Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  The ballet made On Your Toes electrifying, and its star, Ray Bolger, wowed Broadway audiences with his style of rubber-legged, “skin-and-boneless” dancing that suggested he was dangling from a puppeteer’s string, his feet never touching the floor. (He would later play the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.) Rodgers’s insistent, syncopated melody, with its signature brassy main theme, was his most extended musical undertaking to date, and for many years the sheet music for the ballet outsold all other Rodgers compositions. On the Broadway of 1936, the ballet “caused an uproar,” according to the New York Herald Tribune.

  The other notable Rodgers and Hart show of this era is Pal Joey (1940), based on a series of John O’Hara’s stories in the New Yorker about a louche emcee in cheap nightclubs and the rich woman who keeps him and builds him his own club. It was O’Hara’s idea, and the notion came as a complete surprise to Rodgers, but it instantly appealed to him as “something really special.” “The ‘hero’ was a conniver and a braggart who would do anything and sleep anywhere to get ahead,” Rodgers would recall. “The idea of doing a musical without a conventional clean-cut juvenile in the romantic lead opened up enormous possibilities for a more realistic view of life than theatregoers were accustomed to.” Hart was just as enthusiastic, having spent “thousands of hours in exactly the kind of atmosphere depicted in the stories,” and “thoroughly familiar with the Pal Joeys of this world,” as Rodgers would put it. With a book by O’Hara, the best-selling author of the novels Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8 and a withering observer of class and status in American life, the show promised something new in musical comedy, and its creation was perhaps predictably rocky from the start. O’Hara himself was often unreachable for weeks at a time during the writing. George Abbott, who was both the director and producer, haggled with Rodgers about royalties and doubted the show’s commercial prospects.

  But as personified by a young dancer from Pittsburgh named Gene Kelly, whom Dick and Dorothy Rodgers had spotted in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life the year before, Joey is an unregenerate heel from the start. He spurns a dewy-eyed ingénue, Linda English, for a prowling cougar, Vera Simpson (played with relish by Vivienne Segal, one of Larry Hart’s favorite actresses), and when Joey’s behavior is too much even for Vera and she dumps him, the young lovers are not happily reunited but walk offstage in opposite directions at story’s end. Rodgers would later sum up the action by saying there wasn’t one decent character in the whole play, “except the girl, and she was stupid.” The setting brought out Hart at his wickedest. He could write not only pastiche production numbers for the nightclub scenes—their titles tell all: “That Terrific Rainbow,” “The Flower Garden of My Heart”—but cynical solos for Joey and Vera that plumbed their characters in ways barely heard of in run-of-the-mill musical comedies. Even the most tender ballad in the show—“I Could Write a Book”—is sung by Joey to Linda as a blatant con and come-on.

  “Bewitched,” the most enduring song in the play, with its unforgettable alliteration (“Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered”), combines a flowing, romantic melody by Dick with short, self-mocking lyrics by Larry, so full of double entendres they had to be bowdlerized for radio play. When Joey and Vera sing of their illicit love nest—their “Den of Iniquity”—Hart deploys French to add another hint of sophistication, and when Vera finally gives up on Joey, she sings a stinging reprise of “Bewitched” to his face.

  The show opened on Christmas night 1940 and shocked audiences and critics alike. The most famous first-night review was Brooks Atkinson’s judgment in the New York Times, which began, “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical comedy out of an odious story, Pal Joey is it,” and ended, “Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Gene Kelly would recall waiting in Larry Hart’s apartment for the reviews, and when Atkinson’s was read aloud, “Larry didn’t say anything to us; he just started to cry” and walked out of the room. Kelly would also remember the stark difference between the icy reception the show received from theater party matrons from the suburbs on Wednesday matinees and the appreciative laughs it got from more “swinging” audiences on Friday and Saturday nights. Still, the show ran for eleven months, followed by a three-month tour, and Wolcott Gibbs’s review in the New Yorker proved prescient. “I am not optimistic by nature,” Gibbs wrote, “but it seems to me just possible that the idea of equipping a song and dance production with a few living, three-dimensional figures, talking and behaving like human beings, may no longer strike the boys in the business as merely fantastic.”

  * * *

  AS THE NEW Year dawned, Rodgers and Hart had reached the peak of artistic and creative achievement. Each had an income of well over $100,000 a year, which Dick managed carefully and which Larry spent as fast as he could. But their partnership was in trouble, and 1941 would be the first year in six years without a fresh Rodgers and Hart show on Broadway. Indeed, it was unclear whether there would ever be another one again.

  The trouble was Larry. He had loved Hollywood as much as Dick had hated it, seduced by the soft weather, the easy lifestyle, and the swimming pools where he would practice the one form of physical exercise he had ever deigned to engage in. He was also increasingly seduced by alcohol, late nights, and pursuits that he and Dick never talked about. More and more, those pursuits involved his close friend Milton Bender, a onetime dentist who had given up his practice to become a theatrical agent, hanger-on, relentless pursuer of handsome young chorus boys, and, perhaps, a procurer of willing men for Larry. The Broadway publicist Gary Stevens described Bender as “a very devious, nefarious, strange man,” who preyed on gay men, and dubbed him “Assputin.”

  Indeed, Bender was cordially despised by virtually everyone else in Hart’s orbit, though it was universally assumed by everyone except Larry’s mother that whatever Hart’s actual sexual activities, they did not involve women. Years later, the actress Diahann Carroll reported, Dick dismissively referred to Hart as “that drunken little fag.” But the emotion that shines through in all of Rodgers’s public and private recollections of Hart is deep and abiding, even indulgent, affection—coupled with unconcealed irritation. There are fleeting references in Rodgers’s surviving letters to Hart’s nocturnal ramblings. “Had dinner with the shrimp last night and hit the hay while he went about his nefarious (get it?) business,” Rodgers wrote to Dorothy from Hollywood in 1937. Five days later, after she had apparently pressed him on his meaning, Rodgers wrote again, “My crack about Larry was just for fun. I have no idea what he does with himself after I leave him, but according to his morning reticence, I have to draw my own conclusions. However, he seems to be functioning quite well and that’s my major concern unless he manages to get into trouble.”

  But by 1941, Hart was barely functioning at all. “He no longer seemed to give a damn about anything,” Rodgers would recall. Rodgers was approaching forty, more confident than ever of his abilities, and more determined than ever to remain productive. He was growing increasingly frustrated.

  Suddenly that summer, there was a ray of light. In June, Rodgers began talking with his former neighbor Edna Ferber about adapting her new novel, Saratoga Trunk, into a musical. What if they could get Ferber’s old Show Boat collaborator Oscar Hammerstein to write the book? “Larry and I sit with everything crossed hoping that you will do Saratoga Trunk with us,” Rodgers wired Hammerstein on June 29. But by the following month, complications had arisen. Warner Bros. already owned the film rights and was balking. Ferber was acting up. Still Rodgers wrote Hammerstein, “Even if nothing further comes of this difficult matter it will at least have allowed us to approach each other professionally. Specifically, you feel that I should have a book with ‘substance’ to write to. Will you think seriously about doing such a book?”

  Two months later, with Hart still disinclined to work, Rodgers found himself in Philadelphia for the out-of-town tryouts of a new musical, Best Foot Forward, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and di
rected by George Abbott, for which Dick had agreed to become a silent producer. Rodgers was getting nowhere with Hart on a proposed musical adaptation of Ludwig Bemelmans’s autobiographical essays, Hotel Splendide. On a chance, he picked up the phone and invited himself to Hammerstein’s farm in Doylestown, an hour away. Over lunch, Dick poured out his worries about Larry, while Oscar said not a word. When Rodgers finally finished, Hammerstein thought for a couple of minutes and then replied slowly, “I think you ought to keep working with Larry just as long as he is able to keep working with you. It would kill him if you walked away while he was able to still function. But if the time ever comes when he cannot function, call me. I’ll be there.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Away We Go

  There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow.…

  Oscar Hammerstein II

  For a play that would come to epitomize the essence of the American experience, it took shape a long way from home, first at Les Deux Magots in Paris and then in a $2-a-day rented room in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, in the autumn of 1928. Rollie Lynn Riggs, a twenty-nine-year-old gay cowboy turned poet and playwright, had come to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his art. Born on a farm outside Claremore, Oklahoma, to a mother who was one-eighth Cherokee, Riggs had worked as a day laborer, a movie cowboy, a proofreader at the Wall Street Journal, and a schoolteacher in Chicago, and he had spent time in the writers’ colonies of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Now like other members of the Lost Generation, he had arrived in France—to write a play that he hoped would preserve the memory of his childhood in Indian Territory, before Oklahoma became a state. The plot would revolve around a courtship at a “play-party”—a house party with music, singing, and square dancing—and it would feature the cowboy songs he and his cousins had sung in their youth.

  “Indeed, the subtitle might almost be ‘An Old Song,’” Riggs wrote to a friend, “for, like the old songs of its period, it tries to reproduce a gone age in the Middle West—its quaintness, its absurdity, its sentimentality, its pathetic and childish melodrama, its rude vigor, its touching sweetness.” He would call his drama Green Grow the Lilacs, after a popular nineteenth-century folk song about a spurned lover, and he would write in the published preface to the play that his aim was to “recapture in a kind of nostalgic glow” a past that was fast disappearing from memory, by throwing away ordinary theatrical conventions—swift action, a complex plot—and instead trying “to exhibit luminously, in the simplest of stories, a wide area of mood and feeling.”

  Green Grow the Lilacs was first presented by the Theatre Guild on January 26, 1931. It featured Franchot Tone, a young actor just making his name on Broadway, as Curly McClain, a cocky young cowhand who is courting a comely farm girl, Laurey Williams, and it opened with his singing “Git Along, You Little Dogies!” offstage. The cowboy’s rival for Laurey’s affections is Jeeter Fry, her surly farmhand, and a traveling peddler adds spice to the mix. (The peddler was played by Lee Strasberg, who would go on to fame as perhaps the leading teacher of method acting in America.) The cast was rounded out by a troupe of real cowboys from a rodeo that had just closed at Madison Square Garden. As it happens, the farmhand is killed in the second act, but the basic plot involves no surface conflict more riveting than which of the two men will take the girl to the party. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times pronounced the effort “less a play than a hale and hearty narrative of loves, jamborees and neighborly skirmishes,” though he did praise the “warming relish of its characters,” adding, “How alive they are!”

  Obliged to go on the road to fulfill commitments to Guild-affiliated theaters around the country, the company closed the show after just sixty-four performances. But Theresa Helburn, the doughty co-director of the Guild, never gave up on the property, and in July 1940 she was pleased to see a revival of it at the Westport Country Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Connecticut that was owned by her Guild partner, Lawrence Langner. By evening’s end, the audience’s obvious appreciation of the gentle tale made Helburn believe there was life in the old chestnut yet. “After the show, Terry came backstage to see everybody,” the assistant stage manager, Elaine Anderson, would recall years later. “No matter what anybody tells you today, I was there when it happened, and I remember it was strictly her idea. She said to us all, ‘This would make a good musical!’”

  Helburn’s notion was more than an idle thought. After years as Broadway’s most prestigious producer of quality drama, the Theatre Guild was on the ropes. A run of flops and a flock of unhappy subscribers had left the group’s finances in shambles and it was far from clear just how long it could sustain itself. There were “prospects of utter disaster,” Lawrence Langner would recall. At the beginning of 1942, the Guild had only about $30,000 in the bank, and Helburn decided the answer might just be “a totally new kind of play with music, not a musical comedy in the familiar sense, but a play in which the music and dancing would be aids to and adjuncts of the plot itself in telling the story.” Years later she would confess that she was not sure when she had become convinced that Green Grow the Lilacs was such a vehicle. “What I do remember is trying to make other people share my conviction,” she would recall. “When you’re trying to raise a lot of money, people reminded me, you ought to offer them a sure-fire success, not a play that hadn’t done so well in the past. Musicals, they said in disgust, don’t have murders in the second act.”

  But Helburn thought at once of a composer who was in search of a strong second act for himself—the same bright fellow whose musical genius had helped her buy a new set of tapestries for the Guild Theatre seventeen years earlier: Richard Rodgers.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING of 1942, Rodgers had managed to wrest one more show out of Larry Hart: By Jupiter, another comic vehicle for Ray Bolger, based on the play The Warrior’s Husband, about the Amazon women’s war with the men of Greece. But he had only been able to do so after checking Hart into Doctors Hospital in Manhattan to dry out, then taking a room there himself and ordering a piano to be delivered from Steinway & Sons so he could force Larry to finish the score. The moment the show got to Boston for its tryout, Hart disappeared for three days. By Jupiter was a hit—it would have the longest original run of all the Rodgers and Hart shows—but it took its toll on Rodgers. When Terry Helburn asked him to read the script of Green Grow the Lilacs, he was more than willing to entertain new directions. Helburn assumed, of course, that she would be commissioning a Rodgers and Hart show, but Larry was having none of it. He told Dick he was going off to Mexico for a much-needed rest. Rodgers called his bluff, insisting, “The only reason you’re going to Mexico is to drink. When you come back, you’ll be in worse shape than ever.”

  Dick made one last offer in the offices of Chappell & Co., their music publisher: If Larry would check into a sanitarium for alcohol treatment, he would go with him, and they could work together there. But that idea had no appeal for Hart, so Rodgers, with blood rushing to his head, delivered his ultimatum: “If you walk out on me now, I’m going to do it with someone else.”

  “Anyone in mind?” Hart asked, looking at the floor.

  “Yes, Oscar Hammerstein,” Rodgers replied.

  “Well, you couldn’t pick a better man,” the sheepish Hart replied. When he left, Rodgers found himself suddenly alone—and in tears.

  Hart went off to Mexico, and when he returned a month later, “he had to be carried off the train on a stretcher,” Rodgers would recall. Meantime, backstage at the Shubert Theatre one day, Rodgers approached some young cast members of By Jupiter with a question: “Hey, kids, have any of you ever been to Oklahoma?”

  By sheer coincidence, Hammerstein himself had recently rediscovered Green Grow the Lilacs and believed it would make a fine new musical. On a visit to Hollywood in May, he had read the play aloud to Jerome Kern, but Kern did not warm to the subject. Hammerstein wasn’t ready to give up, and on his return to New York, he reached out to the Theatre Guil
d about acquiring the rights. He was told the play was already spoken for, by Rodgers and Hart. At this point, two developments occurred almost simultaneously: one incontrovertible, one slightly curious.

  One development was that Dick Rodgers called Oscar Hammerstein, invited him to lunch in the Barberry Room of the Berkshire Hotel on East 52nd Street, and asked him to read Green Grow the Lilacs. “I don’t have to read it,” Oscar replied. “I know it and I’m crazy about it. I’d love to do it with you.”

  The other development was a brief dispatch in the New York Times on July 23: “The Theatre Guild announces that Richard Rodgers will write the music, Lorenz Hart the lyrics and Oscar Hammerstein the book for its adaptation of the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs. The authors will commence work shortly.”

  It is possible that the Theatre Guild’s announcement as rendered by the Times was a mistake, though that seems unlikely, since the Guild itself was quoted as making the statement. It’s more probable that Rodgers or the Guild still held out hope that Hart could be brought along. In any case, as Rodgers would recall, in the space of that single lunch and without anything more than a handshake agreement, “Rodgers and Hart became Rodgers and Hammerstein,” fifty-fifty partners in a brand-new enterprise. Neither man’s life would ever be the same.

  * * *

  THE NEW TEAM’S first story conference took place at Dick’s country home, a fifteen-room, five-bath Colonial house on six acres off Black Rock Turnpike in Fairfield County, Connecticut. He and Dorothy had bought it in the summer of 1941, and except for periodic hotel stays in Manhattan when work called them to town, they would live there with their daughters Mary and Linda for the duration of World War II. In Dick’s view, the most attractive feature of the place was a massive old oak tree with a ninety-foot canopy that towered over the front yard, and it was under the shade of this tree that he and Oscar set to work on the new show.