Uppermost in Hammerstein’s mind while he is writing a lyric is the larynx of the performer who will have to stand on a stage and sing the thing. “The larynxes of singers are limited,” he has remarked. He tries to provide convenient breathing places in his lyrics, and to avoid climaxes in which a singer will be straining at a word that closes the larynx. “A word like ‘sweet’ would be a very bad word on which to sing a high note,” he says. “The ‘e’ sound closes the larynx, and the singer cannot let go with his full voice. Furthermore, the ‘t’ ending the word is a hard consonant, which would cut the singer off and thwart his and the composer’s desire to sustain the note.” Hammerstein worries a good deal about closed larynxes, and he is inclined to brood morbidly over the times he has permitted his affection for a word to outweigh his concern over a closed larynx. For example, he often berates himself for ending the refrain of “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?,” in Carousel, with “You’re his girl and he’s your feller, And all the rest is talk.” He feels that if he were to write this song again, his last line would go something like “And that’s all you need to know.” “The singer could have hit the ‘o’ vowel and held it as long as she wanted to, eventually pulling applause,” he says. The song was not a distinguished success as sheet music or on records, and Hammerstein is convinced that the word “talk,” which closed the singer’s larynx at the finish, was responsible for this. The majority of his last lines are, he feels, forceful larynx-openers, conducive to applause-pulling, such as “Oh, what a beautiful day!,” “Once you have found her, never let her go!,” “Ol’ man river, he jes keeps rollin’ along,” and “Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i.”
Hammerstein recalls with painful poignancy the problems he faced during the creation of certain lyrics. To a person who does not write lyrics, many of his dilemmas might seem elementary, but to Hammerstein they represent heroic struggles with the muse. “The problem of a duet for the lovers in Oklahoma! seemed insurmountable,” he says. His leading characters—Curly, the cowboy, and Laurey, the young girl—are very much attracted to each other, but Laurey, who is shy, tries to hide her feelings. Curly does not like her attitude, and assumes a fairly belligerent one of his own. Instead of expressing their love, they take to bickering and squabbling. Since both Hammerstein and Rodgers wished to maintain the atmosphere of crackle and snap until at least the second act, it was impossible for Hammerstein to write a simple song in which Curly and Laurey said, out loud and with their larynxes open, “I love you.” Hammerstein talked his dilemma over with Rodgers at great length. Together they hit upon the solution of having the two young people caution each other against demonstrating any warmth, since this might be construed by outsiders as an expression of affection. “People Will Say We’re in Love” was the successful result. Hammerstein had another problem when he collaborated with Rodgers on the musical film State Fair. In the story, a young girl has the blues, for no particular reason, since her family is about to treat her to a visit to a state fair. Hammerstein wanted a song for her mood—it was time for a song, anyway—and it occurred to him, while he was pondering, that her melancholy condition bore a resemblance to spring fever. This thought made Hammerstein even more melancholy than the girl, since state fairs are held in the fall, not the spring. “I toyed with the notion of having her say, in effect, it’s autumn but I have spring fever, so it might as well be spring,” Hammerstein has said. He casually mentioned this possible solution to Rodgers. “That’s it!” cried Rodgers. “All my doubts were gone,” Hammerstein says. “I had a partner behind me.” Out of this came the well-known “It Might as Well Be Spring.”
Hammerstein thinks that one reason for his success as a lyricist is that his vocabulary is not enormous. A huge vocabulary, he is convinced, hampers a lyric writer; it might persuade him to substitute “fantasy,” “reverie,” “nothingness,” “chimera,” “figment,” or even “air-drawn dagger” for the simple word “dream.” He has discovered that a lyric writer seems always to have a supply of the word “dream” on hand, much as a housewife keeps salt in the house. Before composing the lyrics for South Pacific, he decided that he would avoid “dream.” He felt that it had been turning up too often in his lyrics. When he had finished the South Pacific lyrics, he found that “dream” appeared with frightening regularity. “Bali Ha’i” speaks of “Your own special hopes, your own special dreams.” “Some Enchanted Evening” says, “Then fly to her side, and make her your own, or all through your life you may dream all alone” and “The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams.” “Happy Talk” declares that “You gotta have a dream; if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true? If you don’t talk happy an’ you never had a dream, den you’ll never have a dream come true.” Even one of the songs withdrawn from South Pacific during the pre-Broadway tryout said, “The sky is a bright canary yellow…you will dream about the view.” Hammerstein lost his dream of the view but retained the view itself—the bright canary-yellow sky in “A Cockeyed Optimist.”
The word “dream” has worried Hammerstein in more ways than one. Not only has it turned up uninvited in his lyrics but its meaning, he feels, is not precisely clear to him. He is certain that he has never written a word in which he did not believe, which did not spring from the heart, and he is therefore disturbed by the fact that he and the word “dream” don’t entirely understand each other. “The most important ingredient of a good song is sincerity,” he has often remarked. “Let the song be yours and yours alone.” He can put down such words as “love,” “ain’t,” “feelin’,” “rain,” “yes,” “forget,” “home,” “blue,” “bird,” “star,” “believe,” “arms,” “nice,” “little,” “moon,” “trees,” “kiss,” “sky,” “dame,” “beautiful,” “baby,” again and again, and he has been doing so for thirty years, and his only concern is whether they belong in a lyric, or at that particular point in a lyric. These words do not trouble him at all. The word “love” poses no problems for him, and he has no qualms about using it all the time. He will write down “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy” or “Dat’s love! Dat’s love! Dat’s love! Dat’s love!” without hesitation. He will even dwell upon the idea—“Love is quite a simple thing, and nothing so bewildering, no matter what the poets sing, in words and phrases lyrical. Birds find bliss in every tree, and fishes kiss beneath the sea, so when love comes to you and me, it really ain’t no miracle”—eat a large supper, sleep eight hours, and rise the next morning to write another lyric about love. But the word “dream” perplexes him, even though he once went so far into dreamland in “Music in the Air” as to write, “There’s a dream beyond a dream beyond a dream beyond a dream.” It first made a real nuisance of itself seventeen years ago, while he was working with Sigmund Romberg on a motion picture. Romberg had turned out a waltz tune, and Hammerstein took it home to compose the lyrics. The moment he finished looking over the music, the first line, which he also thought would make a good title, popped into his head: “When I grow too old to dream.” A moment later, a second line miraculously popped into his head, below the first: “I’ll have you to remember.” “I have it!” he recalls crying out loud. “ ‘When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember.’ ” Suddenly, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he was afflicted with a curious sensation that something was wrong with his words. He realized that he didn’t understand what he had written. He remembers that he said to himself, “Too old for what kind of dreams? As a matter of fact, when you’re old, aren’t you likely to dream more than at any other time in your life, don’t you look back and dream about the past?” For three weeks, he struggled with other words, but he kept returning to the original ones. “I loved to sing it to myself, alone in my study,” he says. He decided to stick to these lines, and the song became a big hit, but its triumph shook Hammerstein deeply, since innumerable colleagues asked—and ask to this day—what the words meant. Before writing
“When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember,” Hammerstein had religiously believed in simple, unambiguous lyrics. If he wanted to ask, “Why do I love you? Why do you love me?,” he went ahead and asked it. Here, however, was a mysterious, perhaps meaningless combination of words, and they were commercially successful. The more Hammerstein brooded over the lyric, the more he felt that he had stumbled onto something bigger than himself. A year or so ago, still brooding, he brought the matter up in the introduction to his collection of lyrics. “Gertrude Stein has, of course, this unspecific approach to the use of words,” he wrote, “and Edith Sitwell, in her group of songs entitled Façade, has made a deliberate attempt to write words with special emphasis on sound and very little attention to meaning or clarity. I do not believe that the future of good lyric writing lies in this direction, but my experience with ‘When I grow too old to dream’ forces me to admit that there is something in the idea. It belongs with the general flight from literalism in all art expression—notably painting—which characterizes the creative works of this century.”
FROM
Lillian Ross
MAY 24, 1952 (ON JOHN HUSTON AND THE MAKING OF THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE)
HE MAKING OF the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie The Red Badge of Courage, based on the Stephen Crane novel about the Civil War, was preceded by routine disclosures about its production plans from Louella Parsons (“John Huston is writing a screen treatment of Stephen Crane’s classic, The Red Badge of Courage, as a possibility for an M-G-M picture.”); from Hedda Hopper (“Metro has an option on The Red Badge of Courage and John Huston’s working up a budget for it. But there’s no green light yet.”); and from Variety (“Pre-production work on Red Badge of Courage commenced at Metro with thesp-tests for top roles in drama.”), and it was preceded, in the spring of 1950, by a routine visit by John Huston, who is both a screen writer and a director, to New York, the headquarters of Loew’s, Inc., the company that produces and distributes M-G-M pictures. On the occasion of his visit, I decided to follow the history of that particular movie from beginning to end, in order to learn whatever I might learn about the American motion-picture industry.
Huston, at forty-three, was one of the most admired, rebellious, and shadowy figures in the world of motion pictures. I had seen him a year before, when he came here to accept an award of a trip around the world for his film contributions to world unity. He had talked of an idea he had for making a motion picture about the nature of the world while he was going around it. Then he had flown back to Hollywood, and to the demands of his employers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and had made The Asphalt Jungle, a picture about a band of criminals engaged in pursuits that Huston described somewhere in the dialogue of the movie as “a left-handed form of human endeavor.” Now, on this visit, shortly after the sudden death, in Hollywood, of his father, Walter Huston, he telephoned me from his Waldorf Tower suite and said he was having a terrible time trying to make The Red Badge of Courage. Louis B. Mayer and most of the other top executives at M-G-M, he said, were opposed to the entire project. “You know something?” he said, over the telephone. He has a theatrical way of inflecting his voice that can give a commonplace query a rich and melodramatic intensity. “They don’t want me to make this picture. And I want to make this picture.” He made the most of every syllable, so that it seemed at that moment to lie under his patent and have some special urgency. “Come on over, kid, and I’ll tell you all about the hassle,” he said.
· · ·
The door of Huston’s suite was opened by a conservatively attired young man with a round face and pink cheeks. He introduced himself as Arthur Fellows. “John is in the next room getting dressed,” he said. “Imagine getting a layout like this all to yourself! That’s the way the big studios do things.” He nodded with approval at the Waldorf’s trappings. “Not that I care for the big studios,” he said. “I believe in being independent. I work for David Selznick. I’ve worked for David for fifteen years. David is independent. I look at the picture business as a career. Same as banking, or medicine, or law. You’ve got to learn it from the ground up. I learned it from the ground up with David. I was an assistant director on Duel in the Sun. I directed the scene of the fight between two horses. Right now, I’m here temporarily on publicity and promotion. David—” He broke off as Huston strode into the room. Huston made his entrance in the manner of an actor who is determined to win the immediate attention of his audience.
“Hel-lo, kid,” Huston said as we shook hands. He took a step back, then put his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned forward intently. “Well!” he said. He made the word expand into a major pronouncement.
Huston is a lean, rangy man, two inches over six feet tall, with long arms and long hands, long legs and long feet. He has thick black hair, which had been slicked down with water, but some of the front strands fell raffishly over his forehead. He has a deeply creased, leathery face, high cheekbones, and slanting, reddish-brown eyes. His ears are flattened against the sides of his head, and the bridge of his nose is bashed in. His eyes looked watchful, and yet strangely empty of all feeling, in weird contrast to the heartiness of his manner. He took his hands out of his pockets and yanked at his hair. “Well!” he said, again as though he were making a major pronouncement. He turned to Fellows. “Art, order some Martinis, will you, kid?”
Huston sat down on the arm of a chair, fixed a long brown cigarette in one corner of his mouth, took a kitchen match from his trouser pocket, and scraped the head of the match into flame with his thumbnail. He lit the cigarette and drew deeply on it, half closing his eyes against the smoke, which seemed to make them slant still more. Then he rested his elbows on his knees, holding the cigarette to his mouth with two long fingers of one hand, and looked out the window. The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting—having set up a Huston scene—for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of the Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual “shots” (the abrupt closeup of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.
“I just love the light at this time of the day,” Huston said as Fellows returned from the phone. “Art, don’t you just love the light at this time of the day?”
Fellows said it was all right.
Huston gave a chuckle. “Well, now,” he said, “here I am, spending the studio’s money on this trip, and I don’t even know whether I’m going to make the picture I’m here for. I’m auditioning actors at the Loew’s office and talking production up there and doing all the publicity things they tell me to do. I’ve got the Red Badge script O.K.’d, and I’m going down South to pick locations for the picture, but nothing is moving. We can’t make this picture unless we have six hundred Confederate uniforms and six hundred Union uniforms. And the studio is just not making those uniforms for us. I’m beginning to think they don’t want the picture!”
“It’s an offbeat picture,” Fellows said politely. “The public wants pictures like Ma and Pa Kettle. I say make pictures the public wants. Over here,” he said to a waiter who had entered with a tray holding six Martinis in champagne glasses. “No getting away from it, John,” Fellows went on, handing Huston a drink. “Biggest box-office draws are pictures catering to the intelligence of the twelve-year-old.”
People underestimated the intelligence of the twelve-year-old, Huston said. He said he had an adopted son in his early
teens, a Mexican-Indian orphan, Pablo, whom he had found while making Treasure of Sierra Madre in Mexico a few years ago, and his boy had excellent taste in pictures. “Why, my boy Pablo reads Shakespeare,” he said. “Do you read Shakespeare, Art?”
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