Quotes

[on Oscar Hammerstein II] [Jerome] Kern would play pieces for me and I'd say, 'Is that the verse or the chorus?' And Jerry used to die because I couldn't tell which was which. One day he showed me this thing, and I put out a piano part to it. This one didn't fall into the same category - that kind of piece Kern wrote that confused me - but it was a meandering sort of thing. It didn't go much of anywhere, when you just took the tune by itself. But the minute you got Oscar's words to it - 'Tote dat barge, lift dat bale, git a little drunk an' you land in jail' - you had a real poet.

[on Irving Berlin] Irving couldn't play a scale, an arpeggio - nothing. He had no piano technique at all. But inside, he hears it. I remember in particular, when we were together and he was doing a song for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the picture 'Carefree'. It's called 'Change Partners'. He came to a spot in this, where he played a plain diminished chord, and he turned to me helplessly and said, 'Is that the right chord?' 'Well' I said, 'I don't think it's the chord you hear, somehow or other'. He said, 'No, that's not it. You play me a chord there'. I played him one. He said, 'No, that's not it'. I played another. 'That's it!' he said. He couldn't put his fingers on it, but he knew which one it should be. Fantastic.