Clifford Grey

Clifford Grey, born Percival Davis on 5 January 1887 in Birmingham, Warwickshire, was an English songwriter, librettist, and screenwriter who contributed extensively to the Broadway and West End stages from the First World War through the Second World War. The son of George Davis, a whip manufacturer, and his wife Emma, née Lowe, Grey was educated at King Edward VI School. After leaving school in 1903 he held a series of office jobs before joining a local concert party as a pierrot performer, at which point he adopted the stage name Clifford Grey. He performed in pubs, on piers, and in music halls, and by the time of his marriage in 1912 he had shifted his focus from performing to writing lyrics for West End productions. His wife, Dorothy Maud Mary Gould, born 1890 or 1891 and died 1940, had been a fellow member of the concert party. The couple had two daughters, June and Dorothy, and Grey also adopted a daughter of Gould's. Grey is also known under the alternate spelling Clifford Gray.

Grey's career as a writer gained significant momentum in 1916 when he collaborated with American composer Nat Ayer on The Bing Boys Are Here, a long-running London revue that opened in April of that year. Two songs from that production became among his most enduring works: "If You Were the Only Girl (In the World)" and "Another Little Drink Wouldn't Do Us Any Harm." He continued collaborating with Ayer on several subsequent productions, including Pell-Mell, The Bing Girls Are There, The Other Bing Boys, The Bing Brothers on Broadway, and Yes, Uncle! He also worked during this period with Herman Finck on Hallo, America!, with Ivor Novello and Jerome Kern on Theodore & Co, with Howard Talbot and Novello on Who's Hooper?, with Novello alone on Arlette in 1917, and with Ivan Caryll on Kissing Time, the last of which also involved a collaboration with P.G. Wodehouse.

In 1920 Kern invited Grey to New York, where Grey contributed lyrics to Florenz Ziegfeld's Sally. He remained in the United States for much of the decade, returning to London periodically for productions including Phi-Phi with Henri Christiné in 1922, The Smith Family with Ayer in 1922, and The Rainbow with George Gershwin in 1923. His Broadway output during the 1920s was substantial, encompassing both musical comedies and revues. His collaborators on Broadway included Sigmund Romberg, Melville Gideon, Ivan Caryll and Guy Bolton on The Hotel Mouse in 1922, and Vincent Youmans on Hit the Deck in 1927. With Rudolph Friml and Wodehouse he worked on The Three Musketeers in 1928, and with Robert A. Simon on Ups-A-Daisy, also in 1928, for the Shubert Theatre. That same year, he co-authored the book and lyrics for Sunny Days with William Cary Duncan at the Imperial Theatre, a production based on his 1925 play A Kiss in a Taxi. His verified Broadway credits also include the revue Gay Paree from 1926, the revue A Night in Paris, the revue The Merry World, and The Optimist. In 1929, back in London, he collaborated with Vivian Ellis on the musical Mr Cinders, which enjoyed a long West End run and introduced "Spread a Little Happiness," one of his best-remembered songs.

The arrival of talking pictures drew Grey to Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays and lyrics for fourteen new films between 1929 and 1931. He collaborated with Victor Schertzinger on the 1929 Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald film The Love Parade, and with Oscar Straus on The Smiling Lieutenant in 1931. His other Hollywood film credits from this period include The Vagabond Lover in 1929 and In Gay Madrid in 1930, and he contributed to films featuring Ramon Novarro, Lawrence Tibbett, and Marion Davies. Songs from his stage work were also incorporated into numerous films. His most celebrated song, "If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)," appeared in Lilacs in the Spring in 1954, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, and The Cat's Meow in 2001, while Hit the Deck was adapted for film in 1955. His later hit "Got a Date with an Angel" also extended his reputation beyond the stage.

Returning to England in 1932, Grey concentrated on the West End and British cinema. His screenplay for the spy film Rome Express in 1932 was notably successful and was credited with establishing a new subgenre. He wrote more than twenty screenplays for British films, among them My Song Goes Round the World in 1934, Mimi in 1935, an adaptation of La Bohème featuring Gertrude Lawrence and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Yes, Madam? in 1940. Throughout the 1930s he continued writing for the West End stage in collaboration with Oscar Levant, Johnny Green, and Noel Gay, among others. Over the course of his career Grey wrote more than 3,000 songs, working as lyricist and librettist for composers including Ivor Novello, Jerome Kern, Howard Talbot, Ivan Caryll, and George Gershwin.

When the Second World War began, Grey joined the Entertainments National Service Association, which brought performances to members of the armed forces across the country and abroad. In 1941 he was presenting a concert party in Ipswich, Suffolk, when the town was heavily bombed. He died two days later, on 25 September 1941, at the age of 54, from a heart attack brought on by the bombing and exacerbated by asthma. He is buried in Ipswich Old Cemetery. After his death, his songs continued to appear in films and television productions.

For more than three decades following a 1979 article by journalist Tim Clark in Yankee Magazine, it was widely believed that Grey had secretly competed for the United States Olympic bobsleigh team under the name Clifford "Tippy" Gray, winning gold medals at the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz and the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, as well as a bronze medal at the 1937 FIBT World Championships in St. Moritz. The claim persuaded many news sources, biographers, and even Grey's own daughters. However, around 2013, research by sportswriter Andy Bull of The Guardian, whose findings were published in book form in 2015, established that the bobsleigher was a different individual, and the story was definitively shown to be a case of mistaken identity.