* * *
YET HIS LIFE HAD BEEN A SERIES OF TERRIBLE BLOWS, beginning with his painful childhood and the death of his father. He married a young woman, Mary Devlin, whom he worshipped—John Wilkes was the only family member at the wedding, and Adam Badeau remembered that “after it was over, Wilkes threw his arms about Edwin’s neck and kissed him”—but Mary died after only a few years of what seems to have been an exceptionally happy marriage. “I was as calm outwardly,” Edwin told a friend, “as though a wedding had taken place instead of a death—but, oh, the hell within me is intense!… My grief eats me.” His second wife, also a Mary, gradually succumbed to a debilitating disease tinged with severe paranoia.
There were other disasters. In 1867, a fire at his theater, the Winter Garden, destroyed all his costumes and effects and forty thousand dollars’ worth of property. The luxurious theater he later built, the Booth, he lost through mismanagement and duplicitous colleagues. (Although he had earned fortunes, he was aware that he lacked business skills.) He had many friends devoted to him, and he cherished his daughter, Edwina, but there seems to have been an essential coldness to his nature; he warded off intimacy.
Edwin had often spoken of death as a release, and he didn’t seem to lament his rapidly diminishing forces as he entered into a premature old age—one writer pronounced, “Booth at 58 is older than many a man of 70.” He stopped acting in 1888, five years before he faded out of life, not yet sixty. He had founded the opulent Players club (it cost him two hundred thousand dollars, a vast sum for the day), which numbered among its members Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, William Tecumseh Sherman, J. Pierpont Morgan, John Singer Sargent, and Frederic Remington, and it was in his apartment there that he spent his final years.
In his bedroom overlooking Gramercy Park and available for viewing today in its close-to-original state, the walls and tables are covered with portraits and photographs, prominent among them his mother and Mary Devlin. To the right of his bed hangs a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, conspicuously displayed, so that all his many visitors would be forced to take note of it. The story of the brothers may be compounded, as Titone and Goodwin would have it, of “ambition, rivalry, betrayal, and tragedy.” But in this close-knit family, it was also shaped by love. And by irony. As more than one biographer has observed, John Wilkes had not ruined his brother’s career; he had just made him more famous.
The New York Review of Books
APRIL 28, 2011
The Lyricist
LORENZ HART
It’s smooth! It’s smart!
It’s Rodgers! It’s Hart!
IT’S COLE PORTER in Du Barry Was a Lady—the song, “Well, Did You Evah!”; the singers, Betty Grable and Charles Walters; the year, 1939. When the song was recycled for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the 1956 movie High Society, this snatch of Porter’s lyric was gone, but smooth, smart Rodgers and Hart weren’t, and more than half a century later they’re still with us, on scores of CDs and on iTunes, their most famous songs the meat and potatoes (or maybe the caviar) of countless jazz and cabaret artists. The year before Porter’s Du Barry, R&H had triumphed with both I Married an Angel and The Boys from Syracuse. A slew of other hit shows lay in the past, and Pal Joey was coming up, with By Jupiter on its heels.
The quality of their work was at its peak, their fame and fortune at their height. Yet just a few years later, the partnership was over, and Larry Hart—at forty-eight—was dead, while Dick Rodgers, only forty-one, was launched on his even more triumphant partnership with Oscar Hammerstein. The story of the irresistible and tragic Lorenz Hart, of his collaboration with the more grounded and less exuberant Richard Rodgers, and of the Broadway musical comedy from the twenties to the forties is the subject of Gary Marmorstein’s new soup-to-nuts biography of Hart, A Ship Without a Sail.
The book begins at the end of the story—with Larry’s death, and the complicated and ugly fight over his will, and the way Teddy Hart, his beloved younger brother, and Teddy’s wife, Dorothy, were (or weren’t?) done out of their fair share of his money. There was a ruthless, perhaps dishonest manager, but to Marmorstein there was a more subtle villain: Richard Rodgers. Not that he grabbed money for himself—he was scrupulous in his business dealings—but, we’re told, “countering Teddy Hart’s accusation of undue influence on his brother, Rodgers tiptoed along the precipice of perjury.” In the lawsuits that followed, Marmorstein writes, “Teddy Hart lost one appeal after another. Rodgers secured what he’d wanted: control of the copyrights to those extraordinary songs.” So ended the exhilarating and rewarding collaboration of twenty-five years—in rage, in grief, and in court.
Lorenz Hart with cigar, Richard Rodgers at piano
* * *
LARRY HART AND DICK RODGERS were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends. The Rodgerses were well-to-do, Dr. Rodgers a prominent physician who enjoyed an haute-bourgeois life—elegant apartment, good connections, conventional environment. Max Hart, Larry’s father, wasn’t prominent, elegant, or conventional. Known as the Old Man, he was short, coarse, with a thick accent, and his manners were less than genteel. (No one ever forgot that at least once, in a moment of impatience, he urinated out a window.) Max claimed he was in real estate, among other respectable things, but essentially he was a con man with strong Tammany associations, convicted once for grand larceny and another time for fraudulent use of the mails, but both times freed on appeal. He never appeared abashed, and Larry had fun telling people that his father was “a crook.” Fortunately for the family, Max was usually in funds, and he spent his money lavishly—mostly on them.
Nothing was too good for Frieda Hart—Momma—a tiny, open-minded, open-hearted woman everyone adored. And nothing was stinted when it came to Larry and Teddy: the best food, the best clothes, the best schools in town.
Throughout Larry’s high school and college years, the Harts’ house was an almost abnormally hospitable gathering place for all the pals the two boys brought home: an endless flow of food, drink, laughter, warmth, and talk that was both serious and provocative. Max, who liked a good laugh, a good meal, a good drink, and a good dirty story, would often join in and be the life of the party, while Frieda smiled and provided. As Frederick Nolan wrote in his excellent 1994 biography of Hart, Frieda “didn’t seem to mind [the gang’s] stripping her front parlor of furniture and turning the room into a sort of debating hall where politics, literature, poetry, and girls were hotly discussed until dawn.” No one else had a family like Larry’s. Yes, the Harts were disreputable, but they were generous and lively and fun. Dick Rodgers, years later, would call them “unstable, sweet, lovely people.”
Even as a young adolescent, Larry was writing lyrics and sketches, and Max, who had theatrical friends like Lillian Russell, took his older son’s precocious talent seriously. He had started taking Larry to theater and vaudeville when he was six, and the kid soaked it all up. He was also reading voraciously, mastering languages, writing for the school paper, going to a series of summer camps that specialized in putting on plays, skits, and revues. By the time he was in his twenties, he was in charge of the entertainment, staging such musicals as Leave It to Jane, one of the most popular of the famous Jerome Kern–P. G. Wodehouse–Guy Bolton Princess Theatre shows that he revered.
All of this was an invaluable training ground and apprenticeship as Larry started moving into semiprofessional areas of the theater, most significantly the annual Columbia University Varsity Shows, which would run for a week in places like the Hotel Astor. He got the job of adapting the songs for an English-language version of a German musical that played in Yorkville, its star named Mizi Gizi, its hit song “Meyer, Your Tights Are Tight.” Soon he was translating German plays for the Shubert brothers, at fifty dollars a week. Not that he needed to earn a lot of money—Max had more than enough, and Larry lived at home, sharing a bedroom with Teddy (which he went on doing until Teddy married, in
1938).
While Hart’s career was inching forward, Rodgers was growing up. By the time he was nine he was composing melodies at the family piano—they just poured out of him. As a teenager, Dick was good-looking, athletic, sociable, interested in girls, and as conventional as the rest of his family. He provided tunes for a few amateur shows—fund-raisers for The Sun Tobacco Fund and the Infants Relief Society—and people were knocked out by his gifts. But he badly needed a writing partner, and in the spring of 1919 a friend had an inspiration: Larry Hart! He led Dick to the Hart ménage, and after a few awkward moments, Dick started to play some of his melodies, at which point, as Marmorstein (unfortunately) puts it, “Larry’s ears pricked up like a startled deer’s.”
Then Larry began to talk. As Dick remembered it years later, “He knew a great deal about rhyming, about versification, and I thought he was wonderful. He felt that lyric writers didn’t go far enough, that what they were doing was fairly stupid and had no point, didn’t have enough wit, they were too cautious, and he felt that the boundaries could be pushed out a good deal.” From the first moment, there was no doubt that the two of them would work together: It was love at first sight. Larry was twenty-three, Dick not yet seventeen. “I left Hart’s house,” wrote Rodgers a lifetime later, “having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.”
* * *
THE BOYS GOT AN EARLY BREAK. Through a pal from summer camp, Herb Fields, they came to know the Fields family—Herb’s sister, Dorothy, who would herself become a brilliant lyricist, and their father, Lew Fields, a onetime great vaudeville star who was now a major force on Broadway. By hook or by crook—or just family pressure—Fields picked up a very early R&H number called “Any Old Place with You” and stuck it in a current show of his. The show ran for only another half-dozen weeks, and the song went nowhere, but there they were, Dick just turned seventeen, on Broadway!
It would be a long time before they were back. After six years of turning out (or churning out) songs and librettos for various amateur venues like the Park Avenue Synagogue—that one was called Temple Belles—they were in despair. Dick, despite unwavering support from his family, knew he had to start earning a living, and was seriously considering going into the children’s-underwear business. Larry was heading for thirty, apparently going nowhere.
And then lightning struck. In 1925, New York’s most prestigious production company, the Theatre Guild, decided to put on a low-cost revue to cover the price of a set of tapestries for its new theater. Through the Guild’s lawyer, who happened to be a patient of Dr. Rodgers’s, Dick and Larry were granted an audition with Theresa Helburn, one of its founders and directors. “When they came to the song ‘Manhattan,’” she would one day recall, “I sat up in delight. These lads had ability, wit, and a flair for a light sophisticated kind of song.” She gave the boys a five-thousand-dollar budget and a month to get The Garrick Gaieties on—for two performances only, on Sunday, May 17, 1925. Audiences and critics were so enthusiastic that the Guild scheduled half a dozen special matinee performances and, when its current Lunt-Fontanne show, The Guardsman, closed, turned the theater over full-time to the Gaieties. It ran for half a year, “Manhattan” was a smash, and Rodgers and Hart were on their way.
The next decade, despite the usual crises and disappointments that punctuate the life of the theater, was a fulfilling time of shows, movies, hit songs, and international recognition. Their first Broadway “book” show, Dearest Enemy, was a romantic comedy set during the American Revolution. A dozen or more shows in New York and London followed, plus some Hollywood musicals starring such performers as Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Al Jolson, and Bing Crosby. Life was easy on the Coast, and the money all too seductive, but their hearts belonged to Broadway. The roster of classic songs from this period includes “My Heart Stood Still,” “Blue Moon,” “With a Song in My Heart,” “Thou Swell,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” and “Lover.”
The turning point came in 1935 with Jumbo, a colossal circus musical that was the idea of the egomaniacal showman Billy Rose, who took over the famous and failing Hippodrome, touted as the largest theater in the world. (It took so long to get the theater ready and the show up and running that The New Yorker observed, “Well, they finally got Jumbo into the Hippodrome. Now all that remains is to complete the Triborough Bridge and enforce the sanctions against Italy.”) It had trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, clowns, Paul Whiteman, Jimmy Durante, and Rosie the elephant. Marmorstein remarks that numerous little boys were taken to Jumbo, one of them “the adopted son of vaudeville impresario E. F. Albee, a six-year-old named Edward” (actually, he was seven). Another of them was me—the first time I was ever in a theater. I can’t have been five, and all I remember is a vast space and, just maybe, an elephant.
Jumbo was a spectacle. On Your Toes, the boys’ next show (starring hoofer Ray Bolger, three years before his Oz Scarecrow), was a revelation, and a landmark in the history of the modern musical: the first to center on a ballet—the marvelous “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” the creation of George Balanchine. It was through Larry that Balanchine was added to the mix—and he stayed in the mix: Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, The Boys from Syracuse were to follow. Although the On Your Toes score included the usual hits, the music that made the biggest impact was Dick Rodgers’s score for “Slaughter,” which is still performed around the world as a stand-alone ballet.
Balanchine and Hart chummed around together, and Balanchine reported that Larry “always appeared happy and laughing. He was so full of fun and energy, throwing his money around. From every pocket would come money and he paid everyone’s bills wherever he went.” He didn’t mention Larry’s heavier and heavier drinking, preferring to remember that it was Larry who taught him how to speak proper English.
* * *
AFTER JUMBO, EVERYTHING CHANGED. From then on it was Larry and Dick who came up with the concepts for their musicals and were in control of them; they were no longer journeymen for hire. It was they who decided that next up after On Your Toes would be something completely different: a bunch of kids putting on a show—no stars, no sophistication. The score of Babes in Arms, another major hit, may be their greatest: “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” and the title song (most of which, in the great Hollywood tradition, were dropped from the Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney MGM musical).
On they went: I’d Rather Be Right, with the great George M. Cohan playing FDR (whom he despised); I Married an Angel, with Vera Zorina as an angel who descends from heaven to Budapest to marry a banker; The Boys from Syracuse—Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, with one of the Dromios played by Teddy Hart; Too Many Girls, a football musical that launched the career of Desi Arnaz, whom Larry had come upon in a Miami nightclub called La Conga.
By now, every Rodgers and Hart show was an event, and they themselves were celebrated figures—on the cover of Time, subjects of a two-part profile in The New Yorker. They were overdue for a flop, and they got one: something called Higher and Higher, which bombed, leaving nothing behind except the plangent “It Never Entered My Mind.”
But around the corner was Pal Joey, the most controversial, and influential, of all their shows. The book came from a series of stories John O’Hara had written for The New Yorker, about a seedy nightclub singer/emcee (Gene Kelly) and the women he seduces and abuses. It wasn’t a pretty story, and some critics, including the most important, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, found that its obvious virtues were undercut by its sordid story: “Although Pal Joey is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” When it was revived a dozen years later, it would be an even bigger success than it had been in 1940, and Atkinson took it all back, but by then, Larry, who had been devastated by that first review, was long since dead. Pal Joey’s songs retain their power and charm: “I Could Write a Book,” a first-rate romantic ballad; “Bewitched, Bothered and Be
wildered,” a mordant masterpiece and a triumph for Larry’s favorite, Vivienne Segal (she sang it in the revival too); and “Zip,” a singularly witty take on the “intellectual” stripper Gypsy Rose Lee:
Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today.
Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?
Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night.
Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.
There would be one more big hit—back to the ancients with By Jupiter, reuniting the boys with Bolger, in their third show to be directed by Joshua Logan. But by now Larry was essentially gone, succumbing to acute alcoholism. He couldn’t or wouldn’t take on a whole new show, but when Dick decided to revive their 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee, he managed to come up with some new lyrics, including one of his very wittiest, “To Keep My Love Alive” (for Vivienne, of course). When he was sober, his mind was as quick and clever as ever.
But he wasn’t sober often. On opening night of A Connecticut Yankee he turned up at the theater drunk, ill, and noisy. Teddy’s wife managed to get him home to their place, but by morning he had vanished into the ugly November weather and couldn’t be found. That night, a pal, searching for him, came upon him sitting shivering in the gutter outside a bar on Eighth Avenue. Nothing they could do at the hospital helped—neither the oxygen tent nor penicillin, the new wonder drug that Eleanor Roosevelt interceded with the War Production Board to procure. It was over. Lorenz Hart was dead of pneumonia, and “Rodgers and Hart” was dead as well. The fun-loving, generous, ebullient guy everybody loved—“the most lovable, cuddly, honey bear,” Josh Logan called him—had self-destructed in the most painful and public way, a desperate, irresponsible drunk no one could help, whose death seemed a relief if not a blessing.
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