Icons: The Juggernaut

Sheldon Harnick at 91.

Drawing by Annie Blackman.

            By way of beginning our conversation on an overcast May afternoon, Sheldon Harnick, Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist, apologized for getting up; he needed his hearing aids.  Talking of ailments as he puttered from the room, he mentioned an elderly relative who got around on crutches.  “He’s ninety-two,” he said sympathetically.  Harnick turned ninety-one in April, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed; he moves, comfortably and with purpose, like someone half his age.

            Harnick’s living room, to which he returned after a momentary absence, is tasteful, large but not sprawling, and dominated by a grand piano on which rests the sheet music to Fiddler on the Roof and The Rothschilds, among some others of his musicals.  The view of Central Park out the wall of windows is like something taken by helicopter.  Harnick quickly settled on an armchair by a bowl of M and M’s, from which he sampled occasionally in between sentences.  (Harnick is warmly loquacious -- in a biography of Hal Prince I read in preparation for the interview, Prince is hardly quoted at all, while a snippet of a Harnick interview appears almost every other page.)

            Born in Chicago in 1924, Harnick wrote music and poetry in high school, where he played violin in the symphony orchestra.  A friend active in the black box theater scene in Chicago soon got wind of him and roped him into a song and sketch-writing collaboration that lasted two years.  “I didn’t think any of it was any good,” Harnick recalled, “but it was a good experience.”  Perhaps the highlight of the collaboration was a nightclub comic who saw their work and approached them to buy jokes.  “We sold him material by the yard,” Harnick laughed.  “I’m sure it was all puns.”  But it made good money, and empowered Harnick and his friend to enter a theatrical competition themselves.  Their routine didn’t get a single laugh.  “That’s when I really started getting interested,” Harnick said.

            Harnick began to write continuously -- during his service in World War II, he told NPR last year, he wrote songs to entertain his special service unit, and upon returning to enroll at Northwestern University he penned numbers for the student variety show.  A fellow student, Charlotte Rae (who would later go on to spend seven years playing Edna Garrett on the sitcoms “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life”), having heard his work, lent him a record of Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow, which had just swept the First Tony Awards.  Harburg’s intricate, technically brilliant lyrics “dazzled” Harnick, he recalls.  “I suddenly thought, that’s a career I’d like to follow.”

The intersecting careers and styles of Sheldon Harnick and Edgar “Yip” Harburg, incidentally, are very telling.  Both highly decorated Russian Jews who showed early talent and penned scores of hits, they’ve become equally venerated in the American theater – although Harnick would be quick to deny it.  Harnick revered Harburg from a young age, and still does; when he talks about Finian’s Rainbow or The Wizard of Oz, he becomes quiet and almost awed.

In the early fifties, when Harnick had moved to New York to pursue writing lyrics, Harnick met Harburg at the Village Vanguard, where Rae was performing.  Harnick was star-struck: “I was asking him, ‘Oh, Mr. Harburg, did you know Cole Porter, did you know Larry Hart?’”  Harburg invited Harnick to his apartment, where Harnick played Harburg his songs and Harburg advised him on grabbing the audience -- “When you write a song, it has to be interesting from the first note,” Harburg said.  It was the beginning of a friendship that was to last over thirty years.

*

Over the seven years that followed his first meeting with Harburg, Harnick, through diligent and underpaid labor both off and on Broadway, became one of the most sought-after lyricists and composers for revues, working with, among others, Alice Ghostley, John Murray Anderson, and, perhaps most significantly, Jack Cassidy (a singer, actor, and, later, father of David).  Cassidy was working at the time mostly on revues at resorts in the Poconos, and had collaborated at various points both with Harnick and with a cooperative young composer from Flushing named Jerry Bock.

Bock had less technical experience than Harnick at the time but had made more of a name for himself, as part of a team with Larry Holofcener that wrote many popular television revues of the time period, as well as, most famously, the Sammy Davis Jr. Broadway showcase Mr. Wonderful, at the time of Harnick and Bock’s meeting still going strong on Broadway.  But though the showcase, essentially an extension of Davis’ nightclub act, had launched Bock’s career on Broadway, it had also put pressure on his partnership with Holofcener, who, according to Harnick, during the out-of-town tryouts “buckled under the pressure… and was not able to come up with the lyrics they needed.”  Holofcener was tossed unceremoniously from the show in favor of George Weiss (one of the lyricists of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), and Holofcener and Bock were kaput.  Short version?  Jerry was looking for a new lyricist.

Harnick describes the initial meeting simply.  “Jack [Cassidy] said, ‘I want you to meet Jerry Bock,” he told me.  “So we met and we got along fine.”  But something in the partnership must have inspired confidence, for soon after they met -- having never written a song together -- Bock’s publisher attracted several high-profile producers (including the journalist and “What’s My Line” panelist Dorothy Kilgallen) to support the first musical collaboration of Bock and Harnick, a boxing tale called The Body Beautiful.

Bock and Harnick fell into a comfortable routine right away.  “Once we knew what the source material was, we would go into our respective studios and try to come up with ideas for songs,” Harnick said.  Bock would sit at his piano and write “eight or ten” songs, then send them to his partner on tape.  Harnick would listen to the tape and assign songs to characters or scenes, then write the lyrics -- with helpful suggestions from Bock, himself an occasional lyricist.  It was a smooth and effective system.  “Also,” Harnick, a fiery liberal, noted, grinning, “we had the same political beliefs, which made it nice.”

The Body Beautiful itself was not so satisfying.  Harnick’s memories of the musical are touched by nostalgia: he recalls seeing ribbons made of boxers’ silk falling with the curtain at the end of the opening and bursting into tears.  But up against My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and West Side Story at the same time, a musical that even Harnick admits had “lots of problems” had little chance.  It would eventually run sixty performances.

As often happens in sad stories at the beginning of Broadway legends’ careers, there was a very distinct and practically unbelievable silver lining.  In attendance at a preview performance of The Body Beautiful in 1958 was a young lyricist whose Broadway debut, playing just a block south at the Winter Garden Theatre, would be one of the reasons for this very show’s demise -- a twenty-eight year old phenom named Stephen Sondheim.  Sondheim called Hal Prince to inform him that there were some talented new kids on the block.  The already legendary producer came to Body Beautiful’s opening night performance, and later to the after-party at Sardi’s.

At the party, Harnick, Bock, and Bock’s wife Patricia sat at the end of an imposingly long table filled with producers.  One by one the reviews filtered in.  The Times.  Bad.  The Herald-Tribune.  Bad.  “When the first review was read,” Harnick noted dryly, “half the people left the party.  When the second review came out, the other half left.”  Harnick and the Bocks were suddenly sitting at an empty table.  “We just felt devastated,” Harnick said.  Then they were introduced to Hal Prince.  “I’ll be honest,” Prince told them, “I had problems with [the show].  But I think you guys are wonderfully talented, and I hope to be working with you within a year.”

*

Prince may have been being generous, but he actually did have a musical in development at the time that was in need of new creative energy.  Fiorello!, the story of the venerated New York City Mayor Fiorello Laguardia to be directed by George Abbott, had been turned down not only by Sondheim but also half the songwriting population of New York.  Jerry Bock was hired right off to write the score, but Harnick was initially left out in favor of Jerome Weidman, who was eventually hired to write the libretto, and had petitioned to write the lyrics as well, but had submitted samples so dense Bock compared them to Beowulf.  Needless to say, a lyricist was still needed.

A competition was established between four songwriting teams to determine who might write the lyrics (and possibly replace Bock as composer) for the new, highly anticipated musical.  “They showed us as much of the book as had been written, and they marked four places where they wanted us to write songs,” Harnick recounted.  Four songs were dutifully written and played for Hal Prince and producer Bobby Griffith, including the ballad “‘Til Tomorrow,” sung by La Guardia to his lover Marie as he prepares to go off to World War I.  The bulk of the short song is taken up by the following lyric:

                        Twilight descends, everything ends

'til tomorrow, tomorrow.

If we must part, here is my heart,

'til tomorrow, tomorrow.

Hal Prince thought it so sappy he was certain it was a satire.  (It didn’t help that the nervous Harnick had smiled at Prince throughout the song.)  Griffith, who had been a young man at the time of World War I, thought it a perfect recreation of the Irving Berlin-style ballads of the day.  An argument broke out in front of Bock and Harnick, who sat uncomfortably at the piano.  Suddenly there was a knock at the door.  Prince, fire in his eyes, commanded, “Don’t anybody say anything.”  In came Fiorello! choreographer Pete Gennaro (a 39-year-old former dancer who two years earlier had co-choreographed West Side Story with Jerome Robbins).  Bock and Harnick were commanded to play “‘Til Tomorrow” once more.  They did so.  Upon its completion, Gennaro smiled, spread his arms wide, and cried, “Ah, it’s 1917, it’s Irving Berlin.”

Grinning widely, Prince turned to Harnick and said, “Okay kid, you got the job.”

*

            Revived only once, in 1962, in a production that lasted sixteen performances, and with a very low profile in modern theater, Fiorello! was nonetheless one of Harnick’s biggest Broadway hits, and he is reflexively -- and rightfully -- protective of it.  “It’s a terrific show; it’s not done nearly enough,” was his immediate response to praise of the score.  He dismissed out of hand the notion (not suggested by me but apparently a common one) that the show might not succeed in regional productions because of its New York focus, recounting story after story of productions in California and Chicago of cooperative directors, effusive orchestrators, and passionate actors.  The truth is that Fiorello! needs no defending.  As a sophomore Broadway effort it does not belie the astonishing talent already budding in the team of Bock and Harnick, and especially Harnick, whose lyrics shone brighter in this collaboration than perhaps any other.  From “Politics and Poker,” a musicalization of a more rudimentary scene by Weidman in which Republican party bosses play cards and plan the selection of a Congressional candidate:

BOSS 1:

Gentlemen, how about some names we can use?

Some qualified Republican who's willing to lose.

BOSS 2:

How's about we should make Jack Riley the guy?

BOSS 3:

Which Riley are you thinking of, Jack P. or Jack Y.?

BOSS 4:

I say, neither one. I never even met 'em.

BOSS 5:

I say, when you got a pair o' jacks, bet 'em!

           

            A different universe from “‘Til Tomorrow,” but handled with equal mastery.

From the beginning, Harnick’s genius as a lyricist was his ability to balance cerebral cleverness and honest, unsentimental emotion with both dexterity and awesome capacity for rhyme, a standard to which most of the great lyricists of the ‘60s (Sondheim, Fred Ebb, Jerry Herman, Joe Darion) would be held.  He was and is in many ways the purest of that company in his relentless dedication to clarity; where any of those (especially Sondheim and sometimes Ebb) might get bogged down in feats of lyrical derring-do, Harnick looked to the story, emerging with numbers that very often rightly became hits in their own right but always served the narrative first and foremost both in their style and content.  As Harnick described it, “I use an idea from the scene and convert it into lyrics.  I’m very good at that,” adding, jokingly, “I’m very good at thievery.”  If that’s thievery, we need more thieves.  Harnick’s lyrics -- and Fiorello! would become one of the foremost examples of them -- are simple, sometimes spare, but they achieve things more complicated lyrics rarely do, but Harnick (still a creative life force in his 90s) produces so many of them he almost makes them seem easy.  They aren’t.

Anyone who may doubt the significance of what Bock and Harnick achieved with this little-known musical may look to its track record -- it ran 795 performances on Broadway, became only the third musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and tied for the Best Musical Tony in 1960.  It would’ve won outright, but just as in 1958, there was some heavyweight competition down the block -- a pesky little musical called The Sound of Music.

*

            Perhaps because of the harmonious development and production of Fiorello! (conductor Hal Hastings called it “one of the most trouble-free shows I’ve ever been involved with,” and Harnick described it as “such a happy experience”), Bock and Harnick spent the next four years working exclusively with Harold Prince, who, despite being younger than both of them, became something of a mentor.  In that time, they wrote two shows.

            “We were so euphoric about the success of Fiorello! that we plunged into” their next show, Harnick said.  Tenderloin (1960), based on a 1959 novel about a crusading minister in an 1890s Manhattan red-light district, ran over eight months (thanks to creative budgeting by Bobby Griffith) but was, Harnick admits, a disappointment.  He faults the story’s focus on the priest, who was played by “a star,” Maurice Evans, as opposed to the far more interesting newspaperman, played by Ron Husmann.  “We tried our best to fix the show,” Harnick told me.  “We came close.  It’s a nice show.”  From Harnick, one of the more mild-mannered men I’ve met, that’s as close to damning something as he’s likely to come.  Still, he harbored brief hope for the musical on the road -- as he told me, pithily, “When a thing doesn’t work, even if it’s bad you hope the audience won’t notice.”  Harnick made a promise, after writing Tenderloin, to take time in the future to examine the source material closely before rushing into production (previously, he said, he would read the book only to find out where the songs were).  This concept would be enormously helpful to him in the coming years.

            When it came to something Bock and Harnick knew, it was hard to find a better example than the source material for their next musical, the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film The Shop Around the Corner (well-known to modern audiences as the basis for the 1998 Nora Ephron film You’ve Got Mail).  “Both Jerry and I knew it and loved it,” Harnick said, and were thrilled when famed stage manager Lawrence “Larry” Kasha, making his first foray into producing, approached them with the concept of adapting the film in 1963.  His prospect for librettist, Joe Masteroff, was especially thrilling to the team, who had just caught Masteroff’s first play, The Warm Peninsula, on Broadway and thought it wonderful.  

            But the most satisfying change of direction on the new musical, which was to be called She Loves Me, was the opportunity to offer Hal Prince an opportunity rather than the other way around.  On Fiorello! and Tenderloin Prince, as a producer, had brought concepts to Bock and Harnick.  Now the team had the chance to offer Prince an opportunity -- the chance to try his hand at directing.

            When Larry Kasha called Bock and Harnick asking for director suggestions, the team initially suggested Gower Champion, who had just directed and choreographed two consecutive hits, Adams and Strouse’s Bye Bye Birdie in 1960 and Bob Merrill’s Carnival in 1961.  Champion had a conflict.  Looking for someone more familiar, Bock and Harnick recalled that Hal Prince, their longtime producer, had been called in to save the John Kander/James Goldman musical A Family Affair at the last second in 1962, and, as Harnick put it, “he damn near did it.”  The team recommended Prince to Kasha, who offered Prince the job.  Prince was thrilled to accept the commission that was to be his Broadway directorial debut.

            The next day Gower Champion called, having resolved his conflict, and offered to direct She Loves Me.  Bock and Harnick flatly refused him.  The man who had approached them at that lonely Sardi’s table five years before was now on the other end of the arrangement, and they did not intend to let him down.

            She Loves Me, as it turned out, was a thrilling, incandescent show that in its passionate and deeply sixties-rooted numbers came closer than any other musical at least since The King and I to capturing perfectly in music the thrill of love, especially young love.  From the title number’s driving rhythm and falling-over-themselves lyrics to the clever, wistful “Dear Friend,” this was fully matured Bock and Harnick, definitively into the next phase of their career.  Still beloved today, it is to be revived on Broadway for the second time this winter, starring Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi.  

For his performance as suave ladies’ man Steven Kodaly, Jack Cassidy (who had nine years earlier introduced Bock and Harnick at an Appalachian summer resort) won a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, and the show ran nearly ten months.  It was time, it seemed, to embrace the fact that the team of Bock and Harnick was among the most technically talented and respected working on Broadway -- and it was time to write something that reflected that fact.

*

            Actually Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick had been approached about writing a musical based on the Shalom Aleichem book Tevye’s Daughters in 1962, but it seems right to approach the history of one of the most monumental artistic achievements of the twentieth century as a creative progression, and there is an evolution to be marked from Fiorello! through She Loves Me, as brief a period as that timespan may be.  From dutiful accuracy to source material Bock and Harnick had moved on to the practice of elevating that material to ebullient heights through perfectly timed collaboration, the kind of snapping together of puzzle pieces that makes their later songs so deeply satisfying.

            In the early sixties, someone -- “I wish I could remember who it was, but that’s a mystery,” bemoans Harnick -- sent Harnick a copy of the 1911 Shalom Aleichem novel Wandering Stars.  “It’s a big, fat novel -- it’s Dickensian -- and it’s about a Yiddish theatre troupe touring Eastern Europe.”  Harnick was drawn right away to the “vividly drawn” characters and fascinating plotlines, and thought it could be the basis for a musical.  Bock agreed.  They sent the book to their Body Beautiful librettist, Joseph Stein, who sent it back almost immediately.

            “It’s too big,” he told them. Indeed, the book is 448 pages long and has two simultaneous storylines.   “The thing that makes the book so great is all these wonderful characters.  We’d have to eliminate most of them.”  Still, the chance to write a musical based on the joyful, effusive writings of Aleichem was too good a chance to pass up.  The hunt for new source material was short -- the 1894 book of short stories Tevye and His Daughters, with its outsize personalities and serious subject matter, was the clear choice.  There was just one problem -- the rights were owned by playwright Arnold Perl, who was at that time staging a play version Off-Broadway.  Bock and Harnick were so desperate for the rights that they negotiated a deal with Perl whereby his name would appear in the credits for every production of the musical from its original staging on.  Bock and Harnick banged out the first act in a few months.

            One step down.  Next, to Harold Prince, who Bock and Harnick asked to produce and direct.  He demurred. Bock and Harnick were forced to install a provisional producer, who had produced several flops, and momentum stalled.  Prince had some advice.  “This is Eastern Europe, my Jewishness is Western Europe,” Prince told them.  “What you need to do is go to Jerome Robbins.”

            Robbins accepted right away.  Bock and Harnick dropped the provisional man -- “Not a very nice thing to do,” Harnick admitted.  Once Robbins, already a Broadway legend for his three Sondheim collaborations -- West Side Story, Gypsy, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum -- signed on, the money came rolling in.

            The passion that went into the development of Fiddler had everything to do with the shared Jewish heritage of Harnick, Bock, Stein, and Robbins (born Rabinowitz).  There was a real desire among the creative team to recreate a certain feeling, a certain culture, unique to each one of them but overlapping in genuine affection for the Jewish experience.  Harnick remembered with awe watching Holocaust survivors in his temple in Chicago praying “with such ardor and grace.”  He even recalled an early ambition to become a rabbi.  The connections to his childhood in the stories, which he so loved, he said, encouraged him to write with such passion.  However, “the fact that the show is the success that it is,” Harnick told me, “is due to Jerry Robbins.”

            When Jerome Robbins was five years old, his parents took him to Poland to visit the shtetl of his ancestors -- his parents had immigrated from what was then a Russian colony not long before he was born.  Even then, it had been an unforgettable experience for him.  When he read, twenty years later, that the Nazis were destroying Polish shtetls, he was horrified that the world was to lose the unique culture of his people.  Becoming the director of Fiddler, he told Harnick, “gave me the chance to recreate the shtetl culture on stage, give it another life.”  “He was a man obsessed in doing that,” Harnick told me.  Indeed, Robbins embarked on a whirlwind education of European Jewish culture, taking his creative team to multiple Orthodox Jewish weddings on the west side.  No one, not Harnick, Bock, Stein, or Robbins, seculars all, had ever seen the kinds of traditions that went on at these ceremonies.  The men and women were separated, the bride and groom lifted in celebration, and, perhaps strangest of all, at every wedding there was one man who walked around with a bottle on his head.

            Robbins was a taskmaster.  “He made us throw out song after song after song until he was satisfied,” Harnick said.  But Robbins knew what he wanted.  When Bock and Harnick came to him with their suggestion for Tevye, Fiorello star Howard Da Silva, Robbins responded, “Howard’s wonderful, but he’s life-sized.  I want somebody who’s larger than life.”  The obvious answer was the larger-than-life star of a larger-than-life musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Hal Prince went to Zero Mostel with the proposition.

            Mostel was enthusiastic -- until Prince told him who was directing the production.  In the 1950s, both Mostel and Robbins were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, responsible for identifying (and effectively blacklisting) prominent Americans thought to be Communists.  Mostel, notably, refused to cooperate when he was called to testify before the Committee, pleading the fifth amendment twenty-eight times.  Robbins, threatened with public exposure of his homosexuality, named names.  “Zero hated him for that,” Harnick told me.  Finally, after much advocacy by Prince, Mostel was convinced that Robbins was the right man to direct the piece.  “But tell him,” Mostel told Prince, “I’m not going to fraternize with him.  I don’t have to eat with him.”  He seemed to mean it.

            Naturally, the first day of rehearsal was tense.  The cast and creative team gathered in the rehearsal room, nervously awaiting Robbins, and with baited breath watching Mostel’s expression.  Robbins finally arrived.  Dead quiet.  Then, Mostel, cheerfully, cried out, “Hello, Blabbermouth.”  The room, including Robbins, collapsed into laughter.  Things improved from there.

            From that day, Robbins and Harnick saw little of each other.  Harnick told me, “It breaks my heart, but I never get the score right the first time” -- possibly a point of view he acquired from Robbins’ stubborn habit of having him throw out “song after song after song.”  He spent most of the production process writing and rewriting with Bock in various hotel rooms in New York, Detroit and Washington.  The one element of production Harnick was privy to was the creation of the “Tradition” sequence, a magnificent, austere staging altogether worthy of one of the great opening numbers of all time, which took Robbins, according to Harnick, “about two hours.”

            Harnick’s rosy memories of Robbins, who he cites as the main reason for Fiddler’s immortality, may be shaped by his limited exposure to the man, who by most accounts was legendarily difficult to work with.  Dancer Sondra Lee once said that Robbins had to be avoided at all costs starting a week before opening because he became a “nervous wreck;” convinced -- no matter what -- that the show would flop, he refused to talk to almost anyone.  Robbins was known to be dictatorial, too.  Sondheim has been known to tell a story about the production of West Side Story, where he and Leonard Bernstein were listening to a section of the score played by the orchestra.  Full of confidence and swagger, Robbins approached them and said, “Lenny, in that passage they’re playing, now, wouldn’t that be stronger played on a tuba than a bass fiddle?”  Bernstein explained that, for his own reasons, he wanted it played on the fiddle.  The next time Sondheim and Bernstein were listening to the score, when that passage came back up, Bernstein sat bolt upright.  Sondheim asked him what was wrong.  “That son of a bitch,” Bernstein said.  “Now it’s on tuba.”

            Harnick was a bit more adept at dealing with what resistance he met from his director.  During a Wednesday matinee at Fiddler’s shaky run in Detroit in the summer of ‘64, he noticed Robbins had rewritten two lines of a song for Tzeitel.  So he handed Joanna Merlin, who was playing the part, the “two worst lines I think I’ve ever written” to replace them.  That night in the theater, as the lines were sung, Harnick heard a chuckle behind him.  It was Robbins.  “Okay,” the lithe, bearded man said bemusedly.  “Next time I’ll ask.”  There was no further trouble.

            The Detroit run was poorly reviewed, but luckily, those bad notices were curtailed by a newspaper strike.  Boasting the attraction of Zero Mostel live and in person, the run sold out, and, thanks to highly positive word of mouth, there were lines outside the box offices in both Washington and New York.  Almost with relief at the memory, Harnick told me, “Then we thought, It’s gonna run.”

*

            3,242 performances in its original run, a record at the time.  A 1,574x return on investment.  And this fall, Fiddler will be revived a fifth time, tying it (with Guys and Dolls) for the most-revived American musical written since 1927.  How does a hit become a hit?

            Harnick doesn’t know, but he has some theories.  One is what he calls Jerome Robbins’ “obsession” with the show, his insistence on getting the best, his forceful demands that Bock and Harnick rewrite over and over until he was satisfied.  That’s true.  In previous (but inferior) hits, like She Loves Me or Fiorello, the team’s partner and ostensible boss was Hal Prince, an enormously talented man who was nonetheless more of a father figure than a taskmaster.  The necessity of being driven, the Whiplash theory of creative excellence, could be an explanation.

Another is the obvious: “It’s a wonderful show.  It’s got a terrific score, and a terrific book, and there’s dances in it.”  That’s also true.  Everyone involved with the show, especially Bock and most notably Harnick, was at the top of his game in the mid-sixties, and it showed.  There’s almost too much to talk about, lyrically speaking -- the aforementioned “Tradition,” with its simple, rhythmic inception building upon itself to a complex, overlapping climax that justifies it ending by shouting to the rooftops the name of the show; the deeply religious and deeply felt numbers like “Sabbath Prayer” and the immortal “Sunrise, Sunset;” and can we talk about the last stanza of “If I Were a Rich Man” for a second?

Lord who made the lion and the lamb,

You decreed I should be what I am.

Would it spoil some vast eternal plan

If I were a wealthy man?

Just aside from the facts of the situation -- the perfect delivery by Mostel (and later, even better, by Topol), the swelling, stellar music by Bock -- what kind of upstart genius writes an astonishingly beautiful, desperate, emotional AABB verse where every line’s last word is also a near rhyme?  (Don’t ask Harnick -- I gave him my whole spiel on how much I love that near rhyme thing, and he told me he’d never noticed.  Go figure.)

But it’s Harnick’s third explanation that rung the most true for me, and goes, really, to the core of who he is.   “It hits families.”  For parents who see their children moving away from their values, children who dismiss social mores their parents held dear, the show couldn’t be more true to life.  What parent who has disapproved of their child’s choice of lover could listen to Tevye’s soliloquy in “Chaveleh” and be unaffected?  What child could resist hewing to Perchik’s revolutionary edicts condemning the old world and the old rules?  Why has Fiddler has been produced in Japan hundreds of times? Because the postwar parents-children split, the most severe and sudden generation gap in modern history, is echoed all too accurately on the stage.

“It hits families.”  Who could forget Fiddler’s wounding, breathtaking, deeply affecting final scene, Anatevka packing their things and fleeing the invading Cossacks to venture forth to an uncertain future?  The violent displacement of families, as anyone watching the news of the beaches of Europe can tell you, is far from a thing of the past.  “Refugees” is the word of the day, but has it ever not been?  That stark image of familial flight from a homeland hits us all because it is so ubiquitous.  Fiddler speaks to the worst of what humans are capable of just as it speaks to the best.

*

            The last two musicals Bock and Harnick wrote together were both narratively ambitious, long-running pieces based on classic literature -- The Apple Tree and The Rothschilds.  From 1965-1970 they were twice nominated for the Tony Award for Best Score.  And then, in 1971, they stopped writing together.

            Harnick began to become uncomfortable with this subject almost immediately.  “For a while it was a secret,” he reflected, but Bock had disclosed the origin of the split publicly first (on a radio show, years before), “so I’m free to talk about it.”  It happened out of town on The Rothschilds.

            An epic tale of the titular Jewish extended family and their rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Germany, The Rothschilds marked, ironically, an evolutionary step in Bock and Harnick’s partnership, the first of their musicals to be written almost exclusively in period style.  It went into production in 1968, and a twenty-eight-year-old British prodigy named Derek Goldby, who had directed the original production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead three years before, was hired as director.  Bock and Goldby hit it off, becoming inseparable almost immediately.

            This was a problem.  Goldby was young, inexperienced, and practiced almost exclusively in small-scale straight plays.  Goldby’s sister, Harnick told me, told Sherman Yellen, the librettist, to take it easy on her brother.  “Watch out for my brother,” she apparently said; “He’s so anxious, he’s never done anything this big.”  This was not what Yellen wanted to hear.

            “When we were in Detroit, as far as all of us were concerned, Derek had lost control of the show,” Harnick said.  The producers, wary of Derek’s inexperience, had gone so far as to hire Finian’s Rainbow choreographer Michael Kidd as a backup, to step in in case things really went south.  Now they felt it was time to deploy the nuclear option.  During the Detroit tryout, they convened a meeting to suggest it.  Michael Kidd, who Harnick described as “one of the world’s great gentlemen,” shot it down, saying it would be too unsettling to the company.  Instead, he suggested the company hold secret meetings at which most of the planning for the show -- new songs, new dances, new scenes -- would be done -- without Goldby’s knowledge.  Goldby would come in for the official meeting and technically direct the new scenes, which would have been blocked out before he arrived.  “Nobody had to know,” recalled Harnick.  “We thought, What could be fairer?”

            This arrangement lasted three days.  On the third day, during rehearsal, the show’s star, Hal Linden, reading new pages, called Goldby over.  “I don’t understand the need for this scene,” Linden told him.  Goldby grabbed the script, stalked over to Kidd, and threw it in his face.  “Ask Michael Kidd,” he shouted, and walked out.  Goldby was fired.

            Bock never forgave any of the production team, Harnick included, for what they had done to his friend.  When Harnick reached out to him, he responded, “I’m not sure I can talk to you anymore.”  They managed -- barely -- to finish the show (it ran 14 unremarkable months on Broadway and has never been revived), but Bock followed through on his promise.  Harnick would call to schedule meetings or lunches, Bock would tentatively accept, then, the night or even morning before, he’d call and cancel.  “We never wrote again,” Harnick said.  He looked down at this point and described the situation simply as “heartbreaking.”

            Years later, when Bock had “calmed down,” they finally did have that lunch.  There were a few minutes of decorum before Harnick broke down.  “Jerry,” Harnick implored him, “we had something special.  We should be working together.”

            “I know,” Bock said, “but I’ve always wanted to write lyrics.  And now’s my chance.”

            Something so simple.  A dispute over a director, an unspoken desire to write lyrics, and there went one of the great writing partnerships of the twentieth century.  There followed the longest Broadway drought of Harnick’s career so far -- he didn’t write a Broadway musical for the following six years.

            This fall, a scaled down version of The Rothschilds, entitled Rothschild and Son, played the York Theater off-Broadway.  Though I didn’t know it at the time of the interview, Harnick was working tirelessly on new songs and numbers for the show when I met with him.  It’s hard not to see this new, thrilling concept, coming as it does almost exactly five years after Jerry Bock’s death, as a kind of an attempt to fix mistakes made and honor a friendship and a partnership that made Sheldon Harnick who he was and is.  Somehow, some way, the show that broke them apart will and must become the show that memorializes them.

*

            In 1964, Stephen Sondheim worked with the sixty-two-year-old Richard Rodgers on the musical Do I Hear a Waltz?  36 years later, in the first book of his collected annotated lyrics, Sondheim described the Rodgers of that time as “depressed, insecure, paranoid, and difficult to work with,” and wrote that “the well of his talent had run dry.”  In 1976, Sheldon Harnick worked with Rodgers on his first post-Bock musical.  Neither had had a show on Broadway in six years.  Rodgers was seventy-four, twelve years past the “dry well of talent.”

            “I fell in love with Richard Rodgers,” Harnick told me effusively.  He described the prodigious composer as witty and easygoing, a man who regularly called Harnick into his office to discuss progress and offered to work whatever way was easiest for him.  Naturally, their collaboration was much discussed, and producer Richard Adler (earlier lyricist and composer of The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees) took up the opportunity willingly.

            The show would become Rex, which presented King Henry VIII as a scheming antihero.  Harnick and Rodgers were well into the score when Adler came to Harnick with bad news.  “The show may be off,” he said.  Rodgers had cancer of the larynx and was going in for an operation.  It was unclear if he would survive.

            He did, as it turned out, but his vocal cords were damaged severely, such that he had to remaster the power of speech.  The first few weeks he communicated with Harnick exclusively via pad and paper, while gradually working his way back to spoken words.  Rodgers was accompanied by a nurse twenty-four hours a day; there was a very real chance he might spontaneously choke to death.  “I was just so moved by his courage,” Harnick said.  “I loved him.”

            Working with him, though, was labor-intensive.  In his time, Rodgers had written music first or second depending on the demands of his partners -- with the habitually soused Lorenz Hart, Rodgers had had to write the music first to force him to pen and paper, and with the prolific, controlling Hammerstein, lyrics always came first – usually sent by airmail from Pennsylvania.  With Harnick, though he had insisted he would work at his lyricist’s convenience, Rodgers was, at this stage of his life, at least according to that lyricist, incapable of writing music first.  Neither did Rodgers ever agree to rewrite or change the music he’d written.  According to Harnick, it wasn’t that he was confused or obstinate, as Sondheim seemed to believe.  Rodgers fundamentally didn’t understand how the process worked anymore, to the point where, on one assignment from Adler, Harnick had to start writing out music for Rodgers before he could start.  As the cancer worked its way through his body, Rodgers had lost the ability to think abstractly.  It was a partnership that required dedication from a lyricist -- the kind Harnick was willing to provide.

            He was sickly -- wracked not only by the cancer but by a series of strokes -- and less creatively fertile, and nervous -- at one point, about to play a new song for the first time, he muttered to Harnick, “I’ll probably fuck it up.”  There was a vulnerability in Rodgers then that resulted in a working relationship closer than he would have been willing or able to form in earlier partnerships; Harnick was the only lyricist after Hammerstein who called him “Dick.”  He died three years later at seventy-seven, one of the two factors that gives Rex such a finality in the Harnick oeuvre.  

            The other is that Rex, a 49-performance flop that was among the shortest-lived of Rodgers musicals, is to this day the last Broadway musical for which Harnick wrote the lyrics.  Harnick described it as “full of mistakes that were so clear and so easy to see,” and that only in subsequent revisals did the show become “good.”  There’s very little retrospective significance attached to Rex, probably rightfully; it’s a show that feels important in its scale and subject matter but is not the best work of its creative team.  

The importance of Rex really is that, while the last Broadway outing for Harnick, it was by no means a stopping point -- he’s had eight musicals produced locally and Off-Broadway since, and he has multiple projects in the works now, including the Rothschilds revisal, an adaptation of Moliere’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself (which contains Harnick’s favorite song he’s ever written, “Wine, Wine, Wine”) and two operas, one about Lady Bird Johnson.  

            I asked Harnick why, given recent productions of subpar work by legends like John Kander (The Visit comes to mind), all of this wonderful Harnick work couldn’t find a place on his home turf.  He could only shrug and reply, “Your guess is as good as mine.”  He thinks Dragons, a fairy tale musical that premiered in my hometown, Montclair, in 2003, “could be done very effectively on Broadway,” and he brought his Doctor in Spite of Himself adaptation to Artistic Director Oskar Eustis of the Public Theatre, who turned it down.  “I would like all of these shows to get as good productions as they can get,” he told me, “but  -- ” and here he laughed -- “I remain so busy I haven’t had the time to go back and work on them.”  Harnick, a nonagenarian bullet train, plows forward always.

*

            In 1981, Harnick and his first and permanent mentor, Yip Harburg, served as panelists for a two-day seminar at Collin College in Dallas.  At the end of one five-hour day, Harburg, eternally energetic, invited Harnick on a late-night walk.  Harnick told him, “Yip, I’m exhausted.”  Harburg told him to suit himself and “bounced off into the night,” Harnick recalls.  Two weeks later Yip Harburg died of a heart attack while driving on Sunset Boulevard.  He was eighty-four.

            I talked to Harnick a lot about legacy.  He really didn’t have much to say.  “I’d like my better shows to continue being done,” he said.  “I hope that eventually Fiddler, Fiorello!, and She Loves Me, and maybe The Apple Tree, that they’ve maybe entered the repertory, so that over the years, there’ll be a production here, a production there.  There may not be many productions -- But they’ll be alive.”  

A couple of weeks later, at a 92nd Street Y show celebrating Fiddler’s 50th anniversary, Harnick held court stage right, reading from a binder of notes he’d prepared for the occasion, drinking in the adoration of the packed house.  After a particularly positive reception for one cut number from the Fiddler score, he beamed and said, “I know, that one is pretty good.”  At times he closed his eyes and swayed with the music.  With the foreknowledge of the revival coming up that fall, and a warm remembrance of the glory of the original and the Oscar-winning film, he seemed a man spanning a century, fully ensconced in the best traditions of the past and raring to move into the future.

On the way out of his apartment, Harnick led me past new sheet music for Dragons, framed photographs of him with various theater figures, and his piano, all without comment.  The one thing he showed me was a letter he got from Harburg three days after his visit more than sixty years ago.  It was written on a card on the front of which was drawn a woman playing the harp with her bare feet.  Inside was written, “Dear Sheldon -- Good things will come to you if you keep whanging the lyre.  Signed, Yipper.”

One of the greatest lyricists in Broadway history waved pleasantly at me as I made my way to the elevator.  “Nice to meet you,” he said, then closed the door.  Back to work.