MUSIC MAN’S DEMONS – NEW TELL-ALL PROBES RICHARD ROGERS’ DARK SIDE, DRINKING
Entertainment
Michael Riedel
RICHARD Rodgers, the celebrated Broadway composer whose infectious melodies have brought joy to millions of music lovers, was an alcoholic and womanizer who...
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New York Post
RICHARD Rodgers, the celebrated Broadway composer whose infectious melodies have brought joy to millions of music lovers, was an alcoholic and womanizer who suffered from debilitating bouts of depression.

His personal demons, long kept from public view, are explored in detail in a new tell-all biography, “Somewhere for Me” by Meryle Secrest, to be published in November by Knopf.

Outwardly, Rodgers, who died in 1979 at 77, would seem to have led a charmed life.

He was born with the gift of melody pouring out of his fingertips, and could pick out catchy tunes on the family piano by time he was 6.

In his 20s, he teamed up with lyricist Larry Hart and wrote a slew of hugely successful musical comedies that made him rich and famous.

With Oscar Hammerstein II, he wrote the ground-breaking musicals “Oklahoma!” “Carousel” and “South Pacific.”

Secrest writes that alcohol was always a part of Rodgers’ life, though he was never, as a young man, a drinker like Hart, who died of pneumonia after going on a bender.

Rodgers complained bitterly about Hart’s drinking (it often got in the way of their work), but “the fact that he periodically abused alcohol himself hardly counted,” Secrest writes. Rodgers believed “a real man ‘could hold his liquor’; getting drunk occasionally was . . . almost proof of manhood.”

But the drinking increased throughout his life – playwright Moss Hart once saw him down 16 scotch and sodas in one sitting – and in 1957, he was hospitalized for depression and alcoholism at Payne Whitney, which the novelist Jean Stafford called a “high-class booby hatch.”

Why Rodgers was prone to depression and alcoholism is not entirely clear, though Secrest sketches in a troubled childhood. His father would go for weeks without speaking to anyone in the family, she writes. When he did speak, it was usually to yell at his wife.

“Even today, a loud voice makes me uncomfortable,” Rodgers once said.

Rodgers’ womanizing was well-known in theatrical circles.

As one of the most famous and powerful men on Broadway, he could have his pick of pretty chorus girls.

Joshua Logan, who directed “South Pacific,” “thought Rodgers was a great success with women, so sure of his looks and charm that he could be crude,” Secrest writes. “He could walk up to a girl and say, ‘Do you want to f – – -?’ and get away with it.”

Not every actress fell under his spell, however.

He once made a pass at Shirley Jones, who played Laurie in the movie version of “Oklahoma!” She stopped him cold by saying, “You’re just like a father to me.”

Rodgers’ marriage survived his womanizing, and he often said his wife, Dorothy, was “the love of my life,” Secrest writes.

“Somewhere for Me” was written with the cooperation of Rodgers’ family, though it is not an authorized biography.

Mary Rodgers, the composer’s daughter, said the family agreed to talk candidly about Rodgers’ life because “alcoholism and depression are not like irresponsibly acquired social diseases, and if there is going to be a biography of my father, it is pointless to try to conceal things.”

“We wouldn’t have done this while Daddy was alive,” she added, “because it would have embarrassed him. And my mother, too. She took great pains to conceal problems from the world.”

Mary Rodgers’ verdict on the book: “I’m a little disappointed in what it didn’t say than what it did say. Of course, he had problems. Who doesn’t? But he was also a terribly funny man, witty and sharp and very often full of joy. That doesn’t come out in the book.

“If I have one other criticism, it’s that I’ve come to realize that you cannot capture the essence of musical genius, which I believe my father had, in a book,” she adds.

“You can’t look at a composer’s life and figure out why he wrote what he did the way you can with a novelist or a lyricist. Music is an emotional language all its own, and I don’t think it is possible to draw the connection between neurosis and ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ ”