Operetta composer Rudolf Friml’s two biggest successes were Rose-Marie, 1924, followed by The Vagabond King, 1925.
Set in the Canadian Rockies and starring Oscar I’s Manhattan Opera alumni Emma Trentini and Orville Harrold, Rose-Marie was as plot heavy as operettas got. A city boy wants a gold miner’s sweetheart. The miner is mired in a land-claim fight: American Indians want the land back. The sweet-heart’s disapproving brother abets the city boy. The miner is wrongfully accused of murder. Duplicity and subplots abound. Finally, the city boy’s city girl confesses the deed and true love prevails again.
Critics generally praised both the music and the book, and the production caught word-of-mouth fire. Rose-Marie ran 557 performances in 1924 and had the song hits “Pretty Things,” “Totem Tom-Tom,” and “Indian Love Call.” It was an even bigger hit in London, running 851 performances, and was made into a movie three times, in 1928, 1936, and 1954.
“Indian Love Call” sheet music from Rose-Marie
THE MOVIE STAR
Arthur had married his daughter Elaine’s mother, Jean Allison, in 1893 (in the Koster & Bial days). Elaine was born in 1897. Arthur and Jean separated in 1905 and divorced in 1910, Arthur receiving informal custody of Elaine. Arthur married three more times: the first to actress Grace Hoagland for five years, and the second to actress Claire Nagle for a mere two. Elaine remained Arthur’s only child.
In April 1924, Arthur married for the fourth and final time to the noted actress Dorothy Dalton. His fourth marriage lasted thirty-one years, until his death in 1955.
Elaine Hammerstein deserves an honorable mention in the family annals. Before her eighteenth birthday, Arthur had shoved her into the chorus of his 1913 comedy High Jinks. Her remarkable beauty quickly attracted offers from Hollywood and out she went to make silent movies. From 1915 to 1926, she was a bona fide Hollywood star. Fan magazines gushed over every movie she made, every place she went, and every dress she wore. She was the Hammerstein of the 1920s. Arthur beamed and said that he was more interested in his daughter’s career than his own.
But nothing is forever. Elaine was a silent-movie actress versed in the art of the dramatic gesture—a talent that wasn’t relevant when the “talkies” arrived. After completion of her forty-fourth movie, the 1926 drama Ladies of Leisure, for Columbia Pictures, Elaine retired and soon after got married. Her happily ever after was sadly cut short when she and her husband died in a car crash in Mexico in 1948. They had no children.
The Hammerstein legacy had bestowed on Arthur access to many opera singers. Their continued involvement allowed Arthur’s composers the freedom to write vocally demanding compositions. In turn, Oscar learned to write lyrics that took to heart the singer’s breath-control demands. He made certain those long notes at the end of a refrain—the ones that often brought down the house—did not end in a crash of syllables or with an open E that prematurely drained the air from the singer’s lungs. Oscar’s apprenticeship to opera-survivor Arthur had truly made him a singer’s songwriter.
Soon after the success of Rose-Marie, Oscar was contacted by Charles Dillingham. Dillingham had started off as a press agent for old Oscar’s Olympia. He later became Florenz Ziegfeld’s on-again, off-again coproducer. He now tapped Oscar and Otto to collaborate with songwriter Jerome Kern for his latest production, Sunny.
Charles Dillingham
Back in 1902, a young Jerome Kern had sat next to Willy on a train and the two had struck up a conversation. Kern told Willy of his ambition to write theatre music and Willy had invited him back to his house so Kern could play some of his tunes on Willy’s next-door neighbor’s piano. That neighbor, music publisher E. B. Marks, published Kern’s first tune. Three years later, Willy got Kern his first job as an accompanist. Naturally, Kern was now delighted to work with Willy’s son.
Jerome Kern
In this new show, British circus performer Sunny and her old flame Tom remeet cute, but Tom must soon sail for America. She stows away on his boat in order to escape the amorous advances of her circus boss. In order to be allowed to legally disembark, they agree to temporarily marry. Once ashore, they divorce—and fall in love. Critics raved and Sunny shined for 517 performances, then 363 more in London. It was made into a “talkie” twice, in 1930 and 1941. But the longer-lasting result of this collaboration was that Oscar and Jerry became the best of friends.
“Who?” sheet music from Sunny, 1925
During the writing of Sunny, Kern’s song “Who” presented Oscar with a challenge: the melody featured a sustained nine-count opening note. Oscar’s brilliantly simple solution to this vocally demanding challenge was the syllabically unencumbered, purse-lipped vowel sound—who. “Who” became the showstopper. Oscar had matured into a lyricist to watch.
Marilyn Miller hides from trouble in this press photo from the 1930 film version of Sunny. Miller’s career began on the vaudeville stage when she was a child and took off when Ziegfeld tapped her for his Follies of 1918, but it was her memorable performance in Sunny that made her Broadway’s highest-paid star.
Uncle Arthur grabbed Oscar and Otto back and teamed Stothart with a young composer named George Gershwin for a show called Song of the Flame, about a Cossack prince who falls for a young peasant girl unaware that she is a revolutionary leader known as the Flame. Of course, love conquers all in the end. Critics torched the plot but adored the lush, faux-Russian score. Acknowledging its musical quality, Otto Kahn, director of the Metropolitan Opera and the man who had once bought out Oscar I, approached Arthur and made him an offer: “Arthur, you have made a mistake. Move your show down to the Metropolitan; that is the place for it. I will give you the house.”
George Gershwin
Flame burned for 219 performances and was made into a movie—now lost—in 1930.
The title song of Song of the Flame, 1925
Arthur once again teamed Friml with Otto Harbach and Oscar, along with Ziegfeld Theatre designer Joseph Urban, to replicate the successful chemistry of Rose-Marie in a show called The Wild Rose. In this show an American man falls for a princess as her father, the king, is overthrown. The American restores the king to his throne by gambling at Monte Carlo and wins the princess’s hand. Add Bolsheviks and oil prospectors; mix well. Despite generally positive reviews, The Wild Rose wilted early after a meager sixty-one performances.
The 1926 Desert Song was a team effort. Arthur and Frank Mandel coproduced the show; Oscar and Frank cowrote the book; Oscar and Otto cowrote the lyrics; and the unabashedly sentimental Viennese composer Sigmund Romberg scored the music.
Otto Kahn
The Desert Song “colonialized” the real story of Berber chieftain Abd el-Krim, who led the Riff revolt against the Spanish and the French in the early 1920s. In the show, Abd el-Krim became Pierre, a French officer who switches sides and, as the Zorro-like, masked Red Shadow, protects the local Moorish tribes from the villainy of his general father’s abusive troops. Pierre makes masked love to a pretty French arrival and abducts her to his lair. He then ensnares the French troops but refuses to duel with his captured father and is banished by the Moors. Pierre returns to the French side and, with the Red Shadow’s clothes and mask in hand, declares that he has killed the masked marauder. Our heroine is brokenhearted until, while all the others’ backs are turned, he dons the mask for her.
The title song of The Desert Song, 1926
The roar of critical and public approval, primarily for Romberg’s lush score, gave Oscar his second big moneymaker in two years. The Desert Song ran 417 performances, 432 in London, and was made into a movie no less than three times, in 1929, 1943, and 1953. The many song hits included “The Riff Song,” “The Desert Song,” “One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden,” and “Romance.”
Now Arthur, in the tradition of his theatre-building father, and, no doubt also vexed by what he perceived as the easy money theatre owners made off producers, endeavored to become a theatre owner himself. Over a two-year period Arthur built the new Hammerstei
n Theatre on Fifty-third Street and Broadway, so named in honor of his father.
Said Arthur:
The sacred memory of my father’s name—a name which embellished theatrical history for more than a score of years, and the fine things in the theatre for which that name stood, have been a perpetual source of pride and inspiration to me. In the few things I have done in the world of the theatre, I have tried in my humble way to make the illustrious name to which I have fallen heir stand for the same ideals that were always the aspiration of my father. If I have succeeded, then I can truthfully say that the training I received under my father during his eventful reign as impresario has been largely instrumental in any success which has been mine.
The show that christened the Hammerstein Theatre on its opening night, November 30, 1927, was Golden Dawn. For Golden Dawn, Otto Harbach and Oscar wrote book and lyrics; Stothart and newcomer Emmerich Kálmán wrote the music. In the cast was one Archibald Leach, who soon after changed his name to Cary Grant.
In the story, golden-haired Dawn has been captured by an African tribe as a young child. Now grown to beautiful womanhood, she prepares to become the tribe princess until an escaped war prisoner enters the picture. Love blooms, the lovers flee, and the curtain comes down.
Oscar Hammerstein and Sigmund Romberg
The song list said it all: “When I Crack My Whip,” “We Two,” “Here in the Dark,” “My Bwanna,” “Consolation,” “Africa,” “Dawn,” “Jungle Shadows,” and “Mulunghu Thabu”—as in taboo. The critics, reflective of the times, loved it. Nevertheless this overheated, colonialist, fever dream remains the Hammerstein family’s most unmitigated embarrassment.
“Dawn” sheet music from Golden Dawn, 1927
Arthur, who was on a production losing streak, lost possession of the theatre a few short years later. After producer Billy Rose also lost it, the theatre came into the possession of the fledgling CBS-TV network and become the home, for seventeen years, of the king of post-vaudeville variety—The Ed Sullivan Show. This was followed, in turn, by the Late Show with David Letterman. If there is poetic justice, it is that, although Arthur built the Hammerstein to honor his operatic father, it would be his vaudeville brother’s ghost that endures there to this day.
Oscar diligently continued to hone his song- and book-writing skills. Along the way he developed the calm personality to collaborate with a wide variety of creative temperaments and grew a thick skin to absorb the blows of failure. Throughout the 1920s, Oscar Hammerstein II formed the foundation of a career that proved to be one of the most sustained, productive, and creative in the history of musical theatre.
Less than a month after Golden Dawn christened Arthur’s new house, Kern and Hammerstein’s new show—the one with a million-dollar name—would change musicals forever.
Oscar Hammerstein statue by Pompeo Coppini
Chapter 9
SHOW BOAT
Musical comedies, operettas, and all their mutt offspring were expensive affairs to produce and, therefore, needed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Characters were drawn broadly. Lead roles were streamlined—the characters were bright, sexy, and good. Villains, secondary leads, comic sidekicks, and the rest all played to the type. And none of this got in the way of the singing, dancing, and shtick. In straight drama of the 1920s, unhappy endings and flawed characters abounded. But in musicals, the everyman hero clouts the moustache-twirling villain, wins the heart of the fair maiden, and lives happily ever after every time. This was pure melodrama. This was Oscar’s craft.
Throughout the 1920s, Oscar achieved his greatest success with Arthur’s Viennese-flavored operettas. In them he packed lots of plot and wrote songs that sometimes moved the stories forward—but not always. He inherited a rafter of old-school composers, courtesy of his uncle Arthur and, in turn, courtesy of his grandfather Oscar I.
“Ol’ Man River” sheet music from Show Boat, 1927
The New York City theatre audience went to see straight drama and musicals, but they brought a very different set of expectations to each. In 1926, New Yorkers enjoyed both Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown and Romberg and Hammerstein’s The Desert Song. But one was a night of thought, the other of laughter and forgetting, and never the twain had met.
This was, in short, the theatre world before Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein discovered their next project.
The Princess Theatre musical triumvirate of (l. to r.) Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jerome Kern
Kern’s collaborations with Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse in the tiny, 299-seat Princess Theatre had marked a significant departure from the frilly, girls-and-gags extravaganzas of which Arthur was so fond. They launched a realist revolution in the development of the “Princess Theatre Musical”—the forerunner of the “book musical” play.
Because the stage at the Princess was so small, Kern and company had to discard the costly effects, multiple scene changes, large casts, diverting subplots, and distracting chorus lines that had been the norm up till then. It was clear that cost-effective plot was required. Even the pit was tiny. It held only eleven musicians, but here, of course, Kern made no cuts.
The plot-oriented, smaller production shows at the Princess inspired Oscar and also a young fledgling composer, Richard Rodgers, who revered Kern’s music and sought to follow in his footsteps. The Princess Musical was, in short, the creative ground zero for what became the American musical.
The sharp-tongued but always funny Kern could be impatient and difficult, but he and the always affable Oscar got on well. Their families socialized and the two young men had developed a serious friendship. They agreed to keep an eye out for good material to work on next.
As soon as Jerome Kern read Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel Show Boat, he saw the possibilities.
Kern called Oscar and told him he had read a book with a “million-dollar” title that he was convinced would make a great show. Oscar got a copy, and, when the two of them compared notes, it turned out they had independently chosen precisely the same scenes to dramatize.
For Oscar this was just the opportunity he had been waiting for. He wanted to bring serious, meaningful music to the stage, something American rather than European. He wanted to create not his grandfather’s or his father’s or even his uncle’s musical theatre but his own. Ferber’s atmospheric and sprawling story would allow him to take material that accurately reflected twentieth-century America—unhappy marriages, miscegenation, family friction, racism, addiction, and social ostracism—and put it on the musical stage for the first time. Kern wrote Ferber a letter asking her for the rights. She turned him down.
Edna Ferber was no fool. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, into a family that moved frequently, she and her family finally settled down in Appleton, Wisconsin. Ferber was a tomboy (her mother had wanted her to be a boy, named Edward) who craved a career as an actress but couldn’t afford elocution lessons. Instead she settled for being the first female reporter on the local newspaper. Plagued by poor health, she turned to the less physically demanding vocation of short story and novel writing and forged a prolific and successful career. In 1924 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big.
Edna Ferber
Ferber became intrigued by an American concept already fading into memory and myth, the showboat. Showboats drifted (were pushed, really, by towboats tied tightly to the back of a flat-bottomed barge) down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, playing to towns along the way. Show Boat was published in 1926 and was an instant and huge success.
After Ferber’s initial refusal, in mid-October 1926, between the opening-night acts of one of his plays, Kern saw the New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was one of Edna Ferber’s Algonquin Round Table pals, and Kern scurried through the crowded lobby to besiege Woollcott to smooth the way so he could get to Ferber. Unbeknownst to Kern, Ferber was Woollcott’s companion that evening and had only temporarily gotten separated in the crowd. Woollcott, cherishing the moment, bel
lowed across the room for her to come over and meet Jerome Kern. Ferber thought Kern a pixie-looking man, although with a winning smile. She continued, however, to be aghast at the notion that she would allow one of her “children” to be turned into a musical, with visions of high-kicking chorines, tap dancers, and bad joke tellers in her head. But despite her objections, Kern’s enthusiasm and apparent seriousness of purpose was compelling.
The next day Ferber, Kern, and Hammerstein met in producer Flo Ziegfeld’s office. Kern argued for the extravagant “Ziegfeld touch.” Flo had the money and the time—his Follies had finally fizzled out and he purportedly wanted to produce bigger, legacy-caliber shows. After reading Oscar and Kern’s outline for the script and some first-act songs, Flo wrote Kern a beaming letter: “This is the best musical comedy I have been fortunate enough to get a hold of. I am thrilled to produce it. This is the opportunity of my life.”
We had fallen hopelessly in love with it. We couldn’t keep our hands off it. We acted out the scenes together and planned the actual production. We sang to each other. We had ourselves swooning.
—Oscar Hammerstein
But Flo had some issues (besides the fact that Oscar I had once sued him for uncalled-for humiliation). He was wary of Oscar II’s narrative seriousness of purpose:
Flo expressed his concerns to Jerry in a telegram that read:
I feel Hammerstein is not keen on my doing Show Boat. I am very keen on doing it on account of your music but Hammerstein’s book, in its present shape, has not got a chance. With critics—but the public? No. And I have stopped producing for critics and empty houses.
The Hammersteins Page 8