Oscar’s last effort of 1941 was his career’s coup de grace. Cajun-flavored Sunny River, written with Romberg, opened on Broadway to devastating reviews, three days before the Japanese demolished Pearl Harbor. It shuttered after thirty-six performances. Oscar hunkered down at his home, Highland Farm, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and wrote to Sunny River producer Max Gordon:
Thank you for your letters. I feel sure that you did everything that was humanly possible to give the show its chance to find a public, and it didn’t. I don’t believe there is one—certainly not in New York. Operetta is a dead pigeon and if it ever is revived, it won’t be by me. I have no plans and at the moment I don’t feel like making any.
Oscar often related his recurring nightmare: In the dream Oscar is in the audience watching his play. Some of the audience gets up to leave. More leave. Then all leave in a stampede. He is alone in the theatre. He wakes in a cold sweat.
“Lordy” sheet music from Sunny River, 1941
He had now lived this nightmare for a decade. Were the critics right? Certainly Oscar made little impression on musical theatre in the 1930s. Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and Rodgers and Hart ruled the decade, and while the fickle public appreciated Oscar for all he’d done—Rose-Marie, Show Boat, and other high-toned musicals—they would not truly miss him if he passed out of the scene.
The phone wasn’t ringing. The war raged without—and within. Sitting alone at Highland Farm, Oscar listened to a recording of Bizet’s Carmen, studying the libretto, playing it over and over. Years ago he’d had the idea to modernize it, and now, with no projects on the horizon, he had time to work on it, secretly, without telling anyone except his family.
Carmen libretto
Oscar remembered the first time he had seen Carmen at the Manhattan Opera House. He had been twelve. The applauding crowd, shouting “Bravo” over and over, was to him dizzying and overwhelming. Willy pointed out to young Oscar a distinctive silhouette, thick cigar smoke curling up into the lights. That man behind the curtain, stage right, had been the wizard of opera, Oscar’s grandfather Oscar Hammerstein I.
Inspired by memories of his childhood, of Paris, of opera, and perhaps, of that man behind the curtain, Oscar sat on his farm and began to rework Carmen. He decided to translate the story into a familiar American setting and time without changing a musical note. Oscar wrote of his approach to updating Bizet’s opera:
Program from Carmen Jones, 1943
However unconventional may be my treatment of the original work, the score remains an operatic score, and the story, in its spirit and rendition, is an operatic story. It is a tragedy. Yet it has appealed to the same public that nightly patronizes musical comedy…. Within the limits of my taste and knowledge I sincerely believe Carmen Jones to be an effective and interesting musical play.
With this exercise in revision, Oscar was leapfrogging backward, over operetta and musical comedies of the last two decades, into his grandfather’s operatic domain, and pulling up a bucket brimming with love and death from the well of opera.
Then the phone rang.
Chapter 12
BEAUTIFUL MORNING
Richard Rodgers, like Oscar Hammerstein, grew up near Oscar I’s Harlem Opera House. As a four-year-old boy he had toyed with the piano, and had taught himself to play by the time he was six. Three years later he was improvising, and he wrote his first musical when he was fifteen. Although as a child he refused to take formal lessons, Richard Rodgers became one of the most learned and musically accomplished composers in the history of the stage (Irving Berlin, by contrast, couldn’t read music). Like Oscar, Rodgers had loved the theatre for as long as he could remember; he also had gone to Columbia, largely so he could be in the Varsity Show, which was put on every spring and ran for a week in the Astor Ballroom. After Columbia Rodgers had attended the Institute of Musical Art (now Juilliard School). When Rodgers first heard Jerome Kern’s music at the Princess Theatre, he was inspired for life (as was George Gershwin). Rodgers met Lorenz Hart at Columbia. Larry was older, charming, caustic but kind, and erratic. He could create the most beguiling lyrics, but crafting a tune was beyond him. Conversely, Dick positively flowed with melody, but not words. They formed a team and had worked together exclusively and remarkably for the next two decades.
I left Hart’s house having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.
—Richard Rodgers
Despite the productive partnership and deep friendship between the two, Larry was a problem from the start. When Dick’s mother first met Larry, she remarked not unsympathetically: “That boy will never see twenty-five.” If she had meant twenty-five more years, she was just about right. Height challenged (he wasn’t quite five feet), haunted by what he perceived as so-so looks (he went for constant hair-restoration treatments), and tormented by his homosexuality (which he kept secret from his mother, who constantly inquired when he was going to marry and settle down), he had always found refuge in the bottle.
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz “Larry” Hart
When Dick married in 1930, Larry lived with him and his wife, and that too was a trial. He would disappear in the middle of a project—sometimes binging for days at a time, visiting a variety of gin mills, and frequently ending up at the baths. Larry could never work by himself, so Rodgers always knew that if he wasn’t with him, nothing was getting done. Rodgers, in the years to come, would also succumb to the temptations of the bottle, as well as indulging in hypochondria and indiscriminate affairs, but he never allowed it to effect his work.
Rodgers and Hart had joined the creative throng lured west by the siren call of easy money in Hollywood and, like so many artists before and since, had returned home with lessons learned (Rodgers at one point had read a column headlined WHATEVER BECAME OF RODGERS AND HART and that was it for him: back east he went). Jumbo in 1935, followed by On Your Toes in 1936, marked the team’s successful return to Broadway. But by 1941, the year they wrote Pal Joey—based on a John O’Hara New Yorker piece—featuring the singing and dancing of Gene Kelly, Rodgers and Hart’s working relationship had seriously deteriorated. People who knew them wondered how the partnership had lasted this long and when it would come to an end.
Rodgers was now interested in making Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical. Larry wasn’t. He thought his partner was making a mistake, and besides, he was worn out and wanted to go to Mexico for a rest.
“If you walk out on me now, I’m going to do it with someone else,” Dick warned him.
“Anyone in mind?” Hart asked.
“Yes, Oscar Hammerstein,” Rodgers replied.
“Well,” said Hart, who had destroyed himself but not the feel for the theatre that made him great, “you couldn’t pick a better man.”
Richard Rodgers had met Oscar Hammerstein years earlier at Columbia. Dick was twelve, the younger sibling of one of Oscar’s fraternity brothers. Now, in September 1941, Rodgers was in Philadelphia, only an hour away from Oscar Hammerstein’s farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He called and invited himself to lunch.
Rodgers had long admired Hammerstein and his work with Jerome Kern, believing, as did many others, that it had changed musical theatre in America. He was well aware of Oscar’s recent dry spell and the fact that some now considered him a has-been. But there was much about Oscar Hammerstein that appealed to Rodgers. He was well known to be a happily married family man who didn’t indulge in the tawdry New York nightlife that was available to him and couldn’t wait to wrap himself in the seclusion of his farm. In addition, both men were married to interior decorators named Dorothy. And both marriages were borne of shipboard romances.
Oscar and Dorothy stroll the farm.
Oscar’s exemplary professional reputation was well deserved. He got up early and worked hard, writing lyrics with a thick lead pencil while ensconced in a comfortable chair or in his study at the writing stand that Jerome Kern had given him. He didn�
��t yell or harangue actors, he attended rehearsals religiously, and he was known to follow theatre patrons out into the street so he could overhear their candid comments on his show. Oscar’s calm demeanor masked a passionate nature. In a 1947 Saturday Evening Post article, he had told the interviewer that as far as people who made noise, whispered, or rustled their playbills, “I really feel like killing them.” In his own quiet way Oscar Hammerstein was just as much the striving perfectionist as Richard Rodgers was.
More than anything else, Dick Rodgers admired Oscar Hammerstein’s way with words. Yes, he was a romantic—even sentimental at times. But he was also always a solid craftsman and a lyricist whose simple sentences were artfully constructed and conveyed universal truths. At times they even became pure poetry. Irving Berlin said, “The difference between Oscar and the rest of us lyrics writers is that he is a poet.”
On top of all that, Oscar’s ability over the years to work with a variety of composers in a variety of styles and consistently come up with exceptional work was one of his greatest talents. In 1949 Oscar wrote: “It must be understood that the musician is just as much an author as the man who writes the words. He expresses the story in his medium just as the librettist expresses the story in his. Or, more accurately, they weld their two crafts and two kinds of talents into a single expression.”
Rodgers said of their September 1941 luncheon at Oscar’s farm:
What happened between Oscar and me was almost chemical. Put the right components together and an explosion takes place. Oscar and I hit it off from the day we started discussing the show. For one thing, I needed a little calm in my life after twenty-three hectic years. When Oscar would say I’ll meet you at two-thirty, he was there at two-thirty. That had never happened to me before.
When Rodgers called him, Oscar was already familiar with the Lynn Riggs play and heartily agreed with Rodgers about its possibilities (Kern, like Hart, didn’t). The two met under the big oak tree at Rodgers’s Fairfield, Connecticut, residence. There they began to transform Green Grow the Lilacs into what would eventually become Oklahoma! Until the tryout in New Haven it was called Away We Go!, a title that no one liked. The titular song was added then and the name of the play changed. The exclamation point, which went on to become the most famous exclamation point in Broadway history, remained because, during these Depression years, no one wanted the audience to associate the play with the Okies made famous by John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. At that first meeting, Rodgers and Hammerstein created a blueprint for the play, essentially outlining the scenes together then going their separate ways to work their crafts.
Oscar did nearly all his writing on his Pennsylvania farm, which he and Dorothy had bought, according to Dorothy, when they saw a rainbow over the house (which makes sense if you’re married to someone who would soon be writing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” there).
To say that the Hollywood years haunted Oscar Hammerstein would be misleading considering his positive outlook: “I am never discouraged, I don’t believe in discouragement.” But he did wonder what he would do next if he failed in this venture. He needed a hit, and he knew it.
When it came time for casting, Oscar wanted Mary Martin for the lead but she was seriously considering another play. She agreed to flip a coin and Oscar lost. He should have kept the coin because he and Dick, as it turns out, had to finance the play themselves. This was a difficult trick in the best of times, and these were the worst of times. Or, as Stephen Sondheim, the boy who would become Oscar Hammerstein’s surrogate son and only protégé, would put it many years later in his inimitable fashion: “Creating art is easy. Financing it is not.”
To help raise the money Rodgers and Hammerstein were forced to take to the “penthouse circuit,” where in the early days Rodgers would play the piano and Hammerstein would sing the lyrics. Rodgers remembered one night going to an apartment that “was not only large enough to have a ballroom in it, it actually had a ballroom in it.” But while seventy people listened politely, nibbled canapés, and sipped champagne, they subscribed not one dime.
—John Steele Gordon, American Heritage magazine
One potential donor said he wasn’t interested in backing a play about farmhands.
It took two years of painful arm twisting (the pain being theirs) to raise enough money for the show. But this arm twisting had also taught Oscar and Dick how to be producers, a lesson that would serve them quite well in the future. Rodgers and Hammerstein would go on to establish a business organization that was as effective as the creative team it represented.
For the choreography, Oscar wanted to hire Agnes de Mille. He had followed her career for years. Agnes happened to be the niece of movie maniac Cecil B. (except that she didn’t capitalize de) and had had a complicated upbringing. She loathed her uncle and it has been written that “when the occasion warranted … her mother would send a note to school: ‘Gloria Swanson is being thrown to the lions and Agnes has to be excused from her classes.’” As an adult she became a solo performer—despite, by her own admission, not possessing a dancer’s body—and developed a unique style that employed gesture and dynamic movement to communicate psychological states, especially sexual states. She had once been a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and had worked with composer Aaron Copland on the hugely successful, groundbreaking 1942 ballet Rodeo, in which she danced the lead. She was considered, along with her friend Martha Graham, one of the premier choreographers in the country.
Agnes did not, however, possess a terrifically agreeable personality: some referred to her as “Agony de Mille.” Hiring the thirty-seven-year-old as choreographer, an idea first put forward and championed by Oscar and warily agreed to by Rodgers, was a bold and brilliant decision. The not-known-for-her-modesty de Mille remembers: “I invited myself to be part of Oklahoma! I’d found Oscar in a drugstore and said, ‘Please let me do the dances.’ But Dick wasn’t sure I could handle the Broadway situation.”
It turned out that Dick was right; she couldn’t handle the “Broadway situation.” Believing that “dancing should be more than just movable decor on the Broadway stage,” she insisted on ballet dancers instead of chorus girls, or girlfriends of anyone with pull, and that was only the beginning.
Agnes de Mille insisted at the outset that she have complete control over casting the chorus, but Hammerstein told her, deadpan, that she’d have to make room for everyone’s mistresses. Once she realized he was kidding, she relaxed a little. Rouben Mamoulian [the director] took the clause in his contract that gave him a “free hand” very seriously and was soon at loggerheads with de Mille. He banished her from the stage and she was forced to rehearse the dancers in the downstairs lounge of the Guild Theatre on West Fifty-second Street, where rehearsals were taking place.
The tantrums continued. Mamoulian took his control so seriously that when Rodgers and Hammerstein saw the sketches for the costumes before he did, Mamoulian had a thoroughgoing temper tantrum. One afternoon, Marc Platt, the male lead dancer, had to drag de Mille off screaming from one rehearsal that was going badly and hold her head under a cold-water facet until she calmed down.
—John Steele Gordon, American Heritage magazine
But Agnes de Mille was a creative genius. She managed to convey the inner psychological feelings of the characters and their relationships through dance, adding another dimension to musical theatre. Her dream ballet that closes act one of Oklahoma!, as well as the stylized barroom fight, would result in the making of a new direction in musical choreography.
Said John Acocella, of the New York Times Book Review, “She was one of the makers—together with Anthony Tudor and Jerome Robbins—of mid-century realism, the fusion of ballet technique with vernacular movement and modern psychology. On Broadway she was a leader of a related revolution, the push to integrate dancing with song and story.”
Frank Rich, of the New York Times, declared:
Dance musicals, meanwhile, grew out of de Mille’s advances
in Oklahoma! Though George Balanchine had staged the first ballet that served a musical plot—“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” for Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes in 1936—it was de Mille’s dream ballet for Rodgers and Hammerstein that integrated dance into the emotional fabric of a musical’s story.
But Rodgers and Hammerstein had not yet become the venerable “Rodgers and Hammerstein.” Given the untested array of talent assembled and the lack of big names in the cast, the advance buzz for Oklahoma! was not good. The investors Oscar and Dick had found certainly weren’t expecting much. The producer Mike Todd, who walked out after the first act during the show’s New Haven tryout, had returned to New York to wisecrack “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” Ziegfeld couldn’t have said it better, or been more wrong.
From the moment the curtain came up, the audience knew it was in for something new.
Prior to Oklahoma!, practically all musicals started with a big, high-kickin’ chorus number, a spectacle that gave late arrivals the opportunity to seat themselves. Not here. Instead, the curtain rose on an old woman churning butter silently on her porch. Then, offstage, the audience faintly hears “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” Oscar, the devotee of the book, had started the story with an opening song that developed the main lead’s character, peace of mind, surroundings, and sense of destiny. Here was a story about love and death in the land of the farmer and the cowman. That first song set the mood and tone for the rest of the show.
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” sheet music from Oklahoma!, 1943
When Oklahoma! opened at St. James Theatre on March 31, 1943, it was far from standing-room only. But the audience was stunned; their troubled minds had been transported from the worries of a disastrous world war to a celebration onstage of the values that defined America—or at least some of it, sometimes. The critics were equally rapturous.
The Hammersteins Page 11