The contribution people outside the mainstream have made to American culture is staggering. In music, African-American jazz is one example. Another is the disproportionate Jewish impact on Broadway musicals through the 1960s. They wrote the songs people listened to, danced to, and sang. Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Dorothy Fields, and Harold Arlen were all Jews who thrived in an era of virulent anti-Semitism. Cole Porter was from a wealthy Midwestern Protestant family, but he was homosexual, which gave him another outsider's perspective. Lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) was Jewish and homosexual, making him a double outsider. In A Ship Without a Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Shuster, $30), Gary Marmorstein provides a detailed look at this sunny yet tortured man.
Born into an upper-middle-class Manhattan family, Larry was the oldest of two boys. His brother Teddy became a successful character actor. Both were exceptionally short. At four feet, 10 inches tall, with an exceedingly large head, Larry was sometimes mistaken for a dwarf. Privately educated, very bright, he enrolled at Columbia, without graduating. Writing lyrics for musical theatre was his passion. Meeting composer and fellow Manhattanite Rodgers (1902-79) in 1919 proved mutually beneficial. They wrote hundreds of songs and 28 stage musicals. Their first success was The Garrick Gaieties (1925), a revue for which they created "Manhattan" and "Mountain Greenery."
Even young, Larry drank heavily. He was undisciplined, but the methodical Rodgers would get him to concentrate. He wrote quickly, often scrawling lyrics on bits of paper.
Among their best-remembered shows are A Connecticut Yankee (1927) (based on Mark Twain's novel); Jumbo (1935); On Your Toes (1936), choreographed by George Balanchine; Babes in Arms (1937); I'd Rather Be Right (1937), starring George M. Cohan; The Boys from Syracuse (1938), the first successful musical based on Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors); Too Many Girls (1939), which featured the young Desi Arnaz; and Pal Joey (1940), from which Gene Kelly emerged a star. They wrote the score for Rouben Mamoulian's still highly regarded film, Love Me Tonight (1932), with Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. Less memorable was their contribution to the Joan Crawford musical Dancing Lady (1933).
Marmorstein chronicles each show with painstaking, often excessive detail. Referring to them as "the boys" sounds patronizing. But he recaptures their era well. Fanny Brice, Bea Lillie, Ray Bolger, Billy Rose, John O'Hara, Jimmy Durante, among others, appear. He does a good job describing the increasing difficulty Rodgers faced managing Hart's behavior as his alcoholism became chronic, ultimately killing him at age 47.
Hart would often spend days and nights at the public baths, where presumably he had sex with men. He never came out, but Rodgers, Teddy Hart, and others knew of his sexual orientation. Larry befriended openly gay Milton "Doc" Bender, a dentist turned producer, of whom few of his friends approved. According to Marmorstein, on at least one occasion, Rodgers angrily, protectively, denied Hart's homosexuality. He wept openly at his colleague's funeral. Yet, after completing the lyrics and music for No Strings (1962), he told star Diahann Carroll how wonderful it was not to have had "to search the globe for that little fag."
Rodgers recommended his financial advisor William Kron to the free-spending Hart. Kron convinced Hart to change his will late in life. Teddy Hart and his wife were left $100,000, a substantial amount of money, but only received royalties from the songs during their lifetime �" their children would earn nothing. Rodgers gained control of the copyrights.
Despite poor health, Hart contributed a new song, the show-stopping "To Keep My Love Alive," for the hit 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee, but Rodgers couldn't interest him in the musical that became Oklahoma (1943). He thus turned to Oscar Hammerstein.
While Marmorstein excels in describing Hart's lyrics, he fails to show how his being gay and considered physically undesirable influenced them. In the great "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," Hart wrote, "I'll sing to him/ Each spring to him/ And worship the trousers that cling to him," a line only a homosexual of that era would have penned. The poignant "My Funny Valentine" reflects Hart's own feelings of inadequacy. It's almost certain that he suffered from internalized homophobia and anti-Semitism. Unlike Rodgers, who strove to join high society, Hart was happiest in bars with show-biz types and other writers. He was compulsively generous to family, friends, and strangers.
Hart's perspective was urban, urbane and topical. His lyrics are romantic, cynical, witty, sexy. Rodgers would find greater commercial success with Hammerstein, but Hart would never have been involved in treacly musicals like The Sound of Music (1959).
According to Marmorstein, the film of Too Many Girls (1940), which starred Lucille Ball and Arnaz (they fell in love while shooting) captures the spirit of the stage show better than any of their other movies. Ironically, in MGM's lavish, fictionalized biography of the duo Words and Music (1948), gay actor Tom Drake plays Rodgers, while straight Mickey Rooney is Hart. In the film, Hart's drinking results from the unrequited love of a woman. The musical numbers however, dazzle. Ann Sothern superbly sings "Where's That Rainbow?" June Allyson is terrific performing "Thou Swell." Rooney and Judy Garland excel with "I Wish I Were in Love Again." Lena Horne sizzles through "The Lady Is a Tramp," and is heartbreaking rendering "Where or When." Kelly and Vera-Ellen are dynamic dancing the famous "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" ballet.
The lavishly illustrated, thoroughly researched A Ship Without a Sail confirms that physically, Hart may have been short, but as an artist, he was a towering man.