Word: lerner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like Kennedy, Lerner went on to Harvard, class of 1940, where he majored in French and Italian literature. He knew all the current show tunes by heart, and walking down Mount Auburn Street one night, he burst out: "I want to write songs!" He worked on the Hasty Pudding Club musicals of 1938 and '39, filled them with promising, pun-filled lyrics, put in two summers at Manhattan's Juilliard School to learn more about music...
Boxing attracted Alan Jay Lerner as well as Frederick Loewe, and fighting in the Harvard gymnasium one day, he suffered an accident that cost him the sight of his left eye. After graduation, it also cost him his chance to serve in the Army in World War II. Embarrassed and depressed by his 4-F rating, he made a personal appeal to the Surgeon General of the U.S., got nowhere, complained: "They won't take me unless the Nazis get to Rockefeller Plaza." He worked on his radio scripts, made himself familiar at the Lambs, waited for someone...
Patterns. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote that musical, The Life of the Party, in twelve days, and it ran nine weeks in Detroit. What's Up (1943) was their first on Broadway. The Day Before Spring (1945) won lower-middling reviews and closed after five months. Then 1947's Brigadoon spread the L. & L. tartan down Shubert Alley. In 1951 they achieved a sluggish eight months' run with Paint Your Wagon, a mining-camp western with an awkward book and a rousing score. Lerner, meanwhile, had been moonlighting on his partnership with Loewe, won an Oscar...
...prospective backers; Fair Lady was sold without a single audition; now they just pick up the phone. CBS has put up the entire $480,000 cost of Camelot, and money now follows L. & L. wherever they go. They have yachts in the Mediterranean and villas on the Riviera. Lerner has a town house in Manhattan, and Loewe an airy glass pleasure-dome in Palm Springs, Calif. Each owns an $18,000 Rolls-Royce convertible; Loewe's is "black pearl" grey and Lerner's, according to a Rolls salesman, "not-quite-royal" blue...
Meanwhile, their private lives have not been as boffo as their shows. Lerner's list of wives reads almost like a history of plays on the road, and one of them points out that he plays a new part with each. Ruth Boyd (1940-47) was Social Register. Marion Bell (1947-49) was his Leading Lady, as she was in Brigadoon, and she came to the wedding with her music teacher. Actress Nancy Olson (1950-57) was the Upper-Middle-Class-All-Amer-ican-Girl (Lerner referred to her once as "the perfect wife"). Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo...