Frederick Loewe Dies at 86 - Wrote 'My Fair Lady' Score - NYTimes.com Frederick Loewe Dies at 86; Wrote 'My Fair Lady' Score By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: February 15, 1988 Frederick (Fritz) Loewe, the composer who with his longtime lyricist partner Alan Jay Lerner created the scores for ''My Fair Lady,'' ''Camelot,'' ''Paint Your Wagon,'' ''Brigadoon,'' and ''Gigi,'' died yesterday in Palm Springs, Calif.. He was 86 years old. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to John F. Morris, an artist and longtime friend of Mr. Loewe. Among the most famous songs Mr. Loewe wrote with Mr.

Lerner, who died in June 1986, were ''Almost Like Being in Love,'' ''I Could Have Danced All Night,'' ''On the Street Where You Live,'' ''I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face,'' ''If Ever I Would Leave You,'' ''Gigi,'' and ''Thank Heaven for Little Girls.'' The team's finest songs are marked by a contemporary conversational fluency and precision of phrase joined to a graceful Old World melodicism that looks back often wistfully to the turn-of-the-century operetta. Lerner and Loewe, whose creative chemistry was comparable to that of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dietz and Schwartz, and George and Ira Gershwin, were a less likely pairing than most other Broadway theatrical teams. Seventeen years older than his New York-born collaborator, Mr. Loewe came from the world of European operetta and in 1924 moved to the United States, where he struggled for years to gain a foothold in the musical theater.

The collaboration, which began inauspiciously in 1942, culminated 14 years later with ''My Fair Lady,'' a Broadway show that is widely regarded as the 50's Broadway musical at the pinnacle of perfection. For Rex Harrison, the nonsinging actor who played the role of Henry Higgins, Mr. Loewe invented melodies that matched to perfection his caustic, supercilious delivery. For Julie Andrews, who played the cockney girl whom Higgins turns into a lady, his melodic style extended from the clang of English music hall to the elegance of Straussian waltzes. Soloist With Berlin Symphony Frederick Loewe was born in Berlin on June 10, 1901. His father was Edmund Loewe, a well-known Viennese tenor who created the role of Prince Danilo in ''The Merry Widow'' in 1906. A skillful pianist by the age of 4, Mr. Loewe studied the instrument in Berlin with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert, and worked on composition and orchestration with Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek. At 13, he became the youngest piano soloist to appear with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

He also began writing songs at a young age, composing the tunes for a music hall sketch in which his father toured Germany. At 15, he wrote ''Katrina,'' a popular song that became an enormous hit across Europe. Mr. Loewe's early songwriting success gave him the confidence to move to the United States in 1924. He gave a concert at Town Hall, followed by an engagement at the Rivoli Theater. But hampered by a tenuous command of the English language and a musical sensibility that was considered not ''American'' enough, he failed to achieve the success he had anticipated. To support himself, he took a succession of odd jobs, from busboy to riding instructor to prizefighter, and even worked out West for several years, as a cowpuncher and a mail carrier. On returning to New York, he played the piano in beer halls and the organ in a movie house, but lost the latter job with the advent of talking pictures. Mr. Loewe married Ernestine Zerline in 1931; they had no children and they were divorced in 1957.

To make contact with the musical theater world, he joined the Lambs Club, and in 1935 he finally sold his first song to Broadway. He earned $25 for the tune, ''Love Tiptoed Through My Heart,'' which Dennis King sang in a show called ''Petticoat Fever.'' The following year, another of his songs, ''A Waltz Was Born in Vienna,'' was interpolated into the unsuccessful revue ''The Little Show.'' In 1937, he and Earle Crooker collaborated on a musical, ''Salute to Spring,'' for the St. Louis Opera. And in 1938, he composed his first full Broadway score, ''The Great Lady,'' in collaboration with Crooker. One of the bigger flops of the year, the show ran only 20 performances. A Score in Two Weeks It was a chance meeting at the Lambs Club in 1942 that brought Lerner and Mr. Loewe together. Henry Duffy, a producer in search of a new treatment of Barry Conners's play ''The Patsy,'' had asked Mr.

Loewe to write a new libretto and update the lyrics of ''Salute to Spring'' for a production in Detroit. The composer, who admired some lyrics Lerner had written for a Lambs Club revue, introduced himself, and two days later the two men boarded a train for Detroit, where they completed the score for ''Life of the Party'' in two weeks. Though their next show, ''What's Up?'' (1943), directed by George Balanchine, lasted only 63 performances, they continued to collaborate. Their third show, ''The Day Before Spring'' (1945), ran for 165 performances and was the one that convinced them they had the right chemistry to continue as partners. ''We could feel the movement in the structure of our work, and it wasn't termites,'' the composer later quipped. Their partnership was cemented with ''Brigadoon'' in 1947. For this show about a sleepy Scottish town that wakes up every hundred years, Loewe concocted music that inflected his soaring Viennese lyricism with a highland flavor, though at the time he had never been to Scotland.

''Brigadoon'' ran 581 performances and won the New York Drama Critics Circle award for the year's best musical. In addition to ''Almost Like Being in Love'' it yielded such ballads as ''Heather on the Hill'' and ''Come to Me, Bend to Me.'' 1 Loewe, 'Fair Lady,' 'Camelot' Composer, Dies - latimes Loewe, 'Fair Lady,' 'Camelot' Composer, Dies February 15, 1988 |BURT A. FOLKART | Times Staff Writer Frederick Loewe, whose chance meeting with Alan Jay Lerner nearly 50 years ago led to one of the more productive associations in American musical history, died Sunday afternoon in a Palm Springs hospital. He was 86 and was admitted to Desert Hospital on Thursday after suffering a heart attack. Loewe had lived in Palm Springs for 25 years.

With such eternally glittering musicals as "My Fair Lady," "Camelot," "Brigadoon" and "Gigi," Lerner and Loewe ascended into the theatrical firmament to join such teams as Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and George and Ira Gershwin. Had the World Singing Loewe's melodies and Lerner's lyrics had the world singing and whistling such songs as "The Heather on the Hill," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "They Call the Wind Maria," "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," "I Remember It Well," "If Ever I Would Leave You" and dozens more. The association that ended on one of the more artistic and commercially successful notes in the American theater almost never began at all. Loewe, the Viennese-born son of Edmund Loewe, star of such operettas as "The Chocolate Soldier" and "The Merry Widow," met Lerner, heir to the Lerner Shops chain and a Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy's, when the two were at the Lamb's (theatrical) Club in New York City just after the outbreak of World War II.

Dissimilar in backgrounds (Loewe liked to brag that he had starved before meeting the already wealthy Lerner), they were exchanging pleasantries in the men's room at the club where Lerner was writing material for a spring revue. Loewe remarked that he knew Lerner's work and said, "You write good lyrics." "Would you like to write a musical with me?" he reportedly added. Their first effort was for a Detroit stock company. It was called "The Patsy" and survived nine weeks. The next effort went to Broadway but might as well have stayed in Detroit. It was called "What's Up" and folded after 63 performances. They followed that with the mildly successful (165 shows) but now forgotten "The Day Before Spring" in 1945, which did win a New York Drama Critics Award. Then two years later came the acclaimed "Brigadoon," a fantasy set on the Scottish moors that won the best musical award from the New York Critics' Circle. Finest Achievement It led to road performances, revivals and a 1954 film starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

"Paint Your Wagon" in 1951 with its California Gold Rush setting was a lesser, albeit prosperous, production. But then--after Lerner had taken time out from the partnership to craft the screenplay for "An American in Paris"--came what most consider their finest and certainly longest-enduring achievement, "My Fair Lady" in 1956. The adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" was not without its problems. They at first worked on it for five months, abandoned it for several more, but then completed what they hoped might be an acceptable score. With Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza, "My Fair Lady" broke all existing Broadway box-office records. It won numerous awards in its first year on Broadway and ran for more than six years with 2,717 performances, then the longest in New York history. Nine Academy Awards It grossed nearly $12 million in its first two years and in 18 months sold more more than 1.5 million original cast albums. The screen version, pairing Harrison with Audrey Hepburn, won nine Academy Awards.

Most of the songs in "My Fair Lady"--"Get Me to the Church on Time," "On the Street Where You Live," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," "With a Little Bit of Luck" and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"--became a collective bunch of hits most songwriters could fashion only in a lifetime, if at all. Harrison, in interviews over the years, recalled with fondness the great lengths both Lerner and Loewe were forced to go because of his limited vocal abilities. "I had just four or five notes they could use," he said. "They produced a song embracing just those four or five notes and it was called 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.' " Original Film Musical Then Lerner, the elegant and tightly wound apparel store heir who died in 1986 of lung cancer, and Loewe, the prodigy out of near-poverty who wrote his first song when he was 5, embarked on what many critics believe was the finest original film musical of all time: "Gigi." It won the 1958 Academy Award as best picture and Oscars for Lerner and Loewe for the title song.

It also was judged the best directed, best photographed, best musically directed, best edited and best costumed film of the year. (They also supervised a 1973 stage production of that paean to youth that made its premiere at Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.) What proved to be their final major effort together came in 1960, the larger-than-life musical treatment of King Arthur's mythical court, "Camelot." Melodious, Dramatic Tunes About the Playwrights: My Fair Lady — Utah Shakespeare Festival About the Playwrights: My Fair Lady About the Playwrights: My Fair Lady By Rachelle Hughes My Fair Lady has often been touted as the “most perfect musical.” The already successful team of Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist and librettist, and composer Frederick Loewe produced the adaptation of the infamous George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion starring Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Higgins. It was almost impossible for this 1956 Broadway show to fail. The winning combination of Shaw commentary, Lerner and Loewe musical genius, and Andrews and Harrison stage presence set box office records.

When Lerner and Loewe met in 1942, Lerner was busy writing radio sketches and other odd jobs in the musical entertainment industry and Loewe was struggling to gain attention for his work on musical plays such as Salute to Spring (1937) and Great Lady (1938). Then one day during lunch at the Manhattan’s Lamb’s Club, Lerner got the attention he had been craving and Loewe got the partner he needed. Loewe walked up to Lerner’s table. “You write good lyrics,” he said “Would you like to do a musical with me?” Lerner replied: “Yes, I happen to have two weeks off.” The rest is musical theatre history. Their collaborations yielded a collection of musicals that generations of theatre-goers and classic film buffs continue to honor with the highest praises: Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956, film 1964), the film Gigi (1958) and Camelot (1960). Personal differences during the writing of Camelot caused them to end their collaboration but not their friendship.

The score and lyrics for My Fair Lady are among the most successful to emerge from American musical theatre. It is hard to resist such songs as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” "Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?,” and “Rain in Spain.” Alan Jay Lerner was born on August 31, 1918 in New York to a wealthy owner of a chain of dress shops (the Lerner Shops). Lerner’s musical education began with piano lessons as a child. He later studied at the Julliard School of Music, the Bedales Public School in England, and Harvard University. Although he had an impressive educational background, Lerner had to work his way to the stars. He spent time as a journalist and radio scriptwriter before he met Loewe. Along with his successful collaborations with Loewe, Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for An American in Paris (1951). After Loewe’s retirement, Lerner’s collaborators included Burton Lane, Andre Previn, and Leonard Bernstein. But his greatest triumph would always be My Fair Lady which had a run of 2,717 performances on Broadway and 2,281 performances in London before it was filmed with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

The Broadway cast album hit number one in the U.S. charts, selling over five million copies and staying in the top forty for 311 weeks. Lerner had a knack for writing romantic lyrics; he also had a knack for romance: He married eight times (one colleague commented that “I never met a Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner I didn’t like”). Unfortunately, Lerner also had an addiction to amphetamines which he battled for over twenty years. In June of 1986 he lost his battle with lung cancer, yet he left behind a collection of legendary plays and songs that shaped musical theatre in his era. Frederic Loewe was also destined for musical greatness from the moment he was born in Vienna, Austria in 1901 to a father who was a professional singer. By age five Loewe was a child piano prodigy. At age seven he was composing his father’s presentations, and at thirteen he became the youngest soloist to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. At age fifteen, he wrote the popular song “Katrina” that eventually sold one million copies of the sheet music. In 1924 Loewe came to America where he failed to find work in the classical musical scene.

Instead he found himself playing piano in restaurants and bars, and doing other odd menial jobs throughout the country, including boxing, prospecting and cow punching. By 1936 he managed to find his way back to New York City where he started writing music for Broadway revues. But he received little acclaim. After hearing some of Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics he boldly asked him to help him revamp the lyrics to “A Salute to Spring.” Loewe retired to Palm Springs, California where he died in 1988. Loewe led an extraordinary life, sharing his gift of music with millions. With his death he continued to share his largesse. He left one-half of his musical royalties to the Desert Medical Center in Palm Springs. As partner Alan Jay Lerner once said, “There will never be another Fred Loewe.” It could even be said that there will never be another musical writing duo like Loewe and Lerner. They gave us such a “loverly” time.

× Stage 1950s II: The Composers Cont'd Leonard Bernstein (The images below are thumbnails  click on them to see larger versions.) In his retirement, Cole Porter fell in love with one musical that he saw more than a dozen times, marveling at its brilliance. He was not alone  millions flocked to make My Fair Lady the biggest theatrical success of the 1950s. Lerner & Loewe: "Oh, the Towering Feeling" Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison on the original cast Playbill for My Fair Lady, the longest running Broadway hit of the 1950s. Lyricist-librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe followed their 1947 hit Brigadoon with Paint Your Wagon (1951 - 289 performances), a rustic love story set during the California Gold Rush. Featuring "I Talk To The Trees" and "They Call The Wind Mariah," it enjoyed modest success. Some were surprised when this team announced that their next project would be a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion. No less an authority than Oscar Hammerstein II warned Lerner this project could not possibly work.

It seems that even the greatest genius can be wrong. With My Fair Lady (1956 - 2,717 performances), Lerner and Loewe surpassed Rodgers and Hammerstein at their own game. To many (this author included), this is the finest work the musical theatre has ever produced, with a remarkable blend of eloquence, melody, intelligence and heart that has never been surpassed. Rex Harrison , Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway headed the cast, Cecil Beaton designed the distinctive Edwardian costumes, and playwright Moss Hart directed. The book mixed some of Shaw's original dialogue with wonderful new scenes by Lerner, all deftly interwoven with an exquisite score, which included "With A Little Bit of Luck," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "On The Street Where You Live," and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." My Fair Lady is filled with examples of flawless story-song integration. In one scene, Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering try for weeks to train cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to speak like a lady.

Late one night, the caustic Higgins speaks gently to an exhausted Eliza about the beauty and majesty of the English language, reassuring her that she will conquer it. After a breathless moment, Eliza makes the phonetic connection and correctly pronounces, "The rain . . . in Spain . . . stays mainly in the . . . plain." Disbelief turns to jubilation as the three characters break into a celebratory tango, collapsing onto a sofa at the final note. It is one of the most exhilarating moments the theatre has ever produced. Another standout is the wordless moment when Eliza first appears in a dazzling Edwardian ball gown. As she descends a staircase to the melody of "I Could Have Danced All Night," Higgins and the audience sees the "squashed cabbage leaf" complete her transformation into an elegant lady. This wordless moment has moved theatergoers in countless productions. It is worth noting that both of these exquisite scenes discussed above do not exist in Shaw's Pygmalion  Lerner created them for My Fair Lady. From its first performance on the road, it was clear that the show was a phenomenon.

It opened to unanimous raves, won every major award, became Broadway's longest running musical up to that time (a record that stood for a decade), and played to acclaim in numerous languages all around the world. It has been revived several times in both New York and London, remaining a worldwide favorite after almost half a century. After creating the screenplay and score for MGM's Academy Award-winning Gigi (1958), Lerner and Loewe returned to Broadway with Camelot (1960 - 873 performances), based on T.H. White's novel The Once and Future King. Richard Burton played the legendary King Arthur, with Julie Andrews as Guenevere and newcomer Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot. The luscious score featured "If Ever I Would Leave You," "How to Handle A Woman" and a catchy title song, but the pressure to write another major hit proved too much for the creative team. During the pre-Broadway tour, both Loewe and director Moss Hart suffered near-fatal heart attacks. In desperation, the ailing Lerner was forced to take over direction, and an unfinished Camelot opened on Broadway.

Many came expecting another lighthearted My Fair Lady -- instead, they found a romantic tragedy. Although brilliant, it was unlike any previous Broadway musical. Most critics were not impressed, but some post-opening revisions by Hart made a profitable run possible. Richard Burton and Julie Andrews plan to announce the invention of King Arthur's round table in Camelot. Camelot is a perennial favorite with audiences, thanks to the timeless appeal of the Arthurian legend and the show's identification with President John F. Kennedy, who had frequently listened to the original cast recording. Whatever its shortcomings, Camelot has more melody and heart than most shows could ever hope for, and its original cast recording remains an all-time best seller. It has been revived once in London and four times on Broadway. Loewe would only work on two more projects with Lerner: the film version of The Little Prince (1974) and an unsuccessful Broadway adaptation of Gigi (1974). Lerner later wrote shows with distinguished composers Burton Lane, Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Strouse, but he is best remembered for his work with Loewe.

For a sometimes hilarious behind-the-scenes look at how My Fair Lady, Gigi and Camelot were created, read Lerner's autobiography The Street Where I Live (W.W. Norton & Company, New York. 1978). Leonard Bernstein : "The Best of All Possible" Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert on the original Playbill cover for West Side Story. The charismatic and multi-talented Leonard Bernstein was the only principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic to compose for the Broadway stage, so it is not surprising that he created some of the most ambitious musical theatre scores of his time. His blending of classical, pop and jazz styles so distinctly invoked New York that his three hit musicals were all set in that city.  Bernstein collaborated with Betty Comden and Adolph Green to create the jazzy dance musical On the Town (1944 - 463 performances), where three sailors spend an adventurous day in New York.

The same trio later wrote Wonderful Town (1953 - 559), creating a score with everything from an aria ("A Little Bit In Love") to a comic duet ("Ohio") to innovative jazz ("Wrong Note Rag") to an uninhibited "Conga." With its sanitized but endearing view of life in Manhattan's bohemian Greenwich Village and a hilarious performance by Rosalind Russell, Wonderful Town ran for more than a year.  Broadway's last self-proclaimed "comic operetta" was Bernstein's Candide (1956 - 73 performances), based on Voltaire's story of a man who learns that blind optimism is no defense against life's cruelties. Its political satire and operatic score (including the wonderful coloratura aria "Glitter and Be Gay," introduced by Barbara Cook ) may be more than the general public will ever be able to handle. Thanks to a brilliant (if truncated) cast recording, Candide developed a dedicated following. A 1974 Broadway revival that revised the libretto and stressed the comedy racked up 740 performances, and opera house productions based on that version have done well.

However, a lavish 1997 Broadway revival flopped, proving that this show's popularity is still limited.  Bernstein composed West Side Story (1957 - 732 performances) in collaboration with lyricist Stephen Sondheim , director/choreographer Jerome Robbins and librettist Arthur Laurents . Inspired by Shakespeare, it set a Polish-American Romeo and a Puerto Rican Juliet in the middle of a New York City street gang war. This show combined glorious music, a finely wrought libretto and unforgettable dancing. Bernstein's melodies had a steamy vitality that gave the score tremendous appeal. "Maria" and "Somewhere" soared with operatic grandeur, "Dance at the Gym" was a jazz explosion, "America" had an irresistible Latin sound, and "Gee Officer Krupke" was a variation on classic vaudeville. The original cast included Chita Rivera , the first in a string of show-stealing performances that she would offer right into the next century.

Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert played the doomed lovers and introduced the hit ballad "Tonight." Revived successfully on Broadway in 1980 and 2009 (both times with the original Robbins choreography), West Side Story remains one of the most popular musicals of all time. Two decades passed before Bernstein composed the ill-fated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976 - 7). This complex but brilliant work, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner , has yet to receive long overdue reconsideration. Bernstein supervised numerous recordings and revivals of his hits in his later years, but wrote no more Broadway scores. Classical and contemporary, gay but a married father, an oversized soul in an undersized time, Bernstein was one of the most remarkable personalities of the 20th Century. So there were a number of outstanding people writing musicals in the 1950s. Who made their scripts and songs into three dimensional realities on stage? Alan Jay Lerner Facts ADD TO WORD LIST Alan Jay Lerner Facts Alan Jay Lerner (born 1918) was one of the top songwriters in both Broadway musical theatre and Hollywood for a quarter century during the Golden Age of the American musical.

His collaboration with Frederick Loewe yielded many fine musicals including Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. Lerner also wrote the lyrics for musicals with Leonard Bernstein and Andre Previn, among others, but was never able to achieve the success he had with Loewe. Alan Jay Lerner, was born in New York City on August 31, 1918 to Edith Adelson Lerner and Samuel Lerner. His grandfather had come to the U.S. from the Ukraine as a poor immigrant. Samuel Lerner worked in the fashion retail business and eventually owned a chain of successful stores known as the Lerner Shops. His marriage was less successful, and Lerner's parents eventually divorced. Although he and his two brothers were Jewish by birth, religion did not play a significant role in lives. Lerner attended plays regularly with his father from a young age and developed a strong attraction for the theater. He began taking piano lessons at the age of five and wrote his first songs as a teen. While his father wanted him to have a career in diplomatic service, the theater was what he wanted. Lerner attended Choate School along with John F. Kennedy. The two co-edited the school yearbook.

He attended college at Harvard and graduated in the same class with Kennedy in 1940. During the summers of 1936 and 1937 he studied at Julliard. He wrote and participated in two Hasty Pudding Club shows at Harvard in 1938 and 1939. At Harvard, Lerner lost the sight in his left eye due to an accident in a boxing match. The injury prevented him from serving in World War II, so he wrote radio scripts during the war. In addition to being nearly blind, Lerner was a short man, only five feet six inches tall. It is said that his attempts at compensating for these flaws made him seem abrasive. At the same time, he is also said to have had a tremendous sense of humor. Humphrey Burton reported in the Independent, "Like Bernstein, Lerner smoked incessantly, not always nicotine, and bit his nails so fiercely that he always wore white cotton gloves; bloodstained discards would later be found in the men's room. Yet he was reportedly an intensely agreeable personality, immensely persuasive and, like Bernstein, a true son of Harvard.

They were the same age but their only previous collaboration had been 20 years earlier when they concocted a spoof song in honor of their alma matter." After finishing college, Lerner married Ruth O'Day Boyd and moved back to New York to write for the theatre. He wrote radio scripts and books for revues at the Lamb's Club, a theatrical institution. One night in 1942, during a bridge game at Lamb's, he met the composer Frederick Loewe. Lerner was 24, Loewe was 38. The two men decided to collaborate and began a highly successful partnership. In fact, Lerner and Loewe were ranked near the top of the musical entertainment world for a quarter of a century. Collaboration with Loewe The first joint effort of Lerner and Loewe was Life of the Party, which was produced in Detroit in 1942. The following two shows included What's Up and The Day Before Spring, both of which received fair reviews.

Despite this slow start, the collaboration eventually produced some of the best musicals of the Broadway stage: Brigadoon (1947); Paint Your Wagon (1951); My Fair Lady (1956); the Hollywood film, Gigi (1958) and its 1973 stage adaptation; Camelot (1960); and The Little Prince (1974). The duo's first great success was the Broadway musical, Brigadoon in 1947. The duo performed the score at over 50 auditions before they were able to get the funding they needed. Their persistence paid off: Brigadoon received the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best musical. Songs like "The Heather on the Hill" and "Almost Like Being In Love" proved Lerner to be a great lyricist, charming audiences by giving insights into the characters and moving along the plot. Edward Jablonski's biography of Lerner quoted the lyricist's explanation of how he and Loewe composed their musicals: "First, we decide where a song is needed in a play. Second, what is it going to be about? Third, we discuss the mood of the song.

Fourth, I give (Loewe) a title. Then he writes the music to the title and the general feeling of the song is established. After he's written the melody, then I write the lyrics." Troubled Personal Life The Lerner-Loewe association was not always pleasant or effective off stage, however. Part of the problem stemmed from Lerner's rocky personal life. Lerner was married eight times. He had three daughters, Jennifer, Liza and Susan, and one son, Michael. In addition to Boyd, he was married to dancer Marion Bell, lawyer Micheline Muselli Posso di Borgo, editor Karen Gundersen, and actresses Nancy Olson, Sandra Paine, Nina Bushkin, and Liz Robertson. The most notoriously unhappy of Lerner's marriages was to Micheline Muselli Posso di Borgo. Loewe had warned him not to get involved with a lawyer. When the marriage ended, it was reported that she had taken over half a million dollars and shipped much of it to Switzerland. Lerner was said to have neglected his wives and family while he was involved in a show, and was bored with everyday domestic life between productions.

He is also said to have become dependent for a long period on methedrine treatments prescribed by Dr. Max Jacobson. The "doctor" called them "vitamin injections." Professional Struggles Lerner often struggled with his lyric writing. While he was able to complete "I Could Have Danced All Night"— the most popular Lerner-Loewe tune—in one 24-hour period, this was unusual. He often agonized for months over a song and was constantly rewriting. It didn't help that Lerner suffered from chronic bouts of insecurity about his talent. Yet, his audience would never have known, as the result was always elegant and natural, even in the diverse range of topics and emotions that he explored. Lerner told author Donald Knox in his oral history called The Magic Factory, "You have to keep in mind that there is no such thing as realism or naturalism in the theater. That is a myth. If there was realism in the theater, there would never be a third act. Nothing ends that way. A man's life is made up of thousands and thousands of little pieces. In writing fiction, you select 20 or 30 of them.

In a musical, you select even fewer than that." My Fair Lady My Fair Lady was the biggest success of Lerner and Loewe. Based on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, the show opened on March 15, 1956 at the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York; it ran until 1962. Directed by Moss Hart, the musical starred Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, Stanley Holloway as Alfred P. Doolittle and a young, unknown actress from London named, Julie Andrews, as Eliza Doolittle. Lerner sometimes wrote with his singer in mind. "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" was written to accommodate the very limited vocal range of Rex Harrison. It is also an excellent example of a Lerner song that served the purpose of advancing the story: by the end of the song, Professor Higgins realizes he loves Eliza. In a 1979 interview on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Lerner discussed some of his lyrics for My Fair Lady.

They were not grammatically correct, but they were written that way for the sake of the rhyme; Henry Higgins sings, "Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter, condemned by every sentence she utters. By right she should be taken out and hung. But it rhymes with the tongue," Lerner said, "so for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue. And I thought, oh well, maybe nobody will notice it, but not at all. Two nights after it opened, I ran into Noel Coward in a restaurant, and he walked over and he said, Dear boy, it is hanged, not hung. I said, Oh, Noel, I know it, I know it! You know, shut up! So, and there's another, then to have ever let a woman in her life. It should be as to ever let a woman in her life. but it just didn't sing well." My Fair Lady set records for the longest run of a musical in both New York, where it had 2,717 performances, and London. It received the New York Drama Critics and Tony awards for best musical that year. The cast album, recorded on Columbia records, sold over five million copies.

The movie was made in 1964 and the stage show returned to Broadway in 1976 for another successful run. Other Lerner-Loewe Productions Lerner and Loewe combined their talents for the Hollywood film, Gigi, based on a story by the French writer Colette. It was seen by some as being almost a French version of My Fair Lady. The screenplay and title song, subtitled Gaston's Soliloquoy, won Academy Awards in 1958. In 1974, the duo earned a Tony Award for best score of a musical for their stage adaptation of Gigi. The next Lerner-Loewe collaboration was Camelot, produced in 1960, directed by Moss Hart. The star-studded cast included Richard Burton as Arthur, Julie Andrews as Gueinevere, and, Robert Goulet as Lancelot. Songs from the show included "How to Handle a Woman," "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood," and "If Ever I Would Leave You." While the show was a success, it did not receive anywhere near the acclaim that My Fair Lady had. Behind the scenes there were many problems, as well.

Moss Hart experienced a heart attack during rehearsals and died shortly after the show's premiere. Lerner was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers, and Loewe was having heart trouble. Lerner and Loewe fought to the point where neither wanted to work with the other again. End to Lerner-Loewe Partnership Lerner split with Loewe after Camelot. While Loewe decided to retire, Lerner, only in his forties, continued his career. In 1965, he wrote the words for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever with music by Burton Lane. The show, which explored the idea of extra-sensory perception (ESP), earned Lerner a Grammy Award that year. He also worked with Andre Previn on Coco in 1969. Katherine Hepburn played the starring role. Neither musical was particularly successful. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, written with Leonard Bernstein in 1976, was Lerner's greatest failure. He had first approached Bernstein in 1972, depressed about the state of the nation in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and well aware of Bernstein's liberal background.

Lerner proposed a show that would cover the previously grand history of the White House itself—in fact, the White House would serve as a metaphor for the entire country. The Independent of London quoted actress Patricia Routledge, who sang the female lead, as saying that the show was a "diamondstudded dinosaur." Lerner never saw the success of My Fair Lady again. His 1979 collaboration with Burton Lane, Carmelina, received meager praise. His last musical, Dance A Little Closer with music by Charles Strouse, opened and closed the same night on Broadway in 1984. The musical was based on Robert Sherwood's play, Idiot's Delight, and starred his last wife, Liz Robertson. The show received bad reviews. Lerner died of lung cancer at the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York on June 14, 1986. At the time, he was working on a stage/musical version of the 1936 movie My Man Godfrey. William A.

Raidy, in The Seattle Times, observed, "If someone asked me to write his epitaph it would come from one of his own observations: 'I write not because it is what I do, but because it is what I am. Not because it is how I make my living, but how I make my life."' A 1985 Kennedy Center celebration in Washington honored the Lerner-Loewe duo for their contributions to American culture. That same year, Lerner earned a Johnny Mercer Award, given by the National Academy of Popular Music, for his lyric writing. And in 1989, Paul Blake put together a musical revue based on Alan Jay Lerner's life and lyrics, Almost Like Being In Love, with music by Frederick Loewe, Burton Lane, Andre Previn, Charles Strouse and Kurt Weill. The show ran for ten days at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Further Reading on Alan Jay Lerner Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, June 18, 1986. Chicago Sun-Times, November 24, 1989.

Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1986; December 24, 1995; May 1, 1996. Dallas Morning News, December 2, 1989. Globe and Mail, April 13, 1996. Independent, London, July 5, 1997. Irish Times, April 20, 1996. Jewish Bulletin, November 15, 1996. Los Angeles Daily News, April 21, 1996. Portland Oregonian, April 9, 1996. San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 1989. Seattle Times, June 29, 1986 Washington Post, June 15, 1986; June 16, 1986.

On Broadway WWW Info Page, (November 14, 1999.) On Broadway WWW Info Page, (November 14, 1999.) My Fair Lady cast | creative After their success with On the Town, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green were asked to take a look at musicalising Pygmalion. A screening of the 1938 film version was arranged, and Lenny, Betty and Adolph trooped in. Two hours later, they trooped out, determined to leave it alone. "It's perfect," said Adolph Green. "Don't touch it." They were right ? and wrong. Right, because hit plays rarely make hit musicals, and those few that do usually require some novelty tweak ? Romeo and Juliet transposed to New York's West Side, The Taming of the Shrew as the play-within-the-play for a backstage yarn. Even after My Fair Lady was the toast of New York, some Broadway professionals retained an ambivalence about it, nicely caught in a Sondheim lyric from Merrily We Roll Along: I saw My Fair Lady I sort of enjoyed it.

Many composers, lyricists and librettists sort of enjoyed My Fair Lady, but couldn't quite see the need for it. Pygmalion was perfect; why touch it? But that's where they and Bernstein, Comden and Green were wrong. There's no such thing as a great idea or a lousy idea for a musical: it all depends in whose head the light bulb lights up. The Phantom of the Opera is a lousy idea for a Rodgers and Hart musical, but just dandy for an Andrew Lloyd Webber one. And that's the way it went with Pygmalion. If a writer's lucky, just once in his lifetime he collides with the perfect subject. For Lloyd Webber, it was Phantom. For Lerner and Loewe, it was My Fair Lady. They had hits before (Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon) and after (Gigi, Camelot), but this is the show that defines the team at their best ? Loewe worldly and a little detached, the kind of composer who's sceptical of a big musical-comedy-Wow!-I'm-In-Love!

number but is prepared to allow that I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face; Lerner urbane, literate and such an anglophile that, having stumbled on a lyrical style for Henry Higgins, he found that, ever after, his first draft of every song sounded as if it were written for Rex Harrison. Frederick Loewe was born in Vienna exactly a century ago and at the age of 15 wrote a Mittel European million-seller called 'Katrina'. It was his last hit song for over 30 years. His parents brought him to America, where he became a cowboy, a gold prospector and then a prizefighter. With hindsight, it would be easy to read this eclectic resum? as a determined attempt at cultural assimilation, lacking as it does only a spell as comic-book illustrator and G-man. But such an interpretation would be mistaken. Richard Rodgers once described Jerome Kern as a composer with one foot in the Old World, one in the New. But that still puts him one foot ahead of Loewe.

Panning for gold, branding his longhorns, tying his four-legged friend to the hitching post outside the Dead Man's Gulch saloon, Loewe's feet nevertheless remained, musically speaking, firmly in Old Vienna. Jazz, swing, musical comedy passed him by, and it wasn't until the mid-1940s that the Rodgers and Hammerstein school of musical play ? Oklahoma!, Carousel ? created a more hospitable climate for Loewe's talents. In 1942, looking for the men's room at the Lambs Club in New York, he bumped into Alan Jay Lerner, a moneyed young man struggling to break into showbusiness despite the crippling burdens of having been educated at Bedales in England and then, back in America, at Choate, where his classmates included John F Kennedy. Lerner and Loewe had very little in common except that (as I can testify from experience) both had a tendency to address one as Dear boy. Whether Lerner acquired the affectation from Loewe or vice-versa, it somehow encapsulates what set them apart from other, more indigenous Broadway teams.

Otherwise, they were opposites: Loewe wrote fast, musical ideas dashed off almost insouciantly. When Lerner suggested a musical elocution lesson built around the phrase The rain in Spain, Loewe said, Good. I'll write a tango ? and played the main theme there and then. Lerner, on the other hand, sweated over every phrase. He wore white gloves when he wrote, otherwise he'd gnaw his fingers to the bone. He had a special desk so that he could write standing up: if he sat down, he focused so hard on the lyric that he'd go into a trance. To the end of his life, he was a great disdainer of that songwriter's standby, the anthropomorphized heart, citing the famous song from The Sound of Music in which Sister Maria's heart wants to leap, sigh, laugh, sing, etc. "One chorus and I need an oxygen tent," he said. Yet, agonizing over the lyric to 'I Could Have Danced All Night', he found himself forced to fall back on "When all at once my heart took flight." He never liked it, swore he'd come up with something better, yet never could.

Lerner and Loewe were opposites off-stage, too. Having been a struggling youngster till late middle-age, Loewe suddenly discovered he was rich enough to enjoy the good life, and in 1960, after Camelot, quit Broadway for Palm Springs and the Riviera. He spent the next three decades at the gaming tables, and died a wealthy man. Lerner, by contrast, worked till his death in 1986 and died a wholly owned subsidiary of the Internal Revenue Service and his platoon of ex-wives. Loewe was an inveterate womaniser, Lerner a serial monogamist, married eight times. To discuss Alan without reference to his relationship with the opposite sex would be absurd, for it runs right through his work, up to one of his very last and most autobiographical lyrics: I've tossed and turned and couldn't sleep From counting minks instead of sheep I've Been Married. I've practiced writing epitaphs And read the Book of Job for laughs I've Been Married. If it has the slightly dated whiff of Vegas alimony gags, well, no one was more entitled to do them than Alan.

After one rehearsal for Fair Lady, he and Rex Harrison were strolling down Fifth Avenue reflecting on their mutual much-marriedness when Harrison suddenly stopped and said in a loud voice which turned more than a few heads: "Alan! Wouldn't it be marvellous if we were both homosexual?" Alan didn't think so, but he walked home and en route reworded the question: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Professor Higgins' charming misogyny struck a chord in both Lerner and Loewe, and indeed Lerner appreciated the premise of Pygmalion ? young unformed woman moulded by older sophisticated man ? so much that he couldn't stop writing it. Two years after Fair Lady, he wrote Gigi: young unformed woman, older sophisticated man. In 1971, with Bond composer John Barry, he musicalised Lolita: older sophisticated man, young unformed ...ah, but that proved one reprise too many of 'Thank Heaven For Little Girls'. No musical is truly autobiographical ? there are too many hands involved ? but with Pygmalion Lerner and Loewe, the characters, the pretext and the Edwardian milieu were made for each other.

What Rodgers and Hammerstein and others who turned down the property saw as its main defect ? the lack of romance ? turned out to be a virtue: Loewe was sceptical of passion, and for Lerner what Higgins does to Eliza is romantic. That aside, both men understood that the principals didn't need big, bold love duets: the romance would be supplied by the audience, silently urging them on regardless of what anybody said or sang. That's a good example of how successful musicals manage to have their cake and eat it. The trick, said Lerner, was to be specific ? to the plot and character ? yet also universal. The score of My Fair Lady rides those twin horses brilliantly. 'I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face' comes direct from Shaw ? "I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance." Put like that, it sounds rather clinical. But nudged just a little and set to Loewe's beguilingly conversational melody it both stays true to the play yet also expresses something more general about the kind of love that steals up on you.

There's a wonderfully bleary recording by Dean Martin whose mood couldn't be more different from the original context: it sounds like a guy waking up in his pad and discovering that last night's one-night stand has decided to stay for breakfast. Lerner and Loewe didn't write the song for Dino, but they knew enough not to rule him out. As to what Shaw would have made of it, we can only guess. Asked whom he wanted to compose the music for Pygmalion, he replied Mozart. You can't blame him. The last Shavian musical, The Chocolate Soldier (1908) was such a crass reduction of Arms and the Man that Shaw insisted all programmes and posters carry a public disclaimer by him. In that sense at least, My Fair Lady redeems musical theatre for the sins of its fathers. From the opening number, 'Why Can't The English Teach Their Children How To Speak?', Fair Lady declares that this is, paradoxically or not, a musical about words. Lerner was punctilious on the subject of language, at one point rebuking Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley for writing 'Who Can I Turn To?'.

He felt it should have been 'Whom Can I Turn To?' (Surely you mean 'To Whom Can I Turn?', I suggested.) Bricusse replied with a note pointing out a rare Lerner solecism from My Fair Lady: By rights you should be taken out and hanged For the cold blooded murder of the English tanged. But, as Lerner always said of lyric-writing, the clever word-play is the easy stuff. One of my favourite songs in the score is 'Show Me', the moment when Eliza, mightily sick of words, demands something more: it's a lovely jest, in a work so articulate, to produce a song recognizing the limits of that articulacy, and it's one reason why My Fair Lady ? from source material to adaptation ? sums up better than any other the ambitions of the post-war musical play. It was the perfect musical play, Andr? Previn, a sometime Lerner composing partner, told me. "But it was so perfect that afterwards, what else could you do?" My Fair Lady was the last word as far as that kind of musical was concerned.

So Broadway turned to dance musicals, and rock musicals, and concept musicals, and through-composed musicals, and none of them ever really stuck around long enough to become a viable living tradition. Fritz Loewe understood he could never top Fair Lady, and flew off to Palm Springs. Alan Lerner kept trying, an unenviable task. Today we can enjoy the work for what it is ? a superb example of how, in the right hands, no material is beyond the range of musical theatre. ? Mark Steyn, February 2001 Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph, Canada's National Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, and appears in many other papers around the world. He is film critic for The Spectator in London and writes on theatre for The New Criterion in New York. His book, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, is published by Faber and Faber.

Question: Who wrote the words for My Fair Lady and Camelot?
Answer: Alan Jay Lerner