George M. Cohan Biography

George Michael Cohan (July 3 or July 4, 1878 – November 5, 1942) was a United States entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, director, and producer of Irish descent. Known as "the man who owned Broadway" in the decade before World War I, he is considered the father of American musical comedy.

Cohan was born in Providence, Rhode Island to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that he was born on July 3, but the Cohan family always insisted that George had been "born on the Fourth of July!" George's parents were traveling Vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, at first as a prop, later learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.

He completed a family act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" Cohan (1848–1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854–1928), and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1874–1916). Josie's husband, Fred Niblo Sr. (1874–1948) was an important director of silent films, including Ben Hur (1925), and was a founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Their son, Fred Niblo Jr. (1903–1973) was an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.

Cohan was the pioneer of the musical theater libretto. He is mostly remembered for his songs, later interpolated into musicals such as Anything Goes, Guys and Dolls, The Producers, and Hello Dolly! However, he invented the "book musical," becoming the first showman to bridge the gaps between drama and music, operetta and extravaganza.

More than three decades before Agnes De Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle but to advance the plot. The engaging books of his musicals supported the scores that yielded so many popular songs. As a storyteller, Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes".

Characters like Johnny Jones and Nellie Kelly appealed to a whole new audience. He wrote for every American, instead of highbrow Americans. (see book by Thomas S. Hischak, Boy Loses Girl (ISBN 0-8108-4440-0).

In 1914, he became one of the founding members of ASCAP. In 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Cohan wrote numerous other Broadway musicals and straight plays, in addition to contributing material to shows written by others — more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Cohan Revue of 1918 (co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933).

Cohan is probably the most honored American entertainer. On June 29, 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with a Congressional Gold Medal in honor of his contibutions to World War I morale, in particular the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". This award is sometimes wrongly characterized as a Medal of Honor, but only combat veterans are given that medal.

In 1959, at the behest of composer Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square, at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor in New York City. He was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003.

His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard. The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary in July 1978.

Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.

Many of these honors were accepted posthumously by Cohan's large family. In 1899, he had married Ethel Levey (1881–1955), a musical comedy actress who bore him a daughter, Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900–1988). George and Ethel divorced in 1907 and she spent much of her subsequent career in England.

He married again in 1907 to 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. Mary Cohan Ronkin (1909–1983) had a brief career as a cabaret singer in the 1930s, and later composed a score for her father's non-musical play The Tavern, and in 1968 supervised musical and lyric revisions for the Broadway play George M!.

Daughter Helen Cohan Carola (1910–1996) made several movies, including Lightnin (1930) starring Will Rogers, and was one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1934.

George M. Cohan, Jr. (1914–2000) graduated from Georgetown University and served (along with Sammy Davis Jr.) 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, Scranton, 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.