Marshall Barer; Lyricist for ‘Mattress’

Marshall Barer, lyricist and wit who wrote the words to the Mighty Mouse theme song and to the Broadway musical that launched comedian Carol Burnett, “Once Upon a Mattress,” has died. He was 75.

Barer, who penned the lyrics to more than 4,000 songs, including “Beyond Compare,” died Tuesday of cancer in Santa Fe, N.M., where he retired a few years ago.

“Just call me the irrepressible, wafer-thin, rapier-keen, Anglo-sexual, psycho-Semitic, almost unbearably gifted Marshall Barer,” he cheerfully told Times music writer Don Heckman in 1993 before a rare Los Angeles concert celebrating his 70th birthday.

Actor Brandon Maggart, a longtime friend who made the announcement in Los Angeles of the lyricist’s death, said friends and colleagues had considered Barer “the best living lyricist and the worst living house guest . . . [with an] inability to put the top back on the peanut jar.”

Despite Barer’s prodigious output, he never became well-known, wrote words to many songs never performed and lived his free-form lifestyle at Venice Beach financed by royalties from “Mattress.”

The show, featuring the first produced score by the legendary Richard Rodgers’ daughter Mary, hit Broadway in 1959. A comedic version of “The Princess and the Pea” story by Hans Christian Andersen, it was revived on Broadway in late 1996 with Sarah Jessica Parker in Burnett’s role as Princess Winnifred. In between, the durable musical was produced twice for television and more than 25,000 times as a staple of community theaters around the country.

“Next to ‘Oklahoma,’ it’s the most-produced musical,” Barer told The Times in 1993. “And the funny thing is that it wasn’t that successful in the beginning. But amateurs gradually picked up on it, and it seems to work very well for them.”

Barer also had his failures--the musical “La Belle” did well in Boston and closed in Philadelphia. “Pousse Cafe,” which he wrote with Duke Ellington composing the music, took five years to create and closed after only three nights on Broadway. Barer’s “Happy Lot!” has been called a “lost” musical, although Maggart, Betty Garrett and Michael Feinstein performed a concert version of it at Theatre West in Hollywood earlier this year.

Barer also wrote lyrics for the successful revues “New Faces of ‘56” and “Ziegfeld Follies of ’57.”

If “Mattress” was Barer’s most famous musical, clearly his most heard lyrics were those for “Here I Come to Save the Day,” the theme song of the cartoon Mighty Mouse.

“Some claim to fame, huh?” the septuagenarian Barer said. “I’m actually not all that proud of it. I wrote it in the back of a taxicab. But it’s great when I tell people about it, and they respond with a gasp, ‘You wrote the Mighty Mouse theme song?’ ”

A native of West Palm Beach, Fla., Barer moved to New York as a teenager and became a commercial artist. He worked for Esquire magazine and illustrated its Esquire Jazz Book of 1946. But theater beckoned.

Barer relocated to Los Angeles in 1971 and opened an art gallery--only to return to songwriting when Feinstein and Andrea Marcovicci started reviving his songs.

A storied party-giver for singers and songwriters, Barer became a beloved character in Venice. He was often seen driving his signature automobile--a Mercedes with denim patches and a kerchief hanging from the right rear window.

In his 60s, Barer started singing his own songs in small clubs like The Gardenia in Los Angeles and Don’t Tell Mama in New York.

“In all honesty,” he told The Times, “I think I do them better than most people.”