How Guys and Dolls Became the Toast of the Town

Decades before Times Square became the family-friendly tourist mecca it is today or the seedy wasteland it was in the 1970s, Depression-era Broadway attracted a mix of high and low, socialites and hell-raisers. Writer Damon Runyon found fame chronicling life in and around the Great White Way, and his humorous tales inspired one of the best Broadway musicals ever written: Guys and Dolls, now back on Broadway a year shy of its 60th anniversary.

The Boswell of Broadway
Damon Runyon created a life for himself every bit as colorful as the characters in his columns and short stories. Born in Kansas in 1884, he grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, and learned the news trade from his father, an itinerant printer and publisher of small-town papers. The boy’s mother had died when he was seven, and he was expelled from school in the sixth grade.

At 14, Runyon enlisted in the Army to fight the Spanish-American war and was sent to the Philippines, where he continued to write. A heavy drinker as a teen, he managed to give up alcohol completely by the time he arrived in the Big Apple in 1911 to cover sports for the New York American. Instead of booze, he chain-smoked and drank 40 cups of coffee a day.

The rough-and-tumble world of New York proved to be a perfect fit for Runyon, who became friends with the likes of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and, later on, mobster Al Capone. Writing in a first-person, faux-formal style, he created characters with names like Madame La Gimp, Angie the Ox and the Lemon Drop Kid. Runyon was an enthusiastic gambler—a horse race named in his honor is still run at Aqueduct—and his hoodlums and chorus girls inspired an adjective still used to describe glamorous low-lifes: “Runyonesque.” As Jimmy Breslin noted in a not-so-flattering biography, Runyon “made gangsters so enjoyable that they could walk off a page and across a movie screen.”

Eight years after being diagnosed with throat cancer, Damon Runyon died in 1946 and was memorialized in an uniquely New York fashion: His ashes were scattered over Broadway from a plane flown by World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

Origins of a Musical
“Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that the guy they call The Sky is the highest. In fact, the reason he is called The Sky is because he goes so high when it comes to betting on any proposition whatever. He will bet all he has, and nobody can bet any more than this.”

Thus begins “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” which formed the basis for Guys and Dolls. Actually, producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin didn’t have a particular story in mind when they optioned Runyon’s work—they just thought the title Guys and Dolls would make a good musical. Later, they honed in on the tale of a beautiful Times Square mission worker named Sarah Brown who catches the eye of roguish gambler Obadiah “The Sky” Masterson. Soon, the producers signed on Frank Loesser to composer the score.

A native New Yorker, Loesser came from a family of classical musicians but was more interested in popular music; after a series of odd jobs, he began his career as a lyricist and songwriter in Hollywood, collaborating on such hits as “Heart and Soul,” “Two Sleepy People” and the Oscar-winning “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” “Frank and I knew each other from the early days when we were broke, living on borrowed money,” Feuer recalled in his rollicking memoir I’ve Got the Show Right Here. After an early skirmish over securing Loesser’s services for a film, Feuer writes that the composer “started off by calling me a male genital organ, then a son of a bitch, and it went downhill from there…Frank was a little guy, but he had commanding presence.”

By the time Guys and Dolls came along, Loesser had successfully collaborated with Feuer and Martin on the musical Where’s Charley? and quickly wrote his first Runyonesque song, the catchy “Fugue for Tinhorns.” His score for Guys and Dolls mixed romantic songs like “I’ll Know” and “If I Were a Bell” with a trio of classic comic numbers, “Take Back Your Mink,” “A Bushel and a Peck” and “Adelaide’s Lament,” all involving Miss Adelaide, a nightclub engaged for 14 years to gambler Nathan Detroit.

The show’s book was more problematic. Screenwriter Jo Swerling took a first crack, but according to Feuer, a falling-out happened when Swerling refused to incorporate a romantic wager; specifically, in Feuer’s words: “Sky Masterson makes a bet that he can get into Sarah Brown’s pants. That’s how he gets all the gamblers to come to the mission! We loved it. Swerling was highly indignant.”

Exit Swerling although forevermore he got first billing on the credits. Enter yet another New York native, Abe Burrows, a radio writer with a felicity for turning Runyon’s convoluted turns of phrase into speakable dialogue. Coincidentally, Burrows appeared on a TV game show with George S. Kaufman, which helped attract Broadway’s premier director to the new musical. Together, they honed the script, with one particularly descriptive line of dialogue, “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York,” transformed into yet another memorable Loesser song.

Luck Be a Lady
The four leads in Guys and Dolls—Sarah, Sky, Nathan and Adelaide—are now considered iconic musical roles, but only one of the original stars, Sam Levene, had ever appeared on Broadway. One was drawn from the movies Vivian Blaine as Adelaide, one came from burlesque Robert Alda as Sky, and one was a young British stage actress Isabel Bigley as Sarah. The producers looked for what Feuer called “people with bumps,” including many novice actors, to play the gamblers. Former longshoreman Tom Pedi played Harry the Horse, and a foul-mouthed comedian named B.S. Pully who brought his own dice to the audition was cast as Big Jule. During rehearsals, the short-tempered Loesser insisted that the actors sing at full volume at all times, even at the risk of blowing out their voices. In one infamous confrontation, Loesser slapped Isabel Bigley when her voice kept cracking on the difficult-to-sing “I’ll Know.” As producer Ernest Martin told the story in Max Wilk’s They’re Playing Our Song, “[Bigley] always broke somewhere in the middle of that range. She could never do it. Who the hell could? We’re rehearsing it, and again she breaks. Frank walks up and gets up on the conductor’s podium and he hits her. Boing! Right smack on the nose! So she stars to cry…the only guy I ever saw punch a soprano in the nose. Took a swing at me once, too!” A chastened Loesser immediately apologized and, according to Martin, bought his leading lady “a bracelet that must have cost a thousand dollars.”

Guys and Dolls opened at the 46th Street Theatre now the Richard Rodgers on November 24, 1950. The audience response was so electric, Cy Feuer turned to his wife during the performance and said, “They were waiting for us.” The show ran for three years, winning Tonys for Best Musical, for Alda and Bigley’s performances, Michael Kidd’s choreography and Kaufman’s direction.

Rolling the Dice with Brando and Sinatra
Film producer Samuel Goldwyn paid a record $1 million for the movie rights to Guys and Dolls. When the stars he originally wanted—Gene Kelly as Sky, Grace Kelly as Sarah and Betty Grable as Adelaide—weren’t available, the film’s Oscar-winning screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz pushed for Marlon Brando who had starred in his adaptation of Julius Caesar to play the smooth-talking gambler. British actress Jean Simmons was tapped as Sarah, and Vivian Blaine reprised her Broadway turn as Adelaide.

As for Nathan Detroit, Mankiewicz wanted original Broadway star Sam Levene, but Goldwyn insisted on giving the part to Frank Sinatra. What to do with America’s most famous crooner in a part written to accommodate a comic actor who couldn’t carry a tune? Simple: Write him a new song, “Adelaide,” one of three numbers added to the movie, along with “A Woman in Love” used during the scene in Cuba in which Sky and Sarah have their first date and a kitty-themed novelty number, “Pet Me Poppa,” sung at Adelaide’s Hot Box Club.

Five songs were deleted from the Broadway score, including “My Time of Day” Frank Loesser’s favorite, according to commentary on the special edition DVD, “Marry the Man Today,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “More I Cannot Wish You” and, most surprisingly, “A Bushel and a Peck,” which Sam Goldwyn didn’t like. Presumably, “Pet Me Poppa” was more his speed.

Released with great fanfare in 1955, the 150-minute-long movie version of Guys and Dolls preserves Michael Kidd’s Broadway choreography in the crap game dance, Blaine’s performance of “Adelaide’s Lament” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” memorably performed by Stubby Kaye as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. As for Brando, what he lacked in singing ability, he made up for in sex appeal. Kidd kindly opined that the future Godfather “moved beautifully.”

The Sky's the Limit
In the 40 years since Frank Loesser died of cancer at age 59, his most popular show has gotten three Broadway revivals and two major mountings in London. An African-American Guys and Dolls led by Robert Guillaume as Nathan enjoyed a six-month Broadway run in 1976. But it was Jerry Zaks’ glitzy 1992 production—and the rave it got from New York Times critic Frank Rich, with a front page production photo—that reminded the world just how good Guys and Dolls really is.

Headlined by Peter Gallagher as Nathan and Josie de Guzman as Sarah, the revival ran for three years and catapulted Nathan Lane and Faith Prince to stardom as Nathan and Adelaide. It won Tony Awards for Prince as well as for Best Revival, Best Director and Best Scenic Design Tony Walton. Ten years later, a major London revival starred Ewan McGregor as Sky, Jane Krakowski in an Olivier-winning performance as Adelaide, Jenna Russell as Sarah and Douglas Hodge as Nathan.

Now a new quartet of stars are assuming the leads in Guys and Dolls: Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham will lock pre-marital horns as Nathan and Adelaide; Craig Bierko and Kate Jennings Grant will fall in love as Sky and Sarah. “They’re like a dream come true,” director Des McAnuff says of his cast. “That’s the reason we’re doing it—Guys and Dolls is like Hamlet, a timeless story that speaks to all ages. All that’s required is the actors to play these parts, and we’ve found them.”

McAnuff—who achieved great success with his 1995 Broadway revival of Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying—shies away from previewing his production, set to open on March 1 at the Nederlander Theatre, saying simply, “I’m paying attention to the short stories, and to Runyon himself. He created a mythic landscape, one in which it’s very natural for people to break into song. Most importantly, Guys and Dolls is about two couples, and those couples represent all of us. It’s impossible to follow this story without relating to it in a personal way.”