Betty Smith is best known for her bestselling novel of 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; however, in the adaptation of that novel for the stage in 1951, her rich background in theatre made her as suitable a collaborator for Broadway legend George Abbott as did her ownership of the rights to the story. In spite of an eighth grade education, Smith had been allowed to audit classes at the University of Michigan and then at Yale in the 1930s, while her first husband attended school. She’d studied journalism, where she discovered that her writing was strong and her point of view vastly different from her classmates’. She’d studied theatre under the same professors as Arthur Miller, learning about production, acting, directing, and playwriting. During this time, she sold a number of articles and stories to magazines, and had several of her plays produced and published. In 1935, in desperate need of money after her first divorce, she took a job with the WPA Theatre as an actress, and was later transferred to the Federal Theatre Project, under the direction of Hallie Flanagan, where she worked on the Living Newspaper.

In the 1940s, Smith had two plays produced professionally, although neither was successful. She’d always dreamed of having a play on Broadway, and in 1950, a Broadway producer came to her new agent looking for an idea for a show and picked Tree from a list of suggested titles. She was reluctant to work on the play herself after her recent disappointments, but from the moment of meeting George Abbott their partnership was sealed. The two worked on the play while he was aboard a ship to South America; Smith described mailing a new scene to a different port of call everyday!

Smith started out a German immigrant in Brooklyn and grew up into a working-class chain-smoker who wrote to eke out a living for herself and her children. The largely biographical Tree fit well with the short-lived penchant in 1940s popular literature for socially-conscious realism that addressed problems in American life; its success catapulted her into immediate fame—and even a little fortune. It was made into a popular film in 1945 (Elia Kazan’s first), and the Broadway play opened to solid reviews and ran for a year. Smith went on to write two more novels, neither of which took the country by storm the way her first had done. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is still widely read in Europe, though in America it has been the victim of the postwar pruning of the academic literary canon that stripped away most race, gender and class diversity.

Dorothy Fields grew up in relative ease in Manhattan, the daughter of vaudevillian-turned-producer Lew Fields. After finishing school, she found work teaching drama and stumbled into songwriting. She felt an immediate affinity for the work, and soon found her songwriting voice with the popular “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” written with her first partner, Jimmy McHugh. An insouciant 1935 article in Popular Songs accuses this first hit of “start[ing] a million young couples marching blithely to the altar.”

The two wrote many songs for films in the 1930s, and Fields also started collaborating with other composers. She began working for Broadway with Arthur Schwartz and realized that she preferred the connection to the larger work through its entire process that was possible in this genre, a connection not possible with film. In 1945 she was instrumental in creating the wildly successful Annie Get Your Gun for Ethel Merman, with Irving Berlin as composer. The 1950s were a busy time for her, with four Broadway musicals, four films, and a television musical. Her best work from this decade was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which revealed a new facet to her talent. Her lyrics for Tree show off her ability for clever comedy, but she also brings to the work a new understanding and sympathy for the characters and writes lyrics specific to them.

Fields’ most successful work, Sweet Charity, would come a decade later, when the 61-year-old Fields was a solid generation older than her collaborators Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse, and Neil Simon. When she died in 1974, she had been writing lyrics for popular songs, films, and plays for nearly fifty years, penning some 400 songs in all! She was admired for her ability to write lyrics with impeccable structure and rhyme scheme that still managed to sound like natural speech and honest emotions.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the musical, alters the intent of the novel, shifting the focus from little Francie to the hardships and heartaches of her mother and Aunt Cissy. The play was written around two of its players: the indomitable Shirley Booth, who caused the comic role of Cissy to grow and compete with the more somber tone of the main story; and Nomi Mitty, whom Abbott was set on as Francie despite the fact that she couldn’t sing, thereby causing two beautiful songs to be dropped from the score (much to Schwartz’s and Fields’ dismay). A few reviews noted these problems with the show, but most were warm and a few even effusive. The score is full of “local color” songs that evoke the period as well as ballads of lovely simplicity that are sweet but never cloying. It has been called one of the most outstanding scores of the 1950s; unfortunately, it had to compete with The King and I and Guys and Dolls, which opened in the same season!

Perhaps in conjunction with the near-disappearance of the novel from the stage of popular consciousness, the musical also dropped out of circulation and is no longer even carried by a publisher. However, this “lost treasure” has recently received two notable revivals: a reworking of both book and score at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2003; and a collation of all extant original scripts, including some rediscovered orchestrations from the original Broadway production, performed with a slightly condensed book in the “Encores!” series at the New York City Center in February, 2005. It is through the cooperation and assistance of the New York City Center and members of the Schwartz family that the “Encores!” version was presented by Echo Theatre.

For more information, visit Carol Siri Johnson’s online dissertation on Betty Smith’s book, and Deborah Grace Winer’s biography of Dorothy Fields, On the Sunny Side of the Street.

[December 2005]

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