The Crime Lady: Remembering Tom Lehrer
Dear TCL Readers:
Hello from the South of France, where I’ve been working on some new projects at the Moulin a Nef residency in Auvillar. (Travel and work explains the long gap between newsletters.) It’s been marvelous and I’m getting so much work done and in a way, it was the perfect setting to learn of the death this weekend of one of the all-time greats, one of my personal heroes, the creative genius satirist Tom Lehrer, at the age of 97.
In lieu of an obituary — already there are many, and there will be many more — I wanted to point you all first to my December 2023 essay investigating the curious origins of “Hanukkah in Santa Monica,” a serpentine adventure involving Mickey Katz, Garrison Keillor, Michael Feinstein, and, in a particularly inspired cameo, Marvin Hamlisch.
I also posted a bunch of ephemera on Bluesky tonight and by far the weirdest of them was The Dodge Rebellion Theatre, a 60-minute extravaganza made exclusively for…Dodge dealers and executives. Around 2000, someone asked Lehrer about the impetus for this extreme oddity in his career, to which he replied: “The Dodge thing was actually a lot of fun. The movie Cat Ballou had just come out and the idea was that I would be like Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole who in that movie would appear from time to time to sing ‘The Ballad of Cat Ballou.’”
Apparently Lily E. Hirsch’s Taking Funny Music Seriously, published by Indiana University Press in July 2024, has Lehrer’s last-known interview, though I have not verified this independently. What I’d really love to see is a collection of letters that Tom Lehrer sent his friends and fans over the decades, which he did until as recently as a couple of months ago. And since he famously didn’t give a fig about copyright, this may be fairly easy (if time-consuming) to crowdsource.
There will eventually be biographies. There will eventually be more information about the life Lehrer wanted to keep private, and why he quit performing in the late 1960s. There may be, if my theory holds, documents that need to be declassified. But the mystique of Tom Lehrer will endure because his work was so good and his wit so sharp, he quit while he was well ahead, and he structured his life to do almost exactly what he wanted on his own terms.
No doubt there were low points and missed opportunities and regrets. But they are undoubtedly dwarfed by the lives he touched with his songs and his college classes, his capacity for friendship, and his admiration for other musicians and artists.
I think often about the NYT paid notice Lehrer almost certainly wrote for his younger brother William Waller (“Barry”) Lehrer, who predeceased him in June 2007. (Lehrer had no survivors.) It was pithy and pointed: “A good friend, veteran, former teacher and business man. A nice fellow and a solid citizen.”
He was describing his brother, but I can’t help think that Lehrer was describing himself, too.
Until next time, I remain,
The Crime Lady