Somewhere for Me - A Biography of Richard Rodgers [Paperback]

Meryle Secrest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

No American composer has been more widely celebrated, nor so consistently misunderstood as Richard Rodgers. Although he was one of America's most brilliant and prolific composers, whose credits include more than 900 published songs, 40 Broadway musicals and numerous films, Rodgers is widely believed to be the almost stolid opposite of who he really was. Meryle Secrest shows us for the first time his complex nature and the inspiration for his art. Looking intensely at Rodger's unparalleled career, Secrest follows his close and fruitful working relationship with Lorenz Hart, a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty musicals but was ultimately undone by Hart's alcoholism. Moving on to Rodger's second collaborator, Secrest records the triumphs with the gifted and more stable Oscar Hammerstein, including Carousel, South Pacific and The King and I, along with many more. Rodgers' personal life is explored, as well. Secrest writes about the composer's childhood, and how, from an early age, he used music to escape. And she explores Rodgers' own battle with alcohol, as well as the deep tensions in his 49-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner. Somewhere for Me is both a vivid portrait of American musical theatre, and an illuminating examination of one of its greatest artists.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) wrote some of the loveliest and most touching popular music of the 20th century, from "Thou Swell" in A Connecticut Yankee through "Edelweiss" in The Sound of Music. He was half of the two most celebrated teams in American musical theater: Rodgers and Hart sparkled with the insouciant gaiety of the 1920s and '30s, while Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein forged a revolution with more serious, artistically unified productions like Oklahoma and The King and I. Meryle Secrest skillfully depicts Rodgers's glittering lifestyle and the complex personality hidden underneath the suave manner and elegant clothes. Born into an affluent but tension-riddled New York Jewish family, he was playing the piano at seven and had his first Broadway musical produced before 18. Life after that was a succession of hit shows, glamorous parties, famous friends, and lavish homes decorated by wife Dorothy, who turned a sophisticated blind eye to his affairs with pretty actresses. Theatrical colleagues recall Rodgers as amusing and charming, if not precisely warm; daughters Mary and Linda paint a darker picture of a hypercritical and sometimes cruel father enmeshed in a marriage he often found confining. Secrest hasn't anything very new to say about Rodgers's music, but she's written a perceptive biography of an intriguingly complicated man and a formidable creative artist. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Whiskers on kittens and warm woolen mittens," sings Maria to a lighthearted melody in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, but this sentimental, carefree imagery was hardly the stuff of which composer Rodgers's life was made. This deeply researched and moving critical biography covers the composer's long life and career (he died in 1979), with astute analysis of his work and sympathetic, but not hagiographic, insights into the man. Born in 1902 to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in New York City, Rodgers copyrighted his first song, "Auto Show Girl" when he was 15. After he teamed up with Lorenz Hart in 1919, they turned out a series of shows and songs that made them world famous and well-off (by the mid-1930s, at the height of the depression, they were each making more than $100,000 a year). When Hart died in 1943, Rodgers partnered with Oscar Hammerstein and went on to produce some of the most popular and important musicals in the second half of the 20th century, including The King and I and No Strings. Secrest, who has penned critically acclaimed biographies of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, has a good eye for detail and neatly integrates important personal details such as the impact of Dorothy's homophobia concerning her husband's relationship with the gay Hart or the increasingly debilitating effect that Rodgers's alcoholism had on his work. Based on extensive interviews (and the help of Rodgers's children) as well as comprehensive research in the sociology of the music and theater industry, this is a wonderful addition to the literature on American popular culture. (Nov.)Forecast: Bookstores with music sections would be wise to stock this title. Expect strong sales from both theatergoers and lovers of song standards.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 462 pages
• Publisher: Applause Books (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557835810
• ISBN-13: 978-1557835819
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #54 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Sheet Music & Scores > Composers > Rodgers

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent musician - a sad man, November 29, 2001

By 

Noel Brusman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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!

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Like Subjects, Like Biographer?, November 15, 2001

By 

Sandy McLendon (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

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

By 

Elkhart (Moscow, Russia) - See all my reviews

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.