Before Rodgers and Hammerstein there was Rodgers and Hart yet most people know very little of Lorenz Hart even though they would have listened to many of his songs in every decade since the 1920s. His repertoire has been widely performed and recorded by generations of stars from Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra to Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga and many singers of renown.
Richard Linklater’s newly released biopic Blue Moon has generated a renewed interest and introspection into his life and work. Linklater refers to the film “as a little howl into the night of an artist being left behind.” The film centres on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma.
For Hart, who attended the opening night, the production represented the end of his 24-year collaboration with Rodgers and the realisation that their professional relationship was over. Rodgers would then work with Oscar Hammerstein for the next 17 years, producing many memorable musicals such as South Pacific, The Sound of Music and Carousel.
Mark Saltzman’s musical play, Falling for Make Believe: The Life and Songs of Lorenz Hart has enjoyed successful productions in Chicago and Los Angeles and has contributed to the growing retrospective interest in his work.
Lorenz Hart was often referred to as the poet laureate of Broadway given the inventiveness and sophistication of his lyrics that were reflected in his virtuosity of word and rhyme. He expressed in his songs what eluded him in his private life.
The late theatre historian Gerald Mast wrote, “What he could never say aloud, even to his closest friends in private, he let characters sing in public.” He wrote over 800 songs that expressed both the joys of finding romance as well as the heartbreak and poignancy of unrequited love and loneliness.
Songs such as My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is a Tramp, Where or When, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, Manhattan, Blue Moon, He Was Too Good To Me, Little Girl Blue, With a Song in My Heart, have become classics in the American Songbook cannon.
Lorenz Hart was born in New York to a Jewish German immigrant family in 1895 and after studying at Columbia University was employed to translate German plays and operas into English by the Schubert Publishing company.
He met Richard Rodgers in 1919 when he was 23 and Rodgers was 16. They enjoyed a 24-year successful collaboration. On meeting him Rodgers recalled, “In one afternoon I acquired a new career, a partner, a best friend and a constant source of irritation.”
The “constant source of irritation” referred to was Hart’s increasing unreliability, missing deadlines, disappearing for days at end, drinking heavily, and not being present when songs needed to be developed or reworked for new shows and revivals. Despite these challenges the team of Rodgers and Hart maintained a high level of achievement and success in their joint works.
Their many musicals and film scores included hits such as The Garrick Gaieties (1925), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), By Jupiter (1942), and Love Me Tonight (1932).
Lorenz Hart was affable, intelligent, and charming company. But beneath the facade of a generous bon vivant, a witty and charming host who regularly hosted lavish parties, and surrounded by a multitude of hangers-on, existed a deeply tormented and unhappy man.
His alcohol dependency and depression slowly increased with time and he felt afflicted by his short stature of under 5 feet. And there was the issue of his homosexuality which, in the era that he lived in, had to be concealed and suppressed.
Mabel Mercer, the acclaimed cabaret artist of his time observed: “He was lonely in the crowds that he demanded, sought, and collected around him. He was the saddest man I ever knew.”
He lived with his widowed mother until her death. Family and cultural expectations constantly reminded him why was he yet to “find a nice Jewish girl and get married.” Humorously, he told his mother, “First I need to meet the girl, Mama. Then I’ll need a stepladder.”
It was clear Hart was of a homosexual orientation who tried to conform to the heterosexual ideal by proposing to a number of singers – all who declined his offer. He was forced to be secretive about his private life often relying on his exploitative friend Milton ‘Doc’ Bender (who was vehemently loathed by Hart’s circle) to procure sexual contacts for him.
Some commentators have been critical of Hart’s lack of discipline, his distractions from his creative output, and his neglect of his work at crucial stages. But what needs to be remembered is that, for most of his adult life, he was a lost soul, unable to live an authentic life. An unloved, creative talented man struggling to stay above water. It has never been recorded that he ever had any lasting intimate relationship.
While composing their songs, Rodgers and Hart had an unconventional style of collaboration. Rodgers first wrote the melody and presented it to Hart who would then craft lyrics to fit the tune. That changed when Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein.
Rodgers would take Hammerstein’s finished lyrics and compose the music to match them. The former style is considered more demanding and required a more intense level of verbal dexterity, craftsmanship and inventiveness.
Stephen Sondheim noted that Hart “freed American lyrics from the stilted middle-European operetta technique.” In his book, Finishing the Hat, while acknowledging Hart’s brilliance, Sondheim chose a few examples to critique the “mis-stressed syllables” and “convoluted syntax” in some of his songs arguing that such sins “sacrificed meaning for rhyme” – which appears to be pedantic on Sondheim’s part.
The lyrical breadth and inventiveness of Hart is exemplified in his song Blue Moon. He wrote four versions to the same tune. Two were either cut from film scores or rejected by producers. A third set of lyrics The Bad in Every Man was sung by Shirley Ross in the 1934 film Manhattan Melodrama. The following year it underwent another lyric change and became the classic romantic ballad Blue Moon.
In one iteration it was presented as: Oh, Lord, what is the matter with me / I’m just permitted to see / The bad in every man. And in the version that became a classic: Blue moon / you saw me standing alone / without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own.
Shirley Ross singing The Bad in Every Man
His biographer, Gary Marmorstein, noted, “Hart’s lyrics disclose what it’s like to be excluded … to be outside looking in … to feel undesirable and insignificant” as illustrated in Falling in love with love is falling for make believe / Falling in love with love is playing the fool and I fell in love with love one night when the moon was full / I was unwise with eyes unable to see / I fell in love with love, with love everlasting / But love fell out with me.
A sense of resignation, regret and wistfulness permeated many of his songs that widely resonated with audiences and privately reflected his inner world. In A Ship Without a Sail he declares: Still alone, still at sea / Still there’s no one to care for me / When there’s no hand to hold my hand / Life is a loveless tale / For a ship without a sail.
The lyrics in Where or When evoke a mystical sense of déjà vu, the possibility of finding new love, or the feeling when you’ve met someone for the first time as though you have known them in a previous life: Sometimes you think you’ve lived before / All that you live today / Things you do come back to you / As though they knew the way.
The 1930 hit song Ten Cen’s A Dance was inducted in the US Library of Congress Registry of culturally and historically important works. The song powerfully tells the story of a dancer lamenting the toughness of her job at a dance hall: Ten cents a dance / Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown. … Sometimes I think I’ve found my hero / But it’s a queer romance.
Multiple performers over several generations such as Nina Simone, Julie London, Jessye Norman, and in particular Frank Sinatra in an iconic version, have played homage to his 1938 song Spring Is Here. Hart was able to capture in merely two stanzas the emotional pathos and wistfulness of unrequited love. Spring is here / Why doesn’t the breeze delight me? / Stars appear / Why doesn’t the night invite me? / Maybe it’s because nobody loves me / Spring is here, I hear.
In 1950, six different recordings of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered from Pal Joey made the Top 20 list of most-played songs on radio in that year. The song encompasses the emotional roller-coaster of someone besotted, love-struck and confused by their lustful romantic flame. I’ll sing to him / Each spring to him / And worship the trousers that cling to him / Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I.
Yet, as the song concludes, they know it will not last: Romance, finis. / Your chance, finis. / Those ants that invaded my pants, finis. / Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – no more.
The song is included in multiple movies and TV shows such as Dynasty, The Crown and The History Boys. A complete unedited version of the song, with its risqué original lyrics, is immortalised by Ella Fitzgerald (over 10 million views on multiple YouTube links). And who could forget Virginia Gay’s dazzling performance of that song in the Broadway concert at the Sydney Opera House in May 2023.
In I Wish I Were in Love Again, Hart uses humour and irony as lovers reminisce about longing to be back together again while being apart: The broken dates, the endless waits / The lovely loving and the hateful hates / The conversation with the flying plates / I wish I were in love again.
In 1943 Hart added two new songs for the much-anticipated Broadway revival of A Connecticut Yankee. The first was a tender and yearning ballad Can’t You Do a Friend a Favour? Unfortunately, this touching song has remained largely obscure in the Rodgers and Hart repertoire with only a handful of recordings. Like many of his other poignant songs it deserves to be rediscovered. Can’t you do a friend a favour? / Can’t you fall in love with me? / Life alone can lose its flavour, / You could make it sweet, you see!
Eileen Farrell Singing Can’t You Do A Friend A Favour
The second addition To Keep My Love Alive was to become his last song and a popular hit and showstopper in which the character of Morgan Le Fay played by Vivienne Segal (who he once proposed to) sings of the multitude of ways in which she terminated her many husbands in a witty and humorous parody. I married many men, a ton of them / Because I was untrue to none of them / Because I bumped off every one of them / To keep my love alive.
The last eight months of Hart’s life in 1943 were dramatic, eventful, and etched in pathos and alcoholic decline. Oklahoma premiered on March 31. Four weeks later his mother died on April 25. He was so devastated by her death that his drinking got worse.
He turned up to the opening night revival of A Connecticut Yankee on November 17 heavily drunk and rowdy and was removed from the theatre. A few days later he was found lying in the gutter in a drunken paralysis. Friends took him to hospital where he died of pneumonia on November 22. He was 48 years of age. A nurse who cared for him in his final days recalled that his last words were “What have I lived for?”
Lorenz Hart’s life was characteristic of gay people in the 1920s and 1930s, forced to live in the repressed shadows of society’s margins with no avenues for their acceptance, or the formation of an open life, or visible same sex relationships.
There was no such thing as coming out, protection before the law, equality, sexual liberation. After all it was 20 years since the death of Oscar Wilde and homophobia remained entrenched throughout society.
In contrast to Hart’s era, future generations of gay composers (such as Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb) never had to live in the shadows or forced to hide their sexual orientations or compromise their identity to fit into a heteronormative world. Their open and unsuppressed lives helped them produce great masterworks for musical theatre.
The other imminent gay contemporaries of Hart were Cole Porter and Noel Coward. Both had a less concealing and more sexually daring approach. They often included salacious double entendre in their lyrics such as Porter’s You’re the Top, Anything Goes, I Get a Kick Out of You or Coward’s Mad About the Boy. Stephen Sondheim wrote, “Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart are the two acknowledged gay lyricists in the American pantheon. But Hart’s style conceals his homosexuality, Porter’s parades it.”
There is no doubt that Lorenz Hart was a tragic figure throughout his life: unfulfilled, conflicted, and deeply unhappy BUT – contrary to what many have argued – his torment cannot be simply explained by his homosexuality or reduced to his alcoholism or depression. A broader historical context is needed.
Instead, it was because the way homosexuality was negated by society, by mainstream culture, and the way homophobia was institutionalised through the criminal justice system, draconian laws, religious prejudice, and regressive mental health professions that caused his, (and generations like him), despair, self-loathing, and misery.
His own family suppressed his struggles and in the 1948 bio film Words and Music, his life story was ridiculously sanitised and distorted from who the real Lorenz Hart was.
There is also a shocking quote from Richard Rodgers who told his lead singer Diahann Carroll in 1962, while rehearsing his new musical No Strings (for which he composed both the words and music) “You can’t imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for that little fag.”
The callousness of that quote, from the person who collaborated with him for over two decades, is both revealing and indicative of the latent homophobia and prejudice that surrounded Hart.
All the great singers from every era have kept his songs alive and flowing. In every decade since his death over 80 years ago, Lorenz Hart’s songs are still being recorded on albums, performed in cabaret rooms and concert halls around the world, included in film scores, infused in choral and operatic renditions, and reimagined in jazz and other musical genres.
Despite a lifetime of setbacks and obstacles, Lorenz Hart gave us some of the greatest songs in the American songbook tradition. Out of profound suffering came a litany of beautiful poetic and memorable songs. For that we should be forever grateful. If this article could sing back to him, it would use his own words to say:
My funny valentine,
Sweet comic valentine,
You make me smile with my heart.
Your looks are laughable,
Unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favourite work of art.
Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?
But don’t change a hair for me,
Not if you care for me.
Stay, little valentine, stay.
Each day is Valentine’s Day.
Revisiting Lorenz Hart – The Poet of Broadway
Peter Khoury is a Sydney Writer. He has written extensively on the work of Stephen Sondheim.
Images: Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (supplied) | Shirley Ross singing The Bad in Every Man (film still) | Eileen Farrell (sourced)