tip them, no matter how much you’ve lost.”

Loewe has been a big loser—once so much that he vowed never to return. But he did, if only to sample the fine food and wine he loves. “I went back because of the French strawberries, French asparagus, the bouillabaisse and the French vegetables.” This is the pattern of Loewe’s life now. Since his break with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner—a partnership that lasted 18 years and made both men multimillionaires—he has refused the most tempting of offers to come out of retirement.

“I owe it to myself to take time to find a little peace and serenity," he says. It wasn’t always this way. Loewe earned his millions fighting his way up from the

blood-stained canvas and sweaty confines of a Brooklyn prize ring to see his name atop tile flashing neon lights of glittering Broadway Of the men who made the big time, the career of the child prodigy born in Berlin to Viennese parents—hi* father was a famous operetta tenor—is probably the most colourful of all.

At 13, he appeared a* soloist with the famed Berbn Symphony Orchestra and the same year won the Hollander medal, an award given to the most promising student in the Stearns Conservatory in Berlin.

Brought to the United States in 1924, Loewe found that his European reputation cut little ice in the New World Barely understanding English and striving to reestablish himself as a concert pianist and composer he had to struggle to stay alive. For five dollars a bout he became a prizefighter in Brooklyn. He was 23, and a bantam-weight, with hands better suited to the concert stage than boxing glove*. “I tried not to hit anybody with my hands,” he recalls. “I could do that because I was was fast as lightning in the ring.” It was this speed and agility that was his undoing. Convinced that nobody could ley a glove on his fighter, the composer’s manager mismatched him with Tony Cabzooed. later to become world feather-weight and light-weight champion. “All I remember was hearing a swishing sound, then a symphony orchestra playing, and I saw stars shining in the distance,” Loewe said. That knockout, eight seconds after the start of the first round, put an end to his career in the ring. Returning to New York in 1935, Loewe tried to crash Broadway with bis own compositions. “The first break I got was writing a song for a shew called ’Petticoat Fever,’ starring Dennis King," he said. "That song paid me 25 dollars a week for seven or eight months, which was glorious " A chance meeting in 1942 at New York's theatrical club, the Lambs, with Lerner, a young man determined to write for Broadway, led to atn alliance that was to take Broadway by storm. Their first effort, a musical written in haste for a Detroit stock company, flopped. So did the second "What’s Up?”—a show of which Lerner once said: “You’d have missed it if you were away for the weekend.”

Lucrative “Lady”

The first inkling of what the two could produce together came in 1945 when their “The Day Before Spring,” ran on Broadway for six months. “We could feel movement in the structure of our work, and it wasn’t termites,” recalls Loewe. Then came the breakthrough, “Brigadoon," a two-year smash-hit, and “Paint Your Waggon,” a moderate success in 1951. Five years later. New York rang with praise for the Lerner-Loewe adaptation of Shaw's “Pygmalion,” the phenomenal “My Fair Lady” which ran on Broadway for 2717 performances and netted 20 million dollars. The Last was "Camelot” with * fantastic advance ticket sale of more than three million dollars. And today, while Frederick Loewe takes it easy, both shows are playing somewhere in the world to delighted audiences.