Howard Greenfield

Did You Know?

• Greenfield was openly gay and in a domestic partnership with cabaret singer Tory Damon from the early 1960s until his death.
• Greenfield died from complications from AIDS eleven days before his 50th birthday; Damon died from AIDS complications a few weeks later and is buried next to him.
• Greenfield was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills).

Songs

Greenfield had a hand in four US number-one singles: "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" for Sedaka, two for Connie Francis, and "Love Will Keep Us Together" for Captain & Tennille. His other top-ten collaborations included hits for Sedaka, Francis, the Everly Brothers, Jimmy Clanton, and the Shirelles. He also helped write theme songs for 1960s TV shows like Bewitched and Gidget. Decades later, the 1971 Tony Christie recording of "(Is This the Way to) Amarillo," which Greenfield co-wrote with Sedaka, topped the UK charts for seven weeks in 2005, with a charity video featuring a star-studded lip-sync.

Career

Howard Greenfield grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and met Neil Sedaka as a teenager when both lived in the same apartment building in the Brighton Beach neighborhood. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School. By his late teens, Greenfield and Sedaka had begun writing songs together. Their first recorded work appeared on both sides of a 1956 debut single by the Tokens, a group Sedaka briefly belonged to, though the record did not chart. They went on to write "Passing Time" for the Cookies and other singles that failed to become hits for the Clovers and the Cardinals. During this period, songwriting brought in very little money, so Greenfield worked as a messenger for National Cash Register.

In 1958, Greenfield and Sedaka signed with Al Nevins and Don Kirshner's Aldon Music, based at 1650 Broadway in New York. That same year, they wrote songs for Jimmy Clanton and Bobby Darin, and landed their first major pop hit with Connie Francis's "Stupid Cupid," which reached number 14 on the US charts in September 1958. They also wrote Francis's later hits "Fallin'," "Frankie," and the theme for the film "Where the Boys Are." When Sedaka signed with RCA Records as a solo artist in 1958, the pair composed a string of hits for him, including "The Diary," "Oh! Carol," "Stairway to Heaven," "Calendar Girl," "Little Devil," "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen," "Next Door to an Angel," and the number-one single "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." Sedaka's recordings eventually sold 25 million records.

As Sedaka's touring and promotional duties increased, Kirshner urged Greenfield to work with other Aldon writers. Starting in 1960, Greenfield began a regular partnership with Jack Keller, and for six years they wrote together every Monday and Wednesday. Their collaborations produced two consecutive number-one hits for Connie Francis—"Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own"—as well as another Francis top-10 hit, "Breakin' in a Brand New Broken Heart," and Jimmy Clanton's top-10 hit "Venus in Blue Jeans." They also wrote songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ernest Tubb, Patti Page, and Brenda Lee, and supplied theme music for the television shows Gidget and Bewitched.