Oscar’s second wife, Malvina Jacobi (1854–1912)
Reunited with her husband, Anna now arranged a marriage between Oscar and a marriageable woman she had known back in Selma named Malvina Jacobi. Anna believed Oscar needed someone to hold down the family fort. Malvina needed the status, respectability, and financial security that came with being the wife of a successful tobacconist. To the family of four boys, Malvina and Oscar soon added two daughters, Stella and Rose.
Oscar and Malvina’s daughters, Rose and Stella
Oscar had his own “Dutch Widow” now. Like his father before him, Oscar had remarried to a “useful” woman for the sake of home and family. It is no surprise that, with the death of beloved Rosa and his marriage to useful Malvina, Oscar’s trajectory to a lone-wolf life of opera sped up. Malvina, a woman of propriety, objected vehemently to Oscar’s theatrical forays, but Oscar wasn’t asking for permission. He came home only when he felt like it—and that was almost never. The loss of Rosa had had a profound and pivotal effect on him. He was determined that never again would a woman break his heart. Oscar was now, and forever, unbound.
Chapter 2
REAL ESTATE MOGUL
Toward the end of the 1870s, Oscar’s tobacconist activities began to take off. His patents had attained status as industry norms and were reaping fortunes. His Journal had grown. With the patents’ profits, Oscar’s interests turned in a new direction: Harlem real estate speculation and construction. Despite the fact that Malvina couldn’t fathom what possessed him to buy up these squared-off patches of scrub and rubble, Oscar grasped the growing value of Harlem real estate. Sometimes he bought parcels just to flip them for a quick, speculative profit. Other times he would hire contractors to build apartments and brownstones on the land. Within two years, he had completed the construction of twenty-four apartment buildings and thirty houses. The city’s papers often referred to Oscar as the number one real estate speculator in Harlem.
Throughout the 1880s, Oscar only dabbled in theatre. He had backed an opera season with Neuendorff, produced one drama on his own, and written three short plays that were produced by others. But Malvina knew the depths of his passion for theatre, especially opera. She knew there would come a day when Oscar would stop digging real foundations and start sinking the family’s fortunes into “the Devil’s synagogue,” as she called it. That day finally came.
J. B. McElfatrick, architect
Harlem in 1887 was more than four miles of dirty, muddy roads removed from the center of the city. Tellingly, the city’s papers listed Harlem’s entertainments as they would those of New Haven or Philadelphia, lumped together as a courtesy to the interested few, rather than sorted by type—salon, concert, drama—for the many-headed downtown reader. It was, for all practical purposes, a separate town, although improvements in transportation would soon speed up its development and incorporation within the larger city. For now, though, the press and the public were keenly curious as to why a successful editor would sink all his fortunes into building an opera house in the middle of nowhere.
Employing the convincing rationale to his completely unconvinced wife that a theatre would lend class to the neighborhood and value to his real estate holdings, Oscar made the leap and hired the architect John B. McElfatrick, who specialized in the designing of theatres. McElfatrick had built scores.
It was November 1887 and Oscar was eager to begin building immediately. McElfatrick knew from experience that it would be wiser to wait till late spring or early summer of 1888, to be certain that the project would not be subjected to the sting of winter. Headstrong as always, Oscar ignored this advice, hired dozens of contractors, and broke ground for the foundations of his first theatre, which he proudly dubbed the Harlem Opera House. It seemed as if the fates were with him: the winter had thus far been unseasonably balmy.
The foundations for the theatre were half completed when, on March 11, 1888, rain began to fall. The next day that rain turned to snow. The blizzard of 1888, also known as the Great White Hurricane, is still regarded today as the single most devastating snowstorm in New York City history. Thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds whipped the metropolis for thirty-six uninterrupted hours and dumped almost seven feet of snow, burying the entire East Coast. Power lines snapped, stranded citizens froze in their homes, fire stations were paralyzed, property loss climbed to an estimated $25 million, and over four hundred deaths were attributed to this catastrophic act of Mother Nature.
Oscar stubbornly attempted to clear the snow. He lit giant bonfires to thaw the frozen ground so that some progress could be made on his half-built theatre. When the contractors for his building failed to show up, he used his sons as labor. Unfortunately, all his efforts proved utterly futile. Like the city and the entire eastern seaboard, his theatre site had become a disaster area. Thanks to Oscar’s impatience, McElfatrick’s blue-sky budget of $175,000 for the cost of the Harlem Opera House had, courtesy of the Great White Hurricane, snowballed to almost $525,000.
The blizzard marked the end of schooling for all four of Oscar’s boys. They now had jobs. From that point forward Harry, Arthur, Willy, and Abe became Oscar’s employees. Willy, not yet thirteen, was especially affected by his father’s dragooning ways: his precocity for landscape painting was nipped permanently in the bud. With the storm, Oscar’s boys had become irrevocably intertwined in his theatrical ambitions. They would never get out.
Newark Bay, oil on board, painted by eleven-year-old Willy Hammerstein near what is now Newark Liberty International Airport
Once the theatre was completed, Oscar at first refrained from producing operas. He instead took his management cues from the safer downtown theatres and solidly booked the high-class repertoire circuit—often at exorbitant costs. For established stars, a Harlem theatre venue seemed a risky proposition. Therefore, box office heavyweights like Edwin Booth, Helena Modjeska, and Joseph Jefferson gouged the Harlem’s ticket sales for up to 90 percent of the receipts for their performances. Oscar took it stoically. Building a reputation for excellence, he reasoned, would take time and money.
However, patience was not one of Oscar’s virtues. Three months into his first season, he financially cannibalized the Emma Juch opera company, renamed it Oscar Hammerstein’s Opera Company, and presented mostly German operas to sparse audiences. Oscar was a stoic opera messiah. Building a popular base for opera, he again reasoned, would simply take even more time and money.
The Harlem Opera House on 125th Street
Oscar seemed naturally to grasp the idea of creating—as opposed to merely catering to—market opportunities. He decided to build a second theatre, also on 125th Street, which he named the Columbus Theatre. Why? Because the first theatre was losing money. Perhaps he thought that over offering would allow him to create and, at the same time, corner the market on Harlem theatre offerings. He’d have the jump on the competition. And would this not make his Harlem residences more attractive than ever? Oscar’s counterintuitive reasoning actually worked brilliantly. The Columbus kept Oscar’s coffers filled and allowed Oscar the occasional opportunity to indulge his taste for opera production, since he could at least split the losses over the profits of two theatres. The opera house trended toward more highbrow performances, the Columbus more lowbrow, but a season averaged ten bookings, and so exceptions abounded.
By 1892, the two Harlem theatres had found a profitable, complementary groove. But Oscar’s operatic ambitions had not been quenched. He now set his sights on midtown and bought a parcel on 34th Street for his third theatre, the Manhattan Opera House.
The Columbus Theatre on 125th Street
During the construction of Oscar’s midtown opera house, an interesting thing happened that must have made Oscar feel as if the opera Gods were on his side: some scenery and costumes caught on fire at the Metropolitan Opera House, destroying the theatre’s interior—and with it their 1892–1893 season.
In reporting on the fire, the New York Times proffered that the nearly completed Ma
nhattan Opera House would make an ideal temporary location for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1892–1893 season. When asked about this hasty union of interests, Oscar assured the Times that he could ramp up construction and have the opera house completed by month’s end simply by hiring more men, if need be. He then boasted of his opera house’s large seating capacity, its profusion of boxes, and its ability to accommodate opera of every variety. He was, for the sake of opera alone, very publicly offering to let the Metropolitan Opera use his house.
THE LOOK
Oscar stood five foot four inches tall—in heels. In an effort to look older and taller, Oscar made two changes to his appearance, both of which lasted a lifetime: he grew a Vandyke beard and he wore the largest top hat he could find. The incongruity was comical, the impression everlasting. Oscar became recognized for his distinctive look: Napoleon as a French vaudevillian. A Prince Albert morning coat completed the comical formality by which he would be recognized the world over.
The Met, however, never sent a reply. Met management was no doubt sanguine at the loss of the season. (It was no secret that their coffers were low after a string of very bad seasons.) For Oscar, their silence was an insult, and their indifference to opera unforgiveable.
Ground-floor seating and box seats illustration from the first Manhattan Opera House on Thirty-fourth Street
Oscar’s Manhattan Opera House could most aptly be described as looking like the love child of the Casino Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera House. Like the Met, it was jam-packed with boxes. Like the Casino, the decor was an Arabic hallucination of spires, minarets, and tiles. Thanks to his own patented design, depicting something of a modest prototype for today’s ubiquitous cantilevered balcony, Oscar was able to place the balcony audience closer to the stage. In fact, Oscar had widened the horseshoe shape of the traditional opera house; as a result, the entire theatre layout was wider and shallower, and everybody had a better seat.
1892 theatre-design patent by Oscar Hammerstein
The Manhattan Opera House brazenly exemplified Oscar’s contradictory approach to opera production: Did he want to rule the existing world of opera—in other words, beat the Met? He had built an opera house that could certainly accommodate the city’s upper crust, with its Met-like boxes and Casino-like ambience. Or, as his theatre’s shape suggested, did he want to sack fortress opera and open the gates to “the people”? With his revolutionary design, Oscar had significantly narrowed the distinction between the best seat and the worst.
Eldest son Harry managed the box office for Oscar’s theatres
Whatever his goals for reaching an audience, Oscar clearly wished to retire one hoary operatic convention: casting unbelievable performers in key roles. It was wearily typical to see a beefy pair of forty-something songbirds playing teenage lovers to bravos, flowers, and big checks. Up to this point, dramatic verisimilitude had always been the first casualty of operatic tradition. Singers had always succeeded on the strengths of their voices.
Manhattan Opera House proscenium illustration
Oscar’s house made that illusion harder to achieve. Because the audience was now closer to the stage, singers needed to look and act their part as well to be able to sing it. And they needed not to sing as loudly either. A potential benefit of Oscar’s new approach to production was that younger, prettier, less loud actor-singers were more numerous, much cheaper to hire, easier to direct, and brought in a younger crowd. Oscar hoped that, set free like this, opera might actually become a paying business.
Unfortunately, however, these subtle changes were not immediately apparent to New York City audiences. The papers lauded the acoustics and the decor—describing in rapturous detail this defiant statement of a theatre—but never got far enough back to see just how much of a tectonic shift this was. Time would tell.
Within weeks of opening, Oscar landed a solid hit: The Isle of Champagne. With plenty of legs, laughs, and tunes, as well as one inventive plot, The Isle of Champagne ran eight happy weeks, and then was transferred to Harlem for another two.
Champagne follows Beere illustration
Despite his success, Oscar once again heard opera’s siren call and within months he again tried his hand at opera production. The Met was dark. Surely, he reasoned, there was a New York City audience that was ripe for opera, Hammerstein-style. He was blind to the sad truth—the Met’s audience enjoyed their social exclusivity above all else, and Oscar’s efforts were anathema to them. His opera productions were met with a “frenzy of indifference” (a five-generation family expression of lament).
Oscar’s easily identifiable “look” landed him in many a newspaper cartoon illustration.
Despite the profits of the uptown theatres, Oscar’s midtown efforts practically bankrupted him. The red ink forced Oscar into partnership with Koster & Bial, who ran a cabaret down on Twenty-third Street where they had developed an expertise for discreetly catering to the many vices of an upscale “sporting” crowd. They were looking to move north and “up.” Both parties saw in this union a needed complementary quality in the other. Oscar gave Koster & Bial “class.” Koster & Bial gave Oscar financial stability. As often happens with such marriages of convenience, the honeymoon proved short indeed.
Oscar with a full beard, before the Vandyke
Oscar suffered this partnership in uncharacteristic silence. The marquee of the Manhattan Opera House now read KOSTER & BIAL’S. To create the smoky ambience for which they were well known, Koster & Bial gutted every other row of seats, installed tables, and provided food, wine, and cigars, all served by louche ma’am’selles. It was quite a change for Oscar.
Koster & Bial initially handed the booking reins over to Oscar, but he reverted to form by booking yet another critically acclaimed, unprofitable ballet-within-an-operetta called Versailles. Koster & Bial, who had controlling interest in the partnership, quickly set Oscar straight about his role at the new Koster & Bial’s. From that point onward, the entertainment trended away from heavy theatrical fare and instead served up a light, frothy mix of trapeze artists, comics, and singing and dancing girls, girls, girls!
A prime, though hardly singular, example of the girls employed by Koster & Bial was Carmencita, the Spanish dancer. Resplendent in a dress made of jingling coins and clapping her castanets seductively, she was an ageless composite of many dancers, across many decades. Did her authenticity really matter? Not to this crowd.
Because the weekly acts no longer rose to the level of reputable theatre, the papers listed only new additions to the bill. To top it all off, Koster & Bial installed curtains in the boxes so that patrons could be “entertained” in privacy. In short, they created a “lobster palace,” a term that aptly described who, not what, they served. With entertainment a distant third behind vice and intoxication, the money rolled in.
A Koster & Bial’s Music Hall broadside
To be fair, it was through his association with Koster & Bial that Oscar learned to craft a balanced variety bill, a talent that would serve him well, even beyond this association. But in all other matters of management, Oscar was marginalized. He had become a silent, compliant landlord and his beautiful opera house had been reduced to an establishment that offered a titillating night of dinner theatre for the sporting set. Oscar was in a purgatory of his own making.
Chapter 3
THE FATHER OF TIMES SQUARE
It all began as a simple bet between good friends.
In late September 1893, Oscar had taken a train to Boston to scout out the possible booking of A Trip to Venus, written and produced by his good friend the composer Gustave Kerker. Once back home, Oscar and Gustave met at Marcus Meyer’s office in the Fromme Bros. law firm, talked shop, and fell into their usual conversation about the general dearth of native, creative talent. They moved on to assess the relative merits and flaws of their own recent productions of Venus and Champagne. Kerker bemoaned that Venus had eaten up an entire year of his efforts.
Oscar Hammerstein
This tidbit dumbfounded Oscar. Hadn’t Kerker merely tried to cash in on the success of the previous season’s A Trip to Chinatown with his own Trip to copycat show, one of many that followed in Chinatown’s wake? After all, these entertainments were pure froth; an assemblage of vaudeville talents tethered to a wafer-thin plot; a revue posing as a comic operetta. This was hardly a fusion of song mit story, after all. How could it possibly have taken a year to produce?
“A composer of real musical genius ought not require more than a few days to reel off a comic opera or operetta. I could write one myself in a day or two,” Oscar chided. Kerker just laughed at him. Oscar pulled out a $100 bill and declared that he could write music, book, and lyrics for a one-act operetta in forty-eight hours. Gus eagerly matched the bet.
They agreed to recuse themselves from the verdict and quickly assembled a jury of professionals in the field, led by playwright Charles A. Byrne, the writer and theatre manager A. M. Palmer, New York Herald managing editor and critic J. I. C. Clark, writer and critic Leander Richardson, and theatrical jack-of-all-trades Jessie Williams. Each man was to judge thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a specific aspect of the work. Palmer would judge lyrics; Richardson, dialogue; Clarke, literary merit; and Williams, music. They alone would deem whether Oscar’s effort merited his claim.
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