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Radio Row & Park. Lerner could have had, say, two years off if he had wished. He was as rich as Loewe was poor. But he was working as a radio scriptwriter on "a schedule so tight," he remembers, "that it would only work if I didn't sleep on Monday nights." He wrote daily sketches for Celeste Holm and Alfred Drake, material for Victor Borge and Hildegarde, turned out great hunks of audiopageantry for Philco Hall of Fame and Cavalcade of America, all the while keeping dark the personal secret that he was an heir to the loverly fortune that his father (once an Atlantic City dentist) and uncles had built up by converting a small blouse-making firm into the national chain called Lerner Shops.
Alan Lerner was raised in a 17-room Park Avenue apartment with a paneled library and wall-to-wall antiques. He adored his father and resented his forceful mother. There was considerable tension between the parents (later divorced). Alan's mother once slapped his face, saying: "You look too much like your father." Muses Alan now: "My mother really didn't start loving me until Brigadoon."
His long-ailing father believed that "there are only two reasons for having money to get the best room in the hospital and to educate one's children." From the start, Alan had a first-rate education Manhattan's Columbia Grammar School; Bedales School in Hampshire, England; Choate School. As a prep-school boy, Alan was fastidious but full of enthusiasm. Says his brother Richard: "He was the only one I've ever known who could play 60 minutes of gutsy football on a muddy field and not get his uniform dirty."
Hasty Puddings. Young Alan wrote a football marching song that is still sung at Choate, was one of the editors of the school yearbook, along with 19-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (A registered Republican, Lerner organized a Stevenson Club in 1956, likes Kennedy well enough and still sees him occasionally, but has said of the 1960 election that he really does not "give a damn," is for Jack only because he is against Nixon.)
Like Kennedy, Lerner went on to Harvard, class of 1940, where he majored in French and Italian literature. He knew all the current show tunes by heart, and walking down Mount Auburn Street one night, he burst out: "I want to write songs!" He worked on the Hasty Pudding Club musicals of 1938 and '39, filled them with promising, pun-filled lyrics, put in two summers at Manhattan's Juilliard School to learn more about music.
Boxing attracted Alan Jay Lerner as well as Frederick Loewe, and fighting in the Harvard gymnasium one day, he suffered an accident that cost him the sight of his left eye. After graduation, it also cost him his chance to serve in the Army in World War II. Embarrassed and depressed by his 4-F rating, he made a personal appeal to the Surgeon General of the U.S., got nowhere, complained: "They won't take me unless the Nazis get to Rockefeller Plaza." He worked on his radio scripts, made himself familiar at the Lambs, waited for someone to say: "You write good lyrics. Would you like to do musical with me?"