Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  Neither particularly fancied nightlife. Hammerstein perfected the art of backing out of cocktail receptions so discreetly (Jerome Kern called it “the Hammerstein glide”) that no one would realize he had gone, and on once running into Rodgers at a party, had inquired, “Fancy meeting you here—who’s minding the score?” Indeed, in their sober suits, they could have passed for bankers or lawyers or, as Groucho Marx once put it, “a couple of chiropractors.” For eighteen years, through ups and through downs, they maintained an unbroken public front of unity, harmony, and calm. “In our collaboration, Mr. Rodgers and I have no definite policy except one of complete flexibility,” as Hammerstein would write in the preface to his collected lyrics.

  The truth was far more complex. The two men only rarely worked in the same room, with Rodgers preferring to compose at his Manhattan apartment or Connecticut country house, and Hammerstein writing at his farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, or in his Manhattan town house. Rodgers was prolific and lightning fast—Noël Coward once said he could pee melody—while Hammerstein might labor for days or weeks over a single lyric before sending it off for Rodgers to write the tune. (Both had generally worked in just the opposite way with previous partners—music first, lyrics second—a remarkable reflection of their shared versatility.) Hammerstein once complained that Rodgers’s facility so irked him that he could have “thrown a brick through the phone,” when informed how quickly his partner had found a melody, while Rodgers confessed that his reputation as a speed demon “used to make me a little angry, you know, as if I perspired these tunes.” Hammerstein was a passionate political advocate for liberal and left-wing causes, while Rodgers was a conventional, middle-of-the-road liberal who steered clear of controversies. To the ends of their days, each maintained that he’d never been sure whether the other really liked him.

  * * *

  A GLIMPSE OF the careful, starchy formality of their professional relationship—even after long years of working together—can be seen in the only written record of their collaborative method that survives: an exchange of letters during the creation of Cinderella, as it happens. Hammerstein had gone to Australia to attend the 1956 Olympics, and he and Rodgers sparred delicately from afar over a ballad called “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?,” which would become the prince’s love song to Cinderella. It bears noting, as a sign of their symbiosis, that Hammerstein’s principal qualms involved the music and Rodgers’s the words.

  Writing on November 10, 1956, from the Hotel Windsor in Melbourne, Hammerstein said he was uncomfortable with one of his lyrics for the prince: “Am I making believe I see in you, a girl too lovely to be really true?” partly because he thought it uncomfortably echoed his own famous song, “Make Believe,” from Show Boat. He suggested, “Am I telling my heart I see in you…” as a more emotionally revealing alternative. But his main suggestion involved the melody.

  “Would it not be more exciting and psychologically sounder,” he asked, “to finish the refrain in major, even though you have started in minor. It is my conception that although the last line is a question the lover really believes she is ‘as beautiful as she seems.’ So after starting with doubt, the major finish would imply: ‘Oh, hell, I love you and I really think in my heart of hearts you are as beautiful as you seem.’ This is based, of course, on the assumption that it is not musically ungrammatical to start with minor and finish with major.”

  Nine days later, Rodgers replied, with a touch of the schoolmaster’s asperity, that he had no objection to the phrase “making believe,” since it was simply common parlance (and by implication nothing special that anyone might attribute to Hammerstein), but added, “I am not devoted to the line ‘A Girl Too Lovely to Be Really True,’ for the simple reason I am not devoted to splitting infinitives.” Then, raising the temperature just a notch, Rodgers added, “Apparently you don’t remember that you gave me a pretty good briefing on the subject of going into a climax” at the end of the refrain. “At that time I agreed that you were absolutely right and I changed the tune to subscribe to your suggestion.… There is absolutely nothing ungrammatical about ending in major when you start in minor. It is quite conventional and extraordinarily effective. I think you will find that you have the lift at the finish that you expected.”

  On November 28, Hammerstein answered, wounded that Rodgers had not noted his concern about making believe. “I think ‘Telling my heart’ has more emotional importance,” he wrote defensively. “You, apparently, don’t because you didn’t even mention it. Let us wait until we get together which will be in two weeks.” Hammerstein added that he had tried to avoid the split infinitive, and had even considered asking Rodgers to change his melody to aid in the effort, but thought the result would be less musically interesting.

  Five days later, Rodgers had the final word. “As I said in my last communication, once you and I sit down in a room and discuss these matters of syllables and notes, there isn’t the remotest possibility of disagreement.”

  In an interview, Rodgers once explained that when he and Hammerstein had a divergence of opinion, they resolved it with Gallic politesse in the manner of Alphonse and Gaston: “We’ll do it your way.” In this case, as in so many others, they apparently did: Hammerstein’s original words, which he doubted but Rodgers approved of, remained as written, and Rodgers’s melody, which Hammerstein proposed to alter, was, in fact, changed to end in a satisfyingly uplifting major key.

  “I guess like Gilbert and Sullivan or any of the geniuses, they were wary of each other,” recalled the actor George S. Irving, who had parts in both Oklahoma! and the last musical Rodgers ever wrote, I Remember Mama, shortly before his death. “But when it came to the crunch…”

  * * *

  WHEN IT CAME to the crunch, they delivered—time and time again. But the results often hid the enormous effort and emotional toll involved.

  Barley three months after Cinderella’s debut, Rodgers would sink into a depression—fueled partly by alcohol—that was so deep and severe as to require months of hospitalization at New York’s Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic. Years after his death, Rodgers’s daughters publicly revealed a secret that had been well kept in his lifetime: for much of his career, he was an alcoholic, albeit a high-functioning one, and an incorrigible womanizer with a girlfriend in almost every show he produced and a hideaway love nest in a Times Square hotel. When a chorus girl once slapped her hips in turn, saying that one side represented weight gained in New Haven and the other one extra pounds put on in Boston, Rodgers rejoined that he himself preferred Providence.

  For his part, Hammerstein’s reputation as a “cockeyed optimist,” to borrow one of his most famous lines from South Pacific, belied a sometimes sardonic character, who could be surly and hypercompetitive with his own children, and cutting in debate with adversaries or supplicants when they crossed him. He was every bit as hard-driving a businessman as Rodgers. Even while relishing (and deserving) his sentimental reputation as a devoted family man, he apparently conducted at least one discreet affair of his own with a statuesque showgirl.

  And yet. And yet the songs these two men made together. They are woven as seamlessly into the fabric of American life as “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Home on the Range.” In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s prime, only the music of Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Foster enjoyed a foothold in popular taste that had endured as long as their own songs have today. When a gravely wounded army lieutenant named Bob Dole struggled to recuperate after World War II, the only song that gave him comfort was Jane Froman’s recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from Carousel. More than sixty years later, when Barack Obama became the nation’s first African American president, the opera star Renée Fleming sang the same song at his inaugural concert, and it has become the favorite game-day anthem of soccer fans worldwide. As a young basketball standout at Princeton, Bill Bradley psyched himself up for every big game in the early 1960s by playing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” from The Sound of Music. When g
rieving White House staffers arrived for Richard Nixon’s resignation on the morning of August 9, 1974, they heard the Marine Band in the Grand Foyer playing songs from South Pacific. For a state visit by the Austrian president, Ronald Reagan’s staff ordered the marines to play “Edelweiss,” because someone thought it was the Austrian national anthem. When the broadcaster and Kennedy heiress Maria Shriver married the actor-bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, she called the Rodgers and Hammerstein office for permission to march down the aisle to the strains of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria.” Even today, visitors to Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. hear “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from Oklahoma! blaring from hidden stereo speakers in the park.

  Collectively, the team’s musicals won thirty-four Tony Awards, fifteen Academy Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Grammys, and two Emmys, a record unmatched by any other songwriting team. Later in life, Dick and Oscar liked to play a game in which they imagined that Oklahoma! had been a failure, “and then we tell each other why it was a failure, and how ridiculous we were to do what we did,” as Rodgers once explained. Indeed, nothing about their collaboration’s success was foreordained. If they had never so much as met, Rodgers and Hammerstein each would be remembered as signal figures in theatrical history. Together, they achieved immortality. But no one could have known that on the long-ago March evening when a handsome young cowhand loped onto a stage, singing about the dawn.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Sentimentalist

  The sophisticate is a man who thinks he can swim better than he can and sometimes drowns himself. He thinks he can drive better than he really can and sometimes causes great smashups. So, in my book, there’s nothing wrong with sentiment because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life, the birth of a child, the death of a child or of anybody, falling in love. I couldn’t be anything but sentimental about these basic things. I think to be anything but sentimental is being a “poseur.”

  Oscar Hammerstein II

  There is some dispute about whether he saw his first play at the age of three or four or five—or even eight—but there is no dispute that Oscar Hammerstein II was born into the theater. He never had a chance to escape it—and he tried. His paternal grandfather and namesake, the first Oscar Hammerstein, was the most famous theatrical producer in America, if not the world, when his grandson was born in Harlem on July 12, 1895. The elder Hammerstein was the son of German Jewish parents from Stettin, Prussia, and he showed an early talent on the flute, piano, and violin. But his father wanted him to pursue more practical subjects. Hammerstein resisted, and one day after his father beat him for going skating in a park, the son sold his violin and lit out first for Liverpool and then New York, arriving in America at the age of eighteen.

  He found work in a cigar factory on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, and eventually became a cigar manufacturer himself, ultimately owning patents for some eighty devices used in production. He used the proceeds to pursue his passion: the theater, where he made his money in vaudeville and lost several fortunes in pursuit of opera, his first love. At one point, his Manhattan Opera House rivaled the mighty Metropolitan Opera itself, which bought him out on the proviso that he not produce any opera in America for ten years. He fled to Europe, went broke, came home, and went broke again, saved only by his son Willie, the younger Oscar’s father, who managed the family’s legitimate theaters and, later, its variety houses. The old man was a romantic, but also a realist. One of his favorite maxims: “There is no limit to the number of people who will stay away from a bad show.”

  Oscar II had hardly any contact with his famous forebear while growing up (his own father wanted his offspring to avoid a theatrical career at all costs), but he would inherit his namesake’s pragmatism: The composer Johnny Green called Oscar II “a businessman-poet,” and his future partner Richard Rodgers would describe him as “a dreamer, but a very careful dreamer.” The younger Oscar first met his grandfather, a gruff and forbidding figure in a black silk top hat, in the lobby of Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, a vaudeville house at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square. Later, alone in the darkened theater, young Oscar watched transfixed as a bevy of women, costumed as water maidens, sought to untangle a large fishing net and sang a beguiling siren song. At intermission, his father took him backstage, where he promptly came face-to-face with a large lion in a cage. Suddenly, the cage started to roll toward him, and he feared he might be sick to his stomach. By one later account, he went home, slept fourteen hours, and “when he awoke, he announced that the theater would be his life work.”

  At the age of four, for reasons he himself would later be unable to explain, Oscar was sent to an apartment one flight below his own family’s to live with his maternal grandparents, who were of Scots-Presbyterian stock, while his younger brother, Reginald, remained upstairs with their parents, Willie and Allie. Young Oscar started each day sharing a milk punch spiked with scotch with his grandfather, James Nimmo, and at bedtime they would split a bottle of Guinness stout. Every morning, the pair would troop to nearby Mount Morris Park shortly before seven, in time to see an attendant climb the winding staircase to a bell tower and sound the hour. His grandfather told him that it was the devil who rang the bell, a little old man whose heart was filled with kindness and his pockets with sourballs of the kind that Grandfather Nimmo himself dispensed. Oscar would later attribute his love of the theater to his Grandfather Hammerstein and his sunny, upbeat view of life to Grandfather Nimmo.

  If Oscar and Reggie thrilled to all aspects of the theater (a special favorite was the Wild West show of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, which they managed to see over and over for free by volunteering to be two of the children in a stage coach chased by a tribe of wild Indians), Oscar’s father fulfilled his role as the theatrical businessman of the family with more duty than joy. He didn’t like the theater, didn’t see plays except his own, and didn’t even audition promising acts he’d heard about, on the theory that if they were good enough, they’d come to him. He trudged to the theater each morning, returning home for an early dinner before trooping back downtown again to count the nightly box-office receipts. Oscar would later recall, “Kissing him goodbye in the morning and hello in the evening was nearly the whole story of my experience with my father during my early youth. I didn’t really get to know him. He didn’t really become a force of any kind in my life until my mother died. I was fifteen then. Up until that time I had respect and affection for him merely because he was my father. He seldom scolded me and never punished me, I think the extent of his rebukes would be asking: ‘Is that nice?’ if he disapproved of something I had done or said.”

  By his own reckoning, “Ockie,” as he would be known to his family and intimates for the rest of his life, was a cossetted mother’s boy. “She was my friend, my confidante, obviously my worshipful admirer and also the firmest and strongest person I knew,” he would remember late in life. “Without ever punishing me, and without ever seeming stern, she had a way of letting me know when she meant a thing to be done or not to be done.” Allie’s death from a botched abortion and the resulting peritonitis (she was an early advocate of birth control, but methods were unreliable then) affected him deeply. During her illness, he would recall, “I didn’t believe she was going to die for the simple reason that I couldn’t visualize a world without her, couldn’t imagine living without her.” After she died, he found he was able to carry on with his life, and noted that this early trauma “crystallized an attitude” he had had toward death ever since. “I never feel shaken by death, as I would have been if this had not happened to me when I was fifteen. I received the shock and took it, and sort of resisted as an enemy the grief that comes after death rather than giving way to it. I get stubborn about it and say it is not going to lick me, because it didn’t then.”

  More than forty years after his mother’s death, Oscar would write to his own eldest son, Bill, that “whatever order or form I have got out of life has been e
xtracted from chaos,” adding, “my strange disorderly unsystematic family may have developed in me a tolerance for disorder which makes it possible for me to live in a disorderly world, even though I crave another kind.” Indeed, Stephen Sondheim, his protégé and surrogate son, would judge that “Oscar’s point of view … was both more hard-headed and more quirky than people who think of him as a naïve and dreamy idealist might expect.”

  * * *

  AFTER ALLIE’S DEATH, Willie Hammerstein remarried—to his wife’s maiden sister, Anna, who was known as Mousie. She was a buxom, tattooed, somewhat blowsy woman, whose favorite greeting was “Hiya, Tootsie,” but she became a loving stepmother, encouraging a warmer relationship between Willie and his sons. By their teenage years, both Oscar and Reggie were spending their summers at the Weingart Institute, a pioneering and renowned summer camp in Highmount, New York, where Oscar made enduring friendships with his fellow campers, including Harold Hyman, who became his longtime physician, Leighton Brill, who would work as his assistant for two decades (and would for a time run the Hollywood office of Rodgers and Hammerstein, with mixed results), and Myron and David O. Selznick, the brothers who would win fame as Hollywood’s first talent agent and one of its legendary producers.

  In 1912, at the age of seventeen, Oscar entered Columbia University, where his contemporaries included the future publisher Bennett Cerf, the future screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, the future lyricist and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicist Howard Dietz, and an antic, elfin personality named Lorenz Hart, whose future would be interwoven with Hammerstein’s own in ways he could scarcely have fathomed. In part to please his father, Oscar enrolled in a pre-law curriculum. But Willie Hammerstein died of kidney disease at age thirty-nine in 1914, and with him died any last obstacle to Oscar’s pursuit of a theatrical career. From the beginning, the allure of Columbia lay less in its classrooms than in the Varsity Show, a musical comedy extravaganza staged each spring in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor in Times Square. Though the shows were amateur—performed by undergraduates and typically produced by recent alumni—they approached professional caliber and were routinely reviewed by the major New York newspapers. Hammerstein joined the University Players as both a performer and writer, and his first appearance was as a “consumptive poet” in the 1915 show, On Your Way. The critic of the New York Evening World wrote of his performance, “Oscar is a comedian and as a fun-maker he was a la carte, meaning all to the mustard.”