Andy Propst - They Made Us Happy: Betty Comden & Adolph Greens Musicals & Movies

H ailing from Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively, Comden and Green grew up in two distinctly different homes. He was the older of the two, born on December 2, 1914. His parents, Hungarian immigrants Daniel and Helen Green, came to the United States before they were teenagers and married before they turned 20. Daniel, according to the 1930 census, was a tradesman, but according to Greens son, Adam, Daniel was a stock speculator and bootlegger. In the same census, notations indicate that Daniel and his wife were proficient in English. Nevertheless, they used Magyar, a difficult Hungarian language, at home, and as he was growing up, Green, according to his son, made an instant goulash of both it and English.

Comden was born Basya Cohen two years, five months, and one day after Green, on May 3, 1917. Her parents, Leo and Rebecca Cohen, were also immigrants, but, unlike the Greens, the couple came from Poland and at markedly different ages. Rebecca arrived in the United States in 1888 when she was just barely five, while Leo arrived in 1902 at the age of 19. In addition, the Cohens married relatively late in their lives, when they were both 29. They had waited to establish themselves professionally and financially. Until her marriage, Rebecca worked as a teacher, while Leo practiced law in Manhattan.

But while Comden and Green might have been growing up in different boroughs and with dissimilar parents, both discovered an affinity for the arts and demonstrated a penchant for inventiveness while they were still just grade-school age.

For Green, who was speaking what could jokingly be termed Magyarlish at home, love of theater and the elegant use of English started out thanks to school plays. One of his earliest stage experiences came when, in third grade at P.S. 39 in the Bronx, he played an evil dwarf in a production of Snow White and the Red Rose. Other age-appropriate productions followed, and then Green played the more adult role of Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivans The Mikado. It was a seminal moment for the boy; Green was so taken with the wordplay in the operetta that he memorized the entirety of the teams canon.

Comden was showing her own inventiveness at just about the moment when Green was developing a demented laugh and violent demeanor for his performance in Snow White. She, however, was re-creating herself. It started at the age of five, when she grew tired of her peers inability to pronounce Basya. She told her father about the problem and of her desire to have a new name. His response, she recalled, was, You can take any name you like as long as it begins with B. She settled on Betty. As for her surname, the family took an equally liberal approach, and she adopted Comdena name used by other branches of the familybefore she turned 20.

In Brooklyn Comden, too, was discovering the allure of make-believe. At home she fashioned costumes for herself from what she would later describe as her dress-up baga large pillowcase filled with old clothes of my mothers. Further, at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, Comden got a taste of both writing and performing when she and her class adapted and presented a stage version of Sir Walter Scotts