Hamilton, Nancy

Helen Keller, undated

Nancy Hamilton, Broadway actress, lyricist, author, scriptwriter, producer, and playwright was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, July 27, 1908, daughter of Charles Lee Hamilton and Margaret Miller Marshall. She was educated at Miss Dickinson's School in Sewickley, at the Sorbonne, and received a B.A. from Smith College in 1930. Hamilton began writings songs and sketches while at Smith, acting in and directing The Chocolate Soldier in her senior year. She was Producing Director of the Dramatic Association Council at Smith. After a period of amateur acting and producing in Pittsburgh and Montclair, New Jersey, she moved to New York City in 1932 and leased a large apartment with an assortment of women friends. For a short time she worked for Stern's Department Store and then for RKO Pictures as a spy checking audience reactions and reporting on vaudeville acts. She began her acting career as understudy to Katharine Hepburn in The Warrior's Husband and also had a walk on part in the play. She made her Broadway debut in 1934 in New Faces, not only appearing in the show but also writing many of the lyrics. When it closed she turned to play writing. She collaborated with Rosemary Casey and James Shute on Return Engagement which was made into a film entitled Fools for Scandal . During the next two years Hamilton wrote radio scripts for comic actress Beatrice Lillie, Fred Astaire, and Lois Long, and published articles and poems in Stage Magazine and Harper's Bazaar . She went on to write lyrics for three successful Broadway revues (a genre of musical theater that flourished in the 1930s): One for The Money (1939) ran for 132 performances, Two for the Show (1940) ran for 124 performances, and Three to Make Ready (1946) ran for 323 performances. These revues launched the careers of Alfred Drake, Keenan Wynn, Gene Kelley, Betty Hutton, Eve Arden, and Ray Bolger. Song lyrics written by Hamilton include "How High the Moon," "The House with the Little Red Barn," "The Old Soft Shoe," "I Hate the Spring," "The Old Gavotte," "Lovely Lazy Kind of Day," and "Clambake." In 1945 she spent six months with the American Theater Wing War Players touring the battle areas of France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In the mid-1950s Hamilton produced Helen Keller In Her Story (also known as The Unconquered ), a documentary on the life of Helen Keller narrated by Katharine Cornell. It won an Academy Award in 1955 for the best documentary.

Nancy Hamilton is known as one of the first women to succeed as a lyricist. Korey Rothman in her dissertation, "Somewhere There's Music: Nancy Hamilton, The Old Girls Network, and the American Musical Theatre of the 1930s and 1940s,"¹ states that Hamilton is "…an important unsung figure of the twentieth century musical theater" and that she "…was part of a large network of women with whom she maintained overlapping professional and romantic relationships." She was the life-long partner of actress Katharine Cornell. Hamilton died in New York City, February 18, 1985, after a long illness.

[¹ PhD Dissertation, University of Maryland at College Park, 2005]

Nancy Hamilton was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1908, where she attended Miss Dickinson’s School. She also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1926-1927 and received a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in 1930, where she appeared in and directed plays. She started her theatrical career writing, producing and acting in the revue, And So On in 1930. In the early 1930s she concentrated on her writing career and her articles and poems appeared in various newspapers and magazines.

In 1932 she made her Broadway debut in The Warrior’s Husband, playing a small role and understudying the leading lady, Katharine Hepburn. In 1934 she wrote songs for and appeared in the first New Faces revue. In 1935 she played Miss Bingley in Helen Jerome’s dramatization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . In the mid-30s she wrote special material for the comedienne Beatrice Lillie that was performed on the radio. With playwrights James Shute and Rosemary Casey and composer Frederick Loewe Hamilton worked on a musical called Return Engagement that was never produced but was later adapted by MGM into a vehicle for Carole Lombard, Fools for Scandal (1938).

In collaboration with composer Morgan Lewis, Hamilton wrote lyrics and comic sketches for the popular revue, One for the Money (1939). Hamilton was also a member of the cast, which also featured Alfred Drake, Brenda Forbes, Gene Kelly and Keenan Wynn. Lewis and Hamilton followed One for the Money with the equally successful Two for the Show (1940), which also starred Drake, Forbes and Wynn as well as Eve Arden, Richard Haydn and Betty Hutton. Two for the Show also introduced the song “How High the Moon” which has become a jazz standard, covered by such musicians and singers as Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Harry James, June Christy, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Gloria Gaynor.

In the 1930s Hamilton met the great stage actress Katharine Cornell and the two soon became lifelong friends. During WWII, Hamilton wrote the scripts for Billie Burke’s radio show, Fashions in Rations . From 1944-1945 Hamilton was an assistant stage manager and understudy in Cornell’s wartime company, performing The Barretts of Wimpole Street for servicemen in hospitals in Europe. After the war she and Morgan Lewis completed the third in their series, Three to Make Ready, which featured Ray Bolger, Brenda Forbes, Harold Lang and Gordon MacRae. Hamilton and Lewis’ trio of revues were combined into later revues, including Three to One (1952), Here We Go, which was proposed for television in the 1950s and One for the Money, etc. that was produced Off-Broadway in 1972. In the late 1940s Hamilton worked with Helen Hockinson on the never produced play, Our Best Girl, and she and Lewis wrote a musical, Maggie Here that was also not produced.

In 1954 Hamilton and Lewis contributed a song to the Mary Martin vehicle Peter Pan, the score of which was primarily written by two other song-writing teams, Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh; and Jule Styne and Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Hamilton produced directed and co-wrote with James Shute, a documentary about Helen Keller, The Unconquered (1954), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. From 1959-1960, Hamilton accompanied Cornell on the national tour of Dear Liar . After Cornell’s retirement, she and Hamilton lived on Martha’s Vineyard, which was the subject of their 1971 documentary film, This is Our Island .

In 1971, “How High the Moon” was included in The Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Nancy Hamilton died in New York, NY on February 18, 1985.