Quotes of the Day

Tuneful, tasteful,
Soulful, smart.
Music: Rodgers.
Lyrics: Hart.
— Irving Berlin

It's smooth!
It's smart!
It's Rodgers!
It's Hart!
— Cole Porter

Richard Rodgers, the Broadway composer whose centenary was celebrated with the fireworks of theatrical huzzahs on June 28th, enjoyed long collaborations with the two most prominent lyricists of the American musical. He worked with his first partner, Lorenz Hart, from 1919 until Hart's death, at 48, in 1943. And he teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II from the epochal "Oklahoma!" in 1943 to Hammerstein's death, at 65, in 1960.

Rogers' Hart phase should be the apprentice work, leading to the fullness of the Hammerstein years. Yet if you listen with alert ears and a clean-slate mind, you might think that the R&Ham songs had come first; for they are ripe with sentimental Americana, fashioned in long melodic lines for big, fluty voices, and grounded in the turn-of-the-century operetta form. They seem far more innocent, more remote from our day, than the R&Hart oeuvre.

Read the words to those tunes — ideally, in "The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart," currently out of print but well worth tracking down. Listen to the songs — ideally, on the 1956 double-album, "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book," the most magnif of Ella's eight Verve song books, with sensitive charts by Buddy Bregman. Or you could just punch the buttons on your mental juke box, and ascend to rapture.

Written 60 to 80 years ago, mostly for forgotten shows and movies, these bouncy, brittle, worldly and world-weary tunes — "Manhattan," "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "Where or When," "The Lady Is a Tramp, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," dozens more — sound both today and timeless. They sing (with confident wit) and speak (with confidential despair) about tough hearts ready to break, melt or explode. Rodgers' melodies get you humming, then dreaming, but the subject and style of these songs, their matter and meter, come straight from Hart's heart.

THE AMERICAN TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

The movies give us two glimpses of Hart: both fictional, tantalizing, sad. The better known is an MGM bio-pic, the 1948 "Words and Music," with Tom Drake as Rodgers and Mickey Rooney as Hart. There we learn that Hart was short, agitated, unreliable, full of mischief and misery — and that if only Betty Garrett had accepted his offer of matrimony, he might have lived his full span. It happens that Hart did propose to Vivienne Segal, who starred in R&Hart's "Pal Joey"; and she did refuse, telling friends, "I mean, I never even kissed Larry." The film omits Hart's real-life alcoholism and homosexuality — but then, most 40s musical bio-pics (see, or rather avoid, plague-like, the Porter "Night and Day") had only a coincidental connection with their tunesmiths' lives. The films were devised as cavalcades of songs and stars, and that's the interest in "Words and Music": a couple dozen R&Hart numbers, most of them well performed (though sometimes at odd tempi), many with the infrequently sung verses accompanying those renowned refrains.

The other, weirder film is "Makers of Melody," an early-talkie (1929) short that purports to depict R&Hart's laborious, five-year rise from uptown anonymity to midtown stardom. (An little irony: after shooting the film, R&Hart went to Hollywood, where, with the exception of the buoyant "Love Me Tonight" and the ambitious misfire "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," they spent another five, largely frustrating years.) This time, the songwriters play themselves; and though it may be due to our boys' limited acting skills, there seems an undertaste of distaste that Dick shows Larry. Hart is humiliated in the script, in Rodgers' withering comments and, for one scene, in the couture: he wears a plaid suit, collar buttoned up, that looks like a kid's pajamas. Hart is the bad wittle boy, Rodgers' the annoyed adult. If these self-portraits are at all accurate, they suggest a reversal of the two men's original relationship, which began when Hart was a bon-vivant 24 and Rodgers a precocious 17.

Born in 1895, Larry claimed to be descended from the German-Jewish poet Harry Heine, the student of Hegel who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Christian (!) Johann Heinrich Heine. His most famous poem, "Lorelay," set to music by Friedrich Silcher, has some of the melancholia (if not the elfin wit) that marked many Hart lyrics: "I do not know what haunts me,/ What saddened my mind all day;/ An age-old tale confounds me,/ A spell I cannot allay." And a quatrain Heine wrote for his wife Therese — "You're lovely as a flower,/ So pure and fair to see;/ I look at you, and sadness/ Comes stealing over me" — is echoed in Hart's pathetic, lifelong obsession with women. His need for them was exceeded only by his belief that they were put on earth to beguile and reject him. (Was Hart homosexual? Yes. A homosexual who was in love with women and was serially devastated that they were only amused by him.)

His mother was cultured, his father defiantly not. Max Hart was a round (300-pound!) boisterous sort who did favors for Tammany Hall and, if he was too lazy to go to the bathroom, he'd take a whizz out the dining room window. Lorenz had Papa's appetite for excess and Mama's love of lore. He had his mother's height too: a shade under five feet. Edith Meiser, who would star in Rodgers and Hart shows, described Larry as "the American Toulouse-Lautrec ... an enchanting man. He had such appeal.... He had this enormous head and a very heavy beard that had to be shaved twice a day... And he was always rubbing his hands together. That was his great gesture when he was pleased." Meiser makes this exuberant dwarfish lad sound like the Rumplelstiltskin of the Upper West Side.

If Hart's impression was cartoonish, it was surely an animated cartoon. Everyone noticed his energy and felt its force. In Meryle Secrest's book "Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers",Hammerstein is quoted as saying of Hart, "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. He laughed loudly and easily at other people's jokes and at his own too. He large eyes danced and his head would wag." A young man of ravenous intelligence, he was well-schooled and smartly self-taught. He attended Columbia University, where, he said, he "majored in Varsity Shows" — those larkish musical comedies, written mostly by undergraduates, that occasionally attracted the attention of the producers whose offices were 70 blocks further down Broadway.

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."

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?"

Hart couldn't match his partner's belt-notches; Dick didn't care about that. But like the demanding city editor on a daily tabloid, he did want Larry to deliver copy. Many people who knew Rodgers said he had the soul of a banker. He went to work, wrote a gorgeous, chromatically sophisticated tune, went home (or to an upper room in Sardi's). He was the fastest composer in the East; as Noel Coward said, mixing envy and awe, "The man positively pees melody." Speed was essential in the mid-20s, when Dick and Larry finally got cooking and, in 1926, produced 60 songs for six shows. But Rodgers didn't lose anything off his fast ball when he teamed with Hammerstein; it is said he composed the entire "Oklahoma!" score in six working days. An impatient man condemned to collaborate with slow pokes, he learned to simmer waiting for Hart to show up from one of his night-crawls.

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.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on Broadway' snazziest songwriting partnership: composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart