Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  Dorothy Hammerstein’s daughter, Susan Blanchard, once said that her mother was the sort of woman who “contemplated calling a lawyer” if Oscar danced with the same woman twice, but it is not clear whether she was aware of Oscar’s dalliance. By all accounts, the Hammersteins’ marriage was close and compatible; after more than two decades together, they still held hands when they rode in a car together, and Oscar would often sneak up behind Dorothy and kiss her. But at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party at the Pierre Hotel in 1954, at least one guest, Moss Hart, had detected a surprising lack of feeling in the room, noting that while Oscar had made a speech that briefly warmed up the mood, the proceedings had felt more dutiful than celebratory. What is beyond dispute is that a marriage that had begun with a thunderclap of love at first sight—and a tempestuous affair—would endure until Oscar’s death.

  * * *

  NOW, WITH DICK unwell and Oscar perhaps more distracted than usual, it may be no wonder that Pipe Dream was having more than its share of problems. Many of Rodgers’s tunes were lovely, but he was not always present to hear them. Oscar did his best to supplement Harold Clurman’s wavering direction. But the killer team that had once coolly known how to fix a show, “and by Monday,” suddenly seemed at a loss. Because the conflict between Doc and Suzy—his rejection of her as a prostitute—was never spelled out, Steinbeck complained that the would-be lovers had been reduced to “two immature people who are piqued at each other.” In Boston, Steinbeck wrote a pained letter to Oscar that laid it all on the line, and summed up the crux of the problem the show now faced. Noting that the respected Boston critic Elliot Norton had pronounced the show “conventional,” Steinbeck seized on that critique:

  I have heard others describe the same thing as sweetness, loss of toughness, lack of definition, whatever people say when they feel they are being let down. And believe me, Oscar, this is the way audiences feel. What emerges now is an old fashioned love story. And that is not good enough for people who have looked forward to this show based on you and me and Dick. When Oklahoma came out it violated every conventional rule of Musical Comedy. You were out on a limb. They loved it and were for you. South Pacific made a great jump. And even more you were ordered to go ahead. But Oscar, time has moved. The form has moved. You can’t stand still. That’s the price you have to pay for being Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  And when the show opened at the Shubert Theatre on November 30, 1955, the New York critics largely shared Steinbeck’s assessment. “Except for nice music, it is pretty much of a bust,” wrote Time magazine. “It is so warm-hearted about a cold world, so high-minded about its lowlifes as to emerge more hootch-coated butterscotch … what is meant to be low-down seems more like a hoe-down.” Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune had a discerning and perceptive take. He noted that in the song “The Man I Used to Be,” Doc complains that he’s not having as much fun as he used to because he’s “got a mission now” in his scientific research. “I wonder if something strangely similar isn’t beginning to happen to Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Kerr mused. “The authors seem unable to keep their minds on cheerfulness. Philosophy keeps breaking in.… Someone seems to have forgotten to bring along that gallon jug of good, red wine.”

  Despite its $1.2 million advance sale, the largest of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show to date, Pipe Dream would have the shortest run of any of the pair’s collaborations, just 246 performances. There would be no national company—and, as with Allegro, no London production, no movie version, and precious few amateur or stock revivals in years to come. Because Dick and Oscar had broken their long-standing rule against investing in their own shows by backing this one entirely, they lost their whole investment—and the hopeful Feuer and Martin never saw a cent. Even in the weeks after the show opened, Oscar would still be rewriting—a fact noted by Ed Sullivan in a tribute to Pipe Dream on February 5, 1956, when he charitably described the show as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s latest “smash.” Oscar told Sullivan that there was no reason not to try to make any show better, even one that the public was already paying to see. But they never managed to get this one quite right.

  In a letter to the casting director John Fearnley years after the show’s failure, Steinbeck said the die had been cast when Dick Rodgers told him they’d decided to call it Pipe Dream. “That name indicated that R+H didn’t believe in it,” he wrote. “They were telling the audience it wasn’t true before they started.… If you will read Sweet Thursday again you will see that I believed every word of it and played it as though it were the most important thing in the world. Pipe Dream didn’t convince anyone.”

  Billy Rose’s verdict was more succinct. “You know why Oscar shouldn’t have written that?” the veteran showman said. “The guy has never been in a whorehouse in his life.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Beyond Broadway

  You ask too much of people who have been successful and they’re human, too. I’m tremendously worried right now about the next show. This isn’t because Pipe Dream only ran one year instead of five, it’s a natural wariness at the nature of the business. It’s very easy to fail and I’ve always known that.

  Richard Rodgers

  In the spring of 1954, the dean of Boston drama critics, Elliot Norton, addressed the University of Massachusetts’s spring convocation. He noted that while the American theater had produced a first-rate crop of modern playwrights—Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maxwell Anderson, and Tennessee Williams among them—“only one person in fifty” among the general population “would be able to identify them.”

  “But,” Norton added, “the names of Rodgers and Hammerstein,” the convocation’s honorees that year, “are almost literally household words. However, people don’t merely know these names, they know the works these men have done. When you mention Rodgers and Hammerstein to almost any normal American with a sound heart and good hearing he thinks at once of songs and scenes and shows which they have written and which have given him great and abiding pleasure. In their work these two men have touched and enriched the lives of more people than any other American dramatic writers.”

  This was no exaggeration. But even as Norton spoke, Dick and Oscar were hard at work assuring that their words and music would soon reach millions more people, at home and all over the world. They would move beyond the familiar stretches of West 44th Street in Manhattan and Drury Lane in London that had been their home for a decade, and that had made their names so famous. In doing so, they would further enrich their bank accounts and extend their brand. They would also sow seeds that helped to stifle their creativity and diminish their critical and artistic reputations in years to come. How? They went Hollywood.

  At first, the rewards were apparent, but not the risks. Having for years steadfastly resisted all entreaties to sell their shows to the movies, as the tenth anniversary of Oklahoma!’s Broadway premiere passed, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and their ever-reliable legal and business adviser Howard Reinheimer made plans to conquer the next logical frontier. And they made certain to do so in the only way they liked to work: with the maximum degree of creative and financial control. The first step was to buy back all of the rights to Oklahoma! from the Theatre Guild and the show’s original investors for the impressive sum of $851,000—more than $7.5 million in 2017 dollars—to be paid out in six installments beginning in the summer of 1953.

  Hollywood’s interest in Oklahoma! as a film property had been so intense, Rodgers would recall, that at one point Paramount Pictures had offered the partners 100 percent of any movie’s profits, so convinced was the studio that it could make a fortune on the distribution rights alone. But true to form, and still wary of the ways of the Hollywood they had loathed two decades earlier, Dick and Oscar decided to do it themselves, forming a corporation, Rodgers and Hammerstein Pictures, Inc., to produce and package the film. With the old Hollywood studio system collapsing in the face of competition from television, and with moviemakers striving for ever-greater special effects with
wide-screen formats like Cinerama, not to mention novelties like 3-D, the partners made the strategic decision to embrace a brand-new format themselves: Todd-AO.

  Todd-AO was a partnership between the producer Michael Todd and the American Optical Company of Southbridge, Massachusetts. Todd had been captivated by Cinerama, an early wide-screen process that used three interlocked cameras and three separate strips of 35-millimeter film stock to produce a panoramic image on the screen. But the technique had flaws, including a tendency for the picture to blur at the seams, and Todd was convinced that there had to be a better way—a system that would, as Todd put it with typical bluntness, amount to “Cinerama out of one hole.” The resulting image would be projected on a wide, deeply curved screen that would extend partway around an auditorium’s walls, giving the viewer the sensation of being in the picture.

  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s partner in producing the film using the new format would be the Magna Theatre Corporation, whose directors included Todd, the longtime Fox executive Joseph Schenck, the producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., and the veteran movie exhibitor George Skouras. Hornblow was one of the few Hollywood producers Rodgers trusted completely, and he played a crucial role in the production team’s next choice—of Fred Zinnemann as director. Hornblow had worked with Zinnemann since the 1930s, and though he had never made a musical, Zinnemann had gained respect for his work on films like High Noon and From Here to Eternity, which would win the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1953, with Zinnemann taking home a statuette as best director. Shuttling back and forth between New York and Hollywood, Zinnemann threw himself into the work of screen tests and casting, with constant oversight from Dick and Oscar, who by now had Me and Juliet up and running on Broadway and were also preparing the London production of The King and I. There was hardly a promising young actor on either coast who was not considered at one time or another for a part in Oklahoma! Some of the ideas now seem far-fetched. Richard Burton as Jud Fry? Elsa Lanchester as Aunt Eller? Frank Sinatra as Ali Hakim? But other options amount to a tantalizing list of might-have-beens.

  Josh Logan was especially enthusiastic about a young actor who was then appearing on Broadway under his direction in William Inge’s Picnic. Fred Zinnemann was less impressed. “Paul Newman is a handsome boy but quite stiff, to my disappointment,” he wrote to Oscar. “He lacks experience and would need a great deal of work. Still, in the long run he may be the right boy for us. He certainly has a most winning personality although I wish he had a little more cockiness and bravado.” Zinnemann was more impressed with Newman’s future wife, Joanne Woodward. “Joanne has a lovely quality,” he told Hammerstein. “It may be that she is a bit too wistful for the part, and perhaps she doesn’t have quite the kind of radiance and vitality required for Laury [sic]. However, I was amazed at her ability to play the part believably—as though she were a very young and naïve teenager.”

  Zinnemann also tested another young actor just then making his name in live television, James Dean. “Dean seems to me to be an extraordinarily brilliant talent,” he told Hammerstein. “I’m not sure he has the necessary romantic quality. Just the same, I shot his scenes with great detail because I felt that with an actor of his calibre a standard of performance would be set up which would later on become very helpful as a reference and comparison.” Not every contender earned a screen test, but Zinnemann considered a raft of other names for Curly, among them Robert Stack, Vic Damone, Jeffrey Hunter, Van Johnson, Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan, and Robert Alda. He was especially taken with Eli Wallach’s audition for the role of the peddler but also considered Hoagy Carmichael, Buddy Ebsen, Danny Thomas, and Ray Bolger. Lee Marvin and Jason Robards Jr. were both considered for Jud, and among the potential Ado Annies were Debbie Reynolds and Rosemary Clooney. For the all-important lead role of Laurey, the list included Piper Laurie, June Allyson, Doris Day, June Haver, and Janet Leigh.

  But Hammerstein wrote to Joe Schenck on October 22, 1953, reviewing Zinnemann’s screen tests and auditions. “We didn’t find ourselves sufficiently enthusiastic about any of the candidates to make us want to proceed further with them.” He acknowledged this was somewhat worrisome, but there was no alternative but to keep plugging away. What Oscar didn’t say was that since that July, he and Dick had had an ace in their back pocket, a sparkling nineteen-year-old soprano from Smithton, Pennsylvania, named Shirley Jones. She had shown up at one of the weekly open auditions at the St. James Theatre. These casting calls, presided over by John Fearnley, had become a Broadway institution and a necessity for Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had to find replacement casts for their long-running New York shows and touring companies. Among the other young talents who were spotted through this farm system were Florence Henderson, Edie Adams, and Julie Andrews.

  Dick and Oscar had been so impressed with Jones’s crystalline soprano voice—and her creamy, blond good looks—that she became the only performer ever to be placed under a long-term personal contract by the team. She was promptly put in the chorus of South Pacific and would later join the road company of Me and Juliet. But from the moment they saw her, Dick and Oscar had considered her a potential screen Laurey.

  * * *

  MEANTIME, THERE WAS plenty of spadework to be done, including raising the financing for the film, and Rodgers and Hammerstein remained skeptical about their new Hollywood partners. After a lunch with George Skouras that fall, Dick wrote to Oscar, “You and I seem to be standing firmly in the middle of that pail of snakes that we talk about so often. It seems to be endless backbiting among all of them, and I think we’ll have to be very careful not to lose our heads.” And Oscar, belying his reputation as the easygoing half of the team, told Joe Schenck that he and Rodgers were determined to strike the best possible bargain for the rental of soundstages to shoot the picture. They would prefer the capacious facilities at MGM in Culver City, he said, but not at any cost. “We cannot pretend to have very much knowledge of our own as far as the details of a question like this are concerned,” Hammerstein wrote, “but one thing we can do is count, and if one studio is going to cost us two or three hundred thousand more than another we are not going to want to go there.”

  By early 1954, final casting choices were coming together, some of them unconventional. For Ado Annie, Zinnemann picked Gloria Grahame, who’d played a blowsy string of bad girls in noir films but who also had a gift for comedy. Rod Steiger, a New York method actor who had won widespread acclaim as a mobbed-up union official in On the Waterfront, would be Jud. Eddie Albert, a veteran song and dance man, was cast as Ali Hakim, and Gene Nelson would play Will Parker. Charlotte Greenwood, the veteran Broadway star who had been unavailable to play Aunt Eller on Broadway in 1943, finally got her intended part. And by spring, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Zinnemann had settled on their Curly: Gordon MacRae, a handsome Broadway and radio baritone who had co-starred with Doris Day in musicals at Warner Bros. MacRae had a winning personality and a gorgeous voice, but at age thirty-three was already showing the puffy and paunchy effects of a lifelong problem with alcohol. In late March, during the broadcast of a televised tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, MacRae performed songs from Oklahoma! with Florence Henderson as Laurey, and backstage, Jan Clayton asked Oscar if they were “going to give Gordy the part” in the film. “And he said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Why don’t you tell the poor lad?’” Clayton would recall. “He said, ‘We’re trying to worry a few more pounds off him.’” At virtually the same time, Shirley Jones, in Chicago with Me and Juliet, got a phone call from her agent. “Hello, Laurey!” he said.

  For Jones, it was a Cinderella story that seemed too wonderful to be true. Soon enough, though, she experienced the darker side of her good fortune: Rodgers invited her into his office, closed the door, and made “a cold-blooded pass,” as she later recalled. Over the years, Jones would recount slightly varying versions of her response, but the gist of it was that she told Rodgers, who was thirty-one years her senior, that she would always think of him as her father or, worse fo
r his ego, her grandfather. “It is a tribute to Richard Rodgers’s professionalism,” she would say, “that he didn’t take steps to fire me or ensure that Oklahoma! was the last movie I would ever make.”

  Location shooting began on July 14, 1954. Oklahoma itself had been ruled out as too full of telephone lines and other signs of civilization to pass for Indian Territory, circa 1907. So had Iowa. But Arthur Hornblow had seen some spectacular pictures of the San Rafael Valley near Nogales, Arizona, just north of the Mexican border. At a cost of $100,000, the scenic designer Oliver Smith built a replica of a working farm for Aunt Eller, complete with a cheery yellow farmhouse, a red-sided barn, and a rough-hewn smokehouse made with recycled lumber from an abandoned miner’s shack. Crews had planted seven acres of waving wheat, a peach orchard, and ten acres of specially irrigated corn, overseen by the University of Arizona’s agriculture department and guaranteed to be high as an elephant’s eye by the time of shooting. At its peak, the traveling company of actors and technicians numbered more than three hundred, with seventy trucks and trailers and a portable workshop to keep the expensive Todd-AO cameras in fighting trim. The encampment taxed Nogales’s resources so severely that the local chamber of commerce warned would-be visitors to stay away.

  Because the Todd-AO process was still untested, Zinnemann and the producers felt they needed a backup plan, and so decided to shoot every scene two ways: in Todd-AO and in the more tested CinemaScope format. Needless to say, this prolonged the shooting schedule and complicated everyone’s lives. Dick and Oscar kept a close watch on every aspect of the production, from Shirley Jones’s weight to Gene Nelson’s singing. “Richard—boy, you sang it the way it’s supposed to be sung, or not at all,” Nelson would recall years later. Walking around the Arizona landscape during breaks in the shooting, Hammerstein tried to work on the lyrics for Pipe Dream, which was then in the planning stages, but confessed he did not make much progress.