Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers - Hardcover

Secrest, Meryle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375401644 ISBN 13: 9780375401640

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers–more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable–Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood –seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.

Now Meryle Secrest–biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein–brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

She writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operetta—of Franz Lehar and Jerome Kern. She follows his close and wonderfully productive working relationship with Lorenz Hart–a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hart’s drinking. She evokes Rodgers’s triumphant second collaboration, with the gifted–and happily stable–Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and more. She explores Rodgers’s own problems with alcohol as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his forty-nine-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.

Somewhere for Me is both a lively portrait of the American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody, and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.

About this title

Review:

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) wrote some of the loveliest and most touching popular music of the 20th century, from "Thou Swell" in A Connecticut Yankee through "Edelweiss" in The Sound of Music. He was half of the two most celebrated teams in American musical theater: Rodgers and Hart sparkled with the insouciant gaiety of the 1920s and '30s, while Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein forged a revolution with more serious, artistically unified productions like Oklahoma and The King and I. Meryle Secrest skillfully depicts Rodgers's glittering lifestyle and the complex personality hidden underneath the suave manner and elegant clothes. Born into an affluent but tension-riddled New York Jewish family, he was playing the piano at seven and had his first Broadway musical produced before 18. Life after that was a succession of hit shows, glamorous parties, famous friends, and lavish homes decorated by wife Dorothy, who turned a sophisticated blind eye to his affairs with pretty actresses. Theatrical colleagues recall Rodgers as amusing and charming, if not precisely warm; daughters Mary and Linda paint a darker picture of a hypercritical and sometimes cruel father enmeshed in a marriage he often found confining. Secrest hasn't anything very new to say about Rodgers's music, but she's written a perceptive biography of an intriguingly complicated man and a formidable creative artist. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover:

"Somewhere for Me is a thorough and scrupulously researched biography that is both welcome and necessary. . . . It is our most detailed portrait of a man whose compositions may have substantially changed the world for the better. . . . As in her biographies of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Secrest delves into both the personal history of her subject and his underlying psychology. The result is a copiously documented, generous portrait of a Richard Rodgers unknown until this account."
- Gerard Alessandrini, New York Times Book Review

"How you managed to capture so contradictory a man so well, I don't know, but it's a feat you have brought off and should be proud of."
-Arthur Laurents, author of Original Story

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375401644
• ISBN 13: 9780375401640
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480