New York Times: "Baby It's Cold Outside"

[Miguel]

LIFE Dec 8, 1952

He has been made rich and famous by his songs. On the other hand, he sometimes seems to be a little ashamed that he has been drawn into the profession. His father, an immigrant from Germany, was a high-brow music teacher of considerable stature. His brother is a high-brow music critic for the Cleveland Press, a frequent guest pianist with symphony orchestras and a musical scholar of considerable fame. In the cultural sense, Loesser is the black sheep of the family.

Sometimes he seems to feel that he has led a completely wasted life. "How can a fellow get excited about putting little words on big sheets of paper," he has been heard to say, "when other fellows are inventing things like penicillin?" At other times he tries desperately to pretend that the high-brows and low-brows are all brothers under the skin. "Now you take Bach," he once said. "When Bach auditioned for a job as a church organist, what did the boss guy say? Naturally, he said, in whatever was the popular jargon of the day, 'Okay, sit down and play me some licks.' Or you take Mozart. Mozart was a hustler like anybody else."

In all truth Loesser is just as smart as anybody else in the very smart family he comes from. The only difference is that, like a lot of Americans born of immigrant parents, he has rejected the old for the new.

To create such a literary vignette, a man must naturally be quite a knowledgeable fellow. This is where Loesser's high-brow origins serve him well. He knows a little bit, although sometimes not very much, about practcally every matter mentioned in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. As he puts it, "I'm not an authority, but I am unauthoritative on a vast number of subjects." Moreover, he is highly opinionated and will argue about anything in the world. "I am a man of great convictions," he says, "all of which keep changing every hour."

...His songs always have a certain intensity that gives them a universal quality...He can point up and exploit such common human experiences as the fact that lovers who stay up too late almost invariably run out of cigarettes (Two Sleepy People), that women are lonely in wartime (They're Either Too Young or Too Old) and that infantrymen get damn tired of marching (What Do You Do in the Infantry). As the greatest exponent of the contraqpuntal duet like Make a Miracle, or his even more famous Baby It's Cold Outside, he has recognized the fact that in real life conversations people often interrupt one another in mid-sentence and thus created more realistic dialogue than even such tape recorder authors as Hemingway and John O'Hara.

The fact is that Loesser, in going low-brow, has become an acute student of modern Americana, perhaps out of a sense of guilt for his wasted cultural opportunities. No matter when he goes to bed, he is up and about at 7:30 AM, showered, shaved and dressed fit for dinner at any fashionable restaurant. (He fumes incessantly about the fact that nobody else in show business can be roused at that hour, or if roused by ruse, is too sleepy to talk sense.)

The low-brow art of the music hall and the popular song may in history's verdict be the best art our times have produced. If so, Loesser will doubtless be one of history's heroes.

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