© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all
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According to
Stanley Green, the musical theater historian, the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz
Hart collaboration “was a near perfect combination of [Hart’s] frequently
sharp, sophisticated lyrics set to [Rodgers’] music that was just as frequently
warm and lyrical. The remarkable thing, of course, is how well each man
complemented the other’s style, adding something both inseparable from, and
indispensable to, the total effect.”
I never knew much
about the life of Lorenz Hart, although I was always attracted to a quality
about his lyrics which Deena Rosenberg described in her insert notes to Ella
Fitzgerald: The Rodgers and Hart Songbook: “Hart delighted in the
incongruities of word play.”
Frankly, I
remained mystified by the magic of all the great lyricists – Irving Berlin,
Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwin’s, Johnny Mercer and Lorenz Hart, among
many others – until I read the following assessment of their gifts by the late,
Jazz writer, Gene
Lees :
“We absorbed into
memory lyrics by … [Hart, Mercer, et al.], those magnificently literate men who
gave us, in collaboration with some very gifted composers, the common, everyday,
garden-variety popular songs of the period. One assimilated from them one’s
sense of the English language. [emphasis mine]
They were
glorifying and elevating it, not in inaccessible works of High Culture, but in
popular music that you heard everyday on the radio.”
In his book, The
Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe – which, incidentally, is “dedicated
to Larry Hart” - Lees goes on to say of Hart that “he was the man who did the
most to make Fritz Loewe believe that he had the talent to make a life as a
lyricist.”
Loewe is quoted by
Lees as having said of Hart: “He was kind, endearing, sad, infuriating and
funny, but at the time I knew him, in a devastating state of emotional
disarray. I worshipped him.”
Returning to the
Ella-Rodgers/Hart Songbook, Gary Giddins as this to say about the union of the
vocalist and lyricist on this recording in his Visions of Jazz: The First
Century:
“Yet throughout
the Rodgers and Hart volume, Fitzgerald affirms Hart's preeminence among
lyricists even as she mines for all they are worth the ingeniously jazzy,
endlessly appealing melodies Rodgers had in him before he tailored his art to
the ponderous musings of Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart brought out his soul, and
does the same for singers. An alcoholic, depressive, four-foot-eleven, Jewish
homosexual who died at forty-seven, thinking Oklahoma
The occasion for these reflections and remarks
about Lorenz Hart is Simon and Schuster’s publication of Gary Marmorstein’s new
biography of him entitled A Ship Without a Sail from which the
following is excerpted. At the conclusion of the excerpt, you’ll find links to
retailers should you wish to order the book.
PROLOGUE
I’m a Sentimental Sap, That’s All
ON THE morning of November
29, 1943 , one week
after the death of
Lorenz Hart at age
forty-eight, several people gathered at the Guaranty Trust
Company, on the
southwest corner of Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue
to open the
decedent’s safe-deposit box. Hart was considered by many to be
the greatest of
all American lyricists. Hart’s attorney Abraham M.
Wattenberg arrived
with his young associate Leonard Klein, bearing an
order, duly made
by Surrogate James A. Foley, to open the box with the
express purpose of
removing Hart’s will. A representative of the state tax
commission agreed
to be there at 11:45 A.M. to oversee the task. Already
present were the
two executors named in the will: William Kron, who had
been Hart’s
accountant for the past five years; and Richard Rodgers, the
composer with
whom, over the course of twenty-five years, Hart had written
more than eight
hundred songs, including “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It
Romantic?,” “My
Heart Stood Still,” “Blue Moon,” “My Romance,” “With
a Song in My
Heart,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Thou Swell,” “I Didn’t
Know What Time It
Was,” “Mountain Greenery,” “Manhattan
“Bewitched,
Bothered and Bewildered,” “I Could Write a Book,” and
“Where or When.”
Expected at the
bank were Hart’s younger brother, Theodore, an actor
known personally
and professionally as Teddy, and Teddy’s wife, Dorothy.
Teddy had lived
with Lorenz—or Larry, as he was called—and their mother
until January
1938, when he married Dorothy Lubow and the couple moved
to an apartment in
the West Fifties. Never living far from Larry, the Harts
often looked after
him—and few intelligent, able-bodied men have needed
such looking
after—especially in the six months following the death of the
boys’ mother,
Frieda, in April 1943. When they arrived at Guaranty Trust,
they did not know
what was in the will. The others did.1
The state tax
commission representative was delayed. Teddy Hart, who had
always played up
his lack of book knowledge in clowning contrast to the
erudition of his
brother, now asked Abe Wattenberg if he had a copy of the
will. Wattenberg,
in fact, was carrying two copies, and he gave one to Teddy
and one to
Dorothy. Sitting side by side in the funereal hush of the bank, the
Harts read through
Larry’s will, dated June 17 of that year. The high-ceilinged
space had not
always felt so sepulchral; decades earlier it had been occupied
by the opulent
restaurant Sherry’s, where Charles Pierre, who later built the Hotel Pierre,
was captain, and diners were serenaded by live music and the clatter of
silverware and crystal.2
“Do either of you
have any questions?” asked Wattenberg.
Dorothy Hart
finally looked up from her copy. “Does this mean that if I have
any children,
they’re cut off?” Yes, said Wattenberg, that’s what it meant.
“That’s hardly
fair,” Dorothy said. She pointed out that Larry’s estate ought
to remain in the
family; given the way the will was worded, if she were to
have children,
they would have no share in his legacy.
By then Teddy and
Dorothy had been married for nearly six years; to Abe
Wattenberg, a Hart
child seemed an improbability. Nevertheless, Wattenberg
assured her that
the Harts would be ably supported by the $100,000 life
insurance policy
that Larry had left to Teddy—more than enough to take
care of the Harts
and any children they might have. “In any case,”
Wattenberg went
on, “I followed your brother’s instructions to the letter.
This is what he
wanted.” Wattenberg, a music publishing insider who over
the years had
represented John Philip Sousa, George Gershwin, Jerome
Kern, and Vincent
Youmans, had been Larry Hart’s attorney since 1925 and,
as he reminded
Teddy and Dorothy, every legal action he’d taken had been
in his client’s
best interests. Wattenberg produced a waiver of citation that, if
signed by Teddy,
would enable probate to go through within three or four
days. Anxious
about holding up the proceedings, Teddy signed.
The state tax man
appeared. The safe-deposit box was extracted from the
vault and taken to
a conference room. The will inside it was compared with
the copies read by
the Harts, and everyone agreed the copies matched the
original document.
Wattenberg gave the original to a bank representative,
who would forward
it to the Surrogate’s Court. At this point Richard
Rodgers, having no
reason to remain, left the bank.
Wattenberg led the
Harts, both groping for purchase in a fog of legalese, up
to the second
floor to get Teddy Hart’s signature notarized. Wattenberg then
handed the
notarized waiver and the petition to probate to his associate, who
took the documents
away to file with the court.
The Harts remained
in the conference room with Wattenberg, who did his
best to placate
the befuddled couple, and with Larry Hart’s financial
manager, William
Kron, whose position in the decedent’s will was its most
perplexing aspect.
A full 30 percent of the Lorenz Hart estate was to go to
Kron; when he
died, that same 30 percent would pass on to his children, and
then to his
children’s children, and so on, presumably until the family
stopped
reproducing. Although the will bequeathed Teddy Hart 70 percent,
with his share
going to his wife when she was widowed, no provision was
made for their
issue; the Harts’ participation in Lorenz Hart’s future
royalties, which
were sure to be considerable, would end with Dorothy’s
death. Then the 70
percent share would be payable, in perpetuity, to the
Federation of
Jewish Philanthropic Societies (later known as the United
Jewish Appeal).
This was curious,
because Larry Hart—although he’d been bar mitzvahed at
organizations,
notably the Jewish Theatrical Guild—was not known to have
been devoted to
Jewish causes. If the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies
maintained a
strong link with anyone even remotely involved in the
proceedings, it
was with Rodgers’s wife, Dorothy. Felix Warburg, a close
friend of Dorothy
Rodgers’s family, had been first president of the
Federation, and
Dorothy Rodgers’s mother, May Adelson, was a founder of
the Federation’s
thrift shops. If Dorothy Rodgers had a lifelong cause, it was
the battle against
anti-Semitism and raising funds to help in that battle. Larry
was sympathetic,
but the cause wasn’t his. William Kron was said to be an
ardent supporter
of the Federation. It was just as likely, however, that the
Federation’s
inclusion in the will had been engineered by Rodgers to
acknowledge his
wife’s profound interest in the organization.
As they left the
bank that day, the Harts were drifting into shock. Dorothy
knew at least one
thing that Wattenberg and the others did not. One week
earlier—on the day
her brother-in-law died, in fact—she had gone to her
doctor, concerned
about abdominal discomfort that she thought was an ulcer,
only to learn she
was pregnant.
Larry Hart’s will,
dated June 17, 1943 , was filed in New York City
Surrogate’s Court
on November 30. The will named Rodgers and Kron as
coexecutors and
trustees and instructed them to form two trusts out of the
residuary
estate—the Teddy Hart share and the William Kron share. Before
there was a
residuary estate, however, bequests had to be made. Teddy Hart
was bequeathed
$5,000 outright, with another $2,500 going to Dorothy. The
other legatees
were Hart’s cousin Sidney Hertz (the family surname before
Hart’s father
changed it); his friend Irving Eisenman; Mary Campbell,
known to the Hart
family as “Big Mary” and in their employ as housekeeper
for twenty years;
and Dr. Milton (“Doc”) Bender, a dentist turned talent
agent who had been
as close to Hart as anyone for more than twenty years.
These legatees
received $2,500 each. Hart’s aunts Emma Kahn and Rose
Elkan were to
receive $2,000 each, as was his uncle William Herman, but
Elkan predeceased
Hart by six weeks, and the bequest did not pass through
to her two
children.3 Herman, too, died before probate, his share going back
to the residuary
estate. Bequests of $2,000 also went to Irene Gallagher, who
had spent years
with Chappell & Company, one of the more powerful music
publishers, and to
Rodgers’s two daughters, Mary and Linda.
As executors, Kron
and Rodgers legally seized control of the Rodgers &
Hart copyrights
and could direct payouts from various income sources,
particularly the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers,
better known as
ASCAP. What made Kron’s position as a primary
beneficiary so baffling,
however, was that he had been imposed as
accountant on Hart
by Rodgers only a few years earlier. Hart was known to
be a big spender;
so, although he was never poor after 1925, when Rodgers
and Hart’s
Revolutionary War–era musical, Dearest Enemy, became a hit, he
was frequently
broke. In Rodgers’s eyes, Kron, who had handled the
financial affairs
of playwright Edna Ferber and composer Jerome Kern, was
the antidote to
Larry’s devil-may-care attitude about money. The Rodgerses
saw Kron as saving
not only Larry’s money but saving Hart from himself.
Dorothy Rodgers
said, “Willy Kron, Larry’s good friend and financial
advisor, went away
with him for short trips and played endless card games
to keep him from
drinking.”4
In 1929, Rodgers
and his father, William, a prominent obstetrician known as
Will, had opened a
savings account for Hart at a bank at Eighty-Sixth and
Broadway; Hart’s
royalty checks, according to Rodgers, went directly into
that account. This
was something of a hedge against not only Larry’s
profligate ways
but also his generosity—supporting his mother and brother
for many years,
routinely picking up checks for people he barely knew, and
being widely known
as the softest touch on Broadway. “Later on, when
there was a great
deal more money available,” Rodgers remembered, “what
[Willy Kron] did
was virtually the same thing that my father and I did, with
one exception. He
took Larry’s money and distributed it in savings accounts
all over the city,
in Larry’s name. There was no way for Larry to get at it,
and no way for
anybody else to get at it.”5
Not everyone saw
Kron’s caretaking as magnanimous. Kron often appeared
in the lobby of
the Ardsley, Larry’s apartment house on Central Park West,
and someone down
there—a doorman or a friend—would phone upstairs to
the penthouse to
signal that the accountant was on his way up “ostensibly to
discuss business,”
as the Hart biographer Frederick Nolan has said, but
really to check
out the evening’s festivities. Everyone tried to scatter before
Kron made it up
there. “It was like dodging the truant officer,” Nolan has
written. “Larry
loved it.”6
“The relationship
between Kron and Lorenz Hart was, as far as I could see,
purely a business
relationship,” Mary Campbell, the Hart family’s devoted
cook and housekeeper,
testified in New York
never expressed
any affection for Kron. Kron’s children visited very rarely
and only when Kron
brought them there.” If Campbell
suggested that
Kron’s closeness to Larry had been inflated by the
coexecutors, other
remarks she made were more troubling.
“I also heard Kron
tell Lorenz Hart that Dorothy Hart, Theodore’s wife, was
planning to put
him in an insane asylum because Dorothy wanted Theodore
to inherit
Lorenz’s money and when he did she would take the money away
from Theodore Hart
and leave him. On each occasion Kron said he would
protect Lorenz
against any such acts on the part of Dorothy and that he
would see to it
that Dorothy would not put him away.
“Lorenz Hart
frequently repeated these statements, more particularly when
he was under the
influence of liquor.”
devotion. “I have
never known two brothers who were more attentive to
each other and who
loved each other more. When Lorenz spoke of Teddy he
frequently cried.
Lorenz, during his lifetime, frequently said that whatever
he had in life was
for his mother and Teddy and when his mother died he
said that
everything was for Teddy.”7
If the testimony
sounded coached, there was still ample evidence, pictorial
as well as
written, of how close the brothers were. Larry did not hang
photographs of
himself, whether pictured alone or with others, in his various
residences, but he
kept a photograph of Teddy’s appearance in the
play Three Men on
a Horse in his bedroom. Even as adults the two famously
undersized men—at
five feet one or so, Teddy was slightly taller than his
older brother—had
lived and occasionally worked together. Teddy’s leading
role in The Boys
from Syracuse
accusation that
Teddy and Dorothy Hart were planning to put Larry away by
declaring him
insane sounded wild on its face and was almost certainly false.
It would be more
reasonable to conclude that Larry Hart was being
manipulated by
Kron, and probably at the direction of Rodgers. Yet Larry
drank, according
to Doc Bender, “morning, noon , and night,” and the
paranoia that
often accompanies such chronic alcoholism had kicked in,
exacerbated by the
loss of the one person—his mother—who had given him
unconditional
love.8
It was rumored
that Larry was bankrupt—that those deposits in “savings
accounts all over
the city” had vanished. Teddy and Dorothy Hart suspected
that all that cash
had gone into Willy Kron’s pocket. According to an Order
to Show Cause for
Approval of Compromise Agreement, not counting two
insurance
policies—$100,000 from New York Life, and a separate $10,000
policy that turned
up—the estate showed a total of $33,462.69—more than
$29,000 in ASCAP
royalties and $4,000 from a checking account.9 But this
wasn’t enough to
pay immediate expenses, including $22,500 in bequests;
costs incurred
from Larry’s last illness and burial, which amounted to
$16,500; and
Larry’s bequest of $1,000 to Mt. Zion Cemetery
Queens, for the
perpetual care of the Hart family plot. (The will makes no
mention of
cemetery space for Teddy or Dorothy Hart.) It also turned out—a
shock to the
Harts—that the New York Life policy erroneously named the
estate as
beneficiary, not Teddy.
This was not even
the final insult to the Harts. In the last week of 1943,
given the stunning
insurance policy mistake and now desperate to slow the
probate process,
Teddy Hart filed an affidavit in Surrogate’s Court stating
that his brother
had been “an alcoholic addict” and was subject to undue
influence when he
had revised his will the previous spring, shortly after the
death of his
mother. Teddy Hart’s affidavit declared: “In the last three years
of his life he
acted like a man mentally unbalanced and one who did not
know what he was
doing and did not understand the nature of his acts. His
friends and
business associates recognized this.”10 Acknowledging his
brother’s
alcoholism was painful for Teddy, but it was necessary to
challenge the
will.
In a counter-affidavit,
Rodgers wrote, “If I did not think Lorenz Hart was
physically and
mentally capable of carrying on with his part in the
production of [the
revival of A Connecticut Yankee], which required an
investment of
$100,000, I never would have risked the investment of that
large sum nor
would I have risked my own professional standing and
reputation.”11
Rodgers was in a
tricky position. Through years of Larry’s alcoholism,
Rodgers had gone
to great lengths to get him to work. As early as 1938,
during the writing
of the stage version of I Married an Angel, Hart’s long
unexplained
absences had greatly truncated the team’s writing sessions.
Rodgers, if
pressed, could write lyrics, sometimes even good lyrics, but they
were not Hart
lyrics. For two decades Rodgers had hung in, forgiving Hart’s
tendency to vanish
and trying to get him to see a psychoanalyst. If Rodgers
and Hart were
hardly (as one admiring newspaper profile put it) the Castor
and Pollux of
Broadway, they had loved each other. “Part of it was Dick
really adored
Larry,” said costume designer Lucinda Ballard, “and he would
get frantic with
worry because Larry was always getting half drunk across
the street with
somebody; he would disappear from his cronies as well as
from everybody
else. He might disappear just at a time when a lyric was
desperately needed
or a change or something. Their relationship was more
like brothers who
are fond of each other but become estranged by different
lifestyles. You
know how in families people can still love each other, and I
think Dick wanted
to protect Larry.”12 When the success of Oklahoma
written by Rodgers
with Oscar Hammerstein II after Hart had expressed no
interest in it,
had quietly but obviously pierced Hart, it was Rodgers who
pushed to revive
their 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee so that Hart would
have work to focus
on.
But Rodgers also
wanted control of the works he’d produced with Hart.
“There is a
statute of limitations on gratitude,” Rodgers said of the artistic
debt he owed
Larry.13 Fed up with decades of worry and anxiety, of playing
the responsible,
chiding brother to an erratic imp, Rodgers figured it was
time to get
something back for his suffering. Given that Larry Hart had to be
practically locked
in a room to write a lyric, it’s astounding that he and
Rodgers wrote any
shows at all. As it was, they produced nearly thirty shows
and some eight
hundred songs in twenty-five years (with additional “lost”
lyrics still
turning up now and then). At least fifty of those songs are among
the finest American
songs ever written.
Further countering
Teddy Hart’s accusation of undue influence on his
brother, Rodgers
tiptoed along the precipice of perjury. “The
New Connecticut
Yankee has been received with great acclaim and is one of
the current New York
hit). “Its present
success depends in a large measure upon the excellence of
the lyrics for
which Mr. Hart was solely responsible and to the brilliance of
the book which he
assisted in rewriting.” Among those lyrics was “To Keep
My Love Alive,”
one of the wittiest songs written in the twentieth century,
about an
oft-married queen (“I’m never the bridesmaid/I’m always the
bride”) who kills
off each and every one of her imperfect husbands—a list
that Larry Hart
kept expanding as delighted audiences demanded additional
choruses. “From
the foregoing I can unhesitatingly state that between May
and October,
1943,” Rodgers went on, isolating the period when the team
was revising its
1927 show, “Lorenz Hart was never under the influence of
liquor in my
presence and that at all times during that period as far as I know
he was in complete
possession of all of his mental faculties and aware of his
every act and
competent to understand the nature of same.”14 The kindest
thing to say about
that closing sentence may be that Rodgers was being
technical. His
claim was supported by Dr. Jacques Fischl, the young Doctors
Hospital resident
who had seen Larry on June 17, 1943 , the day he signed
the last will, and
testified that the lyricist had shown “not the slightest trace
of intoxication.”
The Harts’ jaws
could not have dropped lower. Although the Harts were
hardly genteel Upper East Side people who aspired to Society—the kind of
which Dorothy
Rodgers might have approved—Dick Rodgers carried no
animosity toward
them. What he coveted was revealed in the Fourth Part of
the June 17 Hart
will:
In this connection
I respectfully request those persons who are authorized to
renew copyrights
of any of my literary compositions, dramatic compositions,
dramatico-musical
compositions, musical compositions and songs pursuant
to rights of
renewal of such copyrights, to procure such renewals of
copyrights and
after they have done so to assign them to my Trustees
hereunder, or to
the legal entity which may be organized by them under the
provisions of
this, my Will.
I also
respectfully request that all sums that may be payable to me by the
American Society
of Composers, Authors and Publishers be paid to my
Executors and
Trustees hereunder or to the legal entity which may be
organized by them
under the provisions of this, my Will.
The underlining
was done by Abe Wattenberg, who took pains to emphasize
the assignment of
copyrights to the will’s Trustees—the control that Trustee
Rodgers had wanted
all along. It was the last paragraph, directing that all of
Larry’s ASCAP
royalties be paid to the Trustees, that set Teddy Hart off on
another round of
litigation.
The will’s
Trustees, Rodgers and Kron, were represented by the white-shoe
law firm of O’Leary
and Dunn. Teddy was represented by the scrappy Louis
Brodsky, who found
himself in something of a bind: he did believe that
Larry Hart had
been a victim of undue influence in signing the June 17 will;
he also believed
that Teddy Hart’s consent to go ahead with probate was not
made under duress,
and there was only so much that could be done in light
of that fact.
Prepared to compromise, Brodsky wrote a letter to Emil
Goldmark, attorney
for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, reviewing
the situation:
The decedent
undoubtedly believed that the $100,000.00 [New York Life
policy] was
payable to his brother. This belief was shared by his attorney,
and immediately
after the death of Larry Hart, the policy was delivered to
Teddy Hart for the
purpose of cashing the same, but when he attempted to
do so and filed
the necessary papers, he was told that the policy was payable
to the estate.
Brodsky went on at
some length about Larry’s alcoholism and pushed for a
compromise:
I have suggested,
subject to the other elements that may enter into it, such as
taxes, etc., that
the Federation be paid the sum of $10,000.00 in cash in lieu
of their interest
in the policy of $100,000.00, and if such a proposition is
acceptable to the
Federation then Mr. Dunn and I can resume our talks with
a view to
straightening out the whole matter.
Brodsky sent the
letter to Goldmark’s office and kept his fingers crossed.
The Federation, as
it turned out, was prepared to compromise; Brodsky’s
client, Teddy
Hart, was not.
The first Surrogate’s
Court judge on the Hart case was James A. Foley, a
veteran of the
so-called New Tammany. When Foley stepped down, he was
replaced by James
A. Delehanty. Sixty-four years old when the case came
into his
courtroom, Delehanty seemed to give Teddy Hart every legal
opportunity to
challenge the legitimacy of the June 17 will.
Meanwhile, Larry
Hart was remembered in a March 5, 1944 , memorial
service, organized
by Oscar Hammerstein II, at the Majestic Theatre.
Proceeds went to
Armed Forces Master Records, which supplied servicemen
with records (and
sometimes the phonographs to play them on). Although
Hart had made it
clear he did not want a funeral, he would have been proud,
as a patriotic
American deemed too small to serve in the First World War, of
the $6,000 raised
that day at the Majestic.15 The opening speaker was
Deems Taylor,
president of ASCAP, who would be named within the year as
part of Teddy
Hart’s complaint against ASCAP. Six days after the memorial
service, the
revival of Connecticut Yankee ended a Broadway run of less
than four months. Oklahoma
authors reaping
the fruits of the new all-American brand known as Rodgers
& Hammerstein.
On April 28, Louis
Brodsky, at his wits’ end, tried one last time to persuade
Teddy to accept
$86,250.00 out of the insurance fund: $50,000.00 in cash
and $36,250.00 set
aside to pay federal and state taxes, with the excess
eventually
returned to him. In addition, the Harts would get back property—
furniture, silver,
many personal effects, etc.—which had been seized by the
Trustees’ agents
as collateral against the estate. “I believe that this
settlement is as
fine a settlement, short of winning the case itself, as could
possibly be made,”
Brodsky concluded.16
Regarding Brodsky’s
eagerness to compromise as a betrayal, Teddy fired
him. Teddy hired
Arnold Weissberger, an attorney based on Madison
Avenue. The
Surrogate’s Court judge, tolerating Teddy’s apparent
intractability,
came up with yet another compromise, but that too proved
inadequate. “Mr.
Theodore Hart has asked me to advise you that he is not
prepared to accept
the modifications of the proposed settlement agreement
suggested by Your
Honor,” Weissberger wrote, “and requests that the
agreement be
withdrawn.”17
In early June
Teddy had pulled out of the cast of the Kurt Weill–Ogden
Nash musical One
Touch of Venus, though the show would continue to run
for a while.
Lorenz Hart II was born that summer. And Rodgers and
Hammerstein were
preparing their second musical collaboration,Carousel,
which Rodgers
would claim to be his favorite of all his shows. Carousel was
based on Ferenc
Molnár’s Liliom, which was first produced in 1909 in
his hero in the
fifth scene. More than a decade later, when the Theatre Guild
presented an
English-language version of Liliom, the translation was signed
by Benjamin F.
Glazer, a literary agent with ambitions to write and direct.
Unacknowledged in
public was that the translation used for the 1921
production—a
theatrical run so successful that it kept the Theatre Guild
afloat through bad
times—had been made by Larry Hart as part of his
routine work for
Shubert associate Gustave Amberg. Larry received $200 for
four weeks at $50
a week. Although never credited, Larry didn’t make an
issue of the fact
that the translation was his.
Throughout 1945
Teddy Hart lost one appeal after another. Rodgers secured
what he’d wanted:
control of the copyrights to those extraordinary songs.
It is pointless to
suggest that Larry Hart’s lyrics would have gripped us as
they have without
their marriage to Rodgers’s music. No American
composer is so
frequently recorded as Rodgers. Noël Coward said of
Rodgers that the
man positively pees melody (Rodgers did not, as some
antagonistic
critics have claimed, say it of himself), and if the line is hardly
elegant, it is
metaphorically accurate. Though Rodgers’s music has been
sometimes derided
for having no discernible style—unlike, say, the
constantly shifting
rhythms of George Gershwin or the absolutely right blue
notes of Harold
Arlen—that is more a testament to his fecundity than to his
limitations. Larry
Hart, annoyed by the lack of depth and adventurousness in
American
lyric-writing, overhauled the art—but he probably needed the
disciplined,
endlessly imaginative Rodgers to succeed.
In his seminal
study, American Popular Song, the composer-lyricist Alec
Wilder wrote about
Rodgers: “Though he wrote great songs with Oscar
Hammerstein II, it
is my belief that his greatest melodic invention and
pellucid freshness
occurred during his years of collaboration with Lorenz
Hart. … I have
always felt that there was an almost feverish demand in
Hart’s writing
which reflected itself in Rodgers’s melodies as opposed to the
almost too
comfortable armchair philosophy in Hammerstein’s lyrics.”18 In
their
collaboration Rodgers’s music usually came first and Hart’s lyric
second, but Wilder
is surely referring to Hart’s high standards, which pushed
Rodgers to create
fresh, memorable melodic lines.
The longtime music
director Buster Davis said something similar about Hart
inspiring his more
disciplined collaborator. “Rodgers & Hart: I put them a
little bit ahead
of George and Ira. Musically, Rodgers, though not given to
the rhythmic
variation of Gershwin, had an incredible harmonic sense; his
melodies go places
the Gershwins never thought of. The reason:
Rodgers catered to
Hart—and Hart’s lyrics, especially the later ones, are
complex,
multidimensional and unique.” Like tobacco or alcohol, a tune,
Rodgers said, was
a stimulant to Larry—he needed it to get started. “Hart
was a mercurial,
thoroughly unreliable tortured genius who drove Rodgers
up the wall,” Davis
great cruelty but
he certainly had been provoked.”19
There is plenty of
evidence that Rodgers did not intend to be cruel. Two
years after Larry
Hart’s death, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put a biopic about
Rodgers and Hart
into development. Rodgers could have quashed the project
immediately but
signed off on it because he wanted the Harts to reap the
payoff that came
with it. Or so he claimed. Rodgers’s go-ahead benefited
him and Kron as
well, of course, because the money paid by MGM for what
are called “grand
rights” or “cavalcade rights,” to depict the songwriters’
lives and use
their musical compositions, would be considered income and
thereby
apportioned to the estate.
Apprised of the
lucrative movie contract, Teddy Hart still could not rest. He
contended that the
right to privacy—his as well as his brother’s—was being
sold, along with a
permit to have his brother represented by an actor, and
therefore should
be considered principal, payable to him. But Teddy was
manacled by a
provision in Larry’s will, cleverly inserted by Abe
Wattenberg six
months before Larry’s death, which stipulated that if Teddy
were to anticipate
income from the trust, or if he became so financially
overburdened that
creditors would attempt to reach into the trust, Teddy’s
share would be
eliminated.20 Challenging MGM ’s legal department as well
as the trustees’
attorneys, Teddy had to be cautious.
1920s, to sketch
the story. By July 1946, Bolton
had turned in the outline
of With a Song in My
Heart, a biography of the songwriters that was almost
dizzying in its
fictions. Bolton provided the sober Larry with a girlfriend
he
never had; Larry’s
swift decline, in Bolton ’s version, is due to heterosexual
romantic grief
that Larry never suffered, so far as is known—the first
stirrings of
portraying the lyricist, in the words of Wilfrid Sheed, as a
“lovelorn
dwarf.”21
became Easy to
Remember. To coproduce, MGM brought in Rodgers’s
brother-in-law Ben
Feiner, who had known Rodgers since boyhood and Hart
since adolescence.
When the biography was finally filmed and
renamed Words and
Music, script credit went to Feiner and Fred
Finklehoffe, whose
play Brother Rat had been a smash hit in 1937. That may
partially explain
why Feiner himself is a character in the movie, while more
important
characters from Hart’s life—notably his father, Max, and Teddy
and Dorothy
Hart—are omitted.
Despite its myriad
inaccuracies, Words and Music offers some significant
pleasures. It
contains the extravagant, accelerated rendition of that
marvelous song
“Where’s That Rainbow?,” led by Ann Sothern (whose
early career got a
tremendous boost from her appearance in the 1931
Rodgers & Hart
show America Tenth Avenue
rechoreographed
and danced in the film by Gene Kelly, had been conceived
by Larry Hart,
even though it was an instrumental piece with no lyrics. And
Judy Garland and
Mickey Rooney appear together on-screen for the last
time, trading
lines in “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” easily the best lyric
ever written about
the sometimes violent, sometimes out-of-control rush of
romance.
In fact it is
Mickey Rooney who rises above Words and Music’s infelicities.
Despite obvious differences
between actor and role—Rooney is light and
Irish where Larry
was dark and Jewish; Rooney is irrepressibly heterosexual
where Larry was
quietly, discreetly homosexual—Rooney captures many of
Larry’s mannerisms
and much of his personality: the way he rubs his face or
his hands, his
easy laughter at other people’s jokes, his delight in the big
black cigars he
smokes, his generosity, and the dynamic way he moves. “I
think of him as
always skipping and bouncing,” Hammerstein wrote of
Larry, and he might
as well have been describing Rooney’s version of him.
“In all the time I
knew him, I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his
face in repose. I
never heard him chuckle quietly.”22
However
entertaining Rooney’s performance might have been, Words and
Music left a sour
taste in the mouths of its primary beneficiaries. In early
July 1948 Rodgers
sent a telegram to producer Arthur Freed full of praise for
the picture, but
secretly he hated it. Teddy Hart—no surprise—lost his case
against MGM in New York
the showing of a
motion picture in which the compositions of Rodgers and
Hart will be made
known to a wider audience than they have hitherto
enjoyed will
result in larger sales of sheet music and phonograph records
and in a larger
use by musicians of the music and words and in a larger use
of the
compositions in radio performance and in television shows.23
Teddy and his wife
would have to be content with 25 percent of the contract
proceeds, while
the remaining 75 percent went to the estate.
Perhaps that was
all that could be hoped for. The motion picture, a
photographic
medium before it is a dramatic or philosophical one, has
always struggled
to show what’s internal and complex; why expect it to be
able to cope with
Larry Hart’s work, which was interior and often too clever
by half, the
lyrics spinning with what Rodgers referred to as their “pinwheel
brilliance” and
much more dazzling than the narratives they were set in?
“There is more
going on inside a lyric, and inside Hart’s head, than in
anybody else’s,”
the performing arts critic Gerald Mast wrote. “Hart was the
most confessional
of theater lyricists—the most able and willing to put his
own feelings,
thoughts, pains, sorrows, fears, joys, misery into the words of
songs for specific
characters in musical plays. What he could never say
aloud, even to his
closest friends in private, he let characters sing in public.
He was a gay
bachelor who wrote the best love lyrics for women and the
most joyous lyrics
about falling in love and the most melancholy lyrics
about falling out
of love.”24
Such encomiums
suggest that Larry Hart was a poet, as he’s often been
called. His friend
Henry Myers thought otherwise. “Larry in particular was
primarily a
showman,” Myers wrote. “If you can manage to examine his
songs technically,
and for the moment elude their spell, you will see that
they are all meant
to be acted, that they are part of a play. Larry was
a playwright.”25
Hart usually wrote
for specific characters, and his lyrics often take on even
greater depth when
we return to their original settings. “You Are Too
Beautiful,” for
instance, was written to be sung to an amnesiac. “Have You
Met Miss Jones?”
was originally addressed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“This Can’t Be
Love” was sung by two relatively new acquaintances who
fear they might be
already related by marriage, if not by blood. “I Could
Write a Book” was
a pickup line of Pal Joey’s. As fast as Larry Hart wrote,
he always kept his
characters in mind.
Ben Feiner, as
writer and associate producer on Words and Music, thought
Hart’s energy—if
only it could be captured on the screen—would make the
picture
irresistible. “At no time was Larry ever an ordinary conventional
human being. He
was always tremendously high-strung, and consequently
either way up or
way down. His dialogue was extremely dynamic and
colorful. It was
never bland, and he never indulged in clichés or even the
usual patterns of
speech.” He was a curious contradiction, this man whose
lyrics could be so
nuanced and indirect, his behavior so direct—shouting
when he was angry,
laughing when he was pleased, crying openly when
displeased.
“Remember that living with Larry for a protracted period of
time,” Feiner
wrote, “would be something like existing in the midst of a
continuous
demonstration of brilliant and varicolored fireworks. At times
they are totally
extinguished. And then the silence and the darkness become
that much more
emphatic.”
From A SHIP
WITHOUT A SAIL by Gary Marmorstein. Copyright © 2012
by Gary Marmorstein. Reprinted by permission of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Hardcover
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