Holmes Is Where the Heart Is

Thirty-nine years ago this week, Baker Street opened with a helluva lot of ballyhoo. That’s because showman extraordinaire Alexander H. Cohen was the producer of this musicalization of Sherlock Holmes stories. Above the marquee of the Broadway Theatre, Cohen had an elaborate display that took up the entire facade. I can still see an animated figure climbing up a ladder, and Holmes — whom Cohen shrewdly labeled as a precursor to the then-white-hot James Bond — was also on hand, with smoke pouring out of his famous pipe. Cohen also saw to it that Baker Street‘s Playbill had a color cover — which was a first for musicals. Depicted were Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes; Martin Gabel as Holmes’s famous nemesis, Professor Moriarty; and Inga Swenson as the American actress Irene Adler, who somewhat insinuated herself into Holmes’s life.

Baker Street was around for most of 1965 and none of 1966; after 313 performances, it closed at a loss. Still, the show had a number of charms including a fun score, and it certainly looked great. How else could set designer Oliver Smith have beaten out Boris Aronson and his evocative sets for Fiddler on the Roof at Tony Awards time?

Many people have never heard Baker Street because its MGM original cast album has never been released on CD. Brian Drutman at Decca Broadway, which now owns the MGM catalogue, desperately wants to issue it but can’t locate the original contracts. In situations such as these, company lawyers insist that no CD be made — for if the company went ahead and then someone came out of the woodwork with a contract, there’d really be trouble.

Another person who wishes that those contracts could be found is Raymond Jessel, who co-wrote the music and lyrics for the show with Marian Grudeff. Jessel’s in town doing his cabaret show The First 70 Years at Don’t Tell Mama. If, God forbid, you miss this witty evening, he does have a CD of the show available on LML Records. But there’s no CD of Baker Street.

Jessel was born in Wales 72 years ago, moved to Canada in his boyhood, and planned to be a serious musician. But then, in 1955, he met Marian Grudeff, director of the annual revue Spring Thaw that was a big event in Toronto and, later, in the provinces. Jessel worked on the show and things went so well that the two decided to try their hand at creating a musical. They decided on the life of Phineas T. Barnum, wrote some songs without benefit of a bookwriter, and brought them to Cohen. He liked what they had and optioned the show. An opening was set for 1964, as is evidenced by Cohen’s advertising Barnum as “The World’s Fair Musical” — in honor of the big hoo-hah that was to take place in Flushing Meadows that year.

But Jessel and Grudeff still didn’t have a bookwriter. Recalls Jessell, “We trouped around and found plenty of them, but Alex liked none of them. I think it’s because he thought of himself as a modern-day Barnum and wanted someone to write a character as big as he was. But then he had the reverse problem with another show he had under option — Baker Street, which he felt had a serviceable book and a not-so-good score. Its director was then Michael Langham, and because he’d heard and liked what we’d written for Barnum, he asked us to write a few songs for Baker Street.”

Jessel and Grudeff came up with “It’s So Simple” as an opening song for Holmes that would show his amazing powers of deduction. According to Jessel, “The other songwriters — really, I can’t remember their names — hadn’t written one, to our surprise. So we wrote a Prokofiev-ian melody over which Holmes could sing his deductions. And when the people he was talking to joined in, we went for a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like, Victorian melody.” For the Baker Street Irregulars — those urchins who hang around and do the grunt work for Holmes — they wrote a song called “Law and Order” which didn’t make it into the final version of the show. “And,” notes Jessel, “we thought of doing something for Watson that would set him far apart from Holmes. That meant his feelings about women. So we wrote ‘A Married Man'” — a song about which we’ll hear more later.

Langham was so delighted with their work, says Jessel, that he encouraged Cohen to give the new team the entire show. And that’s what happened. Barnum was put on hold, and the team never finished it. (Mark Bramble, Michael Stewart, and Cy Coleman, of course, did their own version many years later.) But Baker Street‘s problems weren’t all solved. Now, who was going to star in it?

Everyone wanted Rex Harrison, and Cohen eventually sweetened the pot by offering the role of Irene Adler to his wife, Rachel Roberts. “But,” says Jessel, “Harrison felt that the character was too similar to Henry Higgins. Both are men who don’t have much use for women and are meticulous where grammar is concerned.” Indeed, at one point, when Holmes and Irene are undertaking a ruse in disguise, he criticizes her by saying: “Your ‘a’s are a trifle flat” — something we can all hear Higgins saying. Roberts, meanwhile, would have her own musical running when Baker Street finally opened: Lionel Bart’s Maggie May, which opened in London on the same day that Fiddler opened in America but ran a considerably shorter time.

The production’s inability to land leads eventually discouraged Langham enough that he left the project. He was succeeded by Joshua Logan. “We worked with him for several exciting months — pre-lithium,” Jessel says, alluding to Logan’s famous bouts with medication. But before Logan could suggest that the Baker Street Irregular Boys go shirtless, he was out and Harold Prince was in. Of course, Prince wasn’t yet the powerhouse director he would become; while he had guided A Family Affair into town after a torturous tryout under Word Baker and had then directed (superbly, from all accounts) the original She Loves Me, he’d yet to have a real hit. Jessel says that seeing She Loves Me made him feel that Prince would do a good job — yet, almost immediately, the team disagreed with Prince on one important issue.

“He wanted someone known for her acting to play Irene,” Jessel relates. “Joan Hackett was someone he was keen on. That was tempting in a way, but we felt that with Holmes, Watson and Moriarty not having glorious voices, we’d like one person in the cast who could really sing. It took us a long time before we landed on Inga Swenson. And Fritz Weaver we got after we went out to Jones Beach to see him doing Around the World in 80 Days.”

They’d go on to have bigger problems with Prince: When they were in Toronto, he suggested that Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who’d just done Fiddler for him, augment the score. “Of course, we weren’t happy,” says Jessel, “but we didn’t stop him or them. They came up with ‘I’m in London Again’ for Irene. That replaced our opening number for her, ‘I’d Do It Again,’ which we moved to later in the show. But Hal didn’t like ‘I’m in London Again’ either, and kept after them to write what he called ‘a sheer entertainment number.’ They didn’t come up with anything until after we opened: ‘Buffalo Belles,’ which we all felt was even worse.” (That may be, but even Jessel admits that Harnick came up with something brilliant in his song for Moriarty: “I Shall Miss You, Holmes,” which replaced the team’s “A Veritable Work of Art” and which contained the felicitous lyric, “when the stately Holmes of England is no more.”)

But the song that became the score’s best-known, “A Married Man,” was by Jessel and Grudeff. Some months earlier, Cohen had produced Richard Burton in Hamlet, so he asked the man whose marriage to Elizabeth Taylor was the most celebrated and notorious of the decade to record this number about the joys of being hitched. Burton did so and the recording actually made the Top 40. According to Jessel, “Cohen also had Elizabeth Taylor sing one of Irene’s songs, ‘Finding Words for Spring.’ But she didn’t do good hob of it, so it wasn’t released. Marian has a copy of it but I don’t.” (Message to Marian: Please e-mail me at the address below!)

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]