“A toughie”
“Not easily licked by weather, storm, wind or snow”
“A tiny white flower that can mean so much”
“All that is good in a great country.”
One early draft contained these lines:
Edelweiss, edelweiss
I’ll come back and I’ll find you.
Small and white
Clean and bright
On the mountain behind you …
And, doubtless mindful of his own precarious situation, Oscar’s early idea for the bridge went like this:
Look to your lover and hold him tight
While your health you’re keeping.
In a room furnished with a piano at the Ritz-Carlton, Dick and Oscar worked out the final version, with its simple last line—“Bless my homeland forever”—and the song went into the show. It clicked immediately, and Bikel would recall that a fan once stopped him at the stage door to say, “I love that Edelweiss,” adding, “Of course I have known it for a long time, but only in German.” It was the last lyric Oscar ever wrote, his 1,589th.
Meantime, Rodgers had had his fill of the querulous Richard Halliday. One of Halliday’s early suggestions had been to have Maria catch her bloomers on the tree in her opening number. Dick and Oscar rejected the notion, infuriating him. “You know what’s wrong with you guys?” Halliday demanded. “All you care about is the show!” In Boston, Rodgers finally let Halliday have it. Just what prompted the blowup is unclear, but the result was that the composer didn’t speak to either his co-producer or his star for a few days, and at the Boston opening night cast party at the Ritz, the Hallidays and the Rodgerses sat on opposite sides of the room, incommunicado.
* * *
THE NEW YORK opening was Monday, November 16, and the advance sales had climbed to $2.3 million. The first-night audience was the usual glittering gang: Helen Hayes, Claudette Colbert, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Cornell, Gypsy Rose Lee, and, in a green satin gown—a gift from Mary Martin—Maria von Trapp herself. Once again, as they had been with South Pacific, Dick and Oscar were confident enough to book the St. Regis Roof for the after-show party. This time, however, when the reviews came in, the evening was less than enchanted. The good news: Brooks Atkinson in the Times judged that “Mr. Rodgers has not written with such freshness of style since The King and I. Mr. Hammerstein has contributed lyrics that also have the sentiment and dexterity of his best work.” The New York Post wrote that “the score and the lyrics are particularly rich in freshness and imagination,” and Variety agreed: “… Rodgers has composed the sort of richly melodious score for which he’s famous, and … Hammerstein has provided some of his most graceful lyrics.”
But the bad news was worse, and it preponderated. Atkinson found it “disappointing to see the American musical stage succumbing to the clichés of operetta” and complained that “the revolution of the Forties and Fifties has lost its fire.” Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune called the show “not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music.” And Kenneth Tynan’s verdict was the most acid of all: “To sum up un-controversially, it is a show for children of all ages, from six to about eleven and a half.”
The Hammersteins attended the opening with Herbert Mayes, the editor of McCall’s magazine, and his wife, who were their upstairs tenants in the top-floor apartment at 10 East 63rd Street. Their homecoming that night was a glum one. “Herb told me later that, as they were going up in the elevator, they heard Oscar give a heartfelt sigh of despair,” Anna Crouse would recall. “It just broke my heart.”
Rodgers and Hammerstein—and Lindsay and Crouse—were paying the price of their long success. Broadway was no longer their oyster, and if The Sound of Music seemed out of step and old-fashioned, it was because it suffered by comparison with its contemporary competition: Fiorello!, a sharp satire of New York politics that would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Gypsy, the gritty story of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s indomitable stage mother (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and Ethel Merman in the lead); and Once Upon a Mattress, a cheeky twist on “The Princess and the Pea” with fetching music by Rodgers’s own daughter, Mary.
But the next night, the producers and authors were back at the Lunt-Fontanne, and Oscar watched the audience closely as always. By intermission, he assured his collaborators that the Big Black Giant had delivered an altogether different verdict. “Make no mistake about it!” he insisted, Anna Crouse remembered. “This is a hit.… Just look and listen to that audience! They couldn’t care less about the reviews. I promise you, this is a smash hit!” Oscar—and the people—were right. The show would run for three and a half years on Broadway—1,443 performances—and nearly twice as long in London, where it set a new record as the West End’s longest-running musical.
Rodgers and Hammerstein were sensitive to the criticism, which differed so sharply from the genuine popular embrace. They were doubtless aware that The Sound of Music would be their last show and would weigh heavily on their reputations. “Anyone who can’t, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted,” Rodgers complained. But Dick and Oscar needn’t have worried. Just twelve days after the opening, the publisher Max Schuster wrote them a note that has stood the test of time. “As in all your other shared creations,” Schuster said, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It adds up. It sings. It parses in the grammar of the heart.”
* * *
COLUMBIA RECORDS RECORDED the cast album on the Sunday after the opening, as was the usual practice, and the album would occupy the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for four months—and remain a bestseller for 276 weeks, almost long enough to share space with the soundtrack of the film version, which would itself stay on the charts for another four and a half years. Taken together, those record sales made The Sound of Music the best-selling Broadway score of all time.
The Hallidays’ profits from the show were so staggering that their accountant eventually persuaded them (in that era of high marginal tax rates) to sell their 25 percent stake for a onetime capital gain—a decision that deprived them of participation in what would prove to be the vast profits from the film version. Those rights were eventually purchased by 20th Century Fox, whose president, Spyros Skouras, was in the audience opening night, seated next to the Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Lazar wound up selling Fox the film rights for a cool $1.25 million, but also added a provision that no one thought mattered much at the time: the stage producers would receive 10 percent of the gross box-office receipts after the movie made a profit of $12 million. After all, what movie had ever made such a profit? Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lindsay and Crouse—and their heirs—would have reason to thank Lazar beyond their wildest imaginings in years to come.
As The Sound of Music settled in for its long run, there were some amusing moments. When some nuns came backstage to see Martin after one performance, the dance director, Joe Layton, mistook them for actresses in the chorus. “God damnit!” he shouted. “You girls know you’re not supposed to stand out here in the hall in your goddamned costumes. Now get back to your dressing room right this minute and get them off.” He was suitably horrified when his mistake was pointed out. For her part, Mary Martin was terribly nearsighted but had always resisted wearing contact lenses. When she finally broke down and got a pair, Bikel noticed that her performance suddenly came alive. When he asked her why, she sheepishly confessed that she could really see him for the first time. When a young Jon Voight joined the company as a replacement Rolf (and fell in love with and married his Liesl, Lauri Peters), he was astounded at how fresh Martin kept her part, after playing it over and over. And having been warned in no uncertain terms that he should never upstage the star, Voight was astounded, too, at how effortlessly Martin could still upstage others. Martin would win the Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance, beating out Ethel Merman’s Mama Rose in Gypsy. But Merman was philosophical, famously telling the producer Cheryl Craw
ford, “How are you going to buck a nun?”
Barely a month after the show’s opening, on December 18, 1959, Dick Rodgers could write to Oscar, who had flown to Jamaica with Dorothy for a rest, that business was getting steadily better as the songs became more popular from radio and record play and sheet music sales. “Do-Re-Mi” alone had sold eighty-five hundred sheet music copies that week. “It is increasingly apparent that we have something very big here and that’s all fine,” Rodgers wrote.
The Hammersteins’ children joined them in Jamaica for Christmas, and Oscar felt well enough to begin work on a proposed film remake of State Fair for Fox, and on a project that sparked greater personal passion: a television adaptation of Allegro in which he would at last try to work out the problems that had dogged the second act. Hammerstein sketched an outline that would borrow from some of Josh Logan’s long-ago suggestions for improving the book. He would revise the character of Jennie to make her more sympathetic and reduce the antagonism between her and Joe Taylor Jr.’s mother. He would eliminate Marjorie Taylor’s death but would have Joe and Jennie, their marriage on the rocks, get word that Joe’s father is dying. In the end, Joe and Jennie would reconcile, and he would decide to stay in Chicago but practice medicine the way his father had. The teleplay would open with the title song before shifting to Joe Jr.’s birth. Oscar had big ambitions for the casting, listing Rock Hudson and Pat Boone as options for Joe Jr.
The Hammersteins even felt up to joining Dick and Dorothy Rodgers in London in March 1960 for the West End opening of Flower Drum Song. On his return to the states in April, Oscar wrote Dick, who was still in England, with some firm casting ideas about any future film of The Sound of Music. He reported that both Jack Warner and Universal were interested in the movie rights but said that if the Universal offer should come with Doris Day attached to play Maria, he would be “very leery” about that idea.
“I realize that right now she is one of the hottest stars on the screen,” Oscar wrote. “But we are not producing the picture right now. I think she is a little too old to play the part now, and how old she will be before we are able to release it is more than anyone can say.” Having countenanced the forty-six-year-old Mary Martin as the original Maria, he added, “I think we should be adamant about having nothing but young girls play the part from now on, in pictures, in London, on the road.”
By early summer, as he felt worse and grew weaker, Oscar told Dorothy he knew that the cancer surgery had not cured him and he realized that he was going to die. He took steps to put his affairs in order and to make his farewells. On July 12, his sixty-fifth birthday, he wrote a journal entry that he hoped might serve as the start of the memoir he had long promised his son Billy he would one day write.
“This is the accepted age of retirement,” he wrote.
I do not want to retire, am in no mood to retire. This is considered a good time to come to a stop. Perhaps it is, but not for me.… I make no room to die with my boots on. Some day I may leave the theatre. But I couldn’t walk out suddenly; I would have to linger a while and take a few last looks. I would have to blow a few fond kisses as I edged towards the stage door. I would have to look around and sigh, and remember a few things, a few people—No, many things, many people.
He played a game of tennis with Jimmy, who was determined not to concede any weakness in his father by holding back his own volleys, but when they were through, Oscar announced that he couldn’t remember when he’d been so tired. From then on, everyone at Highland Farm played croquet instead. Hammerstein was unsentimental with his own children to the last.
“Goddamnit!” he burst out one day when Jimmy started crying. “I’m the one who’s dying, not you.” The younger Hammerstein sensed that it was hard for his father to acknowledge the end. “I’ve had a very happy childhood,” Hammerstein told his son. “I’ve had a good time as a young man. And I’ve had a terrific middle age. The only thing that I’m disappointed in is that I was looking forward to having a really good old age, too.” Oscar summoned the family for a lunch at the 63rd Street town house and passed out studio portraits of himself. Stephen Sondheim asked Hammerstein to autograph his copy. Oscar thought for a moment, before allowing himself a slight smile and inscribing a tender message that nodded to the verse of “Getting to Know You.” (“It’s a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought, that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.”) “For Stevie,” Hammerstein wrote. “My friend and teacher.” Sondheim had trouble making it through the meal.
One day that summer, Oscar asked Dick to lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, one of their regular meeting spots. He urged Rodgers to find a new and younger collaborator to work with when he was gone. He made it clear that he intended to go home to Doylestown to die. “We discussed many things that day,” Rodgers would recall, “two somber, middle-aged men sitting in a crowded restaurant talking unemotionally of the imminent death of one and the need for the other to keep going.” At one point, a man who’d been sitting nearby came and asked the partners to autograph his menu. He told them he couldn’t imagine why they looked so sad; they were so successful, they shouldn’t have a worry in the world.
As late as July, Oscar was still getting suggestions for new shows. Robert Kitchen, a reader of the New Yorker from Philadelphia, wrote to commend a short story that the magazine had recently published, “The Light in the Piazza” by Elizabeth Spencer. “It would be difficult, I believe, for us to adapt it as a musical play,” Oscar replied. “But it is a tempter.”
On August 15, Dick wrote to Jerry Whyte, who had worked for Rodgers and Hammerstein since Oklahoma! as a stage manager, touring company director, and all-around major domo, to say that Oscar was “now in no condition to see anybody or at any rate he doesn’t wish to.” “I understand this perfectly well,” Rodgers went on. “He’s lost weight terrifically and doesn’t want anyone to see him in this condition or be sympathized with. Frankly, I have no desire to see him myself. There is nothing I can do and I am not constituted so that I wish to deliver myself a beating if it can be avoided.” There was no way of knowing how long it might be until the end, Dick added. “We do know that he has no pain whatsoever and is quite heavily drugged nearly all the time so that he is neither too worried about himself nor too unhappy. How rugged it is for the rest of us I leave to your imagination.”
On Oscar’s last office visit to Benjamin Kean, his doctor urged him to reconsider and take some radiation therapy to stave off the cancer even a bit longer. The next day, Hammerstein told him, “Ben, I have considered very carefully your recommendation. In this showdown I must really decide whether to die, possibly a little later, in the hospital, or on Dorothy’s pillow. I’m really lucky and never knew how much until now.”
As the days wore on, Oscar lay in his second-floor bedroom at the farm, eating hardly anything and sipping essence of sarsaparilla. Dorothy stayed by his side for hours. On the evening of Monday, August 22, Harold Hyman, who continued to check in on his old friend and former patient, told Dorothy to take a break and entered the bedroom only to find Oscar murmuring the names of some of his beloved Yankees, “Ruth … Gehrig … Rizzuto,” just as he had muttered the names of baseball heroes more than thirty years earlier during the breakdown before he decided to marry Dorothy. A short time later, his breathing eased by an extra dose of morphine, Oscar died. Hyman broke the news to the family.
Less than forty-eight hours later, there was a small funeral service in a chapel at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, where Oscar’s remains were to be cremated. Harold Hyman read from Leaves of Grass. The Reverend Donald Szantho Harrington, a Unitarian minister who had been active with Oscar in the United World Federalists, paraphrased Saint Paul: “In this life we have three great lasting qualities—faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.” Howard Lindsay delivered the eulogy.
“No man can work as long as Oscar did in a public medium without making a complete disclosure of himself,” Lindsay sa
id. “So he is there, undisguised, in the lyrics he wrote. There you find his basic qualities: simplicity, integrity and compassion. He was so simple and so honest that it never would have occurred to him to have what Winston Churchill once called ‘the craven fear of being great.’ As certain as one can be about a contemporary, I am certain that Oscar Hammerstein had greatness.”
Condolence letters flooded in to Dorothy from every corner of show business and every sphere of Oscar’s life—from Johnny Green, and Jose Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney in Hollywood; from Nelson Rockefeller and Vincent Sardi Jr. in New York; from Richard Nixon, Pearl Buck, Harpo Marx, Harold Prince, Joan Crawford, John Steinbeck, Noël Coward, and Maria Augusta von Trapp. Moss Hart assured Oscar’s widow, “I would sometimes see him looking across the room at you at a party—sometimes begging to be rescued, sometimes just resting his eyes on you with love and pride.” Edna Ferber’s note was typically brisk. “I shan’t pretend to you that I think it’s all for the best, and that sort of nonsense,” she wrote. “His going is wasteful and utterly stupid, and a deprivation to the entire world.” But it may have been Agnes de Mille, who called Oscar “a gentleman in a profession where there were few enough,” who saw Hammerstein’s loss—and his legacy—most clearly. “What a heritage he left us! How bonny and wise, how darling and deft, how inescapable so many of his lyrics!” she wrote. “Girls and boys are going to talk with his words, with his point of view, long hence, and may perhaps not be aware whom they quote. He will be in the air they breathe.”
On September 1, at 8:57 p.m., by order of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the lights of the Broadway theater district were extinguished in Oscar’s honor, and a bugler sounded taps.
* * *
EXPECTED THOUGH IT was, Oscar’s death hit Dick Rodgers like a hammer blow. The World-Telegram & Sun described him as “near collapse from grief,” quoting an unnamed spokesman as saying, “The guy is falling apart.” Mutual friends confided to Dick that Oscar had worried about what would happen to his partner—and had wondered, too, right up to the end, just what Rodgers really thought of him. “He had come to the conclusion that he did not again want to go through the strain of doing another show and he was so deeply concerned as to how you would take this decision,” the producer Eddie Knopf wrote Rodgers in early September. “Although Oscar was full of sentiment he so rarely became sentimental in his discussion of human relationships. But on that day, Dick, he was deeply sentimental about you. He told me that of all the composers he had ever worked with, you had given him so much more than anyone. And he was not speaking only of music. He told me that somehow you had the ability to bring out the best that was in him. And he wondered whether he’d done the same for you, and would his unwillingness to continue writing affect you adversely.”
Something Wonderful Page 33