29 July 2025 - 2:15pm
Tom Lehrer, who has died at the age of 97, effectively vanished from the public eye half a century ago. Yet my brief encounters with the former musical satirist in his later years offered insight into the kind of man he was.
We met through a Harvard professor called Dorothy Zinberg. The two had been friends since childhood, and were neighbours in Cambridge, Massachusetts until her death in 2020. As a “friend of Dorothy”, she was more like a sibling to him, spending every one of Lehrer’s birthdays and every Thanksgiving with him. Tom would sit at Dorothy’s grand piano playing singalongs with A4 hand-outs. She even “inherited” his mother’s pearls and Pucci dresses.
It was Dorothy who arranged a dinner for the three of us in a carpeted Harvard Square eatery in 2012. Tom was 85 at the time, and already deaf enough that he could “no longer hear his mistakes at the piano”, but he still had a twinkle in his eyes. And the dark, scathing wit was very much still there; as Dorothy would say, “his disgruntlement knows no bounds.”
Any politician who came up would be excoriated. Dorothy had recently seen her friend Henry Kissinger, though I’m unsure whether she referred back to Tom’s public assessment of the US Secretary of State: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Bring up showbiz, however, and Lehrer’s eyes would light up. He could still rattle off any line of just about any musical, from Gilbert and Sullivan to the present day. He’d just met, after much reluctance, Daniel Radcliffe — whose rendition of Tom’s song “The Elements” had been a YouTube sensation — and had a blast.
And what of his private life? There were hints of an encounter with Noël Coward, mention of which received an amused raised eyebrow. Sondheim was a contemporary, but while Tom was devoted to Stephen’s lyrics, he claimed to have “no interest” in him. Was there someone in Santa Cruz, where he spent five months each year? No comment.
Tom remained healthy, abstaining from alcohol and rationing his consumption of salt and sugar, and confronted with humour the sad realities of ageing. When he broke his hip in 2019, he wrote to Dorothy: “Three cheers for cortisone. Perhaps instead of a cocktail party you might have a cortisone party. With dancing, of course. Anyway, I hope the cortisone holds out and that one does not build up an immunity to it. Even after you are gone, the shots may help you roll over in your grave at current events.”
His friends weren’t spared from his satire, either. When he caught sight of my cringeworthy notes from a fancy holiday in Cape Town, he couldn’t help but return to his roots in parody. “Santa Cruz is exquisitely lovely this time of year,” he wrote. “What a treat to wake each morning to view Monterey Bay practically at my Florsheim-slippered feet and sit out on the plywood deck, sipping Mountain Dew from an heirloom jelly glass, under a veritable pergola of spider webs. Those less fortunate (and doesn’t that include everybody?) must live inland.” The full spoof extended to 600 words, including lines such as “Last night they introduced me to several of the nouveau-riche multithousandaires who have helped make Santa Cruz the must-see town that it is today. We all ended up at a delightful new sports bar, which fortunately hasn’t been ‘discovered’ yet, and sipped Bud Lite until almost ten o’clock.”
Above all, Tom was generous to a fault. He placed his entire works in the public domain in 2020, and on a smaller scale gifted me several songbooks and offered me his piano music after he stopped playing. He left the world clamouring for more of his sardonic songs when he quit music for mathematics at the height of his fame. But his memory and wit will live on well beyond his 97 years.
