Rose, Billy

Rose, Billy (b. Samuel Wolf Rosenberg) (1899–1966) entertainment entrepreneur, lyricist; born in New York City. He helped write popular songs in the 1920s but moved on to become a financer and producer of plays and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. He owned nightclubs and theater-restaurants, and was famous for producing such spectacles as the "aquacades" for New York's World Fair (1939–40) and the San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition (1940). He occasionally was associated with serious efforts such as the production of Carmen Jones (1943); he commissioned Stravinsky's Scènes de Ballet (1944). A Broadway fixture, he wrote a syndicated newspaper column, appeared on radio in the 1940s and 1950s, and went through five highly publicized marriages.