Customer Reviews

Dancing in the dark

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This is fast reading despite the book's thickness. It has a breezy show-biz style, is full of laughs, and ultimately turns out to pack an emotional wallop. I hope this book will be reprinted someday, because in a lot of ways it's profound. Howard Dietz was a guy who made it. He was head of publicity for MGM when Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer merged. He thought up the lion with the "Ars Gratia Artis" motto. He thought up a lot of memorable blurbs like "Gable's back and Greer's got him!" He planned the spectacular premiere of GONE WITH THE WIND. At the same time he was writing lyrics for Broadway revues like THE BANDWAGON (with special material for stars like Fred Astaire and Beatrice Lillie) which produced songs that became standards, like "Dancing in the Dark" and "Body and Soul." He had an elegant town house in Greenwich Village. He hobnobbed with the rich. He had a yacht (he calls it a boat). He married three beautiful women (all socialites). After a while I started thinking that he sure likes to toot his own horn a lot. He quotes his own witty remarks at parties. Then I wondered just who he was trying so hard to impress. But then in 1954, he was stricken with the first signs of Parkinson's disease and he casually mentions from time to time his further deterioration. He devotes time to his experience as a guinea pig for an experimental drug that helps him dramatically. At the end I realized that it was himself he was trying to impress. His body would no longer cooperate, but he had been there and done that. Hadn't he?

I don't mean to imply that there is anything dour about the book. He glosses over the failed marriages and the flop shows. (On the 1964 Broadway musical ANATOL starring Italian film actor Walter Chiari: "Barbara Cook and all the singers liked their parts, but our leading man couldn't act, dance, sing or speak English, which was a handicap.") Several parts of it were laugh-out-loud funny, like an outrageous story about FREAKS director Tod Browning or time spent with the Marx Brothers, for whom the world was a no-holds-barred comic improv session.

There are lots of photographs and a liberal sampling of the lyrics Dietz is proudest of. It was published in 1974. Dietz died in 1983 at age 86. Those with an interest in musical comedy and the early days of MGM will find this book very much worth reading.