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Patterns. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote that musical, The Life of the Party, in twelve days, and it ran nine weeks in Detroit. What's Up (1943) was their first on Broadway. The Day Before Spring (1945) won lower-middling reviews and closed after five months. Then 1947's Brigadoon spread the L. & L. tartan down Shubert Alley. In 1951 they achieved a sluggish eight months' run with Paint Your Wagon, a mining-camp western with an awkward book and a rousing score. Lerner, meanwhile, had been moonlighting on his partnership with Loewe, won an Oscar for the movie, An American in Paris. The partners came together again in 1954 to see if a musical could be made from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. The answer, 19 months later, was My Fair Lady the best and most successful American musical ever written. It has grossed $40 million so far, is now in its fifth year on Broadway, its third in London, and shows no signs of slowing down.
To collect capital for Brigadoon, they had to go through the show more than 50 times at auditions for prospective backers; Fair Lady was sold without a single audition; now they just pick up the phone. CBS has put up the entire $480,000 cost of Camelot, and money now follows L. & L. wherever they go. They have yachts in the Mediterranean and villas on the Riviera. Lerner has a town house in Manhattan, and Loewe an airy glass pleasure-dome in Palm Springs, Calif. Each owns an $18,000 Rolls-Royce convertible; Loewe's is "black pearl" grey and Lerner's, according to a Rolls salesman, "not-quite-royal" blue.
Meanwhile, their private lives have not been as boffo as their shows. Lerner's list of wives reads almost like a history of plays on the road, and one of them points out that he plays a new part with each. Ruth Boyd (1940-47) was Social Register. Marion Bell (1947-49) was his Leading Lady, as she was in Brigadoon, and she came to the wedding with her music teacher. Actress Nancy Olson (1950-57) was the Upper-Middle-Class-All-Amer-ican-Girl (Lerner referred to her once as "the perfect wife"). Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (1957 ), a slim, blonde, Corsican beauty equipped with a law degree and a fine record at the French bar, is Sophisticated European Woman.
One of the more intriguing patterns in L. & L.'s lives: when Lerner married Marion Bell, Loewe simultaneously started an affair with her understudy; the affair (eleven years) lasted longer than the marriage (two years). Explains an old friend of Lerner's: "Alan thinks he has to marry and have children with any woman he gets involved with." As for Fritz, he has been separated from his wife for eleven years, has made a sizable settlement: $135,000 down and $10,000 a year for life "her life," he explains wryly, "not mine." He has no children, says he does not want any because he hates noise (he keeps earplugs with him at all times) and thinks he could not stand "that waaa-waaa noise kids make." Nevertheless he plans to leave most of his money to the children of friends. As he grows older, he treasures both silence and privacy more: "What's the point of seeing people those poor, sad, beautiful faces with all their heartbreaking troubles?"