Lorenz Hart
Based on Wikipedia: Lorenz Hart
The Saddest Man on Broadway
On the opening night of Oklahoma! in 1943, Lorenz Hart sat in the audience watching his former partner Richard Rodgers revolutionize American musical theater—with someone else. The show was a triumph. Hart knew it immediately. At the after-party at Sardi's, he found Rodgers and delivered what might be the most gracious concession speech in Broadway history: "This is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen, and it'll be playing twenty years from now!"
He was wrong about the timeline. Oklahoma! ran for decades longer than that.
Then Hart left the party early, saying his mother was tired. Within eight months, both he and his mother would be dead. He was forty-eight years old.
The story of Lorenz Hart is one of the most heartbreaking in American entertainment—a man who wrote lyrics of such wit and sophistication that they transformed popular songwriting forever, yet who believed himself fundamentally unlovable. The tragedy isn't that he was wrong about this; it's that he might have been right about how the world saw him, even as millions sang the words he put in their mouths.
A Partnership Begins
Hart was born in Harlem in 1895 to German Jewish immigrant parents. His family had literary pedigree—through his mother, he was a great-grandnephew of Heinrich Heine, the German Romantic poet whose verses were set to music by Schubert, Schumann, and countless others. Perhaps a gift for marrying words to melody ran in the blood.
He attended Columbia Grammar School and then Columbia College, spending two additional years at Columbia's School of Journalism. It was during this time, in 1919, that a friend introduced him to a younger Columbia student named Richard Rodgers. Rodgers was sixteen when they met; Hart was twenty-four. Despite the age gap, they immediately began collaborating on songs for amateur and student productions.
The partnership almost didn't take. For six years, they wrote songs that went mostly nowhere. Hart supported himself by translating German plays into English for the Shubert brothers, the powerful theatrical producers. A few Rodgers and Hart songs made it into Broadway shows—"Any Old Place With You" was interpolated into the 1919 musical comedy A Lonely Romeo—but these were minor credits, not the foundation of a career.
Then came The Garrick Gaieties in 1925.
The Theatre Guild hired the young team to write the score for what was supposed to be a two-performance benefit revue. The show was such a hit that it ran for 211 performances. Suddenly Rodgers and Hart were the hottest songwriting team on Broadway.
The Art of the Unexpected Rhyme
What made Hart's lyrics so revolutionary? In a word: surprise.
Before Hart, popular song lyrics tended toward the earnest and predictable. Moon rhymed with June. Love rhymed with above. The sentiments were sincere but rarely startling.
Hart brought a different sensibility. He had what critics called "a remarkable talent for polysyllabic and internal rhymes"—which is a technical way of saying he could make words dance in unexpected patterns. Consider these lines from "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I don't like crap games / With barons and earls / Won't go to Harlem / In ermine and pearls." The rhyme scheme twists and surprises. The attitude is knowing, urbane, a little defiant.
Or take "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," where a woman admits to her romantic obsession with unflinching self-awareness: "I'm wild again, beguiled again / A simpering, whimpering child again." The internal rhymes (wild/beguiled, simpering/whimpering) create a kind of verbal jazz, the words tumbling over each other in sophisticated patterns.
Hart's friend and fellow writer Henry Myers pushed back against those who called Hart a poet. "Larry in particular was primarily a showman," Myers insisted. "If you can manage to examine his songs technically, and for the moment elude their spell, you will see that they are all meant to be acted, that they are part of a play. Larry was a playwright."
This is an important distinction. Hart wasn't writing verse to be read silently on a page. He was writing words meant to be sung by specific characters in specific dramatic situations. The sophistication of his rhymes wasn't mere cleverness—it revealed character. When a woman in Pal Joey sings with ironic self-awareness about being bewitched and bewildered, the elaborate wordplay tells us she's educated, witty, and perhaps using humor to keep painful emotions at arm's length.
Twenty-Six Musicals and a Revolution
Over more than twenty years, Rodgers and Hart wrote the music and lyrics for twenty-six Broadway musicals. Their "big four"—the shows considered their masterpieces—were Babes in Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), and On Your Toes (1936).
Each of these shows pushed boundaries in different ways.
On Your Toes integrated classical ballet into a Broadway musical, featuring a climactic number called "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" that ran nearly fifteen minutes and advanced the plot through dance alone. This was revolutionary—previously, dance numbers in musicals had been decorative interruptions rather than dramatic necessities.
The Boys from Syracuse adapted Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, proving that the Bard's plots could work as musical comedy. This opened a door that others would walk through—Kiss Me, Kate adapted The Taming of the Shrew, West Side Story reimagined Romeo and Juliet.
Pal Joey was perhaps the most daring. Based on John O'Hara's stories about a charming, amoral nightclub emcee, the show presented a genuine antihero as its protagonist. Joey Evans wasn't lovable; he was a user and a schemer. The critics of 1940 didn't quite know what to make of it. "Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?" asked Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. But the show has aged remarkably well, its cynicism feeling more modern than the earnest optimism of its contemporaries.
Rodgers and Hart also wrote for Hollywood, contributing songs and scores to films including Love Me Tonight (1932), The Phantom President (1932), Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933), and Mississippi (1935). During the Great Depression, Hart was earning sixty thousand dollars annually—the equivalent of well over a million dollars today. He became known for throwing lavish parties, a magnet for the theater crowd.
The Sadness Beneath
Here is where the story darkens.
Hart was short—some accounts suggest barely five feet tall. He was not conventionally attractive. And he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not merely stigmatized but illegal.
Many of his contemporaries who knew him socially have confirmed he was homosexual, though they were careful about specifics even decades later. When someone from a Hollywood trade magazine approached Richard Rodgers at a party in 1933 and asked if the rumors about "Larry" were true—using the slur common at the time—Rodgers grabbed the man by the collar and threatened to kill him if he printed anything.
This wasn't just protective friendship. It was survival. A public accusation of homosexuality in 1933 could have destroyed Hart's career completely.
So Hart lived in the closet, and the closet was crushing him. He drank—heavily, steadily, eventually catastrophically. He would disappear for weeks at a time on binges. His mother, with whom he lived his entire adult life, covered for him when she could.
The drinking and erratic behavior created constant friction with Rodgers, who was trying to run a professional partnership. Rodgers was organized, disciplined, punctual. Hart was brilliant but unreliable. Getting him to finish lyrics on deadline became increasingly difficult. Getting him to show up sober became impossible.
New York Times music critic Stephen Holden later observed that "many of Hart's ballad lyrics conveyed a heart-stopping sadness that reflected his conviction that he was physically too unattractive to be lovable." Think of "My Funny Valentine," where the singer lists her beloved's physical imperfections—"Your looks are laughable, unphotographable"—before insisting these flaws don't matter. Or "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," with its rueful acknowledgment that romantic obsession makes fools of us all.
Holden also noted that "in his lyrics, as in his life, Hart stands as a compellingly lonely figure. Although he wrote dozens of songs that are playful, funny and filled with clever wordplay, it is the rueful vulnerability beneath their surface lends them a singular poignancy."
This is Hart's paradox: he made his living writing love songs, and he believed himself incapable of being loved.
The Partnership Ends
By 1942, the situation had become untenable. Rodgers had been approached about musicalizing Green Grow the Lilacs, a folk play about Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the century. He brought the project to Hart, who demurred. He couldn't write about farmers and cowboys, Hart said. The rural setting was too far from his urban sensibility.
There may have been truth in this—Hart was the bard of Manhattan, of sophisticated city-dwellers, of nightclub denizens and urbane lovers. But Rodgers suspected the real issue was Hart's mental state. He was drinking more than ever. He couldn't focus. He was, in the language of the time, "not well."
Rodgers turned to Oscar Hammerstein II, a lyricist whose own career had been in a slump. Hammerstein's longtime composing partner Jerome Kern had no interest in the Oklahoma project, leaving Hammerstein available and eager.
The result was Oklahoma!, which opened on March 31, 1943, and changed American musical theater forever. The show integrated song, dance, and drama more seamlessly than any previous musical. It ran for over five years on Broadway—2,212 performances—and launched Rodgers and Hammerstein on a sixteen-year partnership that would produce The King and I, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, and Carousel.
Hart attended the Oklahoma! premiere. What must it have felt like to watch his former partner achieve the greatest triumph of his career with someone else? To know that he had been offered this project and declined? To see the audience rapturous, the critics ecstatic, the theatrical world transformed—by something he could have been part of?
At Sardi's afterward, he told Rodgers the show would run twenty years. Then he left.
The Final Weeks
Hart's mother Frieda died in late April 1943, less than a month after the Oklahoma! premiere. Hart was devastated. He had lived with her his entire life. She had been his protector, his cover, his anchor. Now she was gone.
He did not recover emotionally. The drinking worsened.
And yet—in what seems almost incomprehensible—Rodgers reached out that fall about reviving A Connecticut Yankee, their successful 1927 musical. Perhaps he hoped the work would help his old partner. Perhaps he simply missed collaborating with the brilliant lyricist who had been his creative other half for over two decades.
Hart rallied. He wrote six new songs for the revival, including "To Keep My Love Alive," a darkly comic number about a woman who has murdered multiple husbands. The wordplay was as sharp as ever. The rhymes were as surprising. Whatever was destroying Hart's body and mind hadn't touched his gift.
"To Keep My Love Alive" would prove to be his last lyric.
The revival opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on November 17, 1943. Hart showed up drunk. His sister-in-law spotted him in the audience and persuaded him to come home with her. But sometime after they arrived at her Manhattan apartment, Hart slipped out into the November cold.
A friend found him in the gutter outside a bar on Eighth Avenue, shivering. He was taken to Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side, where it was determined he had developed pneumonia from exposure.
Five days later, on November 22, 1943, Lorenz Hart died. He was forty-eight years old.
The Songs Remain
Hart is buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens. The headstone is modest. The legacy is not.
"Blue Moon," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "My Funny Valentine," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Manhattan"—these songs have never left the standard repertoire. Jazz musicians play them. Cabaret singers interpret them. They appear in films and commercials and high school talent shows. They are, as critics predicted, destined for long lives outside the theater.
Hart has been called "the expressive bard of the urban generation which matured during the interwar years." His lyrics captured something essential about sophisticated city life in the twenties and thirties—the wit, the romantic complications, the knowing irony that masked genuine feeling.
Hollywood tried to tell his story in 1948 with Words and Music, an MGM biopic starring Mickey Rooney as Hart. The film was heavily fictionalized, changing Hart's sexuality entirely and attributing his depression to an obsession with a woman who rejects his marriage proposal. This was standard practice for the era—homosexuality could not be acknowledged, so a different explanation had to be invented.
In 2025, a new film attempted a more honest portrait. Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke as Hart, is set during Hart's last days, mostly around Sardi's Restaurant on the opening night of Oklahoma!. Andrew Scott won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance as Richard Rodgers. The film received widespread release in October 2025.
But films, however well-intentioned, can only approximate a life. The truest record of Lorenz Hart is in his lyrics—those intricate, surprising, emotionally layered words that millions of people have sung without knowing anything about the man who wrote them.
Listen to "My Funny Valentine" and hear a man who believed love required overlooking physical imperfection. Listen to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and hear someone who knew that romantic obsession makes fools of the wise. Listen to "The Lady Is a Tramp" and hear urban defiance, the refusal to conform to society's expectations.
Lorenz Hart poured everything he couldn't say directly into those songs. The wit was his armor. The sophistication was his disguise. And beneath it all, the sadness—heart-stopping, as Stephen Holden wrote—of a man who created some of the most beloved love songs in American history while believing himself unworthy of love.
He was wrong about that last part. But he never knew it.