Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) Read online

  LOVERLY

  Geoffrey Block, Series Editor

  Series Board

  Stephen Banfield

  Jeffrey Magee

  Tim Carter

  Carol Oja

  Kim Kowalke

  Larry Starr

  “South Pacific”: Paradise Rewritten

  Jim Lovensheimer

  Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical

  Charlotte Greenspan

  To Broadway, to Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick

  Philip Lambert

  Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater

  Jeffrey Magee

  Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady”

  Dominic McHugh

  LOVERLY

  The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

  DOMINIC McHUGH

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McHugh, Dominic.

  Loverly: the life and times of My fair lady /Dominic McHugh.

  p. cm.—(Broadway legacies)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-982730-5

  1. Loewe, Frederick, 1901–1988. My Fair Lady.

  2. Lerner, Alan Jay, 1918–1986. My Fair Lady.

  3. Musicals—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML410.L7986M34 2012

  782.1′4—dc23 2011035377

  Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the

  AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

  1 3 5 7 9 8 4 6 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  For

  MUM AND DAD

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Geoffrey Block

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  1. False Starts and Artistic Promise

  2. From Page to Stage: The Genesis of My Fair Lady

  3. Shavian but Not Shaw: Developing the Script of My Fair Lady

  4. Knowing the Score

  5. Settling the Score: Part I

  6. Settling the Score: Part II

  7. Performance History: My Fair Lady On Stage

  8. The Legacy of My Fair Lady

  Appendix 1 “Without You” (early versions)

  Appendix 2 “Why Can’t the English?” (original version)

  Appendix 3 “On the Street Where You Live” (original version)

  Appendix 4 Cut Material from “The Ascot Gavotte”

  Appendix 5 “You Did It” cut passage

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Index

  FOREWORD

  When I received the proposal that would evolve into the book you are about to read, I immediately recalled Mozart’s apocryphal but no less prescient remark after meeting with the seventeen-year-old Beethoven: “Keep your eyes on him—someday he will give the world something to talk about.” The analogy may be imperfect, but Mozart’s prophecy remains fundamentally apt to describe the thoroughly accomplished young author of Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady,” Dominic McHugh, of the University of Sheffield. Indeed, McHugh has produced the first comprehensive and most accurate account of how this great and perennially popular show came to be, and Loverly will give us much to talk about, just as the revered subject of this book has for generations added immeasurable wealth to the American musical treasury.

  In telling the story of how Alan Jay Lerner (1918–86) and Frederick Loewe (1901–88) created what one opening night critic described as “a new landmark in the genre fathered by Rodgers and Hammerstein,” McHugh, in contrast to most of his predecessors, turns to Lerner’s 1978 memoir, The Street Where I Live “only where no other source exists.” Although never less than engaging and indispensable, and although we have grown accustomed to accepting Lerner’s recollections at face value, McHugh’s approach is a welcome one. By looking more closely at Lerner’s street—without, however, drawing comparisons with his stage characters as I am doing here—McHugh’s reliance on his documentary exploration reveals that Lerner’s memory shares much in common with that of Honoré and Mamita in Gigi, who think they “remember it well” but clearly do not. Among many polite but firm refutations in the course of Loverly, McHugh carefully points out that contrary to Lerner’s claim in his memoir, Mary Martin did appear to be a “natural” for the role of Eliza. Lerner wrote at the time that “everyone else after Mary has to be second choice” and that despite Lerner’s assertion Rex Harrison was the first choice for Higgins, in fact Lerner and Loewe approached both Noël Coward and Michael Redgrave before turning to Harrison.

  Instead of following Lerner at every turn as most previous writers have done, McHugh offers a meticulous exploration of voluminous contemporary sources, including letters, memos, lyric and libretto drafts, and scores both discarded and replaced. The saga begins with the Theatre Guild (entirely omitted in Lerner’s expansive narrative) and its attempt to find a talented composer and lyricist, starting with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in 1951, who had produced the great Guild hits Oklahoma! and Carousel (and the miss Allegro) in the 1940s. About a year after Rodgers and Hammerstein concluded, as Hammerstein later allegedly reported in a conversation with Lerner, that “it can’t be done,” the Guild solicited Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin before turning to Lerner for the book and lyrics and Loewe for the music. If I may borrow a song title from the completed show, they “did it.”

  McHugh next details the two stages of Lerner and Loewe’s attempt to adapt Shaw’s Pygmalion, the abandoned project of 1952 and the successful second effort from 1954 to 1956 that led to the historic opening night March 15, 1956, which was produced by Herman Levin rather than the Theatre Guild. The next chapters look at Shaw’s original play of 1914, the 1938 film adaption directed by Gabriel Pascal that became the principal source for the stage version, Lerner’s outlines prior to script changes during the crucial rehearsal process, the development of the score based on a rich treasure of musical source material, and the finished show’s stage and film legacy to date. In his final chapter McHugh reviews selected commentary on My Fair Lady and offers a provocative and well-argued interpretation of “the nature of the ambiguous relationship between Eliza and Higgins.”

  We don’t know if Porter, among the composers approached by the Theatre Guild to adapt Pygmalion to the musical stage, regretted not taking on this daunting a
ssignment, but Rex Harrison’s recollection that “Porter reserved himself a seat once a week for the entire [six-year] run” suggests the possibility that he had. Thanks to a surviving letter—supplied to me by Dominic, naturally—we now know that when the first season tickets arrived Porter wrote to Lerner expressing his deep gratitude for obtaining his “‘subscription’ seats.” Although My Fair Lady was not customarily regarded as revolutionary in its own time or since, its perfect blend of story, words, and music along with its verve and originality have earned the show an honored place in the history of the musical. After he first saw it Fred Astaire wrote an effusive note to Lerner to share his enthusiasm for what he considered “simply the best show that has ever been produced.” More recently, although he dismissed Lerner’s work for its lack of interest compared with his predecessors Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim found Shaw’s characterization “more layered and surprising,” and even questioned the notion of doing this musical at all. Sondheim, who was just a few years too young to have been asked to adapt Pygmalion, recalled in his “attendant comments” in Finishing the Hat (2010) that My Fair Lady was “the most entertaining musical I’ve ever seen (exclusive of my own, of course).” Many of us might say the same about Loverly, a book that tells us how Lerner and Loewe transformed Shaw’s fine play into an enduring musical capable of pleasing such diverse critics as Porter and Sondheim, and of course millions of musical theater aficionados for more than fifty years.

  GEOFFREY BLOCK

  Series Editor, Broadway Legacies

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If there’s one musical that deserves to be assessed in a series titled Broadway Legacies, it’s surely My Fair Lady. From the moment of its premiere, critics and audiences alike took the show to their hearts and embraced its wit, its sense of drama, its poignancy, its vivid characters, and its tremendous score. It belongs to a select group of musicals that can truly be said to be artistic landmarks in the genre—a category that also includes shows like Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, Richard Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story, and Sondheim’s Company—as well as enjoying outstanding commercial success (its original Broadway run lasted 2,717 performances).

  Yet to date, My Fair Lady has been the subject of comparatively little scholarly literature, and its composer and lyricist have been similarly marginalized. The only book dealing with their entire output is Gene Lees’s Inventing Champagne: The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, which broke new ground in establishing a text on one of Broadway’s most important partnerships. However, its reliance on gossip and hearsay, its absence of any musical illustration or analysis, and the decision not to cite sources for the information contained in the book, render it sometimes unreliable. Keith Garebian’s The Making of My Fair Lady similarly makes some useful observations and is a fine introduction to the show for general readers, but it is inadequately annotated for scholarly purposes. Gerald Harold Weissman’s 1957 dissertation “The Musicalization of Pygmalion into My Fair Lady” (master’s thesis, Stanford University, 1957) benefited from input from Lerner, who allowed the author to see an early outline of the show, but the critical discussion is largely limited to how Shaw’s play was adapted into a musical. The only substantive studies of the show are a single chapter each in Joseph Swain’s The Broadway Musical (New York, 1990) and Geoffrey Block’s Enchanted Evenings (Oxford, 1997; rev. ed. 2008), both of which offer original views on the show. In particular, Block’s account is the first to make full use of Loewe’s autograph manuscripts (housed at the Library of Congress), while Swain provides a personal analysis of the score and libretto. But because both of these are single chapters in larger books on the genre as a whole, there is an understandable limit to the amount of space that Block and Swain can devote to the show.

  When I began my research in this field, it was not difficult for me to decide to focus on this undoubted masterpiece (not least because it has always been my favorite musical). The real question was how to go about it. We are fortunate in recent years to have seen a steady increase in the amount of quality scholarship on the Broadway musical available in print. Alongside Block’s seminal Enchanted Evenings, the books that have most guided me on my way include Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, a magisterial study of the work of perhaps the most influential composer and lyricist of the past forty years; James Leve’s volume on Kander and Ebb in the excellent Yale Broadway Masters series; and three books that focus on a single musical each—Tim Carter’s Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical, Jim Lovensheimer’s South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten, and bruce d. mcclung’s Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical. Although the individuality of each of these authors takes their work in different directions, what they share is a seriousness of purpose that shows itself through the depth of research informing their every word. Naturally, the specific focus of Carter, Lovensheimer, and mcclung’s wonderful volumes on one show made them especially valuable models for me to use.

  One of the trickiest aspects of dealing with a much-loved show like My Fair Lady is that almost everyone seems to have a story to tell about it. In contrast to the surprising dearth of scholarly literature on such a widely admired show, there is a huge amount of gossip attached to it. I quickly realized that not all of it can be proven to be true, however, so in chapters 1 and 2 I try to describe the background to the musical’s genesis from scratch. The foundation of my revised account lies in several hundred unpublished letters from various archives around the world, most notably the papers of Herman Levin, who produced the show. Chapter 1 describes Lerner and Loewe’s early frustrated attempts to adapt Shaw’s Pygmalion into a musical in 1952, and chapter 2 goes on to show how they eventually managed it in 1954–56. In chapter 3 I take a brief look at the background to Shaw’s play and try to clear up some of the confusion about the 1938 film of Pygmalion, which contains some changes: for instance, although the play does not show Eliza’s lessons with Higgins, the film does. The Pygmalion movie is also the source of the reunion of Higgins and Eliza at the final curtain and is not a “happy ending” appended by Lerner to the musical; he just adopted it. I then explore Lerner’s draft outlines for the show, which document his developing thoughts as to the show’s structure, and go on to look closely at changes made to the script that was used during My Fair Lady’s rehearsals. What begins to emerge is a shift of focus, even this late in the day, from a show depicting a conventional Broadway romance to a story with a much more ambiguous center. Lerner went out of his way to make the relationship between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins as ambiguous as possible, and a great many of the changes to the script made during the final weeks before the show opened in previews served this specific purpose. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 point toward the same purpose in the development of the score. I examine in great detail the unusual wealth of music manuscript material available for My Fair Lady in the Library of Congress’s Frederick Loewe and (in particular) Warner-Chappell Collections, which contain everything from the composer’s sketches for unused songs to the dance arranger’s scores for the cut ballet. By showing the relationships between different manuscripts, I aim to give a flavor of how much of a collaboration the development of a Broadway musical’s score is; it involves arrangers and orchestrators in as much of an authorial role as the composer is, though there is no doubt that Loewe took a keen interest in everything that was being written and orchestrated. Again, various changes of lyric hint at an obscuring of the Higgins-Eliza relationship (though, sadly, Lerner destroyed all his lyric sketches for the show, depriving us of a complete portrait of the lyrics’ composition), as do the rejection of numerous conventional love songs well before they reached even the rehearsal process. In chapter 7 I examine the musical’s complex legacy on stage, which has been unusual in the number of attempts to re-create the original production. Finally, in chapter 8 I visit some of the secondary literature on the show and in particular exami
ne the nature of the ambiguous relationship between Eliza and Higgins. Just as some of the famous stories about the show are not included in the opening chapters, I do not scrutinize the show from every possible angle here, but rather hope to open up the debate for the future.

  If My Fair Lady’s primary message is that education can change your life, I certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the numerous people who have taught me everything I know. First, thanks are due to the librarians at the many archives I visited, including Charles Perrier at the New York Public Library; Harry Miller and the staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society; the staff at Yale University Library; the Special Collections Librarian at St John’s College, Cambridge; Ned Comstock at USC; and most especially Mark Eden Horowitz, Walter Zvonchenko, and their colleagues at the Music and Theatre Divisions of the Library of Congress. Mark’s generosity with his time and help knows no bounds, and I have benefited both from his intimate acquaintance with his collections and his extraordinary knowledge of the musical theatre in general. His friendship has been a guiding force of this book.

  Special thanks go to Jerold Couture of the Loewe estate and David Grossberg of the Lerner estate: by giving me permission to copy original musical materials they have allowed me to go into far more depth with this study than would otherwise have been the case, as well as lending support and enthusiasm along the way. Alan Jay Lerner material is reproduced by permission of the copyright owners, the estate of Alan Jay Lerner and family. Thanks to Alfred Music and Warner-Chappell for allowing me to publish extracts from the score. Quotations from the papers of Herman Levin are reproduced by kind permission of his daughter, Gabrielle Kraft. Passages from Hanya Holm’s notes are used with permission of the estate of Hanya Holm, thanks to her granddaughter, Karen M. Trautlein. Quotations from Theresa Helburn’s papers are used with thanks to the family of her niece, Margaret Kocher. Material from Sir Cecil Beaton’s diary is reproduced by kind permission of Hugo Vickers, Beaton’s Literary Executor. Many thanks are also due to Rosaria Sinisi for allowing me to reproduce passages from Oliver Smith’s letters.