Word: hartness
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...mother was cultured, his father defiantly not. Max Hart was a round (300-pound!) boisterous sort who did favors for Tammany Hall and, if he was too lazy to go to the bathroom, he'd take a whizz out the dining room window. Lorenz had Papa's appetite for excess and Mama's love of lore. He had his mother's height too: a shade under five feet. Edith Meiser, who would star in Rodgers and Hart shows, described Larry as "the American Toulouse-Lautrec ... an enchanting man. He had such appeal.... He had this enormous head and a very...
...descended from the German-Jewish poet Harry Heine, the student of Hegel who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Christian (!) Johann Heinrich Heine. His most famous poem, "Lorelay," set to music by Friedrich Silcher, has some of the melancholia (if not the elfin wit) that marked many Hart lyrics: "I do not know what haunts me,/ What saddened my mind all day;/ An age-old tale confounds me,/ A spell I cannot allay." And a quatrain Heine wrote for his wife Therese - "You're lovely as a flower,/ So pure and fair to see;/ I look...
...Bewildered," dozens more - sound both today and timeless. They sing (with confident wit) and speak (with confidential despair) about tough hearts ready to break, melt or explode. Rodgers' melodies get you humming, then dreaming, but the subject and style of these songs, their matter and meter, come straight from Hart's heart...
...movies give us two glimpses of Hart: both fictional, tantalizing, sad. The better known is an MGM bio-pic, the 1948 "Words and Music," with Tom Drake as Rodgers and Mickey Rooney as Hart. There we learn that Hart was short, agitated, unreliable, full of mischief and misery - and that if only Betty Garrett had accepted his offer of matrimony, he might have lived his full span. It happens that Hart did propose to Vivienne Segal, who starred in R&Hart's "Pal Joey"; and she did refuse, telling friends, "I mean, I never even kissed Larry." The film omits...
...other, weirder film is "Makers of Melody," an early-talkie (1929) short that purports to depict R&Hart's laborious, five-year rise from uptown anonymity to midtown stardom. (An little irony: after shooting the film, R&Hart went to Hollywood, where, with the exception of the buoyant "Love Me Tonight" and the ambitious misfire "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," they spent another five, largely frustrating years.) This time, the songwriters play themselves; and though it may be due to our boys' limited acting skills, there seems an undertaste of distaste that Dick shows Larry. Hart is humiliated...