That instantly struck Rodgers, who was confident of his own abilities but had no wish to compete with musicians named Bach and Mozart, as a bad idea. He and Hammerstein agreed that hybrid scores never worked. They watched the German film and liked the story, and they offered a counterproposal: they would write their own original score. The only problem was that they were committed to Flower Drum Song and told the Hallidays and Hayward that they could not turn to a new project for at least a year. “They came back,” Rodgers would recall, “with the two most flattering words possible: ‘We’ll wait.’”
Meantime, there was plenty of work to do in securing the rights to the von Trapps’ story—and what a story it was. Indeed, the most dramatic aspects of the family’s tale were true, even if many of the particulars differed from the German film.
The real Maria Augusta Kutschera was born not in the mountains outside Salzburg but on a train between Vienna and the Tyrol in 1905. She was orphaned by age nine, and a college-age religious conversion sent her as a postulant to Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg, where her high-spirited personality (she really did whistle on the stairs) proved a poor fit. In 1926, she was sent as a teacher to one of the von Trapp children, not all seven—as it happened, a girl named Maria who was recuperating from scarlet fever. Captain Georg von Trapp, a widower, whose first wife was the English granddaughter of the inventor of the modern torpedo, did use a bosun’s whistle to summon his children, but he was not a joyless martinet. Indeed, he was a dedicated music lover. He really did break off his engagement to a princess, and though at first Maria wasn’t sure she loved him, she did realize she was not cut out to be a nun. She and Captain von Trapp married in 1927 and would eventually have three more children. The captain was, in fact, embarrassed by the family’s professional singing career, which began under the tutelage not of Maria alone but also of a friendly local priest, Father Franz Wasner. His chagrin owed at least partly to the reality that his children were forced to become performers after he lost his fortune by propping up an Austrian friend’s bank during the Depression.
Captain von Trapp opposed the Nazi annexation of Austria, and the family was forced to flee the country in 1938, eventually settling in America. They first struggled as a formal choir, but after taking a more informal approach to performing, rechristening themselves the Trapp Family Singers, they were soon crisscrossing the country in a big blue bus, hopscotching from college campus to concert hall throughout World War II.
Georg von Trapp died in Vermont in 1947, and his widow published her first memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, two years later. Halliday and Hayward assumed that they would need her permission to adapt the family’s saga for the stage, and they set about tracking her down. Accounts of their quest vary. In one telling, the baroness was doing missionary work in Australia, Tahiti, Samoa, and New Guinea, and at each port of call kept ignoring letters from someone named Mary Martin, whom she’d never heard of. When her ship at last docked in San Francisco, this story goes, Halliday was waiting, and invited her to see Mary perform in a touring production of Annie Get Your Gun. Maria was said to have loved the show but to have had trouble envisioning Martin playing her onstage. In another account, Martin’s biographer Ronald Davis reported that Maria was finally tracked down in her sickbed in a hospital in Innsbruck, Austria, where she was recuperating from malaria she’d contracted in the Pacific. In any event, the dramatic rights to her life story were no longer Maria von Trapp’s to convey: she had sold them outright to the German film company.
So Hayward and H. William Fitelson, the Hallidays’ theatrical lawyer, commenced negotiations with the German company, as Paramount’s option on the German film had lapsed. The film had broken box-office records in Europe, and its commercial success had made its star, Ruth Leuwerik, into the most popular female actress in German cinema. Die Trapp Familie (and a sequel, Die Trapp Familie in Amerika) belonged to the Heimat, or homeland, school of German filmmaking popular after World War II, a genre that focused on the pastoral pleasures of prewar German life. And while the film did not sugarcoat the rise of Nazism, it was directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, who as a functionary in the Nazi propaganda machine had made a film promoting the euthanasia of patients with multiple sclerosis.
One fanciful account of the sale to Halliday and Hayward has the German producers, who spoke no English, and Hayward, who spoke no German, conducting the final negotiations in Yiddish. But since Hayward was a WASP who’d been born in Nebraska, that seems unlikely. In the end, a price of $200,000 was agreed to; to raise the needed sum, the Hallidays asked NBC for an advance on Martin’s multiyear contract with the network. And as a gesture of goodwill, they gave the Baroness von Trapp a three-eighths share of their own royalties from the planned show—a move that would reap unimagined benefits for the real Maria in years to come.
* * *
BY 1958, THERE were no more experienced commercial playwrights on Broadway than Howard Lindsay and Russel “Buck” Crouse, who had been working together for more than a quarter century and had produced not only the all-time longest-running nonmusical play on Broadway, Life with Father, but also the Pulitzer Prize–winning political satire State of the Union—together with the books for such musical hits as Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam. Lindsay’s maxim—that “an audience must go away from your play feeling rewarded, or purged”—had proved highly reliable.
Now Lindsay and Crouse sketched a sixty-page outline of the proposed libretto for a show whose first working title was The Singing Heart. From the beginning, their script would lean heavily on the German film screenplay. Their von Trapp villa, like the one in the film, would feature a spacious living room with a curved staircase and balcony running above it. Their philosophical nuns, like the ones in the movie, would be fond of saying, “When God closes a door, he opens a window.” And as in the German film, the von Trapps would make their escape wearing hiking clothes and carrying rucksacks. (Never mind that the real von Trapp family escaped Austria via a train to Italy, not by hiking over the mountains to Switzerland, which is hundreds of miles from Salzburg.) But the playwrights also made important changes. They eliminated the role of Father Wasner and invented a new character, an impresario named Max Detweiler, to launch the von Trapp children’s musical career. Baroness Elsa Schraeder would take the place of “Princess Yvonne” as Captain von Trapp’s fiancée, and together she and Max would serve as politically accommodating foils for the captain’s proud Austrian patriotism. Lindsay and Crouse would also give all the children new names and would replace the family’s eldest son, a medical school graduate named Rupert, with a teenage daughter named Liesl.
Martin herself would play a crucial role in the creation of the character of Maria, through her own improbable but enduring friendship with a Dominican nun who headed the drama department at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. Sister Gregory, born Katherine Eleanor Duffy and educated at the University of Iowa and Catholic University, took her vows in 1939 and was assigned to teach at Rosary (now called Dominican University) three years later. A dedicated theater buff, she traveled to New York each summer to see the latest Broadway offerings and wrote to Martin after seeing the original production of South Pacific, expressing particular admiration for the play’s theme of racial tolerance. The sister and the star struck up a friendly correspondence, and when Sister Gregory returned to Manhattan the next year, Martin invited her backstage. “She didn’t act like a nun, or the way we poor ignorant souls thought nuns acted,” Martin would recall years later. “She was bouncy, enthusiastic, with an ambling walk like a good baseball player. She also had beautiful, clear skin and sparkling, snapping brown eyes. We all fell in love with her.” Sister Gregory’s advice when she heard about the von Trapp play was succinct: “Don’t make nuns sanctimonious.”
As work on the show progressed, Sister Gregory would become a trusted adviser, not just to the Hallidays but to Rodgers and Hammerstein as well. In February 1958, she wrote a five-pag
e, single-spaced typed letter to Halliday and Martin, outlining her views of the story. “The whole purpose of life, it seems to me,” she wrote, “is pin-pointed in Maria’s struggle to choose between two vocations. Like every adult human being, she must find the answer to the question: ‘What does God want me to do with my life? How does He wish me to spend my love?’” She took some pains to explain that, in her view, nuns (and priests) are neither afraid of love, nor incapable of sharing it, but were drawn to their vocation “because they keenly appreciate the gift of life, and have a tremendous capacity to love.
“A religious is neither afraid of sex nor disgusted with it,” she added, “but rather recognizes it as one of God’s greatest gifts, and therefore, in consecrating it to His service, one reflects the measure of one’s love.” Sister Gregory allowed that a priest might actually have a better perspective as a technical adviser, since he would have been apt to have observed nuns in varied settings, and explained that she herself would have been “terribly reticent” to try to explain her views to Lindsay and Crouse but trusted the Hallidays implicitly. It was a trust that would be repaid in kind, as many of Gregory’s observations—and even a few of her verbatim lines of dialogue—made it into the final script.
That same spring of 1958, even as Hammerstein was at work on Flower Drum Song, his friend the conductor and arranger Robert Emmett Dolan warned him about what he saw as some of the pitfalls of the new project. “You and Dick have already done a show about a woman who becomes a governess to a man’s children,” Dolan pointed out. “What made that story come alive was the fact that the man was quite a man equally, if not more, interesting than the woman.” Moreover, Dolan noted, he had qualms about “the very American Mary Martin playing the very Austrian Baroness.”
But even more than Gertrude Lawrence had driven the train on The King and I, Mary Martin was the motive force behind this new show. She was also a big part of the muscle, investing $200,000 for a 25 percent ownership share, which gave her and Halliday just the kind of say-so that Rodgers and Hammerstein preferred not to grant to their actors. The collaboration would prove tense. Richard Halliday was a semi-closeted, sexually ambiguous alcoholic, and he was a querulous and unpredictable partner, ever on the lookout for any perceived slight to his wife. (Martin herself was apparently sexually ambidextrous and reportedly maintained a long and discreet relationship with the actress Janet Gaynor.) Halliday was given to late-night drunken tirades, which endeared him to no one. “As time goes on, Halliday is going to be the one who drives everybody nuts,” Russel Crouse’s son, Timothy, would recall. “Halliday would have a snoot-full and he’d call my father and scream at him and my father just hated it.”
Nevertheless, by January 1959, a month after the opening of Flower Drum Song, the four writers had begun meeting to work on the show that was now tentatively titled Love Song. (Howard Reinheimer warned them that this title was so common for both stage and screen works that it would be impossible to defend under copyright law. “PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get a new title!” he begged.) As that winter turned to spring, the collaborators quickened the pace, meeting once in January, five times in February, six times in March. Lindsay and Crouse usually worked on the book at Lindsay’s town house on East 94th Street, then would join Oscar and Dick for broader conferences at Hammerstein’s house on East 63rd Street. Oscar told his son Jimmy that he was happy to be relieved of the burden of writing the book, and would have given that task up years earlier if he had found collaborators of the caliber of Lindsay and Crouse. By all accounts, it was the happiest of partnerships. “The four guys loved the material, loved working together,” Timothy Crouse would recall. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that they loved each other.”
Free to concentrate only on the lyrics, by early March Oscar had laid out the placement of songs using mostly dummy titles—except for the first one, which he reported to Crouse on March 2: “The Sound of Music.” The other numbers would take shape in pretty much the order he listed them to begin with:
Sad Song
Happy Song
First Singing Lesson
Duet (Young Lovers)
Yodeling Song (to drown out thunder)
Sophisticated Love Song (Captain and Elsa)
Children’s Farewell Song
Face Life: (Abbess to and With Maria)
* * *
OSCAR AND DOROTHY Hammerstein spent a month in Jamaica that winter, at a house they had recently bought there. There, in the Caribbean sun, Oscar wrote the words for “The Sound of Music” and began work on the inspirational song that would end the first act. In it, the abbess would tell Maria, who fears she is falling in love with the captain, that she must return to the von Trapp villa to find out where her heart truly lies. “Don’t think that these walls shut out problems,” the abbess says in an early draft. “You have to face this decision. You have to face life, wherever you are.” Then the playwrights appended a cheeky parenthetical note: “(At this point she also has to face Rodgers and Hammerstein.)” What Maria had to face in the end, of course, was “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” a solemn, stirring, uplifting anthem in the mold of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” in which the abbess urges Maria to discern how she wishes to spend her love, in Sister Gregory’s memorable phrase.
Climb ev’ry mountain,
Ford ev’ry stream,
Follow ev’ry rainbow
Till you find your dream
More than for almost any other show, Oscar kept detailed worksheets of his draft lyrics, so it is possible to track the evolution of his thinking. For the play’s opening number, in which Maria is discovered reclining in a tree, this was his early effort:
To laugh like a brook
When it trips on a stone,
To hum like the leaves on the vines
To pray in the dark
Like a nightingale
To sing through a storm like the pines
The hills give me strength
When my heart is lonely
And lost in the fog
Of a thousand fears
The hills fill my heart
With the sound of music
And my heart wants to sing,
My heart wants to sing,
My heart wants to sing
Every song that it hears.
Only after Dick wrote the accompanying tune, which required some metrical changes in the words, did Oscar settle on the final version:
To laugh like a brook
When it trips and falls
Over stones in its way,
To sing through the night
Like a lark who is learning to pray—
I go to the hills
When my heart is lonely,
I know I will hear
What I’ve heard before.
My heart will be blessed
With the sound of music
And I’ll sing once more.
On April 4, Oscar would report that he’d finished the song—and that he’d also decided that “The Sound of Music” must be the title of the show itself—to the relief, surely, of Howard Reinheimer. By early May, Hammerstein was working on “First Singing Lesson,” and his worksheets show that he quickly came up with the idea of using the Italian syllables that marked the notes of the scale:
A word for every note
A note for every word
Da fa mi re sol fa re
What a very lovely day
Then he explored English equivalents for those musical tones, listing initial thoughts, often scratching through them with better ideas. “Doe is a very young deer” became “Doe is a female deer.” “Ray” is alternatively “a light that comes from the sun,” or “a very bright light from the sun,” while “Me” is either “a thing I call myself” or “what I call myself.” Likewise:
Sow is what you do with wheat
La will always follow so
Tea you drink when cake you eat
Now we go right back to Do
Rodgers con
tributed a melody that skittered appropriately up and down the scale. But it was Trude Rittmann who created the clever choral arrangement—“Do-Mi-Mi / Mi-So-So / Re-Fa-Fa / La-Ti-Ti”—that mimicked the sound of Swiss bell ringers, and that would lodge happily and permanently in the heads of listeners the world over. “You ask after the relationship between Rodgers and me,” Rittmann wrote to her sister. “Pretty good as a whole (no fights whatsoever on the whole show)—rather distant. He was overjoyed about my choral arrangements—they do sound pretty gloriously.”
For the nuns’ song lamenting what to do about Maria’s coltish, irrepressible behavior, Oscar asked Lindsay and Crouse if he could pilfer some lines of dialogue they’d written—about Maria’s having curlers in her hair under her wimple. Seventeen days later, he’d finished “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”
Meantime, Sister Gregory was weighing in right along. In a letter to the Hallidays, she objected to the line about the curlers on the grounds that it “dramatically changes the image I’ve formed of Maria—that of an untrammeled youngster, something of a tomboy, and completely unconscious of her physical beauty and of the power that beauty could exert.” She lost that battle but in the same letter won another. She suggested that Maria should not ask the abbess for permission to say she’s beautiful as she prepares for her wedding to the captain, but instead should simply burst out with a spontaneous declaration, only to have the abbess cut her off: “Do not be vain, my daughter. Let me say it for you. You are indeed beautiful, my dear.” Those lines would appear in the final script verbatim. Finally, Sister Gregory begged of the portrayal of the nuns: “Please don’t have them giggle. Chuckle, laugh—and even explode with laughter, but not giggle. When laughter wells up we are inclined to either smile or go all the way and laugh whole-heartedly.”
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