Alan Jay Lerner - Personal Life

Personal Life

Lerner's personal foibles were the stuff of tabloid legend. For nearly twenty years he battled an amphetamine addiction; during the 1960s he was a patient of the notorious Max Jacobson, known as "Dr. Feelgood", who administered injections of "vitamins with enzymes" that were in fact laced with amphetamines. Lerner's addiction is believed to have been the result of Jacobson's bizarre practice.

He married eight times: Ruth Boyd (1940–1947), singer Marion Bell (1947–1949), actress Nancy Olson (1950–1957), lawyer Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (1957–1965), editor Karen Gunderson (1966–1974), Sandra Payne (1974–1976), Nina Bushkin (1977–1981) and Liz Robertson (1981–1986 ). Four of his eight wives Olson, Payne, Bushkin, and Robertson, were actresses. His seventh wife, Nina Bushkin, whom he married on May 30, 1977, was the director of development at Mannes College of Music and the daughter of composer and musician Joey Bushkin. After their divorce in 1981, Lerner was ordered to pay her a settlement of $50,000. Lerner wrote in his autobiography (as quoted by The New York Times): "All I can say is that if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood." One of his ex-wives reportedly said, "Marriage is Alan's way of saying goodbye."

The divorces cost him much of his wealth, but Lerner bears primary responsibility for his financial ups and downs, and was apparently less than truthful about his financial fecklessness. One persistent fiction, widely publicized, was that his divorce settlement from Micheline Musseli Pozzo di Borgo (his fourth wife) cost him an estimated $1 million in 1965. This was a gross distortion of the truth. It was also falsely reported that Ms. Musseli sent over US$500,000 to Switzerland, but that was gossip given credence by newspaper items claiming that Loewe had warned his partner to not get romantically involved with a lawyer. The reality is that Micheline Musseli Pozzo di Borgo, a French aristocrat who at 20 was France's youngest lawyer ever, brought considerable wealth to her marriage to Lerner and lost most of it through him, including nearly $600,000 from the sale of her Parisian apartment, which Lerner placed in investments that either failed or were looted by him during periods of financial desperation. (Musseli told friends she had not wanted to sell her home, but that Lerner urged her to cut her ties with her native city and that she entrusted Lerner with the proceeds of the sale, for investment in the U.S.) The daughter of a World War One French war hero and herself an unsung heroine of the Resistance, whose Corsican forebears were intimates of Napoleon Bonaparte, she later made Lerner the gift of a chateau in France after he declared to her that he wanted a French rural retreat where he could write. That too was lost to Lerner's neglect of his finances. Some observers speculate that Alan Jay Lerner's pride was so badly bruised by Muselli's much-publicized rejection of him (due to his drug addiction and neglect of their son) that in revenge he portrayed her as a gold-digging spendthrift. Her actual settlement was said to be in the neighborhood of $80,000. Alan Jay Lerner's pattern of financial mismanagement continued until his death from cancer in 1986, when he reportedly owed the US Internal Revenue Service over US$1,000,000 in back taxes, and was unable to pay for his final medical expenses.

Lerner died of lung cancer in Manhattan at the age of 67. At the time of his death he was married to actress Liz Robertson, who was 36 years his junior.

Lerner had four children: three daughters, Susan (by Boyd), Liza and Jennifer (by Olson); and one son, Michael (by di Borgo).