Word: hartness
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...Hart's impression was cartoonish, it was surely an animated cartoon. Everyone noticed his energy and felt its force. In Meryle Secrest's book "Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers",Hammerstein is quoted as saying of Hart, "In all the time I knew him I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his face in repose. I never heard him chuckle quietly. He laughed loudly and easily at other people's jokes and at his own too. He large eyes danced and his head would wag." A young man of ravenous intelligence, he was well-schooled...
...Hart couldn't match his partner's belt-notches; Dick didn't care about that. But like the demanding city editor on a daily tabloid, he did want Larry to deliver copy. Many people who knew Rodgers said he had the soul of a banker. He went to work, wrote a gorgeous, chromatically sophisticated tune, went home (or to an upper room in Sardi's). He was the fastest composer in the East; as Noel Coward said, mixing envy and awe, "The man positively pees melody." Speed was essential in the mid-20s, when Dick and Larry finally got cooking...
...wasn't that Hart agonized over the lyrics (as Hammerstein did); Larry could be lightning-quick when he got down to work. It was that he agonized over life. His felt a misplaced person, a Martian or Munchkin whose job was to observe the beautiful people, then put equally ravishing words in their bowed mouths - to make them sound and feel as smart as they looked...
...HART BROKEN...
...Theatre Guild interested Rodgers in a musical version of the rural drama "Green Grow the Lilacs." Offered the chance to write that would become "Oklahoma!", Hart sensibly said no thanks. (It's hard to imagine a less Hart-y show.) Did he think Rodgers would drop the project rather than commit professional adultery and go off for a Hammerstein fling? If so, he thought wrong. After the opening-night performance, Hart walked into Sardi's and told Rodgers, "This is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life, and it'll be playing 20 years from...