Vic Mizzy (b. 1922)

"The secret of anything in the music business," said Vic Mizzy in a 2005 interview, "is to write something catchy that people will be able to sing." This Tin Pan Alley veteran has been in the business for nearly seventy years, and knows whereof he speaks. Who created the Addams Family's infectious "Da-Da-Da-DUM, snap! snap!"? Every time the TV show is repeated, every time that snippet is played at a baseball game, Vic Mizzy picks up a royalty.

Vic Mizzy was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of three, his parents gave him a toy accordion, and the boy mastered it so quickly that the next year they bought him a piano. By the age of thirteen he was playing Bach's keyboard music at recitals-and playing the accordion in the kitchen at home, where the high ceilings created a natural echo effect.

Already Mizzy knew that his future lay not in the concert hall, but in New York's Tin Pan Alley-West 28th Street, between 5th Avenue and Broadway, where the most important music publishers had their offices and where professional tunesmiths cranked out hit songs by the yard. At the age of fourteen, Vic met Brooklyn-born lyricist Irving Taylor, and together they started to write songs and sketches. Vic enrolled at NYU in 1938, and spent his student years working with Irving on radio shows like The Major Bowes Amateur Hour and Fred Allen's Collegiate Amateur Hour. They performed together at the Roxy Theater in 1939, and in the same year wrote their first smash hit song, "Your Heart Rhymes with Mine." This was the first of a string of hits for the pair. When they were not turning out songs, they were regularly employed by leading Broadway performers to provide special material-songs and repartee suited to the performer's style and personality, written for a particular show or routine.

During World War II, Vic served in the United States Navy as an organist at a school for naval chaplains and continued to write hits. But after the war Vic Mizzy had his first taste of hard times. Postwar prosperity demanded sophistication, and television was already becoming a threat to the kind of variety shows that had been Vic's career. The partnership with Irving Taylor had dissolved. The new generation of singers like Frank Sinatra occasionally picked up a song or two by Vic and his new partner Mann Curtis, but generally favored material by Jerome Kern, Gershwin, and newer sophisticates like Johnny Mercer. A chance meeting with an MGM executive took him to Hollywood to work on an Esther Williams movie, and thus began Vic's new career in movies and TV.

Vic Mizzy's film and TV credits are too numerous to list. He provided zany soundtracks to comedies starring Jerry Lewis and Phyllis Diller, horror films like William Castle's The Night Walker, TV music for Don Rickles and Richard Boone, and wrote the theme songs for such hits as Green Acres, Mr. Ed, and of course The Addams Family.

Still sprightly and hardworking, Vic Mizzy married TV writer Shirley Leeds in 2001. The wedding ceremony was held in Las Vegas. The music? "Da-Da-Da-DUM, snap! snap!."

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