Dorothy Hammerstein had also begun her business by chance, when friends in Hollywood recognized her natural flair for design and asked her for help in decorating their houses. Her early clients included the RKO producer Pandro Berman, the silent movie star Norma Talmadge, and Oscar’s old friend, Dorothy Fields. When Jules Stein built the MCA talent agency’s lavish new Georgian headquarters in Beverly Hills, he asked Dorothy to do the interiors. But in sharp contrast to Dorothy R.’s restrained style, Dorothy H.’s approach was exuberant and informal, with a special fondness for features like wallpaper on the ceiling and vibrant tones of purple, her nephew John Steele Gordon would recall. She liked to mix English and American pieces with Chinese accents, and when searching for dining chairs would invariably ignore four perfectly matching Chippendales in favor of a mismatched assortment. She was a collector of valuable vintage porcelain and china but liked to say that she preferred a “slight dash of vulgarity” to keep a room from feeling sterile.
She was relaxed and earthy and bubbly, and she presided over a rollicking and ever-changing extended family with warmth and ease. She had a sly wit and a way of calming Oscar’s occasional thundershowers of anger at the family table, though she was not above an occasional verbal misfire in the thick of an argument. One evening, she concluded a discussion of religious prejudice by declaring, “Well, I don’t care whether a person is a Jew or a Mohammedan or a Buddhist or anything else, just as long as he is a good Christian!”
In later years, Dorothy Rodgers would publish a fat coffee table book of decorating and cooking advice called My Favorite Things, and would include back-to-back color photographs of her bedroom—in shades of soft pewter blue and plum brown—and the other Dorothy’s—done up in black-and-white cotton chinoiserie prints and a bold Bristol blue rug. “It is a handsome, exciting room—as perfect a background for Dorothy as it would be wrong for me,” La Perfecta wrote with just the slightest whiff of condescension.
The two women had sharply different approaches to child rearing as well. Dorothy Rodgers made it plain that Dick was always her first priority. Both Rodgers girls had shown early musical talent—Linda was an especially gifted pianist—but neither parent particularly encouraged them, and in later years Linda would be reluctant even to play in front of her father. Mary, who had a gift for composition, was by now majoring in music at Wellesley but would soon leave college before graduation to marry—as, later, would Linda, who studied at Smith. The two older Hammerstein children—Billy and Alice—were now each remarried after divorces. Bill was working as a stage manager and fledgling director, the fourth generation to join the family business, while Alice had spent time as a script reader in Hollywood. Jimmy, Oscar’s son with Dorothy, was now a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It is an understatement to say that the two Dorothys—the onetime Jewish society girl from Manhattan and the former chorus girl from Tasmania—had little in common apart from their mutual brains, beauty, good taste, social standing, and famous husbands. “They were perfectly civil and pleasant, and would sometimes shop for antiques together when their husbands’ shows were on the road out of town,” Mary Rodgers would remember. “They just weren’t close friends and I think there was a certain rivalry probably underneath the surface.” Stephen Sondheim was blunter, observing that “the Hammersteins had virtually no social relationship to the Rodgerses.”
But the two Dorothys did have at least one thing in common that would have important consequences for their husbands’ careers: In 1944, both had admired a quirky and captivating historical novel by a Presbyterian missionary’s wife named Margaret Landon. Its title was Anna and the King of Siam, and it told a highly fanciful version of the true story of a British schoolmistress who in the 1860s had been commissioned to teach the children of King Mongkut of Thailand. Both women thought it would make a fine subject for Dick and Oscar. “But Rodgers and Hammerstein rejected it individually and collectively,” Rodgers’s biographer David Ewen recounted. “They said that it was not their meat.”
That was not the end of the story, however. As 1949 drew to a close, two powerful parallel forces would converge to bring the tale of Anna and the king back into the two Dorothys’ field of vision—and into Dick and Oscar’s, too. The first was Helen Strauss, a take-no-prisoners literary agent at the William Morris Agency who represented Margaret Landon and was looking for a new way to exploit her book, which had recently been made into a successful film for 20th Century Fox, starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. The second was Fanny Holtzmann, a longtime lawyer and theatrical agent for the British stage star Gertrude Lawrence, who for a quarter century had been one of the leading lights of Broadway and the West End and was looking for a new vehicle as she headed into her fifties. Lawrence had just filmed a disappointing version of The Glass Menagerie for Warner Bros. and had turned down a feeler to star in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s production of All About Eve, at least partly on the grounds that its bitchy heroine, Margo Channing, would give an unflattering picture of life in Lawrence’s beloved theater. At this juncture, a copy of Anna and the King of Siam landed on Holtzmann’s desk, and an idea began to form.
At the same time, Helen Strauss happened to be discussing other publishing business matters with Bennett Cerf of Random House and mentioned that Landon’s book might make a wonderful property for his friends Rodgers and Hammerstein. As it happened, Cerf was dining with Dick Rodgers that very night and agreed to mention the book. Strauss, citing Cerf’s recommendation, sent Rodgers a copy of the book. (Leaving nothing to chance, William Morris himself sent a copy to Oscar as well.) Cerf then followed up, sending along yet a third copy, with a note inside saying, “This is the book I mentioned the other day. I think it would make a great musical.” Flash-forward to late January 1950, when Fanny Holtzmann, having decided that the tale of Anna and the king would make a perfect project for Lawrence, was bustling along Madison Avenue. At 63rd Street, she caught sight of Dorothy Hammerstein. “Can’t talk now, Fanny,” Dorothy called out. “On my way to Sammy’s Deli to get a sour pickle for Ockie.” Of course, Holtzmann thought to herself. Dick and Oscar! Gertie! Anna!
Here accounts diverge. Oscar’s biographer Hugh Fordin reports that Holtzmann at first sent Dorothy a book about a Jewish actress married to a German general; others say the book was Anna itself. Dorothy wasn’t impressed with the German Jewish romance and called Holtzmann to say so.
“Well, I’ll think of something else,” the redoubtable lawyer insisted. “But I definitely think the boys should do a show for Gertie.”
“I don’t know why they should,” replied Mrs. Hammerstein. “She’ll want it all.”
Oscar, listening from the next room, couldn’t stifle his admiration. “That’s just what we would have said!” he later told Dick.
Holtzmann soon put yet another copy of Anna and the King of Siam in the Hammersteins’ hands, and by now Oscar liked the idea a lot. Dick did, too, but he was wary. He and Oscar had had Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in mind for South Pacific early on, but they had never before written a pure star vehicle, commissioned with only one actress in mind. And with Fanny Holtzmann and Helen Strauss in cahoots, it was clear that this project would be a package deal that included Lawrence or no one.
“We were concerned that such an arrangement might not give us the freedom to write what we wanted the way we wanted,” Rodgers would recall. “What also bothered us was that while we both admired Gertrude tremendously, we felt that her vocal range was minimal and that she had never been able to overcome an unfortunate tendency to sing flat.” So the partners arranged to see the Rex Harrison–Irene Dunne movie in Darryl Zanuck’s Manhattan screening room. “That did it,” Rodgers would recall, explaining that it was instantly obvious that the story “had the makings of a beautiful musical play.” Lawrence herself had seen the film and admired the story and was now eager to play the part. So eager, by Helen Strauss’s later account, that she let Howard Reinheimer sign her to a two-year contract to p
lay Anna even before the dramatic rights were sewn up, which they soon enough were. On February 26, 1950, Holtzmann wrote Oscar, “Gertrude is pleased and is holding up all plans subject to ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM.”
* * *
FOR THEATERGOERS ON both sides of the Atlantic in 1950, Gertrude Lawrence was a name to make the heart beat faster. In light drawing room comedies and music hall romps with her good friend Noël Coward, she had lit up the stage in ways few performers ever do. Despite her vocal limitations, she had introduced such enduring standards as the Gershwin brothers’ “Someone to Watch over Me.” Not a conventional beauty, with an unhappily prominent nose, she nevertheless appeared ravishing behind the footlights. Her personal life was a swirl of caviar and champagne suppers, and she moved with the grace of a young deer. “Vitamins should take Gertrude Lawrence,” was the verdict of Harold Cohen, the longtime drama critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Oh, she was a fey creature—from and of another world,” recalled the composer and conductor Johnny Green, who wrote the ballad “Body and Soul” for her. “Fascinating! Mercurial, volatile, enormously talented.” Green added that Lawrence amounted to one of the unlikeliest instances of musicality he had ever known: “Awful voice, incapable of singing in tune, no breathing technique, sheer magic.” Her longtime chum (and reportedly sometime lover), the novelist Daphne du Maurier, once wondered to their mutual friend Noël Coward, “Why, oh, why, should someone with the mind of somebody of ten, with whom one really had no thought in common, no topic of real conversation, no sort of outlook resembling one’s own at all, who frequently lied, who never stopped doing the most infuriating things, yet have the power to so completely wrap herself around the heart that, because of her, one became bitched, buggered and bewildered?”
Lawrence would portray Anna Leonowens, a widowed schoolteacher of Anglo-Indian descent whose memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, had sparked the imagination of post–Civil War abolitionists upon its publication in 1870. Leonowens offered what claimed to be an insider’s account of life in the king’s harem and of her own influence in moderating his semi-barbaric ways. But she also larded her purportedly factual firsthand account with a raft of self-serving fictions, hiding her mixed-race origins and romanticizing her late husband as a British army officer when he had actually been a civilian clerk.
Taking Leonowens’s account at face value, Margaret Landon, a graduate of Wheaton College who had spent ten years in Thailand with her missionary husband, further embellished the tale with evangelical embroidery of her own, making Mrs. Anna not the instrument of the king’s desire to modernize his country but the agent of his enlightenment under firm and benign Western influence. That was a message that resonated widely when her book was published in 1944, at the very moment when Allied troops were fighting fascism in Europe and envisioning a new era of influence in Asia. It’s fair to say that it was also a message that would have resonated with that dedicated World Federalist, Oscar Hammerstein, for whom the power of Western liberal virtues to influence the rest of the world for the better was an article of faith.
In Landon’s book, the relationship between Anna and the king is not even the central plotline, and he appears only episodically. Like James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, Anna and the King of Siam is more a loosely linked collection of incidents than a cohesively plotted novel. But unlike the case of South Pacific, for which Hammerstein and Josh Logan had to fashion a dramatic narrative almost from scratch, there was already a strong and effective spine on which to base the new libretto: the screenplay of the 1946 film, by Sally Benson and Talbot Jennings, which wove Landon’s vignettes into a coherent story and provided Rex Harrison’s king with his distinctive, demotic, article-free version of English. Hammerstein would follow this lead, improving the result, as usual.
* * *
WITH THEIR STAR in hand, Rodgers and Hammerstein now began assembling the creative team for the show. They first offered the director’s job, and full co-authorship of the book, to Josh Logan. But still smarting from his South Pacific humiliation, Logan turned them down, another decision he would regret for the rest of his life. So they settled for John Van Druten, whom they had known since the days of I Remember Mama, and whom Lawrence also knew and had worked with before. Much of the rest of the creative staff was familiar—Jo Mielziner to design the sets; Robert Russell Bennett to do the orchestrations; and the ever-reliable Trude Rittmann to arrange (and, as it would turn out, actually compose) the dance music. There were also two important newcomers: Irene Sharaff, one of Hollywood’s top designers, to create the costumes using genuine Thai silks; and Jerome Robbins, a young choreographer who had made a name for himself both on Broadway and in ballet, to devise a planned second-act ballet in which one of the king’s slaves would tell the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in stylized dance.
But as the months wore on, Rodgers and Hammerstein still lacked a crucial element: a king. They had had several options in mind from the beginning, including an actor who’d already played the part. “I phoned Rex Harrison and he told me he had been in a couple of musicals and could do numbers, although he was no vocalist,” Rodgers wrote his wife on February 19, 1950. “We’re to have lunch with him next week to discuss it.” But there was bad blood between Harrison and Darryl Zanuck in the aftermath of the film, and since Fox was set to be a major investor in the musical that would soon be retitled The King and I, nothing came of this idea. Dick and Oscar also thought of Lawrence’s old co-star, Noël Coward, and sounded him out in June about the prospect of playing the king and directing the show, following up over a lunch in September, at which they presented him with a draft of act one, which he found charming. Rodgers fought Coward “like a steer” to try to persuade him to act and direct, but Coward had been at work on a comedy of his own with Gertie in mind and had no desire to appear in a play he had not written. Rodgers and Hammerstein then approached a singing actor whose work they knew intimately: Alfred Drake, their original Curly from Oklahoma! Over a lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel they pitched the project to him. But by this point Drake, with a smash star turn in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate under his belt, was fielding any number of attractive offers and did not want to commit to what already looked like an inevitable long run. Dick and Oscar left the Plaza and headed to the Majestic Theatre, where their casting director, John Fearnley, was holding auditions. Fearnley had invited a young actor to perform for the partners, an actor who had worked with Mary Martin in Lute Song and came highly recommended by her.
“He scowled in our direction, sat down on the stage and crossed his legs, tailor-fashion, then plunked one whacking chord on his guitar and began to howl in a strange language that no one could understand,” Rodgers would recall. “He looked savage, he sounded savage, and there was no denying that he projected a feeling of controlled ferocity. When he read for us, we were again impressed by his authority and conviction. Oscar and I looked at each other and nodded. It was no more than half an hour after we had left Drake, and now, out of nowhere, we had our king.”
His name was Yul Brynner, and he had decided he was “fed up with acting” and was directing television programs for CBS. Rodgers thought his “bony, Oriental face” would be perfect. Indeed, Brynner’s appearance was exotic, and he had fashioned a biography every bit as embellished as Anna Leonowens’s. He variously claimed to have been descended from Genghis Khan, to have run away from home at age thirteen to join the circus, to have a PhD from the Sorbonne. His birth year was reported as 1915, 1917, or 1920. The truth, while more prosaic, was yeasty enough. He was born in Vladivostok to a mother who was part Russian and a father who was part Swiss, and was raised there and in the Manchurian city of Harbin and eventually in Paris. He spoke Russian, French, Chinese, Romany Gypsy, and at least a smattering of other languages. He had trained as a circus clown, had worked as a substitute player on a jai alai team and as a lifeguard on the beach in Biarritz, and had studied acting in Paris before moving to Pekin
g to spend time with his father. In 1940 he emigrated to America to study acting with Michael Chekhov, a nephew of the playwright, whose students over the years would include Anthony Quinn, Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, and Clint Eastwood. He struggled to win small parts with Chekhov’s touring troupe, and after the United States entered World War II he worked for the Office of War Information, producing French-language propaganda. He later kicked around Broadway casting calls, and worked for CBS before getting his big break in Lute Song.
* * *
OSCAR WAS ALREADY well along on the script, as a surviving draft from July 1950 makes clear. Taking his cues from the Fox screenplay, which included a much-expanded role for the king and a ceremonial presentation of his wives and children to the new schoolmistress, Hammerstein refined and sharpened the characterizations and plot points. He would eliminate the death of Anna’s son Louis in a horseback-riding accident, change the character of Tuptim from a haughty concubine to a sympathetic slave fascinated by Mrs. Anna’s disquisitions on freedom and feminine dignity, and flesh out the role of the man who helps Tuptim escape, changing him from a priest to her lover. This created a dynamic that echoed South Pacific, in which the secondary characters would be played not for laughs but as tragedy. And just as Cable and Liat’s ill-starred romance is the intellectual heart of South Pacific, Tuptim’s quest for freedom is the crux of The King and I.
By midsummer, Hammerstein was sketching out detailed ideas for songs without yet committing lyrics to paper. In his July draft, he explained the purpose of a proposed soliloquy for Anna, who, alone in her bedchamber, pours out her frustrations that the king considers her his servant and forces everyone in his presence never to have their heads above his but to prostrate themselves in obeisance. This song, Oscar wrote, would “reveal Anna’s character, the well-bred and genteel Victorian surface, and the inner strength and haughtiness of this woman, her pride, her deep love for the royal children, and the Siamese people, to whom she has become attached, and her admiration and affection for the king, however reluctantly she admits it right now. This number then is designed, not only to give added dimension to the character but to afford the actress the opportunity to loosen up and go beyond the bounds of propriety within which a lady had to keep herself in 1862. Here is a chance for more lusty comedy than she can reveal in other scenes of the play.” The finished number, “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?,” written in six distinct sections, which Rodgers set to different melodies, is as compact a piece of dramatic exposition as Hammerstein ever wrote and an important window into Anna’s thinking and motivations, as she alternately gives the king a piece of her mind in an imaginary confrontation, then indulges in her own reflections and self-doubt.
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