Soon after Lerner met Loewe in 1942 they started to work together. Their first collaboration never made it past the out of town previews, but the second one What's Up made it to Broadway, and the songs attracted attention. They then rented space together and worked constantly. Lerner explained:

Fritz would only begin after I'd given him the title and we'd talked about what the song was going to say. ... He'd start to compose, and I'd be in the same room. He'd start to improvise on that title and I'd say, "Oops, that's it!" and he'd say "What did I play? Oh, that's terrible." or "Oh, that's not bad." All the time I would be thinking of things. I wouldn't write the words right then, but I was so involved in the very creation. Not that I was the composer, but a mood was created by the hours spent in the room. I was so involved that sometimes I would almost cry.

This way they wrote several musicals together with modest success. (At the same time they neglected their wives and their personal lives fell apart.)

One day Alan had an idea from a remark of Fritz's: "Faith can move mountains and Brigadoon". There are several stories about a cursed village which disappears except for one day every so many years. (The best known is the German Germelshousen.) Brigadoon moves the story to Scotland and tells of two men who stumble on a remote village which is not on the map. The people wear very old fashioned clothes and have never heard of telephones. One, Tommy, falls in love with a local girls, Fiona. They are told the village only appears for one day every one hundred years and, if any of the inhabitants should leave, it would disappear forever. The men leave leaving Fiona behind. Tommy later returns; at first he can not find the village, but, his love is so strong he is finally able to enter the village and find Fiona. At first Lerner and Loewe had trouble marketing the work, but it was finally produced as their first great success together. Alan fell in love with the leading lady, Marion Bell, divorced his wife and married Marion.

While the 1947 Brigadoon is one of their greatest Broadway successes, behind only My Fair Lady, it led to tension between Alan and Fritz. They quarreled openly during rehearsals and, after opening night, Fritz flew off to Hawaii, leaving no forwarding address and swearing they would never work together again. However, after Lerner's film An American in Paris won an Academy Award they reconciled for Paint Your Wagon in 1951.

Their greatest hit of all was the 1956 My Fair Lady** based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Ironically, it had been offered to both Noel Coward and Rodgers and Hammerstein, but they had turned it down. While working on it, Lerner and Loewe went to London to persuade Rex Harrison to play Henry Higgins. There, they visited the Covent Garden area at 4 a.m. to experience the atmosphere of the market and the Cockney accents displayed in the opening scene. Later, when Alan and Fritz went to England to prepare for the London production, they met with overwhelming adulation from peers and general population alike. Tickets were sold out months in advance and a command performance was given only five nights after the opening. On the night of the opening, the streets near the theatre were lined with thousands of people, there to see the members of the audience arrive.

After the success of My Fair Lady Lerner was looking for a new project. Adapting Colette's 1942 novella Gigi for a film was suggested to him. It had already been a Broadway stage play starring Audrey Hepburn. Set in turn-of-the-century Paris, the story and setting appealed to him but, at first, Loewe was not interested; he didn't like working for the movies. Lerner agreed to do it with another composer if Maurice Chevalier could be persuaded to play Honoré. (This character does not appear in the book; he is only mentioned. He does appear briefly in the Anita Loos play.), and get Cecil Beaton to do the sets and costumes. At first the whole work was to have had only four songs. Hoping Chevalier would agree, Learner built up his part considerably, giving him three songs of his own. Lerner then approached Loewe again and persuaded him by saying they would write the score in Paris! Loewe read the script and enthusiastically agreed. They went to Belgium to see Chevalier, and he readily agreed saying that at the age of seventy-two: "I am too old for women, too old for that extra glass of wine, too old for sports. All I have left is the audience". This became the inspiration for his song I'm Glad I'm Not Young Any More and Chevalier, the epitome of a Parisian, made the show. Lerner was not as successful with his first choice for Gigi. He approached Audrey Hepburn who hd played the part on Broadway, but she was not interested. Leslie Caron, whom they knew from An American in Paris, was engaged. She had already played young nubile girls in Lili and Daddy Long Legs and had played Gigi in the stage play in Paris***. Louis Jordan was more than happy to do Gaston. Hermione Gingold was perfect for Gigi's grandmother and as a foil for Chevalier.

Lerner felt that Paris was as much a character as were the rest of the players and insisted, in spite of the added cost, on filming as much as possible on location rather than in the Hollywood studio. The producer agreed on the condition that they shoot as quickly as possible. This was hard on Lerner who, as usual, was constantly trying changes in the lyrics. They were able to shoot it all in August when, as in most European cities, the citizens are all away on holiday and Paris practically shuts down. An exception was Maxim's which is now mainly for tourists and remains open. Even they agreed to shut down so that the scenes which take place there could be done on the actual site. They replaced the motor cars which Gaston used in the book by open carriages and made other change to show off Paris at its best.

After location shooting was complete everyone went to Hollywood to shoot the interior shots, use Venice Beach in California for Trouville, and finish the editing et cetera. Leslie Caron had recorded her songs in Paris, but ir was decided her voice was not suitable after all and it was lip-synced by another singer. Finally the film was ready to be previewed. This audience loved it, but Alan and Fritz decided it was too long and that all the music would have to be revised. In the end, some scenes were rewritten and the entire score was reorchestrated and rerecorded all of which cost what was then a small fortune, $350,000. However all the changes were worth it. The film won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and the title song Gigi won for Best Song. To the end of his life, Lerner thought Gigi was the best song he had ever written.

Their next collaboration was Camelot (1960), based on T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a story of King Arthur's court. This took off slowly but soon became a hit. After this Loewe retired to Palm Springs until, eleven years later, Lerner approached him to write some new songs for the stage production of Gigi. They then collaborated on a film based on the popular The Little Prince by St.-Exupéry which was a failure. Lerner blamed this on the director, but another problem was that Lerner's lyrics were not suitable to children.

In spite of their troubled professional relationship the pair remained good friends for life. Lerner said of Loewe:

There will never be another Fritz. Writing will never again be as much fun. A collaboration as intense as ours inescapably had to be complex. But I loved him more than I understood or misunderstood him, and I know he loved me more than he understood or misunderstood me.

The noted critic Clive Barnes compared Loewe to Sondheim and Porter:

He had a way with a song that could make words cling to the melodies like ivy to the world." Of the partnership he said: "What they achieved was the particular apogee ... of the Broadway musical's most singular influence—the European operetta. ... Times move. Tastes change. Lerner and Loewe. We shall never see their like again. A pity. I had grown accustomed to their grace." (a reference to My Fair Lady)

* "Lerner and Loewe" is a rare example of a musical's creators being listed with the Librettist first. (The composer usually comes first as in "Rodgers and Hammerstein") Another prominent example of the opposite is "Gilbert and Sullivan".

** My Fair Lady was a smash hit on Broadway before it was turned into the spectacular film. On the other hand, Gigi started as a film with world-wide distribution before it was turned into a stage piece. The latter is a great show, but it has never been able to live up to its original version which was actually shot in Paris.

*** By the time she played Gigi in the film, Caron was married and the mother of a child. In spite of this she managed to play a convincing adolescent girl and show her development into a mature young woman. She achieved this in the beginning by pretending to be a child. In 2009 Caron received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She now owns and operates a bed and breakfast south of Paris but, now in her seventies, Caron recently played Mme. Armfeldt in a Paris production of A Little Night Music.

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Revised August 2010
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