Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters (2 page)

    
The collection on
Coco
is especially rich because both its producer (Frederick Brisson) and star (Katharine Hepburn) donated their papers to public institutions; the 1980s are also well covered thanks to the wonderful collection of Liz Robertson, Lerner’s widow. There are also some disappointing and frustrating gaps: I could find nothing of significance before 1951, for instance, and some of the Hollywood projects from the 1960s are lacking coverage. Such is the nature of archival research, though, and it seems to me that the omissions are less important than the quality of the letters I did discover, most of which are important to our understanding of this major writer and his times. Few edits have been made to the letters; in most cases, I have silently corrected obvious
typographical errors, but a couple of major changes (made in agreement with the Lerner estate) have been indicated with ellipses.

* * *

Many people have helped to make this book possible, but it would never have happened without the incredible passion and support of Liz Robertson, Lerner’s widow. From the start, Liz has helped me to gather letters, not only from her own attic but from those of many of Lerner’s friends, colleagues, and collaborators across the globe. She has been patient and encouraging over the past three fascinating years. To her, and to the entire Lerner family, I owe many thanks. Equally, I am grateful for the continued assistance and support of David Grossberg, Lerner’s attorney and the executor of his estate, who kindly supplied me with the permission to reproduce much of the material in this volume.

    
Extremely generous financial assistance from the Tim Rice Charitable Foundation and the Mackintosh Foundation also helped to get the project off the ground, with funding for a research trip to the United States in the summer of 2011. Tim in particular met with me on several occasions and immediately understood the value of this collection of letters. For giving me permission to reproduce copyrighted material, I am also indebted to Lynn Lane (Burton Lane), Gabrielle Kraft (Herman Levin), Paul Schwartz (Arthur Schwartz), Chris Hart (Moss Hart), Margaret Styne (Jule Styne), and Robin Walton (Irving Berlin). Ned Comstock at USC was especially helpful in the early stages of the book in helping me to trace letters from Lerner’s MGM years, and to the various archives I visited or corresponded with across the globe, I’m enormously indebted.

    
At Oxford, Norm Hirschy has been a dream of an editor. It seems that no query is too small or large for him to deal with, and it never fails to impress me how quickly and cheerfully he responds to all my problems. I’m honored to count him a good friend, too, and look forward to many more collaborations in the future. My thanks are due to the rest of the team at Oxford as well, including the project manager (Mary Jo Rhodes) and copyeditor (Patterson Lamb), who have both done a sterling job. To Geoffrey Block and Mark Eden Horowitz I also extend my deepest thanks for their endless support and help, which have been essential in making this book possible. As always, thanks to my friend and mentor Cliff Eisen for his ongoing support, and for taking the trouble to acquire Lerner’s letters to James Barton for me. I’m also particularly grateful to Richard C. Norton for locating several letters and articles for use in the book.

    
Not long after starting this book, I was honored to join the staff of the Department of Music at the University of Sheffield, where I have enjoyed perhaps the happiest three years of my life. To my colleagues and students, I am very grateful. In particular, I have to thank Danielle Birkett, Debra Finch, and Hannah Robbins, for their help with this book: Danielle very kindly copied
quite a number of letters for me on one of her research trips and brought them back, while Debra and Hannah closely scrutinized and skilfully criticized a draft of the book, vastly improving it in the process.

    
As ever, my friends have been enduringly patient and loving toward me, so my thanks go to Vanessa Ashbee, Stephen Banfield, Ross Bellaby, Nick Bland, Larry Blank, Dorothy and Michael Bradley, Matthew Brett, Tracy and Darren Bryant, Rexton S. Bunnett, Jo Burrows, Elliot J. Cohen, the late Jere Couture, Nikki Dibben, Jeff Dunne, Bill Everett, Michael Feinstein, Ian Marshall Fisher, Marilyn Flitterman, Andrea Gray, Paul Guinery, Patrick Hayward, Loie Horowitz, Simon Keefe, Barry Kirk, Jeffrey Magee, Candice Majewski, Nelly Miricioiu, Adrian Moore, Larry Moore, George Nicholson, Stephen Pettitt, Stephanie Pitts, Sophie Redfern, Helen Reynolds, Marina Romani, Gary Schocker, Nigel Simeone, Anna Stevens, Richard Tay, Arlene and Roy Tomlinson, Mark and Katy Warman, Joseph Weiss, and Walter Zvonchenko. Space doesn’t allow me to describe what they (and many others) all did and do for me, but they know and I know.

    
To my family, I am likewise grateful, and my particular thanks go to Terry and Sue Broomfield, Linda and John Riley, Alistair, Natallia, and Ophelia. Especial thanks go to my Mum and Dad, Gilly and Larry McHugh, who constantly prove that their love for me knows no bounds. This book is dedicated to Lawrence Broomfield, my dearly beloved partner, who is a constant source of love, patience, and support.

Dominic McHugh

Sheffield, December 2013

Compared to the rather sketchy biography of the formative years of his collaborator Frederick Loewe,
¹
details of the early life of Alan Jay Lerner are fairly well known. His birth into a privileged family, his excellent and varied education, and his youthful experiments in writing for the theater all paved the way for his rise to prominence in the 1940s and the peak of his fame in the late 1950s, following the success of
My Fair Lady
and
Gigi
. However, little has survived in the way of significant correspondence from his childhood or the first decade of his career. Presumably, letters from the pre-
Brigadoon
, pre-celebrity Lerner must have seemed of little significance to their recipients at the time, even if the contents were witty or interesting. Therefore, this chapter briefly outlines how he came to be one of the leading writers of his generation through the use of alternative sources, such as interviews, newspaper articles, and other contemporary documentation, as well as Lerner’s own incredible account of some of his career,
The Street Where I Live
.

    
Alan Jay Lerner was born in New York City on August 31, 1918, into a home where business was a family concern: his father, Joseph, had established the Lorraine Stores Corporation in 1917 with his brothers Michael and Samuel, and under a new name it grew into the popular nationwide Lerner chain, specializing in budget-priced ladies’ fashion. This guaranteed the financial security of Lerner’s upbringing, and he was educated at Columbia Grammar School, Bedales (in England), and Choate. But on his own admission, the relationship between his parents was frequently strained: “My Pappy was rich and my Ma was good lookin’, but by the time I was born my father no longer thought so,” he
later recalled. “As far back as I can remember, their life together was a familiar symphony in three movements: arguing, separating, reuniting.”
²

    
He was his father’s favorite, and this led to a fundamental influence in his life: they would regularly attend the theater together, which meant that Lerner saw most musicals that appeared on Broadway starting from roughly his fifth birthday. Consequently, he grew up with a vast knowledge of the output of George and Ira Gershwin,
³
Richard Rodgers
⁴
and Lorenz Hart,
⁵
Irving Berlin,
⁶
Vincent Youmans,
⁷
and all the other major writers of Broadway shows from the mid-1920s onward. His later comment, “By the age of twelve I had only one ambition and that was to be involved, someday, somehow, in the musical theatre,”
⁸
therefore comes as no surprise—and when he eventually came to write his own history of the musical theater, published posthumously in 1986, he was particularly qualified for the task.
⁹
Two works stood out from his early theatergoing days: Jerome Kern
¹⁰
and Oscar Hammerstein II’s
¹¹
Show Boat
(“The entire score was studded with both brilliance and depth, almost as if each man had suddenly opened a door in his creative soul behind which a greater artist had been waiting to see the sunlight”) and DuBose Heyward
¹²
and the Gershwins’
Porgy and Bess
(“It was the first of its kind and remains to this day the greatest triumph of the modern musical theatre”).
¹³
Already, Lerner’s taste was starting
to emerge. Both of these shows are based on strong literary material that had already enjoyed an independent identity, both engage fiercely with social issues, and both feature finely drawn music, book, and lyrics.

    
Though Lerner’s career was entirely focused on words, his initial inclination was more in the direction of music. From the age of five he learned how to play the piano, and he started to compose songs (including Choate’s football song) in his early teens.
¹⁴
While his father’s love of the theater ultimately had more of an impact on him, his mother’s musical talents also contributed to his development: she was a competent singer in her youth and (according to Lerner) had been accompanied at one time by Richard Rodgers’s mother. Furthermore, she took Lerner on “educational sightseeing tours ranging from concert hall to museum, from ancient ruin to European cathedral.”
¹⁵
Relatively untouched by the economic unrest of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lerner enjoyed a privileged upbringing of culture and sport, and like his classmate, the future president John F. Kennedy,
¹⁶
he went straight from Choate to Harvard. Originally, Lerner’s father had intended him to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and to become a diplomat, but Lerner was apparently expelled from Choate shortly before graduation for being caught smoking on the school’s golf course (though, in fact, his name is included in the
New York Times
’s list of graduates from Choate that year, so perhaps he exaggerated the event in his autobiography).
¹⁷
The sentence for his disobedience was to be sent to Harvard instead of the Sorbonne, but Lerner was delighted to be “twenty-eight hundred miles closer to Times Square” than he would have been in the French university and said “it was a little like punishing a prisoner by kicking him out of jail.”
¹⁸

    
He arrived at Harvard in September 1936, and his period there was to be perhaps the most formative of his life. Ostensibly, he specialized in the Romance languages and also spent time boxing and taking flying lessons, though a boxing accident left him with impaired vision and unable to fly in the air corps during the war as he had intended. Yet his heart lay in the Hasty Pudding Club, several of whose shows (or “Theatricals”) he contributed to as writer or performer. In
The Street Where I Live
Lerner refers to the Theatricals as “the annual undergraduate musical romp,” but in spite of their lack of sophistication, the experience was invaluable. He contributed to the script and score of both
So Proudly We Hail!
(1938) and
Fair Enough
(1939). Though the Hasty Pudding Theatricals
were not “book musicals” (where the script is usually substantial and the songs relate closely to it) as such, the opportunity to write songs for a dramatic context of sorts was a first for Lerner. Given that his later career was devoted purely to writing lyrics and librettos, it perhaps comes as a surprise that for all these songs he wrote both words and music. But he had studied the piano for many years, and leading songwriters such as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter
¹⁹
wrote both words and music for their scores, so theirs was clearly the model Lerner aimed to emulate at this point.

    
In October 1937, he registered for copyright numbers called “You’re Not My Type,” “You’re My Song,” “Then I’ll Forget You,” “My First Night with You,” “Man about Town,” and “Living the Life,” and the following March a further song of his, “Chance to Dream,” was published by Chappell.
²⁰
Presumably many of these were intended for
So Proudly We Hail!
, on which Lerner’s collaborators were Benjamin Welles (book and songs),
²¹
Nathaniel Benchley (book),
²²
John MacDougal Graham (book), David Lannon (additional lyrics), and Stanley Miller (songs).
²³
Welles went on to be a lifelong friend of Lerner’s, corresponding with him regularly right up to the 1980s. The show was described in the
Harvard Crimson
as “a satire on Cafe Society with international implications involving Mussolini, Hitler, and Roosevelt and their respective countries, and the small nation of Cafeteria, bounded by Central Park East and 42nd street. Cafeteria is a pawn in the power politics of the three dictators, and these complications form the plot.”
²⁴
The paper’s reporter noted furthermore that “The directors are finding some difficulty in casting the part of Princess Elizabeth”—an ironic reference to the fact that the Hasty Pudding Theatricals had all-male casts. On March 23, 1938, highlights from the show were broadcast on the radio, including Lerner’s “Living the Life,” but the script was banned due to its subversive nature, and special skits had to be prepared for the occasion.
²⁵
The official first night was March 29, then it moved to the Copley Theatre in Boston for two performances before the traditional annual show at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where it played on April 8. The
Crimson
’s anonymous reporter noted of the first night
that “Cheers and hoots greeted the appearance of the hefty chorus ‘girls’ in scanty corsets for one scene,” and anticipated “raised eyebrows” at the Boston and New York venues.
²⁶
Furthermore, the
New York Times
reported that 1,800 alumni and friends attended the gala in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf, and observed that the show “pokes fun at nearly every one.”
²⁷