Herbert Kretzmer: the lyrics and laughter live on

One inconspicuous piece of hand-written musical notation was entitled Night and Day and signed Cole Porter. Another, also written by hand, contained the lyrics of Brother Can You Spare A Dime by Yip Harburg which the author (also of Over the Rainbow) wrote for Kretzmer during dinner with Arthur Schwartz (That’s Entertainment).

On another wall hung gold and platinum cast recordings of Les Mis (an abbreviation which, though it is commonly used, Kretzmer disliked for being disrespectful to Victor Hugo on whose novel the show is based). This was pre-Covid of course, when there were more than 40 versions of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of the show worldwide.

I was there for one of three interviews I did with Kretzmer — Herbie to his friends — over the last few years of his life. This one was on the occasion of his 90th birthday which roughly coincided with the 30th anniversary of Les Misérables. We met up again on the publication of his compendium of interviews which he conducted as a top Fleet Street journalist with titans of 20th century culture, among them Groucho Marx, Cary Grant, Marcel Marceau and even Hitler’s favourite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

“With Riefenstahl, if I had a stance it was adversarial. I knew that whatever I wrote would reflect my dislike. That only happened two or three times,” Kretzmer told me.

A few years later Kretzmer and I met yet again, this time with Charles Aznavour to discuss how the lyric writer turned the French star’s songs into international hits, such as their 1974 chart topper She. They first met when Kretzmer interviewed Aznavour in 1965, two years after the death of Edith Piaf with whom Aznavour had travelled the world as Piaf’s companion, secretary and occasional songwriter (though not lover, he insisted).

Fifty years later as we sat in Aznavour’s plush hotel suit in London, Charles remembered that he knew at the time Kretzmer had already written a song for a film star, though he could not recall the name.

“Peter Sellers,” Kretzmer and I reminded him simultaneously. The song, Goodness Gracious Me, was sung by both Sellers and his co-star Sophia Loren. But it was the collaboration with Aznavour that gave Kretzmer the belief that his work as a once “spare-time, part-time lyricist” as he called himself (his regular job was as theatre critic for the Daily Express and then TV critic for the Daily Mail) was worth persevering with.

These interviews are among the most memorable of my life. But actually I knew Kretzmer long before. My late father David — a writer, journalist and a JC man too — was one of Kretzmer’s — actually Herbie’s — closest friends.

They played badminton every week, and sometimes we’d all hang out at Herbie’s Knightsbridge flat (formerly John Cleese’s) the place in which for five fevered months Herbie wrote the lyrics to Les Misérables and such modern musical theatre classics as I Dreamed A Dream, Do You Hear the People Sing and Bring Him Home.

So I remember him more as a friend of the family than as one of the great lyricists. But also for the laughs he and my father shared, such as the time they sat next to each other during a production of Macbeth. The witches were reciting the ingredients that go into their bubbling cauldron, and as they came to “liver of blaspheming Jew”, Herbie leant across to my father and whispered “chopped liver of blaspheming Jew.”