Zinnemann was acutely conscious of the obligation he had taken on in directing such a beloved property. The annotations on his shooting script reflect his ideas about the story and spirit of the show. “Naïve. Not sophisticated. Primitive,” Zinnemann wrote in notes to himself. “Actors do not condescend to material. Feeling that songs are improvised sung for the first time right now.” And he added this note, “Get weather into picture!” That last desire proved both easier and harder than the director might have anticipated, because near-daily thunderstorms often interrupted shooting, as puffy white clouds built to enormous afternoon thunderheads before calm returned late in the day “with brilliantly clear and soft afternoon sunlight,” in which some of the cinematographer Robert Surtees’s best shots were made, Zinnemann would recall.
Back in Culver City, the Skidmore ranch—the scene of the box social—was built on one of MGM’s largest soundstages. Agnes de Mille had been hired to re-create her dances and the signature dream ballet, and Rodgers would recall that she proved to be the most temperamental member of the production staff, tangling with both him and Arthur Hornblow. “On one occasion,” he would remember, “she had the door locked on a sound stage during a dance rehearsal and made Arthur and me—both her employers—wait outside until she deigned to let us in.”
Rodgers himself tangled with Malcolm Kingsberg, the Magna Theatre Corporation’s treasurer, over what Kingsberg viewed as the extravagance of a $50 lariat, with Rodgers explaining that it was a trick prop, made easy to twirl—and that the $50 had purchased more than one, to boot. Kingsberg also complained about spending $200 for custom-made posters of the burlesque girls in Jud’s smokehouse, only to have Rodgers explain that they had to be specially drawn to match the faces of the girls who come to life in Laurey’s dream. Kingsberg’s reply: “Why must they come to life?” As might be expected, Rodgers also kept an eagle eye on the music, setting out detailed notes for what he wanted from the seventy-five-piece orchestra that would play Russell Bennett’s orchestrations under the director of the original Broadway conductor, Jay Blackton. The movie’s opening sequence had been carefully planned, with the camera moving silently through that field of priceless corn before emerging into an open meadow to reveal Curly on horseback, singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
“Before anything appears on the screen,” Rodgers wrote to Hornblow, Zinnemann, and Bennett on October 29, “I suggest that we hear a faint rustle coming from an outsize string section. After this rustle has had a chance to establish itself, we ought to get the first glimpse of the tall corn. As the camera starts to move through the corn, the rustle should grow to a murmur, and the murmur should gradually increase in volume until the camera breaks through the corn, and as we look out over the valley there should be a tremendous outpouring of sound from the entire orchestra while Curly starts riding up the hill toward us.”
That same week, George Skouras saw a rough cut of the film and was worried. “I see a beautiful picture with beautiful paintings which will call forth from the audiences exclamations of appreciation,” he reported to Dick and Oscar, “but, it seems to lack the suspense, excitement and virility which are the very elements of making a motion picture a great box office attraction.” Skouras proposed a prologue for the movie that would begin with Dick and Oscar rehearsing the Oklahoma! company in New York, then announcing that the cast would all be flying on location to the state of Oklahoma itself. He suggested borrowing a DC-7 from whichever airline would supply it for free, filming scenes of the craft flying past the George Washington Bridge (and almost hitting it), before heading west. “I feel that by this time the audience will not only have been greatly thrilled by the process, but it will have experienced an intense enough sense of participation to be ready to relax and enjoy the picture.”
Dick and Oscar’s reaction to this outlandish idea is not recorded, but in the end, the film would be preceded in its theatrical showings with a special short subject, The Magic of Todd-AO, in which filmgoers were treated to a camera’s-eye view of a roller-coaster ride and other thrills, lest they underestimate the possibilities of the new wide-screen process.
Zinnemann finished shooting on December 6, 1954, and while the film’s release had originally been anticipated for early 1955, repeated delays caused by the new equipment forced the postponement of its premiere to October 11. But the delay did not dim the critics’ enthusiasm. The movie “magnifies and strengthens all the charm that it had upon the stage,” wrote Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, and the public lapped it up. The film opened in limited road show release in select, specially equipped theaters and played for fifty-one consecutive weeks at the Rivoli on Broadway, grossing $1.5 million there alone. Total box-office receipts were $9.5 million, making it the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year.
Late in life, though, Rodgers would remain ambivalent about the final result, finding the wide-screen process not so effective in the intimate scenes and complaining that the casting was not “totally satisfactory.” In the future (except for South Pacific), he noted, “Oscar and I left moving pictures to moving-picture people and stayed clear of any involvement.”
* * *
THERE WERE CLEAR practical and legal reasons for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s comparative noninvolvement in the next two film adaptations of their work. But they would pay a lasting artistic price for staying on the sidelines. By virtue of having filmed the 1946 Rex Harrison version of Anna and the King of Siam, 20th Century Fox had right of first refusal on any film version of The King and I, and the studio chose to exercise it. And because Fox’s European arm had made the 1934 French-language version of Liliom starring Charles Boyer, it also had a claim on Carousel, whose film rights Rodgers and Hammerstein had bought back from the Theatre Guild for $165,000 in May 1955. Both movies went into production that year, even as the finishing touches were being put on Oklahoma!
At first, Fox’s ideas for Carousel seemed promising, even daring. For the long-suffering Julie Jordan, one name turned heads right away: the long-suffering Judy Garland, Hollywood’s greatest, though deeply troubled, musical star, fresh from her triumph in Warner Bros.’ remake of A Star Is Born. But Garland had a newborn baby son, and nothing ever came of the notion. Fox’s production chief Darryl Zanuck had another idea just as riveting: America’s favorite singing bad boy, Frank Sinatra, as Billy Bigelow. And Sinatra wanted the part. Zanuck told Oscar that he hoped the studio could begin location shooting by late summer and that Sinatra “was born to play this role.” Zanuck added, “He has all of the necessary larceny and yet he has the tenderness and he has developed into a remarkable actor, which has already won him one Academy Award. He is hounding me because he has so many other offers and he wants to leave free time in case we decide to take him. I think perhaps if we played him opposite the girl you have in OKLAHOMA this might be an ideal combination.” Oscar replied that he and Dick agreed that Sinatra could make “a very interesting and offbeat approach to the casting” but urged Zanuck to consider Gordon MacRae as well. He liked the idea of Shirley Jones as Julie but warned Zanuck that she was about to leave for Paris in a special goodwill touring production of Oklahoma! to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and she would thus be occupied through midsummer. Five days later, Zanuck was back to Oscar with another idea. “I think it would be a terrible mistake for us to use the same cast you have in OKLAHOMA,” he wrote, instead suggesting that Julie be played by the British actress Jean Simmons, who had just wrapped up the role of Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls for Sam Goldwyn. “In the case of CAROUSEL I assume we would have to dub her,” Zanuck noted, but added that she and Sinatra would make a perfect “motion picture cast,” adding, “You have no idea how valuable this will be to us in Europe.”
In the end, Zanuck settled on Sinatra and Jones, which would have been a sexy, summer-and-smoke pairing. But when Sinatra showed up on location via limousine in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, he professed shock that the director, Henry King, would be shooting the picture two ways, à la
Fred Zinnemann, this time in standard 35-millimeter CinemaScope and in Fox’s new CinemaScope 55, a 55-millimeter, six-track stereo format. “I signed to do one movie, not two,” the Voice declared, and got back in his limo and headed for the airport. (In her memoir, Jones also floated an alternate reason for Sinatra’s disappearance: his battling wife, Ava Gardner, was threatening to have an affair.) Carousel’s producer Henry Ephron, who with his wife, Phoebe, was also co-author of the screenplay, had “tears rolling down his cheeks,” Jones recalled, and asked her if she knew how to reach Gordon MacRae. From a pay phone, Jones called MacRae in Lake Tahoe (where he was performing a nightclub act) and asked him if he’d like to play Billy. “Give me three days,” he replied. “I gotta lose ten pounds.”
So the studio settled for a rematch of Jones and MacRae, but the sunny chemistry that had worked in Oklahoma! proved off-key for Carousel. The Ephrons concocted a tricked-up screenplay that began the story not with the stunning pantomime of “The Carousel Waltz” but with a hokey prologue before the opening credits, with Billy in Heaven preparing to tell the Starkeeper his story in flashback. Rodgers’s magnificent score was truncated and the sung exchanges between Julie and Billy in the bench scene eliminated in favor of spoken dialogue. Hammerstein was also forced to come up with bowdlerized lyrics to replace some of his saltier phrases to satisfy the movie censors—only to see most of the alternatives eliminated altogether in the final cut. There were distracting technical glitches: the sight of motorboats in the background of the location scenes in Boothbay Harbor, and MacRae singing Billy’s “Soliloquy” amid the crashing rocks and waves of Paradise Cove in Malibu, with the sun setting behind him—an impossibility on the Atlantic coast.
But the biggest problem was the overall sanding down, even the dumbing down, of a story that had always been both delicate and dark. What the Ephrons didn’t do by way of messing up the screenplay, the enforcers of the Motion Picture Production Code did themselves, asking Fox for the elimination of even such mild oaths as “damn,” “by God,” and “what the hell,” and insisting that Billy could not be allowed to kill himself to avoid arrest but must fall on his knife accidentally, because the code’s prudish strictures required that suicide “should never be justified or glorified or used to defeat the due processes of law.” The result, seen by millions of people, and eventually replayed on television, was a Carousel that lacked the subtlety, sophistication, and grace of the Broadway original—and that would in the long run help to cement R&H’s reputation as purveyors of safe, sickly sweet, middle-of-the-road fare. When the film opened on February 16, 1956, Time magazine’s assessment was tough but not off the mark: “The melodies have all their clovered freshness still, but if film fans lick their lips over anything else … it will be because they can’t tell sweet from saccharine.… In a word: goo.” Carousel would prove to be the only one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s major films not to be nominated for a single Academy Award.
Dick and Oscar had no greater involvement in the production of The King and I, but the result was much better, in part because of the strong hand of Jerome Robbins, who re-created his Broadway dances; the gorgeous costumes of Irene Sharaff; and perhaps most of all, Yul Brynner’s brilliant and commanding performance as the king. The director was Walter Lang, who had directed State Fair a decade earlier, and the Fox music department under the direction of Alfred Newman did justice to the score, though in the end several songs did not appear in the final print. Deborah Kerr made a fine Mrs. Anna, credibly and effectively dubbed by Marni Nixon, who worked closely with Kerr to mimic her speech patterns. Trude Rittmann’s chorus featured the future opera star Marilyn Horne, while Rita Moreno, chosen after Fox’s first choice—Dorothy Dandridge—fell through, was an appropriately exotic Tuptim, albeit Puerto Rican, not Thai. (In a reflection of the questionable prevailing practices of the day, Moreno’s own perfectly strong singing voice was also dubbed.) Rittmann had a screen credit as arranger of the ballet music—“not the correct one thanks to Mr. Rodgers,” she ruefully wrote to her sister, “but still my name’s there in connection with the picture.”
Brynner himself, never one to suffer fools gladly, played a key role in keeping things on track, though the veteran television director chafed at the hidebound ways of a studio that he would later dismiss as “16th Century-Fox.” Together, he and Hammerstein conspired to fend off the studio’s idiotic suggestion that the king’s death be explained as the result of his having been gored by an elephant. “The king dies because he has no will to live any longer,” Brynner explained to the producer Charles Brackett. “He dies of a broken heart, if you wish to put it in a common language. But he truly dies because he cannot fulfill his desire to become a modern king that can modernize and bring something to his country that is better for his son.… The studio, they laughed at me when I said, ‘He dies of a broken heart.’ They said, ‘Oh, come on, you’re really just a kid.’”
The film opened on Dick Rodgers’s fifty-fourth birthday, June 28, 1956—just four months after Carousel—and the reviews were uniformly strong. “It has the full content of that charmingly droll and poignant book that Mr. Hammerstein crystallized so smartly,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. “It has, too, the ardor and abundance of Mr. Rodgers’s magnificent musical score.” But in an unhappy postscript, the movie cost Dick and Oscar their long professional association with Jo Mielziner, who sued them and Fox for appropriating his stage designs, including the colorful schoolroom map in which Siam looms larger than all its neighbors. More than two years later, he would settle his case for $21,000, with $10,000 contributed by the studio and $5,500 each by Dick and Oscar. Mielziner, who had designed every Rodgers and Hammerstein show since Carousel, would never do another.
* * *
ONE OF THE most appealing realities about Dick and Oscar, and doubtless one of the secrets of their enduring success, was that while they took their work very seriously, they were never snobs about it—or about the mass popular culture that had embraced it. Moreover, despite their spectacular good fortune, they remained alert to fresh ideas. A case in point was television, the brash new medium of the day. “I look at television a great deal,” Oscar told an audience gathered at Swarthmore College for a lecture, “Art and Mass Media,” in February 1957. “And I resent the kind of snobbish attitude that people have toward it. I get into a great many dinner party fights with people who say they won’t have television in their house. What will it do to their children and things like that! Well, I don’t think it harms the children any more than funnies or comics.” Moreover, Hammerstein contended, unlike the movies, which since the dawn of sound had stolen talent from the Broadway stage, the production of live television drama, then centered in New York, had “used theatrical talent and created more,” with both films and legitimate plays increasingly starting out as television productions.
The topic was far from theoretical for Hammerstein, because he and Dick Rodgers were immersed in creating Cinderella, their original ninety-minute live musical for CBS. And he made it clear that he did not consider the assignment in any way a come-down or an invitation to produce second-tier work. He noted that it typically took him and Dick about a year to write a two-and-a-half-hour play, and explained that they would be spending the proportionally equivalent amount of time—about seven months—on Cinderella. Indeed, he said, “if there is any difference it’s that we are using more care because we are entering a new medium. We do not want to fall on our faces, we want to do the very best we can; and we’re very conscious of those sixty or seventy million people who are going to be looking at the television sets that night.”
Some of the early collaboration took place by mail, because Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein were in Australia. In a letter to Dick on November 10, 1956, Oscar asked him to send a copy of Variety’s review of the recent out-of-town opening of a new Max Gordon production, Everybody Loves Me, in Princeton, New Jersey. Oscar didn’t explain the reason for his request, but he didn’t have to: the play
—which would never make it to Broadway—starred Jack Carson and featured Temple Texas.
From the beginning, the prospect of working on a Cinderella built around Julie Andrews had been all but irresistible. In fact, Rodgers and Hammerstein would produce one of their most scintillating scores for the show. Rodgers’s stirring main march and his swirling, foamy “Waltz for a Ball” are as memorable, and as effective in their place, as any music he ever wrote. Cinderella’s opening ballad, “In My Own Little Corner,” is a plaintive, poignant expression of wistful wish fulfillment, as the character dreams of what her life might be. In writing the lyrics, Oscar went through his usual painstaking process of refinement. An early draft,
I’m a sailor in the battle of Trafalgar
I’m a countess who is kidnapped in Peru
I am taken by the Incas to the mountains
And I have to eat and drink as Incas do …
gave way to lines more appropriate for a brave but lonely girl, and more ruefully funny, too:
I’m a huntress on an African safari
(It’s a dang’rous type of sport and yet it’s fun).
In the night I sally forth to seek my quarry
And I find I forgot to bring my gun!
While both partners made a point in interviews of saying they had no wish to mar the classic story with anachronistic modern touches, the genius of Hammerstein’s book is that he made Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters more comic than evil, and he sprinkled other deft touches throughout. In the lyrics for “The Prince Is Giving a Ball,” a spoof of medieval pageantry that would ultimately open the show, Oscar gave his royals an impossible mouthful of Ruritanian names, each capped by a borscht belt topper. Hence:
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