
Alan Jay Lerner, a lyricist and librettist, was born 102 years ago today.
In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later, Burton Lane, Lerner created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian and television game show panelist, Henry Morgan.
At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy. At Choate, they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, Lerner’s career in musical theater began in college. It was his contributions to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals that inspired his start.
During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied music composition at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
Due to his injury, Lerner could not serve in World War II. Instead he wrote radio scripts, including Your Hit Parade. In 1942, he was introduced to Austrian composer, Frederick Loewe, who needed a partner at the Lamb's Club. While at the Lamb's, he also met, Lorenz Hart, who helped transform Lerner into his protégé.
Lerner and Loewe's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Conners's farce, The Patsy. It was for a Detroit stock company and called, Life of the Party. The lyrics were mostly written by Earle Crooker, but he had left the project, with the score needing vast improvement.
The show had a nine-week run and encouraged the duo to join forces with Arthur Pierson for, What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943. It ran for 63 performances and was followed two years later by The Day Before Spring.
Their first hit, Brigadoon, came in 1947. It was a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village, directed by Robert Lewis. It was followed in 1951 by the less successful Gold Rush story, Paint Your Wagon. Lerner worked with Kurt Weill on the stage musical, Love Life (1948), and Burton Lane on the movie musical, Royal Wedding (1951).
In that same year, Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning original screenplay for An American in Paris, produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli. This was the same team who would later join with Lerner and Loewe to create Gigi.
In 1956, Lerner and Loewe unveiled My Fair Lady. Before finishing the musical, Lerner was eager to write while My Fair Lady was taking so long to complete. Burton Lane and Lerner were working on a musical about Li'l Abner. Gabriel Pascal owned the rights to Pygmalion, which had been unsuccessful with other composers who tried to adapt it into a musical.
Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz first tried, and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II attempted, but gave up and Hammerstein told Lerner "Pygmalion had no subplot."
Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion retained his social commentary and added appropriate songs for the characters of Henry Higgins and Liza Doolittle, played originally by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It set box-office records in New York and London. When brought to the screen in 1964, the movie version would win eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.
Lerner and Loewe's run of success continued with their next project, a film adaptation of stories from Colette, the Academy Award winning film musical, Gigi, starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier. The film won all of its nine Oscar nominations, a record at that point in time, and a special Oscar for co-star, Maurice Chevalier.
The Lerner-Loewe partnership cracked under the stress of producing Camelot in 1960, with Loewe resisting Lerner's desire to direct as well as write when original director Moss Hart suffered a heart attack in the last few months of rehearsals and died shortly after the show's premiere.
Lerner was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers while Loewe continued to have heart troubles. Camelot was a hit nonetheless, and immediately following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his widow told reporter Theodore H. White that JFK's administration reminded her of the "one brief shining moment" of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot.
As of the early 21st century, Camelot was still invoked to describe the idealism, romance, and tragedy of the Kennedy years.
Lerner's personal foibles were the stuff of tabloid legend. For nearly twenty years he battled an amphetamine addiction. During the 1960s, he was a patient of Max Jacobson, known as "Dr. Feelgood," who administered injections of "vitamins with enzymes" that were in fact laced with amphetamines. Lerner's addiction is believed to have been the result of Jacobson's practice.
Lerner died of lung cancer in Manhattan at the age of 67.
In the photo, Lerner and Frederick Loewe working in Oyster Bay, New York, 1960