How did Rodgers and Hart write their songs? This is how Larry characterized their work method to a reporter:
We map out the plot. Then Dick may have a catchy tune idea. He picks it out on the piano—I listen and suddenly an idea for a lyric comes. This happens often. On the other hand, I may think of a couple of verses that will fit into the show. I write them out and say them over to Dick. He sits down at the piano and improvises. I stick my oar in sometimes and before we know it, we have the tune to hang the verses on. It’s like that—simple!
Did they ever quarrel? In his introduction to The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Dick wrote that Larry
loathed changing any word once it was written down. When the immovable object of his unwillingness to change came up against the irresistible force of my own drive for perfection, the noise could be heard all over the city. Our fights over words were furious, blasphemous, and frequent, but even in their hottest moments we both knew that we were arguing academically and not personally. I think I am quite safe in saying that Larry and I never had a single personal argument with each other.
They had differences, though. At first, Larry was the mentor, the semipro; Dick was a schoolboy. The age difference didn’t affect their work, but as time passed, their opposite approaches to life affected their relationship. Marmorstein writes:
Larry Hart never had much use for Café Society, High Society, or the so-called Four Hundred, except as a dartboard, its members largely figures of fun. But the teenage Dick Rodgers was fascinated by that world, which remained exclusive, open only to the wealthiest Americans of the “highest” (i.e., invariably Caucasian, usually with English derivation) pedigree.
Dick’s obsession with being classy never diminished. Max Hart described his apartment on West End Avenue as “like Frank Campbell’s Funeral Parlor, beautiful but dead!” In contrast, Larry, for all his erudition, reveled in the nightlife of Harlem and Damon Runyon’s Broadway—the “characters,” the bars, the seamy side. And he had no interest in money—it came and went, only important so that it could be quickly spent, usually on others.
From the start, Dick was focused on finances and business arrangements; in his later, post-Larry, years, he not only controlled those R&H copyrights but owned and ran, with Hammerstein, major production and music companies. Josh Logan’s theory was that Dick was “a bit embarrassed about the ease of writing music, as though it were too easy, too soft a thing for a man to do,” and was “only really happy making contracts, haggling about royalties, salaries or theatre leases.” It also seemed to Logan that Larry “envied and therefore hated Dick’s rugged self-discipline, his ability to be punctual, efficient and to bring a show in on time. It was agony for Larry to sit down to work. Perhaps it was his fear of being less than perfect or just the painful fact of being Larry.”
One of Richard Rodgers’s strongest characteristics was his lifelong need to control, and unfortunately Larry Hart, from first to last, was uncontrollable, as chaotic in his work habits as his partner was disciplined. He was out drinking and partying late every night and never out of bed till midday, inevitably hungover; Dick was ready and eager to work hours earlier, frustrated by Larry’s no-shows. And then there were Larry’s broken promises about delivery of lyrics or dialogue. He was always remorseful, but what good did that do? Dick, so earnest and methodical in his work habits, grew into an angry taskmaster, the bad cop, and he more and more resented having to be one. Larry bitterly referred to Dick as “the principal” with “a sour-apple face”; Dick referred to Larry as “my favorite blight and partner.” The partnership made in heaven was turning into a working hell. Yet the two men had loved each other. (Some people believed Larry had been in love with Dick from the start. The unambiguously heterosexual Dick, however, both before and after his marriage to the beautiful, elegant, and difficult Dorothy Feiner, was widely known for his devotion to the girls.)
Although by the early 1940s Larry was disappearing for days at a time, his drunken binges more and more appalling, Dick proposed that they get to work on an offer from the Theatre Guild: turning the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical. “I want you to have yourself admitted to a sanitarium,” he said to Larry. “I’ll get myself admitted, too. We’ll be there together and work together. But you’ve got to get off the street.” As Marmorstein relates, paraphrasing Rodgers’s autobiography, Larry
made it clear that he was not checking himself into any sanitarium—that he was on his way to Mexico.
“Larry, if you walk out now, someone else will do the show with me.”
“Anyone in mind?”
“Oscar will write the lyrics.”
“There’s no better man for the job,” Larry said. “I don’t know how you put up with me all these years. The best thing would be for you to forget about me.”
He walked out of their meeting, leaving Dick—and the show that became Oklahoma!—behind. “Alone in the boardroom Dick sighed, the burden of tolerating an increasingly truant, irresponsible partner over the course of twenty-four years having been lifted in an instant. And then he wept.” This, at any rate, was Dick’s conveniently touching version of their parting.
* * *
YEARS LATER, Rodgers would describe what Hart looked like to him at their first meeting. “His appearance was so incredible that I remember every single detail. The total man was hardly more than five feet tall.” He was unshaven, unkempt. “But that first look was misleading, for it missed the soft brown eyes, the straight nose, the good mouth, the even teeth and the strong chin. Feature for feature he had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was a bit too large for his body and gave him a slightly gnome-like appearance.” He also had a vigorously receding hairline, and he usually had a cigar stuck in his mouth.
Gnome, pixie, troll, dwarf—that’s how Larry was seen by his world (Dick’s “shrimp” was affectionately mild). In public he was dignified about what he clearly saw as his deformity. Balanchine remembered, “There was never any mention of his height, though he called the built-up heels in his shoes ‘the two-inch liars.’” “The cost of his brave face, though,” writes Marmorstein, “would emerge over … twenty-five years in dozens of lyrics that were less about being small than about what it’s like to feel small—to be dismissed, excluded, denied admission, and left standing out in the cold.”
Certainly he believed that no one, especially no woman, could love him. Frederick Nolan tells us that Larry was asked by a reporter about his love life. “‘Love life?’ Larry replied. ‘I haven’t any.’ Then he was a confirmed bachelor? ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody would want me.’” Yet there were women in his life to whom he was seriously attached and to whom he proposed. Frances Manson was a story editor at Columbia Pictures who would later say, “I adored Larry.… He was so dynamic and energetic, his presence was so magnetic, that I honestly never gave a thought to his being shorter than I was, though I am not at all tall.” Her reluctance to marry him came from her fear that she might end up drinking as much as he did. The popular young opera singer Nanette Guilford said, “He was absolutely adorable, and to know him was to love him. I loved him. But he never believed me. He didn’t believe any woman could fall in love with him.”
Undoubtedly the woman he cared for most was Vivienne Segal, who was clever, funny, sexy, with a fiery temperament. (Larry once said, “I would rather be caught dead wearing a suit I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing than weather one of Viv Segal’s storms.”) One account concludes, “Although everyone who cared for Larry believed him to be seriously in love with Vivienne Segal, it is our view that his admiration for her was an emotion that bordered on love but stopped short of sexual desire.” Still, he proposed more than once, and more than once she turned him down. Poor Frieda Hart—all she wanted was for her boy to settle down with Mrs. Right. One friend remembers sitting next to her listening to Larry singing “Have you heard, I married an angel” and Frieda whispering, “How I wish my Larry would marry an angel!” Instead, he shared a huge
apartment with his angel mother until she died, only seven months before he did.
It’s taken for granted now that to the extent Larry Hart had a consistently active sex life, it was homosexual. But discreet. Marmorstein speculates about the where and when of Larry’s encounters with other men. Turkish baths? A hideaway hotel room? He seems to have preferred rough trade, going off to Miami or Mexico and enjoying himself with beach boys. (Balanchine reported to his assistant that on a trip the two men took together to London, he “got him out of brawls, when Larry would pick up sailors and get beat up.”) The homophobic Maurice Chevalier, for whom R&H were writing that unique movie Love Me Tonight, warned his young male assistant to stay away from Larry “or he’ll try to get into your pants.” According to Meryle Secrest, Rodgers’s most assiduous biographer, Hart brought an actor named Peter Garey home to the Hart apartment one night. Mrs. Hart “stood on the couch by the window and said, ‘If you go out with my son I am going to jump.’” (He did, and she didn’t.) A frequent guest at another louche Hart party reported, “Larry was more of a voyeur. I can remember going to parties and seeing his eyes glittering, watching this orgy going on. When it came to sex, Larry left an awful lot to be desired. I was one of his boys, and I know.”
It’s easy to hear sly echoes of homosexuality in Hart’s lyrics (there would certainly be none in Oscar Hammerstein’s), but although his great subject was love, he didn’t write much about sex. The following, from On Your Toes, is just about as explicit as he gets:
Mother warned me my instincts to deny.
Yet I fail.
The male is frail.
The heart is quicker than the eye!
She said, “Love one time, Junior,
Look at the Lunts!”
I’ve fallen twice—with two at once.
Passion’s plaything—that’s me, oh me, oh my!
But at least
I’m quite a beast.
The heart is quicker than the eye!
This was remarkably confessional for the Broadway of 1936.
There were rumors about Larry while he was alive, but nothing about his sexuality ever appeared in print. One night in Los Angeles, in 1933, someone from a Hollywood trade magazine approached Dick at a party and said, “I’ve got to ask you something about Larry.… Is it true Larry’s a fairy?” Dick grabbed him by the collar, Marmorstein recounts, and said, “I never heard that. And if you print it, I’ll kill you.” Time marches on. According to the memoirs of Diahann Carroll—who in 1962 starred in Dick’s No Strings—one night he sighed to her, “You can’t imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for the little fag.”
* * *
WITH HIS UNFAILING GENEROSITY, Larry embraced Dick at the opening-night party for Oklahoma! after its jubilant premiere and said, “This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, and it’ll be playing twenty years from now!”
It seems likely that he understood how everything was changing—that a new era of musical plays rather than musical comedies had begun, and that the heartfelt moralistic values of wartime America, and of Oscar Hammerstein, were the future. It’s as inconceivable that Larry Hart could have written “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” as it is that Hammerstein could have written “Zip.” “Hart,” said the director George Abbott, “was a much more sophisticated writer than the mature, assured, poised Hammerstein. Hart saw everything fancifully. His tongue was in his cheek, his poetry was light and airy. He saw love dancing on the ceiling. Oscar saw it across a crowded room.”
The Rodgers and Hart shows have vanished (only On Your Toes and Pal Joey seem to be revivable; maybe A Connecticut Yankee), while the main Rodgers and Hammerstein shows are always with us. Hart would be a footnote to Broadway history if not for the songs. And they don’t die; they’re as viable today as they ever were, perfect conjunctions of words and music. (Words and Music, by the way, is the title of the ludicrous Hollywood biopic, with Mickey Rooney as Larry—well, they were both short—and Tom Drake and Janet Leigh as the Rodgerses.) They’re not as jazzy as the Gershwin songs, not as cannily grassroots as Berlin’s. They’re closest, perhaps, to Cole Porter’s in their combination of sophistication and melodic originality, but, as the songwriter Hugh Martin said, “Cole Porter was all about sex. Larry was about love.” The musical-comedy expert Ethan Mordden put it another way:
At bottom, the difference between Hart, the cleverest of the [era’s] lyricists, and Porter, the funniest, is that Hart saw the love plot in the shows as something worthy, almost unattainable, while Porter didn’t see love at all.… The odd fact is that for all Hart’s jesting and all Porter’s lyricism, Hart was a romantic and Porter a satirist.
He was also sad. And as time passed he grew sadder, and more cynical. Remember: His career takes off in 1925 with a paean of praise for “Manhattan,” and only fourteen years later he’s telling the world:
Broadway’s turning into Coney,
Champagne Charlie’s drinking gin,
Old New York is new and phoney—
Give it back to the Indians.
His words reveal his self-doubt, his loneliness (“All alone, all at sea! / Why does nobody care for me?”), but he’s never angry, only rueful and disconsolate. As he sums it up in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: “The laugh’s on me.” It’s not for nothing that the playwright Jerome Lawrence named him “the poet laureate of masochism.”
And yet … the joy in invention, the sheer energy of a song like “The Lady Is a Tramp”! Who else could have topped himself again and again, frisking from
I like the free, fresh wind in my hair.
Life without care.
I’m broke—it’s oke
to
I like the green grass under my shoes.
What can I lose?
I’m flat! That’s that!
to
I like to hang my hat where I please.
Sail with the breeze.
No dough—heigh-ho!
and landing up on
I like the sweet, fresh rain in my face.
Diamonds and lace,
No got—so what?
And who has written more tenderly of a beloved one than Hart does of his “funny valentine,” with his figure less than Greek and his mouth a little weak?
Then a sudden naughty strike, as in these throwaway lines from a throwaway song called “Harlemania”:
With the best of intentions,
Folks who used to be nice
Shake what nobody mentions,
Not once, but twice.
He could be everything but corny.
And he knew how good he was. “I’ve got a lot of talent, kid,” he told the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. “I probably could have been a genius. But I just don’t care.” Lerner concluded, “Somewhere along the line, there obviously did come a time when the joy of his professional success became drowned in the lost misery of his handicapped life.”
Gary Marmorstein has written a direct and ample—perhaps too ample—chronicle of that life, containing more professional detail and history than the average reader may want to absorb. Frederick Nolan’s book, now almost twenty years old, is less comprehensive, more fluent. Both biographers clearly have reservations about Richard Rodgers as a man; they both warmly celebrate Hart’s remarkable achievement; and they both express tremendous sympathy for Hart himself. And how could they not, given the combination of his generous and lovable nature with the tragic arc of his life? Max Hart, Larry’s rambunctious father, died saying, “I haven’t missed a thing.” How sad that the last words of Larry himself—this man who gave so much pleasure to so many—were “What have I lived for?”
The Atlantic
APRIL 2013
The Belter
ETHEL MERMAN
TWO NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF ETHEL MERMAN in the same month? You may think that’s overkill, but you may also think that one new biography of Ethel Merman is overkill, considering that there alread
y are two, one of them very recent, plus a pair of autobiographies. The real problem isn’t the duplication; it’s that although she had one of the greatest careers in Broadway history, she was just an uninteresting woman. Even the story of her success is uninteresting: She had no struggle getting to the top and no struggle staying there. Miserable childhood? The opposite. Bad marriages? Only four—but she rode them out with something approaching equanimity. Trouble with her children? Yes, but did she notice?
Her life began as it was meant to go on—easily. No one ever had more loving and supportive parents, and no one ever cared more for parents in return. Even once she became a star, she would go home after her show every night to where they all still lived, in Astoria, Queens. And when she married, she had Mom and Pop Zimmermann (“Merman” was a contraction) living a few floors away from her in a fancy building on Central Park West.
Merman was in fourteen Broadway shows over thirty-five years, including a sensational stretch in Hello, Dolly!, and they were fourteen hits. Her voice never gave out. Her fans never abandoned her. Her only professional disappointment was that her movie career never really flourished. (Worst was being screwed—she thought—out of the film version of her greatest role, Gypsy’s Mama Rose.) She was a star from the beginning. She was rich. She had dozens of pals—the Duke and Duchess of Windsor among them. She had a lot of “escorts” (including Walter Annenberg), and a big public romance with the highly conspicuous Sherman Billingsley, millionaire owner of the Stork Club. But did she have real friends?
According to the wonderful lyricist Dorothy Fields, who was fond of her, “She knows all the small talk, but you can’t sit down and talk to her, you just can’t.” Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for Gypsy, found her dumb: “She doesn’t calculate. She doesn’t weigh things. She just blunders ahead.” (Apparently, she never picked up a newspaper, let alone a book.) Pete Martin, the ghostwriter of autobiography number one, said, “Ethel seemed to have little perspective, or insight, into her spectacular career.” The reviews said worse: “It is difficult to believe that Ethel Merman, as dynamic a stage personality as Broadway has ever produced, could possibly be the dull-witted, tiresome egoist offstage that this book makes her appear to be.” Not, perhaps, a good omen for the biographer.
Near-Death Experiences_And Others Page 8