I was with Jerry Herman exactly once for about eight minutes and it was just a few years ago when he was clearly not going to be around that much longer. He seemed very small, very nervous and when I told him — honestly — how much I admired his songwriting, he acted like I was the first person to ever tell him that instead of (conservative estimate:) the one-zillionth.
This is not one of those "obit" messages like people post on Facebook where the subtext is "the deceased was a wonderful, talented, successful person and I must have been somewhere in the same category because we were close friends and he loved me so." I really didn't know the man.
I would have liked to have known him; would have liked to discuss how he came up with so many tingle-inducing musical highlights in shows like Hello, Dolly!, Mame, Mack and Mabel and La Cage Aux Folles. There was something so natural and organic about his tunes. What's more, he did his best work — arguably in those four musicals — in shows where you really don't care a whole lot about the book. Next time I attend a production of one, if they announce "We're going to skip all that talking and just do the songs," it'll be fine with me.
Here — I'll show you what I mean. Watch this video from a BBC Proms concert. It's the title song from Mame and it just might be the best first-act-closer number in the history of musical theater. Ignore the male soloist who didn't hold the lyrics in his hand and as a result, got some of the words wrong. Just listen to the excitement and the way the number builds and builds…and it's so great, it doesn't matter that in the story, there's absolutely no reason for anyone to make this kind of musical fuss over Ms. Mame Dennis…
There's also no reason for the waiters at the Harmonia Gardens to do all that singing and dancing to celebrate the return of Ms. Dolly Levi but who cares? The fact that Jerry Herman wrote a great song is reason enough.
During my eight minutes with him, he said nothing quotable, nothing worthy of reporting here. What I thought might be worthy of reporting though was how pleased he was that I, a total stranger, was honored to meet him. Again, he acted like it was something new in his life when it must have been, at least, a thrice-daily occurrence.
There's a strange kind of humility I've witnessed at times in people of extraordinary accomplishment. If you have six Tony Awards, a couple of Grammies, the Kennedy Center honor and all those rave reviews and box office records — as he did — you can't very well act like you've done nothing. That kind of modesty seems really, really phony…because it is.
You also can't say, "You're right, I'm great" because that's pretty dickish. You might think it but you can't say it. Mr. Herman gave no indication that that's what he was thinking.
What he did was what I love to see. I love it when the person seems personally moved that someone — and a complete stranger might be better than an acquaintance for this — took the time to tell them how much their work had meant to someone else's life. It's certainly better that it comes from a person with no conceivable personal motive for buttering them up…praising them because something is wanted in return.
So I'm very pleased that I got to be among the zillion who met the man and thanked him and gave back a itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny microscopic smidgen of the joy his compositions have brought to the world. They'll continue to bring joy to the world and I hope he understood that. Because now there's no way for anyone else to remind him.