Murray Grand, who died Wednesday at 87, was a relic of the postwar New York cabaret scene.

A renowned accompanist and composer, Grand could be found at trendy spots such as Upstairs at the Downstairs, the Village Green, and the Fireside Inn, a favored haunt of Broadway regulars.

Grand is best known as composer of “Guess Who I Saw Today,” which became a cabaret standard and was recorded dozens of times. A maudlin lament of a boozy housewife who spies on her unfaithful husband, “Guess Who I Saw Today” was written for the Broadway show “New Faces of 1952.”

He was often compared to Cole Porter, but Grand may have been closer to the spirit of Noel Coward in the song “April in Fairbanks,” another complaint: “The air is perfumed with the smell of blubber frying / April in Fairbanks / You’ll suddenly discover / A polar bear’s your lover.”

In the cabaret history “Intimate Nights” (1991), Grand is also credited with producing “Four Below,” which the book describes as “the first legitimate café revue in New York City.” Grand created it on short notice at the Downstairs Room, on West 51st Street, where he was working as a manager.

“Four Below” featured four performers doing skits and singing songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the team that went on to create “The Fantasticks.” A Broadway columnist for the Daily News, Danton Walker, called the show “far and away one of the gayest, most delightful bits of entertainment in New York.”

“Four Below” is generally credited to Julius Monk, who went on to become a well-known impresario of such revues, but, according to “Intimate Nights,” he more or less stole the credit. “He kept saying, ‘Well, dayling, your sister died and left you money and I don’t have any money and I’ve got to protect myself,'” Grand said in an interview for “Intimate Nights.” By the time Monk returned with a follow-up, “Son of Four Below,” the two were no longer on speaking terms and Grand was out at the Downstairs Room.

Grand was born in Philadelphia in 1919 and began his career playing at private clubs while still a teenager. During World War II, he served in the Army and also worked as an accompanist to USO entertainers such as Betty Grable and Gypsy Rose Lee, for whom he wrote the lyric, “I’ve got it hidden / I’ve got it tucked away / I’ve got it hidden / It’s for a rainy day.”

After World War II, Grand studied piano at Juilliard and began appearing at cabarets around the city. He was a staple of the piano bar scene for more than four decades. In his stage persona and, friends say, in real life, he could be vitriolic, even bitchy. He had a running feud with one of the stars of “New Faces of 1952,” Eartha Kitt, over the song “Thursday’s Child,” which Ms. Kitt used as the title for a volume of memoirs. He also had an odd physical resemblance to Mayor Koch, friends say.

In the 1980s, Grand moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he continued to perform and also opened a pet food business.

He had been working on a volume of memoirs, tentatively titled “Guess Who I Saw Today.” An alternate title, according to a friend and director of the Roger Edens Foundation, Bobb Goldsteinn, was “Rotten Fruit.”

Grand leaves no survivors.