Harold Herman “Hal” Schaefer was born in the borough of Queens in New York City on July 22, 1925. For years he was best known to the public as the former vocal coach of Marilyn Monroe, a title which belied his talent as a musician in his own right. At the age of 30, Hal had already immersed himself in many musical circles.

He had his first piano lesson at 6, going on to become a classically trained young prodigy at just thirteen. Some of his earliest performances were at hotels in the Catskills, a major vacation destination for New Yorkers at the time. He attended the Manhattan High School of Music and Art and pronounced Chopin, Debussy, and Mozart among his early musical influences. “But one day I turned on the radio and heard a completely new dimension in piano playing: the music of Art Tatum. I wanted to play the kind of music he did. This came as a shock to my parents,” said Scheafer, since “they had put a lot of time and expense into my piano lessons,” in order for him to become a classical performer. However, the broad, intricately syncopated notes of Tatum’s distinct style stirred Schaefer’s soul and his course was set. He wanted to be a jazz pianist.

After an inauspicious start with Lee Castle when he was seventeen, Hal moved on to Ina Ray Hutton’s band touring the country for about two years. In 1943, when the orchestra arrived in Los Angeles, Hal decided to stay in the city, where he was soon offered important engagements, first with Benny Carter’s band and then with Harry James’s.

Due to his avant-garde style, he was also in demand between 1946-1947 to play and record in Boyd Raeburn’s and Earle Spencer’s progressive jazz bands. Of Boyd Raeburn’s recording of “Hip Boyd’s” for Ben Pollack’s Jewel label, a review from the time noted that, “…the opening 32-bar piano solo, in varying moods, is a masterpiece of Hal Schaefer”.

Early in 1947, Hal recorded a solo single for Jewel, with Don’t Worry About Me, coupled with Where or When. “Schaefer borrows some from Art Tatum, but still displays a brilliant array of original and modern ideas,” according to a Charles Menees review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper.

The recognition from the jazz community came when Hal was chosen by Esquire magazine’s board of artists, critics, and writers as one of the 1947 New-Star Winners in the piano section, behind of Dodo Marmarosa and Bud Powell, and ahead of Billy Taylor and Al Haig.

After a period playing solo in Los Angeles clubs, his reputation continued to grow. The versatility of his style and his refined technique attracted the attention of jazz singers looking for an interesting accompaniment.

In May 1948, Hal accompanied Marie Bryant in The Blues at Midnight at the Beaux Arts Theater in Los Angeles. Marie was a stage and nightclub star famous for her singing and dancing in Duke Ellington’s 1941 musical revue Jump for Joy. During the concert, Hal also played blues and songs of his own composition.

In the fall of 1948, he was one of the pianists included on a 78-rpm quadruple album released by Jewel. The other pianists were Joe Bushkin, Bob Laine, and Harold Bostwick, and they each had a record. On his, Hal performed The Man I Love and Love for Sale.

He spent most of 1949 and 1950 accompanying Peggy Lee, Billy Eckstine, and Vic Damone. On December 1949, he was invited to play on CBS’ Steve Allen Time, which would be his first TV appearance. In 1950, he recorded his trio, on a rare 78 rpm, for the small Sunstone label, which included two of his compositions, a bebop tune, What a Difference an “A” Makes, along with New Sound for the Blues.

From this point on, Hal immersed himself in the world of cinema, playing and arranging for a long series of films yet much of his early work in Hollywood went uncredited. He appeared in The Secret Fury (1950) and With a Song in My Heart (1952), among others.

In 1953, in his own words: “I was hired by 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers as an arranger, working with composers Lionel and Alfred Newman, and as a rehearsal pianist and dance arranger, working on production numbers with choreographer Jack Cole. When Cole found out about my experience with the big bands and the great singers, he gave me a brand-new job: working one-on-one as a voice coach for famous stars. They were doing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, both very talented and magnetic people, but inexperienced in the kind of singing the production music required. I had found a completely new vocation: the study understanding and coaching of the human voice as a jazz instrument. I helped them develop their own special styles for song and dance numbers in movies that depended entirely on their performances. One of my arrangements was Marilyn Monroe’s now famous rendition of Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Schaefer left 20th Century Fox in 1953, after Marilyn made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and went on to coach Jane Russell in the RKO Radio musical The French Line. He then moved to Warner Bothers where hewas asked to do a special job on the remake of A Star Is Born, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. “I was sitting at the piano when Judy came up to me and asked if I would help her rearrange a certain musical number she was doing in the film. It was a good song, but it lacked the kind of excitement she wanted it to have. Together, we came up with a syncopated upbeat version that she used in her performance.”

In summer 1953, Hal was the new attraction in the cocktail lounge of David Higer’s Saratoga restaurant. Marilyn, Jane Russell, and others he worked with in the movies, often came to listen. In spring 1954, 20th Century Fox asked Hal to come back again to coach Marilyn for There’s No Business Like Show Business as she refused to sing on any musical numbers without him. Hal agreed and she worked so hard on her “Heat Wave” number that Hal saw more of her than her then-husband, baseball’s ‘Yankee Clipper’ Joe DiMaggio. The result of this on going professional relationship was that Hal became Marilyn’s confidant, which ended up as a full-blown an affair. When DiMaggio suspected the liaison, he had the couple followed and engaged in nightmarish harassment, Schaefer recalled. “DiMaggio was insanely jealous of his wife. It’s well known that he smacked her around during their nine-month marriage.” Marilyn told Schaefer that DiMaggio scared her, and that she planned to divorce him.

Three months before the divorce, Schaefer tried to kill himself.He was found on July 27, 1954, unconscious in his studio bungalow after washing down sleeping pills and the amphetamine Benzedrine with typewriter cleaning fluid. He was driven to Santa Monica Hospital to get his stomach was pumped. “I just didn’t want to go on anymore,” he said. “A great deal of the focus was on Marilyn, but it wasn’t totally that. It was the way I was in my life. I was despondent, depressed, drinking too much.”

Schaefer barely survived. Monroe’s visits to him in the hospital reportedly angered DiMaggio, who didn’t want a divorce and was determined to catch Monroe in an adulterous act. With his pal Frank Sinatra and a private investigator, DiMaggio staked out an apartment where the couple was in the throes of passion. “I couldn’t take Marilyn anyplace,” Schaefer said. “We’d be followed.”

On November 4, 1954, the raiders broke down a door, terrifying a screaming woman with their camera flashes but it was the wrong apartment. Schaefer and Monroe saw the raid from across the street and slipped away. But Schaefer, mindful of Sinatra’s alleged Mafia connections, was terrified. The only solution was, he said, to disappear. He left the Hollywood movie scene with the lucrative contracts he had amassed, and instead concentrated on improving his musical knowledge. He began studying orchestration and harmony with celebrated composer and teacher Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He also started a jazz recording career.

It would take Hal a year to recover mentally and physically from his time in Hollywood. During his recuperation, he began playing and recording an album fronting his new trio, along with bassist Joe Mondragon and drummer Alvin Stoller, for the RCA Victor label. The recording took place over three sessions at Radio Recorders studios: one in late December 1954 and two in January 1955. His debut album as a leader, Just Too Much, was released in summer 1955 and attracted considerable attention, especially in the Los Angeles area. It was popular not only among jazz fans, but also to the wider public because of Hal’s relationship with Marilyn. Hal displays an unusual amalgamation of influences in his repertoire from classical music to modern jazz, which he unites with his personal technique and refined sentiment. He moves toward a thoughtful and extremely polished Debussy-like impressionist performance, while on his compositions “Yes” and “Montevideo,” he demonstrates his credentials as a resourceful jazz player.

Finally, after many years as a West Coaster, Hal returned to his native New York in spring 1955 to begin a new career. Shortly after arriving, he organized a trio with Vinnie Burke on bass and Al Levitt on drums, which was booked at The Embers jazz club. They did so well that the original reservation of two weeks was extended to two more. “His style is just about ideal for clubs of this type,” wrote Leonard Feather in Down Beat, “…he applies to show tunes and other standards a pleasing combination of modern jazz lines and a cocktail piano approach. Bolstered by the word of mouth created during his Embers stint, he should make a neat impact on the scene very soon.”

That same year, RCA Victor inaugurated a series of new recordings produced by Jack Lewis. The series, entitled The Jazz Workshop, was specifically intended to showcase new ideas in jazz orchestration, composition, and instrumentation, and after the good reception of his first album, Jack Lewis asked Hal to record a new one. His was the second album in the series and released with the simple title of Hal Schaefer. It showcased Hal’s creative writing as well as his fine piano playing. On this project, Schaefer headed three units, and the musicianship of all involved is excellent. The first session featured altoists Hal McKusick, Sam Marowitz, and Phil Woods with the leader on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums.

The second included trombonists Billy Byers, Urbie Green, Freddie Ohms, Chauncey Welsh, and bass trombonist Tommy Mitchell with the same rhythm section. The third session included the trumpets of the terrific Jimmy Nottingham, formerly with Count Basie and Boyd Raeburn, and another Raeburn alumnus Nick Travis, together with Milt Hinton on bass, plus Don Lamond and Ed Shaughnessy on drums.

Here, Hal played the harpsichord, an instrument he used to experiment with new sounds, while the drummers fulfilled both rhythm and instrumental functions. There are several stimulating as well as humorous moments in the writing, largely involving freshly changing textures with especially charming ballads and sparkling new ideas in jazz.

His activity in New York was not limited to his performances in clubs. Schaefer freelanced by recording, composing, orchestrating, and performing in a variety of contexts. He was commissioned for various jobs on Broadway shows. During one of his assignments, he conducted one of the three jazz orchestras that lit up the performances of Eartha Kitt’s new musical extravaganza, Jazz Getaway, which opened on Broadway in March 1956. In the spring, Schaefer was in charge of composing the dance music for The Ziegfeld Follies.

In January 1958, Schaefer became the musical director for the then-newly formed United Artists, where he met again with Jack Lewis, who was working with in A&R at the label. Some of the albums he produced were Showcase, a collection of provocative cool jazz arrangements of great tunes from the company’s movies. They included Ten Shades of Blue (1959), a very fine trio album; Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon Remembered, together with his first wife, Lee Schaefer.

In 1960, Hal produced an album dedicated to two of Cole Porter’s best scores, Can Can and Anything Goes, with ingenious arrangements by Hal himself and Benny Carter. The two of them plus a rhythm section performed the music.

In January 1960, Schaefer parted ways with United Artists, touring Europe as music director for Jane Russell. He later worked with choreographers Michael Kidd and Peter Gennaro on arrangements for the Broadway shows A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) and Foxy (1964). He composed music for the films The Money Trap (1965) and The Amsterdam Kill (1977). He was the vocal coach on the Martin Scorsese film New York, New York (1977) about an aspiring saxophone player and a singer, starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli.

He returned to Los Angeles in 1975 and then moved to San Francisco at the end of 1977 due to a lack of work. He made an appearance at Christo’s jazz cabaret, but largely worked as a singing coach. In 1979, Hal went back to New York to become the musical director of Broadway, Blues & Bach, the show by the genius of the mouth organ, Larry Adler.

After a performance at the Kool Jazz Festival in New York in 1982, John S. Wilson of The New York Times called Hal Schaefer, “a romantic with a rhythmic soul. Mr. Schaefer is very much a mainstream pianist, but he has his own way of looking at the mainstream, enlivening the relatively standard repertory that he played with fresh and entertaining ideas.”

He went on to appear at New York City clubs such as the Zinno, as one half of a duo with Harvie Swartz, and later at the Greene Street Café in Soho, playing solo and as a trio.

Together with his wife of many years, the former Brenda Goodman, whom he met in 1973 when she was sent to him for voice lessons, Hal moved to Sarasota, Florida in 1992. He continued acting as a vocal coach and making occasional appearances as part of a trio with drummer Duffy Jackson and different bass players. That year he recorded an album for Discovery, titled Solo Duo Trio.

In 2000, after Brenda’s death of cancer at 64, he became a resident of Port Lauderdale. In 2001, he released the CD June 1st: A Date to Remember. Its original blues compositions honored the two women who shared a birth date and were significant in his life: Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962, and Brenda, his wife of 25 years.

Hal Schaefer died on December 8, 2012, after a short illness. He was 87 years old. And though Schaefer distinguished himself as a jazz pianist, composer and arranger, his professional accomplishments have been largely overlooked, while the sensational coverage of his brief relationship with Marilyn Monroe never entirely faded.

—Jordi Pujol (From the inside liner notes of FSRCD 1071)