George M. Cohan

Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s and continuing to perform as a headline artist until 1940. He was known in the decade before World War I as "the man who owned Broadway". His life and music were depicted in the Oscar-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the 1968 musical George M!. A statue of Cohan in Times Square, New York City, commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre.

• Birth Name — George Michael Cohan • Born — 3 July 1878 • Birthplace — Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. • Died — 5 November 1942 • Place of death — Manhattan, New York City, U.S. • Occupation — * Entertainer • playwright • composer • lyricist • actor • singer • dancer • producer • Children — 4, including Mary and Helen

• Illustration — Cohan and his sister Josie in the 1890s Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that Cohan was born on July 3, but he and his family always insisted that he had been "born on the Fourth of July!" His parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk. Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the fourth member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" (Keohane) Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928) and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1876–1916). In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Peck's Bad Boy and then joined the family act. The Four Cohans mostly toured together from 1890 to 1901. Cohan and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his early years, he later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, he originated his famous curtain speech: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you." • Illustration — The Four Cohans in 1915 As a child, Cohan and his family toured most of the year and spent summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended baseball player Connie Mack. The family generally gave a performance at the town hall there each summer, and Cohan had a chance to gain some more normal childhood experiences, like riding his bike and playing sandlot baseball. His memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, which is set in North Brookfield and contains one of his most famous songs, "Harrigan". As he matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, Wilderness! in 1934, he told a reporter "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."

Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy". • Illustration — Sam H. Harris (1928) Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 300 original songs noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His most popular songs included: • "Give My Regards to Broadway" • "You're a Grand Old Flag" • "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway" • "Mary Is a Grand Old Name" • "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch" • "Life's a Funny Proposition After All" • "I Want To Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune" • "You Won't Do Any Business if You Haven't Got a Band" • "The Small Town Gal" • "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All" • "That Haunting Melody" • "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye" • "When You Come Back and You Will Come Back" • "Over There", America's most popular World War I song, was recorded by Nora Bayes, Enrico Caruso, and others. The song reached such currency among troops and shipyard workers that a ship was named "Costigan" after Cohan's grandfather, Dennis Costigan. During the christening, "Over There" was played. From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris. Aside from the plays Cohan wrote or composed, he produced with Harris, among others, many of which were adapted for film, It Pays to Advertise (1914) and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio. He dropped out of acting for some years after his 1919 dispute with Actors' Equity Association. In 1912 Cohan and Harris acquired Chicago's Grand Opera House and renamed the theatre "George M. Cohan's Grand Opera House". It was renamed "Four Cohans Theatre" in 1926 but reverted to Grand Opera House in 1928 when Cohan divested the property and the Shubert family became the sole owners of the theatre. In 1925, he published his autobiography Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.

• Illustration — Cohan in a 1933 photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Cohan appeared in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932, he starred in a dual role as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President. The film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He appeared in some earlier silent films, but he disliked Hollywood production methods and only made one other sound film, Gambling (1934), based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City. A critic called Gambling a "stodgy adaptation of a definitely dated play directed in obsolete theatrical technique". It is considered a lost film. By the 1930s, Cohan walked in and out of retirement. He earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and in the role of a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical I'd Rather Be Right (1937). The same year, he reunited with Harris to produce a play titled Fulton of Oak Falls, starring Cohan. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast. In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play Seven Keys to Baldpate was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of the Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price. In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer, and he commented on Cagney's performance: "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan's 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed in 1943 with Jack Benny.

• Illustration — Cohan's mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery From 1899 to 1907, Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881–1955; born Grace Ethelia Fowler) a musical comedy actress and dancer. Levey and Cohan had a daughter, actress Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). Levey joined the Four Cohans when Cohan's sister Josie married, and she starred in Little Johnny Jones and other Cohan works. In 1907, Levey divorced Cohan on grounds of adultery. In 1907, Cohan married Agnes Mary Nolan (1883–1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters and a son. The eldest was Mary Cohan Ronkin, a cabaret singer in the 1930s, who composed incidental music for her father's play The Tavern. In 1968, Mary supervised musical and lyric revisions for the musical George M! Their second daughter was Helen Cohan Carola, a film actress, who performed on Broadway with her father in Friendship in 1931. Their youngest child was George Michael Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000), who graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II. In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943–1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College in Pennsylvania in 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame at New York University. Cohan was a devoted baseball fan, regularly attending games of the New York Giants.

Cohan died of bladder cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by family and friends. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and was attended by thousands of people, including five governors of New York, two mayors of New York City and the Postmaster General. The honorary pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Frank Crowninshield, Sol Bloom, Brooks Atkinson, Rube Goldberg, Walter Huston, George Jessel, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Romberg, Lee Shubert and Fred Waring. Cohan was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter century earlier for his sister and parents.

• Illustration — James Cagney as Cohan in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy • Illustration — Mickey Rooney as Cohan in the 1957 Mr. Broadway television special • James Cagney played Cohan in the 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Cagney won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Dandy. • Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record featuring Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs on the A-side. • Joel Grey starred on Broadway as Cohan in the musical George M! (1968), which was adapted into a television special in 1970. • Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of three Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively. • Chip Deffaa created a one-man show about the life of Cohan called George M. Cohan Tonight!, which first ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006 with Jon Peterson as Cohan. Deffaa has written and directed five other plays about Cohan.

Cohan acted in the following films: • Year — Title — Role — Notes • 1917 — Broadway Jones — Broadway Jones — Lost film • Seven Keys to Baldpate — George Washington Magee • 1918 — Hit-The-Trail Holliday — Billie Holiday — Lost film • 1932 — The Phantom President — Theodore K. Blair/Peeter J. 'Doc' Varney • 1934 — Gambling — Al Draper

• Illustration — "Over There" sheet music cover, 1917 • Illustration — Poster for Seven Keys to Baldpate, 1917 • Illustration — Signed drawing by Manuel Rosenberg, 1919 • Illustration — Sheet music for Little Nellie Kelly, 1922 • Illustration — Caricature by Ralph Barton, 1925

Cohan was recorded at birth as George Michael Cohan. The authorities additionally record the headings George Michael Cohan, George Cohan and Geo. His recorded language was English. He was the child of Jerry Cohan. He married Ethel Levey. 3 children are recorded: Helen Cohan, Mary Cohan and Georgette Cohan.