Great Showman

When Death, the prompter, as it must to all actors, called exit last week George M. Cohan did not have to wonder what his notices would be like: his career had been vividly reported to millions while he lived. Five months before death (of cancer) Cohan had seen a runoff of his own cinemapotheosis, Yankee Doodle Dandy (TIME, June 22), with James Cagney outdoodling the actor he portrayed. The picture turned the jauntiness and the flag-waving, the Cohan tunes and the Cohan tricks, into a nostalgic tintype of an era. No one typified that era more than Cohan himself.

Songwriter, actor, dancer, vaudevillian. playwright, Cohan was never equaled--even by Noel Coward--for sheer versatility. But his many talents had a single aim, a showman's aim: to please the crowd. "First think of something to say," his formula ran, "Then say it the way the theatergoer wants to hear it--meaning, of course, that you must lie like the dickens." Of pure Irish stock, he never plugged the wearing of the green--it was always the red, white & blue.

The child of troupers, Cohan was born in Providence July 4, 64 years ago, when Jerry and Nellie Cohan had $1 between them. At eight he was fiddling in the orchestra for a thriller "so melodramatic they had to pump blood out of the cellar before they could finish the third act." At 13 he played lead in Peck's Bad Boy, He was always part of The Four Cohans--once voted the most popular act in vaudeville. Cocky and conceited, he was a hellion in his youth. "Great actors are born," he said once. "I know. I was born."

Cohan & Harris. Cohan hit Broadway at 23 in his own show, The Governor's Son. Joining at 26 with the late Sam H. Harris in as profitable a partnership as Broadway has ever known, Cohan clicked off such popular hits as Little Johnny Jones, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, The Miracle Man. He tossed off song hits like You're a Grand Old Flag, Yankee Doodle Boy, Give My Regards to Broadway. Sometimes he had six or seven productions a year--writing one while rehearsing another and acting in a third. During World War I he wrote Over There. After 15 years with Sam Harris, he was reputed to be worth ten millions.

During the '20s, Cohan produced and acted in The Tavern and The Song and Dance Man, a title which became Cohan's favorite description for himself. He shone again in the '30s as the father-in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and in I'd Rather Be Right, in which he impersonated Franklin Roosevelt. When he went to the White House in 1940 to receive a medal, the President greeted him with: "Well, how's my double?"

So shiny was the Cohan professional image that few people realized how aloof was the human being behind it. Cohan left the limelight when he left the theater. When he wrote Twenty Years on Broadway, he never once mentioned either of his wives or any of his four children. Though he called everybody "kid," he confessed that he had just five friends, "and I'm a bit dubious about one of them." His greatest love, outside of his mother, whom he phoned every day no matter where he was, was the one other thing as American as himself--baseball.

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