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Invisible as his quirks may be, Hammerstein is a major eccentric. “I am in love with a wonderful theatre,” he often says. It is one of the monumental love affairs of history. He cannot enter a theatre without experiencing that acute aesthetic dizziness reported by travellers when they gaze for the first time upon the Taj Mahal. Hammerstein is six feet one and a half inches tall, weighs slightly less than two hundred pounds, and has the broad, hunched shoulders, the long, easy gait, and the ready, comforting, it’s-going-to-be-all-right-fellows smile of a popular football coach, but passing through a stage door makes him feel weak and helpless. The sight of a bare stage illuminated by a single glaring rehearsal light sends sharp pains up and down his back. These sensations are nothing compared to the exquisite paralysis that comes over him when he stands at the rear of a packed theatre and observes an audience enjoying one of his own shows. Outwardly, he is calm, even indifferent, on such an occasion. Standing quietly, with his arms resting on the rail, he could easily be mistaken for a theatre manager. The only hint that the Furies are raging within is a slight droop at the corners of his mouth, which gives him the look of a man who fears, as Hammerstein feared at the Victoria when he was four, that he might any moment get sick to his stomach. Often, while one of his songs is being sung, he walks swiftly into the empty lobby and bursts into tears. Hammerstein has listened to “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” at least five hundred times, but every time he has been reduced to weeping. “It’s so beautiful that it makes a man want to cry,” he explains.
Hammerstein’s overpowering devotion to the theatre includes not only an intense appreciation of his own lyrics but an equally intense appreciation of the music composed for them by his partner, Richard Rodgers. Rodgers is sometimes able to sit down at a piano and turn out a hit tune in a few minutes. His head is filled with an extraordinary collection of whistleable airs that require only a set of lyrics to bring them out into the open. Hammerstein is a slow and tortured writer. He often labors for weeks to produce a refrain of fifty words or so. He worked for five weeks, for example, over the lyrics of “Hello, Young Lovers!,” in The King and I, and finally threw all his previous efforts aside and wrote the song, in a frenzy of creation, in two days. Once he has completed the lyrics for a song, he is spiritually and physically exhausted. As a result, he is exceedingly attached to what he writes, and when he listens to the words he has a tendency to recall the suffering he underwent while putting them together. Hammerstein is a tolerant man, but his tolerance stops short of letting anyone tamper with so much as a word of his lyrics. Some years ago, a radio singer, not quite sure of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!,” inadvertently substituted “An’ a li’l ol’ willer is laughin’ at me” for “An’ a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me.” Hammerstein was tuned to the program, his eyes full of tears. Shocked by the alteration, he switched off the radio, and swore that that particular singer would have a pretty hard time ever getting into one of his shows.
Although Hammerstein is sentimental about the theatre, his affection has a pragmatic base. “Oscar is a very careful dreamer,” one of his oldest friends says. In Oscar’s estimation, the public is the final judge of what is and what is not a work of art, and he has small patience with the experimental theatre. The test of a good play, for Hammerstein, is the length of the line at the box office on a rainy morning. “With my shows,” he says, “I don’t want to wake up in the morning and have to worry about whether or not the weather will affect the size of the house.” In spite of his firm faith in the judgment of audiences, Hammerstein has been engaged for years in a strange personal struggle with them. “It’s a matter of love and hate,” he explains. He has evolved a method of evaluating an audience’s reactions to a show, which he uses during the out-of-town tryouts of his productions. He stands at the rear rail and observes the backs of the heads of the audience. He believes he can pretty well figure out what is going on inside the heads. “There’s a silent criticism felt by all actors, and everybody else who knows the theatre,” he says, “but my method goes beyond that. And I don’t pay any attention to coughs, either. They don’t mean a thing. But if the heads are motionless, we’re O.K. If they move either up or down or from side to side, we’re in trouble. If people start rustling through the programs, we’re in real trouble.” Hammerstein does not confine his researches to the backs of heads. He often goes into a box and peers down at the faces of the audience. If the customers are enjoying a show, he feels, an indefinable glow comes over their faces. “I can’t describe it, I just know it when I see it,” he says. He may concentrate on one face and, crouched low in the box, await the arrival of the glow. If, instead of the glow, the face reveals dislike or, what is even worse in Hammerstein’s opinion, no expression at all, the muscles of his stomach become even tighter. “There are faces that rise to haunt me,” he says. “Years ago, a man sat in the third row in a tryout in Trenton, a big, fat, red-faced, snorey fellow, everybody around him laughing and laughing, and he just sat there, no expression, no nothing. I remember every line of that face. I would recognize him anywhere. My dislike is still quite active. I remember, too, a young woman once in Baltimore. What a glow! The perfect glow! A lovely, sweet face, responsive to everything!”
Hammerstein feels that the severest test of how a show is working out comes the moment the first-act curtain falls. Just before this moment, Hammerstein leans forward and cups a hand to one ear, then stiffens like a bird dog. “If that curtain drops and there is silence followed by silence—oh, we’re in trouble!” he says. “If that curtain falls and there is silence followed swiftly by an excited buzz of conversation, a sort of ground swell of buzzy talk, we’re probably safe.” After only a minute or two of such listening, he rushes into the lobby. There, head down, he mixes in with the crowd. “I concentrate on a man and woman who spy another man and woman they know,” he says. “If one pair approaches the other and says a few quick words about the play, and then there’s general conversation about the play, we’re O.K. If they merely say, ‘Pretty good first act. When are you and Mary coming over for bridge?,’ we’re in real trouble!” Hammerstein slips back into the theatre after the intermission and again is on the alert for the glow. He thinks that the glow is even more important during the second act. “If they glow when they get back into their seats,” he says, “the chances are that the glow is permanent and we have ’em for good.” Hammerstein feels that the glow induced by Oklahoma! may never be duplicated within his lifetime, or anybody else’s. “People returned to their seats for the second act and the glow was like the light from a thousand lanterns,” he says. “You could feel the glow, it was that bright.”
Hammerstein has put all his adult years into inducing the glow. In what is perhaps his second most glowing triumph, South Pacific, the glow begins to spread across the faces of the audience soon after the curtain is up. Hammerstein has given a good deal of thought to the effect that South Pacific exerts upon audiences, and he is sure that he has pinned down some of the reasons for its phenomenal success, and glow. “The curtain rises,” he recently told a friend, “and we are on an island in the Pacific with luxuriant foliage. A native boy and girl are singing a little song in French. The audience says, ‘What’s this?’ Then, before they have even settled in their seats—bang!—you’re off to the races with a complication. The hero and heroine come onstage—the curtain has been up a bare few minutes—and an honest approach to a love story has been placed before you. There is Emile de Becque, fifty-odd, a planter, cultured, a Frenchman, and a highly romantic figure. There is Nellie Forbush, in her twenties, American, fresh, young, beautiful, a nurse. Two people who have nothing whatsoever in common are in love. No lecherous stuff, you understand. Emile de Becque loves Nellie Forbush. There is nothing underhanded about it. She is ashamed to admit her love—afraid, really, for fear of its not being reciprocated. It’s too good to be true, it’s unbelievable. They express their love and we have the audience in a death grip; we jum
p on them, we beat them up. Then, suddenly—bang!—the scene changes and there’s a fat old thing, a native woman, selling grass skirts. That’s Bloody Mary, and she is unlike anything the audience has ever seen before. The change of pace is terrific. The audience is still in the death grip! They’re caught, they’re helpless, they can’t breathe. We never let go!”
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Hammerstein is a gentle person, with a genuine affection for his fellow-man, and he takes extreme pains in his writing to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings. While working on The King and I, he was acutely and almost constantly fearful that he might, in some way or other, offend the people of Siam, whose King is the King of the title. “I did not want to tread on any Oriental toes,” he said recently. “I had to be careful about gags about the huge number of wives in the royal family. You know, I think we are crude in the West compared to the East. What was required was the Eastern sense of dignity and pageantry—and none of this business of girls dressed in Oriental costumes dancing out onto the stage and singing ‘ching-a-ling-a-ling-ling’ with their fingers in the air.” For the most part, during the construction of a book for a musical, Hammerstein does not attempt to pry too deeply into any of the subtle and complex aspects of human relationships. He is content to stay close to what he considers the fundamentals—love, jealousy, death, and so on. A great many observers of his career regard this simplified attitude toward life as evidence of almost surpassing wisdom. “Oscar has pinned down the verities,” a friend of his says. “He knows precisely what audiences want, their saturation point on any one emotion, and he gives them just that and no more. It’s uncanny, it’s wizardry.” To another group of observers, equally fond of Hammerstein, the limitations of his plots indicate the boundaries of his experience. “Oscar has a beautiful and unsullied view of life,” a man who has known him since childhood declares. “He’s an anomaly in this ugly world. He believes that love conquers all, that virtue triumphs, and that dreams come true.”
While he is working on lyrics, Hammerstein relies almost entirely upon flights of fancy, even when he is dealing with what would appear to be matters of fact. He does not feel that research adds materially to the value of his lyrics, so he rarely dips into a reference work. On the few occasions when he has undertaken research, it has been of an uncomplicated nature, and he early discovered that it raised more questions than it settled. While writing Carousel, he decided to compose a lyric about a clambake. He had never been to a clambake, but he had heard of them, and they sounded like fun. He found himself putting down the words “This was a real nice clambake,” and they sounded like real nice words. He felt that in the second stanza he should describe the clambake in detail, and he tried to recall clambakes he had heard of or read of. He wrote about codfish chowder “cooked in iron kettles, onions floatin’ on the top, curlin’ up in petals,” ribbons of salt pork, and so on, and he felt certain that he was on safe clambake ground. He was aware that lobsters often turn up at clambakes, but when he began to think about the lobsters, he ran into a snag. He assumed that they “sizzled and crackled and sputtered a song, fitten fer an angels’ choir. Fitten fer an angels’, fitten fer an angels’, fitten fer an angels’ choir!,” but a pang of conscience struck him when he came to describing what happened to the lobsters after they were pulled out of the fire. He wrote, “We slit ’em down the front.” Then he wrote, “We slit ’em down the back.” Then he began to wonder just where in hell you do slit a lobster. He dropped in one day at an obscure sea-food restaurant and asked the chef there how he slit his lobsters. The man said down the back, and Hammerstein wrote it that way, adding, in the flush of creation, “and peppered ’em good, and doused ’em in melted butter.” After Carousel opened, a disconcerting number of complaints poured in to Hammerstein. “HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT LOBSTERS EMPLOYED IN CLAMBAKE BE SPLIT DOWN BACK?” one telegram read. “ANY FOOL KNOWS LOBSTERS SPLIT DOWN FRONT. THAT WAS NO CLAMBAKE.” “Shame on you for lack of facts re lobster split,” read a sample letter. Hammerstein decided that thenceforth he would trust his intuitions. Since that unfortunate experience, he has done little research, but he did make an effort to gather background for South Pacific by glancing at some maps of the Pacific area and speaking to several people who had been out there during the war.
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A man’s lyrics, Hammerstein feels, are a reflection of his attitude toward life. “I couldn’t write a sophisticated or sharp lyric, or something terribly, terribly clever, like some lyric writers,” he once told a friend. “I couldn’t, because I don’t see things that way. To me, one of the most beautiful and expressive lyrics of all time is Irving Berlin’s simple ‘All alone, by the telephone.’ Examine those words. Think about them. They tell an entire story. Nothing more needs to be said. You see the picture, complete and whole. All alone by the telephone—the girl jilted perhaps, lonely, unhappy, waiting for the phone to ring. I envy those who can write tricky words, but they are a different sort of man.” Hammerstein feels, too, that if his lyrics display a certain simplicity and wholesomeness, it is largely because he tries to live a simple and wholesome life. His habits are a source of wonder along Broadway, and many of his colleagues regard the regularity of his life as dangerously close to heresy. “The fellow breaks all the rules,” a producer said to a colleague in Lindy’s early one morning. “Why, he’s home now, sleeping like a baby. Isn’t that horrible?” Hammerstein has a real dislike of night life, and he rarely turns up at night clubs. He does his best to avoid large parties, too, and when he is persuaded to attend one, he departs quietly about midnight. He sleeps a full eight hours each night, eats a large hot breakfast, works until one, eats a large hot lunch, works all afternoon, eats a large hot supper, and then, unless he goes to the theatre (he makes a point of seeing practically every show that comes to New York), pokes around in his study, either watching television or reading. He owns an imposing five-story house on East Sixty-third Street and an eighty-acre Bucks County farm near Doylestown, Pennsylvania, eighty-five miles from New York. In both town house and farmhouse, he has large, impressively furnished studies, and he spends a great deal of time in them, sometimes, for days at a stretch, emerging only to eat and sleep. Hammerstein’s family life is a warm and affectionate one. He is married to the former Dorothy Blanchard, an attractive, red-headed woman who was understudy to Beatrice Lillie in Charlot’s Revue of 1924. It is the second marriage for each of them, and each has two children by the previous marriage. The Hammersteins also have a twenty-year-old son, James, who works for Leland Hayward, the producer and agent.
When working on his lyrics, Hammerstein prefers to be on his farm. He is convinced that the muse has little chance of flowering among the fleshpots of New York. When he begins to write, he broods, and when he broods, he becomes unapproachable and sullen. He writes standing up, and in one corner of his Bucks County study there is a high writing desk, like a lectern. For hours at a time, clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back, he paces up and down the study, occasionally stopping before the desk to jot down a word or two on a sheet of yellow foolscap. The countryside around Doylestown nourishes his spirit, he claims, and he often walks along the roads, alone and brooding, his head down almost inside his coat collar. “Oscar meditating on a country road looks like something out of Thomas Hardy on a heath,” a friend of his said not long ago. On rainy days when he feels the need for communion with nature, he tramps back and forth on the porch of his house. As soon as he hits upon a line for a lyric, he sets it to a dummy tune of his own and sings it to Mrs. Hammerstein. “Oscar’s dummy tunes are so terrible they make you want to cry,” she has declared, “but he has perfect rhythm.”
Until he worked with Joshua Logan on the book of South Pacific, Hammerstein wrote his dialogue in longhand. Logan, a man who cannot utter a simple “Thank you” without making it sound like a second-act dénouement, had long been addicted to recording dialogue on a dictaphone. Hammerstein ridiculed the notion, but Logan persuaded him to speak a few of Emile de B
ecque’s lines in South Pacific into his machine. “In peacetime, the boat from America comes once a month,” said Hammerstein tentatively. “The ladies—the wives of the planters—often go to Australia during the hot months. It can get very hot here.” Hammerstein listened to the playback and was somewhat bowled over by his performance. Throughout the writing of the book, all of which was done at the Hammerstein farm, the two men used Logan’s dictaphone. They would speak several lines, passing the mouthpiece back and forth, and then listen with deep appreciation to their work. The writing of South Pacific accomplished another change in Hammerstein’s habits. Logan is a nocturnal animal, and he does some of his best work during what are known as the small hours. He suffers from a chronic inability to fall asleep until nearly dawn, the time of day Hammerstein is usually leaping out of bed, ready for a day’s work. The two men compromised by working until two in the morning. Hammerstein then retired, yawning. Logan went upstairs and alternately read poetry and took hot baths until four or five. He slept until noon, when he and Hammerstein would start revising a typed transcript of their dialogue of the previous evening. By the time this began, Hammerstein would have been up for hours, pacing his study, writing lyrics. “It was a real sacrifice for Oscar, working past midnight,” Logan has told a friend. “I am very grateful.”
In recent years, Hammerstein is convinced, books and lyrics have come into their own, and their contribution to a musical show is no longer taken for granted. Writing about his early days in show business, in an introduction to a collection of his lyrics, Hammerstein said, “The librettist was a kind of stable boy. If the race was won, he was seldom mentioned. If the race was lost, he was blamed for giving the horse the wrong feed.” These days, he feels, words are as important as music, and the score of a musical comedy will not be successful if the lyrics lack interest, do not advance the plot, or are not carefully integrated with the music. In fact, Rodgers and Hammerstein have developed a new popular art form that is neither musical comedy nor opera but something in between. The most common question put to Hammerstein by people he meets is whether the words or the music come first. Hammerstein is a reasonable man, and doesn’t mind answering the question, weary as he is of it. Until he began collaborating with Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein wrote his lyrics after the composer had written the music, but today, as a rule, his lyrics are done first. He considers this a sensible arrangement, far more favorable to the writing of good lyrics. Most scores, however, are done the other way. The music-first method, Hammerstein thinks, developed from the fact that during the first years of the century a good many musical shows were imported from the Continent, notably from Vienna, so that the American lyric writers had to fit their lines to the music. Some of the foreign composers subsequently were themselves imported to the United States. Lyric writers working with them discovered that if the words were written before the music, they sounded weird, and were sometimes completely unsingable, because of the composers’ unfamiliarity with English. Hammerstein believes, too, that the rise of jazz and the fondness for dancing placed the emphasis on the music of a song, and that the lot of the lyricist was made easier if he performed his stint after the music had been composed.
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