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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now, the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. This is the third of a four-part program paying tribute to legendary lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner is best known for writing award-winning classics like Brigadoon, Camelot, and one of Broadway's most enduring shows, My Fair Lady. This program originally aired in November of 1979.

[0:39] Alan Jay Lerner: In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was a look dawn of something shocking, but now God knows, anything goes. Lerner returned to Broadway with Frederick Lowe to write Paint Your Wagon. I've discovered a very interesting record, a record that was produced when the film version of Paint Your Wagon came out and had several interviews with the stars, Gene Seberg and Lerner himself. So here's several selections from Paint Your Wagon, both show and film version, and the lyricist himself singing the song, as well as some interpolated cuts from that interview album.

[1:50] ♪ Musical number: "Wanderin' Star" — performed by Alan Jay Lerner ♪

[4:10] Alan Jay Lerner: Yes, now, the dream of this woman is respectability and, above all, a cabin. A place to never move away from. A place that she can live the rest of her life and love every little shabby corner of it because it's a pioneer cabin. It's one room and it's, of course, very rustic and quite poor, really. This song is when I see my cabin for the first time. The day after the wedding, Lee Marvin comes out and shouts to all the men in the village, and I'm the only woman there, the lady wants a cabin, we're going to build her a cabin. And the song opens just with the tears in my eyes, looking at this funny little, beautiful little cabin they've built for me. It's everything that home means to a woman, and I'm sure that in the world there are many women as there are men who have never really had a home. If you'd like to, why don't we play it a million miles away behind the door?

[5:08] ♪ Musical number: "A Million Miles Away Behind the Door" — performed by Alan Jay Lerner ♪

[7:55] Alan Jay Lerner: Actually, I got into it by sheer accident. I was back in, well, my heavens, 19 years ago. I was in California and I'd gone up to Sacramento to redirect the touring company of Brigadoon that was up there. And on the way I passed Sonora. So I stopped off to see it. I'd never been there. And I stayed for the night and I was alone. And I walked up and down the streets and began to talk to some of the people and read some of the literature that was around. Of course, Sonora is one of the famous old ghost towns of the Gold Rush. And I suddenly began to realize that the Gold Rush was not at all like I had imagined it. And it was not. And it was far from the great lusty Western that I had come to think of it as. And I began to get interested in it and read about it. And suddenly I found myself writing about it.

[9:16] ♪ Musical number: "They Call the Wind Maria" — performed by Alan Jay Lerner ♪

[10:58] ♪ Musical number: "They Call the Wind Maria" ♪

[12:04] Alan Jay Lerner: Among the shows that Fritz and I wrote together was Paint Your Wagon, and this song that Richard Leonard is playing, I talked to the trees, almost drove me up the wall. I'd given Fritz the title, and he'd written a lovely melody for it, but every lyric I wrote seemed unsingable, and so I wrote it over and over and over again until one day I realized what was wrong. For some reason, it was a song that couldn't stand any rhymes, so I took them out, and without them, the song seemed to sing quite well.

[13:43] Paul Lazarus: That was several selections from the Lerner and Lowe collaboration, Paint Your Wagon. Paint Your Wagon opened up at the Shubert Theatre on November 12, 1951, and though it ran for 289 performances, a respectable run, it lost money, as all artistic successes seem to do. You first heard from the Lyrics by Lerner album, Heritage Recording, Wandering Star, and that was sung by Alan J. Lerner himself, followed by Jean Seberg, the female lead in the movie version, singing a song that was written especially for the movie version of Paint Your Wagon, and was music by Andre Previn, and was entitled A Million Miles Away Behind the Door, followed by the male chorus from the film version singing They Call the Wind Mariah, and then Alan J. Lerner introducing himself singing I Talk to the Trees at the Lyricists and Lyrics Evening at the Y, which Lerner gave a discourse on lyric writing and played several of his songs.

You are listening to Anything Goes about noted writer Alan J. Lerner. Lerner then went on to write his classic with Fritz Lowe, and My Fair Lady needs absolutely no introduction whatsoever. I could play every song from the show, but I've chosen to limit it so I can play some other things you may have not heard. But you will hear Lerner himself introducing a couple of songs, and then Rex Harrison introducing I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.

[15:21] Alan Jay Lerner: How did I become a lyricist in the first place? Because of a cigarette on the golf course, a left hook to the side of the head, and a wrong turn on the way to the men's room. If that sounds cryptic, let me explain. The cigarette was on the golf course of the Choate School in Connecticut. After graduation, I was to go abroad to study. Despite the fact that I had a passion for the theater and to be a writer, my father had decided that what I wanted was a diplomatic career. It so happened that at Choate in those days, smoking was automatic dismissal if you were caught. I was caught. Which so enraged him that he canceled my diplomatic career and sentenced me to four years of hard labor at an American university.

And so it was that in September of 1936, instead of living La Vida Boheme along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I found myself more provincially ensconced at Harvard University, 2,800 miles closer to Shubert Alley. At Harvard, I wrote music and lyrics for the Hasty Pudding shows and went out for the boxing team, where one afternoon in the ring, my mind wandered. A left hook caught me on the side of the head and left me with one less eye than I was born with. With the other eye, however, I saw my brothers and friends soon go off to war. Anguished that I was not with them, I deserted my native habitat and moved to the Lamb's Club on West 44th Street. One day while I was having lunch, a short man with a large head and hands strode to a few feet from my table and stopped short.

His destination was the men's room and he'd gone the wrong way. I knew who he was. His name was Frederick Lowe, Fritz to the membership, a Viennese-born ex-concert pianist and struggling composer. He came to my table and sat down. "You write lyrics, don't you?" "I try," I replied. "Well," he said, "would you like to write lyrics with me? My partner just went in the Navy." And thus, with a cigarette, a left hook, and a wrong turn to the men's room, I became a lyric writer on Broadway.

[17:13] ♪ Musical number: "I Could Have Danced All Night" — performed by Julie Andrews ♪

[20:40] Alan Jay Lerner: There was a song that we wrote for Fair Lady that Fitz and I and Moss Hart were absolutely positive would be Rex's Pièce de résistance. That was going to be his big number. He thought so. And it was rehearsed and we opened with it in New Haven. And it lasted one performance. And where it came was right after Askett, when she had been a failure. And then she was back sobbing and there was a moment where he tried to cajole her, persuade her to continue on and not give up. And this is the song that he sang.

[24:01] Alan Jay Lerner: Yes, this is what was called a recognition scene, I think, and it comes very late in the play when one of the protagonists of the play recognizes his own feelings and that's what is really delayed. I think the audience perhaps really believed that he's in love with her before he realizes it, but in this song, Higgins suddenly realizes the dreadful truth that he has fallen in love with Eliza, and this is shocking to him and he fights it like a demon, but eventually it submerges him and he has to succumb.

[24:26] ♪ Musical number: "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" — performed by Rex Harrison ♪

[29:29] Paul Lazarus: Several selections from the Lerner and Loewe all-time classic My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady, the New York production alone, ran 2,717 performances over six years. First, you heard Alan Jay Lerner introducing, well, telling a story about how he became a lyricist, at the Lyrics and Lyricists' Evening at the Y, followed by "I Could Have Danced All Night," Julie Andrews singing, and then Alan Jay Lerner singing an outtake from My Fair Lady, a song that they had believed would be a showstopper that was cut in one evening, entitled "Come to the Ball." That was also from the Lyricists and Lyricists' Evening at the Y, and then Rex Harrison himself on a radio promotion record introducing "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."

We just heard several selections from My Fair Lady, and I just wanted to quote a few lines from Alan Jay Lerner's book The Street Where I Live. He says, remembering the lyrics of a hymn to him was not the only problem Rex had in the course of the play. Nothing impresses an audience more or produces a more dependable spontaneous burst of applause than to see a chandelier appearing from on high. Two chandeliers, ecstasy; three, our collective orgasm. In the finale of Act One, there were three. One night, however, after the show had been running a while, they were lowered too far and one of them hooked itself onto Rex's hairpiece. When the stage manager corrected the mistake and raised the chandeliers, Rex's hair went up with them.

To his everlasting credit, Rex continued as if his hair were still on his head and not hanging from a chandelier like a bird's nest after a storm. On another occasion, in the fourth scene of the second act, which takes place in Mrs. Higgins' Winter Garden, running across the rear of the stage was a small series of rectangular flower pots. Rex had no sooner made his entrance one night than he realized he had an uncontrollable desire to relieve a sudden excess of wind that had lodged itself in his lower abdomen. Being an actor of considerable discipline, he waited for the moment when he went up behind the flower pots to pace up and down in irritation. Once there, he let go. Unfortunately, there was more wind in need of egress than he had contemplated, and from behind the potted flowers came one of the loudest you can imagine ever heard in the history of the theatre.