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Great Encounters
The day Richard Rodgers met Lorenz Hart...
Excerpted from
Lorenz
Hart:
A Poet on Broadway
by
Frederick Nolan
*
Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing a Rodgers and Hart song,
The Lady Is A Tramp 
___________________________________
A few days later, (Philip) Leavitt took young Richard Rodgers
around to the Hart house. Larry Hart met them at the door. They
were a study in opposites. Dick was fresh, tanned, athletic, handsome, a
high school champion swimmer and tennis player. Larry was unshaven
-- according to Rodgers, Hart invariably looked like he needed a shave every
five minutes after he'd had one -- and wearing a bathrobe over an evening
shirt and trousers, with carpet slippers on his feet. He was already talking
-- and doubtless puffing a cigar and rubbing his hands together as he invariably
did -- as his visitors climbed the steps, and kept going non-stop as he took
them back to the overstuffed library, where there was a piano. Bridget,
the cat, strolled in, and Hart introduced her an "old fencewalker." That
broke the ice.
It was all so simple. Dick sat down at the piano, and
Lorry said, "What have you written?" and Dick played some of his music, and
it was really love at first sight. All that had to be done was [for
me to] sit, listen, and let nature take its course.
Puffing on the ever-present cigar, hands flying, brown
eyes flashing with enthusiasm and energy, Hart expounded upon the craft of
lyric writing, excoriating the intellectual poverty of simpleton writers
who rhymed "slush" with "mush" while neglecting the possibilities inherent
in double and triple rhymes, slant rhymes, fragmented rhymes, false rhymes,
interior rhymes, feminine rhymes -- but most of all, witty rhymes. Rodgers
was captivated.
"I listened in rapt astonishment and as he launched into
a diatribe against songwriters who had small intellectual equipment and less
courage, and who failed to take every opportunity to inch a little further
into territory hitherto unexplored in lyric writing. I was enchanted,"
Rodgers recalled in what has become perhaps his most-quoted comment on his
mercurial little partner. "Neither of us mentioned it, but we evidently
knew we would work together, and I left Hart's house having acquired in one
afternoon a career, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation."
Elsewhere Rodgers has been quoted -- more accurately,
one feels -- as saying he left the Hart house bubbling over with excitement,
repeating over and over to himself, "I have a lyricist, I have a lyricist!"
Ever since he had first heard Jerome Kern's music, Dick had only wanted
to do one thing, write songs. It takes no imagination to picture him
walking down 119th Street that Sunday evening, sixteen years of age, elated,
exhilarated, full of hope and anticipation.
Of Hart's feelings there can equally be no doubt. As
Philip Leavitt put it with such unwitting percipience, it was love at first
sight.
"Poor Larry," one of his close friends said. "What
a shame he had to fall in love with Dick."
___________________________________
Lorenz
Hart:
A Poet on Broadway
by
Frederick Nolan
*
From LORENZ HART: A POET ON BROADWAY, by Frederick Nolan, copyright
-- 1995 by Frederick Nolan. Used by permission of Oxford University
Press, Inc.
*
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