Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles
John Lahr
336pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers
Meryle Secrest
458pp, Bloomsbury, £25
Cole
ed Robert Kimball
283pp, Overlook, £50
Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber
Stephen Citron
452pp, Chatto, £25
Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline, watched his Siberian home burn from the roadside before his family emigrated to the worst slum in the western world, New York's Lower East Side; at 13 he busked in its saloons. Richard Rodgers kept tense silence in an extended family in Harlem (then a classy Jewish neighbourhood); his exit from domesticity was a 50-cent theatre seat for musical comedies. Cole Porter, uneasy with his teenage sexuality in Peru, Indiana, escaped to Yale on the family million to write football anthems and join, among other hearty fraternities, the Glee Club, the Whiffenpoofs and the Grill Room Grizzlies.
It is usual when considering the careers of these Broadway talents to compare their differences - their musical divergences, not the gulf in moolah between Porter rah-rahing at the Corinthian yacht club and Berlin kipping on a bench (royalties were low on his first 190 or so songs until Alexander's Ragtime Band bumped up the income to $100,000 a year at 21). But in these books - Cole's complete lyrics; Secrest's dogged biography of Rodgers; Lahr's profile of Berlin, among other ace New Yorker showbiz essays - what's overwhelming is their congruence.
They had life compressed into energy. Berlin "incarnated the advice given to immigrants on how to survive in America: 'Do not take a moment's rest. Run'"; Porter posed for snaps, languid on the Venice Lido, but battered at the baby grand all night when showtime came. They all enjoyed a new artistic liberty: the freedom of early 20th-century New York, the ultimate multicultural city, to be inspired by whatever music was in its air - opera, operetta, black, klezmer, Latin - and match it, or have it paired by partners, with poetic words. Porter borrowed the sprung rhythm of his lyrics from Robert Browning, and Berlin, once past the melting-pot dialects of his "Make-a Rag-a Time Dance Wid Me" period, funded himself study sessions with the couplets of Alexander Pope to refine his refrains to divine simplicity: "And the cares that hung around me through the week / Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak / When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek."
But their closest unanimity was in what they did, which was to define happiness musically, not to pursue it in their private lives. The depressive Berlin lost family, first wife, child, first fortune. (To the guest at a party who said "I guess there's no one who has written as many hits as you" he answered, "I know there's no one who has written so many failures.") Melancholy Porter was crippled for 30 years, his legs crushed in a riding accident, yet was ever more cool and elegant, confecting "True Love" for the movie High Society in an agony of body and soul. Rodgers, comfortable only inside a theatre (well, to be exact, "If I'm unhappy, it takes my unhappiness away"), protected his alcoholic lyricist Lorenz Hart through two decades of very deep depths until Hart expired of liquor. After which, in business with the balanced Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers escaped, through booze and chorus-girl liaisons, his bulimic wife, who had been the perfect ingénue of the songs.
The profession of them all was creating what Lahr calls "America's landscape of promise" - I think he means that as the nation ran out of physical territory in which to place its hopes for the future, it relocated them on film and in song. Sure, the three could deliver certain nuances of rue. Hart's words slewed Rodgers's notes towards incipient nostalgia, the pleasurable regret for a sensation happening or about to happen that is the mood of great standards ("Bewitched", "There's a Small Hotel"). In Porter, a gay shrewdness about mutability is always audible: the undertow of "Begin the Beguine", which he composed aboard the SS Franconia as she steamed to Fiji on his world tour, or the check on flattery in "You're the Top".
At the keyboard, though, Berlin and Rodgers (with Hammerstein) were usually cockeyed optimists whatever the state of the economy, the battle front in the Ardennes, or the unspoken regrets over their own breakfast tables. It's Always a Lovely Day Today (or Tomorrow); there will be Blue Skies, a Blue Moon, a White Christmas. And if the worst happens - defined in their shows as desertion by, or very rarely the death of, a loved one - You'll Never Walk Alone as you Climb Every Mountain.
Lahr describes Berlin's numbers as "emblematic of the great ceremonial constructs of American public life" - war, showbiz, the nation (his "God Bless America" must have had as much airtime last autumn as in 1945). But most of his hits, like those of Rodgers with Hammerstein, serve another American construction - the belief that the happiness promised in the constitution is embodied in the exciting prospect of an ideal romantic partner. In shows they would place a song about the exultation of being in love in the first act, long before the plot justified it. The music they heard when young had been consolation for deprivation and failure, but Broadway demanded boy gets girl: Rodgers and Hart's dash-of-bitters Pal Joey was as low as box office could go.
Foxy Sondheim, Stephen's mom, saw all the shows, bought the sell, and had nowhere to escape but into full-time fantasy when her husband, big in the NY rag trade, with easy access to showfolk and complete scores for the piano, left home for a new love. She almost abandoned her son to educate himself, which he did lyrically with help from family friend Hammerstein. Broadway melodies were Sondheim's NY music in the air: he pastiches them effortlessly, but just as his mentors had dodged the downside of the blues and cantors, so Sondheim turned away from the con of 42nd Street's always-promissory tone.
His revulsion at Foxy's emotional dishonesty and what had nourished it (better documented in Secrest's last biog, of Sondheim, than in Citron's sloppy hit-ography) is the constant in his work. It is most directly expressed in Follies, when the ageing women principals dance with the shades of the perfect, hopeful girls they once were - Richard Rodgers's life summarised. It motivates the light music for the lovers at the start of Passion, romantic according to conventions but actually heartless - genuine love appears in that show at the late time it arrived in Sondheim's own life, and is incompatible with the pursuit of happiness.
Momma's imagination was retarded by the romantic definition of happiness. In revenge, leads in Sondheim shows appreciate -with his best songs - those moments when happiness is caught in reality: the artist Seurat painting a hat in Sunday in the Park , or the maid in A Little Night Music celebrating "everything passing by" with a much-desired fuck and no self-deception. In fact, the characters for whom Sondheim created numbers closest to the old style are the presidential murderers in Assassins. Now that's truly an American romance...
· John Lahr will give a platform talk on Thursday at the National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1. Tickets £3.50 on 020-7452 3000.
