Oh, Wasn't It All Loverly

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When he was 23 and breaking into the entertainment world, Alan Jay Lerner kept to "a schedule so tight that it would only work if I didn't sleep on Monday nights." He wrote daily radio sketches for Celeste Holm and Alfred Drake, crafted material for Victor Borge and Hildegarde and contributed audio pageants to Cavalcade of America. Then one lunchtime at Manhattan's Lambs Club, where he hung around hoping to be noticed, a fortyish theater composer impulsively came up to his table. "You write good lyrics," said Frederick Loewe, who had heard Lerner's contributions to the club's Gambols. "Would you like to do a musical with me?" Lerner cockily replied, "Yes. I happen to have two weeks off."

From that meeting sprang a partnership that enriched the American musical theater with Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), Camelot (1960) and the show many credit as the genre's best, My Fair Lady (1956). Those lush romantic period pieces became big-budget Hollywood movies, usually with scripts by Lerner, and the two created another nostalgic costume epic, Gigi (1958), directly for the screen. Their style of show eventually went out of fashion. Their songs never did: Thank Heaven for Little Girls, If Ever I Would Leave You, They Call the Wind Maria, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face. After Loewe retired in 1960, Lerner collaborated with composers including Burton Lane, Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Strouse but never matched his achievements with Loewe.

The theater world last week honored the team's legacy in a memorial for Lerner, who died of lung cancer on June 14 at age 67. Some 1,500 people gathered at Broadway's Shubert Theater for an 80-minute service of anecdotes, reminiscences and, above all, songs. John Cullum reprised his title number from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). Meg Bussert and Martin Vidnovic, stars of a 1980 Broadway revival of Brigadoon, performed Almost Like Being in Love. Julie Andrews sang Lerner's favorite non-Lerner showstopper, If Love Were All, from Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said, "Few men in our melancholy age brought so much pleasure to so many people." Loewe, 85 and living in Palm Springs, Calif., sent a letter addressing Lerner. "It won't be long," he said, "before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there."

Born in New York City, Lerner was the son of the founder of Lerner Stores, a women's apparel chain. At Choate and Harvard, he was a schoolmate of John F. Kennedy's and later became a sort of goodwill ambassador between the Kennedy White House and the arts. Jacqueline Kennedy, after her husband's assassination, likened his brief tenure to the fleeting glory evoked in Camelot.

Lerner lived flamboyantly, buying an eight-bath Manhattan town house, vacationing in a rented villa on the Riviera, moving to London in his final years, partygoing everywhere. He wed eight times, to women ranging from actresses in his shows to a Newsweek reporter who interviewed him, fathered three daughters and a son. His divorces were sometimes messy, and he blamed the settlements for his financial problems: at his death, the Internal Revenue Service was seeking $1.4 million in back taxes and penalties.

A multitalented writer, Lerner won a 1951 Oscar for his screenplay for An American in Paris. His 1978 autobiography, The Street Where I Live, was praised for its urbanity. His greatest strength, however, came in plainspoken, affectionate lyrics, as in The Heather on the Hill:

The mist of May is in the gloamin',

And all the clouds are holdin' still

So take my hand and let's go roamin'

Through the heather on the hill.

Often he took a gently self-deflating tone toward the very sentiments he celebrated. In Gigi's I Remember It Well, two aging former lovers nostalgically recall their first date and disagree about every detail. In My Fair Lady's Wouldn't It Be Loverly? a cockney flower girl extols the glories of love, chocolate candy and coal for the fireplace, all with the same tone of wistful desire. Her exasperated tutor demands of a male colleague:

Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours? . . .

Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers? . . .

If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss? . . .

Why can't a woman be like us?

In Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Lerner's lyrics consistently matched the original dialogue's wit, verve and acerbic class consciousness. The idea was nonetheless unwelcome to Shaw, who died in 1950 (his estate authorized the show). When a musical version was proposed, the playwright wrote a dismissive 1948 postcard: "I absolutely forbid any such outrage. If Pygmalion is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary." Indeed it was.