The Night Mary Martin Said, ‘Those Dear Boys Have Lost Their Talent’

Broadway legends aren’t always born on stage. Sometimes, they come from a single, brutally funny line.

Picture this: it’s the mid-1950s, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe are nervously previewing a few new songs for My Fair Lady. Their guests? Broadway royalty Mary Martin and her husband, producer Richard Halliday.

Mary listens politely. She smiles. And then… nothing. She and Richard leave without much comment. The poor composers are left to wonder if they’ve struck gold—or struck out.

That night, as the story goes, Mary paced the floor, finally turning to her husband with a sigh:

“Richard, those dear boys have lost their talent.”

Ouch.

Halliday passed the line along a few days later, and it instantly became Broadway lore. Some say Lerner and Loewe even turned it into a running joke between themselves—whenever inspiration ran dry, one would quip to the other: “You, dear boy, have lost your talent.”

Of course, My Fair Lady would go on to become one of the greatest musicals ever written. Mary Martin, who turned down the chance to play Eliza, probably never regretted it—she had Peter Pan to fly away with. But her devastating little comment lives on, a reminder that even geniuses sometimes get a bad review… from a friend.

And somewhere, you can almost picture Lerner and Loewe still chuckling about it in musical-theatre heaven.