7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magnificent musician - a sad man, November 29, 2001
This review is from: Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (Hardcover)
Secrest is an outstanding biographer. Once again she has brought her research skills, integrity, knowledge and compassion to the story of the life of an American musical genius. She presents a straightforward and unblinking account of a composer whose works are classics, whose productivity was astounding, and whose sadness as a person belied the upbeat and joyous tunes he bequeathed to us. I grew up with Rodgers' songs and have enjoyed many of his musicals over the years, on stage as well as in the movies. I feel grateful for the beauty he brought - and brings - into my life. I wish he had had a happier life. Secrest does a superb job in bringing the complexity of this man to the reader. Highly recommended!
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26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Like Subjects, Like Biographer?, November 15, 2001
This review is from: Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (Hardcover)
Meryle Secrest has written what was hoped to be the definitive bio of Richard Rodgers. Her research and her interviews with Rodgers' daughters, Mary Rodgers Guettel and Linda Rodgers Emery, should have produced a great book, but such is, regrettably, not the case.
Secrest is long on information and very short indeed on conclusions, a serious shortcoming in a book dealing with the impact of supressed emotions, alcoholism, infidelity, and displaced anger on the lives of Richard Rodgers and his wife, Dorothy . The author relates anecdotes, lists achievements, and tells tales, but then makes very little effort to weave her material into anything that might help us understand this complicated man and his even more complicated wife. We are told that Rodgers was remarkably unfaithful to his wife for nearly half a century, and we are told that she had her disagreeable side, but what effect, if any, did the unfaithfulness have on the disagreeableness? Secrest doesn't go there; what few conclusions that are drawn about the Rodgerses' behaviour are in the interview material.
Early in the book, Secrest promises to say as much about Dorothy Rodgers as her husband. Not only does that not happen, the references to Mrs. Rodgers are largely negative. She is painted as insecure, greedy, addicted to Demerol, and with shallow interests in decorating and design. The author trivialises the famed Rodgers art collection as canned 'Christmas gifts' that the husband and wife could exchange; she failed to discover, or perhaps merely to relate, that major pieces from the collection (particularly the Toulouse-Lautrec gouache of Mme. Natanson) delight thousands of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum, to whom they were willed. Not only is Dorothy Rodgers' incredible eye for art thus diminished by Secrest, Mrs. Rodgers' philanthropic and charitable efforts also get short shrift. Worst of all, Secrest tells us that Mrs. Rodgers' father committed suicide, and then does nothing to relate that to the pain of her husband's serial infidelities. Might not a woman who has lost one significant male in her life need stability from the remaining one? Might not every infidelity feel like a fresh loss to someone thus wounded?
There is also a bothersome error when the author describes the couple's summer house in Fairfield (the famous "House In My Head" of Dorothy Rodgers' book of the same name) as "completely walled in glass". The barest look at the illustrations in Mrs. Rodgers' book shows clearly that the house was glass-walled on only one elevation, with large windows elsewhere. Such an easily avoided error casts doubt on other assertions.
The wealth of information presented in this work could have made a wonderful book that spoke volumes about the pain of depression and addiction, the trauma of living in a hollow marriage, and the futility of trying to keep family secrets. And surely, something could have been made of the tendency of both husband and wife to create beauty professionally, when they had very little in their emotional lives. Instead, Secrest chooses much the same road the Rodgerses did: Entertain without going down messy psychic paths. Perhaps biographers who do not learn from the mistakes of their subjects are doomed to repeat them.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A skillful chronicle of an immeasurably important composer, January 12, 2002
This review is from: Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (Hardcover)
We can be grateful to Secrest for toiling on Rodgers with her usual thorougness and objectivity, and for doing so when many of Rodgers's friends and colleagues, not to mention his thoughtful daughters, are still here to contribute. If the result is not quite as good a read as her works on Bernstein and Sondheim, we have to blame the subject, not the author. Rodgers was not an easy man to get to know, and while his music was often original and sophisticated, his life was marked by a dull and distant anger. A lesser biographer might have added a larger dose of amateur psychoanalysis and squeezed more dramatic juice out of alcohol and infidelity, but Secrest knows that her job is to depict a life, not to make a sport of it. Given the scope of Rodgers's influence on 20th century culture, Secrest's book will no doubt be invaluable when this fascinating musical era is approached by future writers.
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