Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  Hart’s demons would torture him and strain his collaboration with Rodgers as the years went on. But the immediate challenge was whether the new duo’s songs would ever see the light of day. They spent that spring and summer of 1919 trying to get some presentable enough to audition, and by August, once more through Phil Leavitt’s intercession, they felt ready enough to try some on another Leavitt acquaintance: the former vaudevillian Lew Fields, who now had a second career as a successful actor and producer. Dick trekked alone to Fields’s beach house in Far Rockaway (Larry begged off, claiming a headache), where Fields allowed that he would not simply buy one of the team’s songs, “Any Old Place with You,” but would interpolate it into his current musical, A Lonely Romeo. (“I’d go to hell for ya, or Philadelphia,” went one line in Hart’s lyric.) So it was that on August 26, 1919, at a Wednesday matinee at the Casino Theatre, Rodgers and Hart made their Broadway debut. “It wasn’t much of a splash,” Rodgers would recall decades later, “but to Larry and me Niagara Falls never made such a roar as the sound of those nice matinee ladies putting their gloved hands together as the song ended.”

  Splash or no splash, the boys from Columbia would have a long drought before they made it back to the big time again.

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT six years, as Dick continued his formal education, first at Columbia and then at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School of Music), Rodgers and Hart honed their craft in one amateur or benefit musical show after another. In his autobiography, Rodgers would list a string of their frivolous titles, as if totting up the price of a painful apprenticeship: You’d Be Surprised, Fly with Me, Say Mama!, You’ll Never Know, Say It with Jazz, The Chinese Lantern, Jazz à la Carte, If I Were King, A Danish Yankee at King Tut’s Court, Temple Bells. By the spring of 1925, Dick was almost twenty-three and still living at home. He would later recall that the hellish silences of his childhood had been replaced by his own hellish sense of guilt at not having more to show for himself. He was desperate enough that when a friend mentioned that an acquaintance who owned a wholesale babies’ underwear business was looking for someone to take over his operation—at the rich sum of $50 a week—he was intrigued. He met the man, who made him a firm offer, and was puzzled when Dick asked to think about it overnight. At dinner that very evening, Dick received a telephone call that would change his life. The Theatre Guild, Broadway’s most prestigious producing organization, was staging a musical benefit to raise money to buy decorative tapestries for its new theater, and a friend of Dick’s had recommended him as just the guy to write the songs. “By the time I got to sleep that night, I was sure of one thing,” he would recall years later. “The world was going to have to get along with one less tycoon in the babies’-underwear business.”

  The new job would not pay anything—and for that reason, Larry was at first reluctant to take it. But this would be more than just another amateur show. The Guild had brought Shaw and Strindberg and Ibsen to modern American audiences, and to do a show—even a benefit show—under its auspices was an opportunity too good to pass up. The Guild was the brainchild of Lawrence Langner, by trade a successful patent lawyer, and Theresa Helburn, a theater-loving Bryn Mawr alumna, and since 1918 its business model enlisted a subscription audience to support noncommercial productions of prestige plays. The benefit performance was envisioned as a musical revue, with songs and sketches lampooning topical events, the Guild’s own high-art pretensions, and its current production, Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman, starring the American theater’s reigning royal couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. There were to be two performances on Sunday, May 17, 1925, at the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street, where The Guardsman was playing but was dark that day. After a frantic rehearsal schedule, on a shoestring budget of less than $3,000, the matinee performance of The Garrick Gaieties got under way, with Rodgers himself conducting the eleven-member orchestra.

  All went routinely until midway through the second act, when June Cochrane, the ingénue, and Sterling Holloway, a gangly red-haired song and dance man (who would become famous to later generations as the voice of Walt Disney’s animated Winnie the Pooh), stood in front of the curtain without a speck of scenery and sang a bouncy, infectious fox-trot that Dick and Larry had written for an unproduced show called Winkle Town, and which now took flight. The song was called “Manhattan,” and it was a joyous ode to urban living, rhyming “what street” with “Mott Street.”

  The number stopped the show, and the actors sang two encores until they exhausted all of Larry’s available words. “This show’s gonna run a year!” Hart cried out when the curtain rang down. In fact, there was just one more scheduled performance—that very night. What to do? The reviews were raves. “All of it is fresh, spirited and engaging,” Alexander Woollcott wrote in the New York Sun. “Some of it is bright with the brightness of something new minted.” Rodgers begged Terry Helburn for permission to use the theater for matinees the following week. She agreed, and the show promptly played to standing-room-only houses despite a heat wave, emboldening Rodgers to propose that the Gaieties be allowed to take over the theater for a regular run. When Helburn demanded, “And what do you suggest we do with The Guardsman?” Rodgers would recall, “Giving her the benefit of my many years of success in the theatre, I said simply, ‘Close it.’” She did, and the Gaieties ran for 211 performances, with Rodgers and Hart each taking home $50 a week in royalties (and Rodgers another $83 a week for conducting). Within a year, Rodgers and Hart would have three shows running on Broadway at once. And years later, when the team arrived at an opening at the Guild Theatre on West 52nd Street, Hart pointed proudly to the tapestries and said, “We’re responsible for them.”

  “No, Larry,” Dick replied. “They’re responsible for us.”

  * * *

  HOW DID THESE two men—so unlike in personality, temperament, and almost everything but talent—manage to work together so well? There exists an old film clip—from Masters of Melody, a 1929 quasi-documentary short—depicting Dick and Larry reenacting the creation of their 1925 song, “Here in My Arms.” The clip is fanciful, but it offers an uncomfortably intimate window into the imbalance of their partnership. As Larry sits in checkerboard pajamas and slippers in an easy chair—looking a bit like a jailbird—Dick is perched at the piano, pencil between his teeth, picking out notes, and then jotting down lyrics.

  “Here in my arms, I think it’s adorable,” Hart says.

  “Too long, Larry!” Rodgers replies. “Too long!”

  “All right,” Hart rejoins. “Here in my arms, it’s adorable!”

  In fact, their collaboration was almost as cinematic, in the sense that they really did usually work in the same room, creating music and lyrics together, if not actually simultaneously (though in later years, Larry would have to have at least some lines of melody from Dick before he could even get started). While Rodgers did not need a piano to compose, he usually had one nearby, while Hart would scribble words on whatever scraps of paper he might have at hand: the margins of magazines or newspapers, old playbills, the backs of letters, or discarded toilet-paper rolls.

  Though Rodgers was the younger partner, he was the dominant one almost from the start. In a joint profile of them at the height of their fame, the New Yorker would describe Larry as “small, tumultuous,” and Dick as “poised, immaculate,” adding that while Rodgers was under five feet seven inches, he nevertheless seemed tall by comparison with Hart. In their early years together, Hart referred to his partner as the General. Later he would call him Teacher, or the Professor. If Hart began to look disheveled, Rodgers liked to say, he would take him off to the nearest children’s department to shop for new clothes. If Dick’s default expression when pondering a note, or reproving his errant partner, was a sour-looking scowl, his satisfied smile when he resolved a problem, or made one of the puns he loved, was wide and beatific, and his brown eyes would dance with a mischief and joie de vivre that matched Larry’s brio.

  Ther
e was never a written contract between them, but their contributions were complementary from the beginning, as Hart once explained to a journalist: “We map out the plot. Then Dick may have a catchy tune idea. He picks it out on the piano—I listen and suddenly an idea for a lyric comes. That happens often. On the other hand, I may think of a couple of verses that will fit into the show. I write them out and say them over to Dick. He sits down at the piano and improvises. I stick my oar in sometimes and before we know it, we have the tune to hang the verses on. It’s like that—simple!”

  It wasn’t that simple, of course, and often Rodgers’s first order of business was simply to find Hart so the two could get to work, a problem that steadily worsened over the years as Hart’s drinking increased and his tolerance for alcohol diminished. But mutual affection and respect got them through a lot. Rodgers would recall how Hart hated to change a lyric once it was committed to paper. “When the immovable object of his unwillingness to change came up against the irresistible force of my own drive for perfection, the noise could be heard all over the city,” he said. “Our fights over words were furious, blasphemous and frequent, but even in their hottest moments we both knew that we were arguing academically and not personally. I think I am quite safe in saying that Larry and I never had a single personal argument with each other.”

  What made a Rodgers song? The composer and music scholar Alec Wilder studied the likes of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen and concluded that, of all the bunch, Rodgers’s songs “show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness and sophistication.” Rodgers, like his contemporaries, generally worked within the conventional thirty-two-measure confines of the American popular song, a form that in its essence is as rigid and unyielding as a sonnet, yet susceptible to almost as many infinite variations as a snowflake. The most common format is the so-called A-A-B-A pattern, in which the main melody (and often the title) is stated in the first eight bars of music. The same melody is repeated for another eight measures. Then there is typically an eight-measure middle section—called a “bridge” or “release”—which introduces a new melodic notion. (Think of the part of Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday” that begins, “Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.”) Finally, the melody is restated one last time, often with a slight variation leading to a climax at the end. There are alternatives to this basic scheme, but they, too, generally share a second characteristic typical of the twentieth-century popular song: a cyclical journey through successive musical keys or moods. The trip usually ends up satisfyingly back where it began, on the tonic chord—the musical foundation, the “do” note of the key in which the song is written. The result is that thousands of songs have been written in this standard format, yet hardly any sound the same. “The great composers,” the critic and writer William Zinsser once explained, “never run out of ways to put the notes together in a pattern that makes us say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful! I’ve never heard anything like that before.’”

  Singers and musicians often cite a seeming paradox in Rodgers’s melodies: They turn and twist in surprising ways—with, say, a shift to a minor key when major would have been more expected. Having taken their unexpected path, no alternative seems half as logical or appealing, as if the tunes had been formed in air, only to be plucked down and put on paper by the composer. But Rodgers had his bag of tricks, as he suggested in his own description of the way music works on Western ears. “It was a revelation to learn,” he once wrote, “that by some curious kind of musical magnetics, the fourth step of the scale was pulled down to the third, and that the seventh was pulled up to the eighth. Nobody has ever explained it scientifically, but if you take the simple phrase of music that goes with ‘Shave and a haircut, two bits,’ you’ll find that the note that goes with ‘two’ is carried, whether it wants to or not, to the note that goes with ‘bits.’ It’s almost impossible for it to go anywhere else.”

  The note that goes with “two” is the seventh tone of the major scale, known as the “leading tone,” the “ti” that wants by its nature to be brought back to “do.” In a musical phrase, the seventh tone lands with a pang, a note of unresolved longing, and Rodgers exploited this reality to the fullest. “We’ll have Man-HAT-tan” is a case in point, with the syllable “hat” lingering on the seventh tone in a way that sweeps the listener along. “There’s a sigh in the music that’s emotional,” says Bruce Pomahac, the longtime director of music for the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization. “Without wanting to rip away the magic of what he did, there are things that he did again and again. This is why, in a brand-new song, he’s still Richard Rodgers to us.” By his own account, Rodgers himself was not always conscious of the technical underpinnings of his composition, but he sensed instinctively where a song should go. “What Rodgers’s facility was, was how many ways he could take you away from ‘do’ and then bring you back to it,” Pomahac explains. Moving in and out of keys, alternating between irresolution and release, he adds, Rodgers is “having sex with you, and you’re not aware of what he’s doing. It just feels really good.”

  The music critic Winthrop Sargeant once wrote of Rodgers that “any attempt to reduce his style to a formula is doomed,” noting that his melodic invention may have been greater than that of any other Broadway composer. “Time and again, you think you can guess what Rodgers is going to do next,” Sargeant wrote, “only to find him doing something else entirely.”

  Rodgers once told an interviewer that art could be defined “as the expression of an emotion by means of a technique.” That is an elegantly clinical way of describing a process that is at least partly chemical. If he could not quite define the secret of his success, he knew it when he saw it. “I knew exactly what was happening to me,” he would remember. “I loved every minute of it.… I roll success around in my mouth like a piece of candy and get the last bit out of it.” Decades later, he would insist that he had never been complacent about success. “Never, never,” he said. “There are certain elemental things that are always gratifying: eating, a warm bath, making love, and having a successful show.”

  * * *

  AS IF TO make up for lost time, after the success of the Garrick Gaieties, Rodgers and Hart embarked on a burst of frantic productivity: seven new shows in New York and London in 1925 and 1926 alone, most often with books written by their friend Herbert Fields, Lew Fields’s son. Then, as today, there was constant cross-pollination between Broadway and the West End, as British producers commissioned works by American composers and American impresarios imported popular British shows. The plots of Rodgers and Hart’s shows were mostly forgettable fluff: a Revolutionary War romance in Dearest Enemy; a marathon bicycle race in The Girl Friend; a second edition of The Garrick Gaieties; quasi-Freudian psychological fantasy in Peggy-Ann; a Lower East Side girl’s search for love in Betsy.

  “Larry and I used to thrash around an awful lot trying to find ideas that had not been done, trying to break through the walls,” Rodgers would recall. “We didn’t always do it, but we did try.”

  The songs in these shows bore the unmistakable stamp of the Jazz Age, capturing the insouciance and energy of flaming youth, and going on nearly a century later, they are still staples of the jazz and cabaret repertoire: “Blue Room,” “Mountain Greenery,” “A Tree in the Park.” Only Betsy was a disappointment, lasting just thirty-nine performances and delivering an unexpected indignity: its star, Belle Baker, had secretly commissioned a new song from her friend Irving Berlin, and when the opening night audience heard “Blue Skies” in the second act, no one was more stunned than Dick and Larry, who were doubly chagrined when Berlin stood up and took a bow for what would become a smash hit song.

  In January 1927, Rodgers and Hart left for London, to oversee English productions of their New York shows. On a side trip to Paris, in a taxicab with some New York friends, they avoided a bad collision by mere inches. “Oh, my heart stood still!” someone said. “Hey, Dick, that’s a
title for a song!” Larry exclaimed, from the floor of the cab, where he had landed with his hat jammed over his eyes. Soon enough “My Heart Stood Still” made its way into a British revue produced by Charles Cochran: One Dam Thing After Another, where it quickly became the favorite song of the Prince of Wales and the hottest song in England. It would make an equal impression back in New York that fall, when it became part of the score for Rodgers and Hart’s adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, though to use it, Dick and Larry had to buy the rights back from Cochran, for a reported $10,000 (or about $137,000 in current dollars). It was worth the price: eleven years later, it had earned Rodgers and Hart some $50,000 in royalties.

  Between January 1928 and February 1930, Rodgers and Hart would turn out six more musicals on Broadway, virtually every one of them producing at least one new song that has lasted all the intervening years. Some of their efforts were more ambitious than others. Chee-Chee (1928) was a most unusual tale: the story of the son of a Chinese court eunuch who is desperate to avoid promotion to his father’s job (and to escape his emasculating fate). Only one song, “Moon of My Delight,” has survived from a score that Dick and Larry had sought to integrate so seamlessly with the plot that they put a note in the program, taking a page from Hammerstein’s approach in Rose-Marie, explaining, “The musical numbers, some of them very short, are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the audience to peruse a complete list.” Asked why he wanted to grapple with such an unusual story, Hart waggishly said, “It’s got balls!” The veteran Broadway music director Buster Davis would later sum up the effort as “Rodgers and Hart invade the Orient. The Orient wins.” The play lasted only thirty-one performances, the shortest run of any Rodgers and Hart show to date. But among the New York critics, the show in fact won five pans, two mixed reviews, and six raves, and Dick and Larry showed their continued willingness to experiment with unusual story lines and songs that served and developed the plot. And for Rodgers, the foray to the Far East foreshadowed territory he would be drawn to explore with Oscar Hammerstein two decades later.