A Proper Post on Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash and Dagmar

The title of the present post is because my previous one on Ogden Nash (1902-1971) focused on but a single poem.

Was Ogden Nash the greatest writer of light verse who ever lived? That’s a high bar, but he’s certainly on the short list. I would be hard pressed to think of any reading experience that has given me greater pleasure than Nash’s books. They number over a dozen, written from 1931 through the end of his life four decades later. His most notorious couplet was devised at the front end of that: “Candy is dandy/ but liquor is quicker.” People love his rhyming wit so much (and his mischievous rule-breaking in forcing rhymes sometimes where there aren’t any), that his time as a working shlub was relatively short. He bounced around for a while, went to Harvard for a year, taught school (at his alma mater St. Georges in Middletown, Rhode Island), worked in advertising (not a shock), was an editor at Doubleday, and was briefly on staff at The New Yorker, leading to his books, which made him a mint.

Believe it or not Nash was a Southerner; he only lived in New York a relatively short time. He was directly descended from Abner Nash (1740-1786), the second governor of North Carolina and member of the Continental Congress. The Nashes lived in N.C. until the time of his grandfather, but his father, who owned a turpentine factory moved around from city to city. Nash ended up settling in Baltimore, home of his wife’s family, when the money from his first couple of books made the move possible.

I especially wanted to spotlight Nash though because he did dabble in the show business. As early as 1932 he contributed (a very little) to a short-lived Broadway revue called Hey Nonny Nonny. He contributed to the screenplays of the films The Firefly (1937), Hold That Kiss (1938), The Shining Hour (1938), and The Feminine Touch (1941). Sadly, he never wrote for the Marx Brothers (I think he could have handily handled material for both Groucho and Chico) but he did do a famous project with S.J. Perelman, writing the lyrics, and co-writing the book to One Touch of Venus which ran on Broadway from 1943 to 1945 and was made into a movie in 1948. He also wrote songs for the revues Two’s Company (1951) and The Littlest Revue (1956)

During the ’50s, when such things were possible, he was a TV star on panel shows and variety programs. He was a regular on Masquerade Party from 1953 to 1956 (pictured above with Dagmar). He also made appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Arlene Francis Show, and The Tonight Showwith both Steve Allen and Jack Paar. His last public appearance was on The David Frost Show in 1971,

After he passed away there was a short-lived Broadway revue that set his poems to music, entitled Nash at Nine (1973).

A biography, Ogden Nash: the Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse by Douglas Parker was published in 2005.

For more on show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.