It was no surprise that when Riverside Theatre’s Allen Cornell asked the opening night audience how many had seen “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” before, hands shot up throughout the theater.
After all, the musical that won playwrights Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows the 1962 Pulitzer Prize was a huge Broadway hit, with two revivals including one three years ago.
Of all the fans in Vero, though, none could be as familiar as one Castaway Cove resident, Frank Loesser’s son, John Loesser. Now the manager of Stuart’s Lyric Theatre, John Loesser was 12 when the musical opened. A budding French horn player, he watched it from a seat in the orchestra pit of the Broadway Theatre, nestled among the brass players so he could watch them play.
Loesser’s parents had just divorced when the play came out, and they had moved John and his older sister Susan to Manhattan. One lived on the East Side, and one lived on the West Side. “Central Park was literally my back yard,” he recalls. His father would lock himself in his study with a 1950s version of an electronic keyboard and headphones, and pound away at a new composition, John recalls.
Clearly the rules of the corporate world didn’t apply to the Loesser lifestyle. “He would get up at 3 a.m. in the morning and work and be ready for a martini by 7 a.m.”
Approached to write a musical from the 1952 best-selling handbook, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, Frank Loesser balked. A decade earlier, he had written the music to “Guys and Dolls,” and before that “Where’s Charley?”
“It’s appropriate: My father wrote “How to Succeed” for the money,” says John Loesser. “(Frank’s partner) Abe Burrows really wanted him to do it, so he did it. But it doesn’t have the heart that the rest of his stuff does.”
The book came out just as GIs were back in the workforce trying to climb corporate ladders; Rosie the Riveter, recruited for the war effort, was demoted to secretary.
Ten years earlier, Loesser was writing GI “gripe songs” during the war, including “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which sold 2 million records, and a million pages of sheet music.
When Frank Loesser won the Pulitzer prize he made little of it. “We used his Academy Award (won for the song ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’) for a doorstop,” says John. “I think he never cared about prizes because they didn’t matter. No matter what he did, he could never please his mother.”
His mother, it turned out, had a favorite child, Frank’s older brother Arthur, who was a child prodigy and a classical musician all his life.
That relentless maternal criticism ate away at Frank, John says. It was why he never gave any regard to his numerous awards, including the Pulitzer – which he called his “Putziller.”
Two days after “How to Succeed” opened in Vero, Loesser had his own opening night, with another of his father’s hit musicals, “Guys and Dolls,” done in a concert version.
Though he rose at 4:30 a.m. (as usual; he said his dad never slept much, either), he delayed heading south to Stuart well past mid-morning to talk about his dad on the terrace of Panera – a rare foray into Vero’s daily life. Normally he holds forth at Stuart’s Osceola Café, arriving bright and early at 7 a.m. to chat up the local cast of characters.
Loesser moved to Vero 17 years ago so his wife of 31 years, Laura, could be by the ocean and so their daughter Gracie could get a good education, first in public school at Beachland Elementary, and when they wouldn’t advance her beyond the normal grade level, the private St. Edward’s School. They kept here there even after John got the Lyric job. “We didn’t want her to have to commute.”
Instead, it is John who makes the drive, even though Gracie has long since left the nest – she graduates this year from New College in Sarasota, an art history major headed for graduate school.
Loesser’s son, Jordan, 30, got a degree in business from Eckerd College. He now lives in Costa Rica selling real estate and playing guitar in bars at night. “He has the perfect life,” says John.
John Loesser drives along the ocean for as much of his commute as he can, jogging around the Fort Pierce inlet, then taking A1A south again on Fort Pierce’s South Hutchinson Island.
“I always take the back roads,” says Loesser. “Nobody believes it, but I’m a nature boy.”
For a boy raised in Hollywood and Manhattan, south Floridian civilization has zero appeal, he says. “I’m very different from your average showbiz person,” he says.
Even the gated entry to his Vero island neighborhood gets on his nerves. He lives only for the beauty of the environment here. He remembers with near-reverence the days when he went clamming by kayak in Sebastian and brought home clams by the bucket.
Loesser was familiar with the area because Laura’s parents had a home in Stuart and they’d come “for cheap vacations” for many years. He’s made the commute to the Lyric – which includes driving home late at night after shows – for 15 years, by far the longest post he’s held in show business.
While his career path was a meandering one, he always knew he would one day pursue it. Not that his father encouraged him much; John had a hard time in school. By 19, though, he was a full union manager. That was the year his father died.
“My father didn’t really get along well until the end of his life,” says Loesser, who lost his father to esophageal cancer at the age of 59. “We gave up on each other and just started to like each other.”
“I was a nebbishy kid,” recalls Loesser. “He had no patience for that. I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than be in the business. But I was trained early not to be creative. I don’t know why. My entire career has been taking other people’s creativity and taking it to fruition.”
A year or two after his father died, his stepmother decided to open a branch of a publishing company and Loesser asked to be a part of it. “They allowed me to go and there I learned the music business,” he says.
Among other things, he produced disco albums of Broadway shows – “God help me – I hated the music business.” The family eventually sold the company to CBS. Loesser went back to New York but continued to commute to L.A., commercially presenting shows in small theaters there for the next ten years.
By the age of 30, he was on the East Coast again, broke, “madly in love” with Laura and living in the Hudson Valley. Desperate for work, he called the Humane Society for a job washing dogs. “The woman said, ‘Well, we might have something. What have you done?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t relate.’”
The woman who answered the phone happened to be stage director at the Woodstock Playhouse. He ended up with a job managing the theater.
It was his first work in the not-for-profit arena, and it suited him perfectly. Loesser ran a number of civic theaters after that before landing the post with the Lyric.
Frank Loesser knew a bit about how to succeed in business. By the time he wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning play in 1960, he had three businesses of his own, Frank Music Corp., Music Theatre International and Frank Productions, housed in offices on West 57th Street.
“He and Irving Berlin were the first ones to protect their own copyright by owning music companies. Before that film companies were the music publishers.”
