Somewhere for Me; A Biography of Richard Rodgers

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.

Meryle Secrest was born and educated in Bath, England, and now lives in Washington, D.C. She has written biographies of Romaine Brooks, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, and Salvador Dalí, among others.