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It wasn't that Hart agonized over the lyrics (as Hammerstein did); Larry could be lightning-quick when he got down to work. It was that he agonized over life. His felt a misplaced person, a Martian or Munchkin whose job was to observe the beautiful people, then put equally ravishing words in their bowed mouths — to make them sound and feel as smart as they looked.
HART BROKEN
In 1942, the Theatre Guild interested Rodgers in a musical version of the rural drama "Green Grow the Lilacs." Offered the chance to write that would become "Oklahoma!", Hart sensibly said no thanks. (It's hard to imagine a less Hart-y show.) Did he think Rodgers would drop the project rather than commit professional adultery and go off for a Hammerstein fling? If so, he thought wrong. After the opening-night performance, Hart walked into Sardi's and told Rodgers, "This is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life, and it'll be playing 20 years from now." On the 1998 PBS special "The Rodgers & Hart Story: Thou Swell, Thou Witty," Hart's sister-in-law Dorothy had a different story: "He went to see the opening night, and he didn't like it. But he wouldn't tell Dick he didn't like it."
Rodgers and Hart collaborated once more: five new songs for a revival of their 1927 hit "A Connecticut Yankee." The last lyric Hart wrote was for "To Keep My Love Alive," sung by a noble lady of who tires easily of men — 15 husbands, 15 early funerals. "Sir Philip played the harp; I cussed the thing./ I crowned him with his harp to bust the thing./ And now he plays where harps are just the thing,/ To keep my love alive." Hart's blithe wickedness is indebted to Cole Porter's "list" songs like "You're the Top" (or was Hart there first, with the 1928 "When I Go On the Stage"?); it also anticipates Tom Lehrer's homicidal "Irish Ballad" and necrophiliac "I Hold Your Hand in Mine, Dear."
"Words and Music" legendizes Hart's final opening night — November 17, 1943. Left alone in his hospital death bed, Larry staggers to his feet, puts a jacket and trousers over his pajamas (the risible jammies in "Melody Makers" now a shroud for the walking dead) and somehow makes it to the Martin Beck Theatre, unseen by the preoccupied Rodgers. Furiously kneading his throbbing temples (he apparently has a brain tumor), Larry listens distractedly to a few bars of his and Dick's music, then goes outside, collapses and dies on the street.
The reality was more dramatic than even a histrionic Rooney could have made it — or at least played it, while Rodgers was around and his brother-in-law Ben Feiner Jr. was helping to write the movie's screenplay. (Another scenarist, by the way, was Guy Bolton — the book writer 30 years earlier of the Princess Theatre shows that had inspired Rodgers and Hart to try musical comedy.) Just before the opening, Hart had been on one of his suicidal toots, and when he arrived at the theater an exasperated Rodgers forbade him entrance. Two days later, ill with pneumonia, he was taken to Doctors' Hospital where, three days after that, he died.
It turned out that Hart was bankrupt. The chronic spendthrift had entrusted much of his income to William Kron, a money manager recommended by Rodgers. Oddly, the money could not be found. Further, according to a new will that magically materialized, 30% of the money Hart's estate might earn from royalties was earmarked for Kron and his heirs. Another 20% would go to Hart's actor brother Teddy; but upon Teddy's death this portion would devolve to the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, a favorite charity of Kron's. Teddy's son Larry, Hart's namesake and only nephew, would be shut out after his father died. Smelling a rat — or, rather, two: Kron and Rodgers — Teddy and his wife Dorothy sued them both. The mess took years to clean up, during which time Rodgers and the surviving Harts did not speak.
Thus was a discordant coda to the complicated friendship of two Makers of Melody. Rodgers continued his uniquely popular and remunerative collaboration with Hammerstein. They wrote 10 more musicals, from the 1945 "Carousel" to the 1959 "The Sound of Music" — which has proved so durable that what originally was kitsch endures as camp, in the sing-along movie version that so enthralled Londoners a couple of years ago. On stage, the R&Ham shows are still playing ("Oklahoma!" is on Broadway now) and will keep playing ("Flower Drum Song" opens in October).
As for Hart, he plays where harps are just the thing. A new version of "The Boys from Syracuse," which opens on 42nd Street next month, is Broadway's first R&Hart revival since "On Your Toes" in 1983-84. Why has no producer brought back "Babes in Arms," the original let's-put-the-show-on-right-here musical whose score contains "Where or When," "I Wish I Were in Love Again," "My Funny Valentine," "Johnny One-Note" and "The Lady Is a Tramp"? Why has no canny director secured the rights to a couple dozen R&Hart hits, slapped a new book on it and duplicated the success of the Gershwin-catalogue shows "My One and Only" and "Crazy for You"?
You know what? Never mind. Because the true and welcoming New York home for R&Hart is Encores!, the concert revival series at City Center, which in the last few years has staged faithful, utterly beguiling resuscitations of "Pal Joey," "The Boys from Syracuse," "Babes in Arms" and "A Connecticut Yankee."
Encores! is where Hart — the "laughable, unphotographable" gnome — is most alive, bursting with optimism in his own gifts and the future of the musical. These City Center concerts have the freshness of the team's old Columbia University Varsity Shows. On the edge of a millennium, they distill the joy of 80 years ago, when two bright kids from the Upper West Side just wanted to put on a show; when their songs turned a Manhattan theater auditorium into an aisle of joy; when each day was Valentine's Day; when every new show brought another favorite work of Hart.