“Everyone on the film was unified in their passion to make it the best it could be,” Andrews says today, attempting to explain its endless, enduring appeal. “We shared an unspoken commitment to making a beautiful story while recognizing the dangers of being overly saccharine. I think that is one of the main things that contributes to the film’s longevity—that, plus a heady combination of life-affirming elements, like glorious music and lyrics, the Austrian Alps, triumph over adversity in a critical period in history. Plus, children, nuns, family, and above all, a great love story. What more do you need?”
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WHILE THE HOLLYWOOD filmmakers were immersed in the gemütlich world of “My Favorite Things,” Rodgers was enduring the Sturm und Drang of a new Broadway musical in formation. The path to the project had been anything but straight or smooth. In the wake of No Strings, Rodgers had explored a new vehicle for Diahann Carroll set in ancient Egypt and based on the life of Nefertiti, but nothing came of it. Then he agreed to collaborate with Alan Jay Lerner, whose partnership with Frederick Loewe had ended in recriminations after Camelot in 1960. Dick and Alan discussed several ideas, but the one they settled on was to be called I Picked a Daisy, and it was an exploration of Lerner’s long interest in extrasensory perception. But Lerner’s attraction to the story could not overcome a hopeless case of writer’s block, and an impatient Rodgers moved on. (Lerner would later write the show, renamed On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, with the composer Burton Lane.)
Rodgers’s next choice of collaborator was not altogether unexpected: Stephen Sondheim. Dick had known Stephen since he was a twelve-year-old boy, and the possibility of their collaboration had been germinating for years, encouraged by Oscar Hammerstein before his death. In 1962, Sondheim had at last fulfilled his wish of writing both lyrics and music for Broadway—with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. While that show was a hit, his next outing, Anyone Can Whistle, with a book by his West Side Story and Gypsy collaborator Arthur Laurents, had closed after nine performances. Laurents now had another idea: a musical version of his 1952 play, The Time of the Cuckoo. It told the story of an unattached American woman of a certain age who finds unexpected—and unresolved—love on a vacation in Venice. Hammerstein himself had been interested in the property as a prospect for him and Dick, but he believed the 1955 film version, called Summertime and starring Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, was too fresh in audiences’ minds. Now the project—retitled once more as Do I Hear a Waltz?—looked too good to pass up: a proven vehicle, with established collaborators and a lush Rodgers score. Though Sondheim would once again be writing lyrics only, he could content himself with the thought that he was paying a posthumous debt to his mentor, and everyone stood to make a lot of money.
At first, Sondheim would remember, the collaboration was easy and friendly. But soon there were problems, the central one, in Sondheim’s eyes, that the lead character was so emotionally repressed that she shouldn’t be able to sing—at least until the very end of the show. Rodgers was unable to get his head around such an idea, and instead cast Elizabeth Allen, a brassy brunette with a clarion voice, in the pivotal role. Since he was the producer, he had the final say, and behind his back Sondheim, Laurents, and the show’s British director, John Dexter, took to calling him Godzilla. That those three men happened to be gay added to the complicated dynamics. Long used to the routines of late nights, chorus girls, and being one of the guys, Rodgers felt ganged up on and left out. “The more we worked on the show, the more estranged I became from both writers,” he would recall. “Any suggestions I made were promptly rejected, as if by prearrangement.” Rodgers was also drinking secretly—and heavily—and Sondheim and Laurents came to feel that he responded to their own suggestions with a churlishness that bordered on contempt. In a joint interview with Sondheim, Rodgers joked—but only sort of—that the charming little boy he’d known had grown into a “monster.”
Somehow the show limped into New York. “Unfortunately, when we put our touching, intimate story on the stage, we found that instead of a musical, we had a sad little comedy with songs,” Rodgers would recall. “It simply didn’t work.” In fact, the score has some ravishing songs, including the title number and “Moon in My Window,” a haunting trio for the three lead female characters.
The show opened on March 18, 1965, barely two weeks after the film premiere of The Sound of Music, and while the reviews were mixed, the show would run for a respectable 220 performances and Rodgers was philosophical about the backstage conflicts. “Someday, when we see each other again, I will be able to tell you more about Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics and his personal problems,” he wrote Sister Gregory a few weeks after the opening. “The latter didn’t exactly make for an ideal relationship but now that the show is opened, and apparently will succeed, I am in a wonderfully charitable mood to forget everything I didn’t like and remember the things I enjoyed.”
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RODGERS KEPT BUSY in other ways as well. He had agreed to take on the leadership of the Music Theater of Lincoln Center, housed in New York’s new performing arts center. The goal was to produce first-class revivals of classic works in a two-show summer season. The first two productions, in 1964, were The King and I and Dick’s old childhood favorite, The Merry Widow. The show’s mountings were lavish, and sometimes new cast albums were produced. The most successful venture was a smash 1966 reimagining of Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman once again in the title role and featuring “An Old Fashioned Wedding,” a brand-new contrapuntal showstopping duet by Irving Berlin, the last hit he would ever write.
And even as he aged and grew more artistically conservative, Rodgers showed he could keep up with the times. Belying his reputation as a fierce foe of jazz interpretations of his works—he had reportedly reacted to Peggy Lee’s driving, up-tempo Latin version of his and Larry Hart’s “Lover” in 1952 by lamenting, “I don’t know why Peggy picked on me when she could have fucked up ‘Silent Night’”—he had warm words for Dave Brubeck’s 1965 album of his songs, My Favorite Things. “‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ would, I think,” he wrote Brubeck, “have lasted a whole three months if only orthodox versions had been permitted.” In a similar letter to the pop songwriter Burt Bacharach, Rodgers was also full of praise. “What you are doing,” he wrote, “is to open a window and let fresh air into a room that has become too noisy in one way and too stuffy in another.”
Rodgers’s next project was a 1967 television version of Androcles and the Lion for NBC, starring Noël Coward, and to write it, he would recall, “I simply went back to my No Strings collaborator—me—and we got along just fine.” The show was a mild success but produced no memorable songs. That same year, Rodgers’s sixty-fifth birthday was celebrated with glowing tributes from friends and colleagues, but he could no longer deny the toll that advancing age, and decades of smoking and drinking, had taken on his health. On July 22, 1969, he suffered a serious heart attack. But a mere myocardial infarction could not dull Rodgers’s perpetual quest for the next show; in fact, he was already at work on a new project, an adaptation of Clifford Odets’s 1952 comedy, The Flowering Peach, a Yiddishe version of the story of Noah and the flood. Cast as Noah was Danny Kaye, the zany Hollywood song and dance man who had cut his teeth as a borscht belt tummler in the Catskills more than thirty years earlier. But Rodgers proved reluctant to emphasize the quintessentially Jewish quality of the material. His collaborators, lyricist Martin Charnin and librettist Peter Stone, had brought him the project in the first place, but, without telling them, Rodgers had acquired the rights himself, “which meant we were not only working with him, but working for him,” Charnin would recall. Stone and Charnin were forced to defer to the boss, but they remained puzzled and found Rodgers hard to pin down. “If you wanted to talk to the composer he had on his producer’s hat,” Stone would recall. “And when you wanted to talk to the producer, you got the composer.”
The director Joe Layton, who had first worked with Rodgers
as dance director on The Sound of Music, devised an elaborate scenic concept in which the cast would disassemble the timbers of Noah’s house at the end of the first act, only to reassemble them into the ark as the second-act curtain rose. Charnin found the whole idea cumbersome, and it required endless rehearsals. But Rodgers managed to turn out a number of good songs, including a beautiful ballad for one of Noah’s sons, “I Do Not Know a Day I Did Not Love You.” And despite his heart attack, Dick was also still openly—evenly shamelessly—chasing the girls in the company, including a young Madeline Kahn, who made fun of him to her fellow cast members.
The show, Two by Two, opened on November 10, 1970, and the critics were not kind. “Its badness is total,” wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek. Kaye’s name on the marquee assured brisk enough business at the box office, but three months into the run, he injured his leg coming down a ramp during a performance. He returned to the show in a cast and wheelchair, and began a nightly series of ad-libbed dialogue and bits of comic business that turned the play into The Danny Kaye Show. Charnin and Stone were appalled and Rodgers was none too happy, but audiences flocked to the novelty and Dick kept the show running to return his investment. Kaye took to making curtain speeches in which he said, “I’m glad you’re here, but I’m glad the authors aren’t.” The show ran for eleven months, clocking 351 performances, before Kaye gave up the ghost.
It is to Rodgers’s credit that even such a disappointing experience did not diminish his appreciation for the most exciting show on Broadway that year: Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company, an acid examination of a commitment-phobic bachelor and his circle of married friends. Writing to Sondheim and the show’s producer-director, Harold Prince, Rodgers called the show “triumphant” and said that in all his years of theatergoing, he had rarely been as impressed. “This is a unique talent that you walk around with,” he told Sondheim, setting aside their past quarrels, “and I think you are absolutely right in your insistence that you must write both words and music.” He concluded, “I think COMPANY is to cynicism what THE SOUND OF MUSIC is to sentimentality. This is not only artistically proper but publicly acceptable, as we all know perfectly well by now. There’s room for both in the theatre and I am delighted with your success.”
But the entente was to be short-lived. In a 1973 interview with Newsweek, Sondheim described Hammerstein as a man of limited talent but infinite soul, and Rodgers as a man of infinite talent but limited soul. Asked for comment, Dick replied, “The less said, the better.”
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IN 1972, DOROTHY Rodgers had a serious heart attack, which kept her hospitalized for weeks, but Dick kept plugging away. The latest potential project was a musical version of Arsenic and Old Lace, the popular 1940s black comedy about two elderly sisters who poison lonely old men and then bury them in their cellar. There was some suggestion that Ethel Merman and Mary Martin might be coaxed out of retirement to play the leads. The lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who had just ended his partnership with the composer Jerry Bock, which had produced such shows as Fiddler on the Roof, thought the play was so tightly plotted that there was no room for songs. A number of writers took a crack at the book, including the British playwright Tom Stoppard, before Rodgers decided it could never work and gave up.
But soon enough, Rodgers was at work on another project with Harnick, suggested by the producer Richard Adler, based on the life of Henry VIII. In the spring of 1974, while at work on the show, Rodgers complained to Liza Minnelli that he had a case of “galloping laryngitis.” It would turn out to be something much worse: cancer of the larynx. That July, Rodgers underwent surgery to remove his vocal cords. Grim as the cancer of the jaw had been nearly twenty years earlier, this was worse, literally robbing the composer of his voice. He could have used an electronic voice box but opted for the much more challenging course of learning “esophageal speech,” which requires gulping in air and then belching it back through the oral passages. This not only took time and enormous effort but also deprived Rodgers of one of his greatest pleasures, the witty riposte, the outrageous pun, the bon mot. By the time he could gulp in and belch out, the moment had been lost. It was a major achievement when Rodgers marched into the office of his doctor and the nurse announced he had something important to show the doctor. Rodgers paused a bit and then began singing, “Doe—a deer, a female deer.”
At first, Harnick assumed the Henry VIII project was doomed, but Rodgers craved the work. “When he was able to function again, he just, he had such drive to go forward,” Harnick would recall. They worked in the Rodgers and Hammerstein offices on Madison Avenue, with Harnick usually writing the lyrics first. He was nervous about showing Rodgers his first effort—a lullaby for the newborn Princess Elizabeth. Rodgers scowled fiercely—his usual expression when concentrating—and said, “Well, let me see what I can do.” “And I thought, ‘He hates it,’” Harnick remembered, “but I’ll go on to the next one.” Rodgers could no longer dash off a tune in half an hour, but a few days later, he invited Harnick to the office and dragged himself to the piano. (By this point, he was also suffering the aftereffects of an apparent stroke.) “And he got halfway there and he turned to me and he said, ‘I’ll probably fuck it up.’ And I thought, he is as nervous as I am. And he played it and I thought it was just gorgeous.” Until that moment, Harnick had always called his new collaborator “Mr. Rodgers,” but “When he finished, I said, ‘Oh, Dick, that’s beautiful!’ And literally his shoulders sank. And he said, you know, when I left the house this morning, Dorothy said, ‘Oh, I hope he likes it.’”
But the show, now called Rex, was heavy sledding. The librettist Sherman Yellen had larded the book with long expositions of Tudor history. The British actor Nicol Williamson, who had been cast as Henry, was having trouble in his marriage and drinking heavily, arriving late for rehearsals and leaving early. Rodgers managed to produce at least one lovely ballad, “Away from You,” but the show simply wasn’t working. When Rex opened on April 25, 1976, the verdict was grim. Clive Barnes in the Times said the show “has almost everything not going for it.” It closed after just forty-eight performances.
The last thing anyone expected was for Rodgers to attempt another show. In 1975, he had published an autobiography, Musical Stages, ghostwritten by the theater historian Stanley Green. The book had flashes of Rodgers’s wit, especially in its telling of his earliest days in the business, but it also had a tepid, denatured feel, and sales proved disappointing. As ever, though, Dick kept abreast of the competition, writing to Michael Bennett, the director of Broadway’s latest singular sensation, “I didn’t just have a good time at A Chorus Line, I laughed and cried and had that wonderful feeling way deep inside that can only be there in the presence of something great and new.” There were still some high moments, notably a splendid revival of The King and I starring Yul Brynner that arrived in New York from a national tour in time for Dick’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1977. The following year, Rodgers was among the first group of five artists to be awarded the Kennedy Center Honors, which would become one of the nation’s highest rewards for creative achievement. Florence Henderson, an occasional lunch companion in these later years, would recall that even as he grew frailer, relying on a cane to walk, he lost neither his dignity nor his pride. “When he’d go to get in his car, his limo, he said, ‘Don’t help me,’ he said to the guy, and he said, ‘I just hate it because people try to help you and then the cane goes out from under you and you fall again.’”
Still, the shadows were lengthening. So it is perhaps not so surprising that when the producer Alexander Cohen approached Dick about writing a musical version of I Remember Mama, the play Rodgers and Hammerstein had first produced in 1944, Rodgers said yes. The show was the brainchild of Martin Charnin, who since the days of Two by Two had scored a smash hit with Annie. Charnin had written both music and lyrics, with a book by his Annie collaborator Thomas Meehan, but Cohen thought the show needed a Rodgers score, which Dick agreed to provide. Cohen and Charnin saw
the show as a perfect vehicle for the Swedish film star Liv Ullmann, who, as it turned out, could not really sing. Cohen eventually fired Charnin as the director and brought in Cy Feuer, who wanted to recruit the Hollywood songwriter Sammy Cahn to write some new lyrics. Dorothy Rodgers vetoed that idea, pronouncing him not “theater.” Once upon a time, Dick would never have countenanced such involvement by his wife, but now he depended on her, and he deferred.
I Remember Mama opened on May 31, 1979, and hung on through the summer for 108 performances, closing on the Sunday before Labor Day. It was Rodgers’s fortieth original Broadway show—and his last. For by now the curtain was falling on Dick himself. He was deeply depressed, beset by crippling headaches for which his doctors could find no cause. That October, he suffered a major seizure with convulsions. At times, he hallucinated. Much of the time, he was sedated with a powerful cocktail of morphine, Demerol, and codeine. He would sit, his daughter Linda would recall, “like a baby” in front of the television set, alone in his room while the rest of the family ate lunch.
In early December, there was one last drop of golden sun: a new touring revival of Oklahoma!, directed by Bill Hammerstein, was opening on Broadway. Agnes de Mille, by then herself coping with the effects of a severe stroke, wrote Dick an emotional letter. “Thirty-eight years ago you and I stood hand in hand at the back of the St. James waiting to see what would happen,” she remembered. “Your arms were around me at the end of ‘Farmer’ and the world broke open.” She expressed deep gratitude for the career that Dick and Oscar had helped to launch, and concluded, “Thursday night my hand will again be in yours. We are both broken now and badly dented if not daunted but we know we were right and we know what we are doing today and we can take joy in that knowledge.”
But it appears that Rodgers was too ill to attend the opening on December 13. The new production, starring a mix of comparative newcomers and the great character actress Mary Wickes as Aunt Eller, won widespread critical praise and an appreciative intergenerational audience that rediscovered the show’s irrepressible charms. “As I went up the aisle at intermission,” Walter Kerr reported in the Times, “I noticed one and all were beaming. Some were smiling because they remember. The others were smiling because they will.” Seventeen days later, on the next to last day of the last year of the 1970s—his sixth decade in the professional theater—Rodgers died quietly at home. As had been done for Oscar Hammerstein nineteen years earlier, the lights of the Broadway that Richard Rodgers had changed forever were darkened in his honor.
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