IN 1962, ALMOST TWENTY years after the lyricist Lorenz Hart’s death, his melodist partner Richard Rodgers told Diahann Carroll that “you can’t imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for that little fag.” Ouch. And yet, as Gary Marmorstein’s thoroughgoing—if occasionally conjectural—biography makes clear, Hart seems to have thought even less of himself than Rodgers did. When he gave his blessing to Rodgers teaming up with Oscar Hammerstein on what would become Oklahoma!, Hart confessed to him that “I don’t know how you put up with me all these years.”
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