(4 of 11)
The Two Knights. Frederick ("Fritz") Loewe is Viennese, emotional, a flamboyant gambler who thinks the second biggest thrill on earth is to drop $30,000 in a single night at the casino tables, then tell about it for weeks. Alan Jay Lerner is cool, self-controlled and self-censored, a planner who will not even put money in his own shows because, as he firmly explains, "I don't bet." Loewe likes to recall that he "starved" for 20 years; Lerner has always been wealthy. Short, lean, with the sallow skin of the heart patient, Loewe is 59 and looks it; about the same height (5 ft. 6 in.), with small bones and an unweathered complexion, Lerner is 42 and could pass for a graduate student. Both men are intensely ambitious for the critical success of their work, but Lerner clothes his self-esteem in mannered diffidence while Loewe shrugs: "I'm too old to be modest. I'm a genius and I know it."
Lerner is a fastidious dresser whose clothes are always neat and perfectly cut, with a rococo touch here and there. Loewe is a bit rumpled, his predilections turning more to wine, women, and when the need arises song. Lerner smokes, and has a habit of twirling the ignited cigarette in his fingers like the active end of a turboprop. Loewe has given up smoking, but when the jade palls he constantly keeps an unlit cigarette in his hand, gradually flattening and shredding it as he talks. He pinches away a pack a day, recently changed brands.
Psychologists might note that neither had any fondness for his mother, and that both have wildly unstable relationships with women. But Loewe is mockingly uninterested in psychoanalysis, while Lerner believes in it strongly, has had a pride of analysts. Loewe professes not to worry about his health, while Lerner is a bit of a hypochondriac, makes a fetish of weighing himself daily; he buys a new scale wherever he goes, probably owns the largest collection this side of the Office of Weights and Measures. Loewe has hated the telephone ever since he answered it once when he was six, was told that his favorite uncle had committed suicide. "Bad news I don't want to hear on the phone," he says, "and good news I don't need any more." Lerner, on the other hand, loves and needs the horn; according to his partner, the first thing he does in the morning is to reach yawningly for the phone and pick it up. "Half the time, he doesn't even know who he's going to call."
Both men seem to have yearnings for aristocracy. Loewe murmurs now and again that his mother was a baroness, and Lerner is proud that his present wife is an indirect descendant of Napoleon. Lerner would be unlikely to cross a street unless the trip made reasonable sense, but Loewe once flew with a friend from Los Angeles to Vienna just to taste again those wonderful Little Wiener Wrsteln, (Vienna frankfurters) that "spit in your mouth." Then he got on another plane and flew back to California. It was an epically impractical journey, but it did, however briefly, take him home.