The New York Times Building construction site, 1903
Oscar ran the Victoria like he had the old Columbus, rotating straight plays, musical comedies, and variety. But the roof garden’s profits convinced Oscar, in 1904, to devote the Victoria entirely to vaudeville. Itching, as always, to get back into the opera game, Oscar turned the reins over to Willy, who’d cut his management teeth at the ill-fated Olympia a few years earlier and who had had responsibility for day-to-day management of the Victoria since it opened.
Willy Hammerstein (the only picture of him in existence)
Willy was a faithful-as-a-snow-goose, home-by-nine kind of guy who never saw the second act of his own evening show as he simply would not let it interfere with his family life. He adored his wife and, on those rare occasions when she came to see a show, he jealously guarded her from the rowdy depredations of the Victoria audience. His preternaturally laid-back personality seemed ill-suited to the very public demands of his chaotic profession, yet he remains widely regarded as the best vaudeville manager America has ever produced. Willy’s reticence came across as deadpan. When others were doubled over laughing, he might smile. To make him laugh was a great and rare accomplishment indeed.
Roof Garden program
From 1904 to 1914, Willy ran the Victoria. The talent he booked ranged from the opera stage to the carnival midway. The Victoria may have been called the “nut house of vaudeville” but it was also the big time for thousands of singers, actors, dancers, comics, jugglers, mimes, acrobats, contortionists, freaks, magicians, animal acts, puppeteers, prizefighters, professional wrestlers, bicycle and running champions, sharpshooters, celebrities, criminals, and storytellers—all fighting for their share of the roar of that Victoria crowd. Stars like Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Buster Keaton, Houdini, and Mae West all played the Victoria, some many times. They appreciated Willy’s sharp eye for making good acts better.
Will Rogers credited Willy with encouraging him to talk to the audience as he performed his lasso act. Out of this was born one of the greatest conversationalists of all time. Will Rogers housed his horse on the roof-garden farm. In order to get the horse there every night after his performance, he had to walk the horse up the stairs, because the elevators were too small.
Charlie Chaplin credited Willy with giving him the idea of pie-throwing, though that seems a bit of a reach. At Willy’s theatre, the young Chaplin played a prominent role in Karno’s French vaudeville act. His understudy was a young Stan Laurel.
Charlie Chaplin played the balcony stooge in Fred Karno’s vaudeville troupe.
W. C. Fields performed an early version of his pool-hall act, which consisted of attempting billiard tricks, then, when he messed up, yelling at his assistant, who was his real-life wife, for screwing up his concentration. This was an early and successful example of innovative spousal-abuse comedy.
W. C. Fields
Also in 1904, Oscar built a theatre on the south side of Forty-second Street and leased it to his old friend Lew Fields, now split from Joe Weber and running a stock company of his own. The Lew Fields Theatre was architecturally a near duplicate of the Republic across the street. Thanks to the profits from his lease with Lew Fields and from Willy’s success with vaudeville, the money rolled in. And Oscar once again dreamed of operatic empire.
Lew Fields
The Lew Fields Theatre, on the south side of Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues
Willy billed “Sober Sue—You Can’t Make Her Laugh” and posted a $100-in-gold reward for anyone who could prove otherwise. Naturally, the best comics of the time—Sam Bernard, Willie Collier, Eddie Leonard, Louis Mann, and dozens of others—flocked to the Vic to try to cash in on the reward. And crowds flocked to see the comedians try. What only Willy knew was that facial paralysis had left Sue unable to laugh—on the outside. The $25-a-week act packed the house for fourteen weeks. No one collected the gold.
Oscar Hammerstein in front of his Victoria Theatre, 1899
Chapter 5
OPERA WAR
In 1903, Oscar had quietly purchased a large lot on Thirty-fourth Street. He claimed he was building a spectacle house to rival the outsized Hippodrome Theatre, but his floor plans told a different story. Like the first Manhattan Opera House, this second one was shallower and wider than was traditional for grand opera. The stage was immense. Acoustics and sight lines were excellent. Oscar’s design invited his audience to see and hear, not see and be seen. This would be opera—Hammerstein-style. By 1906, Oscar had completed construction of his second Manhattan Opera House.
The Manhattan Opera House
The Manhattan Opera House interior
Oscar now set his competitive sights on the Metropolitan Opera House. What he saw at the Met were wealthy patrons and benefactors, no meaningful bottom line, the best singers and directors money could buy, exclusive publishing contracts, a daunting web of theatrical alliances, and a twenty-three-year domination of grand opera.
Metropolitan Opera House director, Heinrich Conried
Opera war cartoon
And they saw him back. The Met threatened career repercussions for wayward singers, they tied up a dozen singers with short-term contracts, and they instructed all of their theatre and publishing alliances not to play ball with Hammerstein’s new house.
Conductor Cleofonte Campanini confers with Oscar.
On opening night, December 3, 1906, thirty-one hundred people managed to squeeze inside the new Manhattan, while outside, curious thousands jammed traffic from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River, from Twenty-third Street to Forty-second. Hammerstein had to call in the police to control the crush of people.
The Manhattan Opera House, postcard
Oscar’s first aim was to invite comparison with the Met. For the premiere performance, he opened with Bellini’s I Puritani, chosen specifically to showcase tenor Alessandro Bonci’s astonishing upper-register control. The Met’s tenor Enrico Caruso had wisely dropped this awful opera from his repertoire early in his career. The obliging press framed it as the “duel of the tenors.”
Alessandro Bonci
In the autumn months preceding the opening, Oscar had publicly boasted that the great diva Nellie Melba would sing at the Manhattan, and then promptly steamed to Europe to arrive unannounced at Melba’s Parisian villa. When he asked her to perform at his new theatre, she tossed him out. But Oscar was not to be discouraged. He returned the next day to again plead his case. Melba turned him down once more. After a few more days of this, Oscar finally accepted her refusal, bowed, and pulled out a wad of thousand-franc bills. Declaring sadly, “I won’t be needing this,” he flung the wad into the air, turned on his heels, and walked out in a shower of money. For him it was all or nothing. Flabbergasted, Melba summoned him back and signed on the dotted line for 1907.
Oscar Hammerstein, impresario
Nellie Melba’s stunning performances throughout the second half of the Manhattan’s first season quickly cemented its reputation for opera of the highest quality. Melba’s exquisite voice had counterbalanced the potent threat of Caruso and made Oscar’s Manhattan shine. With the help of Willy’s vaudeville profits and Arthur’s constant assistance, Oscar had created a first-class opera company in a single year and had made more money than the Met had lost.
Nellie Melba
Oscar now gambled big. He had many goals: to keep the Met off balance; to make the rules of opera; to make musical history. In the Manhattan’s second season, Oscar expanded the definitions of opera and introduced the modern, morally complicated French repertoire to his American audiences. Oscar traveled to Paris to sign up the queen of this daring realm—Mary Garden.
Mary Garden
In contrast to the old-school charms of a Nellie Melba, to opera’s audiences Garden embodied the shock of the new. Her fearless singing style ranged from the beautiful to the horrific, all in the service of the larger demands of drama. She sang, danced, and acted. In her Osc
ar saw opera’s future.
Oscar focused great directorial attention on Mary Garden’s performance of the American debut of Claude Debussy’s controversial—and only opera—Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy praised Oscar’s efforts to the skies: “I trust you will find in these few lines the expression of my sincere gratitude for your having dared to present Pelléas et Mélisande in America. It is a particularly happy event that the success of our efforts … helps the cause of French music admirably.” The French government went even further and awarded Oscar the French Legion of Honor medal.
For the first time in his life, Oscar was collaborating with an artist whose expansive vision of opera was equal to his own. Unlike most divas, Mary Garden never bolted to the competition for a better paycheck. The two were completely loyal to each other and fought like jealous lovers—a relationship that was rumored to be true.
Decades back, Oscar had briefly worked with Metropolitan Opera House director Heinrich Conried. Bad feelings had brewed, and the mutual animosity still strongly lingered. In Oscar’s second season, Conried made a costly error. Believing Oscar to be committed to French opera, Conried delayed in resigning the beloved, old-school diva of the Italian repertoire, Luisa Tetrazzini; he saw no reason to rush her contract renegotiation. Arthur Hammerstein saw fair game and pounced.
When a reporter mused that Conried was his own worst enemy, Oscar slyly retorted, “Not while I’m alive.”
Luisa Tetrazzini
Luisa Tetrazzini was a coloratura soprano whose voice control and personal style had won over all of Europe. Her new presence at the Manhattan jeopardized the dominance of the Met’s Italian repertoire. Her recent London debut had caused riots in the streets. It was the same at her New York debut on January 15, 1908. Up to this moment, audience defection from the Met to the Manhattan had trickled. Now it flowed.
Snobby opera journals portrayed Oscar’s audience for Tetrazzini as raucous ethnic immigrants who were out of control and lacking gentility. One thing was for sure: no New York debut of this century had ignited such hysteria. Tetrazzini packed the house. Oscar and Arthur, even the city police, were overwhelmed. Lucky Hammerstein now had two polar phenoms of the “old” and “new” schools, Luisa Tetrazzini and Mary Garden, under one roof.
The “Gallery Gods” on Tetrazzini Night at the Manhattan, an illustration from Musical America
Oscar’s public life was played out in the news every day. But in late November 1908, a scandal broke out that brought Oscar’s private life into the public eye as well.
Oscar and Malvina had an understanding. Malvina was a woman of propriety and feared public humiliation, not private betrayal. She demanded only discretion in Oscar’s affairs. As long as his occasional dalliances with his singers remained out of the public eye, their cool and practical marriage could endure. In fact, Oscar rarely even visited his Harlem home and lived a lone-wolf existence in a small room above the Victoria Theatre.
When the city’s newspapers began printing excerpts of five hundred love letters Oscar had penned to a singer with whom he’d consorted, and who he had then professionally spurned, Oscar and Malvina’s status quo arrangement abruptly ended. Oscar tried to explain to members of the press that a man in his profession needed some latitude in these matters, but, of course, this plea was also printed for public consumption. A humiliated, if not heartbroken, Malvina packed her bags and moved out.
Despite the end of his marriage and the precarious success of the Manhattan, Oscar continued to dream of an even bigger operatic empire. And so he waged a separate opera war with Philadelphia’s venerable and stodgy Academy of Music by building a competing opera house in that city. Arthur oversaw the breakneck pace of the theatre’s construction, and on November 17, 1908, the Philadelphia Opera House opened to the public.
The Philadelphia Opera House, postcard
Oscar’s fourth, and last, season at the Manhattan was a battle to the death: he ran summer and educational programs of opera and managed touring companies performing in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, all of which were straining resources, inflating costs, and ultimately dulling interest. Oscar had outmaneuvered the Metropolitan at almost every level but could not outspend them. He was secretly broke.
Otto Kahn, president and majority stockholder of the Metropolitan Opera board of directors, truly admired Oscar and often referred to him as “a very dangerous genius.” A devoted opera lover, he’d attended Oscar’s Manhattan operas from the beginning. Since Oscar was consummately hands-on and watched every performance on a kitchen chair, in the wings, stage right, he gave his empty box seats to Otto—with his compliments.
By the end of 1909, rumors of Oscar’s insolvency surfaced in the papers. Otto certainly may have known about Oscar’s money troubles, but he believed Oscar to be the best man by far to steer any opera company. He valiantly tried to persuade the board of directors to make Oscar the director of the Metropolitan Opera. But Oscar had angered too many rich, important people and burned too many bridges. Despite further rumors of a Manhattan-Metropolitan alliance, there unfortunately would be no rapprochement in this war.
Arthur Hammerstein
Then, in the spring of 1910, Arthur had an idea: he persuaded Oscar to assign him power of attorney and exile him to Paris. Then he penned a deal with Otto Kahn: the Met would buy out all of Oscar’s opera interests, with the exception of the opera house deed, in exchange for $1.2 million. Oscar and Arthur would sign a written promise to stay out of the opera business in the four largest opera cities in the United States—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago—for a period of ten years. On top of this, the Met demanded the deed to the Philadelphia house.
Proud Oscar was out of options and wearily signed. Otto and the Met extended their invitation to Oscar to be their guest of honor for a conciliatory banquet. He moodily replied, “Gentlemen, I am not hungry.”
Chapter 6
OSCAR IN FLAMES
Throughout the summer of 1911 Oscar publicly argued with the Met over what he could and couldn’t do. Where was opera’s bright, defining line drawn? He quixotically produced a few more “modern” French operas and “educational” operas in English, with little objection, injunction, or profit. Privately he writhed.
Try as he might, Oscar couldn’t use Arthur to get around the ban. Arthur had shrewdly signed on precisely so that Oscar couldn’t use him as a proxy. During Arthur’s Manhattan years, which he described as his “four years of opera torture,” he’d begun to independently produce musical comedies and operettas, quietly preparing for life after father. For him, the ban was his escape.
Over all the years of his father’s financial ups and downs, Arthur had always thrived. Beginning with the Olympia, he’d created and maintained two businesses that catered to, and profited from, his father’s theatre-building mania—one for general construction, the other for plaster casting of all the cherubs and columns that adorned the theatres’ interiors. Moreover, Arthur was cut from the same multitasking cloth as his father and had the same thick hide necessary for life as a theatre producer. And with his signature on the ten-year-ban contract, Arthur had now freed himself from servitude to his father.
Oscar Hammerstein
Since he couldn’t use Arthur, Oscar found another outlet for his anger and ambition. The Met ban made no mention of commissioning new work, and so Oscar promptly tasked the Irish-born, Stuttgart-educated cellist and composer Victor Herbert to write a grand American operetta for him. Herbert had recently written the hit The Song Birds, a musical burlesque of the Conried-Hammerstein opera war. Oscar saw clear promise of rewards to be reaped later.
VICTOR HERBERT (1859–1924)
Victor Herbert wrote forty-one complete operetta scores, among them A Parlor Match, The Fortune Teller, Babes in Toyland, Mlle. Modiste, The Red Mill, Sweethearts, and his crowning achievement, Naughty Marietta. His operettas gave the audience an escape from their day-to-day cares into a far-removed world of fan
tasy and opulence. Daring rescues, princesses in disguise, and impossible coincidences were the norm, played out in mythical European kingdoms where everyone sang like opera stars and love ruled the day. Herbert was a man of self-confidence and artistic integrity who maintained one iron-clad rule: no changes were to be made in the libretto or music without his written consent.
Oscar still held a fistful of singers’ contracts and was well aware that every unhappy singer was a potential court case. He had to do something permanent, and soon. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago were off-limits. Brooklyn was too close. Berlin was too far. And Russia had explicitly banned him out of the blue.
But London looked perfect. In terms of longevity and class crustiness, the Metropolitan had nothing on the centuries-old Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Stuffy London seemed just the place for an opera-mad impresario with a million dollars in his top hat to really make a difference. With his first down payment of $100,000, Oscar bought a piece of property in London on the Kingsway and by late 1910 had broken ground for his London Opera House. When a reporter asked him how the opera business was, Oscar replied, “Opera’s no business. It’s a disease.”
The London Opera House construction site
Back in the States, Victor Herbert’s Cajun-spiced, swashbuckling operetta Naughty Marietta, being overseen by Arthur, proved to be an enormous hit. The singing was particularly exceptional because Oscar had stocked it with the opera singers he still had under contract, including the volatile Emma Trentini and Orville Harrold (whose operatic career Oscar had launched at the Manhattan, after discovering him singing Irish ballads at the Victoria). Arthur managed and partially directed the production. The show played at Oscar’s old Olympia—now the New York Theatre—and marked the first time Oscar had stepped inside his former theatre since his arrest thirteen years earlier for trespassing.
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