(2 of 4)
At the time, Hart's dark, romantic soul was stirred by a bright new form of musical comedy: the Princess Theatre shows, created by Jerome Kern (music), Guy Bolton (book) and the English wit P.G. Wodehouse (lyrics). "His shrine was a phonograph that continuously spilled out the music of the Princess Theatre shows," said Hart's friend Philip Leavitt. "His listened to them for hours in rapt, critical silence. He was sure that, in certain respects, he could do better than Wodehouse." Now all he needed was a Kern. It was Hart's luck, just at the time he own ideas of his percolating enthrallment to these prototype musical comedies that the budding lyricist met the blooming young composer.
At 17, Dick Rodgers was a musical-theater prodigy. The son of a Manhattan doctor of Russian-Jewish stock (family name: Rogozinsky), he had already landed his first song in a Broadway show; the morning after opening night, he went as usual to DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers and Hart quickly clicked as friends and colleagues, and soon they had a Broadway slot. After that opening, Rodgers returned to his job as camp counsellor. Then R&Hart had a rough patch. Though they wrote "Manhattan" in 1922, it didn't get on Broadway for three years, when "The Garrick Gaieties" made the team's reputation.
From the start, Rodgers was composing mature, graceful, muscular pieces. But it took his lyricist partner a while to get over himself. In one of the team's first published tunes, the 1919 "Any Old Place With You," the 24-year-old Hart is already pinwheeling his lyric prodigality: "In dreamy Portugal/ I'm goin' to court you, gal..../ I'm goin' to corner ya/ In California.../ I'll call each dude a pest/ You like in Budapest..../ I'll go to hell for ya,/ Or Philadelphia./ Any old place with you." The rhymes are a bit too facile, and not always true.
Perhaps we can see here what Stephen Sondheim meant when he dismissively said, "I don't like Lorenz Hart's lyrics because he's lazy. His inflections are all off." (In general, though, come on! Sondheim, who was Hammerstein's friend and protege, may be trying to increase his mentor's stature by belittling Hart's craft. But which lyricist does Sondheim echo in his own labyrinthine rhyming and too-hip-for-the-room allusions? In style and tone he is an avatar of Hart, and should be proud of it.)
HART AND HAM
Hart and Hammerstein are such utter opposites — as men, writers, 32-bar philosophers — that they could have been hatched by a Manichean as a test case in the polarities of personality. Hammerstein was "stuck like a dope with a thing called hope," and he stuck Rodgers with it too; their songs were often whipped-cream music on fudge lyrics. In a 1985 TV documentary called "Rodgers & Hammerstein: The Sound of American Music," William Hammerstein offered this reflection: "Many people have criticized their work as being corny and sentimental. And my father's answer always was, Yes, that's what they are. That's what life is'."
That wasn't life for Hart. Trapped in his diminutive stature, he was, according to lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, "a man who seemed deprived of the happiness his lyrical gifts gave to others." They must have made Rodgers happy: his overflowing fount of melody found its perfect match and counterpoint in Hart's smart, disillusioned lyrics. But the little man who was initially drunk on his early Broadway success could not get cheerfully high on it. "One very late night," Lerner writes, "when he had been at the bar longer than he should have, and his eyes were shadowed by the black circles of depression, he turned to me and said, ?I've got a lot of talent, kid. If I cared, I probably could have been a genius'."
Both men were Manhattan babies, born ten weeks and a few blocks apart. But Hart was the truly urban one: bustling, clever, at home away from home, all night, in the bars whose attractions shortened his life. Hammerstein was the country squire, rising early on his Doylestown, Pa., farm and thinking, "Oh, what a beautiful morning!"
Hart's lyrics were of, by and for the New York sophisticate. Sometimes he praised the city, as in "I Gotta Get Back to New York" from the film "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" ("I'll climb up that Woolworth and kiss every floor.' The subway makes music for me with a roar./ I'm dying to feel that I'm living once more./ I gotta get back to New York"). Sometimes he twitted its residents for their high-hat insularity. Have you listened closely to "Manhattan"? It's not a simple paean to the borough that, for all of Hart's life, defined urban chic. It's a song about summer slumming while the rich leave town: "And tell me what street/ Compares to Mott Street/ In July?/ Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by." In another famous, misunderstood song, "The Lady Is a Tramp," the woman who sings it is considered a hobo (not, as is commonly thought, a slut) because she disdains the affectations of Fifth Avenue phony. "Won't go to Harlem in ermine and pearls./ Won't dish the dirt with the rest of the girls..../ I'm broke — it's oke."
There's Hart, chiding the home-town theatergoers of 1937 in slang that still hasn't gone out of fashion. But if he made fun of them, he was also one of them. Remember, this was a time when musicals didn't often have touring companies. To see a Broadway show you came to Manhattan and, with Hart, you got "Manhattan." That was another chasm between him and Hammerstein's. Listening to Hart's lyrics, people felt smarter, snazzier, New Yorkier; listening to Hammerstein's, people felt a part of the American tapestry. One was a siren call to the club of cool, the other a rite of naturalization. Hart invited you inside, Hammerstein lifted you up.
In the post-Hart musicals with Rodgers, Hammerstein wrote for and about the heartland, at a time when Broadway was becoming a tourist destination and road companies meant big business; indeed, the fabulous success of "Oklahoma!" virtually created the nationwide industry of the American musical. For a while, swell and witty was out, Kansas corn was in. In the Secrest book, Gary Stevens, a publicist and later producer, notes shrewdly that Hammerstein "wanted the material understood and appreciated in 48 states. Larry Hart was happy if two guys in Sardi's understood it."