Paul Francis Webster
b. 20 December 1907, New York City, New York, USA, d. 18 March 1984. Although highly educated, at Cornell and New York Universities, Webster was uninterested in pursuing his studies and dropped out, without graduating, to take a job teaching dance. He developed an interest in lyric writing and in 1932 had a hit with Masquerade (music by John Jacob Loeb). Other songs of the '30s were Sweet Madonna (music by Victor Young), Two Cigarettes In The Dark (with Lew Pollack) and Got The Jitters (Loeb). In 1934 Webster and Pollack were hired to write for films and it was while he was in Hollywood that Webster wrote lyrics for the show JUMP FOR JOY, an all-black production with music by Duke Ellington which opened in Los Angeles in 1941. Among the Ellington compositions to which Webster added lyrics was I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good. He also had hits with Lily Of Laguna (music by Ted Fio Rito) and a succession of songs composed by Hoagy Carmichael, among them Baltimore Oriole, The Lamplighter's Serenade and Memphis In June. Other popular songs were Black Coffee (with Sonny Burke), The Loveliest Night Of The Year ( Irving Aaronson and Juventino Rosas) and Secret Love (with Sammy Fain), for which he won an Oscar in 1953. Another Oscar winner in 1955 and again with Fain was Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing. Other film successes for Webster and Fain, several of which were title songs, were April Love, A Certain Smile and Tender Is The Night. Webster also wrote with Dimitri Tiomkin, providing lyrics for Thee I Love, The Green Leaves Of Summer and So Little Time. Webster and Fain collaborated on some unsuccessful Broadway revues. Amongst Webster's other hit songs were Twelfth Of Never (with Jerry Livingston), Like Young (with André Previn) and The Shadow Of Your Smile (with Johnny Mandel), for which he won his third Oscar. He also added lyrics to Maurice Jarre's Lara's Theme from DR ZHIVAGO (1965), which later became known as Somewhere My Love.