A Ship Without a Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart

The lyricist who, with composer Richard Rodgers, penned “Blue Moon,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and other standards is a figure worthy of his own bittersweet songs in this graceful biography. A squat gay man who lived with his mother and had the kind of “laughable... unphotographable” looks he toasted in “My Funny Valentine,” Hart is a jaunty, cigar-chomping bon vivant with a secretly wounded soul, an extraordinary poetic facility—his greatest verses seem to have been dashed off on half an hour’s deadline—and a ruinous thirst for booze. Journalist Marmorstein (Hollywood Rhapsody) resists the temptation to psychoanalyze and instead explores Hart’s personality mainly through shrewd readings of his lyrics as they veer between “enthralling new romance and a lonely, unforgiving desolation.” He holds to a middle-distance perspective, organizing the narrative around lively accounts of Rodgers and Hart’s Broadway and Hollywood musical projects, with Hart’s self-destructive excesses surfacing in matter-of-fact vignettes amid the showbiz swirl. Along the way, he paints a vivid panorama of pre-WWII musical theater and the efflorescence of Jewish-American tune- and word-smithing that created it. Marmorstein’s take on his subject’s life feels like a Rodgers and Hart show, nicely balanced between exhilarating spectacle and pithy revelations of character. Agent, Dan Conaway, Writers House. (July 3)