The Times - UK (2020-10-15)

the times | Thursday October 15 2020 1GM 49

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much looser translation and the re-

mainder was entirely new songs. The

finished show was an hour longer than

the original.

Les Misérables, directed by Trevor

Nunn and John Caird, opened at the

Barbican in October 1985 to horren-

dous reviews, including a dismal write-

up from Jack Tinker, Kretzmer’s col-

league at the Mail, who described it as

“the Glums”. Another critic found that

“one tender death scene came blasting

through the auditorium like a force-ten

fart”. The public thought differently.

Ticket sales soared and the show trans-

ferred to the West End, where it con-

tinued to be staged, breaking the record

for the longest-running musical, until it

was forced to close by the coronavirus

pandemic.

The surprise success of Les Miséra-

bles, which in 1987 won Kretzmer a

Grammy award as well as several Tony

awards, meant that he no longer

needed, in the words of his lyrics, to

“charge ’em for the lice/ Extra for the

mice”. Yet being an unassuming sort, he

Johannesburg Sunday Express before

selling his piano accordion to fund the

passage to Europe. In Paris he tried un-

successfully to be a novelist, supporting

himself by playing piano in the brasse-

ries of St-Germain-des-Prés where he

rubbed shoulders with Jean-Paul Sartre

and became friendly with Aznavour.

On his first day in London in 1954 a

thief stole all his money, but life im-

proved when he found his way to Fleet

Street, writing features for the Daily

Sketch and interviews with stars such as

Cary Grant, Truman Capote and Duke

Ellington for the Sunday Dispatch. Of

Greta Garbo he opined: “Boiled down

to essentials, she is a plain mortal girl

with large feet.”

In 1961 he married Elisabeth Wilson,

an actress whom he had met in the

theatre. The marriage was dissolved in

1973 and in 1988 he married Sybil Sever,

a PR for the cosmetic queen Elizabeth

Arden, whom he met at the opening

night party for the New York produc-

tion of Les Misérables, “what I call my

late-life stroke of luck”, he said. She sur-

Herbie Kretzmer did not so much

translate Les Misérables as create an

English-language version of an obscure

French musical that in 1980 had played

for a few months in Paris. In the process

he read Victor Hugo’s novel in English

and worked from a literal translation of

Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel

Schönberg’s original script.

“You cannot translate a song,” he ex-

plained. “You can translate a textbook

and even a novel, but a song is no more

than a compendium of nuances and

references and illusions, with a reso-

nance within a particular culture. So

simply to translate the words into their

dictionary meaning isn’t going to

work.”

He cited I Dreamed a Dream, where

the literal translation is: “I had dreamed

of another life/ In which my life would

pass like a dream.” In Kretzmer’s inter-

pretation it was: “I dreamed a dream in

time gone by/ When hope was high and

life worth living.”

Until Les Misérables Kretzmer, a tall,

slightly stooping and debonair figure,

had enjoyed reasonable success, writ-

ing songs for That Was the Week that

Wa s, winning an Ivor Novello award for

the Peter Sellers/Sophia Loren Top Ten

duet Goodness Gracious Me, and collab-

orating with the singer Charles Azna-

vour to bring French songs to an En-

glish audience. He also dabbled in writ-

ing screenplays, notably Too Hot to

Handle (1960) starring Jayne Mansfield.

It was an “exposé of sexy, sordid Soho

— England’s greatest shame”. Yet the

big time had evaded him.

His role in Les Misérables came about

after he wrote to Cameron Mackintosh

in 1984 urging the producer to back a

West End revival of Our Man Crichton,

for which Kretzmer had written the lyr-

ics. Mackintosh was not interested, but

invited Kretzmer to tea.

“We talked about everything and

anything and then, between the sofa

and door of his office as he was showing

me out, my entire life changed,” Kretz-

mer recalled. “He said, ‘Tell me why you

didn’t go on as a lyricist.’ And I said, ‘But

I have.’ He asked me to name a couple of

songs and I named two, both with music

by Aznavour. One was She, and another

called Yesterday When I Was Young.

Cameron stopped, threw his arms wide,

did a reasonable impression of a man in

a swoon and said, ‘God, you’ve just

named two of my favourite songs.’ ”

Six months later Mackintosh realised

that the libretto for his English version

of Les Misérables was proving unworka-

ble. “He sat bolt upright in his bed one

morning and thought of me,” recalled

Kretzmer. “He said, ‘That’s the guy’,

based purely on his remembering that

little snatch of conversation.”

Kretzmer, who was the Daily Mail’s

television critic, took six months’ leave

and worked around the clock in his

Knightsbridge apartment, consuming

copious amounts of smoked salmon

from Harrods’ food hall.

About a third of the musical came

from adapting the French, a third was a

Even after his success

he returned to his day

job as a television critic

Obituaries

Conscientious banker

and whistleblower

Paul Moore

Page 50

returned to his day job as a television

critic until, as his fellow television critic

Philip Purser noted, “it was becoming a

little incongruous for a millionaire and

a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des

Lettres to be shambling in and out of

viewing rooms with a notebook and a

plastic cup of coffee”.

Herbert Kretzmer was born in

Kroonstad, in the Free State, South

Africa, in 1925, one of four sons of Willi-

am and Tilly Kretzmer, Lithuanian-

Jewish immigrants who ran a furniture

store. One of his brothers, Elliot, be-

came mayor of Johannesburg.

He was educated at Kroonstad High

School and Rhodes University, Gra-

hamstown, from where he began writ-

ing scripts for documentary films and

cinema newsreels. He moved on to the

In an article he called

Greta Garbo a ‘mortal

girl with large feet’

Herbert Kretzmer

Mischievous if unassuming lyricist behind Les Misérables, the West End’s longest-running musical, as well as Charles Aznavour’s She

vives him with a son and

daughter from his first mar-

riage: Matthew, who works in

the family business in Johan-

nesburg, and Danielle, an ac-

ademic.

There was a spot of trouble

in 1965 when the impresario

Emile Littler won £11,500 in

libel damages and costs from

Kretzmer and the BBC over

a mischievous number he

had written called The Littler

Song. It had been broadcast

on the David Frost show Not

So Much a Programme the

previous November, at the

height of the so-called

“dirty plays” controversy in

the West End, and suggested that Lit-

tler was being insincere in his condem-

nation of obscenity on stage.

In 1967, the same year as his musical

The Four Musketeers opened at Drury

Lane Theatre, Kretzmer took over as

theatre critic of the Daily Express from

Bernard Levin, who had moved to the

Daily Mail: the pair would file their re-

spective overnight reviews and then

meet for a midnight supper. In 1979 he

too joined the Mail.

He continued writing musicals and

worked on the film adaptation of Les

Misérables. He also published Snap-

shots, a collection of his celebrity inter-

views. A letter of thanks from Frank Si-

natra hung in the downstairs lavatory

of his Holland Park home: not for a

song Kretzmer had composed, but for

an article he had written about the

singer in his Fleet Street days. “It’s on

loo level,” he said. “Halfway between

sitting and standing.”

Kretzmer was thrilled in 2009 when

Susan Boyle revived interest in Les Mis-

érables by singing I Dreamed a Dream

on Britain’s Got Talent. “What is it about

that moment on television?” he asked

in his low, rumbling voice that sounded

like a coffee percolator. “This dumpy

little lady walks on to a stage and within

minutes she’s a universal legend. Every-

thing about her is stardust. And she re-

vived interest not only in the song but in

the show. She gave it new life.”

As for his own career, he told The

Jewish Chronicle: “Old song writers

don’t die. They just de-compose.”

Herbert Kretzmer, OBE, journalist and

lyricist, was born on October 5, 1925. He

died from complications of Parkinson’s

disease on October 14, 2020, aged 95

Before adapting Les Misérables, Herbert Kretzmer wrote screenplays, including Too Hot to Handle, with Jayne Mansfield

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