Libby Holman "Can't We Be Friends?" LYRICS HERE = 1929 torch song Henry Sullivan-Harry Ruskin tune

Libby Holman

"Can't We Be Friends?"

Brunswick 4506

1929

Lyrics by Harry Ruskin

Music by Henry Sullivan

I took each word he said as gospel
truth the way a silly little child would.

I can't excuse it on the grounds of youth.
I was no baby in the wild wood.

He didn't mean it.
I should have seen it.
Now it's too late.

I thought I'd met the man of my dreams
Now it seems this is how the story ends
He's going to turn me down and say
"Can't we be friends?"

I thought for once it couldn't go wrong
Not for long--this is how the story ends
He's going to turn me down and say
"Can't we be friends?"

Never again, through with love--through
with men. They play their game without
shame, and who's to blame?

I thought I'd met one man I could trust.
What a bust. This is how the story ends:
he's going to turn me down and say
"Can't we be friends?"

You fool, I thought I knew the wheat from the chaff.
What a laugh. This is how the story ends. I′ll let him
turn me down and say "Can't we be friends?"

I acted like a kid out of school. What a fool.
I can see the way this ends. I let him turn me
down and say "Can't you and I be friends?"

Why should I care if he's gone and given me the air?
Why should I cry, even sigh, and wonder why?

Libby Holman helped popularize songs that became standards, such as "Body and Soul."

She was a torch singer.

In the lyrics of such songs, a female carries a torch (love) for a man who rejected or abused her.

This singer was born Elizabeth Lloyd Holzman in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 23, 1904, to middle-class parents of German Jewish descent.

Libby was not raised in the Jewish faith. Her parents--Alfred Holzman (a lawyer/stockbroker) and Rachel (Workum) Holzman, a schoolteacher--converted to the Christian Science church.

In 1923, after completing a major in French in three years, Libby was the youngest woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati.

At nineteen, she moved to New York with with a goal of making it on Broadway.

In 1925, she landed a significant role in the play The Sapphire Ring.

She joined the road company of The Greenwich Village Follies. Her big break came in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical revue, The Garrick Gaieties (1925), which ran over 211 performances.

Nearsightedness provided an alluring stage persona.

Her palate, an eighth of an inch askew, helped produce her throaty sound.

Holman, a celebrity, landed roles in Merry-Go-Round (1927), Rainbow (1928), and Gambols (1929).

In 1929, she sang “Moanin’ Low” in Clifton Webb’s The Little Show.

During this period, Clifton Webb introduced Holman to Louisa Carpenter, a millionaire member of the du Pont family. By the time Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s Three’s a Crowd opened at the Selwyn Theater on October 15, 1930, Carpenter and Holman had become inseparable lovers (her bisexuality became the talk of Broadway, only the first of many tabloid scandals she inspired in the thirties). Costarring with Fred Allen, Holman sang “Give Me Something to Remember You By” and “Body and Soul.”

Zachary Smith Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, began, followed Holman’s career. An aviator, he flew from city to city courting her attentions until November 16, 1931, when, just days after his divorce from Anne Cannon was finalized, the two were married by a justice of the peace in Monroe, Michigan. The famously ill-fated marriage ended tragically at the Reynolds estate, “Reynolda,” near Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

On July 5, 1932, Reynolds was shot in his bedroom. He died the next morning in the hospital, a coroner declaring the death a suicide.

Two grand juries approved murder charges against Holman, who had been with Reynolds at the time of the shooting, and against Ab Walker, Reynolds’s best friend.

Holman went into hiding with Louisa Carpenter, and eventually the case was dropped through the influence of the Reynolds family. When Holman gave birth on January 9, 1933, to Christopher “Topper” Reynolds, it brought a new heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune and became one of the biggest news stories of the year, later inspiring two Hollywood scandal films: Reckless, starring Jean Harlow (1935), and Written on the Wind (1956).

Although she returned briefly to Broadway in 1934, in Revenge with Music, singing Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s “You and the Night and the Music,” Holman lost interest in singing Tin Pan Alley fare.

Cole Porter’s You Never Know in 1938 was the last musical in which she appeared.

Reynolds’s death was the first in a series of tragic events. In 1939, Holman married a second time, to Ralph de Rimer Holmes, an actor who spent most of the marriage at war. He committed suicide soon after his return. On her own, Holman adopted two sons at birth: Tim (b. 1945) and Tony (b. 1947).

In August 1950, her first son, Topper, died climbing a mountain.