Mark tries his charms on Marla: Baby, it's getting frostier inside
(2019:) Baby, It's Cold Outside: Steyn's Song of the Week :: SteynOnline:
"... As Richard Adler, Frank's protégé, once told me, Lynn Loesser was a domineering woman. She was known around town, somewhat inevitably, as "the evil of the two Loessers", a gag that's stuck to her beyond the grave. You wonder sometimes whether her reputation hasn't simply adjusted itself to a joke too good to pass up. Certainly, on her demonstration records with her husband, she's very charming – and never more so than on "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Through the mid-Forties, Loesser held on to the number and he and Lynn performed it as their party piece at celebrity get-togethers in New York and Hollywood. Lynn Loesser loved the song, loved singing it, and loved the fact that it was theirs alone.
But business is business. And in 1948 Frank Loesser sold the song to MGM for Neptune's Daughter. "I felt as betrayed as if I'd caught him in bed with another woman," huffed Mrs Loesser. "I kept saying 'Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban?'"
Her husband figured it this way: "If I don't let go of 'Baby' I'll begin to think I can never write another song as good as I think this one is."
It's the highlight of the picture – Ricardo Montalban putting the moves on Esther Williams. A couple of years back, when I protested that I had nothing new to add to "Baby, It's Cold Outside", some listeners responded, "Hey, switch things around: Make Jessica the predator, and you the one trying to resist." But that switcheroo's as old as the song: in the movie, after Ricardo hits on Esther, it's immediately followed by a bit of role reversal from the comedy support, with a man-eating Betty Garrett pursuing Red Skelton. It brought Loesser his fourth Oscar nomination, and this time he won - for a song that predates the movie by four years and was only included for purposes of commercial exploitation. When the film came out, Loesser found himself with a new pop hit. Two versions – one by Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, the other by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer – both got to Number Four. Frank Loesser lost a party piece and gained a standard: At the Academy Awards, it was sung by Mae West and Rock Hudson. A few years later, Ray Charles and Betty Carter nibbled the lower end of the pop chart. The only person who wasn't happy was Lynn Loesser: "her" song was now the world's.
Meanwhile, what happened to the brand new song that was supposed to be introduced in Neptune's Daughter? You remember – "Slow Boat To China". Well, you can still hear it in the film, but only instrumentally – during a swimsuit fashion show. Esther Williams apparently recorded a vocal, but the studio nixed it on the grounds that the song appeared to be encouraging an "immoral liaison". It was left to Kay Kyser's big hit record to establish "Slow Boat" with the public.
Speaking of immorality, MGM's censors cut the wrong song. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .
Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was "Baby, It's Cold Outside," as introduced by Esther Williams in "Neptune's Daughter." Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb's view of the West is the merest extension of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.
And so this last week's controversy represents a grand convergence of Islamic imperialism and Generation Snowflake, united by their fear of a harmless playful charming trifle.
Should I make like the snowflakes and sign on with Sayyid Qutb? Well, I'm a reasonable fellow, and I'd be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you'll have to pry "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without "Baby, It's Cold Outside" would be very cold indeed." .......
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