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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode Lorenz Hart and the Queer Artists Who Invented Broadway. In my last episode, I related how even from its earliest days, the Broadway musical has included queer people throughout its ranks, including in the most significant and important positions. Along with Cole Porter, another legendary and queer Broadway songwriter made his debut during the 1920s. He was Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart. During his relatively short career, Larry Hart wrote the lyrics for 31 Broadway musicals.

These were shows that were witty, tuneful, and often innovative and even experimental in their form and subject matter. And out of these shows came some of the smartest, funniest, most delightful, and most heartbreaking show tunes ever, including dozens that have become timeless standards. Lorenz Hart was born in New York City in 1895, the son of German-Jewish immigrants. His father's friends included the great Webber and Field star Lillian Russell, and Larry grew up entranced by the world of show business. He saw every show that he could, and he was especially impressed by Jerome Kern's string of Princess Theater musicals. He entered Columbia University in 1914, where amazingly, among his classmates were two other soon-to-be top Broadway lyricists, Howard Dietz, who would become half of the team of Dietz and Schwartz, and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Neither Hart nor Hammerstein could have possibly imagined how their future lives would be entwined with one another. During his 20s, Hart, who was fluent in German, got a job with the Schubert Brothers translating German plays into English, but his true ambition was to become a lyricist, and he actively set out to find a composer who would partner with him. By 1919, 17-year-old Richard Rogers was attending Columbia, and Hart was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Rogers would later recall his first impressions of Hart. The total man couldn't have been more than five feet tall. He wore frayed carpet slippers, a pair of tuxedo trousers, an undershirt, and a nondescript jacket. His hair was unbrushed, and he obviously hadn't had a shave for a couple of days.

All he needed was a tin cup and some pencils. But that first look was misleading, for it missed the soft brown eyes, the straight nose, the good mouth, the even teeth, and the strong chin. He had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was too large for his body, and it gave him a slightly gnome-like appearance. Rogers was dazzled by the older Hart's knowledge and strong opinions about the theater, and especially his ideas about what Broadway musicals could, and in his opinion, should be, and Hart instantly to Rogers' music. I left Hart's house having acquired in a single afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation. This irritation would come from a number of issues that resulted in a vicious cycle.

Number one, Hart hated the way that he looked. He was barely five foot ten, and his head was out of proportion to his body. He couldn't stand to look at himself in the mirror. Number two, he was homosexual. But unlike some of his queer contemporaries, his particular German-Jewish family values caused him to be tremendously ashamed of this. He was mortified that he was attracted to men, and devastated that he was too ugly, or at least he felt he was too ugly, for any of those men to be attracted to him. He tried to drown this circle of shame with more and more alcohol, and would sometimes go off on benders where he would disappear for days at a time. Author Gerald Mass suggests that Hart's deepest unrequited love may have been for Richard Rogers.

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[5:05] David Armstrong: Hart actually seems to have been more comfortable with being queer during the 1920s. This makes sense because society was looser then, and much more accepting of all kinds of diversity, and it's also when he and Rogers were becoming the toast of Broadway.

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[5:37] David Armstrong: During the early 30s, the team went to Hollywood, and Hart got swept up in the wild underground gay scene there. But unfortunately, this was a much seedier version of that scene than Cole Porter had been swept up in. He returned to New York, and as the 1930s became progressively more conservative, Hart's benders and disappearances happened increasingly more and more. Rogers would sometimes have to resort to locking Hart in a room in order to get him to finish a set of lyrics for an upcoming show. It's a sad story. Larry Hart does not seem to have ever had any kind of substantial romantic relationship, and even though he was constantly throwing parties and surrounding himself with crowds, he was always desperately lonely.

The singer Mabel Mercer described him as the saddest man she ever knew. But through all of this, Rogers and Hart continued to take the Broadway musical to new heights, culminating in the smash hit, Pal Joey, in 1940. The main characters in the show are the cheap but charismatic young nightclub hoofer, Joey Evans, and the wealthy, jaded society matron, Vera Simpson. And Hart wrote lyrics for Vera that I think come very close to expressing his own world-weary, but at the same time, open-hearted view of love and relationships.

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[7:53] David Armstrong: I hate to end on such a sad note, and of course no one's life can be painted in all one color. Here's what Oscar Hammerstein had to say about Larry Hart. I think of him always as skipping and bouncing. In all the time I knew him, I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his face in repose. I never heard him chuckle quietly. He laughed loudly and easily at other people's jokes and his own, too. His large eyes danced and his head would wag. He was alert and dynamic and fun to be with. That's the Larry Hart I'll leave you with today.

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[9:18] David Armstrong: There was another very significant queer artist who worked closely and extensively with both Cole Porter and Larry Hart. His name was Herbert Fields. Herbie, as he was called by his friends, was the son of Lew Fields of Weber and Fields. That amazing Fields family spans nearly the entire history of the Broadway musical. Herbert Fields alone had a career that mostly thrived from 1925 to 1960. He wrote or co-wrote the books to 21 Broadway musicals, often in collaboration with his sister Dorothy, and many of those shows were the biggest hits of their day. His resume includes six musicals in collaboration with Rodgers and Hart. He had attended Columbia University with Richard Rodgers, six musicals with Cole Porter, one with Vincent Eumanns, one with the Gershwins, and one mega hit, Annie Get Your Gun, with Irving Berlin.

Although the books to the majority of his shows go mostly unproduced today and are largely forgotten, the critics of his time, and especially his songwriting collaborators, gave Herbert Fields tremendous credit for the success of their shows and their songs. And critics acclaimed Herbert's shows for their originality and innovation. I would contend that Herbert Fields is actually one of the key inventors of the musical as we know it. And amazingly, he was also able to successfully navigate the transition from the freewheeling musical comedies of the Silver Age to the fully integrated post-Oklahoma musical comedies of the Golden Age, and indeed have his biggest hit ever in that new format. Herbert Fields never married and seems to have lived comfortably as an openly gay man, at least within the worlds of Broadway and Hollywood.

Author Frederick Nolan writes that Herb was part of the gay scene, but also always maintained the fiction of straightness. Apparently he had a string of statuesque chorus girls for whom he bought immensely ostentatious mink coats. The director and actor Monty Woolley had a family background that was remarkably similar to that of his Yale classmate Cole Porter. When Porter arrived at Yale, Woolley was already ensconced as a leading force in the dramatic association. They quickly became friends and would remain so for the rest of their lives. Today, Monty Woolley is primarily remembered for his brilliant, hilarious performance in the George S. Kaufman and Mosshart play and film The Man Who Came to Dinner.

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[12:00] David Armstrong: But during the late 1920s and early 30s, he directed seven Broadway musicals, all of them written by the emerging queer artists of the era, Cole Porter, Larry Hart, Herbert Fields, and Mosshart. These include such shows as Fifty Million Frenchmen, The New Yorkers, America's Sweetheart, and Jubilee. Woolley's life partner was another former Yale classmate named Cary Abbott, who was usually identified in the press as being, quote, his courier secretary and traveling companion.

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[13:04] David Armstrong: Another defining voice of the 1920s was Noel Coward, who was without a doubt one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. He was born into a lower-middle-class family in England in 1899. His father was an unsuccessful piano salesman. Coward only attended a few years of elementary school before dropping out to become a child actor, but by the time he turned 25, he would be acclaimed in both London and New York as the personification of style, wit, and sophistication. During his more than 50-year career, he achieved significant success as a playwright, a composer, a lyricist, an actor, a singer, a director, a novelist, a painter, and a filmmaker, which is why he is still referred to as the master. He wrote more than 20 musical shows, including operettas, reviews, and musical comedies, as well as dozens of plays, several of which have become classics. And he wrote hundreds of wonderful and influential songs.

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[14:46] David Armstrong: His persona and personality would inform all of his work, and he was as open about his sexuality as anyone could be without ever acknowledging it publicly.

[14:46] David Armstrong: Became an unlikely TV personality in the 1950s and 60s, he would often include coded messages in his songs that you would think would have made his queerness obvious to everyone. But 1950s audiences were noted for only seeing what they wanted to see. You know, quite for no reason, I'm here for the season and high as a kite, living in error with Maud and Cab Ferrer, which couldn't be right. You know, everyone's here, frightfully gay. You know, nobody cares what people say. Now, though the Riviera is really much queerer than Rome at its height, on Wednesday night, I went to a marvelous party with Nunu and Nada and Nell. You know, it was in the fresh air, and we went as we were. And we stayed as we were, which was hell.

Poor Grace started singing at midnight, and she didn't stop singing till four. You know, we knew the excitement was bound to begin when Laura got blind on Dubonnet and Jim and scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin. I couldn't have liked it more, honestly. Unlike any of his contemporaries from the 1920s and 30s, Coward lived long enough to see homosexuality decriminalized in England in 1967 and the New York Stonewall riots of 1969. But even then, when friends urged him to come out, he refused, saying there are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don't know, meaning that he didn't want to upset his elderly fans. But perhaps the real reason is that he worried he would never receive the knighthood that he believed had been withheld from him because of his homosexuality. The knighthood was finally awarded to him in 1970, and in 1971, Coward received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater. He died in 1973, but his plays and songs have lived on.

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[16:48] David Armstrong: Beginning in 1930, the prolific writer and director Moss Hart would collaborate extensively with nearly everyone I've talked about so far—Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Monty Woolley, Hazard Short, Robert Alton, and George M. Cohan. His groundbreaking concept and book for the musical Lady in the Dark that he wrote with Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill was, along with Oklahoma and On the Town, instrumental in creating that integration of the musical that took place in the early 1940s and transformed the Silver Age into the Golden Age. And his spectacular track record with both plays and musicals would continue into the 1960s, with its high point being his Tony Award-winning direction of My Fair Lady in 1957.

He is, however, one of the most complicated artists to pin down in regard to his sexuality. He went through phases of being relatively out and open, and others when he was deeply ashamed and tormented by his queerness, and during those times he would become determined to assert and demonstrate publicly his heterosexuality. The most evident example of this would be his long marriage to actress Kitty Carlyle. Much of this depended on which psychoanalyst he was working with at the time. For many years, he was under the sway of the celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Kubi, who believed that homosexuality was pathological but curable. At that time, homosexuality was still considered a criminal act and was officially classified as a mental disorder. Dr. Kubi would screw up the lives of a number of queer theater artists before the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973.

[18:26] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. On sale now wherever books are sold, and I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Jeffrey Bloch says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive, and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one. Kudos to David Armstrong. And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable.

The book is, of course, available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you will currently receive a 10% discount. Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show. So far, we've talked about composers, lyricists, and book writers. Now let's turn our attention to the choreographers.

[20:09] David Armstrong: The choreographer of a musical is often thought of as the fourth author of the show. Directors and designers are basically interpretive artists, but the choreographer is the author of the show's dances, and their choreography often lives on as part of that show in a similar manner to the text and the music. That male dancers and choreographers would be homosexual is even more of a cliche than the idea that gay men love musicals. But the fact is that the male dancing choruses of Broadway musicals have, from the very beginning right up to today, always been predominantly made up of queer men. This also seems to have been true for musical shows in London, Paris, Berlin, and other major cities around the world.

This poses the eternal chicken-or-egg question. Are queer people drawn to the arts because they somehow sense that it will be a safe haven for them? Or is it that artistic people, especially dancers, are more likely to be queer? And since chorus boys, and as we'll see in a future episode, quite a few chorus girls, often grow up to be choreographers, the overwhelming majority of male Broadway choreographers have been, and currently are, gay. For example, Robert Alton debuted on Broadway in the dancing chorus of the Greenwich Village Follies in 1924, and he would go on to choreograph 28 Broadway musicals during the 1930s and 40s, including some of the most memorable musicals of the period, including the last two Ziegfeld Follies, five Cole Porter musicals, including Anything Goes, four Rodgers and Hart musicals, including Pal Joey, and one musical each for Julie Stein and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The dream ballet that Alton created to close the first act of Pal Joey came several years before, and clearly influenced the similar ballets that Jerome Robbins and Agnes DeMille created for On the Town and Oklahoma. Robert Alton married his dance partner Marjorie Fielding, and they had a son, but his same-sex relationships were well known within the business, and Alton enjoyed a long relationship with another Broadway and Hollywood choreographer, Charles Walters. During the 1950s, Alton worked primarily in Hollywood, and I would argue that his work there on classic movie musicals such as White Christmas have had a tremendous influence on several generations of Broadway choreographers. Jack Cole is arguably Broadway's most significant and at the same time least known choreographer.

Cole, who's been called the father of jazz dance, was born in 1911 in New Jersey to Irish and German immigrant parents. Over his four-decade career, this dynamic dancer-choreographer developed a unique and distinctively American style and vocabulary of dance for stage, film, and television. He accomplished this by blending various forms of dance, modern, ballet, African-American, along with many multicultural world dance forms, and he melded them into a 20th century movement language known as theatrical jazz dance. Cole himself preferred to call it urban dance. Cole first studied modern dance at the Denison School in New York City, where after only six weeks of classes, he was invited to join the company.

There he worked closely with the modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. He later became a charter member of Shawn's groundbreaking all-male dance company, Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. After that, he joined Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman's group. All of these were founders of the American modern dance movement. During this time, Cole also became interested in all forms of ethnic dance, Indian, African, Native American, Caribbean, and South American. He studied Indian dance with master instructor Uday Shankar, brother of the world-famous musician Ravi Shankar, perhaps best known for his collaboration with the Beatles in the 1960s. Cole also hung out in the dance clubs of Harlem, where he mastered the Lindy Hop.

Later, he would travel to various Caribbean islands and to Brazil to study in person their native dances. He loved to do dance research, and while preparing to choreograph the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet, he even traveled to Baghdad, which was the setting for that show. In 1937, he formed a nightclub act called Jack Cole and His Dancers, and soon they were headlining the top clubs in New York and across the country. Cole's sexy mix of East Indian and American swing dance styles and music became a sensation. Critics dubbed it Hindu Swing. It wasn't pure Indian dance or authentic jazz dance or classic modern dance, but rather a new form created from elements of all three. This juxtaposition of cultures gave birth to Cole's unique style and brand.

He borrowed from the uptown culture of black and Spanish Harlem for his nightclub number called The Wedding of a Solid Sender, which was also seen on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943. In a number called Sing, Sing, Sing, an all-male cast would strut, leap, and slide on their knees to the blaring horns of Benny Goodman's classic tune. Bob Fosse would later create his own version of that dance in tribute to Cole for his musical Dancing. Cole dancer Buzz Miller stated that when he first danced Sing, Sing, Sing, he came bouncing off the stage, but everyone else was in the corner throwing up. It's really hard to get through, he said. There's such tension. The Jack Cole dancers were hired by 20th Century Fox to appear in a Betty Grable movie, which led to Cole creating the choreography for nearly 30 Hollywood musicals.

These movies constitute the major record of Cole's work today. It's important to note that Cole directed, as well as choreographed, the segments of his films that contain the major song and dance numbers. This is actually true of really every film musical. The choreographer was also the director of the dance sequences, and the official director of those movies was likely not even on the set during the film. Cole had an amazing talent for getting dynamic dance performances from actors that were not trained dancers, most famously Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the film version of the Broadway hit Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

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[26:32] David Armstrong: But throughout his successful Hollywood career, he still kept pursuing the goal that he desired most, a hit show on Broadway. He actually choreographed more than 20 Broadway musicals. His most successful shows were Kismet in 1953, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, and Man of La Mancha in 1965. But only Kismet featured extended dance sequences. Unfortunately, he never had an enduring stage musical that would make him known to a wide audience like Jerome Robbins did with West Side Story or Bob Fosse did with Sweet Charity and Chicago. Within the theater world, however, he is the acknowledged inventor of Broadway dance. Every choreographer since has been influenced by his work, most directly Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Gower Champion, Peter Gennaro, Michael Bennett, and especially Bob Fosse.

Today, Bob Fosse's name is nearly synonymous with Broadway jazz dance, and Cole's is only a footnote. But it's fair to say that there would be no Fosse style without the heavy influence of Jack Cole on his work. And Jack Cole's legacy goes beyond dancing. One critic writes that Jack Cole's influence on gender archetypes was immense. He says that Cole propagated a version of female strength powered by sexuality. He had no interest in nice girls, but instead opted for sexy jokes, bumps and grinds, double entendres, street smarts, and a tinge of violence. He goes on to say that Cole's openly gay lifestyle was particularly remarkable in the 1950s, a time of paranoia and overt homophobia, and it nudged the culture toward the gay liberation movement that would explode around the time of Cole's death.

[28:13] David Armstrong: As we have seen, queer artists found various ways of dealing with and reacting to the shifting attitudes toward homosexuality during the first half of the 20th century. In upcoming episodes, we'll discover that for gay men such as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Lawrence, and Stephen Sondheim, the four creators of West Side Story, the repressive 1950s would indeed be particularly challenging to navigate. In our next episode, we will explore how from the very beginning, women have been much more involved in creating and sustaining the Broadway musical than is generally acknowledged or reported. As epitomized by Herbie Field's amazing sister Dorothy, whose 50-year career spanned from the 1920s to the age of rock.

[29:05] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is produced and written by me, David Armstrong. I want to thank James Rocco for his voice acting contribution, everyone at KVSH 101.9 FM, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and especially everyone at the Broadway Podcast Network. If you enjoy Broadway Nation, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, and please recommend us to everyone you know who is interested in Broadway musicals.