A more conventional effort was Simple Simon (1930), co-written by and starring the great vaudeville clown Ed Wynn, who played a newsstand operator in Coney Island who dreams of Cinderella and her fantastical adventures in two fairy-tale kingdoms. One song from the score, “Ten Cents a Dance,” became a huge hit for the star who sang it, Ruth Etting, and perhaps the grittiest evocation ever written about the life of any working girl.
In the summer of 1929, Dick had at last moved out of his parents’ home, to a penthouse apartment of his own, with a large wrap-around terrace on the eighteenth floor of the Lombardy Hotel on East 56th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. His only neighbor on the floor was Edna Ferber. Charles Cochran was beckoning about a new show in London. So was Hollywood, where the demand for talking pictures was still red-hot. And so, too, was someone even more alluring—and much closer to home.
* * *
BY HIS OWN account, Rodgers had always had an eye for pretty girls. When he was barely ten, his grandfather took him to a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs starring Marguerite Clark, a fetching, doe-eyed stage and screen ingénue of the day. “My prepubescent fantasies were restricted by my innocence,” he would recall decades later, “but as I look back on them I realize I was doing very well mentally for a ten-year-old and was clearly heading in the right direction.” From his teenage years on, Dick had dated plenty of girls, including, discreetly (and by his later remembrance, chastely), an older married woman named Helen, with whom he took long walks in Central Park and spent hours listening to Brahms. But nothing had quite prepared him for the feeling he experienced in the fall of 1925 when he went to pick up his friend Ben Feiner to see King Vidor’s sweeping World War I film The Big Parade and noticed Ben’s sixteen-year-old sister, Dorothy, who suddenly seemed all grown up, and was waiting for her own date with an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman department store fortune. “Although I had seen her at the theatre only a short time before, she no longer looked like just a young kid,” Dick would remember. “In fact, she looked like the prettiest girl I had ever seen.” Indeed, years later, nothing would please Dick more about Words and Music, MGM’s otherwise fanciful and often laughable 1948 biopic about Larry and him, than the actress who played the role of the young Dorothy: it was Janet Leigh, at her dewiest and fresh-faced best, and she bore an uncanny resemblance to the young Dorothy Belle Feiner. Dick made up his mind to wait a year—sixteen seemed too young for the twenty-three-year-old composer—to ask Dorothy out.
By coincidence, that is just what happened. In September 1926, the White Star liner RMS Majestic, bearing Rodgers back from England, where he and Hart had written a show called Lido Lady, stopped across the English Channel in Cherbourg to pick up passengers from France. Among them was Dorothy Feiner, who was on her way home from an extravagant Parisian shopping trip with her parents, to acquire the wardrobe she would soon take with her to Wellesley College. Dorothy and Dick had many mutual friends on the boat, she would recall years later, “but as far as Dick and I were concerned, we were alone on that vast ship.” When the Majestic docked in New York, Rodgers tore off the corner of a magazine page and gave her his phone number. (More than fifty years later, she would still have that scrap of paper.)
Dorothy went off to Wellesley that fall while Dick remained a bachelor about town in Manhattan, and they began a sometimes tempestuous and not-always-exclusive courtship that would last three and a half years. That December, Dick took Dorothy to the first night of his and Larry’s new show, Peggy-Ann, her first Broadway opening. Some of her other beaux talked of marriage, but Dick did not. She broke off the relationship for a time, hoping she wouldn’t miss him, but she did. In February 1928, bored at college and pining for Dick, she left Wellesley and went to Europe with her parents to soothe her sorrow. Her ship passed Dick’s in the North Atlantic, and he sent her a radio message, “Hullo.” Not realizing he’d intended to start a conversation via wireless, she was hurt, and wired him back, “Goodbye.” But they could not make a break, and as 1928 turned into 1929, and Rodgers and Hart kept up a tremendous burst of productivity as the toast of Broadway, Dick and Dorothy’s relationship deepened.
From the beginning, Dorothy seems to have known that she would always have competition. When the notion of marriage first came up, probably sometime in late 1929, her father warned her: “Look, I like him very much, but I think you must realize that he is going to be surrounded by the most attractive women and they’ll be coming along new every year, younger and younger. And as you get older, they’ll still be coming.” So “if this is going to worry you, you shouldn’t marry him.” Dick himself made no secret of the fact that he was highly sexed. His letters to Dorothy when they were apart in the early years of their marriage are full of painfully passionate declarations of ardor, protestations of fidelity, and gently dirty jokes, like the one about an “absent-minded commuter who kissed the train good-bye, jumped on his wife and went to town.”
“There is in Rodgers’s music a quality of yearning,” says Timothy Crouse, the writer and the son of the playwright Russel Crouse, who knew Rodgers in later years. “The yearning may be for many things, but to my mind it has to do above all with the longing for a woman; it’s erotic at its source. Even as a boy, I could see that Dick was slightly different when talking to a woman than when talking to a man—more vibrant, more vivacious. I think that he needed the electricity of contact with attractive, talented women—they sparked his creativity. In the sanctum of his imagination, they may have been his target audience. Part of what drew him to the musical theater may have been that it always contained the tantalizing possibility of romance; it was a world of license that you didn’t find in other parts of the society.”
The couple were married on March 5, 1930, in “a bower of flowers” in Dorothy’s parents’ living room on Park Avenue, two weeks after the Broadway opening of Simple Simon. They headed to Europe for a six-week honeymoon, which culminated in London, where Rodgers and Hart had been commissioned to write a new show, Evergreen, about an actress who poses as a woman of sixty to further her stage career. When she falls in love with a younger man concerned about her age, the truth eventually comes out. The show provided an opportunity for Rodgers and Hart to recycle a song that had been dropped from Simple Simon, “Dancing on the Ceiling.”
Dancing on the ceiling is also what the new Mrs. Richard Rodgers must have sometimes felt she was being forced to do, as she set up housekeeping not only with her husband but with his writing partner as well. The three of them moved into a large rental house on York Terrace in Regent’s Park, and though Dorothy was very fond of Larry, “it was a lot to take on a ménage à trois when I hadn’t yet managed the ménage à deux.” To compound matters, Dorothy soon enough realized she was pregnant, and each morning, a disheveled, unshaven Larry would interrupt their breakfast with the queasy-making smell of a fat black cigar. Dorothy would flee upstairs, Dick would yell, Larry would apologize profusely and then “repeat the whole performance absent-mindedly the next morning.”
The newlyweds had barely gotten used to their London routine before they uprooted themselves again, first back to Manhattan, and then to Hollywood, where Warner Bros. had offered Rodgers and Hart a three-picture deal.
* * *
THE VOGUE FOR film musicals that The Jazz Singer had sparked was still in full swing, and in June 1930 Richard Rodgers arrived in Southern California. His finances had taken a hit in the 1929 crash, and Broadway productions were being curtailed, so the lucrative offer from Los Angeles was especially appealing. But just as Oscar Hammerstein had, Richard Rodgers would find his years in Hollywood personally and professionally unsatisfying. The problems started with the first movie he and Hart were assigned to work on, a confection called The Hot Heiress, about a riveter in love with a socialite. The stars were Ben Lyon, a popular matinee idol who had made a splash in Howard Hughes’s 1930 World War I aviation epic, Hell’s Angels, and Ona Munson, who had appeared on Broadway in No, No, Nanette. The only r
ub: Lyon could not sing, and Munson’s range was so limited that her songs had to be as uncomplicated as possible. By August, Dick and Dorothy were headed back to New York, where she endured a rocky pregnancy and several times came close to miscarrying, while Dick returned to London to finish work on Evergreen. Their daughter Mary was born in January 1931, and the following month, Rodgers and Hart had a new show on Broadway, America’s Sweetheart, about a couple who move from Minnesota to Hollywood determined to make it in the movies but wind up struggling instead. Its subject matter must have cut uncomfortably close to the bone, because The Hot Heiress opened in March and was a fat bomb. With the craze for musical movies suddenly over, Jack Warner bought out the rest of Dick and Larry’s contract. Their next move was uncertain.
But that fall, Hollywood came calling again—with a more appealing proposition. Paramount Publix (as it was then known) was the most cosmopolitan and continental of the Hollywood studios at the time, with a stable of European émigré directors and performers, and it came up with a vehicle for the French music hall performer Maurice Chevalier. Love Me Tonight is based on a play called Tailor in the Chateau and tells the story of a romantic Parisian tailor who falls in love with a lonely princess and masquerades as a baron to win her hand, before being discovered by the servants in her castle. In the end, love conquers all. Once again, the plot was as weightless as a French meringue, but Rodgers and Hart had a crucial ally in the innovative director, Rouben Mamoulian. An Armenian émigré, Mamoulian was himself a recent recruit to Hollywood from Broadway, where he had staged the original production of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s play Porgy for the Theatre Guild in 1927.
Owlish, bespectacled, and temperamental, Mamoulian was possessed of an extraordinary visual sense and an instinctive feel for storytelling in song. Together with Dick and Larry, he devised a singular method of staging a musical film using a previously underutilized tool: the camera itself. In his memoir, Rodgers would recall the basic premise. “What we had in mind was not only moving the camera and the performers, but having the entire scene move,” he would say. “There was no reason why a musical sequence could not be used like dialogue and be performed uninterrupted while the action took the story to whatever locations the director wanted.” Mamoulian was not only the film’s director but its producer, and he agreed completely. Just as he had with the opening scene of Porgy on stage, Mamoulian began the film with a steadily growing symphony of everyday sounds as Paris awakens.
Minutes later, as Chevalier fits a bridegroom for a new suit in his tailor shop, he launches into one of Rodgers and Hart’s all-time great ballads, “Isn’t It Romantic?” Seamlessly, without a break, the scene shifts (as does the song) from the tailor, to the customer, to a passing taxi driver and his fare, to soldiers on a troop train, to a gypsy boy who overhears them, to a campfire where the music swells to the strain of gypsy violins, to the bedchamber of Princess Jeanette (played by Jeanette MacDonald), who expresses her longing for a lover she has yet to meet. The lyrics—really snatches of rhyming sung dialogue—are so perfectly suited to the action that Hart had to write a more generic alternative for the published sheet music version of the song. And Mamoulian’s narrative camera technique, pathbreaking at the time, was so successful that it became the template that has been used ever since, with appropriate technical refinements and enhancements, to film complicated song and dance sequences. His innovations can still be seen in movie musicals like La La Land.
If only the rest of Dick and Larry’s sojourn in Southern California had produced any project even remotely as satisfying. But it did not. From 1931 through 1934 came one disappointing experience after another. Hollywood was where the money was, so that is where Rodgers and Hart stayed, in a succession of rented houses in Beverly Hills. (Larry eventually took his own place after one too many late nights took its toll on Dorothy Rodgers.) Dick summed up their entire output for the year 1933, when they worked variously for MGM and the producers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, this way: “One score for a film that wasn’t made; one score, mostly unused, for a film no one can recall; one song for Goldwyn; one song for Selznick.”
Like Oscar Hammerstein in the same period, Dick chafed at being a studio worker for hire, subject to the whims of directors, producers, and executives, when he’d grown used to having creative control of his own projects on Broadway. To make matters worse, Dorothy was frequently away, in New York, or on vacation by herself, sometimes taking young Mary with her, sometimes leaving her in Dick’s care. In the summer of 1933, she went to New York for a minor operation, while Dick remained in Hollywood. He was miserable, and told her so in no uncertain terms. “I’ve been hideously faithful to you, my pet, and not through a sense of duty!” he wrote on June 13, paraphrasing a Hart lyric. Three weeks later, he was if anything even more frank. “As a matter of clinical fact, sleeping in your bed has had a salutary effect on my morale,” he wrote on July 4. “It gives me a sense of contact that I can’t get in any other way. I could go to your closet and bury my head in your clothes, but the honest hysteria I could achieve by doing that would be lost in the fact that it’s been done on the screen.… Angel, darling, don’t pay too much attention to this. It’s just your lover, a little nuts with all this longing, trying to tell you he adores you and wants to be with you. If you think I’m drunk, tant mieux. That’s when the real stuff comes out. I love you. One Richard.”
Around the same time, he confided to her his frustrations with Hollywood in general. “Some Thursday night, when the servants are all out and there’s a great crowd in the Vendome”—a popular restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard—“I’m going to walk in and yell, ‘Fake!’ at the top of my lungs and walk out again.”
It was in these dark days that Dick happened upon a question printed in the syndicated “New York Day by Day” column: “Whatever happened to Rodgers and Hart?” Rodgers’s hands shook as he held the newspaper. “I called Larry up and said, ‘We gotta get out of here.’” And they did.
* * *
FROM THE MOMENT they returned to New York, things started looking up, and no one would ever again have to wonder what had happened to Rodgers and Hart. Indeed, from 1935 through 1942 they would enjoy an almost unbroken run of success: ten shows, all but one of them hits. In these years, they also produced a bumper crop of songs that were among the best they ever wrote. Their efforts ranged from the spectacular—Jumbo, a circus vaudeville featuring acrobats, live elephants, and Jimmy Durante, for the producer Billy Rose in 1935—to the satirical—I’d Rather Be Right, their 1937 lampoon of Franklin D. Roosevelt starring the great George M. Cohan himself, with a book by Broadway’s leading comedy playwrights, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. That same year, Dick and Larry wrote the book, music, and lyrics for Babes in Arms, a let’s-put-on-a-show story about the children of old vaudeville troupers who stage a musical revue to keep from being sent to a work farm. The cast featured a crop of young unknowns singing some of the most adult, sophisticated songs that Dick and Larry ever wrote, among them “Where or When,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” In 1938 and 1939, the team wrote two shows: I Married an Angel, which paired them with a hotshot young director named Joshua Logan; and Too Many Girls, which introduced a young Cuban band leader named Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha, who would soon be known simply as Desi Arnaz.
Two other Rodgers and Hart projects from this period deserve special attention for the pioneering strides they made. The first is On Your Toes (1936), which they had begun in frustration during their last year in Hollywood as a potential vehicle for Fred Astaire. The plot was conventional Broadway hooey. Junior Dolan, the son of vaudeville hoofers, gives up the family business for life as a serious student of music at Knickerbocker University, where he falls in love with a coed, Frankie Frayne, and becomes friends with Sidney Cohn, who is writing a jazz ballet called Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. They try to sell the idea to a Russian ballet company, whose prima ballerina is interested n
ot only in the dance but in Junior himself. Complications ensue when another dancer, a rival for the ballerina’s affections, puts a mob contract on Junior, who must keep dancing as fast as he can until the cops arrive to save him in the nick of time.
The ballet was Larry’s idea, and from the start it had been seen as integral to the plot. Ballets had been used in Broadway musicals before, but invariably as one-offs in a loose revue format, not as storytelling devices. To choreograph the show, Rodgers and Hart turned to George Balanchine, a Russian émigré who was already energizing the American ballet scene and had been signed as the resident dance master of the Metropolitan Opera. Dick and Larry had seen his work and knew he was the man they wanted, but Rodgers was hesitant about just how to proceed, as he would recall years later. “I didn’t know a thing about choreography and told Balanchine that I was unsure how we should go about it,” he remembered. “Did he devise his steps first and expect me to alter the tempos wherever necessary, or did he fit his steps to the music as written? Balanchine smiled and with that wonderful Russian accent of his said simply, ‘You write. I put on.’ And that was the way we worked.”
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