Hammacher on Broadway
A tongue-in-cheek 1929 showtune pledges undying love for us
We’re so vain… we probably think this showtune’s about us. And we’re right, because our name is right there in the title.
Granted, among 1929’s contributions to the Great American Songbook, “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” isn’t exactly “Ain’t Misbehavin’” or “Singin’ in the Rain”. Near as we can tell, it was never even recorded until singer Michael Lavine’s 2011 album Lost Broadway, Vol. 3, in a version that’s barely 30 seconds long. The lyrics, in full:
Hammacher Schlemmer, I love you
Roebuck and Sears, I adore you
If you want to buy a bassinet or buy a hog
Don’t be in a fog, use our catalogue
Hammacher Schlemmer, you’re sweet, dear
Hammacher Schlemmer, I repeat, dear
Macy’s and Gimbel’s have plenty of thimbles
But I love you
If “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” has fallen short of immortality, the show it was part of, The Little Show, was the start of something big. A few somethings big, actually. At a time when the gaudy spectacles of producer Florenz Ziegfeld ruled the Great White Way, this humble show put the emphasis on “wit, humor and intelligence”, as the New York Times review put it. Time compared it to “an animated issue of such smart charts as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker… gathered by clever Manhattanites from the fancies, satires, slap-sticks of their native city.”
The comic lead, Fred Allen, would shortly become one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Radio, with a cutting sarcasm and brainy absurdity that was well ahead of his time. His old show remains legitimately funny lo, these many years later.
The minds behind “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” were the songwriting team of lyricist Howard Dietz and composer Arthur Schwartz, writing together for the first time. Fred Allen biographer Robert Taylor notes that the title plays on another popular song of the time, “Woman Disputed, I Love You”, even if it doesn’t lift the tune wholesale for a full parody of the “Weird” Al Yankovic school.
The Little Show was far from the last Dietz and Schwartz collaboration. Over the next 30 years, the pair would team up on ten more shows, most notably The Band Wagon, with songs like “That’s Entertainment” and “Dancing in the Dark”. That’s company we don’t mind keeping.
Hammacher Schlemmer, at this point, was still in our hardware era. The Times called this tune “the maudlin, sentimental theme song of our foremost hardware merchants”. Taylor says it “encapsulated the revue’s droll, worldly attitude” with “the anvil beat of the name of the New York hardware firm”.
We love the fact that almost a century ago, we were already known as the place to get anything from a bassinet to a hog - and for the perception that our prices were on the luxurious side (”I repeat, dear”). We’ve tried to do a little something about the latter, but alas, we are at the moment out of stock on hogs.
Mostly, we appreciate that when a great tunesmithing duo composed a paean to mail-order shopping, Hammacher Schlemmer was the first name they reached for. Whatever happened to those Roebuck and Sears fellows, do you suppose?
You can’t hear “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” on the Broadway stage, but you can stream it to the Any Music Format Stereo.
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I do enjoy this newsletter. My dad was a buyer at Hammacher Schlemmer in the 1960s. While he is long gone, I still remember his stories of products he introduced; celebrities and royalty he met, and being trapped for a whole night in the store because of a blackout and dining on the weird, tinned delicacies in the then gourmet food department.