Stephen Sondheim by Meryle Secrest Bloomsbury 461pp, £20 in UK
In 1981, Stephen Sondheim had his first outright flop: a musical version of an old Kaufman and Hart play, Merrily We Roll Along. It told its story in reverse: in the beginning, the hero is rich, corrupt, materialistic, then, after a squalid first scene involving his wife and mistress, the action keeps moving backwards in time until he is last seen as a college graduate, delivering his valedictory address complete with Polonius's bathetic litany - "This above all . . . The play was not a runaway success, and Herman Mankiewicz, who later scripted Citizen Kane, suggested a reason:
"Here's this wealthy playwright," Mank said, "who has had repeated successes and earned enormous sums of money, has mistresses as well as a family, and an expensive town house, a luxurious beach house and a yacht. The problem is: How did the poor son of a bitch ever get into this jam?"
Sondheim should perhaps have taken the lesson to heart. In 1934, Merrily We Roll Along managed to last for 155 performances; the musical version closed after two weeks. The composer-lyricist might have thought he had a kind of credit balance on which to draw; he had, after all, changed the face of Broadway with Company, Follies and the sublime A Little Night Music, not to mention Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd. Surely an artist had the right to fail? Samuel Beckett had, after all, written: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter, Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
This, however, was New York, where failure is, to quote a lyric from West Side Story, a social disease. Once the critics had pounced, Sondheim's collaborator, Harold Prince, decamped; their partnership, he declared, had "run out of steam". Friends disappeared. The theatre where the show was dying became a plague area. Sondheim alone offered comfort and hospitality to his cast.
He was becoming wealthy. He had neither the need nor the wish to write again and invite more of the same. His salvation, one suspects, was the discovery that a writer, a composer, a lyricist, an artist, goes on working because he is good for nothing else. Sondheim's next work took as its subject Seurat's painting A Sun- day Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; it concerned itself with the process of creation, and it was called Sunday in the Park with George. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and this reviewer can recall being so stunned by the Act One song, "Finishing the Hat" (Act Two, set in the present day, was quite beyond me) as to be incapable of speech for the rest of the evening.
Meryle Secrest, who has written this sympathetic and yet unsparing biography, quotes the lyrics:
Studying the hat, Entering the world of the hat, Reaching through the world of the hat, Like a window, Back to this one from that.
Studying a face, Stepping back to look at a face, Leaves a little space in the way like a window, But to see - It's the only way to see.
The song ends when Seurat shows his sketch to his dog and sings: "Look, I made a hat . . ./ Where there never was a hat." It is magnificent, and as his leading man, Mandy Patinkin, said, it is the story of Sondheim's life. There is an irony, inasmuch as the ultimate definition of the creative process appears, not in a learned treatise, but as a lyric in a Broadway musical; but then Sondheim is the supreme ironist.
One might say that he was born with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth. He father, Herbert Sondheim, was a well-to-do dress manufacturer with a passion for music. His mother, known as "Foxy", was, as the saying goes, something else; "pretentious", "self-centred" and "narcissistic" were but a few of the adjectives applied to her by a close relative. Medea could have gone to Foxy for child-care lessons. When her husband left her for another woman, Foxy made sexual overtures to her ten-year-old son, Stephen.
"She substituted me for him," Sondheim said. "What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time." There is grist here for the mill of those who would argue that homosexuals are made, not born. At any rate, it is not surprising that the boy found himself a pair of surrogate parents, who were the lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II and his wife Dorothy. The young Sondheim was a game-player: "brittle, competitive and sarcastic"; Hammerstein projected the image of a cuddly teddy-bear, but he was ruthless and warded off intimacy. Nonetheless, he became the boy's mentor, and Steve found himself at a ringside seat when Oklahoma! and Carousel arrived.
He met famous people - on a trip to Europe he played chess with Humphrey Bogart on the set of Beat the Devil. The showbiz cliches did not apply; he did not go hungry or knock on producers' doors, or compromise. There were those who thought of him as a genius and forecast a career as a classical composer, but his sights were set on Broadway, and he put the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's score, by turn bullying and maudlin, for West Side Story. Contrary to received opinion, the show was a near-flop; it was the film version, which won ten Oscars, that gave it its classic status; to this day, on hearing the first portentous blast of Something's Coming one sighs deeply and becomes respectful.
Gypsy, with music by Jules Styne and brass section by Ethel Merman, followed. It was not until A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that, for the first time, Sondheim wrote words and music. He was learning fast; enough to avoid disaster by heeding the advice of the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, to junk the first number and start the show with Comedy Tonight. Like the lady at a Broadway first night who asked Noel Coward "Should we like this?" the audience needed permission to laugh.
The first truly Sondheim musical was Company, in which five married couples cajole and urge the 35-year-old Robert to join their number - "Strange to say," Samuel Pepys wrote on seeing a wedding party, "what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition." At this remove, nearly thirty years later, it is difficult not to see the musical as a subversive piece in which Robert is a homosexual being pressured to conform. The songs are dazzling and utterly misogynous - "The Ladies Who Lunch" chills the blood, even without Elaine Stritch.
Follies was a multi-levelled piece: set within the context of a reunion party at a theatre that is soon to be demolished, it is in part a pastiche of the musicals of the past. "I'm still here!" an old-time actress sings in a show-stopping number; but also still here are two couples, Phyllis and Ben and Sally and Buddy, who have moved from young hopefuls to middle-aged losers. The show ran on Broadway for 522 performances, but it lost money; perhaps, in spite of a stunning and often romantic score, it was too downbeat. The London revival, which Ms Secrest might have mentioned, had its teeth drawn; the tougher songs had gone, new numbers were added, and the two couples walked off, older and wiser, into the sunset - or at least into the West End.
My own favourite Sondheim work is A Little Night Music, based on Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night. One cannot read or hear the lyrics of A Weekend in the Country without marvelling at the impossible complexity of the rhyming, the wit and the wickedness. And Ms Secrest happily lingers on an account of how "Send in the Clowns" was custom-made for Glynis Johns. Because she could not sustain a phrase, Sondheim put in a number of "full stops": "Isn't it rich?" she sings, using the abruptness of the ch consonant.
Few who heard Ms Johns sing this number on Broadway can have done so dry-eyed, and no one is ever likely to forget it. Mind, Ms Secret really ought not to have called Ms Johns - born in South Africa of a Welsh father - an English actress - or to have said that Marble Arch is in Bayswater, or that the Hollywood film, Hang- over Square, was made in England.
In recent years, Mr Sondheim has moved to off-Broadway - like a true star, he takes centre-stage with him. Meanwhile, in saying that he changed the face of the American musical, one could as validly claim that, being himself unique and a one-off, he has utterly destroyed it as a genre, leaving the field open - Lord have mercy - for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This is not Ms Secrest's business; although perhaps weak on her topography, she has accomplished a literate and wholly absorbing portrait, which is so honest in the warts-and-all sense that one might assume her subject was dead. Thank heaven, he isn't.