Controversy creates a hot streak for ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’

The swirling snowstorm of controversy over the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has just about played out for this holiday season. After a Cleveland radio station banned composer Frank Loesser’s campy 1944 paean to snuggling by the fire – insisting the lyrics’ “predatory undertones” were tantamount to date-rape – others followed suit, and for a few days it seemed as if “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be left out in the cold for 2018, a geriatric victim of #MeToo.

On the just-published Dec. 22 Billboard Holiday chart, logging digital download sales, Dean Martin’s 1959 recording of “Baby” entered the Top Ten with 11,000 sold; Idina Menzel’s 2014 version with Michael Bublé registered 3,000 in sales; the duet by Brett Eldridge and Meghan Trainor, and another by Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redbone (from the Elf soundtrack) sold 2,000 each.

In other words, more than 70 years after it was written, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is the biggest-selling holiday song of the year.

“All publicity is good publicity,” laughs the late composer’s son John Loesser, a resident of Vero Beach, “unless of course your name is Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves.”

The family continues to receive royalties from Frank Loesser’s catalog, which includes the scores to Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Hans Christian Andersen and others.

As for “Baby,” John Loesser says, “It’s brought it to the attention of Millennials and others who may have missed it before. The overwhelming majority of things that I’ve read is that nobody believes it’s a date-rape song.”

Loesser says he received an accounting report indicating “there have been more than 11 million  streams of the song, just because of all of the controversy. And every single one of the radio stations that decided to unlist it put it back on. Every single one. Including the country of Canada.”

The Dean Martin recording, according to Billboard, reached 1.4 million people in airplay audience over the past week.

Frank Loesser and his wife, Lynn Garland, first performed the duet at their New York City housewarming party in ’44. Over the following years, it became their “signature song,” performed at parties, for friends, with the two of them perched on the piano bench as Loesser played.

In 1949, it appeared in the MGM film Neptune’s Daughter – earning the composer an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Born in 1950, John Loesser has no memory of his parents – who divorced a few years later – singing “Baby” together. But he’s well-versed in the history of the song. “It was never intended to be a Christmas song or a holiday song,” he says. “And because it’s religion-neutral, it became that. So it was very easy to be played on any playlist. There are hundreds and hundreds of artists that have covered it for the last 70 years. It’s remarkable.”

He was 19 years old, and working on Broadway, when his father died. “After he died, I was one of two people running our publishing company, Frank Music, with an office in L.A. And I became a publisher and a record producer.”

John Loesser recently retired after 18 years as executive and artistic director of the Lyric Theatre in Stuart, Florida.

As one of the principal administrators and financial custodians of his father’s works, he takes an active interest in the blizzard of attention given to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

“It’s always had its good years and its not-so-good years,” Loesser shrugs. “If it winds up in, let’s say, Hallmark premium albums for Christmas, or two hot stars decide to do it, like Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett, then it gets a lot more plays.”

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, for Frank Loesser’s heirs, 2018 was a very good year.

“I had to laugh – it’s the first time in 70 years that Mommy and Daddy made it to the front page of the New York Times,” John Loesser says.