Something Wonderful
Page 9
Their first and most basic problem was that nothing much happens in Green Grow the Lilacs, certainly nothing that would lend itself to the traditional storytelling techniques of musical comedy. Rodgers and Hammerstein did not set out to break the usual Broadway conventions so much as they decided that it would be all but impossible to adhere to them and still do justice to the spirit of their tale. How, for instance, could they introduce the typical singing and dancing ensemble that opened a musical comedy? Strawberry festivals, sewing parties, quilting bees were all considered and eliminated as “corny devices,” Hammerstein would recall. After much back and forth—discussions lasting weeks—they decided to open their musical the same way Lynn Riggs had opened his play, with Aunt Eller sitting alone on the stage churning butter, and Curly the cowboy heard singing offstage. But singing what? Back home in Doylestown, Hammerstein turned for inspiration to Lynn Riggs’s opening stage directions: “It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation that is partly true and partly a trick of the imagination focusing to keep alive a loveliness that may pass away.”
Oscar admired this ripe prose passage, and in a painstaking effort that took three weeks, he fashioned the first words of poetry that his new partner would set to music:
There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow.
There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow.
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye
An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin’
Ev’erythin’s goin’ my way.
All the cattle are standin’ like statues,
All the cattle are standin’ like statues.
They don’t turn their heads as they see me ride by,
But a little brown mav’rick is winkin’ her eye.
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ …
All the sounds of the earth are like music—
All the sounds of the earth are like music.
The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree
And a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me!
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ …
“Well,” Rodgers would recall years later of the moment that he received the finished lyric from Oscar, “you’d really have to be made of cement not to spark to that,” and he wrote the accompanying melody in about ten minutes.
In fact, Dick and Oscar’s first song set the tone for the whole of their collaboration, combining fidelity to the source material with a novelty, simplicity, and directness of expression that seemed so fresh as to be shocking. It was as if their separate careers had ideally prepared them for a sudden and unexpected collision that brought out the best in both men, with Rodgers’s unadorned melody perfectly matching Hammerstein’s artless words.
As his collaboration with Hart wound down, Rodgers had decided that his piano playing was not what it ought to be, and he commenced a course of study with Herman Wasserman, a virtuoso teacher whose students had included George Gershwin. Rodgers explored the rich Romantic melodies and harmonies of Brahms and Schumann, and in the process, his daughter Mary believed, his own musicality deepened and darkened. The fizziness and vitality of his work with Larry Hart did not disappear, but it was now undergirded by a new richness and seriousness.
For his part, Hammerstein summoned all the theatrical craft he had learned over the past twenty-five years, his lyrics distilling the character, personality, and perceptiveness of his protagonist. This would be a realistic, plain-spoken cowboy, but one with a poet’s eye. He would not sing in the standard thirty-two-bar format of a popular song but in the form of a folk ballad, with a repeating chorus, and verses in which the first two lines are each sung twice—in the manner of the turn-of-the century “field hollers” of farmworkers that gave rise to the blues. And in writing this single song, Hammerstein set the pattern that prevailed for 90 percent of his collaboration with Rodgers: he would write the words first, as he had always wanted to. And he would write them—almost always—from afar, not in the same room with Dick, but standing at a tall captain’s desk at the southeast-facing window of the second-floor study of his Pennsylvania farm.
Oscar’s rural surroundings made their mark on his work; what Lynn Riggs’s words didn’t supply by way of imagery, his own observations would. For instance, on a hot summer morning some years before, he had noticed a herd of cows standing motionless on a hillside a half mile away, and composed a short stanza in his head, which he memorized:
The breeze steps aside
To let the day pass.
The cows on the hill
Are as still as the grass.
Now those old lines, slightly altered, found a new home. Firsthand evidence influenced the song in other ways. Hammerstein had originally written, “the corn is as high as a cow pony’s eye,” only to find on one of his frequent long walks that the midsummer corn on a neighbor’s farm was much taller than that. Rodgers was similarly open to revision and adaptation. His original pencil sketch for “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” shows that he initially set the first six syllables of the opening phrase of the chorus to a descending melody that repeated the same three tones down the scale. But he erased the original notes in favor of the sinuous, four-tone, descending and ascending melody the world now knows.
Oscar was instantly proud of his effort. In a letter to his son Bill, who seemed to question the song’s sixteen bars of verse and sixteen bars of chorus, he defiantly noted that “Dixie,” “Home Sweet Home,” and “Old Black Joe” all used the same form. “I don’t compare it to ‘Old Man River,’” he wrote. “I say it may have a longer life. It is a sure standard, and so simple that it will be adopted as the thing to sing every time the sun shines bright. School children will start the morning exercises with it and so will camps start their days with it.”
With the tone of the show now set, the next task was to work on the plot. Some decisions were minor. Oscar changed the name of the menacing farmhand from Jeeter to Jud, presumably to avoid any association in an audience’s mind with Jeeter Lester, the Georgia sharecropper who was the lead character in Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling 1932 novel Tobacco Road, the dramatic version of which had recently concluded an eight-year run on Broadway. Borrowing a page from the operetta tradition—indeed from grand opera as well—Hammerstein devised a comic subplot involving another pair of lovers, by expanding the bit part of Laurey’s friend Ado Annie Carnes (changed from a pudgy wallflower to a buxom mantrap), and giving her a partner in a rope-twirling cowboy named Will Parker, who is mentioned only in passing and never so much as seen in Green Grow the Lilacs. He named the peddler Ali Hakim (changing him in the process from Syrian to Persian) and set him up as Will’s rival for Annie’s affections, creating a parallel trio with Laurey, Curly, and Jud. Having already turned Lynn Riggs’s opening stage directions into a song, Oscar would keep large chunks of his dialogue, and its period dialect, while trimming the flab and sharpening the jokes. He built up the dramatic tension between Curly and Jud by having them bid for Laurey’s picnic hamper at a box social.
But it was in revising and condensing the play’s flaccid ending that Hammerstein displayed his masterly skills as an adapter and editor. In Riggs’s script, Curly and a knife-wielding Jeeter struggle during the raucous celebration of Curly and Laurey’s wedding night, and Jeeter falls on his knife and is killed. After this climactic moment, the scene shifts to Aunt Eller’s farmhouse several days later. Curly has been hauled off to jail pending trial, but he breaks out and sneaks back for one stolen night with his bride, before agreeing to return and face his fate the next morning. The curtain falls with the sound of Curly’s voice singing to Laurey offstage, his future ambiguous. Laboring t
hrough repeated drafts over the summer, Oscar shortened the action into a summary trial in which Curly is found not guilty of Jud’s death the very same night, and the newlyweds ride happily off on their honeymoon. “What was the third act of this play is all covered in about five minutes in our second act,” Hammerstein would recall years later. Riggs’s version takes thirty pages of dialogue. Hammerstein’s takes three.
* * *
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN’S WORK habits were as disciplined as Larry Hart’s had been chaotic. He would rise at seven and have a long rubdown from his tenant farmer, Peter Moen, who doubled as his masseur. After a shower and breakfast with Dorothy, he would repair to his study. The cozy room, with flowered curtains and Venetian blinds at the windows, was equipped not only with the stand-up captain’s desk but also a comfy armchair and ottoman, where Oscar sometimes worked with a yellow pad propped up on his knees, along with a typewriter, a dictionary stand, and a complete multivolume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Hammerstein would work until late morning, when he dispatched correspondence and dealt with pending business matters. After lunch at one, he would return to the study, where he worked until five, before emerging for a game of tennis or other relaxation. The routine was much the same day in and day out.
Generally working with a soft black pencil, sometimes typing badly, Oscar sketched out ideas, snippets of lyrics, strings of rhyming words—bits of a mosaic that would eventually find their way into finished songs. As if to ground himself in the story, he drew a map of Claremore, Oklahoma’s environs, showing the imagined location of Laurey’s farmhouse, the Verdigris River, the Santa Fe Railroad line, and so on. He catalogued simple prairie food items, like sourdough bread, bacon, dried apples, beans, flapjacks. He jotted down stray phrases: “Clear as the wind that blows behind the rain,” “June bugs zooming round the roses.” He listed possible rhymes appropriate to the period or the region: “Table d’hote—coyote,” “Bloomers—rumors,” “Alkali—Apple pie.”
One challenge was how to let the audience know that Curly and Laurey, who spend most of the first half of the play sparring and fussing, are really falling in love. An early effort expanded on a line of dialogue. After Laurey denounces Curly as a “braggin’, bow-legged, wisht-he-had-a-sweetheart bum!” Aunt Eller explains: “She likes you—quite a lot.” “If she acts like she wants to shoot you,” a draft song lyric ran, “she likes you quite a lot.” A second stab was a duet between Curly and Laurey called, “Someone Will Teach You,” in which they each hope the other will find the right partner someday. One chorus went like this:
Someone will teach you
And clearly explain
How really important you are.
Someone will teach you
To walk down a lane
As if you were ridin’ a star.
Only after these false starts did Hammerstein light on the mutual protestation that became “People Will Say We’re in Love.” In this case Rodgers had written the music first. Dick and Oscar then hit upon the notion of “having the lovers warn each other against any show of tenderness lest other people think they were in love,” and Hammerstein came up with a raft of possible injunctions:
Don’t tie my ties for me,
Don’t tell pretty lies for me …
Don’t buy a hat for me,
Don’t turn Democrat for me—
For the bridge of the song, Rodgers unconsciously made the musical interval between the first two notes the precise opposite of the interval he had used for the opening of the chorus—descending the scale, for emphasis, instead of rising up, as he had at the start. Meantime, Hammerstein tried out these lyrics to accompany Rodgers’s release:
Don’t start collecting things,
Handkerchief, dance card or glove.
Kind friends are suspecting things—
People will say we’re in love.
Line by line, revision after revision, Oscar kept at the song. Finally, this opening quatrain emerged, sparkling with clarity and simplicity:
Don’t throw bouquets at me—
Don’t please my folks too much,
Don’t laugh at my jokes too much—
People will say we’re in love!
And Hammerstein polished the lyrics for the bridge into even greater specificity and directness, with a knowing glimpse—in the not-so-sardonic word “sweetheart”—of the infatuation his words pretend to conceal:
Don’t start collecting things
Give me my rose and my glove;
Sweetheart, they’re suspecting things—
People will say we’re in love!
In a similar bit of alchemy, Hammerstein turned the slightest passage in the opening scene of Riggs’s play—Curly’s invitation to Laurey to go with him to the dance—“in a bran’ new surrey with fringe on the top four inches long—and yeller”—into a song of such shimmering loveliness that Oscar would later confess that hearing it always made him cry. On his trusty yellow pad, he sketched out a long list of words that, when pronounced with an Oklahoma twang, might rhyme with “surrey,” including curry, hurry, flurry, blurry, worry, arbitrury, sanitury, millinury, stationury, and vury vury. Rodgers provided a rhythmic, repetitious melody that mimics the sound of horses’ clopping hooves, until, for the final chorus, the tempo slows to a whisper:
I can see the stars gittin’ blurry
When we ride back home in the surrey,
Ridin’ slowly home in the surrey with the fringe on top.
I can feel the day gittin’ older,
Feel a sleepy head near my shoulder,
Noddin’, droopin’ close to my shoulder till it falls, kerplop!
Rodgers’s own preferred work time was the morning, at the piano; his daughters would recall that the happiest sound of their childhoods was of their father picking out tunes. He would leave the living room door open, and the notes would drift out. But there were rules: no distractions, like whistling or humming, that might disturb his concentration. Years later, someone would ask Rodgers how long it had taken him to compose the entire score of the show. “Do you mean ‘flying time’ or ‘elapsed time’?” he asked. “Counting everything,” he would estimate, “the most I could make it come to was about five hours. But the total ‘elapsed time’ covered months of discussion and planning.”
* * *
EVEN AS OSCAR began collaborating with his new partner, another newcomer—a twelve-year-old boy—entered the Hammerstein family’s life, destined to become Oscar’s lifelong friend, surrogate son, and favorite pupil—and his greatest lasting legacy to the American musical theater beyond his own work. The boy’s name was Stephen Joshua Sondheim.
Sondheim’s mother, the former Janet Fox, and known all too tellingly as “Foxy,” was a Manhattan dress designer and a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein’s. In June 1942, after her divorce from Herbert Sondheim, a maker of women’s ready-to-wear clothing, her only son, Stephen, came to Doylestown to visit. He wound up skipping his planned trip to summer camp and stayed all summer instead at Highland Farm, joining a growing wartime ménage of strays and displaced persons that included the children of two other friends of Dorothy’s who had fraught relationships with their own mothers. “He was the boy who came to dinner,” James Hammerstein would recall. Soon enough, Foxy Sondheim bought a farm of her own on the opposite side of Doylestown and young Stevie became an honorary member of the Hammerstein clan, often riding his bike to Highland Farm and spending the weekends there to avoid his unhappy home life. Stevie—precocious, a skilled pianist, frighteningly good at wordplay, puzzles, and strategic games—quickly became a favorite of Oscar’s, earning the uncritical affection that Hammerstein so often found it difficult to bestow upon his own children, and sometimes seeming to displace them in their own home. “I loved him as a brother, but Steve was not warm,” James Hammerstein would recall years later. For his part, Sondheim would acknowledge that Oscar, like his own father, was not good with children until they reached a rational age, “and the trouble with that
is, by the time you are at a rational age, a number of wounds have been inflicted and scars have formed.”
Stevie taught Oscar how to play chess, but soon enough the competitive older student beat the young instructor. Sondheim had set a complicated, multi-move trap, which Hammerstein eluded at the last moment. “Gosh, you’re getting good,” Sondheim told him. “You saw what I was setting up.”
“No,” Oscar replied. “I heard your heart beating.”
* * *
IF THE THEATRE Guild was banking on Rodgers and Hammerstein to save the day, rounding out the rest of the creative team was equally important. A crucial decision was the hiring of Rouben Mamoulian—the same innovative director who had teamed with Rodgers and Hart for the film Love Me Tonight—to take control of the new show. Mamoulian had returned to Broadway, winning critical acclaim for his direction of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the Guild in 1935, just as he had for the original play. But like Hammerstein, he had lately suffered a fallow period.
With a projected budget of $90,000—lean even by the standards of Broadway’s constricted wartime economics—the new show would be far from lavish in its mounting. The scenic designer Lemuel Ayers would make extensive use of the simplest and least expensive form of stagecraft: painted backdrops, albeit in clean strokes and bold colors that evoked Grant Wood. The costumer Miles White designed authentic period clothing in candy-colored tones that would have to be toned down.
There was no budget for big-name stars. The Guild was initially interested in Shirley Temple for Laurey, but her parents didn’t think she was right for the part. Terry Helburn offered Groucho Marx the role of the peddler, but he turned her down. For their part, Rodgers and Hammerstein were intrigued by Mary Martin, who had made her debut in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me in 1938, but she was skeptical of the idea.