How to Stay Contemporary

Tunesmith Jimmy McHugh was celebrating his silver anniversary as a Tin Pan Alley success--and all of Tin Pan Alley seemed to be joining in the celebration. Disc jockeys, bandleaders and crooners were steadily plugging the tunes the nation once knew by heart: I'm in the Mood for Love, South American Way, On the Sunny Side of the Street. But, as usual, no one was plugging them harder than rolypoly Jimmy McHugh himself.

In the past 25 years, McHugh has written over 500 successful songs, and he is still at it. At 53, his bald pate fringed with wispy grey hair, Jimmy looks like a well-fed friar. But he talks like a bobbysoxer. "In this business," says he, "you gotta stay contemporary. You gotta know what the kids are saying, and feel the rhythm they live by." To keep the rhythm, Jimmy still drops around to four or five Hollywood hotspots every night, waving cheery greetings to movie stars and bartenders. When bandleaders see him coming, they strike up his latest tunes. Jimmy, his own best pressagent, may sit down at the piano and play a few himself.

Jimmy's father, a Boston Irishman, wanted his son to become a plumber. ("I can still fix a toilet," says Jimmy.) Instead, he got what he thought was a wonderful job as office boy at the Boston Opera House: "There must have been 50 pianos!" With 50 pianos to tinkle on, he began making up his own tunes.

He won a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music, but turned it down to take a piano-playing job in Irving Berlin's publishing house. "I began running into people like Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans and the Gershwins. It made me want to write Broadway shows." The first Broadway show he wrote, Blackbirds of 1928, with songs like Diga Diga Doo' and I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby, made him famous. Jimmy confesses that he began to "rake in the loot."

The loot has included some $5 million and a Beverly Hills mansion complete with swimming pool. He has what one Hollywood agent calls "A fabulous ego. Every once in a while, someone ought to tell him that he is not, after all, Sibelius." Jimmy never worries that his inspiration will run dry: "When I was an office boy in Boston, I was a hep kid with a beat. I'm still a hep kid with a beat."

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