(4 of 4)
His next mentor was Avant-Garde Composer Milton Babbitt. Sondheim, straight out of Williams, talked Babbitt into taking him on as a private pupil in structure and theory. He paid with money from a fellowship and stretched the funds by living in bohemian disorder in his father's dining room. Next he tried to break into show business. A few painful years of struggle -- scraping up auditions that led to more auditions, writing and rewriting a show that never got staged because the producer died, going out to Hollywood to write scripts for the TV sitcom Topper -- ended in triumph when his lyrics for West Side Story established him at 27.
With success came creature comforts. Sondheim splurged in 1960 and bought a Manhattan town house after the movie sale of Gypsy. He still lives there, in an East Side enclave of houses that share a sprawling back garden with low brick walls, small fountains and mossy enclosures. Katharine Hepburn resides next door, but they did not meet until nearly a decade after he moved in. "I was up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch for Company, when I heard this banging on the garden door. There she was, in a babushka and no shoes, saying, 'Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you're making.' Now she and my houseman, Lou Vargas, swap recipes, and she brings him vegetables from the country." After renting the house's upper floors to friends for years, Sondheim has expanded, allotting himself an office, a studio with a piano and an exercise room, where he cycles 40 minutes a day while watching old movies to avert a repetition of the mild heart attack that stunned him in 1979. Once a little pudgy, his short frame is now trim. But he does not dress to show it off: his clothing, like his manner, is no- nonsense informal and definitely not extravagant. Jewish by birth but not religious, Sondheim became no more so through his brush with death. Of the idea of an afterlife, he says, "I never think about it." But after years of brooding intensity and frequent suspicion of the larger world, he seems to have achieved a midlife serenity. Formerly a renowned partygiver, Sondheim is a homebody these days, and fretted aloud that his house was too run down -- there are cracks in the walls from subsidence, and the upholstery is in shreds from his cats -- to have the Woods cast over for a proper party.
Perhaps what makes Sondheim's work most interesting is that he is fascinated by happiness without quite sharing the gift for it. Among the characters in Woods are a father uncomfortable with babies, who Sondheim admits is his father, and a mother who regrets having had children, who Sondheim says is his mother. In almost all his shows at least one character stands apart from the world and comments, and that is Sondheim himself. His salvation, always, has been work. Mary Rodgers recalls, "My only expectation, and it was shared by all his close friends, was that Steve would have to make it, because if he didn't, he would die." Make it Sondheim did, in everyone's eyes except his own: "Deep down, I don't feel any more successful than I did as a young man. I won't be happy until everyone likes my shows. If they ever do, I'll worry they're not liking them for the right reasons."