A Conversation with Daniel Okrent
Author of Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy
Daniel Okrent spent three years immersed in the life and work of Stephen Sondheim in order to write Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, a major new biography published by Yale University Press and released this week. Drawing on letters found in 18 separate archives and conversations with dozens of people who knew Sondheim well, among them John Weidman and James Lapine, Okrent traces two defining arcs in Sondheim’s life: from alienation to connection, and from ambivalence to conviction. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s great to meet you. Before we get into the book itself, I’d love to know where your own journey with Sondheim began
When I was 22, Company opened in New York. I had just moved there from the Midwest, and I had always liked musicals. I can’t say that I loved it when I saw the original production in 1970. It was so radical, so different from anything else I had ever seen on the musical stage. It didn’t really grab me. In the ensuing years, I saw the original A Little Night Music, and then I saw Pacific Overtures. It was Pacific Overtures that absolutely knocked me out. Talk about something that had never been done before — the very fact of it, the subject, so far removed. I mean, this was not The King and I; this was a very different vision of the East. From that moment on, I was a fan — and nothing more than a fan.
There was a period in the ‘90s when I was reviewing theatre for Entertainment Weekly magazine. That’s the first time I ever had anything resembling a professional connection to Sondheim’s work. But Yale University Press had this series of books, and I had talked with them about writing about Arthur Miller, whom I knew somewhat. John Lahr had already signed up to write about Miller, so they said, “Come back if there’s ever another subject you’re interested in.”
And so I came back, when Sondheim died. I discussed it with my literary agent, approached Yale, got a contract, and then spent two and a half to three years immersed in every aspect of the man’s work and his life.
This isn’t a book, then, that had been inside you for years, waiting to burst out?
No, no. And in fact, it took his death to pull it out. It was so deeply interred that it was his death that brought it to the surface. The idea of the Yale series appealed to me too — they’re short biographies, not big fat doorstops, and I had never written short before. And you know what they say: you don’t have enough time to write short.
Before I jumped deeply into it, I wanted to see what was available — not just what had been published, but what resources had not been published. I found letters from Sondheim in 18 different archives, and letters about him in several others. Then I was able to use, thanks to her generosity, Meryle Secrest’s audio tapes — her interviews with Sondheim. She did, I think, 45 hours of interviews in the mid-’90s, with a number of people who are now dead and couldn’t be interviewed. Knowing I had all that material to go on, I thought, well, it’s not necessary that I have strong opinions or ideas yet — I’ve got material. And then, of course, out of the material came the opinions and the ideas.
How do you then break through the the tyranny of the blank page?
It’s always been my habit with all my books to do all the research before I write the first word. The ideas begin to form as I read, say, a letter, and I say, “Oh, that’s in contradiction to what he said in this interview,” and so on. Things begin to create an impression.
When I sat down to write, I knew what the two major themes were. The book is about his life, not his work — but his movement from alienation to connection is so visibly seen in the work as well. And from ambivalence to conviction, to resolution — which is also, I believe, seen in his work. His life was a constant quest to escape his feeling of alienation, to get to the point where no one is alone. That’s a long journey from Company, and from the feelings of alienation that absolutely pervade that show.
He said himself that half of his songs are about ambivalence. But then he falls in love, in the 1990s, and he decides, in Passion, that this is a show without any irony. The distancing that irony allows, he decided he was through with. He was going to connect. He was going to know who he was, and resolve who he was.
I’m fascinated by what you say about Passion. Without that protective layer of irony, perhaps we all find ourselves more exposed, more divided in how we respond to it personally?
Certainly. And I think in our perceptions of Sondheim’s work over the years, the shock of Passion was not that it’s sung-through, single-act, with no songs with titles. The discovery was this deeply engaged, non-ironic sense of absolute commitment. I certainly hadn’t picked that up in his work, or particularly in my own life, either. I’m a much too ironic person, and I know how I can use that as a shield to hide behind. I think he did that as well.
He said, at different times, that no one has ever written a successful musical past the age of 65. At other times he said 60. Assassins was when he was 61. Passion was when he was 64. I think he was already losing some of that edge that defined his work and impelled it forward — so that the many years of struggle with Road Show, the incompletion of Here We Are, the casting away of so many other ideas in those years… He was unable to be the Stephen Sondheim he had once been, because his life had resolved.
You return to the idea of revenge in the epilogue as a way of describing at least part of his creative life. It’s a provocative word, and it comes from a direct, real place: Judy Prince’s observation about Sweeney Todd. Could you talk a little about what drew you to that idea, and how it developed?
Here’s the thing: in 1995, he tells an interviewer that Sweeney Todd is essentially the story of his life — and that it had never occurred to him until Judy Prince, Hal’s wife, pointed this out to him. That’s really provocative. That was interesting to me, and something to pursue.
As I went through his life, I saw the motivations of his revenge. Not entirely proper motivations, but the intense feeling he had about being dismissed as a composer and considered only a lyricist early in his career. It led to a ferocious response. And regarding A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he writes to a friend, essentially: I was raked over the coals and destroyed, they hated my work, they hated me. Go back and read the reviews: there were a couple of negatives and some mixed ones, but it didn’t happen the way he perceived it. Yet he perceived that the world was lined up against him as a composer.
And then, after the great success of the shows he did with Prince, you see it again after the failure of Merrily We Roll Along. Even though he’d never been fully convinced it was going to work, he says: there are all these people — Neanderthal critics and nasty bitches in the theatre world — who resent Hal and me, who want us to live in a garret. Our success pisses them off. He’s really winding himself up into a position of revenge-driven rage. And I think it fuels his work.
And Sweeney, of course — when he says it’s the story of his life, it’s not that he’d always wanted to murder people and have them put into meat pies. It’s that he wanted revenge. He was driven by revenge.
Part of that story is also his well-documented relationship with his mother. I noticed that you put “the Letter” in capital letters, and it did become a kind of object that recurred throughout so many interviews.
You say “well-documented.” It turns out it was erroneously documented — which I didn’t discover until I had already written the book. Then, at the last moment, Gail Leondar-Wright looked in the Mary Rodgers papers and found his version — his own version, the one he showed to Mary Rodgers — of his response to his mother’s famous letter. In it, he quotes her saying not “the only regret I have is giving you birth,” but “the only guilt I have…”
And he chose, for decades, to represent it as regret. She regretted giving birth to me. That’s a motivator. Absolutely. I think it’s in an interview with the New York Times in 1994 where he first tells the story of the letter. I don’t know whether he made that choice knowingly or not, but he committed himself to it. That was the story, and he was going to stick to it — even after the letter he sent to Mary Rodgers, which said “guilt,” not “regret.”
I’d love to ask about the collaborative nature of writing a book like this. Looking through your acknowledgements, there are so many names our readers will recognize. Did you have a plan of who to approach first, or did one person lead to another?
I can tell you how it begins. It begins with John Weidman, who’s been my friend for 30 years — not in a theatre context at all, just part of a lunch group of five or six guys who get together every month or so. I began by talking to John. “What do you think about the idea?” And he said, “Do you know about David Benedict’s book?” I said, “No, I don’t, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing this…” But more than anything, it was just talking with John, who was very frank with me about Sondheim and very supportive of the project.
His support enabled me not only to go and see some people I didn’t know, but also to have the credibility to approach people who might not have wanted to talk to me — chiefly James Lapine. James had never given an interview about Sondheim from the moment Sondheim died. He had talked to no one and had refused many people. But I think because John said “this guy’s okay,” and a mutual friend of Lapine’s and mine endorsed it as well, he gave me this astonishing interview in which I learned so much, both about their work and about Steve’s personality.
And from there, once you have the two most important collaborators of the last 40 years of his life in your pocket, it’s easy to persuade others to talk. I was turned down twice. I shouldn’t say by whom; in one case, it was someone very old who simply didn’t have the energy for it. But I ended up interviewing, I think, 37 or 38 people, of whom 30 or more knew him well. I was granted keys to the kingdom.
His widower, Jeff Romley, said that when he moved in with Steve, he had made the pledge that he would never talk to journalists or writers about him. But he said, I wish you luck, and I’m not going to stand in your way. He very easily could have called people and said, don’t talk to this guy. He did not, and I’m very grateful to him for that.
Then, the letters. All of my previous books are history books set in a period long beyond living memory, so they had to be made from archival collections. I love being in archives. The Hal Prince archives are astonishing; he explained his whole life in letters. Someone could do an astonishing Prince biography from that material. He saved everything, and he responded to what Steve was saying. There’s a series of letters about that terrible fight they had in the early ‘90s, when Hal accused Steve of wanting it to be a Sondheim musical rather than a Sondheim-Prince musical. You could feel the fire on the page.
We’re speaking a week before the book goes out into the world, after three years of work. Is there any anxiety attached to that for you — or are you feeling confident, given the response you’ve had so far?
There was a great deal of nervousness and apprehension about how the book would be received. One, because people have such strong opinions about Sondheim. Two, because so much has already been written about him. And three — who the hell is he? I write American history. Before that, I was a magazine and newspaper editor with no involvement in theatre coverage whatsoever. Who is he to be writing this book?
My answer to that is the two blurbs from John Weidman and James Lapine. With James Lapine saying it’s the best book ever written about Sondheim, and that he learned things about Steve he never knew — and John Weidman saying, this is the Steve Sondheim that I knew, done with elegance — I feel well-armed now. People can take shots at this book, but with those endorsements, I’m ready for them.
To order Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy by Daniel Okrent, and for more information, visit Daniel’s website by clicking here.
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Holy cow! I can’t wait to buy and read this book! Thank you for this illuminating interview!