"The contrast between music and lyrics was mirrored in Rodgers and Hart's seemingly opposite natures. Rodgers was a detached, disciplined workaholic with an eye to his own legend; Hart was a warm-hearted, undisciplined wastrel, who was more interested in seizing the day than the brass ring.

"Cigar-chomping and night-loving, he was, as he once described Falstaff in a prize-winning high-school essay, a 'blustering, boisterous boy of Bacchus.'

"Rodgers was an alcoholic... and phobic about, among other things, germs, airplanes, fire, elevators, tunnels, bridges, and homosexuals.

"Diahann Carroll, who starred in 'No Strings,' for which Rodgers wrote the words as well as the music, recounted the shock of his saying to her, 'You just can't imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score, and not have to search all over the globe for that drunken little fag.'"

["Had dinner with the shrimp

[5' Hart] last night," Rodgers once wrote to his wife, "and hit the hay at a very early hour while he went on about his nefarious (get it?) business."]