Baby It's Cold Outside - The Story of this Christmas Hit

This is a complicated one... and to complicate things even further - it began as a song that wasn't intended for anyone to hear!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a complicated one, and to complicate things further,
it began as a song that was never even intended
to be recorded for the public to hear. This is
the story behind the Christmas hits, Baby It's Cold Outside.
Behind the Christmas hits with Drew Savage.
Baby It's Cold Outside was written by legendary songwriter Frank Lawser.

(00:22):
I know the word legendary gets used a lot, but
Frank wrote the music and lyrics for Broadway shows like
Guys and Dolls, and How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying. So, in this case, the word fits.
Frank Lasser was born June 29th, 1910 in New York City.
Music ran in the family. His father Henry was a
German-born piano teacher, and his older brother Arthur became a

(00:46):
respected concert pianist. Arthur was a serious musician, and that's
what Henry wanted Frank to become as well.
But Frank wasn't interested in formal training, he was a
bit of a rebel, and rejected his father's desire to
teach him piano. He was much more interested in writing
witty and conversational lyrics. Years later, Frank's daughter, Susan would

(01:08):
tell NPR in the US that her father quote, certainly
wanted to be different from the rest of his family.
They were kind of snobbish. To them, popular music was
really low class.
Henry Lasser couldn't have been happy when Frank dropped out
of City College of New York after just one year.
He would joke later that he flunked everything but English
and gym. Frank was just 15, but he was determined

(01:31):
to make it his own way. His father Henry died
unexpectedly 1 year later in 1926, and Frank suddenly started
to take on more responsibility to help the family.
His jobs included running a newspaper stand, selling classified ads
for papers, writing some sketches for a vaudeville group, even
becoming nits good editor for Women's Wear Daily, and a

(01:54):
job as a press rep for a small movie company.
He did all of this when he was still a teenager,
but always with the dream of becoming a songwriter.
Frank's first published work came at the age of 21,
a song called In Love with the Memory of You.
He sold several more songs in the early 1930s, none
of them huge hits, but still good enough to get
him more opportunity. In 1935, he was performing at a

(02:18):
club on East 52nd Street called The Backdrop. That's where
he'd meet aspiring singer Lynn Garland, and spoiler alert, she's
about to become very important in this story.
They fell in love, and Frank proposed that September to
Lynn in a letter that included money for a train
ticket to Los Angeles, where he was now working on
contract to Universal Pictures. They were married in a judge's office.

(02:41):
Frank's career began to take off after moving from Universal
to Paramount. His song I Don't Wanna Walk Without You
from the 1942 film Sweater Girl was a favorite of
Irving Berlin's, who once told Lasser that it was the
greatest song he had wished he had written.
Lasser was established, working and socializing with other established names.

(03:02):
In 1944, Frank and his wife Lynn were hosting a
housewarming party, and Frank wrote a song for them to
sing together at the end of the night as a
cue for their guests to leave.
That song was Baby It's Cold Outside. Lynn later wrote
that after that first performance, they became instant parlor room stars. Quote,
We got invited to all the best parties for years

(03:24):
on the basis of Baby. It was our ticket to
caviar and truffles. Parties were built around us being the
closing act. Lynn wasn't kidding. She and Frank never recorded
the song. The only way to hear it was to
be there when Frank and Lynn sang it at the
end of a private party.
It was the talk of the town, and it was
never meant to be anything but that, until Frank got

(03:46):
an offer he couldn't refuse. MGM Studios offered to buy
the song for their movie, Neptune's Daughter, and Frank agreed.
Lynn was furious. Quote, I felt as betrayed as if
I had caught him in bed with another woman. This
was their song, their thing, and now someone else was
gonna sing it in a movie?

(04:06):
Actually, several someones. The song is sung twice in the movie.
First by Ricardo Montalban, yes, Mr. Rourke from Fantasy Island,
and Esther Williams. Later it's sung by Betty Garrett and
Red Skelton, with the roles reversed. The man wants to leave,
and the woman wants him to stay.
Williams once said filmmakers originally wanted to use another Frank

(04:29):
Lasser song called I'd like to Get You on a
Slow Boat to China, but studio censors thought that one
was too suggestive, so MGM made the offer to Lasser
to buy Baby It's Cold Outside. The movie was a
modest hit, but the song was a smash. What small
groups at private parties loved about it translated perfectly to
the big screen, and helped solidify Esther Williams as a

(04:51):
leading musical star for MGM.
Baby It's Cold Outside would go on to win an
Oscar for Best Original Song in 1950. Lynn eventually reconciled
these feelings of betrayal, and was proud that the song
and the vibe that she and her husband created was
recognized in such a significant way.
In the years following its Oscar win, scores of other

(05:12):
singers recorded their own version, Dean Martin and Marty McKay,
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, and later Michael Buble and
Idina Menziel, and Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who swapped
roles just like Skelton and Garrett did in the original movie.
For decades, it was a bona fide Christmas hit, even.
It's not really a Christmas song at all. There are

(05:34):
no Christmas references in the lyrics, and the movie, well,
it came out in the summer, but it is a
great winter song, and audiences reacted when radio stations started
playing it around the holidays. As soon as Dean Martin
included it in his 1959 Christmas album, A Winter Romance,
it officially became a Christmas hit. However,
The more time that passes, the more sensibilities, styles, and

(05:57):
language change. What was a fun, flirty exchange in the 1940s,
no longer read that way to modern audiences. The line, say,
what's in this drink? And the persistent nature of the
male character's persuasion was now viewed as coercion and undermining
the idea of consent.
It was largely a discussion point in the early 2000s,

(06:19):
but in 2016, songwriters Josiah Lemanski and Lydia Liza became
the first to make major changes to the lyrics before
the Me Too movement began. In their version, the song
begins with the lines, I really can't stay. Baby, I'm
fine with that. I've got to go away. Baby, I'm
cool with that. What's in this drink remained, but the

(06:41):
response was, pomegranate Lacroix.
With over 18 million streams on Spotify, it has its audience,
but it didn't definitively reinvent the song. After the Harvey
Weinstein case got global attention in 2017, and we started
to have long overdue conversations about consent, a Cleveland radio
DJ Glenn Anderson, announced that his station, WDOK FM had

(07:05):
removed Baby It's Cold Outside from its Christmas playlist. In
his blog post, Anderson said the song no longer had
a place.
That decision also went global, and more and more radio
stations followed suit. Frank and Lynn's daughter Susan Lasser wasn't happy. Quote,
Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody. In an interview with

(07:26):
NBC that winter, Lasser went on to say that she
did understand the criticisms and asserted her support for the
Me Too movement.
But she also asked people to consider the song's loving
origins and historical context. What's in this drink was a
flirty line once said with a smile and not a
serious concerned question. The female character does wonder what her

(07:46):
parents will think of her if she stays, but never
suggests that she herself doesn't want to stay. But two
things can be true at the same time. A 70-year-old
song was written without any negative intent, and was perfectly
suited for the norms of the day, and it can
age poorly.
If someone heard it for the first time today, it's
perfectly reasonable for them to wonder, what is going on here?

(08:08):
And it's probably unreasonable to expect people to Google the
history of every song they bump up against.
There have been others who have tried to reinterpret the song.
John Legend and Natasha Rothwell took another pass at it
that John recorded with Kelly Clarkson. That has over 38
million Spotify streams, which is a lot of streams, but
it hasn't come close to becoming the definitive version. No

(08:31):
one else has recorded it, and no other songwriter of
note has tried to give reinvention another go. Maybe someone
will try again, but is it ultimately going to work?
Baby It's Cold Outside is very much a product of
its time, and trying to modernize specific lyrics while keeping
the rest of it intact, may be a musical example
of jamming a square peg into a round hole. It

(08:53):
just doesn't fit.
Some recordings of the original lyrics have returned to radio
station playlists after going away for 4 or 5 years.
Will it stay that way? Or will they hit more
bumps in the road as new generations discover the song?
It does make the journey of Baby It's Cold Outside,
one of the more interesting Christmas hits to follow in
the years to come.

(09:14):
I'm Drew Savage, thank you so much for listening. You
can find me on Instagram at Drew Savage on Air.
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