Word: lerner
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...Proudly, Lerner points out that he avoided rhyming "Camelot" with "swam a lot" or "Lancelot" with "dance a lot" but he did bring off such a rhyme in My Fair Lady when he lined up "Budapest" and "ruder pest" (it had to be changed after Soviet tanks in 1956 made the line less amusing). At his worst, his pudding is awfully hasty...
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...
...more intriguing patterns in L. & L.'s lives: when Lerner married Marion Bell, Loewe simultaneously started an affair with her understudy; the affair (eleven years) lasted longer than the marriage (two years). Explains an old friend of Lerner's: "Alan thinks he has to marry and have children with any woman he gets involved with." As for Fritz, he has been separated from his wife for eleven years, has made a sizable settlement: $135,000 down and $10,000 a year for life "her life," he explains wryly, "not mine." He has no children, says he does not want...
...Collaborators. No excess of wives, girl friends, possessions or noise has ever seriously interfered with L. & L.'s work. The composer-librettist relationship can produce some extraordinary cases of love-hate, as in the case of Gilbert and Sullivan. Professionally, Lerner and Loewe are marvelously meshed, and Fritz even goes so far as to say of Alan, "I love him." But friendship is not really necessary for artistic partnership or for marriage...
Their methods have not varied over the years. Lerner starts off by thinking up a title for a song, usually the first line; Loewe then writes the music, almost always in Lerner's presence, and announces to anyone within earshot: "I've got Alan pregnant." Lerner delivers the balance of the lyrics, working with obsessive intensity ; when he is really going strong, he feels ice-cold, has been known to light a fire in the middle of a heat wave while writing. Over the years he has set up a number of semi-fast rules for himself: avoid s sounds...