The Cedar Park Book Review Blog is pleased to welcome Paul R Schwankl as a guest reviewer!
Alan Jay Lerner The Street Where I Live: A Memoir (1978, reissued 2018)
In my childhood I was a fan of kings and castles, and at age ten I got the huge treat of seeing a road production of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot. That was in 1962. Last winter, my oldest grandchild, also at age ten, was treated to a performance of Schwartz and Holzman’s Wicked. From Show Boat to Hamilton, there’s always been an audience for stage musicals—largely, I think, because throughout its history that genre has shown an astounding ability to adapt.
I make this judgment because I’ve just read The Street Where I Live by Lerner, who was a master adapter. After many years of being hard to find, this 1978 memoir has been reissued with a new foreword by John Lahr.
Lerner (1918-1986) was born into New York garment industry wealth. His upbringing included expensive schools, summers in Europe, and, crucially, evening after evening at the theater with his dad. He turned his amateur playwriting and songwriting talent into a career with the help of three wildly unlikely coincidences, involving smoking a forbidden substance (tobacco), turning his head the wrong way while boxing in college, and running into Frederick Loewe after Loewe had taken a wrong turn on his way to the restroom.
In The Street Where I Live, Lerner concentrates on the last three Lerner and Loewe hits: My Fair Lady, the movie Gigi, and Camelot. All of these shows had plenty of troubles—eccentric film moguls for Gigi, multiple illnesses and unwieldy length for Camelot—but the most interesting for American cultural history were the troubles that Lerner and Loewe had turning Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion into My Fair Lady.
The biggest problems came not from Shaw’s heirs, as I would have expected, but from some essential attributes of the play. The relationship between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins is a very ambiguous sort of romance. Besides, Pygmalion has (1) no subplot and (2) no easy way to involve choruses and dancers, two defects that would doom a musical at that time. In 1952, after struggling with the writing for months and learning that Rodgers and Hammerstein had also decided that they couldn’t make a musical out of Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe gave up the project. But they took it up again in 1954, and in 1956 My Fair Lady opened. It’s one of the most successful musicals ever staged.
Did Lerner and Loewe develop some new wondrous talent over the space of two years? Not a bit, says Lerner: “By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high Cs and flying limbs.” As for the peculiarities of Eliza and Higgins, “The accent on the emotional reality of character and story . . . grew stronger and stronger.” So Lerner and Loewe could do in 1954 what nobody could have done a couple of years earlier. “What causes [such a] change? It is not the desires of the audience. It is the restlessness of authors for new forms of expression, which audiences then discover to be exactly what they were unconsciously longing for.”
I found these revelations about our American culture fascinating. I also learned more about the author. Lerner’s public personality had made me think of him as something of a jerk—conceited about his work, married eight times, overfond of his own skill, snobbish about his education and breeding. In the book, to my pleasant surprise, he’s frank about what agony songwriting was for him, matter-of-fact about his marital history, and grateful for the breaks he had. Most impressively for a theater person, he avoids gratuitous putdowns of the many people he worked with, instead talking up their talent and efforts. The entertainment world could certainly use more of that. So, for that matter, could our nation.