Howard Dietz

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 233-234. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.

Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.

In 1929, for a Broadway revue called "The Little Show", Dietz first teamed with the lawyer-turned-composer Arthur Schwartz. With interruptions, their partnership lasted more than 30 years, producing such songs as "Dancing in the Dark", "By Myself" and "You and the Night and the Music".

Dietz was an unusual, but not illogical, combination: a publicist-lyricist. Of his upbringing, he wrote, "We lived in cycles of Manhattan, inheriting neighborhoods as they became passe, from Yorkville to Harlem, to Washington Heights, to West End Avenue, to Riverside Drive. As a result, I got to know kids from all over town -- marble shooters, button pitchers, stoop handballers, and other dazzling athletes who used the city for a outdoor gym. " He went on to Townsend Harris high school ('Ira Gershwin' and E. Y. Harburg were among his fellow students) and, after a brief stint as a reporter, to journalism school at Columbia University. First prize in a slogan-writing contest sponsored by a cigarette company landed Dietz an advertising job; his employer introduced him to Samuel Goldwyn, whose publicity staff Dietz joined, and Jerome Kern, who became his collaborator on a 1924 Broadway musical, "Dear Sir".

Designed the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Leo the Lion's roar logo and suggested its Latin motto "Ars Gratia Artis" (roughly, "Art for Art's Sake"). It first appeared on the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation film Polly of the Circus (1917) and passed to MGM when Goldwyn merged with two other companies about 1924.