Everywhere He Wandered, Loesser Wrote Songs That Jingled

“The Most Happy Fella” was Frank Loesser’s third Broadway hit after “Where’s Charley?” in 1948 and “Guys and Dolls” in 1950.

New York-born Loesser was raised in a musical family but never studied music. After assorted jobs in and out of show business, he headed off to Hollywood in 1936 under contract as a songwriter to Universal Pictures. He later moved to Paramount, where in 1941 he and arranger Joe Lilley came up with “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” for “Forest Rangers.” Writing songs for Mary Martin, Marlene Dietrich, Dinah Shore and others, he was reportedly often driven around Los Angeles while he awaited inspiration.

Loesser wrote words and music for the enormously popular “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” after which he enlisted in the Army and wrote another 100 or so songs as an enlisted man.

He’d written 1,500 songs, many of them hits, by the time “Fella” opened in 1956. Among his many successes, written alone or with such colleagues as Hoagy Carmichael, were “Two Sleepy People,” “Heart and Soul” and “On a Slow Boat to China.’ He won an Oscar in 1948 for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” for the Esther Williams film “Neptune’s Daughter.”

During the nearly five years it took him to write “Fella,” he also wrote “Anywhere I Wander” and other songs for the film “Hans Christian Andersen.” “I don’t write slowly,” he told one interviewer. “It’s just that I throw out fast.”

After “Greenwillow” in 1960, Loesser did “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which won the Pulitzer Prize as best play of 1962. Abe Burrows wrote the book for that show, and Loesser’s widow, Jo Sullivan, says he polished off the music and lyrics in six weeks.

Loesser died of lung cancer in 1969 at age 59, but his shows clearly live on. “Guys and Dolls” had a major revival in London a few years ago, and another production is expected on Broadway later this season. Sullivan and daughter Emily Loesser toured last summer in a revival of “Where’s Charley?”