I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan” is a popular song published in 1929, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. It originally was a summer camp song titled “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed,” with Schwartz’s music set to lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Both young men worked at Brant Lake Camp in the Adirondacks; Schwartz as music counselor and Hart as director of the camp’s stage productions.
The ballad, with new lyrics by Howard Dietz, was introduced by Clifton Webb in the 1929 Broadway revue ‘The Little Show’. Dressed in white-tie-and-tails, Webb sang of his stunned disappointment upon learning that the woman he worshipped from afar was married. It was given the subtitle “The Blue Pajama Song” because of a suggestive line in the second refrain: “I guess I’ll have to change my plan / I should have realized there’d be another man / Why did I buy those blue pajamas / before the big affair began?” The full song was in five parts—Verse 1, Refrain 1, Refrain 2, Verse 2 and Refrain 3.
The song was famously performed by Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan in the 1953 musical film, ‘The Band Wagon’. Dressed in white-tie-and-tails and top hats and leaning on canes, the men sang in unison as if they were competing suitors both rejected by the same woman. They sang the song’s first refrain and a sanitized second refrain, and then danced to an instrumental refrain.
The tune was the opening theme and used repeatedly in the 1932 William Powell film ‘Lawyer Man’. It was used as incidental music in the 1946 film ‘The Big Sleep’ in a way that suggests the inherent tension in the song between the “insouciant” feel of its melody and the quite serious subject of its lyric: “unrequited love.” He goes on to recommend the uncredited piano version played in the scene in which Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) meets Philp Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) in a bar to pay him off for his detective work.
Under the musical direction of Ray Heindorf, brief fragments of the tune can be heard in the background music score for the Joan Crawford film ‘Goodbye My Fancy’, with a slow, almost complete, version played about 40-minutes from the beginning. The song was sung by Marsha Mason and Kristy McNichol in the 1981 Neil Simon comedy-drama film ‘Only When I Laugh’ (the motion picture version of Simon’s Broadway play ‘The Gingerbread Lady’).
