I was born on February 25th 1932, in the very depths of the Great Depression, the son of Nathan and Lillian Yellen, a couple who had emerged from the poverty in the lower East Side where disease had killed most of her family, and a gambler father had forced him to support his own large family from childhood. They told me that the winter of my birth was so cold that Niagara Falls was frozen solid. It was a cold greeting into a warm family. My father, Nathan, armed only with his quick intelligence, good humor, volatile temper and phenomenal sales skills, rose to the ownership of a prosperous sweater factory. My mother Lillian, famous among friends and family for her astonishing beauty as well as her endearing and enduring kindness, joined Nathan in the struggle to make it into the middle class during the early Depression years. My late great sister Simone, four years my senior, and later a distinguished interior designer, was my childhood fighting and laughing companion, and they comprised the family of my youth.

I consider myself fortunate growing up when I did in the New York of the thirties and forties. New York public schools were splendid then, and my education at the High School of Music & Art in Harlem introduced me to a world of ideas and ideals taught by a group of remarkable teachers, practical aesthetes who had survived the Great Depression, and who encouraged my painting, my writing, and my social conscience. I entered Bard College at Annandale-On-Hudson in 1949; it was then a small progressive college, an idyll of bohemia in the Hudson Valley, a refuge for original thinkers in the conventional post-war world of the fifties. I studied creative writing with the renowned Texas novelist William Humphrey, a man who became my mentor and friend, a man of exacting standards in art and life. I soon abandoned painting, determined to become a writer. I was named John Bard Scholar in my sophomore year and honored with the Wilton E. Lockwood Award for Literature upon graduation from Bard. At that time my goal was to be a short story writer and novelist. In college I met my future wife Joan Fuhr. We would marry in the spring of 1952 and settle in Manhattan where I attended Columbia University as a graduate student in 18th century English Literature, planning a career as a college teacher and fiction writer.

At Columbia, the academic life with its petty politics and scholarly footnoting (“Who was the second cousin twice removed of “Lady Mary Wortley Montague?”) lost its appeal and I decided against teaching. In the early fifties work was scarce for aspiring novelists who hoped to make a living in publishing, so I took a job as an assistant editor at Tomorrow a magazine, owned by the eccentric Irish millionaire and trance medium Eileen J. Garrett. Mrs. Garrett was the self proclaimed model for the medium in Blithe Spirit, and one of the models for Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame. Trust me on this, Mrs. Garrett was a true eccentric in her own right, and remarkably generous to a young writer. She gave me a research grant to study in London where I completed a study of the ghosts in Shakespeare for the Parapsychology Journal, and had a marvelous adventure in those cheap and easy post war London days.

My life as a dramatist began when former Bard roommate and close friend, playwright Peter Stone, joined me in collaborating on a live television show, Day before Battle, a Civil War drama produced by CBS's Studio One in the early fifties. It was live TV, pretty close to theatre, and the supporting actor, Jack Lord, changed the ending of the drama by sobbing uncontrollably during the live performance (unscripted) to draw attention to himself, thereby shifting the focus of the play from the actor who was supposed to do the sobbing. It was my lesson in Acting 101, Lord went on to become a famous detective series star, and the other actor disappeared, all part of the adventure of live television in that so called golden age. It was now that I discovered my calling as playwright.

Combining my love for history with my passion for drama, I wrote my first stage play, a Jacobean drama based upon a notorious murder in the court of James I, New Gods for Lovers. It was directed by my friend, the brilliant Kenneth Geist, later a film critic, at the HB Playhouse in the Village. This play was my introduction to the world of theatre and was my way into making my living in television drama. It won the Hallmark Award for Television Drama in an open competition, resulting in a commission to write a Christmas special about the creation of Handel's Messiah, Cry of Angels, starring Maureen O'Hara. This same play was read by Broadway producer Hilly Elkins who had optioned a best selling biography, Frederick Morton's The Rothschilds, and was determined to turn it into a musical. The mercurial Elkins was unsuccessful in finding the writer to do the stage adaptation, and when he read this play asked me to try my hand at adapting the difficult, expansive book. My libretto attracted lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, who had enjoyed a huge success with their Fiddler on the Roof. Reluctant to take on another musical that dealt with the struggles of European Jewish life, they allowed their admiration for the script to overcome their hesitation, and the collaboration resulted in a 1970 production of The Rothschilds. The musical won a Tony Award for its star, Hal Linden, and a Tony nomination for my book.

A short time later Elkins asked me to contribute a sketch to a new erotic review concocted by Kenneth Tynan, the notable theatre critic. I came up with the parody of a 19th century British sexual fantasy, Delicious Indignities; a sketch that proved to be one of the highlights of that show according to The New York Times and Cue Magazine. The show played for years both in New York, Europe, and in London; its tourist crowds may not have understood the words but enjoyed the universal language of its then scandalous sexuality. My recent liner notes for the DRG recording of that show contain my reflections of the making of Oh Calcutta! and my view on the social and sexual revolution taking place at that time.

Although I loved theatre, I earned my living in television during the sixties and seventies, often working in Europe for NBC Television on various adaptations of such literary classics as Great Expectations, Beauty and the Beast with George C. Scott, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Kirk Douglas, as well as Phantom of the Opera with Max Schell and Michael York which was filmed in Budapest. My work on The Adams Chronicles for PBS in the bi-centennial year, won my first Emmy Award for John Adams, Lawyer, to be followed by a nomination for an Emmy for Beauty and the Beast and another Emmy Award for An Early Frost, my story of a family confronting the specter of AIDS, Before these more prestigious assignments were bread and butter jobs writing episodes for The Man From Uncle, Twelve O'clock High, and creating a series pilot with Peter Stone, The Ghostbreakers for Paramount Studios, most notable because it introduced John Williams writer of the score. I later adapted a British best seller, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less” for a BBC mini-series. My work in television ended with an original thriller My Mothers Murder, a ghastly title for a terrific thriller, produced by Studio Hamburg in Germany, and presented by German TV in 1990.

A lifelong interest in jazz resulted in my writing the liner notes for DRG's collection of classic Valadia Snow recordings - Queen of Trumpet and Song. I had previously written a screen play about the remarkable life of this little known jazz great, Black Snow, for Warner Brothers. It is one of the regrets of my professional life that this splendid screenplay, owned by Warners, gathers dust in its files and has never been made into a film. It was my chance to present a little known female Jazz great who lived an extraordinary life - from the black carnivals of the south in the twenties to a concentration camp in Nazi occupied Denmark. As they say, “you win some and you lose some…”

My next musical theatre collaboration was as librettist for Richard Rodgers and Sheldon Harnick in Rex. Rodgers had admired my work as creator of The Adams Chronicles and invited me to contribute a new book to this difficult, ill fated project. That musical about the life and loves of Henry VIII, starred Nicol Williamson, Penny Fuller, and Glen Close. It was a notable failure. Rodgers was ailing, but his extraordinary talent was still there. We started life with the high hopes of one of Henry's wives, and ended on the critic's executioner's block. There was some glorious Rodgers music in that show, a witty book, and excellent Harnick lyrics, and it had its fans, but none of it really came together as it should. Never satisfied with that star crossed production, made more difficult by the behavior of its star, I got together with Sheldon Harnick, and as the surviving creators we revised the musical for the York Theatre's “Musical In Mufti” series, directed by Jay Binder, starring Melissa Errico as Anne/Elizabeth, Patrick Page as Henry, and B.D. Wong as Will Somers, Henry's Fool. This time we felt we had finally gotten it right. It was part of the centenary celebration of Richard Rodger's birth. It still waits to take its place in the Rodgers' canon.

In the late seventies I wrote a play, Strangers, based upon the marriage of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis and journalist Dorothy Thompson. It starred the film actor Bruce Dern who gave a compelling performance as Lewis. When I looked at it recently, I found a better play than I remembered. It played at the Colonial Theatre in Boston and the Golden Theatre on Broadway.

In 1997, my original libretto for a new musical Lucky in the Rain incorporated the music of popular composer Jimmy McHugh and the lyrics of Dorothy Fields and Harold Adamson into a lighter-than-air musical about young American journalists in Paris in 1927, suggested by various memoirs of the period. It was a resounding success on the Main Stage of the Goodspeed Opera, and brought together such talents as director Christopher Ashley, choreographer Randy Skinner, and star performers Patrick Wilson, Marla Shaffel, Rita Gardner, Marcus Neville, Patty Marinaro, Susan Browning, and dancer Scott Wise, with a brilliant ensemble cast and a splendid Goodspeed production. It will perhaps be best remembered for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas joyfully tap dancing to “Sunny Side of the Street.” The inimitable team of Wally Harper and Peter Matz worked on the dance arrangements and orchestrations. A concert recording featuring Barbara Cook was later issued by DRG records.

In recent years my most important work was as librettist and lyricist with the late composer, Wally Harper, who was my friend, my musical mentor, and my laughing companion. It began with our work on Say Yes a musical romp through the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, based upon my original comedy, dealing with the clash of class and money in America, a theme that has always interested me. Its first reading was presented under the auspices of Paulette Haupt of the Eugene O'Neill Musical Theatre Conference. A workshop was later produced with a cast that included Malcolm Gets and Jan Maxwell. Its first full production was directed by Jay Binder at The Berkshire Theatre Festival in 2000.

My essay on the meaning of that great fair and the allure of its memorabilia, appeared in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section in August 2000. Later, the musical was revised and presented under the new title of This Fair World with its politics, songs, and humor sharpened considerably. It was part of Stages 2003, the Chicago Festival of New Musicals with Timothy Gulan and Katherine Yellen in the leading romantic roles, and Chicago cabaret star Alexandra Billings as the Baroness Borealis under the musical direction of Jon Steinhagen, and the stage direction of Steve Scott of the Goodman Theatre. It was the hit of the festival, and a delight for it's composer and lyricist. It proved to me again that musicals, like children, need time to evolve and find their way in the world.

My final collaboration with Wally Harper was Josephine Tonight! a musical about the early life of Josephine Baker, starting with her early years in the East St. Louis ghetto and ending five years later with her stardom in Paris. It had a jazzy, bluesy, witty score that started high and never stopped going We first presented that show at Stages 2002 as Tumpie's Dance starring the incomparable Lillias White in the dual role of Carrie and Bertha, Josephine's mother and mentor. Tazwell Thompson directed the staged reading. The Chicago Sun Times praised this show as “a shining new musical with a future.” All these staged readings were nurtured by John Sparks and Joan Mazonelli, founders of Stages, a festival devoted to the presentation of new musicals at Theatre Building Chicago. A concert version of the show was then presented in November 2003 at the Symphony Center for The Chicago Festival of the Humanities, and a London production had been planned at the time of Wally Harper's untimely death last year. For Stages 2004, my work as a librettist was seen in a staged reading of Broadway Man, a hard hitting, fast talking musical bio of Al Jolson starring the great entertainer/actor Sam Harris as Jolson, and a brilliant Marcus Neville as his nemesis George Jessel, with original music and lyrics by Will Holt joining the score of Jolson standards. An earlier workshop in New York teamed Harris and Neville together with TV star Jean Louisa Kelley as Ruby Keeler. I had previously worked with Holt in a musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, With music by Gary William Friedman and lyrics by Holt (creators of The Me Nobody Knows) Adventure had a series of performances at Book In Hand in New York City. My other work in musical theatre work includes Esther Plays the Palace, a vaudeville turn on the biblical story of Queen Esther. I wrote book and lyrics for the gifted composer Peter Rodgers Melnick. This new musical had its first staged reading in Santa Barbara, Ca.

In the following years, I wrote several straight plays, among them Budapest, a dark modern comedy, a contemporary spin on Camille which touches on the commercialization of the Holocaust, and most recently, December Fools. December Fools is a comedy-drama about the ailing widow of a world renowned popular composer, forced to confront the deepest secrets of her past when her embittered daughter uncovers them. After a series of readings at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, directed by Don Brenner and featuring such notable actors as Anne Jackson, Penny Fuller, Rita Gardner, Joan Copeland, Carole Shelley and Alma Cuervo, it is scheduled for a production in New York in 2005-06 at the Abingdon. After all these years I don't know how to describe my plays. Most of my dramas are invariably comedic, and most of my comedies are dramatic. I guess that results from my personal view of life as a mix of overlapping elements and emotions.

I now live in New York with my extraordinary wife of fifty two years, Joan Fuhr Yellen. We have two sons, Nicholas, a literary agent and father of Vivian Jane, and Christopher Yellen, a creative director for an internet service, married to Lise Brown Yellen, a gifted web designer, and a superb vocalist, the last protégé of my friend Wally Harper, famous for his collaboration with singer Barbara Cook. I sorely miss Wally, his goodness and generosity, as well as my sister Simone and my friend, novelist Lois Gould, all of whom died too young, and took so much of the world's laughter with them. Despite such losses, I keep working every day, trying to hone my art, polish my craft, learn something new, and enjoy the day. That's my life - till now.