ADOLPH GREEN.(composer remembered)

From the late thirties, when Adolph Green was one-third of the cabaret act "The Revuers" (his partners were Judy Holliday and his lifelong collaborator, Betty Comden), and until his death, last week, at the age of eighty-six, he never lost his talent for joy. He was irrepressible. Song was his natural atmosphere. He had a glad heart and a gift for enthusiasm. His particular brand of buoyancy found its public expression in more than thirty musicals, among them "On the Town," "Wonderful Town," "Bells Are Ringing," and "Singin' in the Rain," whose popularity helped give postwar America an exhilarating backbeat of promise. In private, his performing gene was equally original and prodigious. Green, who never went to college, had an encyclopedic memory for music and for film. At the merest coaxing, he would do his Maurice Chevalier or become an entire orchestra. "He would do complex things," Mike Nichols recalls. "He could sing a symphony"--or, literally, throw himself into song. Head bobbing, voice croaking, arms pinwheeling, Green whipped himself up until he attained full dervishosity. A sort of prodigy of playfulness, he was unabashed by silliness and quite capable of pursuing frivolity to zany heights. In his version of "Flight of the Bumble Bee," for instance, he would start as if he were playing the violin, only to end up flitting and buzzing like the bee.

Green loved the city, and co-wrote one of its most celebrated anthems. "New York, New York, a helluva town" spoke his heart. He never missed a party or an opening. In the aristocracy of success, there are no strangers; and Green knew everyone. For most of his life, he looked out at the city from the nineteenth floor of the Beresford, where from his large patio he could gaze south down Central Park West toward Broadway, which dimmed its lights in honor of his passing. Although Green suffered from macular degeneration ...