The Musical Half of Two Brilliant Theater Songwriting Teams

In the 1920s and 1930s, during the first half of his phenomenal career as a composer of songs, Richard Rodgers worked with the dazzlingly witty and sophisticated lyricist Lorenz Hart. In the second half, starting in 1943, Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II, whose splendidly heartfelt lyrics provided a different, if equally fertile, kind of inspiration. One could easily spark an interminable debate as to which partnership produced Rodgers’ best work. At one point, opinion seemed to favor the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein, both for creating a total theatrical experience in shows like “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Flower Drum Song” and “The Sound of Music,” and for the exuberance of songs like “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” “Many a New Day,” “I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “I Enjoy Being a Girl” and “Climb Every Mountain.”

Subsequently, a second school of opinion revived the case for the superior inventiveness and sparkle of the Rodgers and Hart songs, which include such gems as “Manhattan,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “Falling in Love With Love,” “Blue Moon,” “Sing for Your Supper,” “My Heart Stood Still” and “Ten Cents a Dance.” But why quibble over which are better when we’re lucky to have both?

Rodgers’ collaboration with Hart grew increasingly difficult, ending with Hart’s tragic death in 1943. Unusually short, inclined to pursue women who he knew would reject him and predominantly homosexual anyway, Hart ended up drowning himself in drink. But even in the depths of his dissipation, he managed to write something as ingenious and funny as his last lyric, “To Keep My Love Alive.” That same year saw the opening of Rodgers’ first project with Hammerstein, “Oklahoma!,” and his commitment to musical theater survived Hammerstein’s death. He wrote both music and lyrics in “No Strings” and collaborated, less successfully, with younger lyricists like Stephen Sondheim.

Unlike the brilliant, mercurial Hart or the gruff, genial Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers does not seem, at first glance, a very colorful character. Where Hart’s alcoholism resulted in his passing out in public, disappearing for days or showing up at a restaurant wearing nothing beneath his overcoat, Rodgers’ abuse of the same substance simply caused him to withdraw. Where Hart’s pursuit of sailors and lowlifes resulted in bruises and worse, Rodgers’ pursuit of chorus girls was (relatively) painless and discreet. And although Rodgers supported liberal causes, he was not as deeply committed or as outspoken as Hammerstein on their behalf

.But first glances can be misleading. For, as may be gleaned from Meryle Secrest’s serviceable but less than satisfying biography, “Somewhere for Me,” Rodgers was an exceedingly complex man: suave, dapper, polished, yet painfully insecure; acutely sensitive, yet on occasion hard as nails. Born in New York in 1902, Rodgers was allowed, from the age of 9, to go to the theater by himself, and there he spent almost every Saturday afternoon. “He said years later,” Secrest tells us, “that he had only to walk into a theatre to find himself in a good mood. ‘If I’m unhappy,’ he said, ‘it takes my unhappiness away; if I’m happy, I get happier.’” The musical theater was his life--or the most vital part of it: “When I get an idea for a song, I can hear it in the orchestra; I can smell the scenery; I can see the kind of actor who’ll sing the song and the audience sitting there listening to it.”

After a few setbacks, the team of Rodgers and Hart quickly rose to fame and success in the 1920s. By the time Rodgers embarked on married life with the beautiful, poised and intelligent Dorothy Feiner, the young couple were leading a glamorous social life. Secrest begins with a verbal snapshot of the stylish young couple at play. In a rather heavy-handed way, the rest of the book digs beneath that surface to uncover the less attractive reality of a strained marriage with coldness on both sides. Secrest has had the somewhat double-edged benefit of having found unusually frank and forthcoming help from the Rodgers’ two daughters, Mary Rodgers Guettel and Linda Rodgers Emory. Honest as such testimony may be, a child’s view of a parent, like a parent’s view of a child, makes for a rather limited perspective. Yet, for all that, Secrest does not tell us much about Rodgers’ reaction to Mary’s hit musical “Once Upon a Mattress.” Nor does she even mention the marital advice column that Mary and Dorothy wrote for McCall’s magazine.

An experienced if somewhat pedestrian biographer, Secrest has done solid research and made some attempt to provide a balanced portrait. But, although she dutifully assembles the testimony of various people who knew Rodgers, she doesn’t really offer much insight into his character. As a biographer, her general mistake is to confuse painting the subjects’ warts with uncovering their inner selves. Her portrait of Rodgers lacks the spark of imaginative empathy that might have brought him to life. The book is notably deficient in narrative drive: What carries the reader along is not the biographer’s storytelling ability but simply the fact that the reader is interested in Rodgers in the first place and, hence, willing to plow through Secrest’s uninspired (but not uninformative) chronicle to learn more.