He Sent Them Away Humming

Richard Rodgers: 1902-1979

"When the lyrics are right, it's easier for me to write a tune than to bend over and tie my shoelaces," Richard Rodgers once remarked. Many composers would have been happy to tie Rodgers' shoes for him if only they had been able to fill them. He could write anything, and to order and to suit. When Oscar Hammerstein II handed him the lyric for Bali Ha'i, Rodgers studied it for a moment, then turned the typed page over, retired to the next room and five minutes later came back with the completed melody, one of his most haunting.

Thanks to such facility, Rodgers left an unparalleled catalogue of popular music when he died last week at 77. I Could Write a Book, the title of one of his songs, aptly expresses the feelings of anybody setting out to list his accomplishments. Among Rodgers' 1,000-odd compositions, most of them for Broadway, there were straight ballads like My Funny Valentine and It Might as Well Be Spring; cascading waltzes like Hello, Young Lovers and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; invigorating romps like Mountain Greenery and June Is Bustin' Out All Over. But the individual songs were only a part of his achievement. He and his lyricists, principally Lorenz Hart and Hammerstein, wove these numbers into increasingly coherent plots, transforming the traditional hotchpotch of musical comedy into unified musical theater. If Rodgers had written nothing else but Pal Joey and Oklahoma!, his penultimate collaboration with Hart and his first with Hammerstein, he would still have had an indelible influence on the genre.

Always an innovator, Rodgers liked to introduce surprising harmonic complexities. But his melodies had an unfailingly natural flow and simplicity that, in retrospect, seemed like inevitability. Many were built on the basic steps of the scale (My Romance, Dancing on the Ceiling) or returned repeatedly to the same note or notes while varying the patterns in between (Isn't It Romantic?, The Blue Room). Behind such simplicity lay a subtle craft.

Descended from Russian immigrants, Rodgers used to say that his original family surname was so long that not even he knew just what it was. His father was a well-to-do New York physician who took the family to operas and musicals and liked to sing the scores at home; his mother was an amateur pianist. By the time he was four, Richard could pick out melodies on the family piano. He scarcely bothered with lessons.

At 19, having contributed some songs to a Broadway show, Rodgers dropped out of Columbia University to compose musicals full time. For the next few years he got nowhere. Considering himself a failure at 22, he was about to take a job as a salesman for children's underwear when he was asked to write a one-shot benefit for the Theatre Guild. From this emerged The Garrick Gaieties, which ran on Broadway for six months and contained Rodgers' first hit song, Manhattan. He was on his way. Within two years he had five more shows on Broadway, and suddenly was a young lion in New York and London society.

If he had a problem as his career progressed, it was also his greatest asset: Collaborator Hart. Only 5 ft. tall, Hart scorned the button-down conventionality of Rodgers' dress and habits. His working hours were random, his zest for alcohol great. He was a mordant wit, a sophisticated prosodist and a devilish rhymer. As Rodgers wrote of him later:

"His lyrics knew that love was not especially devised for boy and girl idiots of 14." For years, radio stations would not play Hart's original version of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, in which the demiheroine sings of that bum Pal Joey:

Couldn 't sleep,

wouldn 't sleep,

until I could sleep

where I shouldn 't sleep ...

When, by 1942, Hart had become too erratic to work (and shortly thereafter died), Rodgers teamed up with Hammerstein. Where Hart was tiny and mercurial, Hammerstein was a steady, shambling giant. Rodgers' music would never again have quite the worldly insouciance that it took on from Hart. With Hammerstein's influence it displayed more foursquare feeling and social consciousness. As Rodgers put it later: "Oscar was more sentimental, and so the music had to be more sentimental." Oscar was also more dedicated to Rodgers' principle that every song in a show should be fitted to the character. In this spirit, the pair created such epoch-making works as Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, all within 16 years.

After Hammerstein's death in 1960, Rodgers wrote shows with other lyricists, notably Stephen Sondheim, and even tried his own hand at words as well as music. While none of these efforts matched his earlier successes, he seemed to bask in a golden time of life. Honors rained on him (along with an estimated $100 million in royalties). He and his wife Dorothy, a decorator and writer, collected art, engaged in philanthropies, appeared at virtually every social happening or Broadway opening. His only setbacks were physical. In 1955 he had been operated on for cancer of the jaw. In his last years he had a serious heart attack and underwent a laryngectomy, which forced him to learn to talk in a hoarse croak. But, typically, he soon returned to work at the grand piano in his Madison Avenue office. His final show was last year's musical adaptation of I Remember Mama, which, although a flop, testified to his indomitable energy.

His seemingly spontaneous outpourings belied a sustained discipline, as he readily acknowledged: "It's the result of years of living, of study and reading, of personality and temperament. At one particular moment all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself." For Rodgers, they all came together with dazzling frequency.

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