He was a giant who stood less than 5 feet tall. He made poetry look easy, which is why his lyrics are, in lines he wrote in 1932 for Bing Crosby, "easy to remember/ But so hard to forget."
Lorenz Hart, born on May 2 100 years ago, mastered musical comedy in a 25-year collaboration with Richard Rodgers. Before he died, at 47, he wrote hundreds of songs that redefined romance. His interior rhymes were ingenious and unmatchable; he turned his wit on himself and his looks, "laughable, unphotographable." In the verse to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," he calls love "this half-pint imitation."He combined the inventiveness of Ira Gershwin, the bittersweet wit of Cole Porter and the simplicity of Irving Berlin. After his death, in 1943, many peers could have quoted a famous Hart line: "If they asked me, I could write a book."
"Larry Hart was one of the great milestone geniuses in the history of American musical theater. In a sense he invented it, he started it," said director Joshua Logan. P.G. Wodehouse, the novelist and lyricist, was only slightly more restrained. "Larry Hart was always good. If there is a bad lyric of his in existence, I have not come across it," Wodehouse said. "He was the first to make any real assault on the intelligence of the songwriting public. He brought something quite new into a rather tired business."
In 1935, for example, Hart wrote what is now a standard (favored by Carly Simon) by dismantling the June-moon-croon rock pile: "My romance/Doesn't have to have a moon in the sky/My romance/Doesn't need a blue lagoon standing by."
He was born on New York's Lower East Side, the son of Danish and German immigrants. His writing at Columbia University led to his meeting with Rodgers, a composer whose methodical working habits would clash with his. After they met in 1919, Rodgers recalled, "I left Hart's house having acquired in one afternoon a career, a best friend and a source of permanent irritation."
Their first hit song symbolized the magnetism of New York in the 1920s. "Manhattan" glamorized the city's mundane precincts, "the Bronx and Staten Island too." When audiences demanded more, Hart responded with four refrains, including "The city's clamor can never spoil/The dreams of a boy and goil/We'll turn Manhattan/
Into an isle of joy."
In the 1930s, every Rodgers and Hart production was a hit, as were most of the songs. For "Babes in Arms" in 1937, they wrote "Where or When," "I Wish I Were in Love Again," "My Funny Valentine," "Johnny One-Note" and "The Lady Is a Tramp."
Like the Gershwins, Porter and other Broadway writers who worked in Hollywood, Rodgers and Hart loathed the studio moguls. In 1940, with "Take Him," Hart took revenge: "His thoughts are seldom consecutive./He just can't write/I know a movie executive/Who's twice as bright." Hollywood got even in 1948 in the biographic film "Words and Music": Tom Drake plays a vapid Rodgers and Mickey Rooney, typecast as Hart, smokes cigars and looks anxious.
Gene Kelly, the star of the play "Pal Joey," produced in 1940, was astonished at Hart's writing style. "Like Lincoln scribbling down the Gettysburg Address, Larry would jot down lyrics on anything that came to hand - a brown paper bag or a cigarette box," Kelly once said. "Then he'd disappear for 15 minutes and return with the most polished, stylish lyric you've ever seen."
Kelly also noted that Hart "was tortured by his small physical stature and by his homosexuality. For all his wit, he was one of the saddest, loneliest people I ever knew." Singer Mabel Mercer used the same words to describe him: "the saddest man I ever knew."
He died in an alcoholic stupor after rejecting an idea Rodgers had for a musical based on "Green Grow the Lilacs," a 1931 play. The composer turned for a lyricist to Hart's emotional and behavioral opposite, Oscar Hammerstein 2d. Months before he died, Hart cheered them both at the opening night of what was renamed "Oklahoma!"
In a 1994 biography, "Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway," Frederick Nolan wrote that Hart was a "brilliant, tragic, lovable, irrepressible and unutterably sad bundle of contradictions."
In 1932, Rodgers and Hart wrote "Isn't It Romantic?" for Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. In a setting of campy Hollywood operetta, sublime poetry sparkles. In the verse, Hart establishes serious intent: "If dreams are made of/Imagination,/I'm not afraid of/My own creation." His refrain is, as he wrote in "Thou Swell," witty, sweet and grand:
"Isn't it romantic?/Music in the night:/A dream that can be heard/Isn't it romantic?/Moving shadows write/The oldest magic word."
Most of Lorenz Hart's words were magic.