Oscar Hammerstein inspecting scores
Arthur sought to preserve Naughty Marietta’s lineup and repeat its success. For his next show, The Firefly, he paired Herbert with librettist-lyricist Otto Harbach and retained diva Trentini. Unfortunately, on the last performance of Naughty Marietta, Trentini enraged Herbert by refusing to do an encore. Herbert, in turn, threw down his baton and stalked off down the aisle swearing never to work with her again. Arthur and Oscar replaced Herbert with the unknown Czech-born composer Rudolf Friml.
Significantly, the successful shift by Arthur into operetta production threw the family in with a whole new crowd of composers and librettists who would later loom large in Oscar’s namesake grandson’s own musical-theatre education.
Naughty Marietta played 136 performances at the New York Theatre (formerly Oscar Hammerstein I’s Olympia Theatre).
Back across the pond, things were not going well. Oscar may have thought that he could replace the Met with Covent Garden and continue his crusade. But he had a tough time in London. His self-made-impresario persona resonated poorly with London’s more class-conscious press and public. What America thought brave and resourceful, England thought crass and pushy. Oscar found it so difficult to attract press coverage or even to obtain a listing in the papers for his productions that he resorted to buying editorial space in these very same papers to both publicize his offerings and make his criticisms heard.
Oscar still exercised his knack for discovering unknown talent. He plucked Felice Lyne from seemingly out of nowhere and made her a London sensation. But the luck, if you can call it that, he experienced during his four years at the Manhattan had abandoned him. He was unable to entice Royal Opera audiences out of their seats and into his new opera house. After a disastrous year and a half and having spent the entire million he’d received in the ten-year-ban contract, Oscar’s health was deteriorating as well. By August 1912 he literally and figuratively limped home to New York.
Oscar Hammerstein with his daughter Stella
By August 1912, Oscar had thrown in the towel on his London opera venture. Now back home in New York, he resolved to defy the Met ban. He would build another opera house to put on grand opera and would inevitably confront the ban in court to argue against its legitimacy on grounds of restraint-of-trade and specificity of definition.
Oscar had one asset left.
In 1893, vaudeville’s creepy kingpins Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee feared an alliance between Oscar and rival independent theatre managers, and signed a deal exclusively ceding Oscar the area between Thirty-fourth and Ninety-sixth streets for variety presentation. In exchange, Keith and Albee’s United Booking Office, the dreaded UBO, supplied vaudeville talent for Hammerstein’s choosing. Keith and Albee usually took 10 percent from the talent and 10 percent from the theatre—a monopolistic practice for which they were despised and feared by one and all. Hammerstein’s Victoria was the only exception—the clown fish in the anemone.
Willy may have owned majority stock in the Victoria, but not in its parent company, Oscar’s Hammerstein Amusement Company. Oscar’s contract with Keith and Albee long preceded the Victoria’s existence and belonged exclusively to Oscar. It seemed cheap to Keith and Albee at the time, but with Oscar’s jump into Times Square and his huge success at the Victoria, that contract chafed at Keith and Albee’s dreams of a vaudeville empire. Liquidated, it was real money. And when it came to money for opera, everything was fungible as far as Oscar was concerned.
With Oscar’s battered return from London, Willy’s worst fears came true. He tried to stop his father from selling the Victoria’s exclusivity agreement with Keith and Albee by publicly berating Oscar in the press and—joined by Arthur, Stella, and Rose—suing him in court. Keith and Albee, in turn, began to methodically starve the Victoria of top-tier talent and also bought the Palace Theatre as they prepared to dominate Times Square vaudeville. Yet despite his family’s united opposition, Oscar sold his vaudeville gold mine to build one more opera house.
With the $225,000 he received to tear up his UBO exclusivity contract, Oscar began construction of the Lexington Opera House on Fifty-first Street and Lexington Avenue. Willy quit the Victoria and wrote a plea that was printed by the Herald Tribune:
I left the Victoria Theatre because I hoped that by so doing I could save my father from himself … When I talked with him he declared my vision had been dimmed by ill health … I thought he had given up opera and for the first time in years I felt easy. But my feeling of security did not last long. He wanted more money for more operatic ventures … I knew then and there I had only one option. It was to quit and I did, hoping my leaving would bring him to his senses.
Willy went on to puncture one of Oscar’s cherished fictions, opera’s financial viability:
My father states in the press that he made $825,000 out of opera … My father spent $2 million on opera, not counting that $1.2 million payout from the Met, which he all but squandered in London. For sixteen years, he has shown no interest in the Victoria’s phenomenal success, save for how much revenue it could generate for his operatic sprees.
The Lexington Opera House was an acoustical marvel but an operatic pipe dream. The Met’s injunction was soon after upheld in the New York courts and the Lexington was leased out as a movie house. Oscar sold it three years later.
The Lexington Theatre
Seventeen years earlier, on July 12, 1895, in the summer of Oscar’s Olympia Theatre construction, a baby was born to Alice and William Hammerstein. They named him Oscar, after the old man. Tragedies and eccentricities notwithstanding, young Oscar grew up in a stable and loving home. He adored his mother and respected his father—the order of the day. He waved good-bye to his father in the mornings and hello in the evenings. He was an intelligent boy who liked to obey rules. He excelled in school. Oscar II was, in short, a good boy from whom much was expected.
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein, almost two years old
By contrast, Oscar II’s younger brother, Reggie, wore the clown crown. Whereas Oscar skipped two grades, Reggie repeated one. In 1910, when Oscar was fifteen, his thirty-two-year old mother, Willy’s beloved Alice, sought to end a third pregnancy and died of infections following a botched abortion, leaving behind a third generation of motherless sons.
Alice Nimmo Hammerstein
When young Oscar’s mother died, he stubbornly refused to give in to the pain. He bought and assembled a scrapbook of his favorite baseball players and other sports stars to help him deal with his grief, and he took long, solitary walks to help clear his mind and regain his composure.
I never felt like going to anybody for help, and while I don’t quite understand this, I know this is what happened. I also know that it crystallized an attitude toward death I have had ever since. I never feel shaken by death as I would have been had this not happened to me when I was fifteen. I received the shock and took it, and sort of resisted, as an enemy, the grief that comes after death, rather than giving way to it.
In this way, young Oscar shared something markedly in common with his namesake grandfather: neither grieved openly. They preferred their emotions loosed on the stage and the page.
Just one year after Allie’s death, Willy remarried her sister, Anna. Everybody called her Mousie. She drank and smoked like a “modern woman”—complete with tattoos—and swore like a sailor, but she provided a secure, continuum for Willy and his two boys—even if she somewhat mortified Oscar II publicly.
The household also contained the maternal grandparents, Janet and James Nimmo. Grandma had found an incriminating receipt in Grandpa’s pocket a few years back—a receipt for a fur coat Grandma had not received—and Oscar II had shared the downstairs bedroom with Grandpa ever since. They became the best of pals and often took morning walks in the park. Grandpa laced their milk with bourbon, and the two often tottered home for lunch in an expansive frame of mind, whereupon Grandpa would paint the day away in his room. But it was his grandmother who Os
car II adored, and the feeling was mutual. She recognized Oscar’s intelligence and had proudly taken it upon herself to tutor her beloved boy.
Willy’s end came rather suddenly. For a decade he had suffered from kidney disease. On his deathbed, in agonizing pain, Willy made Oscar II swear never to go into theatre. Oscar, now a junior at Columbia University, sadly agreed. Willy passed out and was taken to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. He died two days later, on June 10, 1914.
Oscar I described his loss to a reporter as such:
In my life, I have experienced every great joy, every success, every honor that can be won by a man single-handedly, and I have also experienced every sorrow, every disappointment, every grief, and every tragedy. But this …”
And, choking back grief, he walked away to a box seat where he sat for the rest of the day grieving alone—a Hammerstein habit.
The tears and testimonials flowed for weeks.
MUSICAL THEATRE’S “COLUMBUS”
A year into his marriage, on March 26, 1916, Oscar played the piano at the Hippodrome Theatre for an evening organized by and for notable American composers. When Hammerstein hobbled across the stage, the audience acknowledged the man’s life with a throbbing storm of applause.
Before the crowded Hippodrome audience, the composer John Philip Sousa hailed him as musical theatre’s “Columbus” and declared that he had “done more for the field than any other man in America.”
Most of the men surrounding Oscar at the piano knew the debt they owed him. He had built their world. To be precise, he had created, to a great degree, their stage, their theatre district, and their audience. He may even have had a hand in some of the cigars they smoked. He did not create the American musical—his heart belonged to opera—but his efforts to democratize opera paved the way for future theatre-producing talent, many of whom were in worshipful attendance around that Hippodrome piano. He had fathered—and grandfathered—our American musical theatre.
Oscar (seated) with (l. to r.) Jerome Kern, Louis A. Hirsch, A. Baldwin Sloane, Rudolph Friml, Alfred Robyn, Gustave Kerker, Hugo Felix, John Philip Sousa, Leslie Stuart, Raymond Hubbell, John Golden, Sylvio Hein, and Irving Berlin
Shortly after Willy’s death, in 1915, at the age of sixty-eight, Oscar I married a tall, attractive divorcée named Emma Swift, who was thirty-two years old. (Her Swift family meat-packer ex-husband had sent her packing, but she’d retained the Swift name.) Scratch the surface of many a May-to-December relationship and one may often find that a sordid transaction lies beneath. True love played little part in Oscar’s negotiated monthly allowance to Emma. He had arm candy; she thought she had a free ride with a famous man and a pot of gold at his passing.
But despite Oscar’s fame, Emma Swift had, by 1919, gotten good and tired of Oscar’s piano playing and his dreaming of a glorious return to opera production in a year’s time. So one afternoon she dumped a bucket of ice water over his head. He staggered out of his house, made his way to a bench, and then collapsed on the pavement. Oscar’s brother-in-law Henry Rosenberg happened to be passing by in a carriage, saw all, and sped him to the hospital.
Many decades later his namesake grandson, Oscar II, pondered this moment in an essay titled, “A Kind of Grandfather”:
On August 1, 1919, he lay unconscious on his bed in the Lenox Hill Hospital. For four, possibly five, minutes I watched him and listened to his tired breathing. Then I left the room. This was the longest time I had ever spent with him. I walked down Park Avenue feeling lost and unclassified. My grandfather was dying and I didn’t know how I felt about it. I had no deep sorrow to give way to. I had no resentful memories of a domination from which I could now feel free. I could make no crass speculations concerning my probable inheritance in his will; I knew that he was broke. I had none of the conventional thoughts or emotions of a bereaved grandson. It was an uncomfortable feeling, the more uncomfortable because in some vague way my heart had been touched, and I didn’t know why … I was astonished to realize how little I knew the man whose deathbed I had just left. I was equally astonished to realize that suddenly I wanted to know him. Perhaps for the first time it seemed safe to try. He couldn’t hurt me now. He couldn’t humiliate me. The fears and resentments of this remote “old man,” developed in my childhood, were no longer a block to our union. It is ironic and sad and strange that I did not begin to understand or like my grandfather until the day of his death. But he was a strange man and so, perhaps, am I.
Oscar had been sick on and off for years. He’d suffered from diabetes and poor circulation. Before he slipped into a coma, he was able to say his good-byes to his family. Three days later he died. He was seventy-four years old.
Broadway poured out condolences in waves. Lights dimmed in Times Square for the passing of the old man of the theatre.
Oscar Deluxe, the painting for a 1911 Vanity Fair cover
Chapter 7
YOUNG OSCAR
My strange, disorderly, unsystematic family may have developed in me a tolerance for disorder, which makes it possible for me to live in a disorderly world, even though I crave another kind. But there is no other kind. The world is very much like my family, filled with people of unharnessed passions, illogical impulses, the inconsistent religions and clashing philosophies. All these whirling atoms are held together loosely and kept going slowly in the same general direction by one element—love.
—OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II, 1953
Young Oscar at age 12
In stark contrast to his namesake grandfather, for young Oscar II, home provided refuge and peace of mind:
I have [peace of mind] to an amazing degree compared to all the other people I know. I have always had this somehow. I have never been harried or extremely worried except for temporary, specific causes. In a confused world I am confused, but I am not thrown into a panic by confusion. I am not unduly distressed by it. I can take confusion and imperfection in my stride.
Although his family’s magical world of opera and vaudeville initially frightened young Oscar, his fear soon turned into fascination.
It was during these days in Harlem that I started going to the theatre. My grandfather had several years before this built two theatres there. One was called the Columbus and the other was the Harlem Opera House. He had given opera there for a short time. They were now sort of subway circuit houses. They didn’t call it the subway circuit in those days because there was no subway, but it was a kind of a second-run place, and after the shows had exhausted themselves on Broadway they came up to Harlem, where they found an entirely different population.
Reggie and I loved the theatre. We would always go to matinees, sometimes with my mother, sometimes with my mother and Mousie. Once in a while my grandmother would come too. Once in a while, if the place sounded boring to the older people, we would be sent with a servant.
Brother Reggie
Oscar pinpointed the day—October 5, 1903—that he was actually bitten by the theatre bug. During a performance of The Fisher Maiden at the Victoria, in its pre-vaudeville days, in a scene in which the blue lights of midnight bloomed into the pink lights of dawn, Oscar floated across the footlights, never to return.
But Willy had wanted better for his son Oscar. (Reggie, not so much.) Oscar attended Columbia University, with the clear understanding that he study to become a lawyer. But while he studied pre-law, the siren call of the stage echoed through the Columbia ivy. Oscar soon joined the Varsity Players, performing skits and contributing songs.
My first stage experience came when the Columbia University Players Club produced the show On Your Way. I wasn’t writing but played a comedy role. That was in 1915 and I obtained the part by a competition, the show being cast in a competitive scheme that was open to all university students. The following year I was cast in the leading comedy role in the show The Peace Pirates. I recall that I did my first writing at that time, inserting one scene in the show that was a Shakespearean travesty. When the time passed for the next univers
ity production, I wrote it, the piece being called Home James. I not only supplied the book and lyrics but enacted the principal comedy role.
Oscar in a college varsity musical scene, ca. 1915
It was here, in the varsity dramas, that his relationship with Myra Finn was cemented.
Oscar had casually known Myra for years. She was a distant cousin of Richard Rodgers, of all people, and they shared neighborhoods and social circles. Myra was cute, sexy, and very, very short. And after one game of spin the bottle, Oscar was smitten. Myra’s father was a financially erratic, charming lout who chastised Oscar upon his admission of virginity. Myra’s mother, on the other hand, blew hot and cold emotionally, as did Myra, and she encouraged her daughter to “have fun.” Ignoring all the warning signs, Oscar proposed and Myra accepted. It was his time to get married and move out of the house—be a grown-up—and he dutifully complied. As the marriage trudged along, Oscar began to suspect fidelity was not Myra’s strong suit. He fretted over whether she was right for him, and she resented the monogamy he expected. And, of course, she got pregnant.
The Hammersteins Page 6