We Danced All Night: My Life Behind the Scenes with Alan Jay Lerner

by Doris Shapiro

Book Overview

This tender, personal story reveals the public and private lives of show-business genius Alan Jay Lerner and his personal assistant, Doris Shapiro--the outsider he took along with him for the ride.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688089372
• ISBN13: 9780688089375
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Celebrity high life and musical theatre ...

Doris Shapiro's tough, hard-hitting memoir is an essential piece of theatre history, documenting the frantic, fraught development of several famous musicals, but especially Lerner & Lane's troubled ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER. Anyone who wonders why that show is so uneven, despite its superb score, will find the answer here: Lerner, the author, the show's stars, and what seems like half the celebrities of the 1960s, from JFK and Jackie to Anthony Quinn and Eddie Fisher, were strung out on Dr. Max Jacobsen's miracle "vitamin shots" whose main ingredient was Methedrine (called "speed" then, nicknamed "crystal", "glass", or "Tina" by today's addicts.) In the sixties, as now, speed was popular with high achievers, bringing them boundless alertness and energy for work and play, along with attractive weight loss, even though it would end up devastating most of their lives, careers, and relationships. Shapiro spares no one, especially herself, in what is the best description of stimulant addiction I've seen. It's all here: the initial exhilaration -- you feel unbelievably smart, motivated, energetic, and productive. Depression and fears are banished. You're bursting wtih courage and confidence, sure you've found the key to the universe until lack of sleep and food begin to wear down the body and mind. Then come the mood swings, the subtly growing delusions, paranoia, jitters, confusion, disorganization, procrastination, detachment from reality ... and finally a crack-up, from which Shapiro was luckily extricated by her heroic husband Bert. The book ends on an unnecessarily downbeat note, as she lists the deaths of her principal figures, but overall it's a hopeful story of how a highly intelligent, educated woman declined into drug addiction and finally, improbably, escaped it, saving her marriage and her life. It's a book that took a lot of courage to write -- and to publish (wasn't Morrow afraid of law suits from the celebrity junkies she names?) For lovers of musical theatre, or students of drug addiction, this is an essential volume.