Off stage

With her lifelong collaborator, Adolph Green, Betty Comden has enjoyed the kind of glory known only to the greatest of Broadway and Hollywood's luminaries. Their many successes as lyricists were written with some of the theater's greatest composers: On the Town and Wonderful Town with Leonard Bernstein; Bells Are Ringing and Hallelujah Baby, among others, with Jule Styne; and On the Twentieth Century and The Will Rogers Follies with Cy Coleman. These shows have won them six Tony awards. In addition, Betty has written, always with Adolph Green, the screenplays for numerous films, including the legendary screen musicals Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon. Hers is a career that has spanned many decades, and known countless triumphs. . Her early success in the worlds of theater and film brought her friendship and collaboration with great stars such as Gene Kelly and Lauren Bacall, and warm relationships with idols of her childhood like Charles Chaplin, Fred Astaire, and Groucho Marx. But offstage and behind the scenes, her life has not always gone the way she might have scripted it. Acknowledging that there are no rewrites in life, this very intimate book is a personal remembrance - a humorous and moving trip through an extraordinary lifetime - from her childhood in Brooklyn and her close relationship with her family to her exodus into the Big City, Manhattan, where the "fearful, aspiring theater nut" attended N.Y.U., and shortly after met Steven Kyle, the man she married and loved for life. In Off Stage she describes her life as an intricate balancing act, juggling home and career and not always providing the happy endings her shows offered. She writes of the lessons she has learned as a wife and mother - about her early difficulties with her daughter and the loss of her son to the ravages of drugs. Informed by the experience of working in the theater, and in musical films when they were a fine art form, this book is not only of special interest for theater and movie buffs, but also the inspirational story of a woman of many talents and interests who tried to have it all - and very nearly succeeded.