“But we’ve got something else, hey, Frank?”
“You mean ‘Montgomery’?” said Moon.
“Yeh.”
“Let’s hear it,” requested Brock.
“It’ll take a dinge comic to sing it.”
“Well, Joe Stein can do a dinge.”
“I’ll say he can! I like him best in blackface. And he’s just the boy to put over a number like this.”
Morris played another introduction, strains that Hazlett was sure he had heard a hundred times before, and Moon was off again:
I want to go to Alabam’.
That’s where my lovin’ sweetheart am,
And won’t she shout and dance for joy
To see once more her lovin’ boy!
I’ve got enough saved up, I guess,
To buy her shoes and a bran’-new dress.
She’s black as coal, and yet I think
When I walk in, she’ll be tickled pink.Take me to Montgomery
Where it’s always summery.
New York’s just a mummery.
Give me life that’s real.
New York fields are rotten fields.
Give me those forgotten fields;
I mean those there cotton fields,
Selma and Mobile.
I done been away so long;
Never thought I’d stay so long.
Train, you’d better race along
To my honey lamb.
Train, you make it snappy till
(’Cause I won’t be happy till)
I am in the capital,
Montgomery, Alabam’.
“Another knockout!” said Brock enthusiastically. “Boys, either one of those numbers are better than anything in Jersey Jane. Either one of them will put our troupe over. And the two of them together in one show! Well, it’s in!”
Hazlett mustered all his courage.
“They’re a couple of mighty good songs,” he said. “But I don’t exactly see how they’ll fit.”
“Mr. Hazlett,” said Jerry Morris. “I understand this is your first experience with a musical comedy. I’ve had five successes in four years and could have had five more if I wanted to work that hard. I know the game backwards and I hope you won’t take offense if I tell you a little something about it.”
“I’m always glad to learn,” said Hazlett.
“Well, then,” said Morris, “you’ve got a great book there, with a good novelty idear, but it won’t go without a few changes, changes that you can make in a half-hour and not detract anything from the novelty. In fact, they will add to it. While you were telling your story, I was thinking of it from the practical angle, the angle of show business, and I believe I can put my finger right on the spots that have got to be fixed.
“In the first place, as Louie has told you, he’s got a contract with Enriqueta and she won’t play any secondary parts. That means your heroine must be Spanish. Well, why not make her uncle her father and have him a Spaniard, running a Spanish restaurant somewhere downtown? It’s a small restaurant and he just gets by. He has to use her as cashier and she sits in the window where the people going past can see her.
“One day the boy, who is really an Italian count—we’ll call him Count Pizzola—he is riding alone in a taxi and he happens to look in the window and see the gal. He falls in love with her at first sight, orders the driver to stop and gets out and goes in the restaurant. He sits down and has his lunch, and while he is eating we can put in a novelty dance number with the boys and gals from the offices that are also lunching in this place.
“When the number is over, I’d have a comedy scene between Stein, who plays a dinge waiter, and, say, a German customer who isn’t satisfied with the food or the check or something. Louie, who would you suggest for that part?”
“How about Charlie Williams?” said Brock.
“Great!” said Morris. “Well, they have this argument and the dinge throws the waiter out. The scrap amuses Pizzola and the gal, too, and they both laugh and that brings them together. He doesn’t tell her he is a count, but she likes him pretty near as well as he likes her. They gab a while and then go into the Spanish number I just played for you.
“Now, in your story, you’ve got a boat scene where the gal is landing from Ireland. You’d better forget that scene. There was a boat scene in Sunny and a boat scene in Hit the Deck, and a lot of other troupes. We don’t wan’t anything that isn’t our own. But Pizzola is anxious to take the gal out somewhere and let’s see—Frank, where can he take her?”
“Why not a yacht?” suggested Moon.
“Great! He invites her out on a yacht, but he’s got to pretend it isn’t his own yacht. He borrowed it from a friend. She refuses at first, saying she hasn’t anything to wear. She’s poor, see? So he tells her his sister has got some sport clothes that will fit her. He gets the clothes for her and then we have a scene in her room where she is putting them on with a bunch of girlfriends helping her. We’ll write a number for that.
“Now the clothes he gave her are really his sister’s clothes and the sister has carelessly left a beautiful brooch pinned in them. We go to the yacht and the Spanish dame knocks everybody dead. They put on an amateur show. That will give Enriqueta a chance for a couple more numbers. She and Pizzola are getting more and more stuck on each other and they repeat the Spanish song on the yacht, in the moonlight.
“There’s a Frenchman along on the party who is greatly attracted by Enriqueta’s looks. The Frenchman hates Pizzola. He has found out in some way that Enriqueta is wearing Pizzola’s sister’s clothes and he notices the diamond brooch. He figures that if he can steal it off of her, why, suspicion will be cast on the gal herself on account of her being poor, and Pizzola, thinking her a thief, won’t have anything more to do with her and he, the Frenchman, can have her. So, during a dance, he manages to
