THE JOY
OF STORY
John M.
Daniel’s Blog
October
22, 2016
Welcome, friends. This week’s post
is a sad story, but it’s a story that needs to be told. At least I feel it
should be told, and I humbly hope I’m up to the task of giving a proper tribute
to Lorenz Hart, one of my favorite writers. I’ve been a fan of Hart’s since I
first saw the movie “Words and Music,” when
I was eight years old. Years later, when my first book was published, a murder
mystery titled Play Melancholy Baby,
I dedicated that book to Lorenz Hart. Years after that I learned that Hart died
on my second birthday (which was one day before my father’s death). Hart was
not technically a story writer, but some of his song lyrics have the necessary
ingredients of story: character, plot, conflict. Consider “It Never Entered My
Mind,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” or “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” They’re
stories, almost as poignant as the story of Larry Hart’s life and death.
The Death of Lorenz Hart
“Thou Swell, Thou Witty,” besides
being the title of one of his most popular and successful songs, is probably
how Lorenz Hart would have wanted his tombstone engraved. The description
suited him well. Larry Hart, along with his partner, Dick Rodgers, was swell,
all right. They were, for twenty-four years, one of the most popular and
successful songwriting duos writing for the American musical comedy stage. They
wrote the scores for 28 shows, as well as a half-dozen movies, and they came up
with 500 swell songs. Larry was a swell guy off the stage, too: always
laughing, always pouring the drinks and picking up the tab. He was always
puffing on a swell cigar, always rubbing his hands together with fevered
enthusiasm.
And oh my, was Larry witty. Oscar
Hammerstein II called Lorenz Hart the cleverest lyricist to come along since
William S. Gilbert. Who else but Hart would dare rhyme “holler I choose a” with
“lollapalooza,” or “fratricide” with “mattress-side”?
Not many knew, though, that beneath
the thin veneer of manic gaiety, talent, and charm festered a self-destructive,
self-loathing, self-pitying loser. Others heard only “thou swell, thou witty.”
Larry himself was haunted for life by another line he wrote: “Unrequited love’s
a bore, and I’ve got it pretty bad.” He also wrote these telling words:
“Sometimes I think I’ve found my hero, but it’s a queer romance.”
It wasn’t enough that Larry Hart was
an alcoholic, in and out of hospitals for temporary drying out. He also had bad
lungs, and was in and out of hospitals to recover temporarily from pneumonia in
an era before antibiotics; no doubt those expensive stogies didn’t do him any
good. It wasn’t entirely because Larry was homosexual, although he was ashamed
of his homosexuality and was not the least bit out and gay about it, unlike
other songwriters of his era, such as Ivor Norvello, Noël Coward, and Cole
Porter. True, Larry repeatedly fell in puppy love with glamorous leading ladies
of the musical stage, including Helen Ford, Nanette Guilford, and Vivienne
Segal; but his love for them was a futile denial of his true sexual
orientation. Besides, his crushes were doomed to failure because of Lorenz
Hart’s most crippling curse.
Lorenz Hart was short. Very short.
He stood barely five feet tall, and that was in two-inch elevator shoes. He had
to buy his clothes in the children’s department of clothing stores.
Unfortunately, Larry wasn’t cute short like Mickey Rooney (who played him in
the biopic “Words and Music”). With a head too large for his body, he was more
gnome than pixie. He was grotesque, or at least he thought he was. Who knows?
Maybe his obsessive generosity was caused by a need to seem tall. Maybe his
size issues made him feel inadequate with women and contributed to his homosexuality.
Maybe alcohol was the only way he could forget about being an ugly midget.
According to Richard Rodgers, his
collaborator, his best friend, his business manager, and his imperious boss,
Lorenz Hart was difficult to work with. He was never on time, he skipped
meetings, he skipped town, he disappeared whenever it was imperative that the
duo write songs together. And when Larry was eventually persuaded or corralled
into working, he wrote fast and refused to change a single word once it was
down on paper. It’s a wonder those two geniuses were able to produce such fine
songs, and it’s a miracle their partnership lasted as long as it did.
Richard Rodgers, from the time he
and Lorenz Hart joined forces in 1919, when Rodgers was only eighteen, seven
years younger than Hart, was in charge of the finances and made most of the
business decisions. Rodgers was a hard-driven taskmaster. Later in his career
he joked that people in the business called him “the big son of a bitch” when
he was partnered with Lorenz Hart; after Hart died and Rodgers teamed up with
the tall Oscar Hammerstein, they called him, Rodgers, “the little son of a
bitch.”
As a rule, Rodgers chose which shows
the team of Rodgers and Hart would write songs for; and as a rule Larry went
along with Dick’s choices. Late in their partnership, however, they disagreed
about a job Rodgers wanted to do, a musical comedy adaptation of Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play by
Lynn Riggs. The property was available, and the Theatre Guild offered the
assignment to Rodgers and Hart. The play had a western cowboy theme, and Hart,
who had always been a bon-vivant city slicker (the first big Rodgers and Hart
song hit had been “Manhattan” and the team’s last big hit show was Pal Joey) refused to do it. Dick
Rodgers, the big son of a bitch, was furious, and when he heard that Oscar
Hammerstein was interested in taking the project on and was considering Jerome
Kern as the tunesmith (Hammerstein and Kern had collaborated on the
groundbreaking Show Boat in 1927)
Richard barged in and persuaded Oscar to dump Kern and team up with Dick.
Oscar agreed, a decision that
changed American musical theatre forever.
Dick told Larry the news, and that
was it for Rodgers and Hart. They had one more production in the works, a
revival of their own 1927 smash hit play, A
Connecticut Yankee. The revival was to star Vivienne Segal, with whom Larry
had been smitten since she starred in Pal
Joey. Larry wrote a song for Vivienne to sing in the revival, the last song
he ever wrote, “To Keep My Love Alive.” A
Connecticut Yankee also featured Larry Hart’s theme song, “Thou Swell, Thou
Witty.” This revival was scheduled to open November 17, 1943. It should have
been a sentimental curtain call, a fond farewell to a writing team that had
made popular music history. But by that time, everyone in show business knew
Rodgers and Hart were finished as a team. Richard Rodgers had a new partner.
On March 31, 1943, eight months
before the revival of A Connecticut
Yankee opened in New York, the Broadway curtain rose on the debut of the
new team, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Their musical version of Green Grow the Lilacs, now titled Oklahoma!, was an immediate success,
destined to break attendance records and usher in a whole new era of musical
plays, where the story line was intimately connected to the score. The golden
age of American musical theatre began that night and lasted for twenty years.
Larry Hart was gracious about Oklahoma! He attended opening night,
laughed and applauded loudly, and congratulated Dick and Oscar after the show.
But the end of his own career had arrived, and he may have known that he would
not recover emotionally or physically. His mother, Frieda Hart, died a week
later. He had lived with his mother all his life, somehow hiding from her his homosexuality
and downplaying his alcoholism. With her gone, Larry was desolate and
dissolute. He was even more at the mercy of freeloaders, especially Milton
“Doc” Bender, a dentist and would-be theatrical agent, who had been Larry’s
pimp and Mephistopheles for years and who now took him on his last manic, sad
ride.
On the rainy evening of November 17,
the revival of A Connecticut Yankee
opened on Broadway. It was Lorenz Hart’s last show. When he arrived with an
entourage at the theatre, already drunk, he found that no tickets were waiting
for him and his companions, who included Helen Ford. Larry waited in the foyer
while Helen went backstage to find out from Dick Rodgers what was going on.
Rodgers was furious that Hart had gotten into the building, because he had left
clear instructions that Hart should be not allowed inside. Helen returned to
the crowded foyer and found no Larry, although his overcoat was still hanging
in the cloakroom. She learned from a doorman that Larry had gone into a bar
across the street. Helen and the rest of Larry’s unwelcome cronies gave up and
left the theatre and drifted away.
Larry, however, was determined to
see his last show. After a few more drinks, he went back across the street and
sneaked through a side entrance and past the usher into the back of the
theatre, where he stood as the lights went dim, the orchestra played the
overture, and the curtain finally rose.
He paced back and forth behind the
last row and behaved himself, but when Vivienne Segal, in the role of Queen Morgan
Le Fay, began to sing “To Keep My Love Alive,” the last song Larry ever wrote,
he lost control and began singing along with the star, his voice getting louder
and louder, until he was dragged out of the theatre by ushers and pushed
through the front door, out into the cold rain, without his overcoat.
He somehow made it to the apartment
of his younger brother, Teddy. Teddy and his wife, Dorothy, tried to keep him
warm and comfortable, but he escaped into the night and took a cab to
Delmonico’s, where he was living. Two days later, he checked himself into
Doctors Hospital with critical pneumonia.
Lorenz Hart died November 22, 1943.
His lyrics live on.
Acknowledgments: This piece first appeared in Black Lamb. Most of the information in
the article comes from Rodgers &
Hart: Bewitched, Bothered and Bedeviled, by Samuel Marx and Jan Clayton; Thou Swell, Thou Witty: The Life and Lyrics
of Lorenz Hart, by Dorothy Hart; and
Musical Stages: An Autobiography, by
Richard Rodgers. These three books, and particularly the first two, quote
extensively from primary sources, mainly correspondence and articles written by
people who knew Lorenz Hart. Sometimes their memories conflict, so I can’t
vouch for the accuracy of every fact I’ve written here. The opinions are my own.
§§§
Call for submissions: Your 99-Word
Stories
The
deadline for November’s 99-word story submissions is November 1. The stories
will appear on my blog post for November 12, and will stay posted for a week.
note: this 99-word story feature
is a game, not a contest. Obey the rules and I’ll include your story. I may
edit the story to make it stronger, and it’s understood that you will submit to
my editing willingly. That’s an unwritten rule.
Rules for the 99-word
story feature are as follows:
1. Your story must be 99
words long, exactly.
2. One story per writer,
per month.
3. The story must be a
story. That means it needs plot (something or somebody has to change),
characters, and conflict.
4. The story must be
inspired by the prompt I assign.
5. The deadline: the
first of the month. Stories will appear on this blog the second Saturday of the
month.
6. I will copy edit the
story. The author of the story retains all rights.
7.
Email me your story (in the body of your email, or as a Word attachment) to: jmd@danielpublishing.com
THIS
MONTH’S PROMPT FOR NEXT MONTH’S 99-WORD STORY: Write a story
inspired by the following sentence: I
don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.…
§§§
Calling
all published authors—
I try to feature a guest
author the third Saturday (and week following) of each month. If you’re
interested in posting an essay on my blog—it’s also a chance to promote a
published book—email me directly at jmd@danielpublishing.com.
§§§
Thank you for visiting.
Please drop by next week.
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