Richard Rodgers 1902 - 1979

Richard Rodgers of New York, New York County, NY was born on June 28, 1902, and died at age 77 years old in December 1979.

Richard Rodgers

New York, New York County, NY 10021

June 28, 1902

December 1979

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Richard Rodgers' History: 1902 - 1979

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Introduction

Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 30, 1979) was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositions have had a significant impact on popular music up to the present day, and have an enduring broad appeal. Rodgers was the first person to win what are considered the top show business awards in television, recording, movies and Broadway—an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony—now known collectively as an EGOT. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of two people (Marvin Hamlisch is the other) to receive each award. Biography Born into a prosperous German Jewish family in Arverne, Queens, New York City, Rodgers was the son of Mamie (Levy) and Dr. William Abrahams Rodgers, a prominent physician who had changed the family name from Abrahams. Richard began playing the piano at age six. He attended P.S. 10, Townsend Harris Hall and DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers spent his early teenage summers in Camp Wigwam (Waterford, Maine) where he composed some of his first songs. Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and later collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II all attended Columbia University. At Columbia, Rodgers joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. In 1921, Rodgers shifted his studies to the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School). Rodgers was influenced by composers such as Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, as well as by the operettas his parents took him to see on Broadway when he was a child. In 1919, Richard met Lorenz Hart. Rodgers and Hart struggled for years in the field of musical comedy, writing several amateur shows. They made their professional debut with the song "Any Old Place With You", featured in the 1919 Broadway musical comedy A Lonely Romeo. Their first professional production was the 1920 Poor Little Ritz Girl, which also had music by Sigmund Romberg. Their next professional show, The Melody Man, did not premiere until 1924. When he was just out of college Rodgers worked as musical director for Lew Fields. Among the stars he accompanied were Nora Bayes and Fred Allen. Throughout the rest of the decade, the duo wrote several hit shows for both Broadway and London, including Dearest Enemy (1925), The Girl Friend (1926), Peggy-Ann (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), and Present Arms (1928). Their 1920s shows produced standards such as "Here in My Arms", "Mountain Greenery", "Blue Room", "My Heart Stood Still" and "You Took Advantage of Me". In 1935, they returned to Broadway and wrote an almost unbroken string of hit shows that ended only with Hart's death in 1943. Among the most notable are Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936, which included the ballet "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue", choreographed by George Balanchine), Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), and their last original work, By Jupiter (1942). Rodgers also contributed to the book on several of these shows. Many of the songs from these shows are still sung and remembered, including "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", "My Romance", "Little Girl Blue", "I'll Tell the Man in the Street", "There's a Small Hotel", "Where or When", "My Funny Valentine", "The Lady Is a Tramp", "Falling in Love with Love", "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", and "Wait till You See Her". In 1939, he wrote the ballet Ghost Town for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with choreography by Marc Platoff. Rodgers and Hammerstein Main article: Rodgers and Hammerstein Rodgers (seated) with Hammerstein, 1945 Their first musical, the groundbreaking hit Oklahoma! (1943), marked the beginning of the most successful partnership in American musical theatre history. Their work revolutionized the form. What was once a collection of songs, dances and comic turns held together by a tenuous plot became an integrated masterpiece. The team went on to create four more hits that are among the most popular of all musicals. Each was made into a successful film: Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959). Other shows include the minor hit, Flower Drum Song (1958), as well as relative failures Allegro (1947), Me and Juliet (1953) and Pipe Dream (1955). They also wrote the score to the film State Fair (1945) (which was remade in 1962 with Pat Boone), and a special TV musical of Cinderella (1957). Their collaboration produced many well-known songs, including "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'", "People Will Say We're in Love", "Oklahoma!" (which also became the state song of Oklahoma), "If I Loved You", "You'll Never Walk Alone", "It Might as Well Be Spring", "Some Enchanted Evening", "Getting to Know You", "My Favorite Things", "The Sound of Music", "Sixteen Going on Seventeen", "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", "Do-Re-Mi", and "Edelweiss", Hammerstein's last song. Rodgers was the subject of a two-part special on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town television show in 1952. Much of Rodgers's work with both Hart and Hammerstein was orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett. Rodgers composed twelve themes, which Bennett used in preparing the orchestra score for the 26-episode World War II television documentary Victory at Sea (1952–53). This NBC production pioneered the "compilation documentary"—programming based on pre-existing footage — and was eventually broadcast in dozens of countries. The melody of the popular song "No Other Love" was later taken from the Victory at Sea theme entitled "Beneath the Southern Cross". Rodgers won an Emmy for the music for the ABC documentary Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years, scored by Eddie Sauter, Hershy Kay, and Robert Emmett Dolan. Rodgers composed the theme music, "March of the Clowns", for the 1963–64 television series The Greatest Show on Earth, which ran for 30 episodes. He also contributed the main-title theme for the 1963–64 historical anthology television series The Great Adventure. In 1950, Rodgers and Hammerstein received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York." Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Joshua Logan won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for South Pacific. Rodgers and Hammerstein had won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Oklahoma!. In 1954, Rodgers conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in excerpts from Victory at Sea, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and the Carousel Waltz for a special LP released by Columbia Records. Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals earned a total of 35 Tony Awards, 15 Academy Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Grammy Awards, and two Emmy Awards. After Hammerstein After Hammerstein's death in 1960, Rodgers wrote both words and music for his first new Broadway project No Strings (1962, which earned two Tony Awards). The show was a minor hit and featured the song, "The Sweetest Sounds". Rodgers also wrote both the words and music for two new songs used in the film version of The Sound of Music. (Other songs in that film were from Rodgers and Hammerstein.) Death and legacy Rodgers died in 1979 at the age of 77, after surviving cancer of the jaw, a heart attack, and a laryngectomy. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea. In 1990, the 46th Street Theatre was renamed "The Richard Rodgers Theatre" in his memory. In 1999, Rodgers and Hart were each commemorated on United States postage stamps. In 2002, the centennial year of Rodgers's birth was celebrated worldwide with books, retrospectives, performances, new recordings of his music, and a Broadway revival of Oklahoma!. The BBC Proms that year devoted an entire evening to Rodgers's music, including a concert performance of Oklahoma! Several American schools are named after Richard Rodgers. Alec Wilder wrote the following about Rodgers: "Of all the writers whose songs are considered and examined in this book, those of Rodgers show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication...[A]fter spending weeks playing his songs, I am more than impressed and respectful: I am astonished." Richard Rodgers is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. After Doris Day recorded "I Have Dreamed" in 1961, he wrote to her and her arranger, James Harbert, that theirs was the most beautiful rendition of his song he had ever heard. Mary Martin said that Richard Rodgers composed songs for her for South Pacific, knowing she had a small vocal range, and the songs generally made her look her best. She also said that Rodgers and Hammerstein listened to all her suggestions and she worked extremely well with them. Both Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted Doris Day for the lead in the film version of South Pacific and she reportedly wanted the part. They discussed it with her, but after her manager/husband Martin Melcher would not budge on his demand for a high salary for her, the role went to Mitzi Gaynor. In 1930, Rodgers married Dorothy Belle Feiner (1909–92).[13] Their daughter, Mary (1931–2014), was the composer of Once Upon a Mattress and an author of children's books.[14] The Rodgerses later lost a daughter at birth. Another daughter, Linda (1935–2015), also had a brief career as a songwriter. Mary's son and Richard Rodgers's grandson, Adam Guettel (b. 1964), also a musical theatre composer, won Tony Awards for Best Score and Best Orchestrations for The Light in the Piazza in 2005. Peter Melnick (b. 1958), Linda Rodgers's son, is the composer of Adrift In Macao, which debuted at the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2005 and was produced Off-Broadway in 2007.
06/28

1902

Birthday

June 28, 1902

Birthdate

Unknown

Birthplace

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Personal Life & Family

My Grandfather Richard Rodgers by Peter Melnick Published in the May-June 2019 issue of The Dramatist As a Rodgers grandson who happens also to be a composer, I read Todd S. Purdum’s 2018 book, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, with more than casual interest. Purdum, at the time a national editor and political correspondent for Vanity Fair, took a sabbatical from his regular beat to write about a subject he loves, and a pair of musical theater gods for whom he clearly has enormous affection. His was the first book on my grandfather to receive significant media attention since the publication of Meryle Secrest’s much darker biography, Somewhere For Me, in late 2001. In her acknowledgments, Secrest explained that she wrote the bookat the invitation of my aunt, Mary Rodgers Guettel, whom she described as “frank, funny, and very sympathique, with a special kind of strength that comes from surmounting the handicap of parents who do not necessarily see candor as a virtue.” In December 1979, I was a 21-year-old, present in my grandparents’ New York apartment on the night my grandfather died. He was just 77. Later that evening, I found myself alone with Mary, and was witness to a twilight zone eruption of pain and loss in her. It was as though someone had proclaimed, les jeux sont faits, and the finality of her father’s death exposed a deep hurt that for my aunt had suddenly become irrevocable. Talking more to herself than to me, she exploded with an anger that was at once histrionic and true. To a large extent, the Secrest biography reflects my aunt’s experiences, expressing a hurt that, if anything, seemed to become more inflamed in the years following her parents’ deaths. Mary came by her pain honestly, but hers was a deeply personal perspective. The resulting book portrays a Dick Rodgers who was gifted but miserable, an alcoholic and a womanizer, someone who was miserly with both his money and his affections. Dorothy Rodgers, my grandmother, fared even less well by Secrest. She appeared to be a patchwork of cold, self-deluding traits, a true monster straight out of the National Enquirer–a caricature of the grandmother I knew. The Secrest biography is akin to telling the story of King Lear through the eyes of Regan or Goneril, as librettist Sherman Yellen, one of my grandparents’ few living friends, observed. I might enjoy reading that version of Lear, but as a work of literary fiction, not biography. Todd Purdum’s book is different, a useful exploration of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s transformative impact on musical theater. When he writes about Rodgers the man, however, he’s still operating within the confines of Secrest’s narrative. He quotes Stephen Sondheim’s famous dictum that my grandfather had “infinite talent but limited soul,” and then turns to costume designer Lucinda Ballard, who states, “Dick loved money more than anybody I’ve ever seen, except Oscar… And yet, Oscar was the most lovable person I almost ever knew, and Dick really was not.” There’s something about these two quotes that discourages any impulse to understand the man behind the music. They are opinions, but in Purdum’s book they have the weight and feel of truth, reinforcing the conventional wisdom that Richard Rodgers was “the keenest of businessmen,” who just happened to write extraordinary music. It’s as though Purdum were describing an ordinary American sedan, equipped with a Ferrari engine, without actually looking under the hood or asking the question, “Say, what’s that old sedan doing with a Ferrari engine, anyway?” From where I sit, the Sondheim quote sounds better than it is. Personally, I don’t get the concept of a “limited soul,” but if souls can be measured, my grandfather’s must be an Extra Large. The proof is in the music itself. Take the title song from The Sound of Music, and listen to the way Poppa (Mr. Rodgers to you) set the first line of Oscar’s refrain –“The hills are alive with the sound of music.” Feel the changing harmony on the word “music,” and the spot in the last verse–“I go to the hills when my heart is lonely” –where that same harmonic shift occurs. When the chords change on the words “music” and “lonely,” the lovely world established by the melody up to that point cracks open, revealing a depth of feeling that is sublime, truly beyond description. Where does that come from? It’s beautiful from God. Not pretty from central casting. For me, there is a special poignancy to this song. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it in the spring of 1959. Oscar would not receive his diagnosis of stomach cancer until that fall, so neither man was aware of the devastating news to come. Still, the two were writing on either side of age sixty, and sixty was a lot older in 1959 than it is today. Those hills were the place where Poppa truly breathed, where he found joy. And Oscar was the partner with whom, for nearly twenty years, he breathed the best. When I think of the final quatrain, I think not of Maria, the character who sings it, but of Poppa himself: I go to the hills when my heart is lonely I know I will hear what I’ve heard before My heart will be blessed with the sound of music And I’ll sing once more My grandfather occupies a very important place in my life, both the man and his music. As a composer, I know something about the emotional places he visited when he went to those hills. I also try to understand what it was like to be him the rest of the time, the way he inhabited the part of his life not spent composing. When I was little, I thought about him almost as though he were two distinct people –my flesh-and-blood grandfather whom I called Poppa, and the quadrisyllabic entity, Richard-Rodgers, whom I wasn’t supposed to talk about outside of the family because he was famous and it’s not nice to boast. As an adult grandchild, it’s become important to me to try to fathom the relationship between the man and the extraordinary music he wrote. Poppa was 56 when I was born, but by the time I was sentient, he was already engaged in a rapid descent into old age. During the course of our shared 21 years, his stride grew ever shorter, becoming a slow shuffle by the time he reached his mid-seventies. My other grandfather died long before I was born, so when I was little, Poppa represented everything I knew about grandfathers. As far as I could tell, they were the ones who played hand games with you at the table, cupping your tiny paws inside one of their much larger ones, and who let you watch as they shaved with an electric razor, permitting you a before-and-after stroke of their cheeks so that you could feel them changing from scratchy-tickly to incredibly soft. It turned out that grandfathers were also the ones who wrote music. I heard Poppa’s everywhere –when I rode the carousel in Central Park, in elevators and, of course, on Broadway. (My first theater experience was a matinee of The Sound of Music, during the show’s original run, when I was three. At the intermission, my mother, Linda Rodgers Emory, clapped her hands together enthusiastically and said, “Wasn’t that terrific!” I happily agreed, and followed her out of the theater, unaware that there was a second act, in which the Nazis got a whole lot nazi-er.) Above all else, I heard Poppa’s music at home. When my mother played “In My Own Little Corner” from Cinderella on the family Steinway, she was playing our song, a secret proof against childhood loneliness. Even today, I often experience my grandfather’s music as a direct pipeline to a place very pure and magical, the best part of my youth. When I spent time with my grandfather, I wasn’t thinking about his music. I just liked the grandfatherly things he did with me, like the day he got me past my fear of dogs. I was four years old at the time, spending the weekend at Rockmeadow, my grandparents’ home in Westport, Connecticut. When my mother was a child, they used to keep standard poodles, all with Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired names, like Penny and Pi. By the time I came along, they had switched breeds. My starter dogs were two extremely docile Irish setters named Bridie and Sean. That Sunday, Poppa took me out in front of the house, and spent the better part of an hour patiently easing me past my fear, working up to the big moment when I felt safe enough to pet Bridie’s sleek fur and let her lick my hand. Unfortunately, the moment didn’t last. It had been roughly a year since Oscar Hammerstein’s death, and our Rockmeadow weekend took place at a time when Poppa and Alan Jay Lerner were exploring the possibility of writing a show together. Lerner was meant to come to dinner that Friday night, but he called at the last minute, rescheduling for Saturday lunch. Saturday morning rolled around, and he called again; he was coming from Long Island, and the traffic was monstrous. New plan: he would boat across Long Island Sound, and arrive in time for dinner. My grandmother must have been ready to kill him, especially when Saturday night also proved unworkable. In the end, Lerner arrived by car, pulling up late Sunday morning just as Poppa and I were finishing up with Bridie and Sean. Poppa introduced us, and I was about to shake Lerner’s hand when I noticed the tips of his fingers, all covered in bandages. “What’re they for?” I asked. Lerner didn’t want to say the real reason –that he bit his nails down to the quick, and they had become infected –so he improvised. “Oh, a dog bit me,” he said. There were other, more substantive reasons why the Lerner and Rodgers collaboration never happened, but I suspect I was present for the coup de grâce. I can recall only one time when Poppa got angry with me. It was the fall of 1970, when I was twelve. I flew with my grandmother to Boston, where Two By Two, Poppa’s musical about Noah and his ark, was in previews. I remember standing with him at the back of the Shubert Theatre, watching a matinee together. Afterward he asked me questions about what I liked, and we talked about what was working, and what needed work. I was thrilled. That night we ate at Locke-Obers, a restaurant in Boston’s theater district that dates back to the early 19th century. There were five or six of us at the table, and at some point the conversation turned to Joshua Logan, director of South Pacific and the Rodgers and Hart show, By Jupiter. Logan also directed the subsequent film of South Pacific, for which he employed the innovation of shooting many of the production numbers through color filters that he hoped would have a subtle emotional impact on these scenes. Unfortunately, the end result was neither subtle nor well-received, and Logan, who suffered from bi-polar disorder, took a lot of heat for his idea. I must have heard about this episode, because I made some sort of smart-a** comment, deriding Logan’s flight of fancy. Poppa cut me off, his displeasure an expression of loyalty to the man I had casually disparaged. I had never seen that side of Poppa before, and knew that I had spoken out of turn. But his anger was moderate, not shaming, and it left room for other thoughts to seep in –the sudden discovery that I respected my grandfather, and the realization that I had never stopped to ask myself who he really was. Up until then, Poppa had been an agreeable presence in my life, someone I took for granted, like a big oak tree in the back yard. It was a revelation to discover that there were things that mattered to him, beyond being a grandfather and a composer. At the age of twelve I discovered that my grandfather was actually a person, not a tree. Poppa was just 17 when he and Lorenz Hart had their first frisson of success, a song called “Any Old Place with You” (source of the famous Hart couplet, “I’d go to hell for ya, or Philadelphia”). Over the next few years, they honed their craft, writing upwards of 60 songs and a string of shows that, for the most part, came and went without making much of a splash. But when an invitation came to Rodgers and Hart in 1926 to contribute a few songs to a Theater Guild benefit show, “Manhattan” electrified the audience and become their first bone fide hit. After that, Rodgers and Hart took off. Their output was staggering. Between Broadway and the West End they wrote or contributed to roughly thirty shows and a dozen film musicals, their songs largely defining the American songbook–“Blue Moon,” “My Romance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Falling in Love With Love,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “Easy to Remember,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and many others. There was an energetic, fun quality to my grandfather in the early years of his career. By the time he teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein to write their first show, Oklahoma!, however, all that insouciance had seemingly vanished. To some extent the change was perceptual –call it the intimidation factor. Think John, Paul, George and Ringo circa Hamburg, compared to the post-touring Beatles on the cusp of recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and you get maybe a hint of the enormity of the transformation. When the Beatles gave up touring in mid-1966, they had long since left behind the playful personas they projected in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! As a studio band they reached new, formidable levels of creativity. The business of being The Beatles also took on more weight. Two years after they stopped touring, they formed Apple Records, and created an empire. They were huge, larger than life. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein.You might have liked to drink a beer with Paul McCartney in some Reeperbahn dive in Hamburg. But the McCartney revealed in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be documentary was scary talented and intimidating, even to his fellow Beatles. Richard Rodgers laughing The theatrical entity Rodgers & Hammerstein was indeed serious business, and the scope and complexity of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows required something different from just about anything that had gone on before. Already seasoned pros, they were savvy enough to understand the need for a sophisticated approach to the evolving business. Of necessity, they became pioneers, developing new business structures capable of capitalizing on increasingly complex royalty streams. There was an inherent tension in the fact that they were now wearing two hats. When the other members of their creative teams collaborated with themas authors, they were also interfacing with the show’s producers in a way that was unique. Authors can be dreamers, but a show’s producers make difficult, sometimes unpopular decisions on a daily basis. It’s hardly surprising that they were sometimes resented. There were other, more personal reasons why my grandfather entered his second act a man apart. Larry Hart’s binge drinking had become increasingly severe during the 1930s, and the last years of their partnership were challenging.Even as they collaborated on their last and arguably most successful shows –Boys From Syracuse, Pal Joey and By Jupiter–Hart was on a downward spiral of end-stage alcoholism,Poppa riding shotgun on that harrowing journey. (Having lost my own father to addiction, I have some inkling of how brutal those years must have been for Poppa –little else in my life ever approached that level of pain and helplessness.) When Hart died in 1943, barely a month after Oklahoma! opened, my grandfather lost both a dear friend and the partner to whom his fortunes were tethered. My grandfather also struggled with alcoholism throughout his life, and intense depression. As early as January 1928, he wrote about it with astonishing openness in a letter to my grandmother: Three times now since I left home I’ve experienced something I’ve never known before, and tonight is the third. I have an active and intense feeling of depression which is absolutely impossible to shake off… I need something very badly and I don’t know what it is. Please don’t’ think I’m crazy… The library at Lincoln Center houses some 350 letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother over the five decades spanning from the mid-1920s through 1974. Depression figures prominently in many of them, Poppa writing from deep inside the experience, with an eloquence that was visceral, not writerly. Another letter, written in August 1930 from aboard the S.S. Olympic en route to London for rehearsals of a new show, includes the following: …I’d give my soul to have you in this room at this moment. Then I’d feel safe. As it is, I’m afraid! I’m not afraid of the work, or people… but (I’m writing now after four double brandies…) I’m afraid of something that’s raising hell with me. I want to yell because I feel strong and I want terribly to feel that surge when you and I are close together. Baby, at the same time I know logically that I shouldn’t be writing to you this way; that you’ll worry. What can I do? I can’t tell anybody here. You’re the only person in the world that I could ever tell the whole truth to. Look, Angel, I am telling it to you now, and I don’t care… He then confided that he was also struggling with urges of infidelity, declaring his resolve not to give in. The letter concluded with the urgent request, “Will you please, please remember what I tried to say when we said our goodbyes? I’ve never loved anyone but you, and I swear it, I never will.” This letter floors me. It expresses a tidal wave of pain and confusion. But also, it’s a love song, conveying a powerful need to be known by my grandmother. Indeed, the huge surprise of these letters is what they convey about the depths and complexity of Poppa’s feelings for my grandmother. There’s tenderness, and a sense of yearning, in nearly all of them. “You know what I miss terribly?” he wrote in September 1930. “Waking up in the morning and kissing your hand… I’ve discovered that going to bed alone is actually not so displeasing as waking up that way…”Nearly three decades later, around the time he was composing the score to The Sound of Music, he wrote: It was so good to hear your voice this morning; you sounded so well and happy.I loved your note with all the “I love you’s.” This is my one chance to write you and say the same. I miss you so much! The apartment is so empty and so am I… Come home! I love you. R. It’s clear to me that my grandfather loved my grandmother to the end of his days. The letters also strongly support the idea that my grandparents’ marriage was profoundly co-dependent. My grandmother’s tremendous unhappiness is unmistakable, even from Poppa’s side of the correspondence. The flip side –his desperate need to please her–is equally evident.“…my angel, don’t be so sad,” he wrote from London, where he was attending rehearsals while she remained behind in New York, five months into a difficult pregnancy. “I love you so much that it kills me to have you cry when I can’t put my arms around you…” And a week after that: Two letters came from you this morning, both filled with unhappiness, fretting and dissatisfaction. I leave it to you to picture the frame of mind in which such letters leave me…Oh, Darling! If only your letters weren’t always trying to beat me down and telling me how awful it is of me to be away. I’m sure you don’t know what you’ve written –it’s so cruel… It’s no coincidence that his episodes of depression frequently emerged during their time apart. It may also be significant that several of his most serious health crises occurred while she was away. My belief is that the intensity of his love for her was so much greater than his need for anyone else that, when they were apart, there was a great hole inside him, and his depression took over. He needed her good graces, and he could not keep her happy –that was also part of the co-dependency. The best he could do was to show her that nobody else was as important to him. The conventional wisdom is that, someplace along the way, the marriage of Dick and Dorothy Rodgers evolved into an arrangement, my grandfather ceding control over just about everything to Dorothy in exchange for an inviolable right to disappear into his work. According to this orthodoxy, Poppa willingly gave short shrift to everyone and everything else in his life in pursuit of the joy he found in his work; Richard Rodgers the composer thrived, and the emotional life of his family, my family, paid a steep price. The trouble with this conventional wisdom is that it bears only a wax-museum resemblance to my grandparents’ actual lives and the complexities of their marriage. It fails to address my grandfather’s drinking, and the huge shadow that depression must have cast over both of their lives. (Dorothy Rodgers’ father also suffered from profound depression. When he fell from the terrace of his Manhattan apartment in late 1931, a probable suicide, my grandmother could not have ignored the danger depression posed to her own marriage as well.)If Poppa sold his family short, it was not the result of a Faustian bargain in pursuit of musical theater success. He was lunging for sanctuary from whatever it was that was raising so much hell within him. And my grandmother was right there alongside him, battening down the hatches in the effort to keep peril at bay. It is perhaps not surprising that my mother also lived with depression, undiagnosed until she was well into her fifties. She worked hard in later years to make sense of her life, and came to view her father with enormous compassion. Mom told Secrest that her parents “needed and supported each other and were the worst people in the world for each other.” She felt her father loved her“when he was able to, but that wasn’t very often… He had all he could do to take care of himself, and there wasn’t much left over.” Writing this article has truly been a labor of love, affording me a view of my grandfather, perhaps for the first time, as a full human being. His great sense of humor and a surprising capacity for fun –traits I heard about but could not discern when I spent time with him–come across in nearly all of his archived letters. I discovered, too, the heart of a loving grandfather who was at pains to check in on my cousins and me whenever our grandmother was out of town. On one such occasion, when I was a mere two months old, he wrote, “I talked with all the grandchildren except Peter, for some reason, and found them all delightfully unintelligible as of this rainy morning…” A few days later he paid me an actual house call, and reported back to Granny, “Peter is wonderful and wants to know can he smoke?” Peter Melnick and Richard Rodgers, 1964 Perhaps even more than the average bear, my grandfather was a very complex person –funny and smart and wounded and sweet and loving and, not for nothing, one of the most extraordinary composers of all time. There’s no question that he lived with, and passed on, much damage. I had a ringside seat to some of it and, sorry to say, so have my kids. But unlike Poppa, we are fortunate, blessed even, to live in an era with much to offer in the way of healing. I don’t think that my grandfather ever made it far in the direction of healing. In light of all the joy he brought to the world through his music, there’s something deeply poignant about that. One day, someone will come along with the ambition to write the next Richard Rodgers biography. I hope they bring honesty and compassion to their work. Certainly, they should go after their quarry armed for bear. But I hope he or she thinks to bring along a butterfly net as well, or perhaps even a dreamcatcher. How else do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
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1979

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December 1979

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Unknown
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Richard Rodgers lived 6 years longer than the average Rodgers family member when he died at the age of 77.

The average age of a Rodgers family member is 71.
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18 Memories, Stories & Photos about Richard

Amanda S. Stevenson

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06/25/2022

Richard laughing.

Peter Melnick's article.

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Peter Melnick, Grandson with Richard Rodgers.

Amanda S. Stevenson

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06/25/2022

Peter Melnick, Grandson with Richard Rodgers.

From the article, MY GRANDFATHER RICHARD RODGERS.

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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06/25/2022

Richard and Dorothy Rodgers

Restored.

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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06/25/2022

Richard and Dorothy and family.

By Peter Melnick.

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Amanda S. Stevenson

15.9k+ favorites

06/25/2022

I got to meet Richard Rodgers with Dorothy Rodgers. I thanked him for an autographed photo he had sent me of him with Oscar Hammerstein. I complimented Dorothy Rodgers on her book, The House in My Head which I had read twice! So I made them both happy.

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Amanda S. Stevenson

15.9k+ favorites

11/17/2017

Richard Rodgers

A photo of Richard Rodgers

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

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Did you know?

In 1902, in the year that Richard Rodgers was born, the Aswan Low Dam (the old Aswan Dam) began construction in Egypt in 1899 and was completed in 1902 - making it the largest masonry dam in the world at the time. The dam was built on the Nile River in order to conserve water and regulate flooding, allowing for population increase along the Nile.

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In 1917, at the age of just 15 years old, Richard was alive when Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari was convicted and executed as a German spy. Since Mata Hari, born Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" MacLeod, was a citizen of the Netherlands (which remained neutral in World War 1), she could travel freely in Europe. Her travels (and her romantic entanglements) raised suspicion and she was arrested by the French and found guilty. There is still controversy about her guilt although her name has become synonymous with a seductive female spy.

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Richard Rodgers' Family Tree & Friends

Richard Rodgers' Family Tree

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Richard Rodgers Jun 28, 1902 - Dec 1979

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Amanda S. Stevenson

For fifty years I have been a Document Examiner and that is how I earn my living. For over 50 years I have also been a publicist for actors, singers, writers, composers, artists, comedians, and many progressive non-profit organizations. I am a Librettist-Composer of a Broadway musical called, "Nellie Bly" and I am in the process of making small changes to it. In addition, I have written over 100 songs that would be considered "popular music" in the genre of THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK.
My family consists of four branches. The Norwegians and The Italians and the Norwegian-Americans and the Italian Americans.

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Source(s): Social Security Death Index

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