Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford   New York
Auckland   Cape Town   Dar es Salaam   Hong Kong   Karachi
Kuala Lumpur   Madrid   Melbourne   Mexico City   Nairobi
New Delhi   Shanghai   Taipei   Toronto

With offices in
Argentina   Austria   Brazil   Chile   Czech Republic   France   Greece
Guatemala   Hungary   Italy   Japan   Poland   Portugal   Singapore
South Korea   Switzerland   Thailand   Turkey   Ukraine   Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2014

Research for this book was generously supported by the
Tim Rice Charitable Trust and The Mackintosh Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alan Jay Lerner: a lyricists letters / edited with commentary by Dominic McHugh.
  p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–994927–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Lerner, Alan Jay, 1918–1986—Correspondence.
2. Lerner, Alan Jay, 1918–1986—Friends and associates. 3. Lyricists—United States—Biography.
I. McHugh, Dominic, editor.
ML423.L3A4 2014
782.14092—dc23
  [B]‌
2014001790

eISBN: 978–0–19–939488–3

For my partner
,

LAWRENCE BROOMFIELD

Introduction and Acknowledgments

CHAPTER
1: “From This Day On”: The Rise of the Playwright-Lyricist, 1918–1951

CHAPTER
2: “Open Your Eyes”: Lerner without Loewe and the MGM Years, 1952–1955

CHAPTER
3: “You Did It”:
My Fair Lady, Gigi
, and Beyond, 1955–1958

CHAPTER
4: “One Brief Shining Moment”: Changing Partners, 1959–1964

CHAPTER
5: “Rise and Look Around You”: From
Clear Day
to
Coco
, 1965–1970

CHAPTER
6: “Matters of Consequence”: Collaborations Old and New, 1970–1974

CHAPTER
7: “I Remember It Well”: Old Friends, 1975–1980

CHAPTER
8: “Another Life”: The Final Years, 1980–1986

Timeline

Appendix

References

Index

In one of the letters reproduced in Chapter 6 of this book, Jule Styne—the great composer of
Gypsy, Funny Girl
, and numerous other hit musicals—suggests to Alan Jay Lerner that “one day someone may do a musical based on our letters to one another.” Although to write a Broadway musical is well beyond my capabilities, I believe the impulse behind Styne’s frivolous suggestion is exactly the same as that behind this book. When researching my monograph,
Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady”
(Oxford University Press, 2012), one of my most riveting discoveries was a letter of November 1955 from Lerner to Rex Harrison, who would start rehearsing the show a few weeks later. In it, Lerner discusses various aspects of Higgins’s character, of writing lyrics generally, and of the show’s overall progress. Having by that time plowed through hundreds of letters to and from other members of the production team and cast of
My Fair Lady
, all of which were interesting as documents but hardly remarkable as pieces of writing, I felt this single letter stood out for its charm, insights, and penmanship.

    
Of course, it ought to have come as no surprise that the person who wrote
My Fair Lady
also wrote beautiful letters. Yet Lerner has somehow never been given full credit for his prose facility, in spite of writing several Academy Award–winning movies. Too often he has been blindly portrayed as an able but old-fashioned lyricist who added a few songs to Shaw’s
Pygmalion
to great effect, repeated the “Cinderella” formula in
Gigi
, and went off the rails after the end of his collaboration with Frederick Loewe on
Camelot
. As an artist, he has rarely been discussed as having the vision and ambition to write musicals based on Nabokov’s controversial novel
Lolita
(
Lolita, My Love
), the history of the White House (
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
), or extra-sensory perception (
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
), however problematic these may have turned out, nor as the writer of as critically admired a film as
An American in Paris
.

    
His collaborators, too, make an extraordinary list. In addition to the eminent composers with whom he completed work—Frederick Loewe, Leonard
Bernstein, Burton Lane, Michel Legrand, Kurt Weill, Charles Strouse, and John Barry—we can also add two titans of the Broadway canon, Richard Rodgers and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he was on the verge of collaborating on musicals. Nor should we overlook Arthur Schwartz, Jule Styne, Harold Arlen, and Hoagy Carmichael, with whom Lerner discussed or (in Schwartz’s case) started projects. He wrote material for many of the greatest performers of his day, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Maurice Chevalier, Katharine Hepburn, and Barbra Streisand, and worked with the best producers (Arthur Freed, Cheryl Crawford), directors (Vincente Minnelli, Moss Hart) and designers (Cecil Beaton, Oliver Smith).

    
None of this is a guarantee of quality, of course, and Lerner himself would never have denied that
My Fair Lady
’s unprecedented success was offset by the dismal failure of shows like
Lolita, My Love
(which closed out of town),
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
(7 performances),
Carmelina
(17 performances), or
Dance a Little Closer
(1 performance). The downward trajectory of his career after 1970 led to derision in his own lifetime and beyond, to the extent that one might almost think he had never been responsible for such an important body of work. His biography, too, has been an intrusive agent in the interpretation of his output: gossip about his marriages, financial insecurity, and association with Dr. Max Jacobson has overwhelmed the reason he was famous: his musicals.

    
It is for this reason that the main focus of this book is on his work and not on his private life. By now, more than enough has been written on Lerner’s divorces, and the writer himself was very open in his attitude toward the subject in his book,
The Street Where I Live
. Almost none of the letters I found in the research for this project shed any light on his family life, so in the absence of any new information I decided not simply to turn the wheel on that subject but instead to focus on his work and working relationships, on which there is a great deal more to be said. Previous books on Lerner’s life and works—which are pretty much limited to three volumes: Gene Lees’s
Inventing Champagne
, Stephen Citron’s
The Wordsmiths
, and Edward Jablonski’s
Alan Jay Lerner: A Biography
—tend to repeat most of the same stories about his career and focus much more on the main Lerner and Loewe years than on the rest. This is a striking bias, given that after
Camelot
Lerner worked for another twenty-six years. Since the relationship with Burton Lane was never particularly close, little has ever been written about the four musicals Lerner wrote with him (
Royal Wedding, On a Clear Day, Carmelina
, and the unproduced
Huckleberry Finn
), and because most of his other musicals were unsuccessful, they have been the focus only of the most intense Broadway fanatics and connoisseurs.

    
Yet many of the letters included in this book present windows into the writer’s workshop that confirm that the level of Lerner’s imagination, technical ability, and dedication was much higher than we are usually told, even taking
into account his unquestionable flaws and failures. The correspondence is often quite personal, too, though not in the family sense. The few letters from Lerner to Loewe prove just how close they were in the mid-1950s and how formal their relationship had become by the 1980s; those to Burton Lane suggest they rarely agreed on anything. Lerner’s exchanges with Bernstein seem affectionate and deeply respectful, and he also seems to have got on very well with Arthur Freed, producer of his musicals at MGM. The correspondence with other leading figures of the day also reminds us of Lerner’s stature: he wrote with warmth to Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, four of the heroes of his youth, and in other correspondence we can also see how fondly he felt toward Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn, and Robert Goulet, all of whom starred in his musicals. The next generation was also important to him, and a few letters at the end of the book reveal details of his collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh on the London revival of
My Fair Lady
and his brief involvement with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
The Phantom of the Opera
in the final months of his life.

    
Rather than simply reproduce a stack of letters with a few explanatory footnotes, I felt it would be more useful to place them in the context of Lerner’s career. That is why the commentary in the book is quite extensive, though it is not in any way meant to provide a full biography. To compile a collection of Lerner’s correspondence was a particular challenge, because he kept very few of his own letters. He seems even to have destroyed or given away most of his manuscripts. Consequently, there is no significant archive of his work, other than a small one at the Library of Congress, which may further explain why so little research has gone into Lerner’s oeuvres. The present collection was pieced together from dozens of resources, including the private collections of many of the recipients of the letters (including Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh) and special collections at major archives and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom (including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Yale University, and the University of Southern California).