Alan Jay Lerner

Alan Jay Lerner, born in New York City on August 31, 1918, was an American lyricist, librettist, and book writer whose work for Broadway and film made him one of the most decorated figures in the history of musical theatre. He died on June 14, 1986. His father, Joseph Jay Lerner, was the brother of Samuel Alexander Lerner, founder of the Lerner Stores dress shop chain. Among his cousins was radio comedian and television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Lerner received his education at Bedales School in England, The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and Harvard University. At both Choate and Harvard, he was a classmate of John F. Kennedy, and the two had worked together on the yearbook staff at Choate. During his time at Harvard, Lerner contributed to the annual Hasty Pudding musicals, an early entry into theatrical work that paralleled the collegiate beginnings of Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia. He studied music composition at Juilliard during the summers of 1936 and 1937. A boxing accident at Harvard cost him the sight in his left eye.

That eye injury prevented Lerner from serving in World War II, and he instead wrote radio scripts, among them material for Your Hit Parade. In 1942, he was introduced to German-Austrian composer Frederick Loewe at the Lamb's Club in New York, where he also met Lorenz Hart. Lerner and Loewe's first joint effort was a reworking of Barry Conners's farce The Patsy, retitled Life of the Party, produced for a Detroit stock company. The production ran for nine weeks and led the pair to collaborate with Arthur Pierson on What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943 and ran for 63 performances. Two years later came The Day Before Spring, one of several Broadway productions among Lerner's credits.

Their first major success was Brigadoon in 1947, a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village and directed by Robert Lewis. The show established Lerner and Loewe as a significant creative partnership. In 1948, Lerner worked with Kurt Weill on the stage musical Love Life, and in 1951 he collaborated with Burton Lane on the film musical Royal Wedding. That same year he wrote the original screenplay for An American in Paris, produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli, for which he received an Academy Award. Also in 1951, Lerner and Loewe produced Paint Your Wagon, a Gold Rush story that ran for nearly a year and generated songs that became pop standards, including "They Call the Wind Maria," though Lerner himself later described it as "a success but not a hit."

In 1956, Lerner and Loewe unveiled My Fair Lady, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion that retained Shaw's social commentary while adding songs tailored to the characters of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, originally played by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. The production had been passed over by other composers, including the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, before Lerner and Loewe took it on. My Fair Lady set box-office records in both New York and London. When adapted for film in 1964, it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison. Lerner and Loewe followed that achievement with Gigi, a film musical based on stories by Colette, starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, and Maurice Chevalier. The film won all nine of its Oscar nominations, a record at the time, along with a special Oscar for Chevalier.

The partnership between Lerner and Loewe came under strain during the production of Camelot in 1960, an Arthurian musical whose original director, Moss Hart, suffered a heart attack during the final months of rehearsals and died approximately a year after the show's Broadway premiere. Lerner was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers during the production, while Loewe contended with heart problems of his own. Despite these difficulties, Camelot was a hit. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his widow told reporter Theodore H. White that the Kennedy administration reminded her of the "one brief shining moment" from Lerner and Loewe's show, an association that persisted into the early twenty-first century.

After Camelot, Loewe retired to Palm Springs, California, and Lerner continued working with a succession of composers. He collaborated with André Previn on Coco, with John Barry on Lolita, My Love, with Leonard Bernstein on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with Burton Lane on Carmelina, and with Charles Strouse on Dance a Little Closer, which was based on the film Idiot's Delight and closed on its opening night. In 1965, Lerner and Burton Lane collaborated on On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which was later adapted for film in 1970. During this period, Lerner was also hired by producer Arthur P. Jacobs to write a treatment for Doctor Dolittle, but he left the project after several months and was replaced by Leslie Bricusse. Lerner was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.

In 1973, Lerner persuaded Loewe to come out of retirement to expand the Gigi score for a stage adaptation, and the following year the two worked together on a film musical version of The Little Prince, based on the children's story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, a college classmate, had collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek tribute to their shared alma mater.

Lerner received the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1957 and the Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1974, among a total of three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards over the course of his career. He published his autobiography, The Street Where I Live, in 1978, covering the creation of My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot alongside personal reflections. In the final year of his life he published The Musical Theatre: A Celebration, a history of the form incorporating personal anecdotes. A collection of his lyrics, A Hymn to Him, edited by British writer Benny Green, appeared posthumously in 1987.

At the time of his death, Lerner had been working in London with Gerard Kenny and Kristi Kane on a musical adaptation of the film My Man Godfrey. He had also been approached by Andrew Lloyd Webber to write lyrics for The Phantom of the Opera, contributing "Masquerade" before withdrawing from the project due to memory loss resulting from metastatic lung cancer; Charles Hart replaced him. Lerner died on June 14, 1986.