My Fair Lady (film) at Higgins' home, seeking lessons. Pickering is intrigued and offers to cover all the attendant expenses if Higgins succeeds. Higgins agrees, and describes how women ruin lives ("I'm an Ordinary Man"). Eliza's father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), a dustman, learns of his daughter's new residence ("With a Little Bit of Luck"). He shows up at Higgins' house three days later, ostensibly to protect his daughter's virtue, but in reality simply to extract some money from Higgins, and is bought off with £5. Higgins is impressed by the man's honesty, his natural gift for language, and especially his brazen lack
My Fair Lady settled on the title "My Fair Lady", relating both to one of Shaw's provisional titles for "Pygmalion", "Fair Eliza", and to the final line of every verse of the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down". Recalling that the Gershwins' 1925 musical "Tell Me More" had been titled "My Fair Lady" in its out-of-town tryout, and also had a musical number under that title, Lerner made a courtesy call to Ira Gershwin, alerting him to the use of the title for the Lerner and Loewe musical. Noël Coward was the first to be offered the role of Henry Higgins, but