Oscar with college pals; his future wife Myra rests her hand on his shoulder
Oscar and Myra
Chapter 8
WHEN I’M CALLING YOU
Despite his promise to his dead father, Oscar didn’t wish to pursue law. It wasn’t that he didn’t like law. He did. He would often reflect in later interviews that he would have made a fine lawyer. It was simply that he loved the theatre much more—and, more pragmatically, he needed a better-paying job than law clerking, and he needed it right away to support his family.
Oscar knew that his uncle Arthur could greatly help—or hurt—his chances at success, and he certainly could not be gotten around. For the last six years, Arthur had been like a surrogate father to Oscar and had taken pride in the fact that Oscar was college-educated, smart, and industrious. He was also normal, easy, and not a man to wreak havoc like his own father had. Oscar poured out his theatrical ambitions to Arthur, looking for release from his promise to Willy.
Arthur weighed the pros and cons. On the one hand, Oscar had made a promise to his dying father. On the other hand, he wanted more than anything to work in theatre. Arthur appreciated Oscar’s duty to obey his father’s wishes; he also knew that Willy’s duty to their father had essentially killed him. But Arthur’s own duty to the old man had yielded a bustling life as a successful theatre producer. He knew that Willy had wanted something better for Oscar, but what was better than this? Oscar I was dead. The danger of his opera mania had passed. Before Arthur stood a good boy who had become a smart man, and possibly the family’s theatrical future, asking for permission to get a job at the bottom. Arthur knew that Oscar would have fun too. He sympathized with his brother, but he did not agree with his wishes. He released Oscar from his promise and immediately put him to work as an assistant stage manager for a show called You’re in Love.
You’re in Love vocal score
To keep Oscar’s theatrical immersion at a slow pace, Arthur’s consent came with one stipulation: that Oscar refrain from stage writing for one year. But circumstances altered that promise, too. For Arthur’s next show, Furs and Frills, Oscar got the opportunity to insert some chorus lines into a second-act curtain opener.
Make yourself at home,
Neath our spacious dome,
Do just as you please,
In twos or threes if you’d rather
But rest assured you’ll be no bother
These lines made even less sense than the show. Oscar later shuddered at the embarrassing inanity of this first effort and took no comfort in the fact that the words would be completely drowned out by the busy stage business. He cared, even if no one else did.
“Heart of my Heart” sheet music from Furs and Frills, 1917
Oscar then worked on Arthur’s next show, Sometime, which starred a young Mae West. Sinful and sexy long before she became the legendary embodiment of both, West took a shine to Oscar. She made him her personal assistant, even though they were as different as two people could be, as the song goes.
If Oscar felt any guilt by defying his father’s dying wish, Mae West’s advice must have nagged: “Listen, get out of this crazy business and go back to your law career. The theatre ain’t for you, kid. You got too much class!”
Needless to say, the advice hardly stuck.
MAE WEST, NÉE MARY JANE WEST (1892–1980)
The legendary embodiment of sin and sex, Brooklyn-born Mae West began her career in vaudeville and debuted on Broadway in the 1911 Follies Bergère. In 1926 she shocked the audience with a show she penned and starred in, aptly titled Sex, for which she served eight days in jail. She parlayed her notoriety into a smoldering stage career in The Drag; Diamond Lil, which accurately depicted nightlife in the Tenderloin; The Pleasure Man; and The Constant Sinner. She made her film debut in Night After Night (1932), followed by a film adaptation of Diamond Lil titled She Done Him Wrong (1933), in which she uttered her signature quote, “Come up and see me sometime.” Age and the moralist Legion of Decency conspired to sanitize her sexually suggestive persona. Her later career, as exemplified by her droll performance opposite W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940), parodied her earlier lusty reputation.
At Arthur’s suggestion, Oscar tried his hand at adapting a short story. The Light, a dark play about desperate characters in dire straits, closed to scathing reviews. But even before the postmortems were in on “the light that failed,” Oscar had begun to hash out his next play idea. He was an optimist to his core.
New York City was where the money was, and the talent grew there or came over from Europe. Arthur’s composers trended toward the old-school, classical gravitas of Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and Herbert Stothart, but he gave his productions counterbalancing snap with American lyricists and book writers.
The title song from 1919’s Sometime
Arthur, to his credit, did not brand his productions with a personal stamp (apart from stuffing them with pretty girls and comics, which was de rigueur for the times). He dispassionately assembled teams of talent and then stepped back, allowing them to find the right chemistry. The only exception was Oscar—he was always in.
Before 1920, Oscar, as Arthur’s production manager, supervised preparation for both the Broadway and touring productions. It quickly became clear to Oscar that the story in any production got no credit, little respect, and much blame for the production’s fate. It was hard to make the audience care about a story. Plots were secondary to the dancers, the comedians, and the love songs. Comedians ruled the stage, and songs bounced in and out of shows with gay abandon. Oscar wanted to know, if this devil’s brew of stage talent were integrated into a believable story, would it change things? He decided to find out.
In 1920, an Actors’ Equity strike provided Oscar with the time to write the book and lyrics for his first show. He grabbed Herbert Stothart, Arthur’s musical director for more than a decade, to write the music. Practical Stothart required a production commitment and the two conned one out of Arthur. (While reading Arthur the script, whenever one of them came to a punch line, the other responded with robust laughter.) Oscar had already written the song lyrics, but tradition required the composer to have his lead. So Oscar rewrote his lyrics to fit Herb’s music.
Oscar described the origins of this arrangement:
In the first decade of this century there were two factors which led songwriters into the custom of writing words to music. The best musical plays of that time were being created in Vienna. When they were imported, American librettists had to write translations and adaptations for melodies that had been set in another language. Lyric writers … found it less trying on their nerves to let the foreign musician have his say first and then write a lyric to fit his melody…. The second influence was not foreign at all. It was distinctly an American one—the broken rhythm. First came ragtime, then jazz. For the purposes of creating these eccentric deviations from orthodox meters, it was better to let the composer have his head…. With these new rhythms came what we called in 1911, the “dance craze” … Dancing, once confined to ballrooms and performed mainly by the young, became a new international sport indulged in by people of all ages…. The hit melodies of that time had to be good dance melodies. This being the important consideration, it was better for the lyric writer to trail along after the composer and fit his words to a refrain written mainly to be danced to…. These developments … seem to have been the chief influences which established the American songwriter’s habit of writing the music first and the words later.
“Syncopated Heart” sheet music from Always You, 1920
The result of the collaboration between Herb and Oscar was Always You (which they originally titled Joan of Arkansaw). The show told the story of an American soldier in France who leaves his new, true love, Toinette, behind and returns stateside to marry his former flame, Joan. Complications ensue: the soldier changes his mind, follows his true love, and the result is a happy ending.
A foldout souvenir program f
or Always You
Boston tryout audiences snoozed. Arthur, as producer, shoved a veteran comedian into the mix and told Oscar to write him in. After some “artistic” tears, he complied. Damned by faint praise, Always You ran a modest sixty-six performances. Critics liked the songs but not the plot. Arthur had been correct to at least try to beef it up. Shows like these were a diversion for the tired businessman and a paying business, not a work of art. The result was that Oscar grew a hide and a respect for the collaborative process from the get-go.
Otto Harbach, Oscar’s first mentor, contributed as lyricist or librettist to fifty shows in his long lifetime. Most of his biggest hits—Sunny, Rose-Marie, and The Desert Song—were in collaboration with Oscar.
Despite Oscar’s lukewarm debut, Arthur immediately announced his next production, Tickle Me, would be using the same team of Oscar and Herb. But he also added veteran librettist Otto Harbach to the mix. Twenty-two years Oscar’s senior, Otto had written for the operettas of composers Karl Hoschna and Rudolf Friml throughout the previous decade, and while he was not a blazing comet of talent, he was a principled, decent man who knew his craft exceedingly well. He taught Oscar what he knew about play structure and song placement, and he split credit and pay fifty-fifty. Most important, he exemplified for Oscar the patience and fortitude required for life as a librettist—the mule of the play. Oscar adored Otto and cited his mentorship as one of the two greatest blessings of his life (the other was being born a Hammerstein). In fairness, Otto’s most memorable work would be in collaboration with this eager student.
“Until You Say Goodbye” sheet music from Tickle Me, 1920
Tickle Me starred Frank Tinney, playing himself, doing his bumbling brand of comedy bits and characters in a movie-set-plot set in California and Tibet. (And why not!) Critics were uncritically pleased with this night of legs and laughs, and again singled out Oscar’s lyrics for praise.
One night, during the musical’s run, Arthur decided to pull a publicity stunt that would have made Willy smile. At intermission, the comely chorus marched down the aisles and tossed out flasks of hooch to the audience. Of course, this was during prohibition, and after the performance Arthur was dragged up on charges. However, he coyly revealed that the whiskey was stage whiskey; in other words, tea. Or was it? Regardless of the truth of Arthur’s claim, no press is bad press. The show ran a robust 207 performances.
Oscar’s third effort of the year was a show titled Jimmie. Librettist Frank Mandel joined Otto to write yet another “vehicle.” The plot was standard-issue—a false identity, secret inheritance, and romance wheeze. The star, Frances White, played a cabaret singer, which she actually was. The critics cheered her performance but coughed politely at the conceit of the plot, and the production limped through seventy-one performances before coming to rest.
“Baby Dreams” sheet music from Jimmie, 1920
Oscar and Frank now gave straight playwriting a shot. If there was a plot to Pop, their next collaboration, the critics observed, the lead played it for laughs and stomped on it. The audience laughed from beginning to end, but never believed a word of it; it was entirely too forgettable. The effort closed in Atlantic City previews after eleven miserable days—all on patient Arthur’s dime.
After the failure of Pop, Arthur brought Frank Tinney back for Daffy Dill. He dismissed Harbach and Mandel and teamed Oscar with writer Guy Bolton to write a poor-girl-meets-rich-boy Cinderella story that had, as one critic put it, “just enough of a plot to not get in the way.”
Guy Bolton, writer-librettist
Oscar and Guy cynically described their toil in their fittingly titled lyric “The Tired Businessman”:
Start with a little plot,
Cook it but not too hot,
Throw in a heroine,
Maiden so simple and ingenuous,
Then let your tenor shine,
With his high C;
Write in a well-known joke,
Use all the old time hoke,
For this is the surest plan,
To entertain the tired businessman.
Daffy Dill ran exactly as long as Tickle Me had, a mere seventy-one performances. The Tinney shtick had grown stale. In addition to its failure onstage, Daffy Dill had other personal consequences for Oscar. On the night of the dress rehearsal, Myra, bored with being suburban mother and wife of a workaholic playwright, began an affair with Guy Bolton that lasted several years. It wasn’t the only one, either.
“Two Little Ruby Rings” sheet music from Daffy Dill, 1922
Myra’s behavior was hardly out of place in the hard-partying subculture of theatre. But Oscar, very much like his father, was a careful man who believed that romantic love was the highest attainment and expressed this view throughout his entire career. He yearned for the happily-ever-after ending and recoiled from the fast life in which he worked. He feared disorder—especially the emotional variety. How Oscar dealt with his cuckolding revealed his reticent temperament. One show night, while returning to his home by limo with Myra and Guy, he had dozed off and awoke to find Myra pleasuring Guy—right next to him. Amazingly, he chose not to confront them and pretended to remain asleep. He concluded on that night that his marriage was over in all but name. He and his wife were not in love. His heart was now free. Oscar’s pretense of ignorance and Myra’s pretense of fidelity preserved the marriage for another four cold years. Oscar scrawled his recollections of the time in a terse but telling sentence: “Great need—False values—My fault as well as hers. I am an idiot but work hard.” Looking back it’s clear that the theatre, of course, was his mistress.
Queen O’ Hearts was Oscar’s first effort outside of Arthur’s fold. Producer Max Spiegel teamed Oscar and Frank Mandel to write his newest vehicle for star Nora Bayes. Composers Lewis Gensler and Dudley Wilkinson were also brought in, along with additional lyricist Sidney Mitchell, perhaps to ensure that the lyrics would be strong.
“You Need Someone (Someone Needs You)” sheet music from Queen O’ Hearts, 1922
The critics, as usual, adored Nora Bayes in her role as the titular matchmaker but complained that the plot’s “complications manage to be even sillier than these things usually are, which is no faint praise.” Queen O’ Hearts lost its head after thirty-nine days.
Nora Bayes, singer-actress
These star vehicles—Always You, Tickle Me, Daffy Dill, and Max’s Queen O’ Hearts—were really just dressed-up revues, living and dying on the strength of their talent lineup. The plot didn’t bring audiences in, but it didn’t drive them out, either. And they gave Oscar the opportunity to hone his skills and make all his mistakes in shows where they hardly mattered.
For his next show, the 1923 operettic Wildflower, Arthur streamlined his team. Harbach and Hammerstein shared the book and lyrics, while Stothart and American-born newcomer Vincent Youmans were teamed up to write the music. The production was set in Italy and decorated with the usual bevy of chorines. As for the plot, the heroine reins in her temper and gets the inheritance and the guy in this latest incarnation of the hoary will-clause plot.
“Bambalina” sheet music from Wildflower, 1923
Operettas generally relied less on the vaudeville talent parade and more on the overstuffed plot and what came out of the orchestra pit. As composers, Stothart and Youmans did not disappoint. Critics praised the tuneful catchiness of their music. Harbach and Hammerstein, in turn, were praised through faint damnation for supplying an adequate plot. Wildflower was a solid hit, running 477 performances before moving to London for another 117.
“The Flannel Petticoat Gal” sheet music from Mary Jane McKane, 1923
For his next production, Mary Jane McKane, Arthur teamed Oscar with veteran lyricist-librettist William Carey Duncan. The plot? County girl Mary Jane McKane’s beauty is a city-job liability so she conceals it behind glasses and plain clothing (a la Clark Kent). The boss’s son sees through the disguise, love blossoms, and the boss father fires them both. They start their own company and live
happily ever after, as did the production, which lived for 151 performances before calling it quits.
Oscar Hammerstein II and Milton Gropper
Wrote a comedy that came an awful cropper.
—New York Herald critic Alexander Woollcott
Breaking briefly from the genre, Oscar teamed with Milton Herbert Gropper to write Gypsy Jim, a straight play with incidental music by Herbert Stothart. In the play an eccentric millionaire pretending to wield magical powers (in reality, his checkbook) brings joy to a miserable family. Critics balked and Arthur’s production disappeared after its forty-first performance.
Arthur bravely tried again with the same team and produced New Toys, a tuneless comedy about a couple with toddler and marriage problems. Nothing happened in the plot or at the box office. New Toys broke after twenty-four performances.
Inauspiciously, New Toys marked the first of forty times that Oscar’s stage work would find a second life on the silver screen. The story was somewhat farced for the silent-movie screenplay, but, like its source, failed to draw an audience. With Wildflower’s success in mind, in 1924 Arthur rejoined Harbach with Oscar and paired Stothart with Czech-born composer Rudolf Friml, who twelve years earlier had been brought in to replace an angry Victor Herbert for a follow-up to Naughty Marietta. His Firefly had arguably been the hit of the 1912 season, but his next three efforts for Arthur—High Jinks, Katinka, and You’re in Love, which had provided young Oscar with his first theatre job—had brought ever-diminishing box office receipts. Arthur and Friml had parted company—until now. Arthur had been a shrewd and loyal mentor to Oscar. Now it was time for him to place Oscar in the loftier company of the big time: operetta.
The Hammersteins Page 7