TOWN CRIER:
His Royal Highness
Christopher Rupert
Windermere Vladimir
Karl Alexander François
Reginald Launcelot
Herman—
SMALL BOY:
Herman?
TOWN CRIER:
—Herman Gregory James
Is giving a ball!
Hammerstein initially named his king “Maximillian Godfrey Ladislaus Leopold Elvis” before thinking better of it and substituting “Sidney” instead.
Oscar’s fairy godmother was not an elderly granny but the young and sexy Edie Adams, who was even then appearing on Broadway as Daisy Mae in Li’l Abner. She, too, had gotten her big break through one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s open auditions a few years earlier. They had nothing for her at the time, but George Abbott did, and she originated the role of Eileen in Wonderful Town. For “Impossible,” the song in which the godmother explains to Cinderella that her dreams really can come true, Hammerstein sketched out a rough idea:
Impossible
For six little mice
To be turned into six large horses
Such balderdash/poppycock, of course, is impossible
followed by a list of synonyms: “Fol de rol, fiddle faddle, twaddle, poppycock, drivel, moon-shine, balderdash…”
That sketch became this finished lyric:
Impossible
For a plain yellow pumpkin
To become a golden carriage!
Impossible
For a plain country bumpkin
And a prince to join in marriage!
And four white mice will never be four white horses—
Such fol-de-rol and fiddledy dee of course is
Impossible!
The song’s conclusion summed up as well as anything Hammerstein’s essential philosophy:
But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say,
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things are happ’ning every day.
“When You’re Driving Through the Moonlight” is an extended musical scene in which Cinderella, who has just returned from the ball, though her stepsisters do not know it, surprises them by correctly imagining just what it must have been like. Its sung dialogue is a lighthearted echo of the bench scene in Carousel, and it gives way to “A Lovely Night,” a joyous celebration of the evening, accompanied by a raucous ragtime piano obbligato.
In later years, Julie Andrews would reflect that she barely appreciated at the time what legends she was working with or what an extraordinary opportunity she’d been given. In February and March 1957, she was sandwiching rehearsals for Cinderella between her eight performances a week in My Fair Lady, and trying to sing and dance on a television set so crowded that every move was “a bit of a scuffle.” It was all she could do to keep up. Instead, she would remember the small moments, like watching Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney, theatrical royalty who played the king and queen, eat their brown bag lunches at rehearsal, or standing backstage one day idly whistling “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” only to hear Oscar’s gentle voice behind her saying, “I really meant that when I wrote it, you know,” and having to confess that she’d had no idea it was his song.
Just one number was cut in rehearsal, a song for Howard Lindsay, called “If I Weren’t King.” It’s hard not to see in its wistful lines a reflection of Hammerstein’s growing desire to take things easier in his own life:
If I weren’t King,
What a drifter I would be!
Like a kite without a string,
Irresponsible and free.
While the King was busy opening some bazaar,
I’d be nonchalantly leaning on a bar.
When the monarch made a speech,
I’d be lying on a beach,
Holding seashells to my ear to hear them sing.
And when cornerstones were laid,
They’d be laid without my aid—
If only I weren’t a King!
Critical reaction to the show was overwhelmingly positive—“It had a gossamer beauty, a tender grace, plus the incomparable sheen of a child’s dream world,” wrote Harriet Van Horne in the World-Telegram & Sun—and the ratings were spectacular. Two days after the Sunday night broadcast, CBS took a full-page ad in the New York Times to brag. “At the stroke of 8, on Sunday night, nearly every home in the nation witnessed an act of electronic magic that only television can perform,” the copy read. “By capturing and enthralling virtually an entire population at the same instant, it demonstrated again the medium’s unique power to satisfy the public’s increasing interest in television and the advertiser’s need for vast audiences.”
Because videotape had not yet been perfected, the show could not be rebroadcast, but Oscar told journalists he hoped to see it in the legitimate theater one day soon. The following year, it was in fact produced as a traditional Christmas “pantomime” in London, with the stepsisters in drag and some interpolations from other Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, plus an original number by its antic star, Tommy Steele. In 1965, under Rodgers’s supervision, CBS would produce a much inferior videotaped version starring Leslie Ann Warren, which would be rebroadcast annually over the next decade. In 1997, ABC would reimagine the property again, with Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother heading an interracial cast. Not until 2013 would Cinderella finally fulfill Hammerstein’s wish of getting to Broadway, in a splashy, elegant, and successful production with a new book by Douglas Carter Beane and costumes by William Ivey Long that amounted to a miracle of stage magic. After fifty-six years, it seemed proof that impossible things were still happening every day.
* * *
BUT FOR RICHARD Rodgers, the success of Cinderella rang hollow. With no fresh project in sight—and perhaps with the still-unprocessed trauma of his cancer surgery weighing on him—he fell apart. As early as November 1956, while still at work on Cinderella, he had written to Oscar about a puzzling illness. “Apparently I picked up a bug or got some bad food and in some mysterious manner my central nervous system was affected,” Rodgers told his partner. “I couldn’t retain my balance, I walked unsteadily and kept bumping into things. I couldn’t even sign my name properly.” Rodgers resisted his doctor’s advice to consult a neurologist or another specialist, hoping that the symptoms would resolve themselves spontaneously, which they eventually did.
What did not resolve itself was a serious depression—one that to all evidence had been years aborning. It is impossible to know just how Rodgers’s outlook may have been affected by the disappointment of Me and Juliet and the failure of Pipe Dream—or, for that matter, by the stupendous success of the rival Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, which was now the hottest ticket on Broadway. He thought it was best to forget about criticism “and just go on with your work—but again, being human, you read what’s said about you and you listen to what’s said about you and you’re pleased by it or you resent it.” But his daughter Mary would come to believe that her father’s personality underwent a sea change as he aged. “I get a very peculiar feeling that gradually over the years he changed from somebody who had a wonderful time to somebody who had a terrible time,” she remembered. Rodgers’s dark mood was clearly compounded by the deadening effects of alcohol. As his letters to Dorothy from Hollywood in the mid-1930s showed, he had been wrestling with alcohol for the better part of two decades, alternately going on the wagon and going overboard. Given the intense frustration, bordering on disgust, with which he had viewed Larry Hart’s benders, and the way alcohol had impaired their collaboration, it is remarkable that Rodgers’s own heavy drinking had so seldom affected his productivity.
Indeed, precisely because Rodgers did not disappear, because he did not fail to do his work, and because he was in no sense a stereotypical falling-down drunk, his pro
blem remained a closely guarded secret during his lifetime. Yet there were clues. In early 1957, Moss Hart and his wife, Kitty Carlisle, dined in the Rodgerses’ apartment and, after Dorothy went to bed early, stayed up late with Dick listening to an all-Rodgers program of music on the radio. Hart began counting the number of after-dinner scotch and sodas Dick consumed, and eventually tallied up sixteen. Rodgers may have sugarcoated the question of his drinking, but he did not minimize the crippling effects of what he called his “mystifying” depression. “I began sleeping late, ducking appointments and withdrawing into long periods of silence,” he would write. “I lost all interest in my work and barely spoke either to Dorothy or to my children. I simply didn’t give a damn about doing anything or seeing anyone.”
Rodgers’s younger daughter, Linda, recalled that his typical pattern in this period was to simply retreat and fall asleep at family gatherings, doubtless aided by the tranquilizers his doctors had prescribed. Finally, by the Fourth of July weekend at Rockmeadow, Linda remembered, “He had ground to an absolute halt. Essentially he was not there anymore.” When his family suggested he check into the Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Rodgers did not object, and he committed himself. Linda scrambled to buy pajamas with no strings, because her father had been put on a suicide watch. “I voluntarily separated myself from my family, from my work, from life itself,” Rodgers would recall of this “extremely baffling and frightening period of my life.”
In the mid-1950s, Payne Whitney was not only what Margo Channing, Bette Davis’s character in All About Eve, would have called a “well-padded booby hatch,” but a gilt-edged retreat for elite patients suffering from mental illness. Breakfast was made to order, and tables were set with sterling silver flatware and damask napkins. Over the years, celebrity patients from Robert Lowell to Marilyn Monroe would seek treatment there. Talk therapy appointments alternated with the application of soothing hot wet packs; actors practiced their lines in front of unbreakable mirrors; famous opera stars sang arias in the showers. Rodgers himself played cards, read, chatted with fellow patients, and received regular visits from Dorothy and occasional ones from Oscar. His stay lasted three months by his own account—and perhaps a month longer. “After a self-imposed exile of twelve weeks,” he would recall, “I returned to my family and my work as if nothing had happened.”
The letters that Rodgers saved from sympathetic friends paint perhaps a fuller portrait of the depth of his despair. “You’ve piled mountaintop on mountaintop of success,” his former neighbor Edna Ferber wrote him. “There’s never been anything like it in the history of the theatre, in this country or any other country. Your successful operation of two years ago, so marvelously overcome, was treated by you really with less respect than it should have been rated.… The advantage of this enforced leisure time is that the process of thinking and readjustment almost imperceptibly takes place. You will know yourself better. You will even write better or more wonderful music, if that is possible.” Moss Hart, himself a survivor of a crippling depression just three years before, wrote, “I think you know, Dick, that I, too, have had a taste of the frightening and unpleasant experience you have been going through, and I know how deeply painful it can be. It passes. And even the pain is sometimes hard to recall, afterwards. I hate to say this, but it is not always an unmixed blessing—when it goes, one tastes and relishes every sunny day more keenly.”
The most astute analysis may well have come from the erudite writer, editor, and radio and television host Clifton Fadiman, who sent a long, handwritten letter assuring Rodgers that summer, “I’ve had a couple of bouts of what I think a near-cousin to your trouble.” Fadiman noted that some of his friends, including the editor Van Wyck Brooks, had experienced similar depressions, and he reflected on the knife’s edge on which creativity is sometimes balanced. “You must have noticed that longshoremen don’t suffer from depression,” he wrote. “They suffer from discouragement or frustration or bafflement; but not from the vague constellation of downbeat feelings sometimes oddly known as ‘a nervous breakdown.’” Fadiman added, “The fact is that the trouble often follows a triumph, or a succession of great successes; which seems paradoxical, doesn’t it?… For a first-rater like yourself, it is a very serious and crucial moment when one has done what one sets out to do. The second-rater who satisfies his ambitions is often contented, or at least fatuously complacent.” For the genius, Fadiman suggested, the challenge is different. “It is at this point—precisely when he has everything that he begins to question what he has, that is, if he is a person of complex mental organization.”
Rodgers back wrote to thank Fadiman for his encouraging words but offered little by way of detailed introspection or insight into what he had experienced in treatment. “The hospital has done amazing things for me,” Dick wrote, “and I am now ready for work and to pick up the threads of a very happy life. Things are clear to me now that I never quite understood with the result that I’ll fare better and avoid the possibility of future trouble.” Alas, he would not—not really, anyway—and in the coming years, his drinking, depression, and a range of other physical ailments that almost certainly grew out of them would take an increasing toll on his creativity.
* * *
RODGERS’S HOSPITALIZATION MEANT that he was mostly sidelined for production on the film version of South Pacific, which began in the summer of 1957. This property was especially dear to Oscar and Dick, and to film it they reasserted the kind of creative authority they had been compelled to surrender to 20th Century Fox on Carousel and The King and I. The production should have been creatively foolproof, filmed under the now-familiar auspices of Fox with the veteran Buddy Adler as producer. Josh Logan—by now a successful film director of such hits as Picnic and Bus Stop—held out for a percentage of the box-office receipts (more than making up for what he’d lost out on the stage version) and agreed to direct once more. Outside of Dick and Oscar themselves, no one knew South Pacific better or had a deeper emotional connection to the material.
But almost from the beginning, there were problems with a project that would turn out to be ill conceived and overblown.
First there was the matter of casting. Ezio Pinza was now too old for the part (and would die in May 1957), so Logan and company looked to the forty-year-old Italian film star Rossano Brazzi, who had played opposite Katharine Hepburn in the 1955 romantic drama Summertime. Brazzi had sung for Rodgers and Hammerstein a few years earlier, and they had thought he sounded all right. But in February 1957, Oscar wrote to Logan that he and Dick had heard a recent Italian recording by Brazzi and decided his singing voice “did not sound good at all.” They resolved to dub his songs with Giorgio Tozzi, the Metropolitan Opera basso who had been cast to star with Mary Martin in a road company of South Pacific at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera.
Picking a Nellie Forbush was more fraught. Logan’s first choice, Elizabeth Taylor, was reduced to a nervous croak when she tried to sing for Rodgers, who closed his eyes, winced, and pronounced the idea of dubbing Nellie’s voice “absolutely impossible.” The fallback candidate, Doris Day, whose wholesome blond good looks and natural on-screen exuberance would have seemed to make her a natural, alienated Logan by refusing to sing for him when they met one night at a party at Rosalind Russell’s house. Eventually, Logan turned to Mitzi Gaynor, a bright and brassy Hungarian American from Chicago who had held down singing and dancing roles in musicals at Fox and was filming The Joker Is Wild with Frank Sinatra. Everyone seemed happy with the choice—everyone, that is, but Mary Martin. Martin had recently made yet another Broadway (and television) triumph as an ageless Peter Pan; she and her husband and manager, Richard Halliday, not so quietly seethed at being passed over.
“Mary and Dick are cool to us,” Oscar wrote Dick Rodgers that summer after seeing Martin in South Pacific on tour in Los Angeles. “We have all noticed it. Smart as they are in most things, they are blinded about this one thing. They don’t realize that she is no
t young enough to play Nellie in the movie. This is regrettable. Age is not, in my opinion, the only deterrent. I did not like her performance, although God knows the audience did. She was ‘cute’—very much as Peter Pan is! The little dry crack in voice was over-used. The comedy was well served. The emotional quality—much of it—was lost.” Halliday was even colder to Mitzi Gaynor, who had recently gone to see the Civic Light Opera’s production of South Pacific with her husband, Jack Bean, along with Josh and Nedda Logan and Rossano Brazzi and his wife, Lydia. “He hugged Nedda, kissed Josh, introduced Lydia, shook hands with Rossano and said, ‘Come on in, Mary’s dying to see you,’” Gaynor would recall of Halliday. “Closed the door on Jack and me. That was it.”
More familiar figures rounded out the cast. Ray Walston, who had made such a good Luther Billis in the national and London companies, reprised his role, and Juanita Hall returned as Bloody Mary, though Rodgers decreed that her vibrato was now frayed, so her songs would be dubbed by Muriel Smith, Broadway’s original Carmen Jones. John Kerr, who had shot to fame in the stage and movie versions of Tea and Sympathy, played Cable (with his voice dubbed by Bill Lee). A newcomer, France Nuyen, would be Liat.
After four weeks shooting background material in Fiji, the production team headed to Kauai, Hawaii’s “Garden Isle,” where the lush vegetation, soaring mountains, and dramatic beaches made a natural and authentic location. The company of nearly two hundred people took four cargo ships full of material and built thousands of square feet of concrete roads and loading aprons, spending nine weeks and exposing some two hundred thousand feet of Todd-AO film, including extensive coverage of a real navy and marine training exercise that would stand in for “Operation Alligator,” before returning to California to finish interiors on four soundstages at Fox.
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