(3 of 4)
That's an exaggeration, and not quite fair. Hart knew his audience; he probably knew many of the regulars personally. He spoke their language, and he knew he could refine it into musical-comedy verse it without worrying that the hip references would baffle them. As he had in the Columbia Varsity Shows, Hart was writing for his crowd. They would "get" the three-syllable, three-line rhymes in "Mountain Greenery": "Beans would get no keener re-/ ception in a beanery./ Bless our mountain greenery home." It's complex, but not at all obscure (partly because Rodgers' seductive syncopation gives the words a mile-high bounce). That goes for virtually all Hart lyrics. The best ones have the delight of surprise and the perfection of inevitability. The saddest ones perform heart surgery with a caress. The grateful listener thinks: someone felt this bad, and made poetry this beautiful.
HART DOES HAM
After Hart's death, Hammerstein tried once or twice to capture Hart's bright, bluesy spirit; "The Gentleman Is a Dope" is obviously indebted to "The Lady Is a Tramp." More frequently, Hart had written in Hammerstein's sweeping or soupy operetta mode. But except for a trilly, banal lyric for the 1929 ballad "With a Song in My Heart" ("At the sound of your voice/ Heaven opens its portals to me./ Can I help but rejoice/ That a song such as ours came to be?"), Hart put his own, very contemporary vinegar into the Victorian cake.
A lilting R&Hart waltz, "Falling in Love With Love" from "The Boys from Syracuse," was so close to the R&Ham sound that it was interpolated into versions of the R&Ham "State Fair." Yet in manner it's pure Hart sadness. It speaks the sentiment of one who has been burned in romance and still wears the scars. It is the nagging voice of reality intruding on a fantast's swelling ardor: "Falling in love with love/ Is falling for make believe/ Falling in love with love/ Is playing the fool."
So often a Hart lyric doesn't so much undercut a Rodgers melody as deepen, darken it. Or have fun with it. Another, brisker waltz, "Lover," from "Love Me Tonight," was a pop hit in 1933 ("Lover, when I'm near you/ And I hear you speak my name/ Softly, in my ear you/ Breathe a flame"). But in the film "Love Me Tonight," a different lyric is sung by Jeanette McDonald on horseback; she's in quest of a dream lover, not in his arms, and the apostrophizing is occasionally interrupted with her abrupt commands to the horse ("Lover, when you find me,/ Will you blind me with your glow? Make me cast behind me/ All my... WHOA!").
One more difference between the lyricists. Hart lyrics allowed singers to find the art of doing what comes naturally — vernacular vocalizing in colloquial words with easy wit — while Hammerstein forced them into the heroic effort of using big voices to express heavy emotions. It was the difference between hang-gliding and weight-lifting. Or, in showbiz terms, the operetta of the 20s (and today, whenever Rodgers' Hammerstein shows are revived) and musical comedy of the 30s (and today, whenever Rodgers and Hart songs run through the memory).
LITTLE MAN LOST
Hammerstein wrote in the Platonic vein. That is, everything reminded him of something else; life was a parade of lovely shadows dancing on the cave wall. Hart was here-and-now, and stinting of metaphors. His manner was descriptive. In one of his most brilliant lyrics — "I Wish I Were in Love Again," from "Babes in Arms" (1937) — a couple catalogues the domestic disasters that led to their breakup and expresses boredom with their post-affair equilibrium: "The broken dates, / The endless waits, / The lovely loving and the hateful hates, / The conversations with the flying plates — / I wish I were in love again!.../ The furtive sigh, / The blackened eye, / The words 'I'll love you till the day I die,' / The self-deception that believes the lie — / I wish I were in love again!" Hart never had a sustained relationship, happy or sad, male or female. Here he seems to be pining for the very misery ("The self-deception that believes the lie" — isn't that gorgeous?) that drives two people apart; for him it means that they had once been together.
Some of Hart's lyrics read like semaphores to his would-be lovers who wouldn't be. "This Funny World," from the 1926 "Betsy," is not some quaint, twee place; it's a fun house, with scary specters of derision, and the only way to fight them is alone, armored in ego. "This funny world is making fun of you.../ If you're beaten, conceal it!/ There's no pity for you./ For the world cannot feel it./ Just keep to yourself./ Weep to yourself." The desperation is naked here. So is the plea, for any glint of a beloved's short attention span, in the verse of "You Mustn't Kick It Around" from "Pal Joey": "If you don't care to be nice, dear,/ Then give me air, but not ice, dear./ Don't let a good fellow go to waste."
Larry's wastrel status was a fact of Broadway life; in 1941 TIME described him as "cigar-chewing Hart, the pint-sized genie with a two-quart capacity. Rogers, typically, kept his indiscretions discreet. Though in "Words and Music," he is drawn as a happily married man (Janet Leigh is radiant as his wife Dorothy), Rodgers was in fact a compulsive chorine chaser, retaining an apartment above Sardi's restaurant for afternoon delights. To wags in the know, "Richard rogers" was a complete sentence. "Well, I did it again, didn't I?" he would say with satisfaction to press agent Gary Stevens, who told Secrest, "To him it was like getting a great notice for a show." The actresses also found a Rodgers liaison useful. It is said that one of the composer's bedmates, appearing in a revival of "Carousel," had a debate with her conductor about the tempo of a song. She finally won the argument by asking, "All right, did you sleep with Richard Rodgers or did I?"