Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  With uncanny acuity, Sister Gregory wrote to Dick surmising that his surface reaction to Oscar’s death surely only began to reflect his deepest feelings. “I would guess that it was a little easier for him to release his inner warmth than for you,” the nun wrote. “But yours is reflected with equal strength in your work and in your face.” Indeed, Dick’s letters to even close friends in those weeks reflect a grim, unyielding stoicism. “There isn’t very much to say beyond the things that have been written because they are all true,” he told the playwright Sam Behrman. “It’s been a difficult time, but I suppose nearly everything is capable of being survived.” To Jan Clayton, he allowed, “I suppose patience is a lesson we must all learn but it’s damn tough, isn’t it?”

  For the next year, Rodgers would tell people, “I am permanently grieved.” But, at the age of only fifty-eight, he would also recall, “I could not imagine spending the rest of my days reliving past glories and withdrawing from the vital, exciting world that I loved.” So he walked through the storm, with his chin up high—and for most of the next two decades, he would struggle to prove, to the world and to himself, that his best days were not behind him.

  CHAPTER 11

  Walking Alone

  I’m on a new road, whether it’s with Joe Doaks as a collaborator, or alone. This has got to be a third career, or I’ve got to die.

  Richard Rodgers

  Oscar Hammerstein’s death left Richard Rodgers bereft, perhaps all the more so because it forced him to confront the dynamics of their professional collaboration and their personal relationship in ways that both had largely avoided for eighteen years. In the last year of his life, Oscar had asked Stephen Sondheim, “What do you think of Dick?” When Sondheim wondered why he’d inquired, Hammerstein replied, “Because I don’t know him at all. We’ve worked together all these years and I don’t really know him.” Hammerstein found Rodgers emotionally opaque. “Dick’s life is the office or the box office or the theater. I just don’t understand.” For his part, Rodgers would confess to Hammerstein’s biographer Hugh Fordin years later, “I was very fond of him—very fond of him—and I never did find out whether he liked me or not. To this day I don’t know.” Late in their partnership, Rodgers learned that the Hammersteins were planning a trip to Jamaica only by overhearing word of it in the office one day. Later, Oscar and Dorothy invited the Rodgerses to join them, but the damage had been done. “I let it brush over but it bothered me,” Rodgers acknowledged. “It was all very placid. For the most part, the shows were successful so we didn’t fight about them.”

  But whatever private frustrations the partners had papered over to preserve their well-oiled machine, Dick now found himself alone, and that was far worse. As it happened, he at least had a short-term project to divert him: The Valiant Years, a documentary for ABC Television based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill. In September 1960, Rodgers wrote to Edna Ferber that he had taken up the work with almost a hunger, adding, “I don’t think we need a psychologist to tell us where this hunger comes from.” Rodgers wrote incidental music for the twenty-seven episodes that aired that fall and through the spring of 1961, with Richard Burton reading Churchill’s words. Dick won an Emmy for his work.

  Finding a new collaborator, and a show he could sink his teeth into, was a bigger challenge. “With Oscar gone it was simply too much to expect that I could adjust to anyone else without a lengthy interval between,” Rodgers would recall, adding: “Under the circumstances, there was only one logical path: I had to try to write my own lyrics.” In fact, Rodgers had sometimes been forced to come up with lyrics on his own when Larry Hart was AWOL, and in the years since Hart’s death had sometimes been asked to provide updated lines for revivals of their shows. His first efforts—not memorable—were for an undistinguished remake of State Fair that Fox had cooked up for Ann-Margret and Pat Boone, shifting the story’s locale from Iowa to Texas and losing most of its charm in the process. The five new songs Rodgers wrote for the film included “More Than Just a Friend,” for Abel Frake to sing to his champion boar. But soon enough, Rodgers had a better idea, one all his own.

  It came one evening in April 1961, while he was watching The Jack Paar Show on NBC. Parr’s guests that night included Diahann Carroll, a stunning young black actress and singer whom Rodgers had first noticed in Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s Broadway musical, House of Flowers, in 1954. He had considered Carroll for the lead in Flower Drum Song but could not contrive how to make her look Asian enough. Now it struck Rodgers that Carroll was chic enough to have stepped off the cover of any fashion magazine. With the civil rights movement gathering steam across the country, why not cast her as a sophisticated woman of the world? “She would not represent a cause or be a symbol of her race,” Rodgers would remember, “but a believable human being, very much a part of a stratum of society that the theatre thus far had never considered for a black actress.”

  Thus inspired, Rodgers invited Carroll for a drink the next day, to discuss the idea. He quickly enlisted Samuel Taylor, whose play The Happy Time had been produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1950, to devise a book. Taylor’s story, titled No Strings, would center on the characters of Barbara Woodruff, an American fashion model working in Paris, and David Jordan (to be played by Richard Kiley), a Pulitzer Prize–winning American novelist who has gone to live a dissolute expatriate’s life in France. The couple meet, fall in love, but part in the end because Jordan realizes he must return to his roots in Maine if he is ever to write again, and a successful interracial marriage seems as impossible to him as it had to Lieutenant Joe Cable twelve years earlier. That was a debatable proposition by 1961, and Carroll and Kiley debated it vigorously with Taylor and Rodgers: Why couldn’t the lovers end up together? The compromise—which Carroll would later call “absolutely brilliant”—was to end the play just as it had begun, with the two lead characters singing onstage, each unaware of the other’s presence, “making everything that came in between a fantasy, a love story that may or may not actually have happened.”

  The sinuous song that Rodgers wrote for the opening and closing numbers, “The Sweetest Sounds,” is a remarkable statement of optimism and confidence for a man at his stage in life. It begins in a minor key and ends exultantly in major:

  The sweetest sounds I’ll ever hear

  Are still inside my head.

  The kindest words I’ll ever know.

  Are waiting to be said.

  The most entrancing sight of all

  Is yet for me to see.

  And the dearest love in all the world

  Is waiting somewhere for me,

  Is waiting somewhere, somewhere for me …

  Rodgers’s own take on his new lyricist was sly: “I was always there when I wanted me.” More seriously, he viewed the work as “occupational therapy,” and he would confess that “as any songwriter will tell you, writing lyrics is more demanding than writing music,” because music is “created with broad strokes on a large canvas, whereas lyrics are tiny mosaics that must be painstakingly cut and fitted into a frame.” He worked several ways, sometimes writing snippets of words first and then music, and sometimes the reverse. The one method he never used was the one he’d most relied on with Hammerstein: he never wrote a complete lyric and then set it to music. And in keeping with the show’s title and theme—No Strings—Rodgers also settled on another novelty: there would be no orchestra in the pit; the musicians would appear onstage and in the wings, and except for a harp there would be no stringed instruments at all—only brass, woodwinds, and percussion, lending the show the cool feel of a jazz ensemble.

  If the tunes still came as easily as ever, Rodgers was defensive about the show’s book. In a letter in October 1961 to his son-in-law Daniel Melnick, who had apparently suggested a deeper development of the main characters’ motivations, Rodgers cited one of the nation’s leading authorities on civil rights law in his own defense. “Thurgood Marshall is wildly enthusiastic about the substance and developme
nt of the play,” Dick wrote. “He said to me, ‘Anyone who tries to solve this problem is crazy. Only time and contact will provide the solution.’ I myself feel strongly that we must not try to resolve the situation. We must leave the girl more or less as we found her, relieved to be away from discrimination and poverty, unwilling to return to the discomfort she knew as a child. The man, through sleeping with the girl, has developed the real set of male organs and these finally extend to his work and his resolve. I think this is more than enough for any play to say, regardless of words or music.”

  In two months of out-of-town tryouts—in Detroit, Toronto, Cleveland, and New Haven—Diahann Carroll would be more impressed with Rodgers’s talent than she was with his character. She would never forget the seeming delight with which he informed her that there would be no opening night party for the cast in Detroit because the would-be hostess, a friend of his, had declined to invite black guests to her home. Rodgers did not seem bothered by his friend’s racism, Carroll would recall. “It only confirmed that he accomplished what he set out to accomplish, which was to present this glamorous, very desirable black woman in a vehicle that would startle the white community,” she remembered. Rodgers went to the friend’s house himself, while Carroll held a party for the cast in a restaurant across the street from the theater. “As time passed, I came to the conclusion that he was really incapable of hearing someone’s point of view without regarding that person as a potential adversary and his frequent insensitivity was appalling.”

  No Strings opened in New York on March 15, 1962, and most critics found the book underwhelming. “The musical is a show in which the actors never have to go anywhere,” wrote Walter Kerr. “Everything comes to them. Everything except an idea.” But Howard Taubman of the Times declared that “Rodgers has lost neither his zest nor his art.” The show was a solid hit, clocking 580 performances and producing a national tour and a London production. Rodgers also won the Tony Award for Best Original Score, and Carroll won for Best Actress in a Musical. “But most important to me,” Rodgers would recall, “was the assurance it gave me that I could pick up the pieces of my career and start all over again with new people and new techniques.”

  * * *

  IT IS A paradox that while Rodgers had almost nothing to do with the next project that came his way, it would have more to do—for better or worse—with cementing his and Hammerstein’s worldwide reputations than anything else he ever did: the film version of The Sound of Music.

  Twentieth Century Fox had owned the movie rights since shortly after the Broadway opening, but the sale contract had stipulated that no film of the play could be released before December 31, 1964, or until all Broadway and touring productions had closed, whichever came first. But in 1962, this became a moot point. Fox was awash in red ink from the cost overruns on its production of Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; it had sold off its back lot in the middle of west Los Angeles to create the shopping and housing complex that would become Century City; and Richard Zanuck, the son of the studio’s longtime chief, Darryl Zanuck, had been installed as head of production, presiding over a skeletal staff. As Dick Zanuck rummaged through his script library for a vehicle that might bail the studio out, he turned to The Sound of Music. “It was just an obvious thing to do,” he would recall years later. But it did not seem so obvious to everyone else at the time.

  In December 1962, Zanuck secured a first-rate screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, who had not only written North by Northwest for Alfred Hitchcock but had successfully adapted West Side Story for the screen, but Lehman was having a terrible time finding a director. Billy Wilder pooh-poohed the whole idea, declaring, “No musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success.” Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, two of Hollywood’s leading directors of musicals, turned Lehman down cold. William Wyler was interested, but after a visit to New York to see the play and a flight to Salzburg to scout potential locations, it turned out that he was more interested in making an anti-Nazi drama about World War II than the story of the Trapp Family Singers. Finally, Lehman turned to Robert Wise, who had directed West Side Story and had already passed on The Sound of Music. Wise still had his doubts, but he turned for advice to his friend Saul Chaplin, a veteran composer and music director who had worked with him on West Side Story.

  Chaplin had seen the show on Broadway and hated it. He was prepared to feel the same way now, but as he read Lehman’s draft script, he found himself enchanted. “The characters were more clearly defined, it was more charming, and he had invented a truly exciting and suspenseful finish,” he would recall of Lehman’s treatment. Chaplin’s comment is emblematic of a long-running debate between the partisans of the Broadway and film versions of The Sound of Music, one that persists to this day. The Broadway advocates contend that the filmmakers stripped the show’s subtleties and sanded down its politics, removing “No Way to Stop It,” Elsa and Max’s exhortation to Captain von Trapp to go along to get along with the Third Reich. Wise and Lehman and their allies argue that the movie version leached away saccharine and schmaltz in the service of greater realism. The debate need not be resolved here, but its import for Richard Rodgers was that the moviemakers wanted two new songs: a love duet for the Captain and Maria to replace “An Ordinary Couple,” and a new solo for Maria to sing as she leaves the abbey to take up her duties at the von Trapp villa. Rodgers happily supplied “Something Good” as the new duet, and Chaplin and Wise loved it. But Maria’s new song gave him trouble.

  Rodgers’s first effort was short—just sixteen bars—and in a lugubrious minor key. It was not at all what Chaplin had in mind. Returning to Hollywood, he wrote Rodgers a diplomatic letter explaining his ideas. In response, Rodgers produced the bubbly refrain the world knows: “I have confidence in sunshine! I have confidence in rain!” which would serve as the third part of “I Have Confidence,” but ignored Chaplin’s request about the first two sections, in which Maria would first express doubt, followed by tentative resolve. After half an hour of polite telephone jousting in which, Chaplin would recall, “either he didn’t want to write the new material, or he wanted me to offer to do it,” Chaplin agreed to try. He sent Rodgers a demonstration recording, using motifs from the original verse of “The Sound of Music,” which would not be sung in the film. Rodgers wired back something like “Prefer my version. Okay to use yours if that is the decision,” Chaplin would recall. Only long after the movie’s opening did Chaplin work up the courage to tell Julie Andrews, who played Maria, that she’d been singing an amalgam. “Suddenly everything made sense,” Andrews would recall decades later, “as I’d had a hard time with that song in general, finding that the lyrics didn’t quite resonate for me!”

  Andrews’s performance in the film has become so iconic that it seems impossible to imagine anyone else in the part, but a wide range of other actresses—from Audrey Hepburn and Anne Bancroft to the inevitable Doris Day—either sought the role or were considered for it. Wise, Lehman, and Chaplin made up their minds for good after seeing some early footage of Andrews in Mary Poppins on the Walt Disney lot. “We went right back to the studio and said, ‘That’s our girl,’” Wise would recall. “Sign her.” At twenty-nine, Andrews may not have been quite young enough to be an actual postulant, but she was more than youthful enough to satisfy Oscar Hammerstein’s late-in-life wish that only young actresses play Maria. Christopher Plummer, six years her senior, was cast as the Captain. (The studio’s first choice had been the sixty-year-old Bing Crosby, but the producers never took that idea seriously.)

  The Austrian locations, wide-screen photography, and Chaplin’s carefully planned musical numbers—most notably a “Do-Re-Mi” that ranged wonderfully through the streets and gardens of Salzburg—brought the stage play indelibly to life for an eager new generation of movie audiences, and for their children and grandchildren. The story proved as indestructible as ever.

  Rodgers never visited the Austrian locations or the Fox soundstages, but he was by Julie Andrews’s
side at the New York premiere on March 2, 1965. The New York critics mostly savaged the film, taking the criticisms of the play a step or two further. The headline on Judith Crist’s review in the Herald Tribune warned, “If You Have Diabetes, Stay Away from This Movie,” and her verdict was that “the movie is for the five to seven set, and their mommies, who think their kids aren’t up to the stinging sophistication and biting wit of Mary Poppins.”

  The catcalls couldn’t have mattered less. The Sound of Music quickly became the all-time American box-office champion to date, beating the dollar record of Gone with the Wind, which had held the honor for twenty-five years. It won the Oscar for Best Picture, and the soundtrack album stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for fourteen weeks, longer than any album ever released by Elvis Presley or the Beatles. The film was first released on home video in 1979 and holds the comparable record for longevity of sales in that medium. On the movie’s fiftieth anniversary in 2015, Lady Gaga performed the title song live at the Academy Awards, and was greeted by a surprise onstage visit from Andrews herself as an encore.