Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  Oscar also allowed that in 1949 and 1950, he had made $2 annual contributions to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who had fought for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. But when Howard Reinheimer, whose office had made the payments, noticed that the organization had appeared on the attorney general’s list of suspect organizations, the donations were stopped. Oscar reaffirmed his opposition to all forms of discrimination. He quoted from such all-American songs as “Ol’ Man River” and “Getting to Know You,” cited “The Last Time I Saw Paris” as an expression of solidarity with democratic allies everywhere, and noted that State Fair was reportedly the favorite movie of both Generals Douglas MacArthur and George C. Marshall. He said that his principal post–World War II charitable causes had included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Negro College Fund, and Catholic Charities, and explained that his principal civic engagement had been with the World Federalist Movement—which was itself anti-Communist and had been denounced as such by the party.

  “I should emphasize that if I have been careless in the past in lending my name to organizations with high-sounding titles, I no longer make this mistake,” Hammerstein wrote. For good measure, he added that he had supported both the Marshall Plan to aid struggling democracies in Europe and the American-led international “police action” in Korea, and noted that despite supporting the New Deal, he had become disenchanted with President Harry S. Truman and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1948. He denounced Communism as “the worst gold brick that has ever been sold to the underprivileged.”

  “My plays and songs are either in praise of human dignity, or just plain romantic and happy,” Oscar wrote. “I have helped write many of the songs of this nation, and I do not think I have let the nation down or endangered its security.” In conclusion, he said he hoped that the State Department would not look upon him “as a second or third class citizen, and that it will acknowledge my right to the same two year passport to which every loyal American is entitled.”

  Oscar’s affidavit was typically eloquent. But the preposterousness of his having had to offer it up was underscored by the fact that on the very day he drafted it—November 23, 1953—he and Dick were appearing in Washington as avatars of Americanism at the fortieth anniversary dinner of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. They had organized the evening’s entertainment, and their fellow celebrants in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel included President Eisenhower, five justices of the Supreme Court, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover himself. The show featured Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Eddie Fisher, Helen Hayes, and Rex Harrison. Jane Froman sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and when it was the partners’ turn to speak, Ethel Merman introduced them, counting off their hit shows on her fingers.

  “I think the theater has a better right than almost any other influence in America, to speak for democracy,” Rodgers began.

  Oscar chimed in. “We have no intolerance on the American stage, so we can plead for tolerance everywhere else.”

  “In other words,” Dick added, “our house is in order. We’re at no loss in the theater for blistering names to call each other—but they’re never based on color or religion.”

  “Another thing,” Oscar said, “nobody tells us what to write.”

  “The public tells us what it likes—and that’s democracy for us,” Dick concluded.

  In his own remarks, Eisenhower could not have been more supportive of Dick and Oscar’s comments. “I would not want to sit down this evening,” the president said, “without urging one thing: if we are going to continue to be proud that we are Americans, there must be no weakening of the code by which we have lived; by the right to meet your accuser face to face, if you have one; by your right to go to the church or the synagogue or even the mosque of your own choosing; by your right to speak your mind and be protected in it. Ladies and gentlemen, the things that make us proud to be Americans are the soul and the spirit.”

  Oscar’s regular passport was eventually restored. But the FBI continued to keep him in its sights until December 1959, when the bureau noted that someone—it is unclear who—was once again requesting the file generated by the original 1951 investigation.

  * * *

  THE MUTED REACTION to Me and Juliet did not deter Rodgers and Hammerstein from seeking out their next project. In the early 1950s, virtually every idea for a Broadway musical came to their door, and they turned down many of them, including the shows that later became My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof. Instead, they fell for an unlikely project that had been bubbling along for months. In 1952, the producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, who had scored back-to-back Broadway successes with Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley? and Guys and Dolls, approached the novelist John Steinbeck with a proposition. How about a musical play based on some of the raffish characters in the novelist’s Cannery Row, set in the fishing port of Monterey, California? Feuer and Martin were especially attracted to the story of Doc, a marine biologist, and of the Bear Flag Cafe, a friendly local whorehouse. In fact, their proposed title for the play was The Bear Flag Cafe, and they asked Steinbeck to write a libretto. He was game at first but soon realized he was uncomfortable with the mechanics of dramaturgy and made a counterproposal: he would write a novel based on those characters—he would call it Sweet Thursday—and that could be the basis of Feuer and Martin’s show. From the first, the producers had only one actor in mind to play Doc: Henry Fonda, who was dividing his time between Broadway and Hollywood but had never appeared in a musical. Feuer and Martin sent Fonda to singing lessons and approached their old partner Frank Loesser about writing the score. But Loesser was already consumed by other projects.

  It was at this point that Rodgers and Hammerstein entered the picture. Dick and Oscar knew Steinbeck well, both professionally and personally. The failure of Steinbeck’s play Burning Bright had not impaired their friendship, and Steinbeck’s wife, Elaine, had been assistant stage manager on the original production of Oklahoma! The partners were intrigued by Feuer and Martin’s idea, with the usual caveat: they would have to be sole producers, but they would cut in Feuer and Martin for a share of the profits. Almost from the start, however, there were complications. Despite some six months of singing lessons, Fonda would recall, “at the end of it, I still couldn’t sing for shit.” Rodgers, never one to compromise in the vocal department, agreed. “It would be a mistake,” he told Fonda after a painful audition. What’s more, Hammerstein was not thrilled with the idea of working with Fonda, who was by now his son-in-law, having recently married Dorothy’s daughter, Susan.

  So the team went back to the drawing board. Steinbeck began sending Oscar installments of his novel on color-coded pages, and Rodgers and Hammerstein started sketching out their own vision for the libretto and the score. In the spring of 1954, Sweet Thursday was published—to tepid reviews—and by this time Oscar had written five scenes of the first act, with accompanying lyrics, lifting liberally from Steinbeck’s text. Steinbeck’s story was basic. Doc, who had always been a carefree type, has returned from World War II restless and discontented, and his friends decide that what ails him is loneliness. They contrive to fix him up with Suzy, a defensive but sweet-at-heart hooker whom Fauna, the local madam, has taken under her wing. The plan blows up when Suzy realizes that Doc is reluctant to fall in love with a whore, and she breaks off their budding romance before love wins out in the end.

  Once again, there were early warning signs of trouble. Oscar wrote Dick that he found Steinbeck’s characters very interesting, and Rodgers answered expressing concern about one point. “Whether we can get away with a factual house of prostitution and make one of the leading characters a working prostitute is something else again,” he worried. It would turn out that they could not. Hammerstein’s early drafts of the libretto closely follow Steinbeck’s unvarnished dialogue. When Suzy first arrives in town, Fa
una sizes her up, guessing at the tough life she’s lived: “Lousy home—fighting all the time. Not more than fifteen or sixteen when you married the guy—or maybe he wouldn’t. You left home just to get away from the guy.” (Even in this version, Oscar omits Suzy’s pregnancy, which ends in a miscarriage.) In Oscar’s finished script all such explicit dialogue is gone, and Suzy and Fauna’s occupations are only hinted at in a genteel way.

  The problem is neatly distilled in an exchange of letters between Steinbeck and Hammerstein in the summer of 1955. On July 20, Steinbeck wrote Oscar to pass on a story he had shared with his wife about a hooker who’d worked at the real Bear Flag Cafe. “She was good and popular and on a good night she might turn twenty to thirty tricks,” he wrote. “But as soon as the joint closed every night or rather morning, she piled into an ancient car and drove eighteen miles to Salinas. Once we asked her why. ‘I got a guy over there,’ she said. ‘I have to get it once for love or I don’t sleep good.’ End of story. I find it pretty romantic but don’t imagine the Watch and Ward [the Boston censorship authority] would.” Six days later, Oscar wrote back about this “romantic girl.” “I like her,” he said. “I don’t see how I can wedge her in at the moment, but you never know what will turn up as you go along.”

  As if to signal that this project would be the polar opposite of Me and Juliet, Rodgers and Hammerstein signed up Harold Clurman, a veteran of the pioneering Group Theatre in the 1930s and the director of such serious plays as Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, to direct the new show, which would ultimately be called Pipe Dream, after the abandoned boiler pipe into which Suzy moves when she breaks up with Doc. And they had settled on a new star to headline the show: the Wagnerian opera diva Helen Traubel, who had recently been fired from the Metropolitan Opera for moonlighting as a nightclub singer. Oscar and Dick had seen her perform and agreed that she would make a busty, lusty madam. This was another miscalculation. Traubel’s voice was fading; she would eventually be miked from the stage. By the summer of 1955, with the show headed into production, the two other lead roles were cast. Bill Johnson, who’d played the male baritone leads in the London companies of Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me, Kate, was signed as Doc. And for Suzy, Dick Rodgers had been mightily impressed with Julie Andrews, a nineteen-year-old English ingénue who’d made a splash in Feuer and Martin’s production of The Boy Friend, but she was snapped up by Lerner and Loewe for their Pygmalion adaptation. So Judy Tyler, whom Dick had noticed as Princess Summerfall Winterspring on television’s Howdy Doody Show, would play the role. Tyler’s belting singing style annoyed Clurman, who thought it made her character seem hard and unsympathetic. “Doesn’t that belting disturb you?” he asked Rodgers. But Dick replied, “She’s so pretty I can’t even think about that.”

  * * *

  DURING THAT SAME summer of 1955, a far graver complication arose. Dick Rodgers had been experiencing pain in his left jaw and made periodic visits to his dentist, who was not concerned. Then one day in September, the dentist suspected more serious trouble and Rodgers was packed off first to his own doctor, and from there to a specialist in head and neck surgery. As Dick and Dorothy waited anxiously outside the office, Morty Rodgers (a physician himself) was closeted in lengthy consultations with the surgeon. “The wait was interminable and I knew something serious was going on,” Dick recalled. The verdict was bad: cancer of the jaw, no doubt the result of the years of Dick’s heavy smoking and drinking. The surgeon was measured. “It isn’t too early but it still isn’t too late,” he told Rodgers.

  Dick’s family’s impressions of the effect of his illness would vary significantly. “When he finally got cancer of the jaw, I think he was relieved,” Mary Rodgers thought. “Because he’d been waiting for something terrible to happen for so long, when it finally happened he was like, ‘Oh, well, Now I’ve got that over with,’ and he was always rather curiously happy when he was in the hospital, being taken care of.” But Daniel Melnick, who was then married to Linda Rodgers, drew the opposite conclusion. “Before that happened, he was still very outgoing, and in years to come he started to retreat,” Melnick would remember. “For someone of that period, cancer was the plague, a death sentence. So when it hit him, it had a disproportionately devastating effect.”

  The diagnosis came on a Friday. Rehearsals for Pipe Dream were to start the following Tuesday, and surgery was scheduled for Wednesday. Over the weekend, Dick wrote one new song and finished three piano manuscripts. He got permission to stop by the Tuesday morning rehearsal before entering the hospital for surgical prep. When he awoke Wednesday, “The next thing I knew I was conscious again in the recovery room, minus one malignant growth, a part of one jaw, and numerous lymph nodes.” The surgery was gruesome; all the teeth on the left side of his jaw were removed, he drooled uncontrollably at first, and the metal piece that replaced his jawbone would leave his face (and his radiant smile) permanently a bit lopsided, with the result that he would henceforth prefer to be photographed in profile from the right side. In public, he was typically resilient. “I can’t say the surgical and medical procedures of my hospital experience were enjoyable, but there was nothing horrible about them, either,” he would write years later. On the tenth day after the operation, while still spending his nights in the hospital, he showed up at rehearsal.

  * * *

  FOR DOC’S OPENING number, Oscar had written a lyric that reflected the biologist’s wonder at the natural order of the marine world—and Hammerstein’s own philosophy about humanity.

  It takes all kinds of people to make up a world,

  All kinds of people and things.

  They crawl on the earth,

  They swim in the sea,

  And they fly through the sky on wings.

  All kinds of people and things,

  And brother, I’ll tell you my hunch:

  Whether you like them

  Or whether you don’t,

  You’re stuck with the whole damn bunch!

  As the company packed up for the first out-of-town tryout in New Haven on October 22, 1955, Steinbeck was feeling satisfied. “I am delighted with Pipe Dream—with book and score and direction and cast,” he had written Oscar a month earlier. “It is a thing of joy and will be for a long time to come.” But as the tryouts continued and moved to Boston on November 1, Steinbeck grew increasingly uneasy at Rodgers and Hammerstein’s softening of the show’s tone. “Pipe Dream became full of doilies, and both of them were responsible, not just Oscar,” Cy Feuer would recall.

  Oscar had changed the source of Doc’s discontent from his war service to his first discomfiting meeting with Suzy. In the scene when Suzy arrives in Monterey, supposedly a dusty road kid, she sings a plaintive song, set to a haunting Rodgers melody, “Everybody’s Got a Home but Me”:

  I rode by a house

  With the windows lighted up,

  Lookin’ brighter than a Christmas tree,

  And I said to myself

  As I rode by myself,

  Everybody’s got a home but me.

  Steinbeck imagined Suzy as the kind of woman who has been ridden hard and put away wet, but she was dressed in a neat blue frock and looked, Steinbeck complained, “like an off-duty visiting nurse.” In a long string of memos to Hammerstein, the novelist elaborated:

  One of the most serious criticisms is the uncertainty of Suzy’s position in the Bear Flag. It’s either a whore house or it isn’t. Suzy either took the job there or she didn’t. The play doesn’t give satisfaction here and it leaves an audience wondering. My position is that she took the job all right but wasn’t any good at it. In the book, Fauna explains that Suzy’s no good as a hustler because she’s got a streak of lady in her. I wish we could keep this thought because it explains a lot in a short time.

  In fact, Oscar’s second-act opening number for Fauna, “The Happiest House on the Block,” made the Bear Flag Cafe sound a bit like a USO outpost:

  The happiest house on the block

  Is quietly sleepin
g all day,

  But after eleven

  Our little blue heaven

  Is friendly and foolish and gay.

  Oscar’s reputation for prudishness was well known among his peers. He had, after all, been born in the Victorian era, and in important ways he remained shaped by those times. The sole dirty joke he was known to approve of was a subtle one, told by Dorothy’s son, Henry Jacobson: A man walks into a store and asks the clerk, “Excuse me, Miss, do you keep stationery?” She replies, “Yes, until the very last minute, and then I go crazy!” So it is perhaps a paradox that even as he shrank from describing Suzy’s true trade, he himself around this point in his life had apparently embarked on an extramarital affair with Temple Texas, a striking showgirl who played Agnes, one of the Bear Flag girls in the show. Her photograph appears in the endpapers of the published script of the play, the most prominently featured member of the ensemble. A onetime model, born in Arkansas as Dora Jane Temple, Texas was a veteran of a couple of Broadway musicals and was the sort of girl who used one of her diamond bracelets as a collar for her miniature poodle, Floosy. Her comings and goings were regular fodder for the Broadway columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen in the 1940s and 1950s. In later years, she would find work as an entertainment press agent and settle down to married life as the wife of Joe Shribman, a prominent music industry manager in Los Angeles, with whom she adopted two children. She would count Ethel Merman among her close pals.

  It isn’t clear precisely when her relationship with Oscar began or ended, but Dick Rodgers was apparently aware of it, and was “very protective” of it, according to his niece Judy Crichton. Texas’s son, Owen Shribman, would recall that his mother never explicitly confirmed an affair with Oscar, but always spoke in the warmest terms about the importance of their relationship, and before her death at age sixty-two in 1987, she gave her son a man’s signet ring that Oscar had given her. “When she did speak of her time in Pipe Dream, she always had a smile on her face,” Shribman would recall. “Make of that what you will.”