I’ve been taking an extended break between volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, which has been eating up most of my reading time since last December. I finished the third book, A Storm of Swords, in early April, and I plan to start the fourth, A Feast for Crows, in the next couple of weeks. Once I’ve read Feast, I’ll be fully prepared to join the throngs impatiently waiting for the next one, A Dance With Dragons, which George R. R. Martin optimistically says will be out this July.
As I mentioned earlier, a novel in the Ice and Fire saga, once begun, is hard to put down—which is enormously inconvenient, as each book is six hundred to one thousand pages long in hardcover. Storm of Swords was at the high end of that range, and I plowed through it in two weeks while trying to do things like sleep and get to work on time. I specifically waited to start it until the day Jamie left for Chile. My friends didn’t really see much of me. That’s the kind of obsession a series like this encourages. I’ve heard it described as fantasy for people who aren’t interested in fantasy, and I think that’s fair, given the amount of fantasy clichés that Martin either subverts or completely ignores. For one thing, there’s very little good-versus-evil among his characters; what he goes for is something much more psychologically satisfying, with surprising but sensical plot twists and characters who nearly all have some nuance to them. Almost every character who appears to be an unmitigated villain in the first book develops some valid motivations in later volumes; and other characters who are generally honorable do some terrible, destructive things to preserve their sense of what’s right. Oh, and just about any character can die horribly at a moment’s notice. It really is fun to read, even so.
Anyway, after I finished Storm of Swords and decided to take a long break from all that medieval ultraviolence, the first book I picked up as an antidote was Alan Jay Lerner’s memoir The Street Where I Live, which a friend lent me a while back. Lerner was the lyric-writing half of Lerner and Loewe (writers of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and so forth), and part of the fun of the book was learning about something I had very little prior knowledge of—in this case, the musical theater craze of the 1950s. Lerner divides his book into three long chapters, each focused one of his last three collaborations with composer Fritz Loewe—My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960) for the stage, and the movie Gigi (1958)—with a few digressions on the larger history of American theater in general and musicals in particular.
I love both cultural history and behind-the-scenes stories, so I ate a lot of this up. Lerner has a nice, breezy style that can go straight from laying out a quick history of the rise of musical theater (I was surprised to find out that P. G. Wodehouse had a great influence on the lyric style of ’20s and ’30s musicals, though that makes a lot of sense, as Wodehouse himself thought of his novels and stories as musical comedies without the music) to the long and involved process of getting the rights to adapt George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. (Basically, Lerner and Loewe chose to begin working on the play before being granted the rights, which convinced the pertinent British and American authorities that they would do something commercially viable with the property if they were given the rights. Something like that. It’s really quite convoluted, and I salute Lerner for describing it in the book better than I can here.)
The chapter on My Fair Lady is great fun, full of anecdotes about everything from Lerner’s terrible writer’s block to the low-hanging chandelier that captured Rex Harrison’s hairpiece. And, speaking of Rex Harrison, the jury is out on exactly what Lerner thought of him. He describes the infamously temperamental actor as a dear friend and a wonderful collaborator, and he blows off Harrison’s detractors—Harrison had detractors, from all I can tell, just because he was an ill-tempered little boy for most of his adult life—and then proceeds to tell stories that exemplify exactly the kind of bad behavior they were complaining about. So I don’t know if he’s speaking in code or what, but I thought I caught a distinct backhanded edge under Lerner’s ostensible praise of his old pal Harrison.
Be that as it may, Lerner’s a fun, engaging writer, especially when talking about his creative and commercial successes. The chapter on the making of Gigi drags a bit, but it’s appropriately short, and the chapter on Camelot more than makes up for it. Problems in the making of Camelot included the following: Lerner being hospitalized for severe ulcers; director Moss Hart having a heart attack (not his first) and literally being wheeled into the hospital just as Lerner was leaving; the play’s initial running time of four butt-numbing hours, which naturally caused a few walkouts in the audience; and a general combination of hubris and terrible luck. It went from a train wreck to a respectable hit almost overnight, after some judicious cuts and a performance of a few of its songs on The Ed Sullivan Show. And then it gained some unexpected cultural resonance, as its final lines (“for one brief shining moment” and so forth) were quoted by Jacqueline Kennedy the assassination of her husband, which moved Lerner so deeply when he found out about it that he walked twelve blocks past his house before he noticed he’d gone too far.
I think the unpredictability of success or failure is what I like most about both Lerner’s memoir and behind-the-scenes stories in general: no matter how professional and hard-working everyone is, you eventually have to leave your work at the mercy of the audience and let them decide if it’s going to take off, flop, or find any kind of lasting resonance. So, yeah, it’s well worth reading. Be prepared for a degree of sexism and egotism ameliorated by a lot of genuine insight and creative reflection. (Watch for his funny, affectionate portrait of legendary theater director Moss Hart: “One of Moss’s most endearing traits was his innocent surprise at being Moss Hart.”) Oh, and I should mention that you’ll want to have the soundtracks to all three musicals on hand for reference. My Fair Lady is the only one that I think is still full of memorable songs, but Lerner’s book will definitely make you curious about all those lyrics he was fussing over.
