Alan Jay Lerner

Early life and education

Lerner was born in New York City to a Jewish family. He was the son of Edith (née Adelson) and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian and television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied music composition at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard", a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.

Career

Owing to his eye injury, Lerner could not serve in World War II. Instead he wrote radio scripts, including Your Hit Parade, until he was introduced to German-Austrian composer Frederick Loewe, who needed a partner, in 1942 at the Lamb's Club. While at the Lamb's, he also met Lorenz Hart, with whom he would also collaborate.

Lerner and Loewe's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Conners's farce The Patsy called Life of the Party for a Detroit stock company. The lyrics were mostly written by Earle Crooker, but he had left the project, with the score needing vast improvement. It enjoyed a nine-week run and encouraged the duo to join forces with Arthur Pierson for What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943. It ran for 63 performances and was followed two years later by The Day Before Spring.

Their first hit was Brigadoon (1947), a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village, directed by Robert Lewis. It was followed in 1951 by the Gold Rush story Paint Your Wagon. While the show ran for nearly a year and included songs that later became pop standards, such as "They Call the Wind Maria", it was less successful than Lerner's previous work. He later said of Paint Your Wagon, it was "a success but not a hit."

Lerner worked with Kurt Weill on the stage musical Love Life (1948) and Burton Lane on the movie musical Royal Wedding (1951). In that same year Lerner also wrote the Oscar-winning original screenplay for An American in Paris, produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli. This was the same team who would later join with Lerner and Loewe to create Gigi.

In 1956, Lerner and Loewe unveiled My Fair Lady. By this time, too, Lerner and Burton Lane were already working on a musical about Li'l Abner. Gabriel Pascal owned the rights to Pygmalion, which had been unsuccessful with other composers who tried to adapt it into a musical. Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz first tried, and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II attempted, but gave up and Hammerstein told Lerner, "Pygmalion had no subplot". Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion retained his social commentary and added appropriate songs for the characters of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, played originally by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It set box-office records in New York and London. When brought to the screen in 1964, the movie version won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.

Songwriting

Lerner often struggled with writing his lyrics. He was uncharacteristically able to complete "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady in one 24-hour period. He usually spent months on each song and was constantly rewriting them. Lerner was said to have insecurity about his talent. He would sometimes write songs with someone in mind. For instance, he changed the rhymes in some lines of "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" to ones that Rex Harrison was more comfortable with.

Lerner said of writing:

You have to keep in mind that there is no such thing as realism or naturalism in the theater. That is a myth. If there was realism in the theater, there would never be a third act. Nothing ends that way. A man's life is made up of thousands and thousands of little pieces. In writing fiction, you select 20 or 30 of them. In a musical, you select even fewer than that. First, we decide where a song is needed in a play. Second, what is it going to be about? Third, we discuss the mood of the song. Fourth, I give (Loewe) a title. Then he writes the music to the title and the general feeling of the song is established. After he's written the melody, then I write the lyrics.

In a 1979 interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Lerner went into some depth about his lyrics for My Fair Lady. Professor Henry Higgins sings, "Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters / Condemned by every syllable she utters / By right she should be taken out and hung / For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." Lerner said he knew the lyric used incorrect grammar for the sake of a rhyme. He was later approached about it by another lyricist:

I thought, oh well, maybe nobody will notice it, but not at all. Two nights after it opened, I ran into Noël Coward in a restaurant, and he walked over and he said, "Dear boy, it is hanged, not hung." I said, "Oh, Noel, I know it, I know it! You know, shut up!" So, and there's another, "Than to ever let a woman in my life." It should be, "as to ever let a woman in my life," but it just didn't sing well.

Dramatists Guild

Alan Jay Lerner was an advocate for writers' rights in theatre. He was a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. In 1960, he was elected as the twelfth president of the non-profit organization. He continued to serve as the Guild's president until 1964.

Personal life

For nearly 20 years, Lerner was addicted to amphetamines; during the 1960s he was a patient of Max Jacobson, known as "Dr. Feelgood", who administered injections of "vitamins with enzymes" that were in fact laced with amphetamines. Lerner's addiction is believed to have been the result of Jacobson's practice.

Marriages and children

Lerner married eight times: Ruth Boyd (1940–1947), singer Marion Bell (1947–1949), actress Nancy Olson (1950–1957), lawyer Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (1957–1965), editor Karen Gundersen (1966–1974), Sandra Payne (1974–1976), Nina Bushkin (1977–1981) and Liz Robertson (1981–1986 [his death]). Four of his eight wives — Olson, Payne, Bushkin, and Robertson — were actresses. His seventh wife, Nina Bushkin, whom he married on May 30, 1977, was the director of development at Mannes College of Music and the daughter of composer and musician Joey Bushkin. After their divorce in 1981, Lerner was ordered to pay her a settlement of $50,000. Lerner wrote in his autobiography (as quoted by The New York Times): "All I can say is that if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood." All of this lent some irony to the lyrics for his song Get Me to the Church on Time.

Lerner had four children — three daughters, Susan (by Boyd), Liza, and Jennifer (by Olson), and one son, screenwriter and journalist Michael Alan Lerner (by di Borgo).

Lerner's multiple divorces cost him much of his wealth. Still, he was primarily responsible for his financial ups and downs and was less than truthful about his financial fecklessness. It was claimed that his divorce settlement from Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (his fourth wife) cost him an estimated $1 million in 1965. This was untrue. Lerner's pattern of financial mismanagement continued until his death from cancer in 1986 when he reportedly owed the U.S. Internal Revenue Service over US$1 million ($2.94 million in 2025) in back taxes and was unable to pay for his final medical expenses.

Death

On June 14, 1986, Lerner died of lung cancer in Manhattan at the age of 67. At the time of his death he was married to actress Liz Robertson, who was 36 years his junior. He lived in Center Island, New York. He has a memorial plaque in St Paul's Church, the Actors' Church in Covent Garden in London.

Awards and honors

American Theater Hall of Fame 1979

Kennedy Center Honors 1985

Academy Award

Best Original Screenplay, 1951 An American in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay, 1958 Gigi

Best Original Song, 1958 Gigi

Grammy Award

Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album, 1966, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

Golden Globes

Best Original Song, 1968 Camelot

Best Original Score, 1975 The Little Prince

Tony Award

Best Book of a Musical, 1957 My Fair Lady

Best Original Score, 1957 My Fair Lady and 1974 Gigi

New York Drama Critics Circle

Best Musical, 1947 Brigadoon

Best Musical, 1956 My Fair Lady

Johnny Mercer Award

Lyric Writing, 1985, Lifetime

Works

Stage

Life of the Party (1942), with Frederick Loewe

What's Up? (1943), with Frederick Loewe

The Day Before Spring (1945), with Frederick Loewe

Brigadoon (1947), with Frederick Loewe

Love Life (1948), with Kurt Weill

Paint Your Wagon (1951), Frederick Loewe

My Fair Lady (1956), with Frederick Loewe

Camelot (1960), with Frederick Loewe

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), with Burton Lane

Coco (1969), with André Previn

Lolita, My Love (1971), with John Barry

Gigi (1973), based on the 1958 film of the same name, with Frederick Loewe

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), with Leonard Bernstein

Carmelina (1979), with Burton Lane and Joseph Stein

Dance a Little Closer (1983), with Charles Strouse

My Man Godfrey (1984), unfinished, with Gerard Kenny

Films

Source: TCM

Royal Wedding, 1951 (screenwriter/lyricist)

An American in Paris (1951) (writer)

Brigadoon, 1954 (film) (screenwriter/lyricist)

Gigi, 1958 (screenwriter/lyricist)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1960 (lyricist)

My Fair Lady, 1964 (screenwriter/lyricist)

Camelot, 1967 (screenwriter/lyricist)

Paint Your Wagon, 1969 (producer/screenwriter/lyricist)

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 1970 (screenwriter/lyricist)

The Little Prince, 1974 (screenwriter/lyricist)

Tribute, 1980 ("It's All for the Best", lyricist)

Secret Places, 1984 (title song lyricist)