Word: lerner
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When he was 23 and breaking into the entertainment world, Alan Jay Lerner kept to "a schedule so tight that it would only work if I didn't sleep on Monday nights." He wrote daily radio sketches for Celeste Holm and Alfred Drake, crafted material for Victor Borge and Hildegarde and contributed audio pageants to Cavalcade of America. Then one lunchtime at Manhattan's Lambs Club, where he hung around hoping to be noticed, a fortyish theater composer impulsively came up to his table. "You write good lyrics," said Frederick Loewe, who had heard Lerner's contributions to the club...
From that meeting sprang a partnership that enriched the American musical theater with Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), Camelot (1960) and the show many credit as the genre's best, My Fair Lady (1956). Those lush romantic period pieces became big-budget Hollywood movies, usually with scripts by Lerner, and the two created another nostalgic costume epic, Gigi (1958), directly for the screen. Their style of show eventually went out of fashion. Their songs never did: Thank Heaven for Little Girls, If Ever I Would Leave You, They Call the Wind Maria, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face...
...theater world last week honored the team's legacy in a memorial for Lerner, who died of lung cancer on June 14 at age 67. Some 1,500 people gathered at Broadway's Shubert Theater for an 80-minute service of anecdotes, reminiscences and, above all, songs. John Cullum reprised his title number from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). Meg Bussert and Martin Vidnovic, stars of a 1980 Broadway revival of Brigadoon, performed Almost Like Being in Love. Julie Andrews sang Lerner's favorite non-Lerner showstopper, If Love Were All, from Noel Coward's Bitter...
Born in New York City, Lerner was the son of the founder of Lerner Stores, a women's apparel chain. At Choate and Harvard, he was a schoolmate of John F. Kennedy's and later became a sort of goodwill ambassador between the Kennedy White House and the arts. Jacqueline Kennedy, after her husband's assassination, likened his brief tenure to the fleeting glory evoked in Camelot...
...holiday, May 22 and 23, when the Dow jumped a total 48.12, to 1823.29. Since Wall Street customarily quiets down before a long weekend, many investors had to scramble to take part in the sudden rise. "There's no doubt it caught them absolutely by surprise," said Eugene Lerner, a professor of finance at Northwestern University and president of a Chicago investment-management firm...