Early life Kern was born in New York City, on
Sutton Place, in what was then the city's brewery district. His parents were Henry Kern (1842–1908), a Jewish German immigrant, and Fannie Kern
née Kakeles (1852–1907), who was a Jewish American woman of
Bohemian parentage. At the time of Kern's birth, his father ran a
livery stable; later, he became a successful merchant. In 1897, the family moved to
Newark, New Jersey, where Kern attended Newark High School (which became
Barringer High School in 1907). He wrote songs for the school's first musical, a
minstrel show, in 1901, and for an amateur musical adaptation of ''
Uncle Tom's Cabin'' put on at the Newark Yacht Club in January 1902. His father relented, and later in 1902, Kern became a student at the
New York College of Music, studying the piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico, and harmony under Austin Pierce.
First compositions sings "How'd you like to spoon with me?" in
Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) For a time, Kern worked as a rehearsal pianist in
Broadway theatres and as a
song-plugger for
Tin Pan Alley music publishers. While in London, he secured a contract from the American impresario
Charles Frohman to provide songs for interpolation in Broadway versions of London shows. He began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for
An English Daisy, by
Seymour Hicks and
Walter Slaughter, and
Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs. In 1905, Kern contributed the song "How'd you like to spoon with me?" to
Ivan Caryll's
musical The Earl and the Girl when the show transferred to Chicago and New York in 1905. From 1905 on, he spent long periods of time in London, contributing songs to
West End shows like
The Beauty of Bath (1906; with lyricist
P. G. Wodehouse) and making valuable contacts, including
George Grossmith Jr. and Seymour Hicks, who were the first to introduce Kern's songs to the London stage. , for whom Kern wrote stage and screen music Kern is believed to have composed music for
silent films as early as 1912, but the earliest documented film music which he is known to have written was for a twenty-part serial, ''
Gloria's Romance'' in 1916. Kern was one of the founding members of
ASCAP. Theatre historian
John Kenrick writes that the song put Kern in great demand on Broadway and established a pattern for musical comedy love songs that lasted through the 1960s. In May 1915, Kern was due to sail with Charles Frohman from New York to London on board the
RMS Lusitania, but Kern missed the boat, having overslept after staying up late playing poker. Frohman died in the sinking of the ship.
Princess Theatre musicals Kern composed 16 Broadway scores between 1915 and 1920 and also contributed songs to the London hit
Theodore & Co (1916; most of the songs are by the young
Ivor Novello) and to revues like the
Ziegfeld Follies. The most notable of his scores were those for a series of shows written for the
Princess Theatre, a small (299-seat) house built by
Ray Comstock. Theatrical agent
Elisabeth Marbury asked Kern and librettist
Guy Bolton to create a series of intimate and low-budget, yet smart, musicals. The team's first Princess Theatre show was an adaptation of Paul Rubens' 1905 London show,
Mr. Popple (of Ippleton), called
Nobody Home (1915). Other shows written for the theatre were
Have a Heart (1917),
Leave It to Jane (1917) and
Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918). The first opened at another theatre before
Very Good Eddie closed. The second played elsewhere during the long run of
Oh Boy! that begins: '' In February 1918,
Dorothy Parker wrote in
Vanity Fair:
Oh, Lady! Lady!! was the last successful "Princess Theatre show". Kern and Wodehouse disagreed over money, and the composer decided to move on to other projects. Kern's importance to the partnership was illustrated by the fate of the last musical of the series,
Oh, My Dear! (1918), to which he contributed only one song: "Go, Little Boat". The rest of the show was composed by
Louis Hirsch and ran for 189 performances: "Despite a respectable run, everyone realized there was little point in continuing the series without Kern." another modest success by the same team,
The Beauty Prize (1923); and a Broadway flop,
The Bunch and Judy, remembered, if at all, as the first time Kern and
Fred Astaire worked together. Its relative failure may have been partly due to Kern's growing aversion to having individual songs from his shows performed out of context on radio, in cabaret, or on record, although his chief objection was to jazz interpretations of his songs. He called himself a "musical clothier – nothing more or less," and said, "I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays." He rarely collaborated with any one lyricist for long. With Hammerstein, however, he remained on close terms for the rest of his life.
Show Boat , one of Kern's chief collaborators Because of the strong success of
Sally and
Sunny and consistent good results with his other shows, Ziegfeld was willing to gamble on Kern's next project in 1927. Kern had been impressed by
Edna Ferber's novel
Show Boat and wished to present a musical stage version. The score is, arguably, Kern's greatest and includes the well-known songs "
Ol' Man River" and "
Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" as well as "
Make Believe", "
You Are Love", "Life Upon the Wicked Stage", "Why Do I Love You", all with lyrics by Hammerstein, and "
Bill", originally written for
Oh, Lady! Lady!, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse. The show ran for 572 performances on Broadway and was also a success in London. Although Ferber's novel was filmed unsuccessfully as a
part-talkie in 1929 (using some songs from the Kern score), the musical itself was filmed twice, in
1936, and, with
Technicolor, in
1951. In 1989, a stage version of the musical was presented on television for the first time, in a production from the
Paper Mill Playhouse telecast by
PBS on
Great Performances. While most Kern musicals have largely been forgotten, except for their songs,
Show Boat remains well-remembered and frequently seen. It is a staple of stock productions and has been revived numerous times on Broadway and in London. A 1946 revival integrated choreography into the show, in the manner of a
Rodgers and Hammerstein production, as did the 1994
Harold Prince–
Susan Stroman revival, which was nominated for ten
Tony Awards, winning five, including best revival. It was the first musical to enter a major opera company's repertory (New York City Opera, 1954), and the rediscovery of the 1927 score with
Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations led to a large-scale
EMI recording in 1987 and several opera-house productions. In January 1929, at the height of the
Jazz Age, and with
Show Boat still playing on Broadway, Kern made news on both sides of the Atlantic for reasons wholly unconnected with music. He sold at auction, at New York's
Anderson Galleries, the collection of English and American literature that he had been building up for more than a decade. The collection, rich in inscribed first editions and manuscript material of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, sold for a total of $1,729,462.50 () – a record for a single-owner sale that stood for over fifty years. Among the books he sold were first or early editions of poems by
Robert Burns and
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and works by
Jonathan Swift,
Henry Fielding and
Charles Dickens, as well as manuscripts by
Alexander Pope,
John Keats, Shelley,
Lord Byron,
Thomas Hardy and others.
First films and later shows In 1929, Kern made his first trip to
Hollywood to supervise the
1929 film version of Sally, one of the first "all-talking" Technicolor films. The following year, he was there a second time to work on
Men of the Sky, released in 1931 without his songs, and a
1930 film version of Sunny.
Warner Bros. bought out Kern's contract, and he returned to the stage. It was filmed in 1934 with
Jeanette MacDonald.
Music in the Air (1932) was another Kern-Hammerstein collaboration and another show-biz plot, best remembered today for "
The Song Is You" and "
I've Told Ev'ry Little Star". It was "undoubtedly an operetta", set in the German countryside, but without the Ruritanian trimmings of the operettas of Kern's youth.
Roberta (1933) by Kern and Harbach included the songs "
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "
Let's Begin" and "
Yesterdays" and featured, among others,
Bob Hope,
Fred MacMurray,
George Murphy and
Sydney Greenstreet all in the early stages of their careers. Kern's
Three Sisters (1934) was his last West End show, with a libretto by Hammerstein. The musical, depicting horse-racing, the circus, and class distinctions, was a failure, running for only two months. Its song "
I Won't Dance" was used in the film
Roberta. Some British critics objected to American writers essaying a British story;
James Agate, doyen of London theatre critics of the day, dismissed it as "American inanity," though both Kern and Hammerstein were strong and knowledgeable Anglophiles. Kern's last Broadway show (other than revivals) was
Very Warm for May (1939), another show-biz story and another disappointment, although the score included the Kern and Hammerstein classic "
All The Things You Are". Kern returned to Hollywood, where he composed the scores to a dozen more films, although he also continued working on Broadway productions. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1937. After suffering a heart attack in 1939, he was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores, a less stressful task, as Hollywood songwriters were not as deeply involved with the production of their works as Broadway songwriters. This second phase of Kern's Hollywood career had considerably greater artistic and commercial success than the first. With Hammerstein, he wrote songs for the film versions of his recent Broadway shows
Music in the Air (1934), which starred
Gloria Swanson in a rare singing role, and
Sweet Adeline (1935). With
Dorothy Fields, he composed the new music for
I Dream Too Much (1935), a musical melodrama about the opera world, starring the
Metropolitan Opera diva
Lily Pons. Kern and Fields interspersed the opera numbers with their songs, including "the swinging 'I Got Love,' the lullaby 'The Jockey on the Carousel,' and the entrancing title song." Also with Fields, he wrote two new songs, "
I Won't Dance" and "Lovely to Look At", for the Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers film version of
Roberta (1935), which was a hit. The show also included the song "
I'll Be Hard to Handle". This was given a 1952 remake called
Lovely to Look At. Their next film,
Swing Time (1936) included the song "
The Way You Look Tonight", which won the
Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. Other songs in
Swing Time include "
A Fine Romance", "
Pick Yourself Up" and "
Never Gonna Dance".
The Oxford Companion to the American Musical calls
Swing Time "a strong candidate for the best of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals" and says that, although the screenplay is contrived, it "left plenty of room for dance and all of it was superb. ... Although the movie is remembered as one of the great dance musicals, it also boasts one of the best film scores of the 1930s." For the 1936 film version of
Show Boat, Kern and Hammerstein wrote three new songs, including "I Have The Room Above Her" and "Ah Still Suits Me". The film starred Astaire and
Rita Hayworth and included the song "
I'm Old Fashioned". Kern's next collaboration was with
Ira Gershwin on
Cover Girl starring Hayworth and
Gene Kelly (1944) for which Kern composed "Sure Thing","Put Me to the Test," "Make Way for Tomorrow" (lyric by
E. Y. Harburg), and the hit ballad "
Long Ago (and Far Away)". For the
Deanna Durbin Western musical, ''
Can't Help Singing'' (1944), with lyrics by Harburg, Kern "provided the best original score of Durbin's career, mixing operetta and Broadway sounds in such songs as 'Any Moment Now,' 'Swing Your Partner,' 'More and More,' and the lilting title number." "More and More" was nominated for an Oscar. Kern composed his last film score,
Centennial Summer (1946) in which "the songs were as resplendent as the story and characters were mediocre. ... Oscar Hammerstein,
Leo Robin, and E. Y. Harburg contributed lyrics for Kern's lovely music, resulting in the soulful ballad 'All Through the Day,' the rustic 'Cinderella Sue,' the cheerful 'Up With the Lark,' and the
torchy 'In Love in Vain.'" "All Through the Day" was another Oscar nominee. The music of Kern's last two films is notable in the way it developed from his earlier work. Some of it was too advanced for the film companies; Kern's biographer,
Stephen Banfield, refers to "tonal experimentation ... outlandish enharmonics" that the studios insisted on cutting. At the same time, in some ways his music came full circle: having in his youth helped to end the reigns of the waltz and operetta, he now composed three of his finest waltzes ("Can't Help Singing", "Californ-i-ay" and "Up With the Lark"), the last having a distinctly operetta-like character.
Personal life and death sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" in
Till the Clouds Roll By. Kern and his wife, Eva, often vacationed on their yacht
Show Boat. He collected rare books and enjoyed betting on horses. At the time of Kern's death,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was filming a fictionalized version of his life,
Till the Clouds Roll By, which was released in 1946 starring
Robert Walker as Kern. In the film, Kern's songs are sung by
Judy Garland,
Kathryn Grayson,
June Allyson,
Lena Horne,
Dinah Shore,
Frank Sinatra and
Angela Lansbury, among others, and
Gower Champion and
Cyd Charisse appear as dancers. Many of the biographical elements are fictionalized. In the fall of 1945, Kern returned to New York City to oversee auditions for a new revival of
Show Boat, and began to work on the score for what would become the musical
Annie Get Your Gun, to be produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. On November 5, 1945, at 60 years of age, he suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage while walking at the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street. Identifiable only by his
ASCAP card, Kern was initially taken to the indigent ward at City Hospital, later being transferred to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. Hammerstein was at his side when Kern's breathing stopped. Hammerstein hummed or sang the song "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" from
Music in the Air (a personal favorite of the composer's) into Kern's ear. Receiving no response, Hammerstein realized Kern had died. Rodgers and Hammerstein then assigned the task of writing the score for
Annie Get Your Gun to the veteran Broadway composer
Irving Berlin. married
Artie Shaw in 1942 and later
Jack Cummings. ==Accolades==