Billy Rose

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Billy Rose (* 6. September 1899 in New York ; † 10. February 1966 in Montego Bay , Jamaica ; actually William Samuel Rosenberg ) was an American songwriter , show business - impresario and manager.

Live and act

Rose grew up in the working-class neighborhood of the Lower East Side . He trained as a stenographer and served in this profession from 1917 ( America's entry into the war ) on the War Industries Board (Council for War Industries) in Washington, DC

After the war, Rose decided to work as a songwriter for " Tin Pan Alley ", found a job at Leo Feist's music publishing house and changed his name. He wrote his first song You Tell Her, I Stutter in the early 1920s with Cliff Friend , his first hit Barney Google , based on the comic of the same name and for which Con Conrad wrote the music, came in 1923.
Together with Lee David he wrote Tonight You Belong to Me in 1926 , with Dave Dreyer he wrote some hits for Al Jolson , who is also named as co-author, and others. a. There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1926), Me and My Shadow (1927) and Back in Your Own Backyard (1928).

Rose soon moved to represent and negotiate other songwriters in front of the music publishers - whereby he earned his salary by being named as a co-author. Up until the 1930s, this resulted in a large number of hits in which he was listed as a "co-writer", including:

In 1924 Rose opened his first club, a speakeasy , in which Joe Frisco and Helen Morgan performed - a little later the finer Fifth Avenue Club on the street of the same name. In 1933, at the end of Prohibition , he opened the Casino de Paree nightclub restaurant . From 1939 to 1952 he ran his most famous nightclub, Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (around which 20th Century Fox constructed a musical film in 1945; George Seaton directed Diamond Horseshoe , Betty Grable played the leading role , Harry Warren wrote most of the score, among others Song The More I See You ).

By 1930 Rose turned his attention to Broadway . On Vincent Youman's musical Great Day from 1929 he was listed as a co-author on the score. For Fanny Brice , whom he married in 1929, he produced his first show Sweet and Low in 1930 (which was revised a year later under the title Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt ). In 1935 Rose produced the spectacular Extravaganza Jumbo , for the music of which he hired Rodgers and Hart .

In 1936, Rose was hired to organize an extravaganza (at the Casa Mañana Theater) for the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition in Texas. His next big show was the Aquacade , a giant open-air water ballet show that he put out in 1937 at the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland, Ohio , which was very successful at the 1939 World Exposition in New York and in 1940 at the Golden Gate International Exposition ran in San Francisco . Among the stars were the Olympic swimming champions Johnny Weissmüller , Buster Crabbe , Gertrude Ederle and Eleanor Holm (Rose married in 1939 after he had been divorced from Brice the year before) and the later swimming idol Esther Williams .

In 1943 Rose produced the Jewish history game (pageant) We Will Never Die (for which Kurt Weill wrote the music) organized by Ben Hecht . The extravaganza, which was shown twice in Madison Square Garden in New York and then in six other major cities, was intended to alert the American public to the mass murder of European Jews .

The Bizet adaptation Carmen Jones by Oscar Hammerstein , produced by Rose, was released on Broadway at the end of 1943 . With its completely black cast, the musical was a great success. In 1944 he brought out the Cole Porter musical Seven Lively Arts .

Rose also made a name for himself as a theater owner, in 1933 he acquired Hammerstein's Theater on Broadway and operated it as Billy Rose's Music Hall until 1936 (now the Ed Sullivan Theater ). In 1944 he acquired the Ziegfeld Theater , also in the Theater District , and until 1955 operated it mainly as a musical theater. In 1959 he bought the National Theater (near Times Square ), where it was played under the name Billy Rose Theater until 1978 (now the Nederlander Theater ).
1949–51 ran the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the Ziegfeld Theater . 1951/52 which ran Shaw -Stück Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare -Stück Antony and Cleopatra with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier , a pair of strong standing that at this time in view of public interest. From 1953 to 1955 the musical Kismet ran in Ziegfeld . In 1954 Rose produced the play The Immoralist by Ruth and Augustus Goetz in which James Dean played a leading role. The spectacular Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Was shown at the Billy Rose Theater from 1962 to 1964 . .

From 1947 on, Rose wrote press columns about his life, the Pitching Horseshoes , which found widespread use. They also served as the basis for his 1948 autobiography Wine, Women and Words , which was provided with illustrations by Salvador Dalí . The television station ABC produced some of these stories in 1950/51 in 24 episodes under the title The Billy Rose Show .

In 1958, Rose founded the Billy Rose Foundation to support charitable causes . a. funded the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the New York Public Library . In 1931 he and others founded the Songwriters Protective Association , now the Songwriters Guild of America . In the early 1960s he donated his art collection to the Israeli National Museum in Jerusalem and thus laid the foundation stone for the Billy Rose Art (or Sculpture) Garden named after him .

His separation from Eleanor Holm in the mid-1950s came into the focus of the press and was referred to as "The War of the Roses". His third wife, Joyce Mathews, played a role, with whom he was married from 1956 to 1959 and again from 1965 until his death. A fourth marriage to actress Doris Vidor in 1964 lasted only six months.
Billy Rose died of pneumonia in 1966 at the age of 66 in his vacation home in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

literature

  • Conrad, Earl: Billy Rose: Manhattan Primitive. World Publishing Company, Cleveland 1968.
  • Nelson, Stephen: Only a Paper Moon: The Theater of Billy Rose. UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor 1987.
  • Gottlieb, Polly Rose: The nine lives of Billy Rose. An Intimate Biography. Crown Publishers, New York 1968.

Web links

Commons : Billy Rose  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holocaust Encyclopedia: “We Will Never Die”: Shattering The Silence Surrounding The Holocaust at ushmm.org ( United States Holocaust Memorial Museum )
personal data
SURNAME Rose, Billy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenberg, William Samuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American songwriter, show business impresario and manager
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1966
Place of death Montego Bay , Jamaica