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This chapter focuses on the start of Dorothy's career. The 1920s saw women in the United States going where they had not gone before — into voting booths, for example. The world of Dorothy's early adulthood was very different from the coming-of-age time of her mother or even that of her older sister; American women had new freedoms and were exercising them. To establish herself in songwriting, Dorothy needed not only talent, but also nerve and daring, and the Roaring Twenties fostered those qualities in women far more than previous decades had. Dorothy could look around for encouragement and see flappers of her day trying all sorts of things their mothers had not dared to do. The timing was of great importance, given what lay ahead. Getting a secure foothold in songwriting before the Great Depression hit would be crucial to Dorothy's career.

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 Dorothy's post-high school years. After completing her studies at the Benjamin School for Girls and staying on awhile as an instructor in drama, she had various workaday jobs that seem an ill fit for her talents. For a while, she worked as a lab technician, an occupation that seems so uncharacteristic of her. At age twenty, Dorothy married Dr. Jack Wiener, a surgeon on the staff of Montefiore Hospital. In 1927, Dorothy eventually began collaborating with James McHugh, a partnership that would last almost a decade and would produce some of their most famous songs.

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.

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood career of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. McHugh and Fields went to Hollywood as a songwriting team, like Rodgers and Hart, or George and Ira Gershwin. They signed their first contract with MGM studios on October 3, 1929, just a few weeks before the stock market crash. The first film that Dorothy and Jimmy provided songs for, Love in the Rough (1930), was the sort of cheery fare that would become typical of musicals produced during the Depression.

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 the changes in Dorothy's life and career in the late 1930s. In 1938, Dorothy Fields returned to New York. With this move, she was not only changing place of residence and career orientation; she was also changing her marital status. On July 14, 1938, one day before her thirty-fourth birthday, Dorothy Fields married Eli Lahm. From a position of greater independence and greater sense of self, she was able to begin a new stage of her life, one that would play out on Broadway and bring forth some of her most enduring successes.

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 begins with a discussion of the musical By the Beautiful Sea and how it revisits several themes from earlier musicals the Fieldses had worked on. By the Beautiful Sea was the last work in an intensely active period in Dorothy Fields's career — three Broadway musicals and four Hollywood musicals between 1950 and 1954 In the second half of the decade, she slowed down. Redhead was the last musical she and Herbert would work on together.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's return to Broadway. The Broadway to which Dorothy Fields returned in 1939 had not yet bottomed out financially. Every year in that decade saw fewer productions on Broadway than did the year before. Producers of shows in 1939 had hoped that with the increased number of visitors to New York to see the World's Fair, ticket sales on Broadway would go up, but in fact they went down. Nevertheless, many composers and lyricists who had tasted what Hollywood had to offer in the first half of the 1930s found themselves carried on a return current to New York.

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 begins by detailing the personal losses experienced by Dorothy in 1958, namely the death of Michael Todd in a plane crash on March 22; the death of her brother and collaborator, Herb Fields on March 24, due to a heart attack at age sixty; and the death of her husband just a few months later. It then describes her return to Broadway via the musical Sweet Charity in 1966.

This chapter focuses on the changes in Dorothy Fields's career and personal life in the late 1930s and early 1940s. After her marriage, the first major change in Dorothy's personal life was the birth of her son, David Lahm on December 12, 1940. The next change in Dorothy's life, equal and opposite one might say, was the death of her father. On October 29, 1941, Let's Face It opened on Broadway; this was Dorothy's debut as a Broadway librettist. By 1943, Joseph, Herbert, and Dorothy Fields collectively had five shows running on Broadway—My Sister Eileen, Let's Face It, Junior Miss, The Doughgirls, and Herbert and Dorothy's new work with Cole Porter, Something for the Boys.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's return to writing lyrics via the new musical, Up in Central Park. She and Herb wrote the libretto together, as they had for their previous three shows. The composer was an old friend but a new collaborator: Sigmund Romberg. Up in Central Park is a mixture of fact and fiction. Similar to stage and screen biographies—musical or otherwise — its story was essentially fiction with an anchor in history. In this it differs from Oklahoma! or Carousel, which are also set in the past, but without characters who had actually made news in their time.

This chapter focuses on Fields' and McHugh's Broadway career. The person who launched McHugh and Fields on Broadway was Lew Leslie, who hired them to write the score for Blackbirds of 1928. Between 1928 and 1930, McHugh and Fields supplied songs for several other revues. Ziegfeld's Midnite Frolic had “stars from the Ziegfeld shows and Paul Whiteman and his entire orchestra,” according to one advertisement. Ben Marden's Palais Royale Revue starred Ethel Waters. They also wrote for a revue for Ben Marden's Riviera. None of the songs for these revues became standards. Nevertheless, McHugh and Fields became a songwriting team to reckon with.

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.

This chapter focuses on record company owner Mira Smith, and songwriter and civic leader Maggie Warwick. Smith was the founder and owner of RAM Records. Her recording efforts spanned several genres, including country, rockabilly, R&B, and swamp pop. Smith moved away from Shreveport in the 1960s following the end of Hayride. Together with Warwick, Smith went to Nashville to write songs for producer and music publisher Shelby Singleton.