Iris Rainer Dart can make grown men cry. Or, at least, one larger-than-life guy.
During a recent installment of "The View," wrestler-turned-action hero The Rock confessed that the film version of Dart's novel, "Beaches," drove him to tears.
"He said, 'I can't watch that movie without crying,'" Dart says in a phone interview from her home in California. "So there goes your theory."
Dart says this in response to being asked whether she regards her novels as 'chick lit.' Her answer, it's clear, is 'no,' The Rock's confession a tacit blessing for men who want to admit they have emotions -- and like good stories.
With a new novel, "Some Kind of Miracle," just published, it's also time to set the story straight on Dart, a Greenfield native who attended Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill and graduated from Carnegie Tech before leaving Pittsburgh for California.
In a city that likes to boast about its writers -- the David McCulloughs, the Stewart O'Nans, the Annie Dillards and John Edgar Widemans -- Dart often is overlooked.
A need to tell stories
Dart's parents were immigrants -- her mother, Rose, was from Russia, her father from Lithuania. Harry "Doc" Ratner was a social worker at the Irene Kaufman Settlement in the Hill District; there is a menorah dedicated to his memory at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill. The family lived in a tiny house in Greenfield, with little money to spare.
"And yet I never looked at my childhood as deprived," she says, noting she wore a cousin's hand-me-downs, adding, "Even when I was in my 20s and living in L.A., she was still sending me clothes."
Instead of material wealth, Dart says there was always Jewish humor, "the great sense of finding something funny in every situation. ... Whatever it was, we could handle it because we had this great group sense of humor."
There also was a longing to tell stories. Dart remembers walking down Windsor Street in Greenfield, looking in windows -- "not like a peeping Tom," she laughs -- and wondering about the people who lived there, the stories they might have to tell.
Songwriting, however, was her first love. Dart met Michele Browerman, three years her junior in high school, and the duo began writing songs. Browerman composed music, Dart penned lyrics; the young women also wrote shows for area Jewish organizations.
After graduating from Taylor Allderdice, Dart attended Carnegie Tech (now part of Carnegie Mellon University). Prior to her junior year, she pitched an idea to the student-run Scotch 'n' Soda Theatre to write a play for the organization. It was accepted, and when she came back to school that fall, a freshman approached her, asking if he could write the music. The young man was Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of "Godspell," "Pippin" and "Working."
"Again, I fell in love with songwriting," Dart says.
After college, she moved to California, where she worked in television. Notably, she was the only woman writer on the staff of "The Sonny and Cher Show."
"I started writing for Cher in '75 or '76," Dart recalls. "It was so long ago, I can't remember any specific jokes, but I did write 'Laverne, the lady of the laundromat' and a special section where Cher played herself called 'Saturday night home from a date.'"
When her novel "Beaches" was made into a movie in 1988, Dart achieved a certain degree of celebrity and fame. But one of her most personal stories was still waiting to be told.
Tale of two songwriters
"Some Kind of Miracle" is about two cousins, Dahlia and Sonny Gordon, who write songs together as teenagers. Sonny is five years older, blond and beautiful, with Marilyn Monroe-like features -- and she is troubled. When she exhibits signs of schizophrenia, Sonny is sent to a mental institution at 17.
Twenty-five years later, Dahlia is a struggling songwriter (and masseuse). She's had one hit single, a country tune recorded by Naomi Judd. When a producer she is giving a massage becomes interested in a song Dahlia is humming, she's certain she has struck gold again.
But there's a problem -- Sonny wrote the music. Dahlia must track down her cousin and get her signature if she is to succeed. When she finds her living in a group home in San Diego, family memories resurface.
Dart had little trouble drawing Sonny's character.
"Years ago when I was a kid growing up, a much older cousin was diagnosed with schizophrenia," Dart says. "... My family were immigrants who brought lots of superstitions with them from the old country, so you can imagine the superstitions that existed around mental illness."
The novel also gave Dart the opportunity to "dispel some of the myths and lift the stigmas, because so many things have happened in the world of mental illness, with new knowledge in the neurosciences. As a child, you're so helpless. If only there would have been help then."
For the novel, Dart researched mental illness and treatments, as well as music therapy. For the details about songwriting and melody, however, all she had to do was plumb memories from her past.
What she found is now informing the next step of an incredible career.
Homeward bound
At 60, Dart is embarking on another project, one that will bring her full circle to her roots in Greenfield, and her collaborations with Browerman and Schwartz. She's writing a musical called "Schmaltz," about a woman who was a star in Yiddish films in Poland before World War II.
"Again, I'm caught up in the world of songwriting," she says. "Music elevates us, and it elevates a project to the point where I'm having so much fun with this musical, I'm going to have a hard time going back to writing novels."
If Dart's new project takes off, maybe The Rock will again be moved to tears.
| Hardware store celebrity |
In public, Iris Rainer Dart isn't always recognized as a best-selling author. But no matter where she goes whenever she mentions her brother -- Elliot Ratner, who owned Ratner's, a hardware store in Squirrel Hill -- people light up.
"Everybody knows Ratner's," Dart says.
Even in Israel. A few years ago while the family was in Jerusalem for her son's wedding, the family visited the Western Wall. Dart wasn't recognized, but someone spotted her brother.
"They said, 'Mr. Ratner, is that you?'" she says, laughing. "... They always say, 'Oh, Ratner's, you can find anything there.'"
Additional Information:
Writers Read
Iris Rainer DartShe's reading ... 'Eleonora Duse: A Biography' by Helen Sheehy, and 'What a Life,' the biography of Yiddish stage star Tessa Burstein.
She just saw ... 'Anything Else,' the latest Woody Allen movie. 'I was fascinated by it because ... the character he played was a comedy writer. He took him, beat for beat, from a guy named David Panich, who is no longer with us, who used to write for old comedy shows like 'The Garry Moore Show,' and was my first partner when I worked with Sonny and Cher. I found myself sitting alone in a theater crying, because I recognized David Panich.'
She's listening to ... Music from 'Schmaltz,' a musical she is writing on a Yiddish film star, and 'Ghetto Tango: Wartime Yiddish Theater' by Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek.
