Two days later, Logan was even more emphatic: “The most important problem to solve is the whole development of Joe’s final decision.” Throughout the play, Logan judged, Joe had been weak and indecisive, influenced by his wife, mother, father, grandmother, and friends, but never taking a strong stand of his own. “His action as it now stands is a kind of cowardly retreat rather than a brave step.” Mightn’t it be better to have Joe consider returning home, but then resolve to stay in Chicago and run the big hospital the way he thinks it should be—with patient care at the heart of its mission? Logan offered to fly to Boston, where the show was set to open in two days, to work on the problems in person, and concluded, “I’m afraid that critically you will still be led to believe the show is packing more dynamite with the audience than it actually does. As it stands now it will get some rave notices and hysterical enthusiasm of numbers of people. What I am talking about is the mass effect which I feel the show can have if the points are really made so that everyone understands and feels them.”
There is no evidence that Oscar took Logan up on his offer—or indeed, any record of his reply. On the contrary, it appears that Hammerstein made none of the changes Josh suggested, with the possible exception of softening Marjorie Taylor’s death, which in the final script is implied but only wordlessly confirmed in a telegram Joe receives and reads silently at college. And the reaction of the Boston critics was just as Logan had predicted, veering wildly between praise and puzzlement. Elliot Norton in the Post pronounced it a “knockout.” “It is romantic, realistic, fantastic, satirical, serious and gay all at once,” he wrote. “It has hit tunes, bright jokes, fine singers, wonderful dancers, hilarity, hocus pocus, completely unconventional scenery, and a social conscience.” He added, “It needs a little tinkering and tailoring. But even without tinker or tailor, it is the most remarkable musical show I have ever seen.” But Elinor Hughes of the Herald predicted that there would be “no plain sailing ahead for this production.”
* * *
ALLEGRO ARRIVED AT the Majestic Theatre in New York on October 10, with the biggest advance sale in Broadway history to date: $750,000, at a time when the top price of an orchestra ticket was no more than $6 and an advance sale of $100,000 was considered astronomical. The show had been featured in cover stories for both Life and Time magazines, but as de Mille’s husband, Walter Prude, would recall, it went over with its opening night audience “like a wet firecracker.”
The New York critics were just as divided as their Boston colleagues. “For at least half its length,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the Times, “it is a work of great beauty and purity, as if ‘Our Town’ could be written in music.” Richard Watts Jr. in the Post found it “a distinguished musical play, beautiful, imaginative, original and honestly moving.” But John Chapman of the Daily News complained, “They have set Allegro to an andante beat” (using the Italian term for a moderately slow tempo), while William Hawkins of the World-Telegram & Sun called the show “a vast disappointment,” whose “realization crosses the stage like an impoverished sophomore class production.”
In fact, as Stephen Sondheim himself would conclude years later, it was the muddiness and lack of sophistication of Oscar’s writing—all the more glaring because of its contrast with the novelty and depth of his concept—that doomed the show. Indeed, Hammerstein had proved the point of the show by being too busy and distracted by other pressures to do his best work. “In Allegro, he was writing about the conflict between responsibility to your community and responsibility to yourself,” Sondheim would recall. “He found that the more public appearances he made, the more speeches he gave, the more he traveled to support these causes, the less time he had for writing, the thing he was born to do. That is what he was trying to convey in Allegro. And nobody got it.”
The New Republic archly observed that “the Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein bitterly regret being the richest and most successful people in the American theater and wish they could go back to Spirit, South Dakota, or Barstow, California, or some other suitable, small, simple community, and there devote their talents to playing the organ for the town glee club and composing songs for the high school football team.” Rodgers’s music came in for more than its share of scorn as well. While he was all but incapable of writing un-hummable melodies, Rodgers did write some of his least tuneful music for Allegro, especially in some of the ensemble numbers. “It seems the minute he leaves the métier of conventional musical comedy, in which he excels, and ventures into a more exacting area of theater music, he passes outside the limits of his technique and his ideas alike,” wrote Cecil Smith in Theatre Arts magazine. “Even the best parts of the Allegro score misrepresent the composer who could command the wit of ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.’”
Allegro ran for 315 performances and was the top-grossing Broadway play of the 1947– 48 season, but it was still a disappointment for Rodgers and Hammerstein. Near the end of the run, the company dropped eight chorus members and six musicians to cut costs. A scaled-down, sixteen-city tour ran for another seven months, but there would be no movie, no London company, no full-scale Broadway revival.
Cole Porter once remarked that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s innovations had made musical theater harder for everyone else in the business. But they had made it harder for themselves, too. Josh Logan’s take was that Dick and Oscar wanted to top not only themselves, but also Irving Berlin’s smash success with Annie Get Your Gun. “They were overanxious,” he said. “They wanted to do something sensational and they tried too hard.”
In later years, in separate interviews, the partners sometimes seemed to indulge in fleeting mutual recriminations. Rodgers would agree with an interviewer that the show was “a bit pretentious,” while adding in his own words, “I think it was too preachy, which was the one fault that Oscar had, if any. He tended to moralize a great deal, and this came across in Allegro more than in anything he ever did.” For good measure, Rodgers added, “But I myself thought it moralized too much.” For his part, Hammerstein said that the Greek chorus had not come out the way he envisioned it. “I intended Dick to write music for it but we wound up reciting the chorus instead,” he said. “We also wound up with a great deal of scenery, with a stage that’s not exactly a revolving stage but that shifts back and forth from the wings. Actually that was the reason the play didn’t make money. I’m not blaming anyone, because we all accepted it, we all collaborated, we all liked the idea. But it was a mistake.” To critics who claimed he had a naive affection for small towns, Oscar liked to point out that the most morally suspect character in the play—the ambitious and dishonest Jennie—is a small-town girl. But he could not quarrel with audiences’ ultimate judgment. “Sometimes the audience writes your play for you, and rewrites it in the way you don’t want it re-written,” he would recall. “And if so, there is something wrong with you as a writer. It is as if a horse decides where he is going to take you, if he doesn’t feel a strong enough grip on his reins.”
It is difficult to know to what degree the failure of Allegro caused strains in the partners’ relationship, if only because they maintained such a unified public front in all things. It may well be that Hammerstein was more inclined to experimentation than Rodgers, even if he was no more capable of ensuring that experimentation’s success. In the end, Dick and Oscar were haunted by their failed effort. “Of all the musicals I ever worked on that didn’t quite succeed,” Rodgers wrote in his memoir, “Allegro is the one I think most worthy of a second chance.… I still keep hoping.” Normally the most unsentimental of men about failure, Oscar could not let go of Allegro, either. “It is the only play that was not a big success that I have any loyalty toward, any desire to produce again and perhaps rewrite, give another chance to,” he told an interviewer.
The plain truth is that Rodgers and Hammerstein would never again take such risks, never again push conventional boundaries so far. They would go on to resounding future successes and would continue to refine and sharpen and t
est the limits of the new genre of musical theater they had almost single-handedly created. But the era of innovation was over for them. The era of empire lay ahead.
CHAPTER 6
Enchanted Evening
The most commercial thing you can do is not to have your mind on commerce. One of our greatest qualities, I think, is the honesty we try to get into our work. Even those who didn’t like Allegro couldn’t say it was phony.
Richard Rodgers
By 1947, Joshua Logan was as much in demand as any director on Broadway, but even he lost a big fish from time to time. One of the most painful ones that got away was Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Early in the year, its producer, Irene Mayer Selznick, had sent Logan the script to consider, but she sent it at the same time to Elia Kazan, whom Williams preferred. Logan was crushed, but not so permanently that he and his wife, Nedda, didn’t eagerly attend the play’s premiere on December 3, as guests of its scenic designer, their friend Jo Mielziner. Logan’s mood was elevated by the knowledge that in just a few weeks a play of his own would be opening: Mister Roberts, a rollicking but poignant comedy about life aboard a navy cargo ship stuck in a backwater of the Pacific in World War II, based on the best-selling novel by Thomas Heggen. Logan had co-authored the script with Heggen and was set to direct, with Leland Hayward producing. Henry Fonda had signed on to play the title character, and Broadway was already abuzz with anticipation.
So it was not surprising, when the Logans repaired to Sardi’s after the Streetcar opening, that Mielziner’s brother Kenneth MacKenna, a former actor and veteran story editor at MGM, mentioned another new novel that might provide some scenic color for Mister Roberts. That book was Tales of the South Pacific, a loosely linked collection of nineteen short stories by James A. Michener, a navy veteran now working as a textbook editor at Macmillan. The MGM brass had passed on buying the movie rights, but MacKenna thought it had promise. Logan, who was headed with Hayward for a quick getaway to Miami Beach, picked up a copy to take with him and was immediately entranced by one of the stories, “Fo’ Dolla,” the tale of a passionate interracial romance between a marine lieutenant from the Philadelphia Main Line and a young Tonkinese native. He resolved at once to try to buy the dramatic rights to the book. But the next morning, Logan recalled, Hayward sensed that something was up, and that afternoon, while Logan was napping, Hayward swiped the book and read it himself, exclaiming when Logan woke up, “Josh, we’re going to buy this son of a bitch!”
Whereupon Logan had an instant brainstorm: a musical adaptation by Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Of course,” Hayward replied, “but don’t you dare mention it to them. They’ll want the whole goddamn thing. They’d gobble us up for breakfast.” But Logan was nothing if not indiscreet, and a short time later, after returning to New York, he ran into Dick Rodgers at a cocktail party and could not resist blurting out a not-quite-true boast. “Don’t tell anyone I’ve told you this, but I own a story you might want to make a musical of.” Rodgers took out the little black notebook he always carried and jotted down “T. of the S. Pacific” and “Fo’ Dolla.” (Rodgers would later confess to having been puzzled by his own cryptic note. “Did I owe someone money, or did someone owe me? And why the devil had I suddenly started writing in dialect?”)
A few weeks later, at the Philadelphia tryout of Mister Roberts, Logan ran into Oscar Hammerstein and mentioned Tales of the South Pacific to him. Two days later, Oscar called back, just as excited, having read the book himself, and having also talked to Rodgers, who assured him, “Oh, I was crazy about it, too, but some son of a bitch I met at a cocktail party owns it so we haven’t got a chance.”
Logan was the SOB in question, of course, but he had not locked up the rights, and now Leland Hayward hit the roof: the would-be producers would have to share their pet project with the two most powerful men on Broadway, who insisted on 51 to 49 percent control. Logan’s indiscretion would cost him untold heartache in the months and years to come, but at the moment, the prospect of another collaboration with Rodgers and Hammerstein was too thrilling to turn down.
Hammerstein at first had trouble finding Michener to work out a deal with him, placing a frantic round of phone calls in Manhattan before finally realizing that the author lived on Harvey Avenue in Doylestown, a ten-minute walk from Highland Farm. Now Howard Reinheimer entered the negotiations and promptly poor-mouthed the property. “You know, Michener, your book has no story line,” the lawyer said. “It has no dramatic impact.” So Rodgers and Hammerstein couldn’t possibly pay Michener the 1.5 percent of royalties that they and the Theatre Guild had given Lynn Riggs for Green Grow the Lilacs. After all, that had been a real play, with a cohesive plot and dramatic arc—not a ragtag collection of loosely linked tales. In the end, Michener accepted an offer of 1 percent of the gross box-office receipts in exchange for the rights to all of the stories and “never had regrets,” he said. Michener had plenty of reason for optimism. He knew that Rodgers and Hammerstein were still smarting from the failure of Allegro and were determined to have a hit. “Those fellows are so mad,” he would remember thinking, “they could make a great musical out of three pages of the Bronx telephone directory.”
* * *
REINHEIMER WAS RIGHT about one thing: Tales of the South Pacific was a neither-fish-nor-fowl creation, not a standard novel with a beginning, middle, and end, but more an accumulation of atmospheric character sketches. The New York Times had pronounced it “truly one of the most remarkable books” to come out of the war, and its appeal lay in its granularity—in its depiction of American types interacting with South Sea island originals—more than in its inherent drama. Michener’s wartime service in the Pacific had left him with a notebook full of vivid impressions and memorable characters. But Oscar Hammerstein would somehow have to hammer it all into a coherent libretto that could hold an audience for two and a half hours. The way forward was not immediately obvious, but there was no shortage of color.
“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific,” Michener’s book begins, in an evocative passage that Oscar underlined in his own personal copy.
The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting. But whenever I start to talk about the South Pacific, people intervene. I try to tell somebody what the steaming Hebrides were like and first thing you know I’m telling about the old Tonkinese woman who used to sell human heads. As souvenirs. For fifty dollars!
Indeed, it is just such a woman—a wily, betel-chewing entrepreneur and master of pidgin GI slang known as Bloody Mary—who features prominently in “Fo’ Dolla,” the longest story in the book. Making the acquaintance of handsome young lieutenant Joe Cable, she spirits him to the nearby island of Bali Ha’i, where the French planters have sequestered their daughters for the war, and where he promptly falls for Mary’s own lovely daughter, Liat. With Mary playing an uncomfortable combination of matchmaker and procurer, Cable is drawn again and again to the mystic island. But despite his deep love for the girl, he knows he can never marry her or take her home to his family in Philadelphia. Bloody Mary’s response as Cable heads off to duty in “Operation Alligator,” a major assault on a Japanese-held island, is unsparing: “Lieutenant one bullshit goddam fool!”
Michener summons up a gallery of other compelling characters. There is Tony Fry, a swashbuckling American officer with a penchant for acting outside the regular chain of command. He figures in “The Cave,” one of the most dramatic stories in the collection, about a group stationed on a small island, trying to keep the Japanese from retaking Guadalcanal. They receive messages from the “Remittance Man,” a British trader named Anderson, who has hidden out on a nearby island, secretly broadcasting Japanese troop movemen
ts to the Allies before being brutally killed. There is Lieutenant Bus Adams, an American bomber pilot who is shot down, and whose rescue mission costs the American taxpayers $600,000. “But it’s worth every cent of the money,” Michener’s narrator notes, “if you happen to be that pilot.” There is Luther Billis, a tanned, tattooed Seabee from the navy’s construction battalion who is obsessed with a ritual native boar’s tooth ceremonial on a neighboring island. There is Ensign Bill Harbison, a snappy, ambitious, married officer from Albuquerque who takes a shine to a navy nurse from Arkansas, Nellie Forbush, and, having briefly lost his head after a beach party, tries to rape her.
And finally there is Emile De Becque, a middle-aged French plantation owner, who falls in love with Forbush and asks her to marry him, in a story called “Our Heroine.” Nellie agrees, until she learns that De Becque has eight mixed-race daughters by four different mothers, two Javanese, one Tonkinese, and one Polynesian. “A nigger!” the omniscient narrator exclaims in horror. “To Nellie’s tutored mind any person living or dead who was not white or yellow was a nigger. And beyond that, no words could go!” But in the end, Nellie overcomes her fears and prejudices, returns to Emile, and joins him and his daughters in singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”
It was a lot for a librettist to absorb, and with his usual meticulous attention to detail and his strong eye for plot and character, Hammerstein went through Michener’s book story by story, underlining bits of dialogue, making red grease-pencil checkmarks in the margins, suggesting at one point that Cable, who never meets Nellie Forbush in the book, could have a scene telling her all about Bloody Mary’s improbable proposal. On a sheet of yellow legal paper, with page numbers from Michener’s book running down the left margin, he made notes of the characters’ names: Nellie, Harbison, and so on. Oscar’s work gained added impetus—and the whole project got a big shot in the arm—on April 27, with the surprise news that Tales of the South Pacific had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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