In conversation with writer and critic Bill Goldstein at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in March, Daniel Okrent explained what prompted him to begin writing about Stephen Sondheim: Steve had died. “You should never,” he explained, “write about someone who’s alive.”
After reading Okrent’s new biography, Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, it is clear why he feels that way. While the book is far from the first to cover the legendary Broadway composer, it addresses its subject’s personal struggles with a novel frankness. Okrent’s biography, part of the Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, grapples with Sondheim’s alcoholism and drug use, his bitter disdain for critics, and his interpersonal prickliness. It also pursues a comparison that Sondheim himself always resisted: that between his characters and himself. In our conversation, Okrent assured me that his accounts of Sondheim’s inner turmoil came from some of the composer’s closest friends—and that his loved ones attested to the accuracy of Okrent’s depiction. Still, the book is sometimes at odds with what Steve said publicly about himself.
This isn’t to say that the book is critical of its subject. Sondheim’s genius is undisputed, and Okrent pays special attention to the effort Sondheim put into nurturing younger composers. But Sondheim is a god in the world of musical theater. He parodied his deification in a song called “God” in Sondheim on Sondheim (a musical review of past work). The chorus sings, “God! I mean the man’s a god! Wrote the score to Sweeney Todd!” In Art Isn’t Easy, Okrent humanizes this god.
Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times. His books include Pulitzer Prize nominee Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center and Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which was a major source of inspiration for the Ken Burns miniseries Prohibition. He also happens to have invented modern fantasy baseball! These accomplishments, my dad explained, make him a certified Very Big Deal.
I shook my tree of Upper West Side Jewish connections until his email address fell out. Okrent responded to my query (which amounted to “I LOVE SONDHEIM LET’S TALK??”) quickly and enthusiastically, and we spoke on Zoom in late March. He was warm and generous with his time. We digressed often, laughing at old theater gossip and speaking the shorthand of experts. I immediately felt connected to him as someone who worships the same (troubled, gifted, and entirely human) god.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Annie Rasiel: I’m curious about how you reconciled Sondheim’s self-assessment with what you learned in your research and the reports of people close to him.
Daniel Okrent: I think that Sondheim’s self-assessment would be about as accurate as my self-assessment, which is to say not very accurate. I don’t think we see ourselves the way that we truly are, so I’m inclined to believe secondhand reporting. For example, [longtime collaborator] James Lapine told me stories about Sondheim drinking while working with him. Lapine loved him, loved him. That’s true of everybody I talked to who knew him. They were on his side, but they knew things about him that he probably didn’t perceive about himself. There’s also the question of whether his shows are autobiographical. Sondheim vehemently denied it, but of course, he’s present. We’re all present in what we create. Lapine said something like, “Passion wasn’t about Steve falling in love with Peter Jones [Sondheim’s first long-term partner], but he had fallen in love with Peter Jones. Suddenly love was a matter of interest and importance to him.” It was very important to me that I talked to as many people as I did, people who knew him extremely well. After my reporting, I believe that I’m more accurate than he was.
AR: One topic where I found your book at odds with Sondheim’s own narrative was his relationship with his mother. Can you talk about Foxy Sondheim?
DO: I think that what’s important about his relationship with his mother is his perception of it. He told people that she wrote him a letter in which she stated, “I regret your birth,” when, in fact, by his own record, she said, “the only thing I have guilt about is your birth.” My ultimate conclusion is that the version of the story that he told is revealing whether or not it’s true. He told that story over and over again, that she regretted his birth. That’s not what she said, but that’s what he believed.
AR: In some ways it’s more revealing if he’s misremembering or falsifying what she said.
DO: I don’t think it’s falsifying. I think that he actually believed that’s what she said. But in 2013 he went looking for this letter to show to Mary [Rodgers, Sondheim’s close friend], and it was a different quotation. That was something I discovered when the book was already in copy editing. Gail Leondar-Wright, a Sondheim specialist, had gone down to look at the Mary Rodgers files, which had just been opened at the Library of Congress, and she found that letter while I was almost in galleys. It was a huge surprise.
AR: How did that revelation affect your writing? Did it reshape the narrative in any way?
DO: I changed one paragraph. We were too far along in the process for me to add more. If I hadn’t been under time pressure, I would have written about it much more, but I think the way I wrote about it is better actually. I just raise the question. I ask, “What does this mean to you?”
AR: Throughout my life as a Sondheim fan, my understanding of Foxy Sondheim was that she was a monster. That’s how he talked about her. And then in the Secrest biography [Stephen Sondheim: A Life, 1998], there are intimations of sexual abuse. It’s all very dark. I’m sure this is subjective, but I found myself much more sympathetic to Foxy while reading your book. I started to understand her as a socially ambitious woman who was unhappy being a mother and was maybe not a terribly pleasant person. How do you make sense of the contradictory stories surrounding Foxy?
DO: I spoke with people who knew her who said, “Foxy was a monster!” but they were all friends of Steve. I didn’t find anybody who wasn’t a friend of Steve who said that. I talked to two people about Foxy at length. One was my late friend Coco Brown [Harry Joe Brown Jr.], who said that Stevie was “a whining little shit.” The other was Susan Rothschild, who is one of my very closest friends. She’s the daughter of Molly Berns, whose family owned the 21 Club. She said, “Foxy was the life of the party! She was fun to be around.” I’m not saying she was a good mother. The testimony we have about the sexual behavior is his alone, of course. There are other stories—one of her showing up to a performance of The Frogs and claiming to be “Mrs. Stephen Sondheim”—that show me she was nuts in some ways. I’m sure she was a problematic woman. I’m not saying that she wasn’t. But I’m not sure that she was a horrible woman. She may have been, but I don’t know.
AR: I found the story of her suicide attempt—or fake suicide attempt?—so confusing. [An anecdote that Sondheim often recounted for comedic effect involved his mother swallowing a bottle of placebo sleeping pills in what he claimed was a fake suicide attempt for attention.]
DO: It makes no sense.
AR: And he thought it was funny?
DO: The only way that would have been a fake suicide attempt is if the doctor had told her, “Here are some placebos.”
AR: That seems like a longshot. The fact that the doctor even gave her placebos suggests that she was a suicide risk.
DO: It really seems like she tried to kill herself.
AR: Regardless of how accurate or empathetic this portrait that Sondheim painted of his mother was, it was something that he came back to constantly. This was his origin story.
DO: He knew a good story, and he told it a lot. He liked to tell it. I had much more detail about this in an earlier draft of the book, but after Foxy’s second husband died, she moved to a retirement community in New York for the last ten years of her life, and Sondheim visited her several times.
AR: But at the time of her death, he claimed they’d been estranged for twenty years.
DO: All of this suggests to me that the relationship wasn’t as horrible as he sometimes claimed.
AR: You frame the biography with a story about Sweeney Todd and revenge. Sondheim played some of the songs for his closest friend, Judy Prince, and explained the gist of the show: Sweeney has been terribly wronged and is hellbent on revenge. Prince responded, “This is the story of your life.” In reporting that story to his biographer Meryle Secrest, Sondheim concurred with Prince’s assessment, saying, “of course it was.” What revenge was Sondheim seeking? Was he fixated on his mother as a possible source of his anger?
DO: That interview with Secrest—which is when he said “Oh my god, this is the first time I realized what Judy meant by that”—took place when he was well past sixty. I guess he could have realized that when he was writing Sweeney, but at that point he was already forty-five, so it’s not as if it was something consciously driving him until that point.
AR: Did this narrative come from some kind of midcentury psychoanalysis-based urge to blame the mother?
DO: That could be coterminous. He was in psychoanalysis for so long. But the way he responded to Judy, as he reported it directly to Secrest and as Judy confirmed, makes me think that he didn’t realize to what degree his feelings about his mother were a motivator, that revenge was the story of his life.
AR: But revenge against whom?
DO: Obviously his mother and, at some unconscious level, his father. And critics. In an exchange of letters with Leonard Gershe about the critical response to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he just went on and on: they trashed me, they beat me up… He goes on and on and on. And then I read all the reviews, and it’s just not there. There was one negative review. There was this hypersensitivity to critics. He would claim, “Everybody in the so-called Broadway community wants Hal [director/producer Hal Prince, one of Sondheim’s closest collaborators] and me to fail. They want us to live in garrets.” There was still this intense anger. He was bitter about the people who said he should stick to being a lyricist when all he wanted to do was compose. He held grudges against these people—John Lahr, Robert Brustein— for more than thirty years.
AR: Do you think that anger fueled his work, stymied his work, or both?
DO: Both. The themes that I see in his life begin with alienation and ambivalence and end up in commitment and resolution. Those are all present in his work. A character like Bobby is so clearly him, unable to connect. Bobby looks at all the friends around him who are in love and he says, “I can’t do it. I’m alienated. This doesn’t work for me.” Sondheim didn’t fall in love until he was past sixty. Do you know anybody who can say that? Of course those feelings informed Sweeney, and they informed George in Sunday in the Park. It’s funny, actually. The show that he said was most autobiographical was Merrily We Roll Along, but he wasn’t either of those characters. He wasn’t Franklin Shepard or Charley Kringas. He said, “This is the one that’s about me,” but it’s the one that’s least about him.
AR: That’s a very surface-level comparison. The similarities end at them both writing musicals.
DO: Frank [Rich] actually said he believed Sally in Follies was a piece of him. I can find the quotation: “Steve never stopped insisting there was none of him in June and Louise, in Faye in Anyone Can Whistle, in Leona and Bobby, and Ben and Sally, and Fredrik and Désirée, all these characters yearning to connect.” Frank said, “There was none of his destructive mother in Mama Rose or Mrs. Lovett. And no, you must never superimpose him on George, hiding behind his canvas. […] That was Steve’s story, and he was sticking to it.” But he’s present. He’s so present in his work. He’s not Ben, and he’s not Sally, but he’s somebody who feels that same kind of distance.
AR: The portrait that you paint of Sondheim in this book is a difficult person who was quick to rage. Obviously, that’s not all that you say about him. He was nurturing to young composers, he was an eager collaborator—
DO: His friends loved him so deeply.
AR: Yes, an immensely loyal friend. But also rageful and petty and bitter. As someone who’s such a fan of his work, did you ever worry or feel guilty about putting that image of him into the world?
DO: It’s concerning to me that that’s what people seem to be focusing on in various commentaries. I think that’s because it’s new. People are surprised that he was an alcoholic, that he could be mean to people. Either they don’t want to believe it, or it’s disappointing to them. You focus on the things you don’t know. I would like to think that by the time you get to the end of the book, you see that my view of him is very positive. He was a troubled person who found his way. I was a little bit nervous, but then both Weidman and Lapine said that I’d nailed it. Weidman said, “That’s the Steve I knew.”
AR: Someone can be a tremendously good person in many ways and also be very difficult.
DO: And such people sometimes end up in twenty-five years of psychoanalysis.
AR: I don’t think anyone who engages meaningfully with his work would expect him to be a ray of sunshine or even a particularly easy person. As you said, his ambivalence, his isolation, his anger—it’s all present in the work.
DO: Of course.
AR: How did you pick which aspects of his life and work to focus on or to include in the book?
DO: Who knows? I don’t outline my books. I knew it was going to be in basically chronological order, but at various times I’d hit a theme and say, “Okay, let’s pause here and talk about him wanting to have kids.” Or “Let’s pause here and talk about alcoholism.” Those themes are not strictly chronological, but they hang off of something chronological. Then I expand and digress. When I record my notes, I grade them on a scale of—well really on a scale of three to five, because if it’s below a three I’m not including it anyway. Before I start writing, I print out all the fives. This is the stuff that must be in the book. The fours are things that would be nice to get into the book. The threes are there to confirm things. When I sort through the fives, that’s when the book starts taking shape.
AR: Was there anything in your research that you were on the fence about including?
DO: Most of what I was concerned about didn’t end up in the book. There were rumors about his sexual habits that I heard from a few people, but none with firsthand experience. I decided to ignore that.
AR: Yes, there have been jokes and rumors.
DO: When it came to the drinking and the drugs, I really was uncertain, but James Lapine was so firm about all of it. It clearly troubled him a great deal. During Into the Woods, according to James, there was a lot of cocaine. James, who was twenty years younger, stopped because he was worried about his health, but Steve went on. It was upsetting to him. This was also true of the drinking stories, which came from close friends who experienced them in sorrow.
AR: I didn’t realize any of this was secret. The first time I saw Sondheim speak was in 2010, and he was clearly drinking at three o’clock in the afternoon. I thought his alcoholism was common knowledge.
DO: I think the extent of it wasn’t known. It’s different with a label. People would say, “Oh, sure, Sondheim drinks!” But to have so many of his closest friends and associates tell me, “Yeah, of course he was an alcoholic,” is a different thing.
AR: There was one moment in your book that made me gasp out loud. I even called my husband into the room to read it to him. It was the image of Sondheim’s Oscar resting atop Jeff Romley’s Xbox.
DO: Isn’t that a great detail?
AR: I have seen pictures of that beautiful home. The fact that there was an Xbox in it is astounding to me.
DO: When it wasn’t on the Xbox, he used it as a doorstop for many years.
AR: I love that. Sondheim’s husband, Jeff Romley, was 23 to Sondheim’s 73 when they met. He played Xbox. He went to Rangers games. He was a jock.
DO: He was a triathlete!
AR: What do you make of that relationship?
DO: A friend has explained this to me. He, too, is an older man with a much younger husband. He said this is a thing. It’s something that occurs in the gay community: young men who want to be with old men and old men who want to be with young men. It’s a taste, a culture.
AR: A wealthy, successful man with a much younger partner is not exactly a new story, but he was with this man for many years. I’m curious about your understanding of what they saw in each other.
DO: When Weidman told me about the Oscar on the Xbox and the Rangers games, he was saying that Jeff was so unlike the other people in Steve’s life. That was a big part of the attraction, I think. He was from a different planet. And opposites attract.
AR: And in a world where Sondheim was seen as a god, maybe he liked being with someone who was so outside that world.
DO: I think that’s absolutely right. Steve said, “I live with a guy who goes to bed with his iPhone looking at Facebook, Face-fucking-book!”
AR: Have you spoken to Jeff Romley?
DO: I approached him, and he very kindly responded that he had made a pledge when he moved in with Steve not to talk to journalists. He wished me luck with the book and said he wouldn’t stand in my way. He could have told people not to talk to me, but he didn’t. I’m grateful to him, though he wouldn’t talk to me.
AR: So he was supportive?
DO: It would have been very easy for him to make this research difficult. If he had called Steve’s friends, many of them, out of loyalty, would have refused to talk to me.
AR: Who were some of your favorite sources for this book? Who did you really enjoy talking to and learning from?
DO: Ted Chapin. Cynthia O’Neal. John Weidman—though John and I have been friends for decades, so that doesn’t count. Jamie Bernstein and I have become very good friends. Jonathan Marc Sherman is great. I made friends along the way, you know? Probably made some enemies, but they haven’t told me yet.
AR: Do you have a musical background?
DO: Zero. My mother was a music teacher, so music was in my house, and she had me take lessons, but I inherited my musical ability from my father. I can sometimes carry a tune, but I can’t take it very far. I have no sense of rhythm, and I am the worst dancer on the planet, but I love music dearly. It means so much to me, and it was my mother who implanted that in me. Music is huge in my life. I go to a lot of plays, but I go to more concerts. I’ve always been interested in how hard it is to write about music. In the 1990s, I reviewed Broadway shows for Entertainment Weekly magazine for a few years. I looked back at them recently and realized that I didn’t address the music at all. I had nothing to say about the music. Maybe “It’s good.” So writing about music became my specific challenge to myself in this book. Can I explain why the music is good, or can I explain how it works? I received significant help from my friends Tony Tommasini [classical music critic Anthony Tommasini]; Sean Galagher, a composer and my dear friend; and Sean Gallagher, who is a pianist and a musicologist. I took lessons. I talked through my ideas with them. They told me where I was wrong and where I was on to something. I could not have done this without them. Tony, particularly, spent a day at the piano demonstrating for me. We talked about Sweeney Todd. He explained things like, “You see this chord here, the chord behind the word beautiful? Do you realize it’s saying there was something wrong with her beauty?”
AR: Oh, what a dream—to have someone sit you down and explain, “You know this thing you like? Here’s why it’s good.”
DO: For Sondheim’s music specifically, it’s so intricate. The people who don’t like his music or who say he’s primarily a lyricist haven’t listened closely. There are things that he does musically that are so counterintuitive. Half of “Barcelona” is two chords, back and forth, back and forth. Long stretches of “Someone in a Tree” are one chord. He doesn’t modulate at all. It goes on for 16, 24, 32, measures on one chord. This was an extremely sophisticated composer. He was doing this for a reason, and it comes across in the meaning of the song.
AR: They should release some kind of series explaining all this. Maybe someone already has.
DO: There is a young British guy who does this on YouTube. I didn’t rely on him, but I did confirm a few things—like the bean theme in Into the Woods, the way that it’s not resolved is so important to the propulsive motion of the show, and then when it finally is resolved it’s brilliant.
AR: My next question was going to be, “has learning about Sondheim changed how you hear his music?” But it sounds like the answer is yes!
DO: Absolutely. Even for me, the lyrics have always gotten in the way. The lyrics are so good, but when I’m thinking about the lyrics I’m not thinking about the music. Writing this book, I forced myself to think about the music. I listened to two recordings. One is jazz interpretations of Sondheim’s work, and the other is orchestral. I still hear the lyrics in my head, but the recordings enable me to concentrate more clearly on the music. And I think the music is even more remarkable than the words.
AR: Did you have fun writing this book?
DO: I did—and usually I don’t! I really did. I always love research. I love meeting people. The whole point of writing books like this is to learn about things you want to learn about. The writing part I generally don’t enjoy, but I kind of did this time because I was compelled to write short for this series, which meant—very Sondheimianly—solving a puzzle, making things fit into limited space. I liked it.
AR: Is there any information you didn’t find, or any questions you didn’t answer, that are still just killing you?
DO: Mostly trivial things. What color was that shirt? That kind of thing. There’s also a show that Bernstein, Sondheim, and John Guare were writing together, an adaptation of a Brecht play. There were eight songs written that have never been played. I’d love to hear those.
AR: Eight secret Sondheim-Bernstein collaborations!?
DO: Locked up by the estate!
AR: We’re going to have to break in somewhere and get them.
DO: I’d also like to hear his juvenilia. We all know the Saturday Night songs, but he wrote a couple of musicals before that. A couple songs from Climb High are on the Sondheim Sings album, but there were shows before that. I’d love to hear the ones he wrote at Williams [Williams College, Sondheim’s alma mater] or the sonata that he wrote for Robert Barrow.
AR: How did Sondheim change musical theater?
DO: I had a theory when I began writing that he set off in an entirely new direction that had never been explored before, but that the direction was a cul-de-sac because nobody else could do it. I’ve since revised that theory. I think there have been shows that could not have existed without Sondheim. The one that comes immediately to mind is Next to Normal. The very subject matter would not have made it in the pre-Sondheim era. There are many others. He wasn’t the first to write musicals about grave and unhappy subjects. I think Cabaret is the real revolutionary show in that sense—and, you know, John Kander was one of his closest and oldest friends.
AR: Yes!
DO: Take Company, for example. It’s so filled with irony and distance and bitterness. I don’t think anybody had ever seen that before. And then Follies, my god, what a grim show—but fantastic! To say nothing of Sweeney Todd. Pacific Overtures, which is my personal favorite, is so totally out of the blue. Why would he write a musical about the opening of Japan to Western commercial interest? I think it’s in the breadth and emotional depth of the subject matter.
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