Behind 'Blue Moon' and The Broken Hart

Richard Linklater’s film Blue Moon, the tart, sad tale of a famous musical break-up and the broken Hart behind it, will resonate with any fan of the Great American Songbook. Or with any victim of romantic self-delusion – and maybe too much bourbon – as to be sure was the short, sharp, closeted and conflicted songwriter Lorenz (Larrry) Hart himself.

But despite the film’s opening headlines, the March 31, 1943, Broadway debut of Oklahoma was not the beginning of musical collaboration by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II – far from it. Nor was it the end of Rodgers and Hart, at least not quite.

In fact, Hammerstein worked with Rodgers before Hart, on a 1919 amateur musical comedy titled Up Stage and Down. It included the song “There’s Always Room for One More,” repurposed in the 1920 Columbia University Varsity Show, Fly With Me, otherwise mainly by Hart and Rodgers (then still a comely teen)— making it the first production in which all three had a hand.

The Hammerstein lyric, meant for an avid, young ladies’ man, was surprisingly saucy for the eventual master of high-minded anthems and deep romantic ballads. For example: “My heart is an airy castle filled with girls I adore/ My brain is a cloud of memories of peaches galore/ There was Jane and Molly and Ruth and Sue, Camilla, Kit, and Patricia too/ My heart is filled to the brim with you, but there’s always room for one more.” Oh, Oscar!

The preternaturally talented trio collaborated again on You’ll Never Know, the 1921 Varsity Show, with Oscar as director of production.

Born to a theatrical family, Hammerstein subsequently co-wrote 850 songs with top composers of the day including Jerome Kern (with whom he created the groundbreaking1927 musical Show Boat), and won eight Tony Awards and two Oscars for Best Original film song.

But Hart and Rodgers bonded, though quite unlike in personality and approach ( Rodgers disciplined, Hart determinedly not, and increasingly alcoholic). Music came first, then lyrics when Hart could be found. After several years with only one song in one show, they captured the nation’s musical attention in 1925 with witty, melodic, “Manhattan” (The city's clamor can never spoil/The dreams of a boy and goil). And within a year they had three shows on Broadway simultaneously.

Determined to help lift musical theater above its then dated blend of operetta, vaudeville and disjointed revues, they were the first to bring in Shakespeare —The Boys from Syracuse, (1938), based on the bard’s A Comedy of Errors. They ‘d already raised the level of Broadway choreography with ballet by George Balanchine in On Your Toes (1936) and later Babes in Arms and, I Married an Angel.

And before all that they’d even musicalized time travel with their 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee, based on Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

In the end the mismatched pair created 28 stage musicals, many later hit films, and more than 500 songs, continuing mainstays of classic American pop music such as “Falling In Love With Love,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Isn’t It Romantic,” “My Funny Valentine (for a character named Valentine),”The Blue Room,” “Little Girl Blue”, and of course “Blue Moon"). Hart well knew his blues.

Not so much in the awards department, but then Tony Awards only began in 1947, and for a musicals in 1949 with Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. Oscars for best original movie score or song began in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz (best of both) but don’t seem to have been awarded again until the 1960s and 70s.

Blue Moon the film is more than bit misleading with its opening scene of Hart staggering through city streets and alleys, ending in a final, seemingly fatal collapse after a deserved Rodgers cold shoulder.

In real life, something close to that scene only played out months later, after Hart and Rodgers completed half a dozen new songs for a revival of their “Connecticut Yankee,” as the film’s closing credits note.

Foremost among those numbers was the merrily murderous “To Keep My Love Alive,” for actress/songstress Vivienne Segal, to whom Hart had reportedly proposed marriage twice, whatever his underlying orientation. And with whom on opening night -- from his seat and drunken stupor, by one account -- he was singing along when Rodgers saw him removed from the theater to a sister’s home. Sadly, madly, Hart took himself to the streets, collapsed, contracted pneumonia and died in hospital within days.

That ending, for those who know, may still cast a chill on the fun final lyrics for the broken Hart’s would-be wife Segal:

I've been married, and married, and often I've sighed,
"I'm never a bridesmaid, I'm always a bride."
I never divorced them—I hadn't the heart (he had to realize the pun)
Yet remember these sweet words: "'Til death do us part..."

Poor Larry.
--David Alpern