A letter from the Publisher

IN his sprawling garden suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel one evening last week, Composer Fritz Loewe rippled at the piano while a companion paced and hummed. This was not Lerner and Loewe at work, but Loewe enjoying himself and TIME Senior Editor Henry Grunwald mixing work with some nostalgia. The Loewe-Grunwald repertoire: songs from Countess-Maritza and The Smiling Husband by the late Austrian Librettist, Alfred Grunwald, whom Composer Loewe knew back in Vienna more than 30 years ago, and who was Editor Grunwald’s father. To his astonishment, Grunwald found that Loewe remembered more of his father’s songs than he did.

The impromptu performance at the Ritz-Carlton was part of five week’s preparation for this week’s cover story on Loewe and his lyricist partner, Alan Jay Lerner. The process began when Grunwald and Show Business Writer John McPhee watched the new Lerner-Loewe show, Camelot, on its second night—in Toronto. Soon afterward, Researcher Joyce Haber was assigned to the story, spent 14 days in Toronto and Boston interviewing the mercurial Loewe and getting back-ground information from others in the cast (plus a miserable cold, perhaps inherited from Star Richard Burton). Once, while Researcher Haber and Loewe were dining at Toronto’s Franz Josef restaurant, the orchestra unwittingly struck up his On the Street Where You Live from My Fair Lady, and the obviously delighted composer swept the young reporter onto the dance floor. Joyce, who had by that time labored so long and late with Camelot that a chorus girl had mistaken her for Julie Andrews’ understudy, confesses that she could not have danced all night.

On the lyric beat, TIME Toronto Bureau Chief Kenneth Froslid, concentrating on Alan Lerner, attended 13 performances, had to explain to autograph seekers that he was not Roddy McDowall. His biggest worry came when his subject was rushed to Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital with a bleeding ulcer, but the physician did grudgingly allow three visitors: Lerner’s wife, his collaborator and Fros-lid. When the lyricist returned twelve days later, Froslid was alongside—car-rying the Thermos bottle full of milk. By the time Froslid had completed his comprehensive interview, Lerner quipped, “Now that you are gone, I’ll have to go back to my analyst.”

While the reporting was going on at the center of the story’s stage, TIME correspondents in Vienna, Bonn, Hollywood, Washington, London, New York, Paris and Chicago were digging at other sources. Among them: John F. Kennedy, who took time from a crushing campaign schedule to tell Washington Correspondent Hugh Sidey about his school and college days with Classmate Lerner.

When the results of this exhaustive reporting were finally piled on Writer McPhee’s desk last week, he faced his own formidable composing task: a 61-hour, mostly sleepless writing stint. For McPhee—unlike his subjects— there could be no trial runs in Toronto or Boston. He was opening in New York, and Senior Editor Grunwald was a tough critic.