I much enjoyed Wilfrid Sheed’s entertaining story about Broadway songwriters among the Philistines of Hollywood during the early 1930s (October). Reading it, I suddenly realized the full, score-settling import of a lyric that Lorenz Hart wrote in 1940, long after he had fled back to his beloved New York.

Near the end of Pal Joey , the title character’s two girlfriends, each having just found out about the other, tell each other why they are dumping the bum. One explains: