The Heart to Hart : LORENZ HART: A Poet on Broadway, <i> By Frederick Nolan (Oxford University Press: $25; 390 pp.)</i>

Lorenz Hart remains as elusive as his songs are present. He had a special quality as a lyricist, urbane and witty, yet saved from cynicism by a helpless attraction to all the things he knew he should be cynical about. Something about Hart’s lyrics inspires the listener with a feeling for how difficult and singular the ordinary is, how hard happiness is to come by, how wonderful to imagine and how worth cherishing whatever moments of it you can have. Frederick Nolan has written a narrative account of Hart’s life and career that fills in many gaps and corrects many mistakes. The interviews he conducted with many of Hart’s contemporaries enliven and authenticate the book, yet he has missed his chance to write a definitive biography.

Lorenz “Larry” Hart (1895-1943) was a child of the Jewish urban middle class, albeit from a bohemian exception to that straight-laced rule. His father, Max Hart, was a successful if shady entrepreneur who supported his family in high style and instilled in his son an early and lasting appreciation for the high life, especially the theater; he also demonstrated that the best way to let money slip through your fingers was to be open handed. Larry grew up hating his looks, his short stature and his gnome-like appearance. He was precocious and literary; the trunk he took to summer camp was all books and no clothes, earning him the nickname “Shakespeare.” Fixed very early on writing verse and lyrics and plays, he knew that the theater was his destiny.

Hart met his fate in the supremely talented melodist Richard Rodgers. They were opposites, Rodgers as self-possessed and sensible as Hart was restless and imprudent, as straight as Hart was gay. Nolan helpfully corrects the Rodgers’ version of their initial partnership. Rodgers portrayed Hart as unreliable and himself as the anchor of the pair. But Rodgers was 17 and Hart was 24 when they met, Rodgers a novice and Hart “the one with the experience, the contacts, the know-how. It was from his fertile mind, not Rodgers’, that the titles for their songs, the sketches for their revues, the stories for their shows sprang.”

For all Nolan’s useful correcting of the record, however, he has failed to pierce the mystery of the man whom chanteuse Mabel Mercer called “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hart was a tormented man. Nolan attributes this to his height, his homosexuality and his alcoholism. Hart’s homosexuality is presented here in a superficial and sinister light. There is simply no excuse for a biography of a major gay creative artist like Hart that perpetuates the ignorance about homosexuality that made his life so hard to bear. His longtime gay crony “Doc” Bender is described as “unashamedly homosexual” and as someone who would have “an increasingly pernicious effect on Larry’s life.” Hart supposedly liked Hollywood because in such a sexually various atmosphere, “Larry’s personal hang-ups must have seemed considerably less oppressive.” When Nolan writes about a change in Hart’s personal life around 1938 from “an erratic but fairly ordered existence” into a “frenetic round” of parties, drinking “and other things,” the “other things” mean Hart’s life as a gay man. Nolan quotes observers of the gay circles Hart moved in and he comments on the odd dualism of public scorn and private exclusivity experienced in those circles, but he has no interest in moving beyond the most conventional understanding of that double life.

There is no point in continuing the pretense of ignorance about the kinds of places Hart “disappeared” to when he was not with his family or straight friends. Like Stephen Citron’s 1993 study of Hart’s gifted gay peers, “Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates” (which contains the amazing statement: “Coming from such a classically twisted psychological situation, it is not surprising that both Noel and Cole were homosexual”), Nolan’s biography of Hart--wittingly or not--perpetuates a new version of old stereotypes. To write such a biography today, one must almost willfully refuse to take advantage of contemporary knowledge of the history of gay men in American culture. Readers who really want to know where Hart “disappeared” to can consult George Chauncey’s “Gay New York.”

Regarding Hart’s (or anyone else’s) sexual orientation, it is fair to ask what difference it made. In Hart’s case, there is reason to think it made a big difference. His increasing inability to concentrate on his work--he eventually had to be almost forced to write--and his steady refusal to do anything about his drinking or finally to take care of himself add up to a picture of torment that can be attributed in considerable part to his feelings as a middle-class Jewish gay man in a subculture and a society that wouldn’t accept him, let alone help him to accept himself as gay.

Nolan has written Hart’s life rather than a study of his lyrics. But the songs give a clue to why being gay and not comfortable about it, even in the way that Cole Porter and Noel Coward, among others, were, was part of Larry Hart’s immortality as well as of his personal tragedy. For it is the very yearning quality of his love lyrics and the wisdom of this apparently lovelorn man that made him the classic American troubadour. Forced to witness conventional romance from the outside, Hart saw what was sexy, sad, poetic, funny, ironic and dear about the romantic yearning of the human heart. Our romance doesn’t need a thing but this funny gay Valentine.