Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
He Took Manhattan
By David Hajdu
Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers
by Meryle Secrest
Knopf, 457 pp., $30.00
Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway
by Frederick Nolan
Oxford University Press, 390 pp. $19.95 (paper)
Early in Richard Rodgers's career as a musical-theater composer, his rapid ascension on Broadway earned him an invitation to one of Elsa Maxwell's masquerade balls. He was expected to wear a cheekily imaginative costume, and Rodgers came up with something appropriate. Looking exactly as he always would, conservatively attired in a dark business suit and tie, Rodgers went as Zeppo Marx—the Jazz Age icon of anonymity. A New York newspaper would later describe Rodgers as a person 'like anybody else.' Indeed, despite the extravagant success of his music during most of the past century, he would always seem a figure of indeterminate identity, a man whose image is most striking for its extraordinary ordinariness.
Review, 2828 words
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