HOW A RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS GAVE THE WORLD THE TIMELESS CLASSIC TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD The New York Times Michael Brown, a cabaret performer and songwriter known for his sprightly contributions to the industrial musical, an American entertainment genre that literally sang the praises of vacuums and zippers and autos and steel — and who, as an improbable result of this work, bestowed on his friend Harper Lee the wherewithal to write her only novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — died on June 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. His death, from lymphoma, was confirmed by his wife, Joy Williams Brown. At midcentury, many American corporations put on Broadway-style musical extravaganzas for their employees. Typically staged for just a performance or two at sales conferences and managerial meetings and occasionally recorded for posterity, the shows were meant to rally the troops — a kind of “How to Succeed in Business by Dint of Really Trying.” “They were entertaining, but they were also motivational,” Steve Young, the author, with Sport Murphy, of “Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals” (2013), said in a telephone interview. “They presented the company as our great family that we’re all pulling in the same direction for.” Industrial musicals boasted professional casts — Florence Henderson and Dorothy Loudon are alumnae — and opulent production values. In an era when a Broadway musical might cost $500,000, its industrial counterpart could cost as much as $3 million. They also had high-level composers and lyricists, including Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, known widely for “Fiddler on the Roof” and less widely for “Ford-i-fy Your Future,” the Ford Tractor show of 1959. Mr. Brown, whose clients included the J. C. Penney Company, Singer sewing machines and DuPont, was among the genre’s most sought-after creators. His shows — he supplied music, lyrics and direction and often took part as a singer — were known, Mr. Young said, for “their high quality and general buoyancy and fun.” Consider Mr. Brown’s “Love Song to an Electrolux”: This is the perfect matchment, All sweet and serene. I’ve formed an attachment. I’m in love with a lovely machine. Or his spur to a sales force: You gotta be a good greeter — Sell the car! You gotta turn on the heater — Sell the car! And when you get to St. Peter — Sell the car! Sell the Edsel for ’59! For DuPont, Mr. Brown created “Wonderful World of Chemistry,” a show that in all likelihood has had the greatest number of performances of any musical in history. Marion Martin Brown Jr. was born on Dec. 14, 1920, in Mexia, Tex. As a youth, he played the piano and wrote songs; at 15, he entered the University of Texas. After receiving his bachelor’s degree there while still a teenager, he earned a master’s in English from the University of Virginia. After wartime service as a cryptographer, Mr. Brown moved to New York, where he adopted the name Michael. He became a regular at supper clubs, including the Blue Angel, performing his own satirical compositions. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story One of his best-known original songs from this period is “Fall River Hoedown,” a.k.a. “Lizzie Borden.” A lively ensemble number written for the Broadway revue “New Faces of 1952,” it contained this memorable lyric: Oh, you can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts And then blame all the damage on the mice. No, you can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts. That kind of thing just isn’t very nice. The Chad Mitchell Trio popularized that song and another by Mr. Brown, “The John Birch Society,” which included these lines: “You cannot trust your neighbors, or even next of kin./If mommy is a Commie then you gotta turn her in.” His most widely seen show was without doubt “Wonderful World of Chemistry.” Presented in the DuPont pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, it was a rare example of an industrial musical open to the public. The show, written, produced and directed by Mr. Brown, was performed at least 40 times a day, by at least eight companies, for months on end. Seen by an estimated five million people, the show, 24 minutes long, played some 17,000 performances. Broadway’s longest-running musical, “Phantom of the Opera,” by contrast, has had about 11,000 performances since opening in 1988. It was the modest windfall from just such an industrial show — a musical fashion show for Esquire magazine in the fall of 1956, Joy Brown recalled last week — that let Mr. Brown and his wife help usher “To Kill a Mockingbird” into being. The Browns had met Ms. Lee through her friend Truman Capote. Mr. Brown had contributed lyrics to a song in the 1954 Broadway musical “House of Flowers,” with a book by Mr. Capote and music by Harold Arlen. By 1956, Ms. Lee, an Alabama native, was living in New York. Her longed-for career as a writer was stymied by the need to pay the rent, and she was toiling away as an airline reservations clerk. That Christmas, visiting the Browns, she spied an envelope with her name on it in the branches of their tree. “I opened it and read: ‘You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas,’ ” Ms. Lee recalled in a 1961 essay in McCall’s magazine in which she did not identify the Browns by name. “It’s a fantastic gamble,” Ms. Lee, in the words of her essay, told Mr. Brown. “It’s such a great risk.” “He looked at me,” the essay continued, “and said softly: ‘No, honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.’ ” The result, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, and for nearly a half-century afterward the Browns and Ms. Lee kept their secret. News of the gift — Ms. Lee insisted that it be a loan — came to light in 2006 with the publication of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” a biography by Charles J. Shields. In an interview last week, Ms. Brown declined to specify the amount of the loan but said it had long since been repaid. Besides his wife, whom he married in 1950, Mr. Brown is survived by two sons, Michael Jr. and Kelly. Another son, Adam, died in 1994. Mr. Brown wrote music, book and lyrics for the short-lived Broadway musical “Different Times,” staged in 1972. He was also the author of the popular children’s picture book “Santa Mouse” (1966), with illustrations by Elfrieda DeWitt, and its several sequels. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” widely considered a seminal novel of the 20th-century, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was the basis of an acclaimed Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck, released the next year. Speaking by telephone last week, Ms. Brown recalled her and her husband’s astonished delight upon hearing what the book’s original publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, planned for it in 1960. “We thought, they’re printing 5,000 copies,” she recalled. “Who in the world is going to buy 5,000 copies?” According to its current publisher, HarperCollins, “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been translated into more than 40 languages and has sold 30 million copies worldwide, a sure thing if ever there was one.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 03:52:38 +0000
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