Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters (3 page)

    
A year later, Lerner contributed to the 93rd annual Hasty Pudding Show,
Fair Enough
. This time, the book was written in collaboration with Morgan O. Preston and David Lannon, and Lerner shared the score with Elliot Forbes,
²⁸
Francis C. Lawrance,
²⁹
and Sherwood Rollins;
³⁰
no less a figure than Leroy Anderson, future composer of
Sleigh Ride, The Typewriter
, and the Broadway musical
Goldilocks
, was the conductor.
³¹
The review in the
Crimson
indicated that this show was more successful than
So Proudly We Hail!
had been. “The Hasty Pudding has gone Broadway and vanished are the touches of Minsky that labelled past shows as ‘college,’” it was remarked, and the first night was given “a tumultuous reception.”

    
Whereas
Proudly
had represented a departure from previous Hasty Pudding shows in its tone of political satire,
Fair Enough
returned to lighter themes and dealt with “the troubles of Homer Leland in raising enough cash to stage the World’s Fair.”
³²
The production gave birth to Lerner’s second and third published songs, “From Me to You” and “Home Made Heaven,” both of which are slightly generic but very charming. Typical of his gently witty writing is the opening line of the verse of the latter song: “Didn’t you ever dream you owned a palace/Or were an Alice/In Wonderland?” Lerner was the only member of the team to contribute to the music, lyrics, and script, hinting at the emergence of his all-encompassing theatrical vision. The show toured extensively and to great acclaim, stopping off in Boston, Providence, Hot Springs, Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, before reaching the Waldorf on April 8. Lerner’s
ballad “Home Made Heaven” was singled out in the
New York Times
as a highlight of the evening.
³³

    
As if to confirm that Lerner had set his sights firmly on the theater as a career, in October 1939 it was revealed that he had co-written the score with Stanley Miller (of
So Proudly We Hail!
) for “an intimate revue” called
The Little Dog Laughed
. Edward Clarke Lilley
³⁴
was slated to produce, and the sketches had “mostly” been written by Arthur Pierson,
³⁵
who would go on to be involved in Lerner and Loewe’s first Broadway musical.
³⁶
Nothing much seems to have happened with the show, but its announcement meant Lerner’s entrance into the theatrical gossip column of the
New York Times
, in which his name would be a regular fixture for the next four decades. The next we hear of him is in March
1940, when he announced his forthcoming marriage to Ruth O’Day Boyd, a fellow New Yorker, following his graduation from Harvard. They were married on June 26, and while continuing to pursue his theatrical ambitions Lerner worked as a scriptwriter for radio, later crediting himself with creating over 500 programs between 1940 and 1945.
³⁷
Two further unpublished songs in the Library of Congress’s copyright deposits relate to these events: he wrote the lyrics and music for “Evening at the Stork,” evidently inspired by his visits to the Stork Club with Boyd, and “Cities Service Signature” is a radio theme tune for which he wrote the music. Again, neither piece is of huge artistic consequence but these early examples of Lerner’s work help to reveal the length of his apprenticeship, a period that is often mistakenly thought to date only from his first professional musical.

    
That show,
Life of the Party
, marked the start of Lerner’s greatest collaboration, namely, with the German composer Frederick Loewe. He was fond of telling how they came to meet in the summer of 1942 at the Lambs Club, where he had also met and been encouraged by his mentor, Lorenz Hart:

    
I was having lunch in the grill when a short, well-built, tightly strung man with a large head and hands and immensely dark circles under his eyes strode to a few feet from my table and stopped short. His destination was the men’s room and he had gone the wrong way. He turned to get back on the right road and suddenly saw me. He stared for a moment. I knew who he was. His name was Frederick Loewe, Fritz to the membership, a Viennese-born, ex-concert pianist and a talented, struggling composer. He came to my table and sat down. ‘You’re Lerner, aren’t you?’ he asked. I could not deny it. ‘You write lyrics don’t you?’ he continued. ‘I try,’ I replied. ‘Well,’ he said ‘would you like to write with me?’ I immediately said, ‘Yes.’ And we went to work.”
³⁸

Alternative versions of the meeting have been told, changing the date or hinting at Lerner’s initial reluctance, but they are all credibly based on their meeting at some point at the Lambs Club, of which they were both members.
³⁹
In any case, their first assignment did not require them to “go to work” quite in the way Lerner suggests.
Life of the Party
was a revision of a show called
Patricia
for a Detroit theater company, which had been produced the previous November in San Francisco by Henry Duffy.
Patricia
itself was an adaptation of Barry Conners’s
largely forgotten comedy
The Patsy
(1925).
⁴⁰
The idea was to take a few songs from an earlier piece by Loewe and his regular lyricist Earle Crooker, called
Salute to Spring
(1937), and redraft them for
Life of the Party
, along with some new material. Lerner’s input was only on the book, since Crooker was responsible for the lyrics, which is why this is by no means the first “Lerner and Loewe” musical; after all, Lerner’s lyrics would become integral to the formula of their later shows.
Life of the Party
opened at Detroit’s Wilson Theatre on October 8 with a cast including Dorothy Stone, Charles Collins, and Charles Ruggles, and it ran until December 5.

    
It is clear from a notification in the
New York Times
that there was no plan for the show to have an afterlife.
⁴¹
But it hardly mattered, for Lerner and Loewe were now destined to act as a team for the foreseeable future. Back in New York, they set to work on a new musical,
What’s Up?
, to be produced by the bandleader Mark Warnow.
⁴²
As with
Life of the Party
, there was a third, familiar collaborator: Arthur Pierson, with whom Lerner had written the unproduced
The Little Dog Laughed
several years previously. Pierson’s obvious inclination toward farce is betrayed in the book for
What’s Up?
, which he co-wrote with Lerner: the plot describes how an aircraft carrying an Eastern potentate makes a crash landing in the grounds of Miss Langley’s School for Girls, where the passengers are forced to be quarantined due to an outbreak of measles. Recounting the plot in the
New York Times
, Sam Zolotow added with a hint of sarcasm that “For good measure, the President’s voice is introduced on the telephone and he, being a good sport, even obliges by bringing the lovers together at the final curtain. What more can anyone ask?”
⁴³

    
In spite of the presence of ballet legend George Balanchine
⁴⁴
on the production team (choreography and staging), much of the show carried the atmosphere of a slapstick revue, starring a mostly young cast alongside popular comedian Jimmy Savo,
⁴⁵
who was responsible for much of the broad comedy. Rehearsals began in September 1943 and the show opened at Broadway’s National Theatre on November 11 after tryouts in Wilmington and Philadelphia.
⁴⁶
Unfortunately,
the reviews were by no means kind: Lewis Nichols found it “curiously lacking” and added that while “No one expects a musical comedy book to rank as high literature…something a little this side of embarrassing does no harm.”
⁴⁷
The show ran only 63 performances and barely lasted to the New Year.
⁴⁸

    
But undeterred by a second disappointment, Lerner and Loewe set about writing their next piece,
The Day before Spring
. This time, Lerner was to write the book and lyrics on his own, and regardless of the failure of
What’s Up?
the progress of the new show was regularly charted in the press. In mid-November 1944, the two were ready to announce their new project: “Stanley Gilkey, general manager for Guthrie McClintic, says he will have first call on a musical comedy which Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe are working on entitled ‘The Day before Spring.’ Mr Gilkey would like John Murray Anderson to do the staging.”
⁴⁹

    
However, five months later it was revealed that John C. Wilson,
⁵⁰
who had enjoyed recent success as the producer of
Bloomer Girl
, would direct and produce the show, which was due to appear in September.
⁵¹
In June 1945, backing was provided for
Spring
by MGM, which put up $75,000 (half the production costs) and signed a deal for the movie rights, too. Eventually, this would reap $250,000 for Lerner and Loewe (though they did not each receive that figure, as Loewe later claimed).
⁵²
The article announcing the deal is revelatory: Irene Dunne
⁵³
was mentioned as a potential star for the eventual film adaptation, while for the stage version Wilson had hired Bill Johnson (for the lead male), Robert Davison (scenery), and Miles White (costumes). Even more tantalizingly, the first mention is made of the next Lerner-Loewe musical, tentatively called
Rigadoon
. Wilson had an option on the show, whose plot was vaguely revealed to deal with “a couple of Americans in the Scottish Highlands.”

    
That the concept for
Brigadoon
had been determined before
Spring
was completed is important in light of Lerner’s later account of his career progression. He says that in
Spring
he “set out to try to combine the dramatic lyrics of Hammerstein with the wit and tenderness of Larry [Hart],” resulting in “The sort of play George Kaufman used to call a ‘succes d’estime,’ i.e., a success that runs out of steam.” He continues that “then I got off the track” and both “
Brigadoon
and
Paint Your Wagon
were much more along the
Oklahoma[!]‌
road than the one I had set out on.”
⁵⁴
Lerner tries to imply that with
Spring
he started to explore the kind of theater that he would later return to and perfect in
My Fair Lady
. Yet it is clear that
Brigadoon
was conceived more in conjunction with its predecessor than with the show that followed it, which perhaps helps us to understand it as being more a part of his experimental phase than might be assumed.

    
Casting for
Spring
took a long time, and the female leads (Irene Manning
⁵⁵
and Patricia Marshall)
⁵⁶
were only hired in August, pushing back the production schedule.
⁵⁷
Rehearsals started on September 24,
⁵⁸
with tryouts in New Haven (October 25) and Boston (October 30).
⁵⁹
A scheduled three-week extended additional tryout in Philadelphia was canceled when Wilson’s Broadway theater of preference (the National) suddenly became vacant, allowing the production to open on November 22, 1945.
⁶⁰
The attenuated preview period might have been partly to blame for some of the show’s weaknesses, which had been noted even in its previews: an anonymous reviewer from the
Harvard Crimson
reported in early November that although it was “superior entertainment” it was “burdened by a book that gets it off to a slow start.” The acting of the two leads was also severely criticized, suggesting that casting strong singers rather than actors might have been the fault rather than the writing.
⁶¹
This perspective is likewise apparent in some of the Broadway reviews: Lewis Nichols, for instance, notes that Manning, Johnson, and Marshall “know how to sing” Loewe’s “very pleasant tunes” but “Albert [
sic
] Jay Lerner…has chosen to be austere rather than light.”
⁶²
Weak acting is again mentioned in a later interview with Maurice Abravanel,
⁶³
the show’s conductor, who thought it was “very interesting” but “badly cast.”
⁶⁴
The heavy tone may also have been partly due to the direction, which was shared between Edward Padula
⁶⁵
(book direction) and Wilson (staging).

    
In spite of the mixed reception, the show certainly put Lerner and Loewe on the map. In February 1946, MGM took up their option on the screen rights, and the movie version went into pre-production for an early summer filming. Tom Helmore
⁶⁶
was to repeat his stage role, and Arthur Hornblow Jr. was set to produce.
⁶⁷
But this extra publicity failed to improve the show’s fortunes, and in mid-March Wilson had to declare the production would close on April 14 after only 165 performances, though it went on to have a brief run in Chicago.
⁶⁸
The financial impact of the early closure hit Wilson hard, and in June he declared he would produce no more musicals for the time being, thereby relinquishing his right to
Rigadoon
.
⁶⁹
Inevitably, this delayed the show’s premiere, though other producers were interested. In September, Billy Rose
⁷⁰
and Oscar Hammerstein II discussed a co-production of
Brigadoon
, as it was now called,
⁷¹
but Lerner felt that Rose’s demanding contract (which included the right to call in other authors to add material) “negated Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves.”
⁷²
Instead, Lerner took the project to Cheryl Crawford,
⁷³
one of the powerful managing directors of the American Repertory Theatre, and she immediately signed up to produce the show. She announced the project on October 2 and had already managed to engage Agnes de Mille (of
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
fame)
⁷⁴
for the choreography—quite a coup, considering De Mille’s stature at the time, but perhaps also one of the reasons Lerner felt
Brigadoon
led him more in the direction of
Oklahoma!
than he had wanted.