Dorothy Fields — Vincent Dicks

Another in a series of Jersey Shore personalities, this one is mixed with personal memories.

A girl from Allenhurst, steeped in show business, wrote songs that are stuck in my memory, and hundreds of other familiar tunes...

Song #1, Age 6

The other day, I was reminiscing with my friend Richard over a short film of Hal Roach's Little Rascals. Filmed from the early 1920s-1940s, Roach and director Robert McGowan made short films that encouraged child actors to interact naturally as children. The comedies resonated with several generations.

Darla Hood and some of the Gang (Pitch Singer Publicity Shot)

The film “The Pitch Singer” featured a love song. "I'm in the mood for love", first sung to me by little Darla Hood at one of Spanky's barn reviews. It was later performed by her boyfriend Alfalfa in his slightly off-key voice:

I'm in the mood for love,

Simply because you're near me,

Funny but when you're near me,

I'm in the mood for love

The boys, and the "He-Man Women Haters Club" did not like Alfalfa singing about love. They swapped out his cheese for soap when he sang, "Let me call you sweetheart" in a later short. But it occurred to me that love between boys and girls was probably a good thing, even though Spanky and Our Gang were not yet ready for it. (Neither was I).

I looked up the origins, and the song was written by Dorothy Fields. That meant nothing to me until I saw her other hits. They triggered a flood of memories.

Later that day, I was discussing with my uncle, my grandfather's penchant for cigars...

Song #2, Age 14

To this day, that terrible smell warmly reminds me of Gramps. It went with him. At the time, there was a television advertisement for Muriel cigars. A showgirl (Edie Adams) in a boa sang, "Hey Big Spender" to a line of sophisticated gentlemen, lighting up. The song was Broadwayesque over the top orchestration and words, and was adapted from the play Sweet Charity, whose lyrics were by Dorothy:

The minute you walked in the joint,
I could see you were a man of distinction,
A real big spender,

Hey big spender!

While Darla was a cute girl, this was a glamorous woman with power, looking for a 'real man'. The lyrics were suggestive and transactional: "I don't pop my cork for just any man I see." My now teenage boyhood could recognize that smoking and this type of relationship were dangerous. I associated the temptation for the transactional woman with smoking. Gramps had switched from cigarettes to cigars after a heart attack. He died of cancer from his habit when I was 16. The Muriel commercial helped save me from ever trying cigarettes, cigars or dangerous women.

On the bio for Dorothy Fields, I saw she won an Oscar for another familiar tune.

Song #3 Age 17

Around this time, I found my future wife. We were both teenagers. I liked the rock music of the era: Kansas, Styx, Queen. But the old 'standards' were also able to move me. There was a tune that Frank Sinatra sang that articulated the way I felt about Denise, and more importantly, the way I thought about her when I wasn't with her. As I thought of Darla’s tune, this one wormed out of the shadows of memory:

Some day, when I'm awfully low,

When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you,
And the way you look tonight.
Yes, you're lovely, with your smile so warm
And your cheeks so soft,
There is nothing for me but to love you,
And the way you look tonight.
With each word your tenderness grows,
Tearing my fear apart,
And that laugh that wrinkles your nose,
It touches my foolish heart.

Lovely, Never, ever change.
Keep that breathless charm.
Won't you please arrange it?
Cause I love you, Just the way you look tonight.
Just the way you look to-night

The way you look tonight

I'm married 41 years. Knowing Frank Sinatra was not the original artist, I looked up that it was originally written by Dorothy for Fred Astaire in the 1936 movie "Swing Time".

Dorothy Fields was one of the most prolific writers of lyrics, penning hundreds of songs for Broadway, film, and television during a five-decade career.

Her talents were learned at the knee of her father. Lew Fields was a Polish Jew from the Bowery in Manhattan. As a boy named Moses Schoenfeld, he and his friend Joe Weber developed a knack for comedy. They honed their skills on stage in their teens until they were the most popular comedy duo in New York.

After touring the region's vaudeville theaters, they opened the Weber & Fields Broadway Music Hall in Manhattan in the 1890s with their own act as the centerpiece. They produced a show modeled after Fred Carno's Music Hall in London, which trained Charlie Chaplin and his understudy Stan Laurel.

The main difference was that Carno's acts were mostly pantomime and slapstick. Fields and Weber added complex dialogue. He and his partner Joe Weber developed routines playing German and Irishmen with comical wordplay, often based on misunderstandings of English that would make for funny arguments of exaggerated logic. Newly assimilated New Yorkers, many struggling with the language themselves, howled at the humor.

Fields and Weber reunited to help launch NBC radio in the 1920s (Library of Congress)

Many of the act's key elements were copied a generation later by New Jersey actors Budd Abbott and Lew Costello.

Lew Fields used his fame to purchase a house in Allenhurst around 1904 when he broke up with Weber and became a solo Broadway producer. He developed over 40 musical comedies for the stage. His youngest, a daughter, Dorothy, was born there in '04. Dorothy and her older brothers, Joseph and Herbert, all showbiz writers, likely got to see their father perform at the Savoy theater in Asbury Park.

The Savoy was a grand 800-seat theater. It is still hiding in a state of partial renovation one block south of Cookman Ave. It survived into the 1970s as a seedy movie theater. But in the era before movies, 1911 until just after WWI, it was an actor's stage. Lew used his summer location to work on shows for Broadway, and his kids were around to witness his genius. Little Dorothy focused on her studies and won several awards for her writing in Shore Area contests in grammar school. Allenhurst kids were part of the Long Branch school system.

Her father wanted her to have a normal career, and in her teens, sent her to the Benjamin Franklin Girls School in NY for formal training. Dorothy wanted to act, but her mother intercepted an acceptance letter after she auditioned for a stock company in Yonkers, and hid it from Dorothy for years..

She was a lab assistant and then a teacher, but she still had the bug. Dorothy wrote lyrics on the side and submitted the songs to magazines. Eventually, she took the stage in London, egged on by a friend, the beautiful model (Edith) Sylvia 'Silky' Hawkes, who later used her feminine wiles to marry a string of famous men, including Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, a Baron, an Earl, and a Prince. The girls appeared as a duo, like her father, performing as "Silky and Dottie" in London. Dorothy did much of the writing, and their work was good enough to get an invitation as guests of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland in Morocco.

When she came back to New York, Dorothy was tapped to write lyrics for music producer Jimmy McHugh. She was quoted in the Long Branch Daily Press about her writing love songs, “I'm always looking for a new way to say ‘I love you,' " she confides. "You see, we phrase his lovemaking for the boy who isn't very facile with words. We give him something that he can sing softly as he dances with his girl or sits in the moonlight, soul wracked with emotions he can't express.”

By the late 1920s, she was writing Broadway hits and Cotton Club standards for Duke Ellington. She was highly productive, writing in the latter days of Tin Pan Alley for Broadway, musical revues, and film. By 1934, only five years into her partnership, she was celebrating her 500th song put to Jimmy's music, and making four figures a week.

In 1936, she wrote her Oscar-winning song, "The Way You Look Tonight," which still resonated with me 42 years later, and has stayed with me for 48 more. The success brought her to Hollywood. When she won, she was dubbed "Monmouth County's most prolific lyricist" by the Long Branch Record at age 32. Dorothy married and had two children, and was still writing for Broadway into her late 60s. She was the first woman inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1971.