Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

May 2, 1895– Lorenz Hart

“Once you told me, I was mistaken, that I’d awaken, with the sun and order orange juice for one. It never entered my mind.”

In Autumn 1980, I appeared in a musical revue, Rodgers & Hart. In that show, I had the very good fortune to sing I Could Write A Book, Isn’t It Romantic?, and Where Or When. It is my understanding that I was quite good in this production. Not surprising; I do have a way with a song, a dance, and a quip, plus audiences love me.

Hart wrote over 500 songs with the most sophisticated lyrics for the most enthralling melodies. But, this is a sad story.

Hart agonized over his life. He felt that he was an outsider. He believed that his vocation was to watch and make note of the beautiful people and then put ravishing words in their perfect mouths so that they would sound smart, sly and sexy when they sang his songs.

Richard Rodgers, one of the greatest of all Broadway composers, enjoyed long collaborations with the two most amazing lyricists of the American Musical. Hart and Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who both went to Columbia University, but there the similarity ends.

When they first met, it was love at first sight. Hart was 23-years-old, Rodgers was not quite 17. Rodgers:

“I left Larry Hart’s house, having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.”

He worked with Hart, from 1919 until Hart’s death in 1943. Next, he teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II, starting with the groundbreaking Oklahoma! in 1943 until Hammerstein left this wretched world in 1960, right after The Sound Of Music opened on Broadway. Rodgers’ earlier work with Hart gives his music a particularly non-Hammerstein flavor. The two lyricists could not be more different.

Rodgers (L) with Hart (R) by World Telegram staff photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Written 70 to 95 years ago, mostly for now forgotten Broadway shows and films, Rodgers’ and Harts’ brittle, world-weary tunes include: Manhattan, Blue Moon, My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is A Tramp, and Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered, along with many, many, many more. Today these songs sound both current and timeless. They are filled with confident wit, a dash of cynicism and a big dose of confidential despair. Rodgers’ melodies make you remember, but the subject and style of these songs come straight from Hart’s heart.

Their shows were rather inconsequential even when the songs were winners. They worked together on 28 musicals that are rarely revived nowadays. Some are excellent: On Your Toes (1936) was a landmark musical because it was the first to center on a ballet. It has the revelatory Slaughter On Tenth Avenue sequence, the creation of George Balanchine. Balanchine stayed with Rodgers and Hart for Babes In Arms (1937), I Married An Angel (1938), The Boys From Syracuse (1938), all were entertaining, with sparkling scores and creaky books.

Pal Joey (1940) was their most controversial and influential show. The book was based on The New Yorker stories of John O’Hara about a seedy nightclub emcee and the women he seduces and abuses. It was a sordid story for the era, and the audiences and many critics found it to be uncomfortable. It starred Vivienne Segal and Gene Kelly, and despite the mixed-reviews, the show ran for 10 months, the third-longest run of any Rodgers and Hart musical. When it was revived 12 years later, it was big success with rave reviews. But, poor Hart, who had been devastated by the reviews, was long gone. It remains the most produced of their musicals. All the songs are great in Pal Joey, especially the mordant masterpiece, Hart’s own favorite, Zip, a witty take on stripper Gypsy Rose Lee:

Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today.

Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?

Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night.

Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.

Zip was performed by Segal in the original and the 1952 revival. In other productions it has been performed by Elaine Stritch, Kay Medford, Dixie Carter, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ann Reinking.

Hart was a diminutive, rather unattractive, cripplingly self-conscious man. Lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner wrote:

”Hart was a man who seemed deprived of the happiness his lyrical gifts gave to others.”

Hart was profoundly alcoholic. He was also gay and more than glad to be unhappy. He found little enjoyment in his experiences with other men. Terrified of intimacy, he would wait for his sex partners to fall asleep, and then creep out of bed and curl up on the floor of his bedroom closet to sleep. Hart’s acquaintances claimed that he went to special ”private parties”, but never joined the action. Hart liked to watch. It was less stressful than joining in. He sought solace in the company of hustlers and an occasional chorus boy. His erratic behavior, drinking, and gay ways moved the very heterosexual Rodgers to choose another songwriting partner in Hammerstein, breaking their long fruitful collaboration.

Offered the chance to write what would become Oklahoma!, Hart smartly declined. It is hard to imagine a less Hart-ish musical. After the 1943 opening night performance of that landmark show, Hart went to Sardi’s (a famous showbiz hangout) and told Rodgers: ”This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen in my life. It’ll be playing 50 years from now.”

Rodgers and Hart were not done yet though. They collaborated one more time. In 1943, they did five new songs for a revival of their 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee. The last lyric ever Hart wrote was for one of my favorites of his songs, To Keep My Love Alive, sung by a noble lady who tires easily of her men, dispatching with 15 husbands and attending 15 early funerals:

Sir Philip played the harp; I cussed the thing

I crowned him with his harp to bust the thing

And now he plays where harps are just the thing,

To keep my love alive.

In the days before the opening night of A Connecticut Yankee, Hart had been on a drinking and hustler binge. When he arrived at the theater for the opening, an exasperated Rodgers refused to let him enter. Hart sat in the November rain on a curbside drinking and crying. Two days later, with pneumonia, he was taken to a hospital where he died three days later. He was just 47-years-old. Now he plays where harps are just the thing. His last words were: ”What have I lived for?”

His sad story was told as a happy tale in the film Words And Music (1948) with Mickey Rooney as Hart. This MGM biopic didn’t get to any of the truth, except, maybe, Hart’s height. It has no redeeming value other than great Golden Age of Hollywood stars doing first rate renditions of those terrific Rodgers and Hart songs: Cyd Charisse, June Allyson, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, and Vera-Ellen. The film was a box-office hit, but with no trace of Hart’s gayness to be found in the screenplay. Still, I watched it last weekend on TCM.

There are sly intimations of his gayness in many of Hart’s lyrics. The following is from On Your Toes:

Mother warned me my instincts to deny.

Yet I fail.

The male is frail.

The heart is quicker than the eye!

She said, Love one time, Junior,

Look at the Lunts!

I’ve fallen twice, with two at once.

Passion’s plaything, that’s me, oh me, oh my!

But at least

I’m quite a beast.

The heart is quicker than the eye!

For decades, Hart’s bitter sophistication paired well with my very own sensibilities and my whiskey-voiced interpretations of the songs. When I had my own act, I had several Rodgers and Hart songs in my repertoire. I used It Never Entered My Mind as an audition song; it fit my range and disposition rather perfectly. Maybe I should dust it off for one more go of it.

“The early bird might catch the worm, but I bet it also needs a ton of under eye concealer.” Nicole Richie

Reminds me of that one gremlin that does interviews.

Always remember to lift with your back in a twisting jerking motion.
Really though why is this happening?

This idiot. (I’m a little harsher this morning because I’m up earlier. Because I’m the early bird. And I need concealer. There, I just tied everything together. You’re welcome. Also feel free to judge me for quoting Nicole Richie.)

And my cold heart has melted. This is the biggest “Awe” evaaaar!

Child abuse is no laughing matter .. unless it’s a cat abusing the child. Then it’s hilarious.

1986, photo via Wikimedia Commons

May 4, 1958– Keith Haring:

“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”

Someone stole my much loved Keith Haring Swatch watch in the early 1990s. I think I know who it was, but when queried, they denied any possibility of having been responsible for it gone missing. This morning, I saw the same watch on eBay for $1600. The Husband stated: “You couldn’t get $1600 for that watch. You loved that Swatch into a state of ‘very used’. I wish I had $1600, I would buy you a new one.” I have never recovered from losing my Keith Haring Swatch. I loved having him near.

For most of the 1980s, I had prints of Haring’s drawings and paintings, torn from Interview Magazine, displayed on my fridge. Unbelievable, there is a Haring, held by an Andy Warhol magnet, on my stainless steel refrigerator this morning. Some things just don’t change. The display face on my iPhone is a Keith Haring barking dog.

Via YouTube

Keith Allen Haring grew up in Kutztown, a small Pennsylvania Dutch farm community. As a child, he drew cartoons and gradually progressed to more complex compositions. He attended a showing of Warhol’s work when he was in his teens, and was impressed by the artist’s flat lines, his use of pop icons and mundane everyday objects, and Warhol’s entire concept of mass-produced art. Warhol’s elevation of the commonplace into high art would become the focus of Haring’s own work.

Haring moved to NYC in 1980 to be at the center of both the art world and the gay community. At 22-years-old, he began to create his own graffiti: ambiguous looking animals and human figures on all-fours, painted in the NYC subways. Haring was a graffiti artist with a decidedly different approach. Instead of spray painting the subway cars, he drew with white chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces, working in a distinctive style that became widely known before anyone knew his identity. Despite several arrests for criminal mischief, Haring dared to continue creating his subway graffiti during the early 1980s.

Haring found a job as an assistant to gallery owner Tony Shafrazi who gave him his first major exhibition in 1982. During the mid-1980s, Haring’s pieces brought him wealth and celebrity. His collectors included Yoko Ono, Dennis Hopper, and even Warhol himself. Madonna gave this explanation of why his art had such a vast appeal:

“There was a lot of innocence and a joy that was coupled with a brutal awareness of the world.”

He found much success during his own time on our planet, with his pieces going for as much as $350,000. His friends: Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf, Madonna, Ono and Boy George championed his work. His art was featured in the era’s discos like The Palladium, and used as set decorations on MTV. His murals were seen as a backdrop for a 1985 hunger-relief benefit concert in Philadelphia, on walls on the Lower East Side and scenery for various theatre works and dance concerts.

From Haring Foundation

Haring opened a pair of Pop Shops in NYC and Tokyo which sold merchandise based on his designs with every inch of the shops devoted to Haring’s work including floor-to-ceiling murals. Haring was devoted to creating cultural awareness about HIV and LGBTQ Rights issues. The Pop Shops are closed now, but the Keith Haring Foundation was established in 1989 to assist his HIV related and children’s charities. The foundation continues to maintain the Haring archives. Haring had generously contributed his talents to art workshops for kids, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and he produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers for disadvantaged communities. Sale of Haring merchandise continues to insure the work of his foundation continues. When faced with criticism from the art world’s elite, Haring stated:

“I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price. My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

His paintings and sculptures are in the collections of many of the planet’s major museums like the Hirshhorn Museum, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Whitney in Manhattan and the Beaubourg in Paris.

Pisa, 1989, photo: public domain

Haring produced huge public murals, including a mural of the 10 Commandments for the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux in 1985, and a 300 foot painting of a chain of red and black figures on the Berlin Wall in 1986. Haring did murals for DC’s Children’s Hospital and Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris. He created posters for the Anti-Apartheid movement and Gay Rights causes, increasingly using apocalyptic imagery.

Section of “Commandments” via YouTube

Haring was among that first generation of gay men lost in the initial wave of the epidemic. He was diagnosed with HIV in late 1988, but he continued to produce his art until the very end, when he could hardly hold a pencil or brush. Haring’s bold lines and primitive figures carry poignant messages of vitality and unity. His legacy has made a lasting impact on late 20th century art and beyond. During his brief career, Haring invented an entire cartoon universe inhabited with crawling children, barking dogs and dancing figures.

Haring was just 31-years-old when he left this wretched world in 1990. He would have been 60-years-old today. I cried this morning thinking about writing this post: for Keith being gone too soon, too young, for my own loss of innocence, and for that missing Keith Haring Original Swatch. But looking at his work to prepare for this #BornThisDay, I have to say that Haring leaves me with a more positive vision for the future.