Stephen Sondheim by Daniel Okrent Review – A Superb Biography of the Musical Master
Packed with gossip and incident, this book is also a fascinating study in the gestation of genius. Among the many great pleasures of Daniel Okrent's new biography of Stephen Sondheim – a book perfectly weighted between the gossipy and erudite – is its rendering of the milieu beyond its immediate subject. You come for the biography and stay for the world of mid-20th-century New York, in which Leonard Bernstein says terrible things about Sweeney Todd (“disgusting”), Sondheim says terrible things about Barbra Streisand (“doesn't have one sincere moment left inside her”), and Arthur Laurents says terrible things about everyone. In the early 2000s, during a particularly poisonous exchange of letters between Laurents and Sondheim, the latter told his old collaborator, “you're just good enough to know you're mediocre”.
The entire book is sheer delight and Okrent, formerly an editor at the New York Times and a baseball fanatic who effectively invented the modern fantasy baseball league, does a terrific job of telling Sondheim's life story alongside shrewd analysis of his body of work. We meet Sondheim's mother, known as Foxy, whom the writer and composer made an elaborate play of hating his entire life and who Okrent brings to life in order to get behind that particular performance.
We see the young Sondheim taken under the wing of Oscar Hammerstein, the great man of musical theatre, who called out the young Stevie, as he knew him, for early missteps: “You're writing like me,” said Hammerstein. “You're imitating me, you're talking about nature and things like that. You don't believe in those things.” He then gave Sondheim a piece of advice the younger man would carry close to his chest throughout his career: “Write what you believe, and you'll be 99% ahead of the game.”
The early chapters are a fascinating study in the gestation of genius. Sondheim attended Williams College, Massachusetts, where he switched from studying maths to music once he understood the latter could have the same “exactitude and rigor”. This shift was largely down to his tutor, Robert Barrow, an unpopular figure among students for being dry and doctrinaire but a perfect fit for Sondheim. Barrow's instruction was pivotal; on Claude Debussy's La Mer, Barrow said, “Anybody here hear the sea? Well, even if you do, that's not what it's about. What the piece is about is the whole tone scale.” Music to Sondheim's ears, who later credited that moment for teaching him “that music is a thought-out process, that it is craft, not inspiration”. (Forty years later, he would make the hero of Sunday in the Park With George have similar insights.)
In those early years of his career, we see Sondheim at the mercy of the big beasts of musical theatre – in 1958, Ethel Merman rejects him as a potential composer for Gypsy because, as she sees it, he is “a beginner” (Sondheim later referred to her as a “loud, vulgar, cheap, small-eyed lady”). Instead, he was relegated to writing the lyrics, a job Sondheim considered far inferior to composing. This story made me laugh: when Sondheim shared his lyrics for Everything's Coming Up Roses with Jerome Robbins, the show's director, Robbins asked: “Everything's coming up Rose's what?”
Throughout these episodes we see Sondheim struggling to emerge from the generation of theatre composers before him – to get out from under the influence of the Jule Stynes and Leonard Bernsteins and find his own style. A note on his abilities: as Okrent writes, during a cast recording, “Sondheim would sit in the control room, seemingly not engaged, idly reading the New Yorker. Then he'd look up and say, ‘The French horn just played an E instead of an E-flat.’”
At the same time, he was struggling to settle into his sexuality. For many years, Sondheim tried his hardest to date women, most convincingly Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers, and the actor Lee Remick, before throwing in the towel in the late 1960s. As Arthur Laurents, a more open gay man in that impossible era, believed, Sondheim had been involved with women, “because he hoped”.
It was this ambivalence and instability – “I'm ambivalent about most things,” said Sondheim in 1976 – that fed his work and would eventually result in some of the greatest musicals of the late 20th century. But in the 60s, the legend was still building. After the film rights for Gypsy delivered a cash windfall, Sondheim bought the five-storey townhouse on 246 East 49th Street, next door to Katharine Hepburn, where he would live for the next six decades. He went to parties featuring the A-list New York crowd of the day, including Mike Nichols, Lauren Bacall and Richard Avedon, whose pretensions he gently sent up. Among them, Sondheim remained idiosyncratic. Okrent writes, “in their social circle, the unattached, unemotional, sexually unresolved Sondheim was the magnetic core”.
In the early 1960s, Sondheim was busy writing Anyone Can Whistle, the show Frank Rich described as his “cult flop” and a genre in which Sondheim would excel. “On his 40th birthday,” writes Okrent, “his entire body of recorded music consisted of twenty-eight songs from the cast albums of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle. Then came the first preview of Company, and Sondheim's life changed utterly and forever. So did the history of the American musical.”
As in most biographies, the successful years are slightly less enjoyable than the slog to the top. But even after his greatest hits – Company, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park and Into the Woods – turned him into an icon, the dynamics around Sondheim were still dynamite. Bernstein never recovered from the younger man eclipsing him. (As the playwright John Guare says, “as Steve got more famous, Lenny became more hostile.”) There are moments in the book that capture the precise moment of Broadway's changing of the guards. In 1970, after Company opened to critical adulation, Okrent writes, “Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot … came home from the opening night performance, broke into tears and told his wife, ‘My way of writing musicals is over.’”
In his art, Sondheim was precise, exacting, and in his life, not so much. “His personal habits were deplorable,” writes Okrent. “[Mary] Rodgers said ‘he was a pig’ who ‘never washed, never shaved’.” He was also, writes Okrent, “by any definition of the word, an alcoholic”. Sondheim left everything, including writing, to the last minute then let anxiety and adrenaline carry him through. This is how, in the early 1970s, he wrote one of his most famous songs, Send in the Clowns, from A Little Night Music – in 36 hours of total panic just days before the show previewed. He would pull off a similar trick with Children and Art, and Lesson #8, two extremely late additions to Sunday in the Park With George, which Sondheim wrote days before the show went into its off-Broadway trial in 1983, while Mandy Patinkin, the star, tore out his hair.
I could go on. The book is brimming with delicious incident. Towards the end, we see Sondheim offer himself as a mentor to younger writers including Jonathan Larson (Rent) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton). He remained generous, and extremely cranky, well into his 70s, when he settled into a relationship and lived with someone for the first time – Jeff Romley, a man 50 years his junior who, to Sondheim's amazement, brought an Xbox and Facebook-scrolling into his life. By all accounts, he was happier in this period than he had ever been and the pair were still together when Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91. One of his great regrets, he said towards the end of his life, was the absence of children. “I really do miss not having had a family.” But, he added, ambivalent to the end, “I suppose if I had one I wouldn't have had anything to write about.”
