* * *
PERHAPS NO COMPOSITION in Hammerstein’s whole career has a more carefully documented record of its creation than the catalogue of happiness-inducing objects and experiences that he initially called “Good Things.” It was to be sung by Maria and the abbess as the postulant works up her courage to leave the abbey to care for the von Trapp children, and the two women recall a song that both had known in childhood. Critics have mocked the song for celebrating the prosaic and quotidian, but Oscar’s notes show that he labored over it with the care of a master craftsman. He began the lyric in late June, making lists of pleasing phenomena: kittens, mittens, small baby’s fingers, ice cream and cake, little boys who smell like boys. Then he sketched a quatrain:
Sun on a Mountain
Lights in a fountain
A crisp apple strudel
A soft yellow noodle
On other pages he listed still other pleasures, each steadily more concrete and specific: cream-colored ponies, white muslin dresses with pink satin sashes, “snowflakes that fall on my nose and my eyebrows (eyelashes).” Then a breakthrough came, with these words neatly typed on lined paper:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Curling my fingers in warm woolen mittens,
Riding down hill on my big brother’s bike
These are a few of the things that I like
But he thought better of the last word, “like,” a hard word to sing on a sustained note, a bad word with which to end a line. Instead, he scribbled beside it: “My favorite things.” (Similarly, he changed “pink” satin sashes—another pinched short vowel sound—to “blue” satin sashes, a long vowel that could resonate.) Then he made a list of words that rhymed with “things,” including clings, kings, rings, sings, springs, strings, slings, and wings—and wrote the phrase “Brown paper packages tied up with strings.”
Then he put his lists together, each refrain ending with the signature line, “These are a few of my favorite things.” But the litany still lacked meaning; it was only a list. So he gave it a final twist, scrawling in a barely legible hand:
When the dog bites,
When the bee stings,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad!
“This makes it a song with a reason,” says Mark Horowitz, a senior music specialist in the music division of the Library of Congress, who has studied Hammerstein’s work closely for years. “One thinks of favorite things—singing—when something bad happens, or one is sad. In a way, singing becomes a blessing, a relief, like a prayer.”
But Hammerstein’s worksheets also show that he was far from infallible, that the deftness of his final product was usually purchased at a painstaking price. Hawaii became the fiftieth state in the union on August 21, 1959, and within days Oscar wrote these lines for “So Long, Farewell,” the von Trapp children’s good night song to their father’s party guests:
So long, farewell
Auf wiedersehen, aloha
And then he proposed that Marta, the second-youngest daughter, chime in: “I hate to say the time has come to go-ha,” before “she does a little hula step and exits.” An object lesson for hasty writers everywhere on the merits of a second draft.
* * *
FROM THE BEGINNING, Sister Gregory had worried about how Richard Rodgers would handle the music for the convent scenes. She told the Hallidays that too much use of Gregorian chant would be tiresome, while too much Broadway razzle-dazzle would be inappropriate. It turns out that Rodgers was worried, too. “Given my lack of familiarity with liturgical music,” he would recall, “as well as the fact that I was of a different faith, I had to make sure that what I wrote would sound as authentic as possible.” So he did something unusual for him: He undertook some musicological research. Through a friend, he arranged to hear a special concert of liturgical music—traditional chant, together with modern religious works—at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
Then, in lieu of a standard overture, he decided to open the show with an a cappella nuns’ chorus at prayer with “Dixit Dominus,” the Latin words for the text of Psalm 110: “The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” This would be followed by a ringing “Alleluia,” which fades into Maria’s rendition of “The Sound of Music.” Sister Gregory enthusiastically approved of the final result, writing the Hallidays that she and some fellow sisters had taken the sheet music and dug into Rodgers’s “Praeludium,” as he called the piece, until it “really orbited and soared all over the place.”
But it’s at least possible that Rodgers did his research too well—and failed to credit his sources properly. In an unpublished monograph written late in her life, Agnes de Mille would insist—with the tacit backing of Trude Rittmann, who read the paper and altered other passages but not this one—that Rodgers lifted his prelude from a work by Orlando di Lasso, a sixteenth-century Franco-Flemish composer, “which he claimed without hesitation to the astonishment of musicologists.”
For the rest of the score, Rodgers would write, “It was essential that we maintain not only the genuineness of the characters, but also of their background.” The melodies apparently came as easily to him as always—and, indeed, they do not sound like songs written by a fifty-seven-year-old man. They evoke the spirit of childhood and play, whether in “Do-Re-Mi” or “The Lonely Goatherd,” which is sung by Maria to buck up the von Trapp children during a frightening thunderstorm—the spot in the plot where “My Favorite Things” is sung in the film. And in what was by now the prevailing Rodgers and Hammerstein pattern, virtually all the songs were packed into the first act, with only two new numbers after intermission—“No Way to Stop It,” a political dialectic between Max and Elsa and the Captain, and “An Ordinary Couple,” a duet for Maria and the Captain when they realize they’re in love. The rest of the second-act score consisted of various reprises, including the stirring final rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”
* * *
BY MIDSUMMER, IT was Maria von Trapp’s turn to weigh in on the draft script. On July 21, she told Dick Halliday on the telephone that the portrait of her husband was “so marshaling,” and insisted, “He wasn’t like this.” It was a criticism she might equally have made of the German film, but this was her last chance to do anything about her story. “Please rectify my husband’s picture,” she begged Halliday, according to his notes of the conversation. “Now he looks like a Prussian officer.” Sister Gregory, too, thought the character of Captain von Trapp was too cold and unsympathetic for the bulk of the play, making his sudden transition to a warm father at the story’s end surprising and implausible. “Anything that’s attractive about the Captain is told us,” Sister Gregory wrote. “We never see it. Elsa tells us. The housekeeper tells us, ‘He never used to be that way.’ Maria tells us, when she tells the Abbess. But we never see it ourselves. I think you have to prepare the audience for the change.” In the end, the change would be visible, and it was one that Howard Lindsay dated to the earliest story conferences; it was, he recalled, “to be music—the sound of music—that first broke the Captain’s self-imposed shell.” Just after Maria confronts him about his failings as a father, the Captain hears his children singing, allows himself to be moved, and joins in. If the authors never quite succeeded in making this character as multidimensional as they might have, no one could argue that they had not provided musical and emotional subtext.
Simply casting the part was proving challenging enough. From the beginning, the decision had been made not to have Martin essay an Austrian accent, but the producers did wonder if it might not make sense to cast a Mittel-European actor as her husband. A number of actors were considered, including—by his later account—Christopher Plummer, who was not yet quite thirty years old. (Martin would turn forty-six just after the play opened.) The producers auditioned the Hollywood actor Leif Erickson (who despite his Scandinav
ian-sounding name had been born William Anderson, in Alameda, California), but he didn’t seem quite right. Eventually they saw Theodore Bikel, a thirty-five-year-old Vienna-born actor and singer whose Jewish family had fled Austria for Palestine in 1938. Bikel was shooting a movie in the Netherlands, but Halliday and Hayward flew him to New York for an audition. He sang Frank Loesser’s “My Time of Day” from Guys and Dolls, but then the producers asked him to sing a folk song, and he played his own guitar. “And apparently,” Bikel would remember, “while all this was happening, Mary Martin leaned forward, tapped Dick Rodgers on the shoulder and said, ‘We don’t have to look any further, do we?’” He won the part.
As it happened, Bikel had been a friend of Martin’s son, Larry Hagman, when Hagman was stationed in London with the US Air Force. Bikel viewed Martin as a complete professional and would find it tough to work with her in only one way. “She was kept in a glass bowl, wrapped in cotton, as it were,” he would remember. “She was so guarded and taken care of, surrounded by blow-softening material.” To make up for the difference in their ages, Bikel was sent to the society hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, known professionally as “Mr. Kenneth,” to have a single gray streak dyed in his hair. The treatment would be repeated every couple of weeks during his entire run in the part.
Casting the seven children posed yet another challenge. In the end, Vincent Donehue would recall, more than three hundred youngsters auditioned, before a group of unknowns were chosen. “They had to emanate health and joy and, of course, they had to sing,” Donehue said. In the end, Donehue chose well enough. The children would be jointly nominated for a Tony Award for their performances (in the best featured actress category, as it happened).
For her part, Martin trained like a fighter in that summer of 1959—literally slugging a punching bag while singing aloud in order to strengthen her abdominal muscles under the lash of her vocal coach, William Herman. She also did Pilates exercises—then little known to the general public, but already favored by dancers—to strengthen her core and improve stamina and balance. And she spent two weeks with Maria von Trapp in Stowe, where the baroness gave her the one room in the family lodge with an en suite bathroom. Martin not only learned how to cross herself and kneel properly, but posed for a series of striking black-and-white pictures for the noted Life magazine photographer Toni Frissell, running through the Vermont hills in a dirndl dress in what amounted to priceless advance publicity for the show.
* * *
REHEARSALS BEGAN ON the morning of September 1 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and Oscar approached the task with the sangfroid of an old hand. “I think this will be the 46th time I have sat down with a cast to a first reading of a play I have written—not counting plays we have produced or foreign companies of plays,” he wrote his old friend and onetime collaborator Harry Ruby. “I guess this makes me a veteran. I feel like one too; otherwise I would not be calm enough to be dictating letters this morning.” But barely two weeks later, Hammerstein’s natural optimism would be tested as never before. On September 16, he went for a checkup with his regular doctor, Benjamin H. Kean, who had taken over Oscar’s care when Harold Hyman retired. After the exam, Kean pronounced Hammerstein in fine health but asked if he had anything he wanted to discuss. At first, Oscar said no, but as he was leaving, he ducked his head back in the door to say, “You know, I’ve been awakening in the middle of the night hungry. I take a glass of milk and then it’s fine.” Kean thought for a moment, then chased Oscar out onto Park Avenue to say that he’d like to run tests for an ulcer, just to be on the safe side.
Oscar walked the few blocks home and as he came through the door of the town house on East 63rd Street, he gave rare voice to his frustrations with Dick. “God damn it!” he said. “I have an ulcer. That son-of-a-bitch has done it to me.” But it wasn’t an ulcer. The tests found stomach cancer, and surgery was promptly scheduled for September 19 at New York Hospital. Lindsay and Crouse sent Hammerstein a cheery note, urging him not to worry and borrowing a line from his love duet for young Liesl and her suitor, Rolf: “Dear Oscar: We are sixty, going on seventy, and you can depend on us. Get well soon. Love, Howard and Buck.”
On the day before the surgery, with the extent of his condition still a secret, Oscar met Mary Martin at the Lunt-Fontanne’s stage door with a folded piece of paper, explaining that it contained some lines for the show, though he wasn’t yet sure where they would go. “Don’t look at it now,” he told her. She went to her dressing room, where Rodgers gave her the bad news and said they’d all just have to do their best. When she unfolded Oscar’s piece of paper, Martin saw the words he had originally written as a verse for “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and that would now introduce Maria’s second-act reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” in which the new stepmother reassures Liesl about the joys of true love.
A bell is no bell till you ring it,
A song is no song till you sing it,
And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay—
Love isn’t love
Till you give it away …
To the end of her life, Martin would treasure the words.
The postoperative prognosis was grim; the cancer was Stage IV, meaning that it had spread. The surgeon, Dr. Frank Glenn, had removed three-quarters of Oscar’s stomach and advised Dorothy that her husband would be dead in six months to a year. He had taken her aside to tell her the news, and when the children, waiting nearby, saw her slump, they knew the word was bad. But when Oscar asked Dorothy what the doctors had said, she finessed the question, answering, “They just cut it all out,” and he did not press her. Hammerstein would remain in the hospital until October 4, and then spend another ten days recuperating at home.
Meantime, The Sound of Music was coming together, but there was work to be done. Years later, Mary Martin would recall the demands of her part. “The treatment had to be very skillful, totally controlled. It was one of the most disciplined shows I ever did. You could never do a kidding thing, never play it broadly. I had to remember the character always, keep a tight rein on my emotions and my performance.” It was also a workout: she appeared in eighteen of the show’s nineteen scenes; had fourteen costume changes, sang ten times, and climbed flights of stairs on six occasions. Halliday put a pedometer on his wife at one point and calculated that she walked—all but ran, really—three miles per performance.
Martin was also receiving steady reassurance from an important source. She and Halliday had sent Sister Gregory the music for “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and on September 17, she wrote to tell them, “It’s a beautiful song and drove me to the Chapel,” adding, “(Relax chums, I’m sure it will not effect [sic] your audiences in the same way).” Rather, she explained, the song had moved her to prayers of gratitude for all those who find their true vocation, and she marveled that she had found her own. “How from all the gay, glittering and gilded avenues that beckoned I found the secluded by-way that has brought such unbelievable happiness for over twenty years, only God knows.”
On September 25, while Oscar was still in the hospital, the scenery was hauled to New Haven, for the opening and weeklong run beginning October 3. It was in New Haven that the creative team—minus Hammerstein, of course—decided that the second-act appearance of Nazis in brown shirts and swastika armbands was too heavy-handed. Henceforth, they would mostly be heard offstage, and would wear blue uniforms or light brown shirts when they did appear, and would say only “Heil!” not “Heil, Hitler!”—a softening choice that Theodore Bikel did not approve of but had no power to influence. It’s worth noting that the mere appearance of any Nazi character was enough of a rarity in any Broadway play in 1959 that the producers’ qualms were perhaps understandable.
It was also in New Haven that Dick Rodgers and his collaborators decided that the character of the Captain needed a stronger moment in the second act to underline his growing warmth—and to take advantage of the skill with the folk guitar that had won Bikel the part in the first place. Rodge
rs worked out a simple tune to await words from Oscar when he was well enough to work.
The Boston opening was Tuesday, October 13, and the critics were decidedly mixed. Elliot Norton, as always the most influential of the Boston reviewers, complained about the “silliness, stiffness and corny operetta falseness of the script,” but Elinor Hughes of the Herald called it “a wonderful addition to this or any season,” and audiences loved the show from the start. So did Oscar Hammerstein, when he first saw it a few days into the Boston run. He sat in a box with Dorothy, who found Russel Crouse at intermission. “‘I have only seen Oscar’—Poppy, she called him—‘cry once in my whole married life … and he’s been crying,’” Crouse’s wife, Anna, would recall years later. Backstage, after the show, as she watched Oscar give the cast meticulous and supportive notes on their performance, it was Dorothy Hammerstein’s turn to cry.
With the dispatch that the situation required, Oscar set to work on the lyrics for the Captain’s new song, which was to feature a hardy Alpine flower that was a symbol of Austrian pride. It is a member of the daisy family—its Latin name, as Oscar noted, is Leontopodium alpinum—and its common name is edelweiss. In his notes sketched out on a small pad, Oscar wrote:
“No hothouse flower”
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