Rodgers & Hart: The Song That Got Rewritten Four Times Before It Worked

In 1933, MGM asked Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for a song for a movie called Hollywood Party. They wrote one, called it "Prayer (Oh Lord, Make Me a Movie Star)," and the studio cut it before the film was finished. The following year they reworked the same melody with new words for Manhattan Melodrama, retitled "It's Just That Kind of Play." Cut again. They tried once more, as "The Bad in Every Man," fitted to a nightclub scene for Clark Gable. Cut a third time, or rather, kept in the film but rejected by the studio as a song with commercial potential. On the fourth attempt, they gave the same tune brand new lyrics and a new title: "Blue Moon." It became one of the biggest standards either of them ever wrote, covered for decades, a number-one hit for the Marcels in 1961, nearly thirty years after the melody was first thrown away.

That's a useful story to hold onto if you've ever had a piece of music you believed in that kept getting rejected in every context you tried it in. Sometimes the tune isn't the problem. The words around it are.

A sixteen-year-old and a lyricist seven years older

Richard Rodgers was sixteen and Lorenz Hart was twenty-three when a mutual friend introduced them in 1918 or 1919. Hart, a Columbia student who translated German operettas for the Shuberts to pay his bills, was already writing sharp, literate lyrics on his own time and looking for a composer who could keep up. Rodgers, still in high school, could. They wrote songs for Columbia's annual Varsity Show together and made their professional Broadway debut with "Any Old Place With You," tucked into the 1919 musical A Lonely Romeo.

The partnership that followed lasted almost twenty-five years and produced more than 500 songs across 28 stage musicals, including The Garrick Gaieties, A Connecticut Yankee, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, and Pal Joey. During its first decade, the pair averaged roughly two new shows a season, a pace that's hard to picture today for anyone chasing perfection on a single track.

A lyricist who wrote with his ear, not a rulebook

What made Hart distinctive wasn't just wit, though he had plenty of it. It was his willingness to write about romantic disappointment, self-doubt, and ordinary human messiness in a genre that mostly wanted moon-June simplicity. "My Funny Valentine" is a love song built almost entirely out of backhanded compliments. "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," from Pal Joey, is sung by a woman fully aware that the man she's obsessed with is bad for her. Pal Joey itself, built around a manipulative small-time nightclub hustler with no real redemption arc, scandalized some critics in 1940 for having an unlikeable lead; a 1952 revival was received as ahead of its time. Hart wrote toward complicated feeling long before that was the expected mode for Broadway lyrics, which is a large part of why his songs still read as strikingly modern next to other work from the same decades.

A partner Rodgers had to go find

The trouble was that Hart was also, by most accounts including Rodgers's own, becoming harder and harder to work with as the years went on. He was a small man, under five feet tall, self-conscious about his height and, by several biographical accounts, his sexuality in an era that offered him no safe way to be open about it. He drank heavily, sometimes disappearing for days or weeks at a stretch, and Rodgers increasingly found himself tracking him down at bars and hotel rooms to drag him back to a piano to finish a lyric. Rodgers later described him, with real affection but no illusions, as "a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation."

If you've ever carried a creative partnership through a period where the other person wasn't showing up the way they used to, that tension, love for the work and exhaustion with the person, is close to the emotional center of Rodgers and Hart's last several years together.

Opening night at Sardi's

The partnership effectively ended in early 1943, when Rodgers, needing a functioning collaborator, began working with Oscar Hammerstein II on a new show called Oklahoma!. Hart and Rodgers reunited briefly that same year for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, adding a handful of new songs, which opened on November 17, 1943. On the night Oklahoma! had opened seven and a half months earlier, March 31, 1943, Hart was reportedly at Sardi's, watching his former partner's future without him take shape in real time. He died of pneumonia on November 22, 1943, five days after the Connecticut Yankee revival opened, at age forty-eight.

What's worth taking from their partnership

Rodgers and Hart's catalog is proof that a songwriting partnership doesn't have to be smooth to be extraordinary. For most of two and a half decades, an increasingly unstable lyricist and an increasingly frustrated, disciplined composer kept producing work that pushed the American musical toward more honest, more adult territory than the genre had attempted before, sung by characters no one else was writing yet. Both men were eventually inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Hart in 1970 and Rodgers among the organization's earliest honorees, and their songs remain some of the most recorded standards in American popular music.

If "Blue Moon" is worth remembering for one thing beyond its four drafts, it's this: the melody Rodgers wrote in 1933 was good enough to survive three rejected sets of words before Hart finally found the ones that fit. Neither of them got there alone, and neither of them got there on the first try. If you've got a tune that keeps almost working and a stack of lyrics that haven't landed yet, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Richard Rodgers, Songwriters Hall of Fame: Lorenz Hart, Britannica: Lorenz Hart, Wikipedia: Rodgers and Hart, Wikipedia: Blue Moon (1934 song), The Listeners' Club: Rodgers and Hart, Ten Enduring Songs