Gary Marmorstein - A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart

Praise for A Ship Without a Sail

The whole story, joyful and unflinching, of an astounding talent. This biography really has Hart.

Laurence Bergreen, author of As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin and Columbus: The Four Voyages

Sophisticated, engaging, elegant, and packed with absorbing detail, A Ship Without a Sail is the definitive biography of Larry Hart for which all of us who love his work have been waiting. That Gary Marmorstein has captured the soaring highs and the crushing lows of that short, unhappy life so completely and so sympathetically is a truly remarkableeven enviableachievement. And I speak of what I know.

Frederick Nolan, author of The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway

Marmorstein brings to the task just the right precision instruments for dissecting Larry Hartpanache, sympathy and smarts. The very title of his book goes to the heart of the tortured story he tells so well.

J. D. McClatchy, The Wall Street Journal

Smart and sympathetic... Marmorstein brings to life the Manhattan of Harts youth.

Brad Leithauser, The New York Times Book Review

A fine new biography of Lorenz Hart by Gary Marmorstein, A Ship Without a Sail, makes clear that Hart, over the years since his early death at age 48 in 1943, has been taken up by the very society he set out, in his lyrics, to unsettle.

David Hadju, The New Republic

[Marmorsteins] biographers sense, his dogged researches, and his fair-mindedness constantly lead him in good directions. His account of Rodgerss controversial involvement in Harts business affairs at his death is the best-balanced Ive encountered.

Michael Feingold, The Village Voice

Marmorstein has done an enormous service for fans of stage and movie musicals of the early decades of the 20th century.... Evrything Ive got belongs to you, goes one Hart lyric that now, thanks to the authors thorough, affectionate research, holds another, profoundly poignant meaning.

Kirkus Reviews

ALSO BY GARY MARMORSTEIN
The Label: The Story of Columbia Records
Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and Its Makers

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To my mother

Wits are never happy people. The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of witfor the raw nerve reacts at once without any agent, the reaction is direct, with no integumentary obstacles. Wit is the cry of pain, the true word that pierces the heart.

Dawn Powells diaries, March 1, 1939

You remember

When Beauty said I love you to the Beast

That was a fairy prince, his ugliness

Changed and dissolved, like magic But you see

I am still the same.

Cyrano de Bergerac to Roxane

Authors note: Preference for a biographical subjects first name is often characteristic of hagiography and meant to demonstrate the authors coziness with the subject. But Lorenz Hart was known even to strangers as Larry. And so, for the most part, he is here.

O N THE morning of November 29, 1943, one week after the death of Lorenz Hart at age forty-eight, several people gathered at the Guaranty Trust Company, on the southwest corner of Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, to open the decedents safe-deposit box. Hart was considered by many to be the greatest of all American lyricists. Harts attorney Abraham M. Wattenberg arrived with his young associate Leonard Klein, bearing an order, duly made by Surrogate James A. Foley, to open the box with the express purpose of removing Harts will. A representative of the state tax commission agreed to be there at 11:45 A.M . to oversee the task. Already present were the two executors named in the will: William Kron, who had been Harts accountant for the past five years; and Richard Rodgers, the composer with whom, over the course of twenty-five years, Hart had written more than eight hundred songs, including My Funny Valentine, Isnt It Romantic?, My Heart Stood Still, Blue Moon, My Romance, With a Song in My Heart, The Lady Is a Tramp, Thou Swell, I Didnt Know What Time It Was, Mountain Greenery, Manhattan, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, I Could Write a Book, and Where or When.

Expected at the bank were Harts younger brother, Theodore, an actor known personally and professionally as Teddy, and Teddys wife, Dorothy. Teddy had lived with Lorenzor Larry, as he was calledand their mother until January 1938, when he married Dorothy Lubow and the couple moved to an apartment in the West Fifties. Never living far from Larry, the Harts

The state tax commission representative was delayed. Teddy Hart, who had always played up his lack of book knowledge in clowning contrast to the erudition of his brother, now asked Abe Wattenberg if he had a copy of the will. Wattenberg, in fact, was carrying two copies, and he gave one to Teddy and one to Dorothy. Sitting side by side in the funereal hush of the bank, the Harts read through Larrys will, dated June 17 of that year. The high-ceilinged space had not always felt so sepulchral; decades earlier it had been occupied by the opulent restaurant Sherrys, where Charles Pierre, who later built the Hotel Pierre, was captain, and diners were serenaded by live music and the clatter of silverware and crystal.

Do either of you have any questions? asked Wattenberg.

Dorothy Hart finally looked up from her copy. Does this mean that if I have any children, theyre cut off? Yes, said Wattenberg, thats what it meant. Thats hardly fair, Dorothy said. She pointed out that Larrys estate ought to remain in the family; given the way the will was worded, if she were to have children, they would have no share in his legacy.

By then Teddy and Dorothy had been married for nearly six years; to Abe Wattenberg, a Hart child seemed an improbability. Nevertheless, Wattenberg assured her that the Harts would be ably supported by the $100,000 life insurance policy that Larry had left to Teddymore than enough to take care of the Harts and any children they might have. In any case, Wattenberg went on, I followed your brothers instructions to the letter. This is what he wanted. Wattenberg, a music publishing insider who over the years had represented John Philip Sousa, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Vincent Youmans, had been Larry Harts attorney since 1925 and, as he reminded Teddy and Dorothy, every legal action hed taken had been in his clients best interests. Wattenberg produced a waiver of citation that, if signed by Teddy, would enable probate to go through within three or four days.

Anxious about holding up the proceedings, Teddy signed.

The state tax man appeared. The safe-deposit box was extracted from the vault and taken to a conference room. The will inside it was compared with the copies read by the Harts, and everyone agreed the copies matched the original document. Wattenberg gave the original to a bank representative, who would forward it to the Surrogates Court. At this point Richard Rodgers, having no reason to remain, left the bank.