(5 of 6)
Rodgers & Hart enjoy today that special blessing which befalls successful songwriters, of having money rain in from all sides—from royalties on shows, from the sale of shows to Hollywood and foreign countries, from sheet music, from gramophone records, from radio recitals, from having their music played by bands. On shows they get 6% of the gross, which means about $750 a week apiece if a show is a hit. Their biggest money-maker was The Girl Friend which played all over the world. In Hollywood they got $50,000 to $60,000 a movie. And from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which collects the royalties for public performances of copyrighted music, and grades royalties on a basis of the composers' musical importance —Rodgers & Hart, like Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, are graded AA or tops—they each get about $18,000 a year. In a good year, their total income is upwards of $100,000. They insist they are not the biggest moneymakers in their field, though they have no idea who is.
Method and Madness. True to the best tradition of collaborators, Rodgers & Hart are not at all alike. Trim, afluent-looking, father-of-a-family Richard Rodgers (who at 36 is getting grey) supplies the method in their work: tiny, swarthy, cigar-chewing Bachelor Lorenz Hart (who at 43 is getting bald), the madness. Dick Rodgers lives with his attractive wife in a duplex apartment in Manhattan's swanky East 77th Street, summers at smart Sands Point, Long Island, gives formal dinner parties, draws a bid to the famed Charles Shipman Paysons' (the former Joan Whitney) Fourth of July parties, hobnobs with socialite Margaret Emerson, the Herbert Bayard Swopes, Noel Coward.
Hart lives with his mother, whom he describes as "a sweet, menacing old lady" on middle-class Central Park West, scowls at white ties, gives manners-be-damned, whiskey-by-the-case, all-night free-for-alls, gets bored with people and keeps picking up new ones. Rodgers takes the world in his stride; Hart is tempted to protest, fume, explain, deprecate — argues, for ex ample, with the desk-clerk of a Khartoum hotel because it does not carry Variety.
On the surface Rodgers, living by the clock, managing his own financial affairs and holding Hart in leash, seems to be the businessman of the pair. But Hart, who employs a business manager, who "runs a temperature" when he does not feel like working, who has to be yanked out of bed late in the day by a determined Negro servant girl, and who prefers to meet a question with a wisecrack rather than an answer, very likely knows to the fourth decimal place the dollars-and-cents value of his "temperament." Aside from Jerome Kern years ago, Rodgers does not feel that anyone has influenced him musically. He hates swing, and so does Hart: "It's old stuff. Benny Goodman only does better what Ted Lewis did years ago." Both Rodgers & Hart hate having swing bands play their stuff—Hart because the subtlety, and even the grammar, of his lyrics is apt to be outraged; Rodgers because his melodies get buried.