Arthur Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 25, 1900. His mother encouraged his early interest in music -- secretly, since his father, a lawyer, battled his son's inclination toward a musical career to the extent of punishing him whenever he was caught at the piano. Schwartz received degrees from Columbia and New York University and then, to please his father, from the Columbia Law School, supporting himself by teaching English in various high schools.
Meanwhile he composed popular songs, and in 1923 published his first: “Baltimore, Md., You're the Only Doctor for Me.” In the summer between graduation from law school and the opening of his practice, he and Lorenz Hart, counselors at the same camp, wrote songs for camp shows and one later sung in vaudeville. But Schwartz's hopes for a lasting partnership, which had led him to take the camp job in the first place, were destroyed by the success the following year of Rodger and Hart's Garrick Gaieties.
From 1924 until 1928 Schwartz practiced law, but his enthusiasm was for music, and he had songs in The Grand Street Follies in 1926 and The New Yorkers in 1927. When he became a full time song writer, it was chiefly for vaudeville, and still without a satisfactory lyricist. In 1929 he applied for and won the job of chief composer for The Little Show, and persuaded Howard Dietz, whose lyrics he admired, to join the production staff. The Little Show established a new style of revue: intimate, sophisticated, the antithesis of Ziegfeld's; and it established a new song writing team: Schwartz and Dietz, who wrote for a series of revues and two book shows between 1929 and 1937, including the songs “I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Something to Remember You By.” During the same years Schwartz worked with other lyricists as well, writing for shows in London and New York, for the movies, and for a musical radio program, “The Gibson Family.”
In 1939 he wrote a musical for the New York World's Fair with Oscar Hammerstein, and Stars in Your Eyes with Dorothy Fields. Soon after he moved to Hollywood, and until 1946 devoted himself to writing film scores (including Navy Blues, Johnny Mercer, 1941; and Thank Your Lucky Stars, Frank Loesser, 1943) and producing films by other composers (Night and Day, Cole Porter; and Cover Girl, Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.) In 1947 he again collaborated with Dietz on a revue, Inside U.S.A. With Miss Fields he wrote two period shows starring Shirley Booth: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1951 and By the Beautiful Sea (also set in Brooklyn) in 1954. Each won acclaim for the star, and, somewhat less unanimously, for the songs; weakened by their books, each ran exactly 270 performances. The Gay Life, with lyrics by Dietz, was based on Schnitzler's Affairs of Anatol; it opened in November, 1961, and closed early the next year. It might be noted that although both of Miss Booth's shows must be counted box office failures, both had more performances than any of the successful Schwartz shows of the Twenties and Thirties, with the exception of The Little Show, which had fifty-one more performances, and Three's A Crowd, which had one more performance.
