This action unfolds with a stirring reprise of the song first sung to Julie by her cousin Nettie after Billy’s death, a tune so authentic-sounding that it might be mistaken for the old New England hymn that the plot explains it is:
When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.
At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark.
Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone.
Christine Johnson, a Metropolitan Opera mezzo soprano, was cast as Nettie, and she never forgot the first time she sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in Rodgers’s office. “I tell you,” she remembered years later, “when I finished, there was something almost spiritual about it—in the silence, we all just felt it, we knew that this wasn’t just an ordinary little hymn-like song. This was some kind of classic.”
When Ferenc Molnár showed up to watch the first run-through of the show, Dick and Oscar dreaded his reaction. They knew that the new ending, in Rodgers’s words, “so completely changed the spirit of the original that we awaited a humiliating dressing down from the playwright.” Instead, a delighted Molnár, his monocle popping out of his eye, exclaimed, “What you have done is so beautiful. And you know what I like best? The ending!” Irving Berlin would later compare the emotional power of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to the Twenty-third Psalm. When the singer Mel Tormé, standing at the back of the theater one night, told Rodgers that the song made him cry, the composer just nodded impatiently and replied, “It’s supposed to.”
* * *
CAROUSEL OPENED OUT of town for a four-day run in New Haven on March 22, 1945, and young Stevie Sondheim, on a break from boarding school, sat next to Dorothy Hammerstein. The story of marital discord and parental regret overwhelmed him, and he wept copious tears into Dorothy’s fur wrap. “Apparently, certain kinds of fur will stain from tears,” he would recall years later, “and I stained hers irrevocably.”
When the curtain at last rang down, tears were in order for another reason: the show had run four hours—thirty to forty-five minutes too long. “This was, as Jo Mielziner remarked, the best musical-comedy script he’d ever read, and it had been beautifully directed, but almost none of it came off as we had expected,” Agnes de Mille would recall. “The staff repaired to a hotel room where sacrifice and a cold supper awaited.” Drastic cuts were in order. In a two-hour conference, the creative team conducted major surgery on the second act, discarding five scenes, about half of a de Mille ballet in which Billy sees what has happened on earth since his death, a couple of complete songs, and several choruses of others. “Now I see why these people have hits,” the stage manager, John Fearnley, would recall. “I never witnessed anything so brisk and brave in my life.”
The Boston opening was set for March 27, and writing in the Boston Post two days before, Oscar sounded a wary note. “We veterans are the most cautious people in the theater,” he confessed. “We have marks of old bruises to remind us not to count the grosses till the ticket-racks are empty.” Hammerstein was right to worry. In the second act, he had discarded the magistrate’s court to which Molnár had consigned Liliom in favor of a New England parlor, where Billy finds himself face-to-face with a pair of heavenly characters known only as “He” and “She,” a kind of Mr. and Mrs. God, Oscar had called them in an early draft. It was a lovely, delicate scene, with a charming proto-feminist sensibility, and a sly wit.
“Who’s the lady?” Billy asks He at one point.
“I suppose you are like all the others. You thought, when you arrived here, you’d have to deal only with a man,” He answers.
“Yes, sir,” Billy replies.
“Strange that the world doesn’t realize it needs a mother as well as a father,” He rejoins.
Billy looks at She with “new respect,” according to the stage directions.
“Nobody ever told me, ma’am,” he says.
“Don’t worry about it now, Billy,” She reassures him. “It takes time for people to get used to it.”
But there wasn’t enough time to accustom the New England critics to such a radical notion, and they rejected it resoundingly. Elliot Norton of the Post, the dean of Boston critics and a reviewer who saw his job as much to point out how shows might be fixed, as to critique where they’d fallen short, pronounced the scene “just plain silly” and called it “a concept which is theologically and dramatically foreign to the New England of Billy Bigelow and alien to the whole tone of the play.” Elinor Hughes of the Boston Herald was likewise skeptical. “It must be said, however unwillingly,” she averred, “that Carousel represents a praiseworthy attempt to fit a fanciful and deeply touching play with a musical comedy frame and that so far the attempt has not really come off.”
So more surgery was thus in order, with nightly pajama-clad conferences at which the actors would study their new lines. “We gotta get God out of the parlor,” Hammerstein declared at one such meeting after the opening night. Mamoulian proposed adding a new character at the back entrance to heaven, a “Starkeeper” perched on a stepladder with a string of twinkling stars stretched out on a celestial clothesline. When the cast tried the new scene out the next day, it worked. Mamoulian would later claim that he came up with the lines that survive in the script, and that Hammerstein hadn’t changed a word. His account is suspect, not only because he was a documented credit hog in the partners’ eyes, but also because the dialogue sounds so much like Oscar: “The pearly gates are in front,” the Starkeeper tells Billy. “Those are the back gates. They’re just mother-of-pearly.”
Agnes de Mille, for one, missed Hammerstein’s original concept. “The first version had a dry toughness that the second lacked,” she would recall, “and a quality that Oscar has frequently been forced to yield before audience hesitation or surprise.” But by April 3, a week into the Boston run, Rodgers was optimistic enough to write to his wife, “Now I can write you because last night we had a SHOW! I am a very cautious kid, as you know, but there are certain bits of evidence that cannot be refuted. Best of all, I know how I feel, and I feel that there are many moments of extreme beauty here and that the public will want to see and hear them.”
Still, Carousel wasn’t out of the woods. Returning alone on the train to Connecticut after the Boston run, Dick had to lug his two heavy suitcases to the car himself, as no porters were present owing to wartime staff shortages. He went to bed without any ill effects, but when he woke the next morning, he coughed and was immediately seized by such excruciating pain that he collapsed on the floor. He had wrenched one of his lumbar vertebrae. He managed to drag himself to the final dress rehearsal at the Majestic Theatre in Manhattan, overseeing it as best he could from a stretcher placed in the center aisle.
The session went badly. “I left the theater thoroughly discouraged,” Lawrence Langner would recall. “I went home and the next morning I remarked despondently to Armina, ‘What an absurd occupation this is. Months have been spent on writing this musical, more months in producing it, $180,000 has been invested in it, yet, on the basis of one evening’s performance, all this may go down in defeat. This is the very last play I will ever do.’”
Opening Night was Thursday, April 19. Rodgers was still laid up, sprawled on a stretcher hidden behind a curtain in an upper box, with only a partial view of the stage and so sedated with morphine that “I could not have appreciated what was happening even if I’d had the best seat in the house. In fact, so fortified was I against pain that I was also unaware of the laughter and applause, and was convinced that the show was a dismal failure. It was only afterward, when people came over to me—making me feel like an Egyptian mummy on display—that I realized Carousel had been e
nthusiastically received.” After the show, Molnár approached Rodgers, who was speaking with his brother, Morty. “He may be your brother,” the playwright said, patting the doctor’s hand. “But he is my son.”
The reviews were rapturous. Lewis Nichols in the Times declared that the pair “who can do no wrong continued doing no wrong,” producing a score that was “on the whole delightful.” Ward Morehouse of the Baltimore Sun said that Carousel was a play “of fragile beauty” with “an enchanting score,” while John Chapman of the Daily News called it “one of the finest musical plays I have seen and I shall remember it always.” The original production would run for 890 performances on Broadway and a national tour of two years. With the war in Europe now ending, and so many American households touched by years of death and loss, Carousel resonated in a darker, more visceral way than Oklahoma! had two years earlier. Now audiences were filled not with soldiers preparing to ship out to war but with veterans returning from the grim rigors of the battlefield. Jan Clayton would recall that at each performance when Billy rose from dead, “invariably you heard from the balcony, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ! That’s too much!’”
To the end of Rodgers’s life, Carousel would remain his favorite score, his favorite show. “I think it’s more emotional,” he would say. “The whole subject matter cuts deeper. I feel it has more to say about human relationships. And I also think it’s the best score we’d ever written. I have more respect for it. I just like it better.”
CHAPTER 5
So Far
It is a law of our civilization that as soon as a man proves he can contribute to the well-being of the world, there be created an immediate conspiracy to destroy his usefulness, a conspiracy in which he is usually a willing collaborator. Sometimes he awakens to his danger and does something about it. That is the story of Allegro.
Oscar Hammerstein II
From almost the moment of Oklahoma!’s premiere, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s creative energies would coexist with the exploding demands of their commercial enterprises. In the beginning, that was a high-class problem to have, and the partners embraced the extraordinary business opportunities that came their way with deliberation, discretion, and uncanny foresight. “Many of the old managers died broke,” Dick would explain years later. “Oscar and I don’t want to die broke.” Starting in the summer of 1943, they contrived to make sure they never would.
The partners were ably abetted in that endeavor by Howard Reinheimer, the brilliant and meticulous lawyer who had been Oscar’s lifelong friend. Reinheimer was, like his clients, a graduate of Columbia University—and of its law school—and he was an expert not only on intellectual property but on taxation as well. He was also thoroughly immersed in the world of New York theater, having represented Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Robert E. Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Mary Martin, and Beatrice Lillie. He had even advised Margaret Mitchell on copyright matters pertaining to unauthorized dramatizations of Gone with the Wind.
A private and practical man who was so discreet, his son recalled, that he never breathed a word of his clients’ business even to his family, Reinheimer also represented a few Hollywood stars. When he met the actress Carole Lombard at a party, neither her name nor her face made any impression. A week later she called asking him to represent her. “I want a lawyer who is not too immersed in moving pictures,” she said. Reinheimer also represented Sigmund Romberg, who once remarked, “Business, business, all the time business, that’s our Howard. I don’t remember ever hearing him laugh … that is, to really laugh hard. It’s a shame; otherwise, he’s a very nice man.”
Oscar Hammerstein’s own legal training had made him more sensitive than most writers to the commercial realities of his creative work, while Dick Rodgers at once cultivated and disclaimed a reputation as the hardest of hardheaded businessmen. But Rodgers’s daughter Mary would insist the myth was overblown. “He was an atrocious businessman,” she would say of her father. “He just made a lot of money.” It seems safe to say that neither Dick nor Oscar might have enjoyed the financial success they did without Reinheimer’s sage advice, which boiled down to two core principles: first, whenever possible, the partners should own the rights to the works they created; and second, they should structure their business enterprises as an interlocking empire of nested partnerships and corporations, so as to take maximum favorable advantage of a federal tax code that then taxed personal income at marginal rates of 80 percent or more. Over the years, these entities would be established with such colorfully appropriate names as “Surrey Enterprises” and “The Siam Corporation,” and Reinheimer and his law partner Irving Cohen would generate a mountain of memos, contracts, and financial reports memorializing the details.
But the partners’ first decision was the crucial one from which all others would flow: in an era when sheet music sales were still a vitally important part of any songwriter’s revenue stream, they established their own music publishing company, Williamson Music, named in honor of their fathers. Their partners in this enterprise were Max and Louis Dreyfus, the brothers who owned and ran Chappell & Co., long the leading publisher of Broadway scores—including those of Rodgers and Hart and Kern and Hammerstein. Music copyrights typically lodged not with composers and lyricists but with their publishing houses, and so the new vehicle would be (as Oscar explained in a letter to his son Bill) “our device for owning title in our copyrighted songs,” in addition to receiving royalties on music sales and public performance rights. The profits of the new enterprise would be split with the Dreyfus brothers, and Chappell & Co. would do the work of publishing and promoting the songs, including the creation of popular piano arrangements. The genius of this setup, for Rodgers and Hammerstein, was that they would make more money while being responsible for less administrative work, and the terms also called for the whole entity to be owned fifty-fifty by Rodgers and Hammerstein and their heirs after the deaths of the Dreyfus brothers.
“This is all pretty complicated,” Oscar told Bill, “but you asked for it. The objective is on a long pull view for Dick and me and our heirs. I only wish I had similar rights in the songs I’ve been writing for the last twenty-three years—or so.”
Sheet music was not the only way that mass audiences heard music in the 1940s, of course, and Rodgers and Hammerstein also signed an extraordinary recording contract with Jack Kapp, the head of Decca Records, to issue an album of 78 rpm recordings of the score of Oklahoma!, performed by the original Broadway cast and orchestra, complete with a souvenir booklet. Strictly speaking, this was not the first such undertaking; Marc Blitzstein’s score for The Cradle Will Rock had been recorded with the original cast in 1938. But the huge popular success of Oklahoma! and the quality of the recording would engender a new standard industry practice that continues to the present day, one that would reap many millions of dollars in royalties. “No previous effort had captured quite so vividly on disc the sheer exhilaration of the Broadway musical experience from overture to finale, from the out-and-out hits to the less familiar character songs,” wrote the musical theater historians Amy Henderson and Dwight Bowers. “More than anything, these recordings solidly confirmed that the music and lyrics for Oklahoma! are essential ingredients in the narrative structure of the show and not just a series of traditionally catchy, easily isolated popular songs.”
The new business team of Rodgers and Hammerstein naturally required offices, which were promptly established in the RKO Building in Rockefeller Center, which housed Radio City Music Hall and the offices of Chappell & Co. Dick and Oscar hired Morris Jacobs, a savvy Broadway veteran, as their general manager, a job he would hold until his retirement nearly thirty years later. From Broadway to Hollywood, the new firm was swiftly known in alphabetical shorthand as “R&H.”
As they reviewed the options for their own next show, the partners made yet another important business decision: to become producers of plays written by others. “We were anxious to keep active in the theatre and also to establish our names as a team,” Rodger
s would recall. It was a logical decision. After all, between them Rodgers and Hammerstein knew virtually all there was to know about the Broadway theater. Oscar had worked as a stage manager and director and had collaborated closely with his uncle Arthur, who produced so many of his early shows. Dick had been a silent producer of Best Foot Forward as his collaboration with Larry Hart wound down. Their own close partnership with the Theatre Guild and the phenomenal success of Oklahoma! had put them in the financial driver’s seat in ways that few other creative artists enjoyed. They participated in all the Guild’s casting sessions and would eventually establish their own regular weekly open auditions to find replacements for the Broadway and touring companies of their shows. They were awash in disposable income, and investing in a business they both knew well seemed as sensible as any alternative—and probably a good deal more fun.
Their first venture was a vehicle as homey and nostalgic as Oklahoma! In 1943, the writer Kathryn Forbes had published a collection of seventeen short stories—amounting to a modest novel—inspired by the quiet family joys and struggles of her Norwegian immigrant grandmother in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Forbes’s book, Mama’s Bank Account, tapped into home-front America’s wartime hunger for tales of a simpler time. The plots of the stories were delicate slivers of domestic life: how to handle the illness of a child; how to pay for a son’s high school education; how to cope with the petty prejudices of polite society; how to help a grumpy alcoholic uncle to die with his dignity intact. The power of Forbes’s book lay in its character study of Mama, whose resolute resourcefulness and calm in the face of every adversity resonated amid the sacrifices of World War II.
The teenage Mary Rodgers had read the book, then passed it on to her mother, who loved it and suggested to Dick that it would make a great play. He and Oscar agreed. To adapt the book for the stage, they signed John Van Druten, a British-born playwright and director who was even then enjoying just about the biggest success on Broadway outside of Oklahoma! with The Voice of the Turtle, his comedy of manners about the challenges of single life in wartime Manhattan. To play Mama, the producers hired Mady Christians, an Austrian-born actress who had emigrated to New York to escape Nazism and had made her mark in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine in 1941. Oscar Homolka played her crusty uncle Chris, while a twenty-year-old newcomer from Omaha named Marlon Brando made his Broadway debut as her son, Nels. Van Druten also directed the play, and in his quietly innovative staging, the narrator—the family’s eldest, now-grown daughter Katrin—sits in a spotlight at the edge of the stage, breaking the theater’s invisible fourth wall and reading aloud to the audience from a manuscript of her childhood memories. “For as long as I could remember, the house on Steiner Street had been home,” she begins, before going on to catalogue her recollections, concluding, “But first and foremost, I remember Mama,” just as the lights come up on the rest of the stage and the action begins.
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