Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French flavor, respectively. Yet a welcome new collection of Lerner’s letters, “Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters,” demonstrates how Lerner made abundant references to his Jewishness when communicating with friends, and sometimes foes, in the performing arts world.
One of Lerner’s closest alliances was with Moss Hart who directed “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.” Although Lerner was heterosexual (eight times married) and from a privileged background (Choate and Harvard, the nephew of the founder of Lerner Stores), and Hart, according to his biographer Steven Bach, was a closeted gay man from an impoverished background, they were brought together by an appreciation for Jewish humor. In 1956 Lerner wrote to Hart to acknowledge a gift in somewhat cryptic terms: “Because I’m ‘rich and Jewish,’ I’ve received a lot of nice presents in my time, but in all my graying thirty-seven years none has ever meant as much to me as yours.”
Aware even in jest of his own wealth and Jewishness, Lerner termed his most celebrated writing partner, Frederick Loewe, a “schizophrenic” in “The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe” by Gene Lees, because Loewe had an Austrian Jewish father and a gentile mother: “That’s why he was difficult. Very moody.” Of course, Hart and Lerner suffered from major anxieties and mood swings without any such background of mixed marriage in their own families. In a 1956 letter, Lerner cheerfully addressed Loewe as “Dear Meistercocker,” an amalgam of Meistersinger and alter cocker, and referred to a benefit performance of “My Fair Lady” that had an audience so grand that “it made the opening night look like a Hadassah benefit.”
In 1973, Lerner wrote to his friend and collaborator Leonard Bernstein at the time of Bernstein’s celebrated Harvard lectures, “The Unanswered Question.” With no apparent interest in Bernstein’s intellectual aspirations, Lerner jested instead about their shared indulgences in booze and pot: “As for your liquor bills, they are still at M.I.T. being computed. And who is this girl Mary Juana? Why is she so expensive? Can’t you find a nice, sensible Jewish girl?”
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