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This chapter focuses on the end of the partnership between Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and her collaborations with other composers. By 1936, despite their many songwriting successes, Fields and McHugh had ceased to be a team. After an eight-year partnership, they never wrote another song together. If there was acrimony in their breakup, McHugh was too much of a gentlemen and Fields too much of a lady to discuss these matters publicly.

Annie Get Your Gun, for which Herbert and Dorothy Fields wrote the book, became the most popular and successful stage work Dorothy ever worked on. A number of famous people associated with the show have, in interviews, disclosed their own point of view on the making and meaning of this musical. This chapter, more than the others, is larded with quotations, not all taken at face value, in an attempt to get a multidimensional view of the work.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's collaborations with Jerome Kern. When Dorothy Fields began working with Kern, she gained not only a new collaborator but a second family and a new approach to integrating songs with dramatic works. Jimmy McHugh was a gifted musician, but Kern was a man of the theater. His Princess shows, some of which Dorothy saw when she was a girl, inspired many songwriters, including Rodgers and Hart and George Gershwin.

This chapter focuses on the remaking of Dorothy and Herb Fields' Broadway musicals into films. The same year Universal released Mexican Hayride, it released Up in Central Park. As far as one can infer from the advertising trailer, the success of the stage version was the basis for marketing the film: after “over 1,000 performances,” here was a “picture everybody can enjoy.” In fact, Up in Central Park played on Broadway for 504 performances; the “over 1,000” may have been standard Hollywood inflation, or perhaps it counted regional performances as well. Annie Get Your Gun triumphed as one of the most popular films of 1950. Although its production budget was enormous — around $3 million — it still made money for MGM. Starting in 1951, Dorothy Fields wrote lyrics for several films that were not remakes of Broadway plays.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's life and career in the early 1950s. Between 1950 and 1954, in addition to writing lyrics for four movies, she worked on three Broadway musicals. Arms and the Girl (1950), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), and By the Beautiful Sea (1954) were all set between fifty and two hundred years in the past. That is, all of these musicals continue in the Americana tradition of the Fieldses' two previous musicals, Up in Central Park and Annie Get Your Gun.

This chapter focuses on the later life and career of Dorothy Fields. Dorothy's last three musicals were separated by long intermissions. There were seven years between Redhead and Sweet Charity and another seven years between Sweet Charity and Seesaw, her final musical, written in collaboration with Cy Coleman. Dorothy died unexpectedly on March 28, 1974. The New York Times listed heart attack as the cause of death.

The chapter explores Berlin’s most frequently performed show from several angles and through several sources. It interprets the libretto as an intersection postwar, mid-century gender and ethnic themes: both a Rosie-the-Riveter story and Jewish assimilation narrative filtered through an Ethel Merman vehicle. It analyzes Berlin’s songs for the show in the context of the rich primary source material at the Library of Congress, tracing how Berlin used song cues provided by the librettists Dorothy and Herbert Fields. By understanding of the order and speed with which Berlin wrote the songs, we can see for the first time that Berlin began by writing his version of “hillbilly” tunes, then expanded the show’s stylistic range to include swing. In the realm of lyrics, the show features Berlin’s flexible and varied use of two lyric-writing devices: the list and the antithesis. The show’s critical reception focused in particular on comparisons and contrasts with Oklahoma!

Phil Leavitt's parents had rented a house next door to the summer home of the producer Lew Fields. In short order, Leavitt got acquainted with Fields's dark-eyed daughter, Dorothy Fields. He persuaded Dorothy to get her father to listen to a song Dick Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had written called “Venus.” Fields had many successful productions, but Joe Weber's star as a producer shone ever less brightly. Fields returned to producing and starring in Broadway musicals. After four weeks at the Shubert Theatre, his newest show, A Lonely Romeo, had moved to the Casino shortly before Phil Leavitt paved the way for Dick Rodgers's audition. When Dick was through, Lew Fields astonished him by offering to buy one of the songs he had played, “Any Old Place With You,” and interpolate it into A Lonely Romeo. Rodgers floated back to the city: sixteen years old, and he already had a song in a top Broadway show.

This chapter describes Bob Fosse’s film Sweet Charity, which opened at the top of 1966 and was a compendium of then-current styles and sexual attitudes. Fosse conceived this American adaptation of Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria (1957) as a vehicle for Gwen Verdon, changing the title character from Roman prostitute to New York City dance hall hostess. He wrote several drafts of the show’s book before relinquishing those duties to Neil Simon. Nonetheless, in Sweet Charity, Fosse’s authorial voice was much in evidence. His staging exhibited a new fluidity, as well as a dark, ambivalent view of sexuality. Sweet Charity was also the vehicle by which Fosse would return to movies, this time as a director. Although full of arresting moments, the film was deemed too busy and full of gimmicky, self-conscious camerawork. Sweet Charity was a commercial and critical failure, but it allowed Fosse to explore the camera’s potential in presenting dance on film.