Somewhere for Me - A Biography of Richard Rodgers

Secrest is long on information and very short indeed on conclusions, a serious shortcoming in a book dealing with the impact of supressed emotions, alcoholism, infidelity, and displaced anger on the lives of Richard Rodgers and his wife, Dorothy . The author relates anecdotes, lists achievements, and tells tales, but then makes very little effort to weave her material into anything that might help us understand this complicated man and his even more complicated wife. We are told that Rodgers was remarkably unfaithful to his wife for nearly half a century, and we are told that she had her disagreeable side, but what effect, if any, did the unfaithfulness have on the disagreeableness? Secrest doesn't go there; what few conclusions that are drawn about the Rodgerses' behaviour are in the interview material.

Early in the book, Secrest promises to say as much about Dorothy Rodgers as her husband. Not only does that not happen, the references to Mrs. Rodgers are largely negative. She is painted as insecure, greedy, addicted to Demerol, and with shallow interests in decorating and design. The author trivialises the famed Rodgers art collection as canned 'Christmas gifts' that the husband and wife could exchange; she failed to discover, or perhaps merely to relate, that major pieces from the collection (particularly the Toulouse-Lautrec gouache of Mme. Natanson) delight thousands of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum, to whom they were willed. Not only is Dorothy Rodgers' incredible eye for art thus diminished by Secrest, Mrs. Rodgers' philanthropic and charitable efforts also get short shrift. Worst of all, Secrest tells us that Mrs. Rodgers' father committed suicide, and then does nothing to relate that to the pain of her husband's serial infidelities. Might not a woman who has lost one significant male in her life need stability from the remaining one? Might not every infidelity feel like a fresh loss to someone thus wounded?

There is also a bothersome error when the author describes the couple's summer house in Fairfield (the famous "House In My Head" of Dorothy Rodgers' book of the same name) as "completely walled in glass". The barest look at the illustrations in Mrs. Rodgers' book shows clearly that the house was glass-walled on only one elevation, with large windows elsewhere. Such an easily avoided error casts doubt on other assertions.

The wealth of information presented in this work could have made a wonderful book that spoke volumes about the pain of depression and addiction, the trauma of living in a hollow marriage, and the futility of trying to keep family secrets. And surely, something could have been made of the tendency of both husband and wife to create beauty professionally, when they had very little in their emotional lives. Instead, Secrest chooses much the same road the Rodgerses did: Entertain without going down messy psychic paths. Perhaps biographers who do not learn from the mistakes of their subjects are doomed to repeat them.