USA TODAY National
We’ve all heard his songs “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
But chances are, you know very little about lyricist Lorenz Hart, who along with composer Richard Rodgers is responsible for classic musicals such as “Pal Joey” and “Babes in Arms.” Richard Linklater’s new film, “Blue Moon” (in theaters nationwide Oct. 24), offers a complex window into Hart’s tragic final months before he died of pneumonia in 1943, after drunkenly collapsing outside a bar during a rainstorm. He was 48.
The melancholic movie is set entirely at New York’s famed Sardi’s restaurant, where Rodgers (Andrew Scott) is celebrating the opening night of “Oklahoma!,” his adulated musical with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Short, balding and deeply insecure, the embittered Hart (Ethan Hawke) offers some disingenuous congratulations, but can’t mask his contempt for Rodgers’ new writing partner and their swoony, uncynical show.
Before he approached Hammerstein, Rodgers initially asked Hart to co-write the score of “Oklahoma!” but he turned it down.
“He was like, ‘This is a cowboy musical and I have no interest in this,’” screenwriter Robert Kaplow says. “When it turns into this landmark hit, it’s professional jealousy manifesting itself as anger. I also think Hart would be the wrong man to write that show: He comes from a period of the 1930s that is much more sardonic. Even in the ‘40s, Hart was writing stuff that’s probably darker than that audience wanted to see.”
Rodgers, meanwhile, “had his ear to the ground and recognized, ‘We’re in (World War II). This is a show about an America that people might be sentimental for.’ ”
As a result of the overwhelming success of "Oklahoma!," as well as Hart's worsening alcoholism, Rodgers continued to collaborate with Hammerstein for nearly two decades on beloved shows including "South Pacific," "The King and I" and "The Sound of Music."
What is the true story behind Richard Linklater's movie 'Blue Moon'?
The film is based, in part, on roughly a dozen letters between Hart and the much younger Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an aspiring production designer studying at the Yale School of Fine Art. Hart desperately pines for Weiland throughout the movie, but she sweetly keeps him at arm’s length.
A lifelong fan of Rodgers and Hart, Kaplow bought the letters from a used bookseller, which then became a springboard for this story.
“They suggest more than they say,” Kaplow explains. “She’ll write, ‘I had this disastrous 20th birthday party,’ or suggest that she and Hart went away for a weekend in Vermont, but she doesn’t actually say what happened. So that was fun to imagine that she’s got one perception of what their relationship is, and he erroneously has another.”
Other elements of “Blue Moon” are historical fiction. There is no proof, for instance, that author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) was at Sardi’s that night, nor that Hart gave him the idea for “Stuart Little.”
“I thought Hart needed to talk to another writer, so I needed to invent that,” Kaplow says. “He couldn’t just talk to the bartender and the piano player,” who are more or less comic relief.
At one point during the afterparty, Hammerstein introduces Hart to a young boy named Stevie (Cillian Sullivan), an aspiring composer whom musical theater fans will recognize as Stephen Sondheim. Growing up, the eight-time Tony winner was a classmate and friend of Hammerstein's son James. Although Hammerstein was Sondheim’s mentor, it’s unlikely that his 12-year-old protégé was there for the opening of “Oklahoma!”
“According to Sondheim himself, the first opening he went to was ‘Carousel' " in 1945, Kaplow says. “I’m making it a musical fable."
What was Lorenz Hart's cause of death?
During one of Hart’s attempts to woo Weiland, she asks him forthrightly whether he likes men, which he awkwardly shrugs off. According to Kaplow’s research, Hart proposed to Broadway star Vivienne Segal and another actress, both of whom turned him down.
“He’s uncomfortable with his own confused sexuality; he’s a guy that doesn’t really like himself,” Kaplow says. There’s no evidence that Hart was indeed gay “because in 1943, you wouldn’t document that. You’d get arrested. But apparently, the circle of friends he was with would suggest that.”
Despite being his biggest hit, Hart was really somewhat embarrassed by his 1934 song “Blue Moon,” feeling that his lyrics were too “mainstream” and “corny,” Kaplow says. He believed his satirical style of writing had fallen out of fashion with the rest of the world, and he spent his last years in a period of heavy drinking and depression.
In her autobiography “A Wayward Quest,” playwright Theresa Helburn wrote that she believed it was seeing “Oklahoma!” on opening night “that broke his heart and hastened his death.”
“She said, ‘Poor Larry: so warm and exuberant and sweet, in spite of his underlying sadness. He was never quite in tune with life,’ ” Kaplow says. “You wish someone could have intervened on his behalf and worked a little harder to sober him up. He was a lost soul.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Blue Moon' tells the little-known true story of 'lost soul' Lorenz Hart
Reporting by Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
FOX 5 Atlanta Crime
Truthout
Raw Story
People Top Story
New York Post
ESPN Football Headlines
Law & Crime