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From Liszt to Lehar. Frederick Loewe grew up in a musical-comedy world. His father, Edmund Loewe, a Vienna-born operetta tenor, was the first Prince Danilo in the Berlin production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow, the Fair Lady of its day, was also Berlin's first Chocolate Soldier. Fritz's mother Rosa was the daughter of a Viennese Baumeister (builder) and a sometime actress who used lipstick and cigarettes in a never-never age when young ladies only pinched their cheeks for color, also added color to her life with a swift and exotic imagination. At 16 she had some people convinced that she was mistress to Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who at Sarajevo was to stop the bullet that started World War I.
Some of Fritz's first steps were mazurkas and waltzes, as he listened to an aunt in Vienna play on the family's baby grand. At five he wrote his first tune, and at nine he contributed melodies to a show of his father's. He also spent so much vagabond time in backstage dressing rooms that his parents decided to put him in a Berlin military school. He still resentfully recalls the wrought-iron gates closing on his smiling, light-footed mother, a blown kiss and her casual "Goodbye, my love, be happy." Later he studied piano at Stern's Conservatory in Berlin, preparing for a concert career. But at 15 he tossed off the first hint of Broadway a popular song called Kathrin ("the girl with the best legs in Berlin") that sold about 2.000.000 copies of sheet music.
Aging into his late teens, Fritz burned out his evening hours moving from party to party, playing everything from Liszt to Lehar. Slender, handsome, with dark blond curly hair, he was cocky, arrogant, and popular with girls, all sorts of girls. He declares that he had his first sexual experience at 2 and his first affair at nine with his governess ("I thought I was abnormally precocious until I read Kinsey"). By 17, in the words of a conservatory friend, he was a "sexual democrat." Once, having outrun his credit at a brothel, he paid off his debt by entertaining at the madam's piano.
Into the Ring. In 1924, accompanying his father on a tour of what Loewe Sr. called "the only country left on this globe," Fritz landed in the U.S. He apparently failed to persuade the critics or himself that the piano was the only career for Fritz Loewe. But a concert life, he told himself, was just so much acrobatics anyway, while a steady job with an orchestra was "like being in a union"; he pawned his career for seven years of wildly miscellaneous jobs.