United We Strand: The Ugly Truth About “Beautiful People of Denver”

The situation got so bad that United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby just apologized for taking a private plane from New Jersey to Denver on June 28, a day when United canceled 750 flights — one-quarter of its total daily roster.

“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home,” Kirby said. “I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days – often through severe weather – to take care of our customers.”

Fine. Now it’s time for Kirby to apologize for the ad campaign that has the abysmal opening lines of the song “Beautiful People of Denver” stuck in our heads, adding insult to injury for all of those people still stuck at Denver’s airport over this holiday weekend, feeling less beautiful by the day.

This spring — just in time for the Denver Nuggets’ successful run at the National Basketball Association championship — United Airlines rolled out an omnipresent TV campaign saluting the Mile High City and the “Beautiful People of Denver.”

The photos were great. The tune that went with them? Not so much.

For reasons known only to United’s marketing team, to celebrate its Mile High hub, the airline decided to resurrect one of Meredith Willson’s most obscure — and irritating — songs from the1960 musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a highly fictionalized account of the life of Margaret Brown, a Denver resident who was indeed on the Titanic and did exhibit unsinkable attitudes…but was never actually known as Molly.

At one point in the show, members of Denver society are mocking “Molly” when she and her husband — fresh from Leadville, where Johnny Brown owns “the richest mine in the United States” — crash a party in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where they are building a home (today the Molly Brown House Museum), and she lauds the “bea-u-ti-ful people of Denver.”

Hear it for yourself here, as sung by Tammy Grimes, who starred as Brown on Broadway (Debbie Reynolds had the role in the 1964 film):
Thankfully, United did not include any lyrics (much less any info on their musical origins) beyond the earworm repetition of the “bea-u-ti-ful people” line in its commercial. Because these days in Denver, and particularly at Denver International Airport, where the situation has occasionally gotten tense over the past few days, “never a dog fight/never a brawl” just doesn’t ring true.

So, CEO Kirby, could we please get another apology?

Beautiful! The people of Denver thank you.