Jerry Herman
Composer and lyricist who had huge hits on Broadway with musicals such as Hello Dolly! and Mame
JERRY HERMAN, who has died aged 88, was a composer and lyricist who, despite having only a rudimentary musical education, was behind some of the biggest musicals to hit Broadway, among them Hello Dolly!, La Cage aux Folles, Mack and Mabel and Mame.
His shows were characterised by big costumes and glamour, while beneath the glitz there was also an undercurrent of great emotion that carried the audiences on the crest of his optimistic anthems. Leading ladies such as Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing and Ethel Merman brought a feel-good factor to New York audiences looking to escape from the tribulations of 1960s America.
His first hit musical was Milk and Honey, about the founding of the state of Israel, which opened on Broadway in October 1961. It ran for 543 performances and was nominated for a Tony award.
Hello Dolly!, the first major Broadway hit after the assassination of President Kennedy, opened in January 1964 and ran for nearly seven years. While it was Herman’s greatest success, picking up numerous awards, including 10 Tonys, Hello Dolly! also caused the most anguish, both in terms of preopening rewrites and a lawsuit claiming that the opening notes had been lifted from another work, which Herman settled out of court to avoid delaying the Hollywood adaptation.
Mame, directed by Gene Saks and starring Angela Lansbury, came next, and for Herman was the antithesis of Hello Dolly!
– nothing but a pleasure. After a trial run in Philadelphia it opened on Broadway in 1966, its opening number – If He Walked Into My Life – becoming an instant hit.
La Cage aux Folles (1983), with its theme of homosexual love, was seen by many as a defiant riposte to the Aids crisis that swept through New York in the first half of that decade, leaving Herman Hiv-positive and killing his partner. The original Broadway production ran for more than 1,700 performances, won six Tony awards and spawned a West End production in 1986, although that ran for only 300 performances.
It was said that, whether in a school hall or on Broadway, there was rarely a day when a Jerry Herman musical was not playing. Many of them enjoyed long runs on both sides of the Atlantic. For Herman the secret of his success was writing songs with a timeless quality. “I write for a mass audience,” he told The Washington Post in 2010. “I write for people, for a smiling public … I write songs that I hope will still be hummed years from now.”
Jerry Herman was born on July 10 1931, the only child of Harry Herman, a New York gym teacher. Family legend had it that his mother, Ruth, played the piano while she was in labour.
He recalled a happy childhood growing up in Jersey City, with frequent trips to see musical comedies at the theatre, including Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway when he was 14. During the long summer months his parents ran Stissing Lake Camp, a popular children’s camp they owned in upstate New York, where Jerry spent every summer until he was 21, increasingly turning it from an athletics camp into a dramatic one.
He was 17 when his mother set up a 10-minute meeting with Frank Loesser, the composer of Guys and Dolls and an acquaintance of her hairdresser. It turned into an afternoon-long session in which Loesser encouraged Herman to pursue his songwriting. “A song is like a freight train,” he told Herman. “It has to have a locomotive, which is the bold idea that first arrests your ear and propels you into the rest of the song.”
After a year studying architecture at Parsons College, in New York, Herman dropped out and enrolled instead at the University of Miami, which had an avant-garde theatre department and was “a glorious experience”.
On graduating he hired a small theatre and put on a revue of his college material called I Feel Wonderful. Soon afterwards his father, who had been slow to accept his son’s artistic streak, raised the funds from his businessmen friends to take the show to New York. When that closed Herman took a job playing cocktail piano – music by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin – in RSVP, a New York club.
By 1958 he had a briefcase full of revue material and approached the proprietor of the Showplace, a seedy downtown club, who accepted his proposal to stage
Nightcap. “I put the whole thing together myself,” he recalled. “I directed, I wrote sketches, and I played the piano.”
The critics loved Nightcap, which ran for two years and eventually led to an invitation from Gerard Oestreicher, a real estate developer and Broadway producer, to compose Milk and Honey, with lyrics by Don Appell.
The show’s financial success enabled Herman to put his year at architecture school to good use: interior design became a secondary occupation and led to him renovating almost 40 different apartments and houses, including Edward Albee’s firehouse in Greenwich Village, which was featured in lifestyle magazines and where the playwright would relax by swinging from a trapeze over the piano.
But Broadway was soon calling once more. Summoned to see the impresario David Merrick, Herman was given three days to turn Thornton Wilder’s script of The Matchmaker into the musical Hello Dolly!, a challenge to which he rose with enthusiasm. “I was like a crazed person, pacing up and down in the middle of the night, scribbling down lyrics and popping candy in my mouth,” he recalled of the show’s gestation.
Not everything was an instant success. Dear World, a convoluted story about an oil find under a bistro in Paris, opened in February 1969 – which meant that Herman was the first composer to have three Broadway shows running simultaneously. However, it attracted poor reviews and closed within four months.
Mack and Mabel ran for only eight weeks on Broadway in 1974, but attracted widespread attention when the British duo Torvill and Dean used its overture when they won ice dancing gold at the World Figure Skating Championships in Copenhagen. It did somewhat better, both commercially and critically, when it reached the West End in 1995. The Grand Tour (1979) was his biggest flop, running for only 61 performances, and has rarely been heard of since.
The immense success of La Cage aux Folles restored his confidence, but thereafter there were only occasional minor forays back into showbusiness. Herman essentially turned his back on Broadway and retired to California to work on his houses.
Yet Hollywood was not always kind. He was dismayed when Gene Kelly – whom he accused of having an anti-broadway bias – cast Barbra Streisand as the matchmaker Dolly Levi in the film version of Hello Dolly! (1969), even though the film won three Oscars. Later he told The New York Times how Kelly had “tried to make it real, and Dolly is, more than anything I’ve written, a farce and a cartoon”.
Herman enjoyed taking part in motorcycle weekends in Pennsylvania and New York state, often accompanied by his friend Mark Reiner, who owned a New York casting company. The tradition was that participants spent the night in tents, but Herman and Reiner would sneak off to a nearby motel instead. “By Sunday night, after watching 300 guys get raunchier and raunchier, Mark and I looked like we just stepped out of a bandbox,” he recalled.
His memoir, Showtune, written with Marilyn Stasio, was published in 1996, while Jerry Herman: Poet of the Showtune, by Stephen Citron, appeared in 2004. He also received a slew of honours, including a special Tony award for lifetime achievement in 2009 and a Kennedy Center honour in 2010. Meanwhile, he ventured into the medium of television with Mrs Santa Claus (1996), a tale of how Father Christmas’s wife is neglected by her husband in December, for Angela Lansbury.
His partner Marty Finkelstein, who was 20 years his junior and whom he met at a Christmas party while La Cage was at the height of its Broadway success, died from an Aids-related illness in 1989 aged 36, seven years into their relationship. Herman, despite having the condition diagnosed in 1985, found that his body responded well to a regime of experimental drugs, though he was deeply hurt when his condition was made public by the New York Post in 1992. He also survived triple heart bypass surgery in 1997.
Latterly Herman lived in Palm Springs, California, with Terry Marler, a retired real-estate photographer, who survives him.