Biography
Born Mechal Saltpeter on 28 June 1892 in New York City, Max Gordon died in the same city on 2 November 1978. Theatre had already claimed his attention during childhood, and by the early 1920s he was working as a Broadway producer, a role he maintained until the mid-1950s. During his first years in the field he occasionally joined forces with Albert Lewis, who had been born in Poland on 15 March 1885 and would die in Beverly Hills, California, on 5 April 1978. Although most of the productions Gordon mounted between the opening of The Nervous Wreck in 1923 and the closing of the long-running The Solid Gold Cadillac in 1953 were non-musical—including Born Yesterday in 1946—he nevertheless lent his name to a number of distinguished musicals that have since become Broadway landmarks. In 1925, collaborating once more with Lewis, he presented The Jazz Singer, which featured George Jessell and completed 303 performances. Three’s A Crowd arrived in 1930 with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. The following year brought both The Band Wagon—260 performances, starring Fred and Adele Astaire along with Helen Broderick and Frank Morgan, again with Schwartz and Dietz—and The Cat And The Fiddle, whose score was supplied by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. Schwartz and Dietz reunited for Flying Colors in 1932, while Kern and Harbach also wrote Roberta, which ran 295 times that same year. The Great Waltz, using melodies by Johann Strauss I and II and lyrics by Desmond Carter, opened in 1934 and returned for a further 49 performances in 1935. Cole Porter furnished the songs for Jubilee in 1935, Harold J. Rome supplied those for Sing Out The News in 1938, and Kern joined Oscar Hammerstein II for Very Warm For May in 1939, whose standout number was “All The Things You Are.” Sunny River, with music by Sigmund Romberg and Hammerstein, reached the stage in 1941 and introduced “Call It A Dream” and “Along The Winding Road.” Two 1945 productions followed: The Firebrand Of Florence, whose Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin score contained “You’re Far Too Near Me,” “There’ll Be Live, Love and Laughter,” and “Love Is My Enemy,” and Hollywood Pinafore, a George S. Kaufman revision of the Gilbert and Sullivan classic HMS Pinafore. Park Avenue, again with Schwartz and Gershwin, closed the sequence in 1946. Gordon’s older brother Cliff—born Morris Saltpeter around 1879—appeared in In New York Town in 1905, produced the musical The Merry Whirl in 1910, and died in Chicago on 21 April 1913.