Backstory

Stephen Sondheim’s musical theater scores frequently express amusing ambivalence, often move on to rueful regret and sometimes explode in caustic anger. The listener is tempted to speculate about the personal sources of all that irony and melancholy.

Enter Meryle Secrest, probing gently but firmly into the artist’s personality as well as his work in her biography, “Stephen Sondheim: A Life.” She spent 50 hours interviewing Sondheim and communicated with a couple hundred of his friends and associates. Sondheim ventured out of his protective shell further than he has for any other interviewer.

Secrest offers a multitude of anecdotes about Sondheim’s shows--from his school efforts all the way through his recent nonmusical flop “Getting Away With Murder” (the premiere of which occurred at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, which Secrest places in La Jolla). Much of this material about his professional history, however, has been documented in other books and articles. An entire quarterly magazine, the Sondheim Review, is devoted to Sondheim’s oeuvre. There haven’t been nearly as many glimpses of Sondheim himself.

Sondheim goes public with his homosexuality here, after decades in which he stayed in the closet because of what Secrest describes as “social attitudes of the day.” Recalling his early career, Sondheim says: “Everybody knew the theater was full of homosexuals, but nobody admitted to being so.” Though the name of only one romantic partner prior to the ‘90s is mentioned, Secrest outlines in some detail Sondheim’s relationship with Peter Jones, whom he met in 1991, and who inspired his work on his last produced musical, “Passion.” She interviewed Jones, and she includes his photo. Secrest apparently stopped short, however, of an obvious inquiry: Will Sondheim’s recent candor on this subject result in any openly gay characters in his work? In 1995, a scene in an authorized revision of “Company” introduced homosexuality into the story--a man made an incomplete pass at Bobby, the central character--yet in the same year Sondheim angrily objected to a Seattle “Company” that, without asking permission, made Bobby bisexual and changed the sexual orientation of two of the couples in Bobby’s circle of friends. But Secrest doesn’t mention any of this.

She accepts Sondheim’s opinion that his gloomy outlook on life isn’t related to previous repression of his homosexuality as much as it is to his longtime, pre-Jones inability “to let somebody else into my life.” And this, Secrest concludes, was due in large part to the shock of Sondheim’s parents’ separation when he was 10, as well as the long-term shenanigans of his late mother, Janet Fox, usually known as “Foxy.”

Foxy is depicted as a stylish, tempestuous woman who was often absent from her son’s life before the separation and later became all too present. She alternately berated the adolescent Stephen and then acted in an inappropriately seductive way with him, holding his hand and watching his face when they attended plays together, arranging her clothes in come-hither poses when they were alone. After Stephen’s father remarried--a union that would give Stephen two younger stepbrothers--Foxy told her son she could have his father jailed if Stephen ever saw his stepmother because she was “an immoral woman.” This didn’t prevent Stephen from visiting his new stepfamily, though he believed that Foxy was having him followed when he did. In addition to relying on those who knew Foxy, Secrest uses some of the fiction Sondheim wrote as a teenager to discuss his attitudes toward his mother.

Their relationship grew even stormier after Sondheim grew up. At one point, Foxy wrote to her son that “the only regret I have in life is giving you birth”--a sentiment that Sondheim photocopied and returned to her when she later tried to make amends.

Although 95 photos, many of them evocative, are strewn throughout Secrest’s book, one looks in vain for a mother-and-son portrait. Perhaps it was too painful for Sondheim to again allow such exposure, as he did for Martin Gottfried’s 1993 coffee table book “Sondheim,” which includes two photos of Foxy with her son as a toddler (one of which is described by Secrest). Or perhaps all the original prints of Sondheim with Foxy were destroyed in a 1995 fire in the composer’s townhouse. No fire, however, can explain the cover photo of Secrest’s book, which goes beyond gloomy and makes the composer look like Norman Bates.

Sondheim’s bitterness toward his mother might have caused him to maintain “a safe psychic distance” from women, Secrest writes. Yet she also explores a number of long-lasting friendships he has had with women, including the late Lee Remick, Harold Prince’s wife, Judy, and Richard Rodgers’ daughter Mary. And while Secrest acknowledges that some of his great women characters aren’t likable, she admires the sympathy with which he wrote the Witch and the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods.”

Foxy does get credit for at least one major gift to her son--she introduced him to Oscar Hammerstein II, who provided essential mentoring to the teenager in both professional and personal arenas. The great lyricist critiqued Sondheim’s first show--a prep-school musical called “By George”--and assigned the boy to write four different types of shows as a system for learning the ropes. He also gave Sondheim a summer job on the set of Hammerstein’s unsuccessful musical “Allegro,” which Sondheim describes as “a seminal influence on my life, because it showed me a lot of smart people doing something wrong.” And it was at a Hammerstein dinner party that Sondheim met TV producer George Oppenheimer, who hired him at $300 a week to come to Hollywood and write scripts for the “Topper” TV series--his first paying job. Secrest acknowledges the “silver-spooned” quality of Sondheim’s early breaks.

Secrest’s commentary on Sondheim’s work is usually thoughtful, though she seldom presents herself as a critic, which is just as well (at one point she appears to dismiss just about every kind of popular music during the last few decades as “bad art” without further explanation). She often refers to critics and authorities in other fields, including four subjects of her earlier biographies, some of whom aren’t particularly pertinent to Sondheim.

Despite occasional gaps or lapses, however, Secrest’s “Sondheim” is irresistible. Anyone who wants to know more about the American musical theater’s unchallenged master will have to read this book.