Silver Bells

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Silver Bells
Written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, 1950

In 1950, Paramount Pictures was finishing a Bob Hope comedy called The Lemon Drop Kid, set in New York City in the days before Christmas. The studio decided the picture needed a Christmas song, sung by Hope and his co-star Marilyn Maxwell, and gave the job to Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, one of Hollywood’s busiest songwriting teams. By their own account, the two weren’t very excited about the assignment at first.

Their inspiration came from a small bell they kept in their office. Its sound reminded them of the street-corner Santas and Salvation Army bell ringers who collect donations in the holiday season. They wrote a song about those cheerful little bells and called it “Tinkle Bell.”

Then Jay Livingston took the song home to his wife. She asked whether they had lost their minds, and whether they knew what “tinkle” meant to anyone who had raised a small child. Evans later admitted the double meaning had never crossed their minds. They kept most of the melody and many of the lines, swapped “tinkle” for “silver,” and “Silver Bells” was born.

The movie scene has a twist that holiday radio leaves out. Bob Hope plays a con man who dresses as a sidewalk Santa to collect “donations” that he plans to keep for himself, to pay off a debt to a gangster. The song begins with one of his fellow crooks, played by William Frawley (a few years before he became Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy), barking comic lines at shoppers to get them to drop money in the kettle. Then Hope and Maxwell take over with the gentle, familiar version we all know.

The song reached the public before the movie did. Bing Crosby and Carol Richards recorded it on September 8, 1950, and Decca released it that October, months before the film opened in March 1951. Their record caught on so well that Hope and Maxwell were called back late in 1950 to film a bigger, more elaborate production of the number.

There was a bit of off-screen drama, too. According to Bob Hope’s biographer Richard Zoglin, Hope and Marilyn Maxwell began a romance around the time they made the film, one that lasted about four years. Hope was a married man, and the pair were so often together that people on the Paramount lot took to calling Maxwell “Mrs. Bob Hope.”

“Silver Bells” became the best-loved song Livingston and Evans ever wrote. That is no small thing for the team that also gave us “Mona Lisa,” “Buttons and Bows,” and “Que Sera, Sera,” all Academy Award winners. “Silver Bells” never won an Oscar. Still, it has become a fixture of the American Christmas season. Its picture of busy city sidewalks, bright lights, and bells ringing on every corner feels as warm today as it did more than seventy years ago.