Excerpt from 'The Street Where I Live'

ALAN JAY LERNER

AS I SAID WHEN I FIRST MENTIONED his name in this book, there will never be another Moss Hart, and no priest, minister, rabbi, or lama can convince me that taking him away at the age of fifty-seven was anything but senseless cruelty. I believe deeply there is a Divine Order and that life is without end, but at times Fate deals with it so frivolously that it seems without meaning.

But the tale of Camelot was not over.

On November 22, 1963, at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, the life of every human being on this planet was suddenly changed. The following week, Theodore H. White went to Hyannis Port and interviewed Jacqueline Kennedy for Life magazine. Teddy White, President Kennedy, and I had been classmates together in Harvard, and the President and I had been coeditors of the school yearbook at Choate. The interview occupied the two-page centerfold of Life and the second page began as follows:

‘When Jack quoted something, it was “usually classical,’ she said, ‘but I’m so ashamed of myself—all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy.

“ ‘At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” ’ “

She wanted to make sure that the point came clear and went on: “ ‘There’ll be great presidents again—and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll never be another Camelot again. Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way—if it made him see the heroes—maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view.’ “

But she came back to the idea that transfixed her: “ ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’—and it will never be that way again.”

The interview then continued for another half-page and ended: “She said it is time people paid attention to the new president and the new first lady. But she does not want them to forget John F. Kennedy or read of him only in dusty or bitter histories: For one brief moment there was Camelot.”

Once the interview appeared, it immediately became a major news story. At the time, I had offices on the Lexington Avenue side of the Waldorf Astoria. Life magazine came out on Tuesday. Wednesday afternoon, I was crossing the lobby of the Waldorf on my way to the Park Avenue side of the hotel, when I passed the news-stand. The Journal-American, now defunct, had just been delivered. In headline letters above the title of the newspaper I saw:

Don’t let it be forgot That once there was a spot, For one brief shining moment That was known as Camelot.

The tragedy of the hour, the astonishment of seeing a lyric I had written in headlines, and the shock of recognition of a relationship between the two that extended far beyond the covers of one magazine, overloaded me with confused emotions. I was so dazed that I did not even buy the newspaper. I lived on Seventy-first Street at the time and I started to walk home. It was not until Eighty-third Street that I realized I had passed my house.

Camelot was then on the road, playing the Opera House in Chicago, a huge barn of a theater with over three thousand seats. I was told later what happened that night.

The theatre was packed. The verse quoted above is sung in the last scene. Louis Hayward was playing King Arthur. When he came to those lines, there was a sudden wail from the audience. It was not a muffled sob; it was a loud, almost primitive cry of pain. The play stopped, and for almost five minutes everyone in the theatre—on the stage, in the wings, in the pit, and in the audience—wept without restraint. Then the play continued.

Camelot had suddenly become the symbol of those thousand days when people the world over saw a bright new light of hope shining from the White House. Later, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote his monumental Oxford History of the American People, which ends with the death of President Kennedy—the last page of the book is the music and lyrics of Camelot.

Ironically enough, also from that moment on the first act became the weak act and the second act, the strong one. God knows I would have preferred that history had not become my collaborator.

For myself, I have never been able to see a performance of Camelot again. I was in London when it was playing at Drury Lane, having arrived a few days after the producer, Jack Hylton, suddenly died. But I did not go the theatre. I could not.

ALAN JAY LERNER (1918-1986) was an American lyricist who created some of the most enduring works of musical theater, including My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot Excerpted from The Street Where I Live: A Memoir by Alan Jay Lerner. Copyright © 1978 by Alan Jay Lerner. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy © Bettmann/Getty Images.