Daniel Okrent

When Sondheim was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house and asked if there was anything particularly that he would like at dinner, and Sondheim replied, according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka, and more vodka.

And there are dozens of other incidents where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and, I think, through his life.

In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy, that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed in an interview with the New York Times in 1994, in which he said, Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement.

And that kind of explains the, or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother.

And it's a story that he, from that point, told over and over and over again.

All the Sondheads, as we sometimes are known as those people who really know everything about him or want to know everything about him, we all know this letter.

He referred to it so frequently.

I found, however, in the Mary Rogers papers, Mary Rogers was

his lifelong friend, daughter of Richard Rogers, he sent her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother.

when he received that.

And so a letter in which he says, I never want to have anything to do with you again.

This is just the end of our relationship.

But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend as the accurate version of the letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say, I regret giving birth to you.

She says, the only guilt I have is giving birth to you.

And there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret.

Oh, that's interesting.

I go the opposite direction.

I like your first version better.

I don't see any evidence that she felt that she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him.

Well, in fact, it is about his mother in a way.