Daniel Okrent's new biography of Stephen Sondheim is a book perfectly weighted between the gossipy and erudite. It offers not just the life of the musical master, but a vivid rendering of the mid-20th-century New York milieu. In these pages, Leonard Bernstein calls Sweeney Todd 'disgusting,' Sondheim says Barbra Streisand 'doesn't have one sincere moment left inside her,' and Arthur Laurents says terrible things about everyone. During a particularly poisonous exchange in the early 2000s, Sondheim told his old collaborator, 'you're just good enough to know you're mediocre.'
Okrent, formerly an editor at the New York Times and a baseball fanatic who invented modern fantasy baseball, does a terrific job of telling Sondheim's life story alongside shrewd analysis of his work. We meet Sondheim's mother, Foxy, whom he made an elaborate play of hating. Okrent brings her to life to get behind that performance.
We see young Sondheim taken under the wing of Oscar Hammerstein, who called out early missteps: 'You're writing like me... You don't believe in those things.' Hammerstein advised: 'Write what you believe, and you'll be 99% ahead of the game.'
The early chapters are a fascinating study in the gestation of genius. At Williams College, Sondheim switched from maths to music once he understood the latter could have the same 'exactitude and rigor.' His tutor, Robert Barrow, was dry and doctrinaire but perfect for Sondheim. On Debussy's La Mer, Barrow said, 'Anybody here hear the sea? Well, even if you do, that's not what it's about. What the piece is about is the whole tone scale.' Sondheim later credited that moment for teaching him 'that music is a thought-out process, that it is craft, not inspiration.'
In his early career, Sondheim was at the mercy of big beasts. In 1958, Ethel Merman rejected him as composer for Gypsy because he was 'a beginner' (Sondheim later called her a 'loud, vulgar, cheap, small-eyed lady'). He was relegated to writing lyrics, which he considered inferior. When he shared lyrics for Everything's Coming Up Roses with Jerome Robbins, Robbins asked: 'Everything's coming up Rose's what?'
Sondheim struggled to emerge from the generation before him—Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein—and find his own style. During a cast recording, he would sit in the control room idly reading the New Yorker, then look up and say, 'The French horn just played an E instead of an E-flat.'
He also struggled with his sexuality. For years, he tried dating women, most convincingly Mary Rodgers and Lee Remick, before throwing in the towel in the late 1960s. As Arthur Laurents believed, Sondheim had been involved with women 'because he hoped.' This ambivalence fed his work and would result in some of the greatest musicals of the late 20th century.
After the film rights for Gypsy delivered a cash windfall, Sondheim bought a townhouse on 246 East 49th Street, next door to Katharine Hepburn, where he lived for six decades. He went to parties with Mike Nichols, Lauren Bacall, and Richard Avedon. Among them, Sondheim remained idiosyncratic—'the unattached, unemotional, sexually unresolved Sondheim was the magnetic core.'
In the early 1960s, he wrote Anyone Can Whistle, his 'cult flop.' On his 40th birthday, his entire recorded music consisted of 28 songs from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle. Then came the first preview of Company, and Sondheim's life changed utterly. So did the history of the American musical.
The successful years are slightly less enjoyable than the slog to the top, but the dynamics remained dynamite. Bernstein never recovered from being eclipsed. After Company opened in 1970, Alan Jay Lerner came home, broke into tears, and told his wife, 'My way of writing musicals is over.'
In his art, Sondheim was precise; in his life, not so much. Mary Rodgers said 'he was a pig' who 'never washed, never shaved.' He was, by any definition, an alcoholic. He left everything to the last minute, then let anxiety and adrenaline carry him through. He wrote Send in the Clowns in 36 hours of total panic. He pulled off similar tricks with Children and Art and Lesson #8, written days before Sunday in the Park With George went into trial, while star Mandy Patinkin tore out his hair.
The book brims with incident. Towards the end, Sondheim mentored younger writers like Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda. He remained generous and cranky into his 70s, when he settled into a relationship with Jeff Romley, a man 50 years his junior who brought an Xbox and Facebook-scrolling into his life. He was happier than ever, and they were together when Sondheim died in 2021 at 91. One of his great regrets was the absence of children. 'I really do miss not having had a family,' he said. 'But I suppose if I had one I wouldn't have had anything to write about.'
