Harold Rome
Everyone on the production side also was a veteran. Rome had been an Army Corporal. He told an interviewer from The New Yorker that he had spent 32 months as a Pfc, 31 of them were devoted mostly to answering phones for an officer at Ft. Hamilton in Brooklyn, where he also wrote, directed and acted in shows in the evenings. In his last month, he worked on a special services show with Arnold Auerbach that never was produced. One show of his that was produced while he was at Ft. Hamilton was "Stars and Gripes," which later toured bases in the country and the Pacific. It included a take-off on "Begin the Beguine" called "When I Begin to Clean the Latrine," but mostly he wrote serious ballads. If he got an overnight pass, he would hop the subway to spend a few hours at his apartment, leading him to claim, "It seems to me I sat out the war on the BMT Sea Beach express."
Like much of the theater community in the 1930s, Harold Rome had been in the camp of the Popular Front, that alliance of Communists, Socialists and Social Democrats that sought to move America culturally and politically to the Left. While there is no evidence that he ever was a party member, he definitely was a sympathizer in his youth. Popular Front organizations offered meetings, workshops and summer camps that provided abundant opportunities for networking, creative collaboration, employment, socializing and romance. Joining in was a smart career move in the 1930s and, Lord knows, the Depression was a powerful argument against Capitalism. Protest and rebellion proved potent creative catalysts and the movement provided a ready-made creative point of view as well as a sizable audience of like-minded people. This youthful enthusiasm would have dire consequences during the McCarthy era, but the artists of the Left thumbed their noses at the red-baiting of the mid-40s.
Like many of the ardent supporters of the Left in the arts community, Rome was hardly a member of the proletariat. His father owned a coal company in Hartford, Connecticut. Harold graduated from Yale in 1929, attended Yale Law, and then transferred to the School of Architecture, receiving his degree in 1934. The Depression was not a good time to launch an architectural career. As it foundered, he studied painting with the Art Students League but that proved not to be lucrative. He did a little work for the WPA, measuring monuments in Central Park and building a scale model of the Holland Tunnel, but earned most of his income from playing the piano. He had been playing piano for ballet classes since college days and he had toured Europe with the Yale band. Now he played in dance halls and clubs, Ever the student, he took up advanced musical studies with Lehman Engel and others. Engel would be hired as musical director of "Call Me Mister." Rome also wrote scores for bands and tried his hand at song writing. Gypsy Rose Lee helped him get a song published and the Ritz Brothers bought "Horror Boys of Hollywood" for their movie "One in a Million."
At that time the summer mountain resorts were a training ground for show business talent. Rome spent three summers at Green Mansions in the Adirondacks, the summer base for the Group Theatre. Each of those summers, he wrote three shows for production at the resort. This led to his breakout opportunity writing songs and sketches in 1937 for "Pins and Needles." The cast were all garment workers and Rome and radical songwriter Earl Robinson accompanied them on piano. The show was a sensation. The cast members joined Equity and the revue moved to Broadway, where it set the record for longest-running musical, a record beaten by "Oklahoma!" a few years later.
As a product of the late 1930s, "Pins and Needles" reflected the confusion and divisions that broke apart the Popular Front. The show was periodically updated to reflect changing events. European Fascists and imperialists, along with domestic "reactionaries," had been among the show's primary targets from the beginning, but the politics were tempered with humor and warmth. The everyday life of working men and women were its focal point. In 1939 a song was added reflecting the newly dictated party line urging America to keep out of European affairs. When the party line changed again after the invasion of the Soviet Union, a song was added to the touring show urging America to join the fight against Hitler. The number and identities of the "Angels of Peace" routine kept changing to reflect the shifts in Soviet-dictated dogma. Originally the skit skewered Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Britain's Anthony Eden as war mongers. Then Neville Chamberlain replaced Eden, but he was characterized as an appeaser. Then Chamberlain was dropped as the war approached. When the ILGWU drew further away from the Party after the Hitler/Stalin pact, Stalin briefly joined the group until the number was dropped altogether and replaced by a song by Rome complaining that keeping up with the international situation was driving him insane, as it would anyone attempting to align themselves with Soviet policy.
According to Moss Hart, a biography by Jared Brown, Rome and collaborator /director Charles Friedman had wanted their follow-up revue "Sing Out the News," produced in 1938, to be more militantly Leftist, but producers Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman had other ideas for the show, wanting a broader range of satirical targets, funnier jokes and less agit-prop. Rome and Friedman clashed repeatedly with Moss and Kaufman over the changes made to the show. The cast of "Sing Out the News" included Joey Faye, Will Geer and Rex Ingram, and a chorus girl, from the Bronx, Eleanor Geisman, rechristened June Allyson. The show produced a hit song, "Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones" and the reviews were mostly positive, but the end result lacked the sharp point of view of "Pins and Needles" and had trouble drawing an audience.
The June 1 "Talk of the Town" interview in The New Yorker described Rome in 1946 as a medium-sized, dark man who had just turned 38. He lived with his wife in a spacious apartment on West 57th Street decorated with African sculpture (apparently a standard fixture among city sophisticates judging from the number of times it is mentioned in accounts of the day) and paintings he had done while studying at the Art Students League.
"Call Me Mister" was not especially political and the viewpoint was not overtly radical. Rome later lent his name to Peoples Songs, a postwar effort to revive the Popular Front, and was active in the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace's 1948 campaign for president, both positioned as efforts to continue the New Deal but seen by much of the non-Communist Left as well as the Right as Communist-dominated. This was enough to win Rome a spot on the blacklist. However, the blacklist had far less of an effect on the theater than it did in Hollywood or broadcasting.
In the Fifties, Rome had a reputation as the thinking man's Broadway composer, "Noel Coward with a social conscience," the sophisticated alternative to Rodgers & Hammerstein. His subsequent shows include "Fanny," "Wish You Were Here," "Destry Rides Again" and "I Can Get It For You Wholesale," remembered now mostly as Barbra Streisand's Broadway debut. He has never been the subject of a biography. His shows and songs seldom are performed today and his reputation has faded considerably. He seems now mostly a man of his times.