Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rogers - Hardcover

Secrest, Meryle

 
9780375401640: Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rogers
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375401644 ISBN 13: 9780375401640
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A portrait of the composer behind such Broadway musicals as "Oklahoma!," "South Pacific," and "The King and I" describes his childhood, his collaboration with Lorenz Hart, his musical success with Oscar Hammerstein, and personal struggles.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Meryle Secrest was born and educated in Bath, England, and now lives in Washington, D.C. She has written biographies of Romaine Brooks, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, and Salvador Dalí, among others.

Aus dem Klappentext

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers–more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable–Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood –seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.<br><br>Now Meryle Secrest–biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein–brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.<br><br>She writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operetta―of Franz Lehar and Jerome Kern. She follows his close and wonderfully productive working relationship with Lorenz Hart–a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hart’s drinking. She evokes Rodgers’s triumphant second collaboration, with the gifted–and happily stable–Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and more. She explores Rodgers’s own problems with alcohol as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his forty-nine-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.<br><br><i>Somewhere for Me</i> is both a lively portrait of the American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody, and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.

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Chapter One

BLUE ROOM

Here comes Jacob Levy trotting along the street, a tiny little man in a neat black suit and fussy bow tie, carrying a cane and sporting a white panama with a surprisingly rakish brim. It is 1926, and Richard Rodgers's grandfather on his mother's side is spending the summer in Long Beach, New York, walking down an expanse of sidewalk bordered by identical lawns, a single Model T Ford parked behind him on that ramrod-straight, deserted street. Now here is Will, Dick's physician father, in the home movies Richard Rodgers began to take with his fancy new film camera, the one you wound up by hand. Will, too, is spending his summer in Long Beach, and stands on the steps of their cottage, red-haired, handsome, and blue-eyed, a smudge of moustache on his upper lip, in his starched-collar shirt and his suit with matching waistcoat, laughing uproariously at some forgotten joke. And here is Mamie, Dick's mother, with her flat, blunt nose, close-set eyes, pince-nez, and distinct gap between her front teeth. Even in those days of blurry and faded film one somehow knows it is a dusty afternoon in high summer, and only city folk get dressed up in hats and gloves to have their pictures taken.

Now the golden boy himself appears, towering (even though of modest height) over his tiny mother, his hair glistening in the sunlight, his lips parted in a curving smile, with his beautifully modeled forehead and the slight cleft in his chin, the kind of face to be found in magazine illustrations of the period advertising cigars, cognacs, Cadillacs, and crossings on the Cunard Line. His suit is something formal and dark and the shirt collar is fashionably stiff and confining, but his tie tells another story: it is daringly patterned with dots and can only be bright red. He leans solicitously over his mother and the tree under which they are posing throws a pattern of light on his cheekbones and the edge of his lapel.

Soon they are on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, whither they have come for the tryout of a new show. Here is Dick, the brim of his hat pulled down snappily over one eye, with his mother on his arm. She is in mourning for her father, lately dead, and looks, in her mountainous black hat, as solemn as an owl. Next to them, in a line advancing toward the camera, are Lew Fields, the famous comedian-turned-producer who backed so many of Rodgers's first shows, and Lew's son Herbert, Rodgers's collaborator on the books. At the far right is the impeccably dressed Lorenz Hart, Rodgers's brilliant lyricist, whose Homburg hat and perfectly tailored double-breasted coat only serve to underline the contrast between his manly head and stunted body. Now we are at the tennis courts, where the agile form of Richard Rodgers, in faultless white flannels, can be seen serving and volleying with the rapidity of a dragonfly. Next we are on a lake and he is lounging in a canoe, wearing a fashionable two-piece swimsuit (striped, sleeveless top, white belt, dark trunks), with his half-smile, his widow's peak of immaculate dark hair parted just off-center, the ever-present cigarette between his fingers. Or he is standing on the dock beside Bobbie Perkins, who sang "Mountain Greenery" in the Garrick Gaieties of 1926, his arm around her waist, a charming scene disrupted by his handsome older brother Mortimer. Morty interposes himself between them and triumphantly carries off the girl.

Next he is on a picnic in Canada, wearing a beret, eating sandwiches and drinking from a thermos flask, then proudly displaying the fish he has just caught. Or he is in Cannes, coming around the corner with a beauty on each arm. On one side is Corinne Griffith and on the other, Kendall Lee, then married to Jules Glaenzer, vice-president of Cartier's. Rodgers is on the Riviera to attend some kind of lavish party at the invitation of Glaenzer, youngish and handsome and wearing what looks like a silk kimono. For Richard Rodgers, ambitious young composer-about-town, has been taken up by café society and invited everywhere. And no wonder, since although he is only in his mid-twenties, he has had several hit musicals and has taken bachelor's quarters, three rooms on the nineteenth floor with a wrap-around terrace, in a deluxe apartment hotel called the Lombardy at 11 East Fifty-sixth Street, with its two-story-high Spanish Renaissance lobby and hand-modeled stucco walls with travertine quoins and jambs. There he has decorated his study as befits his status: light red draperies, cork walls (a daring touch), Moderne furniture, and the latest in Art Deco built-in bookcases. Writing to his future wife, Dorothy Feiner, he said that a divan and bookcase had just arrived and he was biting his nails with anxiety. "I suspect it's rather successful, but you'll know!" he wrote. Charles, his valet, who insisted on the French pronunciation of his name, did everything without being told. One night Rodgers brought home a congenial group after a prizefight, and they sat around singing songs and strolled about on his spacious terrace. Charles made sandwiches, scrambled eggs, and sausages and served champagne. He left the gathering at 4:30 a.m. and "showed up again at nine-thirty to give me breakfast, with the same smile," Rodgers wrote. "Dot, what a way to live! Expensive, but so nice."

The year was 1929, and a decade had gone by since that hot summer day when he and Larry Hart had traveled out to Rockaway to play some of their first tunes for Lew Fields. That same summer the two of them stood in the back of the Casino Theatre at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street to hear Eve Lynn and Alan Hale sing "Any Old Place with You." It was 1919, the musical was A Lonely Romeo, and Rodgers's first song had been heard on Broadway; he was just seventeen. Years of struggle followed until the big chance came with The Garrick Gaieties of 1925, and the writing team of Rodgers and Hart was launched. By the late 1920s newspapers were publishing drawings of Rodgers, the composer of such musicals as Peggy-Ann and A Connecticut Yankee and such songs as "My Heart Stood Still," "Manhattan," "Here in My Arms," "The Girl Friend," "Thou Swell," and "This Funny World." The headline was "The Young Master of Melody." A short film had even been made, with Rodgers and Hart as the stars, celebrating their rapid rise. And everyone was singing their songs.

We'll have a blue room,
A new room,
For two room,
Where ev'ry day's a holiday
Because you're married to me.

("The Blue Room")

Spring of 1929 began, appropriately enough, with a February tryout for Spring Is Here at the Shubert Theatre, Philadelphia; it moved to the Alvin Theatre, New York, the following month. The musical was based on a book by Owen Davis, which he had adapted from his play Shotgun Wedding, and, like most confections of the period, told a forgettable story about a boy in love with a girl in love with somebody else until the last act. It ran for 104 performances, not a very prepossessing number, although the reviewers had been kind, and was notable for at least one wonderful melody, "With a Song in My Heart." It was also notable for its bevy of pretty girls, called "Ladies of the Ensemble" in the program, every one vivacious and charming and with perfect thighs. Rodgers lovingly photographed them all in their silk negligées or their garden outfits of white cloche hats and polka-dot dresses, or their Pierrette costumes-it was the moment for puffed sleeves and tiers of frills on skirts-in which they pouted, pirouetted, and drooped charmingly against doorways. The early home movies are full of such pretty girls, and Dorothy Rodgers, who later provided the commentary, was forbearing....

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375401644
ISBN 13 
9780375401640
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
457
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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ISBN 10:  1557835810 ISBN 13:  9781557835819
Verlag: Applause, 2002
Softcover