The iconic Broadway restaurant Sardi’s reopened this week to serve returning theater-goers.  It survived the pandemic with $4.5 million in Covid relief funds.  Hopefully, it will remain open and prosper.

During my 30-year career in Manhattan real estate management, I also managed to do lunch at Sardi’s a half dozen times.  Not the best Italian food in town but you knew you were at the center of the Broadway/Times Square universe.  I spotted celebrities on a couple of occasions and met Vincent Sardi, Jr (he took over from his father in 1947 and died in 2007 at 91).  Celebrity caricatures filled the walls, and I just read that the one of Barbra Streisand is screwed in place to stop its theft by diehard fans – I would never be a suspect!

In the same neighborhood, I once had to deal with a lady who maintained the Irving Berlin archives – another legend – in a small building off Times Square. I never met the legendary composer himself who was still alive at the time (he died in 1989).  Another Broadway legend who frequented Tin Pan Alley was an Italian American that I was not familiar with in those days – composer Harry Warren.

We have a piece on Warren in The Italic Way, issue XXII, 1994 (italic.org/Research Library).  As it happens, Christmas Eve was his birthday.  Born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna in 1893 (he died in 1981, just shy of age 88), he composed over 800 tunes for Broadway, the big bands, and major films. In fact, he was the first major songwriter to compose primarily for movies.  He’s the guy who wrote That’s Amore for the 1953 comedy The Caddy, sung on screen and ever-after by crooner Dean Martin (Warren didn’t write the lyrics, silly as they are.)

Warren/Guaragna was one of eleven children of Italian immigrants Antonio (a bootmaker) and Rachele (De Luca), growing up in Brooklyn. His father changed the family name to Warren when Harry was a child  (where did “Harry” come from?)  I guess “Wahr” could sound like “Guar.”  It wasn’t uncommon for immigrants to “translate” Italian surnames into an English version.  My maternal great-grandfather changed Guglielmo to Williams for the 1930 census – however, the change didn’t stick!

Young Harry must have gotten his musical talent from his father, who played the accordion.  He easily took to papà’s accordion.  Soon after, it was the drums which he played professionally in his godfather’s traveling band, dropping out of school at 16 to hit the road.  He also learned the piano and made a living playing in theaters during silent movies.  In 1918, the U.S. Navy beckoned.  It was in service that he began composing music.  He hit his stride in the 1930s, launching a Broadway career with those musical extravaganzas like the Gold Diggers series and 42nd Street.  Warren churned out the show tunes Lullaby of Broadway, I Found a Million Dollar Baby, Forty-Second Street, and We’re in the Money.  His other 1930’s hits were: I Only Have Eyes for You, You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, Jeepers Creepers, and The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a Depression tango that Tony Bennett later added to his repertoire.

His music continued into films of the 1940s with railroad themes Chattanooga Choo Choo and On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.  But it was his torch songs that emotionally reflected the sacrifice of the war years: At Last, a classic sung by Etta James; You’ll Never Know, can still conjure up the heartbreak of separation; The More I See You, from 1945 that we Boomers know from the Chris Montez version of 1966; and There Will Never Be Another You, with versions by Nat King Cole and Willie Nelson.

Warren’s productive juices tapered off in the 1950s.  After That’s Amore, he wrote the theme for the film An Affair to Remember (1957) sung by Vic Damone, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. 

As you see, his musical genius was more than just “a bigga pizza pie.” -JLM