Tom Lehrer with his debut LP. Photograph: George Konig/REX Shutterstock
‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?
In
the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their
irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach
mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of
answers
In
1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my
loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs
burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there
began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from
an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best
friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was
one of his more cheerful messages. Between the two there was catechism,
rugby, occasional bullying and fairly frequent beatings.
But
we had the “playroom”, where we could relax and listen to records, and
one day an American boy called Ed Monaghan turned up clutching Lehrer’s
first LP. It was a medicinal dose of the irreverence, nihilism and
rebellion that I craved. To this day, I am word perfect in many of the
songs I first heard then. There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,
all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title
suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard,
which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was
forced to spend watching my school play rugby. It was all done with such
bouncing musicality that I doubt whether the Jesuits ever realised the
subversive nature of what we were listening to.
Lehrer
made my life bearable. I have never been able to tell him so, and it
might not please him, for he has been quoted as saying: “If, after
hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something
nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have
been worthwhile.”
I didn’t know then that
Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own
record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and
selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat
recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no
publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes,
rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.
At
that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a
mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a
first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New
York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage:
piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and
“the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter”.
In
the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who
were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort
Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called
‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959,
“is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a
Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and
highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”
But
in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and
performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs
for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That
Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more
wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic
hymn set in ragtime: “Then the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if
your sin’s original.” Although I was by then a confirmed atheist, I
probably still thought that making fun of the Catholic church would
release a thunderbolt from heaven, and The Vatican Rag cured me.
Photograph: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns
The
album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons. “There’ll
be no more pain and misery / When the world is our rotisserie …” They
were so much better than those whiny folk songs of the era, which Lehrer
rather despised. “You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the
live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student
auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is
against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”
In
this far more political new record, he satirised the Americans teaming
up with West Germany against the USSR (“Once all the Germans were
warlike and mean / But that couldn’t happen again / We taught them a
lesson in 1918 / And they’ve hardly bothered us since then”), and was
horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for
Washington, singing: “‘When the rockets go up who cares where they come
down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
And
then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an
obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for
decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.
Years
passed. I looked for Lehrer’s take on George W Bush and Tony Blair and
Iraq, but had to be satisfied with a quote about how he said he didn’t
want to satirise Bush; he wanted to pulverise him. Occasionally I would
meet someone who loved Lehrer’s work as much as I did. Drink would be
taken, a few favourites sung tunelessly but noisily.
The
only one we never attempted was Lehrer’s masterpiece and his most
famous song: The Elements. It’s simply a list of all the elements in the
periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The
Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium /
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually
impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel
Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago. Science teachers have benefited from the many versions now available on YouTube.
Ed
got back in touch towards the end of the last century, hearing that I
had written a radio play about our school. I had just realised that I
wanted to be a playwright when I grew up; Ed was transitioning from
acting to publishing, and his last stage performance would be in a play
of mine in 2012.
Then, in 2020, Lehrer put out a statement saying that he had placed everything he ever wrote in the public domain. His lyrics and sheet music are now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties.
The statement ended: “Don’t send me any money.” This is unheard-of.
Famous performers usually maximise their royalties income. In my book
about the 60s, I quoted the odd line from songs by the likes of the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and my horrified publishers took the lot
out. The royalties would bankrupt them, they said.
Lehrer on stage at the hungry i club, San Francisco, in 1965. Photograph: Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive/Corbis/Getty Images
In
high excitement, I went to the artistic directors at Upstairs at the
Gatehouse – the north London fringe theatre that has been a home for my
last two plays – and suggested I write them a show about Lehrer, weaving
as many of his greatest songs into the narrative as we could. The show
would ask the question that has mystified Lehrer fans for decades: what
possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of
his game?
Was it because, as a child
mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a
great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT
and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to
mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and
social science majors have to take in the US university system. “Math
for tenors,” he calls it. At Santa Cruz he also taught a course on the
history of the American musical, which is one of his passions.
Was
it because, as he once said, “political satire became obsolete when
Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”? No. Kissinger did
not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated
into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he
believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s
sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much
to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war.
Was
it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life
he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were
merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the
story, but it’s surely not the whole of it.
I
researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former
students as would talk to me. The historian Peter Hennessy, now Lord
Hennessy, turned out to be the only person I knew who had ever met
Lehrer; he interviewed him in 1970. Lehrer told Hennessy he was not
doing paid performances, but had done some benefits for his leftwing
Democratic congressman, Robert Drinan. Lehrer’s public persona is
brittle and ironical, but Hennessy found him to be kindly and charming. “He had grown a beard and looked a little rabbinical,” Hennessy told me.
Lehrer
never replied to my letters, eventually passing me a message through a
roundabout route to say that he did not intend to, but was comfortable
with what I was doing. Ed suggested I should call the play Tom Lehrer Is
Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. So I did.
But
did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not
sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented
man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to
wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things
he wants to do, and he has that. I suspect too that, despite his
protestations to the contrary, there is a serious man underneath the
caustic, cynical front. He once said that you cannot be funny if you are
angry. He could just about stay detached enough to be funny about
Eisenhower’s America. Trying to be funny about a nation that can elect a
President Trump might tear him apart.
Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You will be at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 May to 9 June