Fred Ebb: The death of lyricist Fred Ebb brings to an end the longest and most prolific songwriting partnership in the history of Broadway.
Together with John Kander, he created some of the most groundbreaking and durable musicals, Cabaret and Chicago, as well as one of the world's best-known songs, New York New York.
The 40-year collaboration of Kander and Ebb remained creative right up until Ebb's death of a heart attack last weekend, even though their Broadway world had long since vanished around them. Theirs was the last partnership in a century-old tradition that stretches back to the Tin Pan Alley of the Gershwin brothers and Rodgers and Hart.
Fred Ebb was born in New York into a lower-middle-class Jewish family and had two older sisters. His first musical experience came as a child when his father took him on regular trips to Atlantic City to take part in talent shows.
"I guess I was sort of cute. I would stand on a table and sing Shuffle Off To Buffalo. I always won the $25, and my father would take the money from me. That was the end of that," he remembered later.
He attended New York University and Columbia and wrote material for revues as well as the satirical show, That Was The Week That Was, before he was introduced to John Kander in 1962 by the music publisher Tommy Valando.
"Our neuroses complemented each other," joked Ebb in later years. "It was just a case of instant communication and instant songs."
Ebb's next fateful encounter came in the shape of a scraggy 17-year-old named Liza Minnelli who showed up at his door with a mutual friend one day in 1965 and managed to snag the lead in the team's first Broadway musical, Flora The Red Menace. The show was a flop but cemented a life-long friendship.
"Freddy soon became my mentor, my best friend, my inspiration, my guide and my parent figure," said Minnelli, as Ebb wrote her shows and moulded her public image. "I've always said in jest that I thought Fred Ebb invented me, and it's true."
Kander's and Ebb's Broadway career took off with their next project, Cabaret, a daring musical set in Weimar Berlin against the rise of Nazism. The show, which ran for 1,165 performances and won eight Tony awards, had an impeccable pedigree, drawing together the now legendary Broadway director, Harold Prince, as well as Lotte Lenya, the widow of German composer Kurt Weill. Some critics felt Kander's music aped Weill's Threepenny Opera, but Ebb said he was the one with similarities to the dead composer.
"Lenya told me, 'You remind me of Kurt. You sweat'," he recalled drily.
Kander and Ebb had a steady flow of moderate hits and flops in the 1970s, but it was the 1972 film of Cabaret that introduced the team and its star, Minnelli, to a wider audience, garnering 10 Oscars despite stiff competition from The Godfather.
The pair's most popular song, the theme from the film musical New York New York, almost never happened. Only at the insistence of the film's star, Robert de Niro, did the team, highly injured, rework the song.
"The first version was about going around in a hansom in the park. Like springtime is lovely with the birds in Central Park," says Ebb. "But we rewrote it and it was a hundred times better than what we had originally written. If it wasn't for de Niro we would never have written New York New York."
The song showcases one of the team's specialities, the defiant, life-affirming anthem, though Ebb was most fond of his comic numbers: And for all you ever knew I was hustling for the rent/'Cause you only call collect maybe every other Lent/While I'm bleeding in the street from some maniac's attack/You're in some Ramada Inn seeking wisdom on your back. - (Don't AhMa Me!).
Kander and Ebb enjoyed renewed success in recent years thanks to hugely successful Broadway revivals of Cabaret and Chicago. The latter's successful film version contrasted with its moderate success originally in 1975 when critics thought it too cynical.
"Sardonic wasn't in that year," said Ebb recently. "But I think the audience caught up with the show."
Fred Ebb, born April 1928; died September 2004