A Good Collaborator Is a Precious Thing

by John Aquino on 04/28/14

I have recently been legally representing co-authors on a book contract and throughout the publication process. And I had written earlier in this blog about co-authors when discussing joint copyright.

It made me think about what a precious and rare thing having a good collaborator is.

Many of us will collaborate with others in the course of our work. Literary works are usually thought of as solitary things--a novelist writes a novel, a poet pens a poem. This isn't always true. Some novels are co-written--Seven Days in May--although the bulk are not. Some non-writers require the help of professional writers in their memoirs and fiction.

Dramas are also usually thought of as solo activities--Tennessee Williams as a young man working in a box factory gets an idea for a play.

But dramas lend themselves to collaboration more because the theatre itself--director, lighting, costumes, scenery, actors--is a collaborative medium. In the drama of ancient Rome and Greece, from what know the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Platus and Seneca were solo efforts. Aristophanes' The Frogs, features a debate in the underworld on drama by Euripides, who had just died when the play premiered, and Aeschylus, who had died 50 years before, suggesting they were thought of as solo writers,  although they likely benefited from the collaborative theatre process to get their works on stage. When drama was revived in England in the Middle Ages, the Biblical mystery plays were ascribed to, say, the Wakefield Master, but it's conceivable that they were joint efforts of the communities that put on the plays. Tudor drama in England appears to have been written by solo authors, but Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays were credited to both solo and joint authors on their title pages. And there is even scholarships that  some of the plays in the First Folio of William Shakespeare have scenes by other uncredited authors. Shakespeare himself is thought to have contributed lines to the unfinished and unproduced manuscript play The Play of Thomas More. There were so many theatres in London that each company appears to have needed a new play every two weeks, so there was, not surprisingly, a joining of efforts. In the modern drama, although there have been some playwriting team such as that of George Kaufman and Moss Hart, plays have generally been the works of one author.

In the musical theatre--although there have been individuals such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Steven Schwartz who have written both the music and the lyrics--the composing of music and the writing of lyrics tend to require distinct skill sets and songs are usually the results of collaborations, with one or more persons writing the music and one or more writing the lyrics.

Songs for the musical theatre, then, are perhaps the perfect examples for collaboration. They are joint works with music and lyrics forming parts of the whole. Composers and lyricists have often jumped from partner to partner, perhaps staying with one for a while and then moving on. Successful songwriting teams are rare because they require constant chemistry between the two as well as some luck.

Collaboration is intimate work--close to marriage. There long hours, disagreements, even quarrels, and, when it works, bliss.

Rodgers and Hart. The composer Richard Rodgers is kind of a microcosm of how rare it is to have find a successful partner. He had 40 years of success with two partners and then 20 years of drought.

In 1919, the Queens, New York-born, 17-year-old Rodgers began writing songs with Lorenz Hart, a fellow Columbia University alum seven years his senior. The next year, one of their songs was interpolated in a Broadway show and over the next 20 years they wrote songs for 28 Broadway musicals and 6 Hollywood musical films.

Hart's lyrics were sharp, witty, vernacular (they wrote a song with the most non-musical title they could think of--"I Got Five Dollars"), with sometimes unexpected polysyllabic rhymes. He could also write love songs that were simple, direct, and heartfelt: "Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone/Without a dream in my heart,/Without a love of my own." Rodgers' music was versatile: full of waltz rhythms, jazz melodies and comic numbers. Rodgers sometimes wrote music to Hart's lyrics and just as often and maybe more often as Hart's availability became more erratic, wrote the music first for Hart to wrote lyrics for it later. 

Although seven years younger, Rodgers was the more responsible and the luckiest. He was happily married with children. Hart was short, insecure, drank heavily, lived with his mother, was a latent homosexual and yet also fruitlessly pined for Vivienne Segal, who was often the leading lady of their musicals. While Rodgers was very disciplined, Hart once appeared at a meeting with the European film director Ernst Lubitsch with lyrics scribbled on a coacktail napkin. Rodgers appears to have paternal to his older, troubled partner and yet was also something of a cold fish. Hart often disappeared for days, leaving Rodgers to cover for him and sometimes write his own lyrics.

But they worked well together. They were known as a team--Rodgers and Hart. Their contracts even required that their work always be billed as a Rodgers and Hart. When they were under a film contract and Hart was assigned to write English lyrics to Lubitsch's version of the  Viennese operetta The Merry Widow which already has a  a score by Franz Lehar, the credit read, "Lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart," even though Rodgers had written nothing for the film.

They worked together for over 20 years. Few of the shows they wrote are ever revived since they are tied to a 1920s muiscal comedy style that Rodgers himself helped supplant. There have been occasional revivals of The Boys from Syracuse and Pal Joey. But they produced an incredibly long string of song hits. By 1943, however, Hart could no longer work. He died that year at the age of 48, shortly after his mother. But even before then Rodgers, so fortunate to have the same partner for two decades, found a second partner that he worked with exclusively for about the same amount of time.

Rodgers and Hammerstein. Oscar Hammerstein II had written lyrics with Rodgers before Rodgers met Hart. He too was a Columbia alum. He was Hart's age. Unlike Hart, he was happily married, solid and dependable. With Jerome Kern, he had written the landmark musical Show Boat but was coming off a long line of failures. When they started working together in 1943. Rodgers asked him, "Do you like to write the lyrics first or will I write the music first?" Hammerstein said, "I always write the lyrics first." And he did.

Hammerstein continued to explore the musical drama approach to musicals that he had started with Show Boat. Oklahoma! began not with a long line of chorus girls but a single cowboy singing as he entered. While Hart saw love as wry and sly and sometimes sad and hurtful, to Hammerstein it was warm and strong and life fulfilling, something you could sense "across a crowded room." Oklahoma! was revolutionary and it was followed by four more mammoth hits: Carousel, South Pacific, the King and I, and the Sound of Music, with one modest success--Flower Drum Song, a well-received television musical--Cinderella, a well-received film--State Fair, one ambitious failure--Allegro, and two outright failures--Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream.

Rodgers adapted his music easily to Hammerstein's style. He broadened his approach, making it a little closer to opera in its sweep.

For all of their great successes, Rodgers and Hammerstein were evidently not close, much of that due to Rodgers. After Hammerstein's death in 1960, Rodgers said that he really hadn't known him well.

Rodgers Without Them. Rodgers was an incredibly fortunate composer--two successful partnerships spanning 40 years. But after that, he went from partner to partner, which has been common in the musical theatre.  Having written lyrics for Hart, he wrote his own for the show No Strings (1962), two additional songs for the film version of The Sound of Music, and the score for the 1967 television musical Androcles and the Lion. All were elevated by his name. He tried to partner with Alan Jay Lerner on a musical about reincarnation. Lerner's partner for My Fair Lady and Camelot, Frederick Loewe, had retired due to a heart condition. Lerner's availability was just as erratic as Hart's had been, although for different reasons--Lerner was something of a jet setter. Rogers had evidently become less patient as he aged. The collaboration broke up, and Lerner completed the score for what became On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, with Burton Lane, and it became a modest list.

Rodgers then worked with Hammerstein's protégé Stephen Sondheim on the songs for Do I Hear a Waltz. It was a troubled collaboration and was only a small hit that is almost never revived. Rogers then collaborated with Sheldon Harnick, who had written the lyrics for Fiddler on the Roof, for Rex and Martin Charnick for Two By Two and I Remember Mama, both none were hits and are little remembered. Two By Two ran a few months primarily because its star was Danny Kaye, but the others lasted just weeks.

Rodgers' success with Hart and Hammerstein followed by 20 years of different partners and little success shows that a successful collaboration is a rare thing. However difficult it is, it should really be treasured.

I have three more illustrations that illustrate the preciousness of a good collaborator.

Adley and Ross. Jerry Ross and Richard Adler teamed up as a songwriting team in 1950. Each wrote music and lyrics. In 1953, their song "Rags to Riches" was a hit for Tony Bennett and the same year they wrote most of the songs for the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. In 1954, Pajama Game, which has the unlikely musical plot of a union dispute and for which they wrote the score. won the Tony award for best musical. The next year, Damn Yankees, a musical about a baseball fan who sells his soul to the devil, also won the Tony. Both shows were made into successful Hollywood movies and are frequently revived. But in 1955, soon after Damn Yankees' premiere, Ross died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 29. Adler, who was five years older than Ross, struck out on his own, wrote a number of Broadway shows, but none of them ran long. His last, Music Is, a musical version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, closed after eight performance in 1976. His most noteworthy (or notorious) enterprise after Ross died was the 1962 happy birthday to President Kennedy show at which Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday to the president.

Ross and Adler's talents complemented each other. Together they were successful. Without Ross, Adler was not. Their collaboration was a unique thing.

Menken and Ashman. A related example is that of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. In their thirties, the composer Menken and lyricist Ashman had a broadway success with their musical adaptation of the 1960 cult horror classic The Little Shop of Horrors about a young man who befriends and later learns to feed a carnivorous plant. In 1989, they helped revitalize the Disney animated musical with The Little Mermaid and won Academy Awards for best song and best score. In 1991, they won the same awards for Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which was also nominated for best picture. Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, and his lyrics for only three songs were used in Disney's Aladdin  (1992). Aladdin won Oscars for best music, best score and best song (although the song that won had lyrics by Tim Rice). After that, Menken worked with other lyricists on the scores for the animated Disney features Pocahontas, Hercules, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Disney live action movies Newsies, which was later transplated to Broadway, and Enchanted. He wrote the music for the musical Christmas Carol on Broadway and that was broadcast on tv. There are many ways to say that his career since Ashman died has been successful, unlike Adler's. And yet, none of the movies and shows listed here for Menken without Ashman were runaway hits or even universally praised. The lightning that struck when he worked with Ashman did not strike again.

Gilbert and Sullivan. And then there's the example of Gilbert and Sullivan in the late 19th century. Sullivan was a classically trained composer who was also amenable to writing light entertainments such as Cox and Box. In a way he prefigured Leonard Bernstein who wrote symphonies, operas and Broadway musicals. Gilbert was trained as an attorney, wrote nonsensical verse such as "The Bab Ballads" and plays. He and Sullivan first collaborated in 1871, had a mammoth success in H.M.S. Pinafore in 1877 and were so successful that a theatre was built to play just their works, the Savoy Theatre. Their collaboration was often troubled--while enjoying the money he earned from the Savoy operas Sullivan was often goaded to attempt more serious works--and they fought over which one's contributions was the more important. But together their work appeared golden--The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, The Mikado, the Yeomen of the Guard, the Gondoliers. Even their less successful works such as Ruddigore are sometimes revived. Sullivan's music was written as light opera lightened even more by the wit of Gilbert's lyrics. They broke up in 1890 in a quarrel over the cost of a carpet for the theatre. They wrote for other collaborators, the works were not successful, they reunited for two more operas--Utopia Limited and The Grand Duke, neither of which were successful. The magic was gone. They continued to work apart with others with little success. Sullivan died in 1900, Gilbert in 1911.

 Copyright 2014 by John T. Aquino