On the original 1944 sheet music for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the singer’s names are listed as “wolf”—given lines like “Beautiful, what’s your hurry?”—and “mouse”—singer of “Say, what’s in this drink?” The song, by Tin Pan Alley legend Frank Loesser, is a holiday standard and an Academy Award winner. It’s also “predatory . . . undeniably unquestionably, predatory. And just kind of like, unforgivable.”
That’s Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski speaking. The two recorded a new version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” with lyrics like “I really can’t stay/Baby I’m fine with that” and a LaCroix reference. The new version by these Minnesota twentysomethings went viral a few weeks ago, but Liza and Lemanski are far from the first to point out what now seem like sinister vibes in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Key and Peele spoofed it in 2012, and in 2015, Funny or Die released an “honest” performance of the holiday classic (which ended with the “mouse,” Casey Wilson, knocking the “wolf,” Scott Aukerman, out with a shovel and shouting, “This is a completely inappropriate song!”). S.N.L. had a 2015 parody featuring Kenan Thompson as, yikes, Bill Cosby. Think pieces condemning the sexual politics of “Baby” have flooded the Internet every December for years now. “Today, the song’s subtext finds itself at odds with basic notions of consent,” wrote The Washington Post in 2014. “So, even though it’s catchy and, when [performed] well, can be down right adorable, maybe its time for us to take ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ off the Christmas playlist.”
Frank Loesser’s son, John Loesser, can tell you one thing: if his father were alive today, he would be mortified over what’s happened to his “Baby.”
“It was never anything other than a sweet couple’s number for him and his spouse,” he told VF.com over the phone.
In 1944, way before he became a Broadway legend for Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the elder Loesser was just stressed about the housewarming party he was throwing at New York’s Navarro Hotel.
In those days, it was requisite for guests to “entertain” at parties—whether it was singing a song, playing the piano, or doing some kind of routine—and for Loesser, the host and a showbiz man, the bar was set high. So he and his wife, Lynn, came up with what they thought was a flirty, crowd-pleasing duet. (Ironically, at the time, “Baby” was considered empowering to women, as music historian Thomas Riis told NPR. It was an incredible success. “We became instant parlor-room stars. We got invited to all the best parties,” Lynn said according to the biography, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life,, which was written by their daughter Susan. “It was our ticket to caviar and truffles.”
When, in 1948, Loesser sold the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” rights to MGM, for their film Neptune’s Daughter, Lynn was heartbroken. She considered it their duet. But all was forgiven later when “Baby” won the Academy Award in 1950 for best original song.
The rest was history for “Baby.” In the past 70 years, it’s been covered by everyone from Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan to Idina Menzel and Michael Bublé. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers ranked it as the 22nd-most-played holiday song of all time. For a while there, it looked like “Baby” had its place in the pantheon—right up there on the mantle with “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But then, things started to get messy.
“And you liberals wonder why Trump won,” reads one of the top comments on the YouTube version of Liza and Lemanski’s song. For every bit of praise—“The song is desperately in need of an update,” wrote Refinery29—there are scathing retorts (“I wish this was a fake news satirical story, but sadly, it’s true,” said conservative site Hot Air). Even when the Chicago Tribune—a mainstream media publication if there ever was one—ran a piece about the couple, they got an avalanche of negative comments and hate e-mails.
Loesser sees both sides of the argument. On the one hand, he thinks the anti-Babyers are looking for things that aren’t there. “They’re really equal roles. No one is really the aggressor,” he says. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. It really wasn’t anything but that.”
But, he gets that “art that was written 70 years ago” is sometimes going to feel antiquated. He says he doesn’t mind the parodies. “Everybody can have their opinion.”
That would certainly be the easiest truce to the “Baby” war—that it’s O.K. to have both. That just because there’s a new version, doesn’t mean the old version has to disappear. Liza and Lemanski have heard from sexual-assault survivors, mothers who used it to teach consent to their children, even a college a cappella group who sung it at their holiday concert. It was enough to convince the couple to donate the song’s proceeds to the Sexual Assault Center of Minnesota, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, and RAINN. Meanwhile, Fox News segments ponder their song and wonder, “Have the P.C. police gone too far this time?” Everyone, as John Loesser said, can have their own opinion.
And America agrees with him—just not quite in the way he might intend. A Pew Center report in 2014 said that nearly two-thirds of consistent conservatives and nearly half of consistent liberals say their close friends share their beliefs. So just like the “mouse” sings in the last lines of “Baby,” there’s bound to be talk tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that—but only with people who already think exactly the way you do about the most controversial Christmas song this side of “Wonderful Christmastime.”
