The flamboyant, tyrannical, outrageous, sometimes charming, and always ruthless Ziegfeld was not a champion of serious drama, and Show Boat was precisely that. Ferber was a serious writer; her books featured working-class characters and strong females (thanks to her reporter’s ability to observe). They were a little too true-to-life for Flo. He felt the show would never draw; there was no “gags and gals.”
Arthur had his own objections: Ziegfeld did not have the right to do the play. Arthur was entitled because of a prior agreement he had with Oscar. Oscar and Jerry seriously considered having Arthur produce the musical, but, despite the agreement, in the end opted for the “Ziegfeld touch.” Although Arthur ultimately sued, he lost and Ziegfeld became the producer.
Jerry and Oscar had been working on the show for a few months and realized that they hadn’t heard from Ziegfeld for a while. Had the construction of his brand-new Ziegfeld Theatre (in which Show Boat was scheduled to open) secretly bankrupted Ziegfeld? The always impatient and inquisitive Kern and the always willing Oscar jumped in a car and sped up to Ziegfeld’s country place in Hastings-on-Hudson to confront him with their concerns.
“We drove to Ziegfeld’s palatial grounds, and to an estate that resembled a European chateau,” Hammerstein recalled with amusement. “There we were met by a butler who had the dignity of a banker and who ushered us to a magnificently furnished living room. A maid, dressed in exquisite lace and who herself might have just stepped out of some Ziegfeld production, conducted us to Ziegfeld’s private quarters upstairs, through a regal bedroom, and into an immense bathroom in which the producer was being shaved by his personal barber. The shaving over, Ziegfeld put on his silk brocaded dressing gown and invited us to have a ‘snack’ with him. The ‘snack’ consisted of a royal meal of roast beef and champagne with all the trimmings, attended by a retinue of butlers and waiters. By the time we left Ziegfeld in the late afternoon, not even Jerry had the brashness to ask him if he had any money.”
Oscar Hammerstein, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Jerome Kern
Flo’s lifestyle notwithstanding, Oscar and Jerry were right to worry. While Flo did finally produce the musical, he reneged on his promise to open his new theatre with the show and opened instead with the hot show of the moment, Rio Rita. Naturally, this aggravated Oscar and Jerry to no end. But Oscar, who saw silver linings with alarming frequency, saw one here: “That year’s delay made Show Boat a much better play than it would have been had we produced the first draft.”
Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern worked incessantly on the show for nine months. Oscar, who adapted naturally to the quirks of others, was easy to work with; Kern not so much. But regardless of their personalities, they worked well together, bringing out the best in each other. Kern prodded facile Oscar to focus and he wrote better lyrics than ever. Gathering at Kern’s house in Bronxville, the two sketched the scenes, crafted the characters, wrote the words, and made the music—although not necessarily in that order. Frequently Kern would write the tune, and then Oscar would go into the other room and write the words.
With his lyrics, Oscar was intent on faithfully maintaining the sprawling novel’s atmosphere and the accuracy of the characters—and translating that onto the stage. Every song he wrote had to be an integral part of the characters’ development and the unfolding story line. Oscar and Kern labored endlessly to integrate all the elements—lyrics, music, setting—so that they flowed together seamlessly and to ensure that each song was fully integrated into the scene.
Finally the show was almost ready. In the days leading up to rehearsals, Oscar and Jerry worked even more intensely on pulling the show together. By early September 1927, they were finished.
Helen Morgan, who was a nightclub singer with no acting experience whatsoever, was cast as Julie LaVerne. The part of Steve Baker hadn’t been cast yet, so Oscar read Baker’s lines to Morgan each day (and also directed till they hired a director). Morgan, who had a soft spot for the gentle-faced young man, had no idea who Oscar was. She graciously went to Kern and suggested he give the young man a break and cast him in a role because he seemed to understand the play so well. Kern couldn’t argue with that.
Helen Morgan
From mid-November to late December, Oscar and Kern took their show on the road. Over the course of eight weeks they played D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and finally, Philadelphia. They opened in Washington, D.C., on November 15, and the next day there were thousands lined up to see it. “The play was born big and wants to stay that way,” Oscar quipped. It’s likely that Oscar, the wordsmith, was playing with the title of Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, So Big.
The show was, unfortunately, too big, running four and a half hours. Perhaps Oscar and Kern had been a tad too faithful to the sprawling novel. Something had to be done. As the show moved from theatre to theatre and city to city, the shifting, restructuring, reconsidering, and cutting continued. By the time they got to Philadelphia, they had removed three scenes and eight songs. “Inspiration comes when you are active, not passive,” said Oscar. Finally, the day before the New York opening, they worked eighteen hours straight.
The out-of-town run had been a rousing success. Thanks in part to rave reports in Variety, the New York opening had the largest advance ticket sales of any show up to that time.
On opening night, the curtain raised to reveal a stage filled with ex-slaves singing:
Niggers all work on the Mississippi.
Niggers all work while the white folks play—
Loadin’ up boats wid de bales of cotton,
Gittin’ no rest till de Judgment Day.
The character of ex-slave Joe followed the opening chorus with the song “Ol’ Man River,” a lament in the vernacular that reflected the moral underpinnings of the show. Through Show Boat, Oscar first voiced his deeply held objections to prejudice and intolerance. But Show Boat was more than a discomforting window on racial inequality. It was a meditation on the capriciousness of fate itself—some deserved theirs, others did not. Some characters lived and loved happily ever after, others did not. This was a realist melodrama—a hybrid—and it was a first.
Show Boat told the tale of the intertwining lives of the singers, actors, and gamblers aboard the Mississippi showboat Cotton Blossom. Hammerstein portrayed flawed yet humane characters in realistic situations—changing, struggling, and maturing over a forty-seven-year span. While there remained an aspect of the everyman melodrama to it, and a tacked-on happy ending, the show nevertheless dealt squarely with the base inhumanity of anti-miscegenation laws and portrayed the hardships facing blacks and whites in the post–Civil War South. Such was Show Boat’s power that in states where these laws were still on the books, Show Boat was explicitly banned. This was, moreover, the first time that blacks and whites unapologetically shared the musical story as well as the musical stage—with little stereotyping to soften the blow for the practically all-white musical theatre audience of 1927.
When the opening curtain came down, a silent shock gripped the audience. Ziegfeld bemoaned the missed opportunity to jam in the legs and laughs. Would his crowning effort become his biggest debacle? Then, slowly but surely, the audience found its voice and a sustained ovation beat against the curtain.
Tonight I have seen the perfect show. My decision to take Oscar into show business has been justified. Tonight I knew that I did right by Willy after all, even though I broke my word. I am a happy man.
—Arthur Hammerstein
Resounding critical acclaim followed. The New York Times said:
From such remote centers of theatrical omniscience as Pittsburgh, Washington, and Philadelphia had come the advance word that it was better than good—some reports even extravagantly had it that here was Mr. Ziegfeld’s superlative achievement…. In its adherence to its story it is possibly slavish. The adaptation of the novel has been intelligently made, and such liberties as the demands of musical comedy necessitate do not twist the tale nor distort its values. For this, and for the
far better than average lyrics with which it is endowed, credit Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, who is rapidly monopolizing the function of author for the town’s musical entertainment.
Florenz Ziegfeld
The New York Herald correctly predicted: “Bound to be one of the outstanding triumphs of the season.” The show ran from December 27, 1927, to May 4, 1929, an astonishing 575 performances. The New York Americans declared: “Here at last we have a story that was not submerged in the trough of musical molasses.” Indeed out of Show Boat’s thirteen songs, six were hits, which became, over time, standards. The New York Daily Mirror added: “It is daring in its originality and shows that managers have not until now realized the tremendous possibility of the musical comedy as an art form. It is a work of genius.” And gossip columnist and wag Walter Winchell anointed it as a “masterpiece.”
When the show finally closed in New York, a long national tour followed, and in 1932 the London company gave 350 performances (with Paul Robeson re-creating the role of Joe). There were numerous revivals and films over the years.
Show Boat remains inarguably the most important and influential play in the history of American musical theatre. By employing American themes, characters, and speech patterns, it broke the operetta and the musical comedy tradition that had come before it (created, to a degree, by the Hammerstein family). Show Boat was, in fact, the tipping point in the evolution of the “book musical.” Jerry and Oscar had correctly wagered that the story structure and realism would be a tonic for the complacent, redundant fairy-tale operettas and musical comedies then cluttering up Broadway. Show Boat was fresh and was a harbinger of the genre’s dynamic but still distant future. It pointed the way.
Chapter 10
WHEN YOU FIND YOUR TRUE LOVE
Show Boat wasn’t the only boat transporting Oscar Hammerstein II on life’s journey. When Ziegfeld reneged on his promise to open his new theatre with Oscar and Jerry’s show, Oscar had decided, in early March 1926, to head to London, where he could watch over the Drury Lane production of The Desert Song. He booked passage on the Olympic (the nearly twin sister of the Titanic). Oscar, now thirty-one, had sailed on the same ship when he went to Europe for the first time in 1913.
Myra was “too busy” to accompany Oscar, and while on board the Olympic, he met Henry and Dorothy Jacobson. Born in Tasmania, Australia, one of five daughters, Dorothy was a striking blue-eyed beauty and as independent as she was tall, slim, and attractive. After boldly leaving home when she was twenty-two, she had modeled in London and acted in silent movies before moving on to New York City, where she was, now that Ziegfeld had seen her photo, to become one of the girls in his Follies. This would not come to be, however. Dorothy’s mother disapproved: “Please deny you are going into the Follies,” she had pleaded as soon as she found out. Dorothy had complied and backed out of the Follies (the theatre bug hadn’t really bitten her), but not out of going to America.
Dorothy Blanchard (c.) and her four sisters, 1923
Now twenty-seven, married, and herself a mother, Dorothy would walk each morning around the ship’s deck and would meet Oscar, who was circling in the opposite direction, during each orbit. One morning Dorothy, wishing to end what seemed like the endless “good morning”s, sought refuge in a deck chair—Oscar joined her soon thereafter.
Dorothy Blanchard
They talked and talked: about musicals, which Dorothy thought were silly, and their marriages, which they both admitted were not so hot. Oscar was resigned to his marriage, Dorothy less so. They fell in love: “That was it. It was like the rivers rushing down to the sea,” she thought. “If I were a schoolboy, I’d carry your books home from school,” he thought.
They saw each other in London, and when Myra came over, the Hammersteins and the Jacobsons got together. Not-so-shy Myra casually asked Dorothy if she had a lover and coolly added that she had left hers behind in New York.
Once he returned to New York, Oscar plunged back into working on Show Boat with Kern and saw Dorothy from time to time—at parties they both attended, and alone. When apart, they agreed to look at the moon at the same moment. Dorothy’s husband, who knew what was going on, thought, rather hopefully, that renting a summerhouse near the Hammersteins in Long Island might allow the infatuation to run its course. But it was too late: a furtive but deeply romantic love had blossomed between Dorothy and Oscar. Dorothy talked about divorce, but Oscar, the master of personal indecision, who preferred to indefinitely postpone emotional issues, didn’t. While Oscar, unable to acknowledge the hell at home and certainly unable to ask for a divorce, concentrated on not doing anything, Dorothy became pregnant with her second child, a complication that put their romance on hold.
Oscar and Dorothy
Oscar’s relationship with the headstrong and domineering Myra, which had never been good, was deteriorating further. She no longer even tried to get him to pay attention—good or bad—to her. Workaholic Oscar was spending less and less time at home, anyway. When he was home he frequently slept in the other twin bed in his son Billy’s room.
Although Myra’s infidelities were common knowledge, when a friend finally told Oscar about them face-to-face, even Oscar felt compelled to say something to his wife. He struggled not so much with Myra’s tawdry behavior as with his own inaction: Why was he allowing this to go unchallenged, unmentioned even? Was he afraid? Of what—confrontation, conflict, his own imperfections, the mundane fact that life is not a play and can’t be composed and staged? When Oscar finally asked for a divorce, Myra not only refused to consider it but threatened to blacken Oscar’s name by exposing their sordid lives. This would have showered the very private Oscar Hammerstein II with torrents of unwanted publicity.
Directing his emotions inward, as always, Oscar had a nervous breakdown and voluntarily entered a sanitarium on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There he was subjected to state-of-the-art psychiatric treatment: wet sheets and cold baths. There was no “talk therapy,” which suited him just fine. Two weeks later, after discussing what had happened with no one, he left the sanitarium and returned to his life.
Oscar and Myra were through. Obeying the legal niceties of the day, Oscar feigned an adulterous act, which ended with the hotel manager confronting a semiclothed Oscar and throwing him, and his cohort, out of the hotel. Myra finally granted the divorce. Dorothy agonized leaving her innocent husband, but finally did—he retained custody of the boy and she the baby girl (for which her son never forgave her). At last, on May 13, 1929, Oscar Hammerstein and Dorothy Blanchard Jacobson were married.
Chapter 11
THE 1930s
Even before Show Boat had opened, Oscar had begun preparations for Arthur’s production of Good Boy. For this show Oscar wrote only the book, not the lyrics—leaving that to lyricist Bert Kalmar, who was composer Harry Ruby’s partner. Good Boy was a Cinderella-story musical comedy mixed with the traditional show-within-a-show formula: a farm boy moves to the city to become an actor, wins the girl, loses the girl, makes a fortune, and wins the girl back. Critics praised some novel scenic effects but whistled at the generic plot.
“I Wanna Be Loved By You” sheet music for Good Boy, 1928
The show is remembered for only one Ruby-Kalmar chestnut: “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” which was sung by the show’s star (and unofficial inspiration for the comic-strip character Betty Boop), Helen Kane. Kane’s Lolita-like, baby-talk delivery of that song was such a hit that she quickly became not only indispensable to the show but also a willing prey to offers from other theatre and movie producers. She bolted the run after a pretty decent 253 performances. Arthur had no show without her “boop-boop-dee-doop” and the show immediately closed. But Arthur had his revenge. When Kane soon after booked a Palace solo engagement, Arthur, Schwab, and Mandel temporarily enjoined her from singing the three songs from Good Boy that had vaulted her to fame.
Helen Kane
Close on Good Boy’s heels, Oscar again teamed with Romberg for Schwab and Mandel’s new sh
ow, The New Moon. Both Romberg and Oscar knew what they were in on—a ridiculously over-the-top story of love, murder, intrigue, and revolution set in eighteenth-century French New Orleans. This show had it all. The critics raved about Romberg’s colorful score, the colorful costumes and scenery, and even the plot, which New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson said “finds a way to alternately separate and join loving hearts until a late hour in the evening. It is not merely a good book; it is almost too good, and begins to weigh a little on the entertainment after the first act.” The public cared less.
“Try Her Out at Dances” sheet music from The New Moon, 1928
The New Moon shown for 509 performances before the stock market crash turned out its lights. But The New Moon was a swan song, anyway. The most enduring song from The New Moon, the heartfelt “Lover, Come Back to Me,” perfectly exemplifies the operatic, lush romanticism of the Romberg-Hammerstein pairing. But The New Moon was a throwback. Audience tastes were changing—Americanizing—and frilly, European-styled operettas were very soon to be on their way out.
Sigmund Romberg
After The New Moon, Oscar and composer Vincent Youmans teamed up to write the manly show Rainbow. Thrown in jail for killing a man in self-defense, the show’s hero escapes, joins a wagon train going west, and finds true love. The plot was reminiscent of Rose-Marie, but streamlined and transplanted from the Canadian Rockies to Gold Rush California. Prekaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley choreographed the testosterone-drenched dance numbers. One critic mourned that Rainbow “overindulged in ‘shootin’ and cussin’ and drinkin’ and wenchin’” and seemed obsessed with the swagger and ribaldry of pioneer life. Unfortunately there was no gold at the box office; the show panned after a month.
The Hammersteins Page 9