Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers

by Meryle Secrest

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers–more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable–Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood –seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.

Now Meryle Secrest–biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein–brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

She writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operetta—of Franz Lehar and Jerome Kern. She follows his close and wonderfully productive working relationship with Lorenz Hart–a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hart’s drinking. She evokes Rodgers’s triumphant second collaboration, with the gifted–and happily stable–Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and more. She explores Rodgers’s own problems with alcohol as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his forty-nine-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.

Somewhere for Me is both a lively portrait of the American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody, and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Meryle Secrest was born and educated in Bath, England, and lives in Washington, DC. She is the author of twelve biographies and was awarded the 2006 Presidential National Humanities Medal.

Reviews

[Eric]

Thorough, excellent, absorbing, well-researched life and works biography.

[Bradley Roth]

Richard Rodgers is absolutely fascinating. The book is okay.

[Shawn Thrasher]

I like Meryle Secrest's biographies. They are well written, not overly bitchy, and well researched. She gets good interviews. Richard Rodgers doesn't come out of this smelling like a rose though; smelling like something between shit and sewage. He might have been cold, distant, a womanizer, an alcoholic, but he was brilliant.

[Kris]

2 1/2 stars - because Meryle Secrest is simply not a very good writer. If the subject and related materials are engaging it is in spite of her. This opinion was confirmed after reading—with exasperation—two of her biographies (Rodgers and Sondheim).

[Pollypollack]

His (and Hammerstein's) talents were so amazing that I wanted to read more about them. This book is
very comprehensive and well-researched.