By 1945, the war exacted a horrific toll. Every American grieved the loss of a brother, son, father, or friend.
Carousel tells the story of a doomed love between a brutish carnival barker and a factory girl and ends with his ignominious death. The second act finds him in heaven, where God offers him the opportunity to make amends for his loathsome behavior. Despite the fact that he fails to do so, the audience empathized with his all-too-human efforts to offer advice, to seek forgiveness, to complete an unfinished life, and to bid a proper good-bye from beyond the grave. A war-weary world was having this very same conversation with itself.
IRVING BERLIN, NÉE ISRAEL BALINE (1888–1989)
Irving Berlin epitomized Jerome Kern’s statement: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music; he is American music.” Over his long career Irving Berlin produced an outpouring of ballads, dance numbers, novelty tunes, and love songs that defined the American popular song for much of the century. His standards include “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Blue Skies,” “White Christmas,” “Anything You Can Do,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Heat Wave,” and “Easter Parade.” In a class by itself is his beloved paean to his adopted country, “God Bless America.” He wrote seventeen complete scores for Broadway musicals and revues including The Cocoanuts, As Thousands Cheer, Miss Liberty, Mr. President, Call Me Madam, and the phenomenally successful Annie Get Your Gun. Movie scores include Top Hat, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Holiday Inn, This Is the Army, Blue Skies, Easter Parade, White Christmas, and There’s No Business Like Show Business. Irving Berlin was a cofounder of ASCAP as well as his own music publishing company and his own Broadway theatre, the Music Box.
The ticket lines for Carousel and Oklahoma! snaked around the block. Rodgers and Hammerstein had touched a popular nerve.
Cash-rich and eager to wrest as much creative and financial control as possible, the partners decided to produce. Their first foray into producing brought a Broadway veteran back into the spotlight. With Annie Get Your Gun—second only to Oklahoma! as longest-running play up to that time—Irving Berlin’s career was revived, as that production provided him with his biggest hit. Rodgers and Hammerstein then managed to find time to write the lyrics, music, and screenplay for State Fair in 1945, which Hollywood called their only work exclusively for the screen.
Oscar’s screenplay for State Fair was faithful to the plot of the l933 movie he and Dick had screened and liked. The story starred an Iowa farm family—mom, dad, brother, and sister—who were headed for a fun-filled time at the state fair. Mom and Dad had visions of blue ribbons dancing in their heads (for pies and hogs, respectively). The kids, Wayne and Margy, had other things on their minds: Wayne’s girlfriend couldn’t come, and Harry, Margy’s beau, wanted Margy to marry him—something she wasn’t sure about.
At the fair, Wayne is smitten with a glamorous dancer who aspires to “life upon the wicked stage,” and country girl Margy innocently beguiles a brash big-city reporter who’s covering the event.
Ethel Merman, the undisputed first lady of the musical stage, had a God-given set of pipes. The New York Times described them as “imitative of no one” and George Gershwin made her solemnly promise never to take singing lessons. Her professional career, like her belting voice, was second to none.
Eventually the dancer decides Wayne’s world is not the place for her and he returns, none the worse for the experience, to his girlfriend back home. Meanwhile, back at the now darkened midway (as it’s the last day of the fair) the reporter’s a no-show for their date. Reluctantly he’s left for Chicago and an important job interview. Even though Margy is left in the lurch, she realizes that Harry is Mr. Wrong.
Fortunately for those who are fond of happy endings—Oscar would be at the top of the list—the reporter, who has written his article centering on the family’s visit to the fair (yes, her pie and his hog won), returns and asks Margy to marry him.
Dana Andrews as newspaper reporter Pat and Jeanne Crain as farmer’s daughter Margie in the 1945 film State Fair
Rodgers and Hammerstein found themselves just as adept at producing as they were at creating and became one of the most powerful production companies in the district.
On November 5, 1945, Oscar and old friend and collaborator Jerry Kern planned to hold afternoon auditions for a Show Boat revival. But just after lunch, Oscar received a phone call from the office of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers reporting that a man with an ASCAP card in his pocket with the name Jerome Kern written on it had been stricken with some sort of attack on Fifty-seventh Street and Park Avenue. A cerebral hemorrhage had left Jerry comatose. For the next few days, Oscar left Jerry’s side only to harangue for better medical attention. Oscar would softly sing “I’ve Told Every Little Star” into Jerry’s ear in the hope that their song would revive him, but finally, on November 11, at one-fifteen in the afternoon, Jerry passed away.
About Kern’s death, Oscar wrote the following to his wife:
Collaboration, like marriage, leaves the two people concerned in possession of common bonds no other two people share. I was deeply affected and realized then that he had had a greater grip on my affections than I had known. It was more than losing a friend. It was like losing a brother. It was something else. It was a little like losing a wife.
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN’S EULOGY FOR JEROME KERN, 1945
I have promised myself not to play upon your emotions—or on mine.
We, in this chapel, are Jerry’s “family.” We all knew him very well. Each of us knows what the other has lost.
I think he would have liked me to say a few simple words about him. I think he would not have liked me to offer you feeble bromides of consolation—butterfly wings of trite condolence to beat against the solid wall of our grief. He would have known our grief was real, and must be faced.
On the other hand, I think Jerry is playing “out of character.” The masque of tragedy was never intended for him. His death yesterday and this reluctant epilogue will be soon be refocused into their properly remote place in the picture. This episode will soon seem to us to be nothing more than a fantastic and dream-like intrusion on the gay reality that was Jerry’s life.
His gaiety is what we will remember most—the times he has made us laugh, the even greater fun of making him laugh. It’s a strange adjective to apply to a man, you’ll all understand what I mean: Jerry was “cute.” He was alert and alive. He “bounced.” He stimulated everyone. He annoyed some. He never bored anyone at any time. There was a sharp edge to everything he thought or said.
We all know in our hearts that these few minutes we devote to him now are small drops in the ocean of our affections. Our real tribute will be paid over many years of remembering, of telling good stories about him, and thinking about him when we are by ourselves. We, in this chapel, will cherish our special knowledge of this world figure. We will remember a jaunty, happy man whose sixty years were crowded with success and fun and love. Let us thank whatever God we believe in that we shared some part of the good, bright life Jerry led on this earth.
Oklahoma!—the cow—a gift from Jerome Kern to Oscar Hammerstein
Chapter 13
ALLEGRO
There’s just one thing I hate, and that’s rules. The theatre should have no rules.
—OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II
Oscar had always adapted existing sources, other people’s books. He had never written the story himself. This was the creative challenge he now turned to face: he would write his own story—in more ways than one.
I was concerned when I wrote Allegro about men who are good at anything and are diverted from the field of their expertise by a kind of strange, informal conspiracy that goes on. People start asking him to join committees … and the first thing you know they are no longer writing or practicing medicine or law. They are committee chairmen, they are speechmakers, they are dinner atten
ders.
The back-to-back successes of Oklahoma! and Carousel and the gratifying reception of Carmen Jones and State Fair showed that Oscar could, well, do it all. Now he had a new idea.
It was a mistake he would not make again.
Oscar Hammerstein II
Allegro was the title Oscar chose for this new work, the first wholly original play Rodgers and Hammerstein had done. The title suggested the too-fast pace of modern life. That was, in fact, its subject: life, from birth to death; although somewhere along the way Oscar would compromise on that, settling for birth to thirty-five, as he would, to his later regret, on much else. The protagonist would be a doctor—for whom Oscar did background research with his own doctor—a concept that might have made physician’s son Richard Rodgers a little more comfortable. This particular doctor, whose wife was having an affair, was frittering away his time on rich hypochondriacs posing as patients and a hospital that forced him to compromise his beliefs. But Oscar was after bigger fish than the health care system:
It is a law of our civilization that as soon as man proves he can contribute to the well-being of the world, there be created an immediate conspiracy to destroy his usefulness, a conspiracy in which he is usually a willing collaborator. Sometimes he awakens to his danger and does something about it.
—Oscar Hammerstein
“So Far” sheet music from 1947’s Allegro
Allegro was personal, passionate, ambitious, and daring: Oscar Hammerstein’s Our Town. The staging was bold, unconventional, and very, very modern. It was bare stage, with no scenery, slide projections onto screens, loudspeakers, actors and props being brought in and out on treadmills, and a Greek chorus of sorts that spoke to the actors and the audience.
Rehearsals did not, to put it mildly, go well. Agnes de Mille, who was brought in to direct, was, as seventeen-year-old Steve Sondheim, working as a kind of overqualified office boy, saw it, “a horror. She treated the actors and singers like dirt and treated the dancers like gods … Agnes de Mille was … I think, an extremely insensitive woman, an excellent writer, and a terrible director, in terms of morale, anyway. That was my first experience of bad behavior in the theatre.” The situation got so bad that Oscar had to step in and virtually become director.
When they took the show on the road, to New Haven, everything that could go wrong did. Actors tore ligaments and had to be taken screaming from the stage on stretchers; walls were, or appeared to be, falling down in the middle of scenes; a lead actress fell into the orchestra pit (without missing a note); and a fire, or near fire, almost sent the patrons running for the exits.
Today Allegro is looked back on as a critical and commercial failure. But the truth is, as usual, a little more complicated. The critics were divergent and divided. Brooks Atkinson, in the New York Times, said: “The story has style and character; the music enriches it; the stage has the eloquent simplicity of genuine art … Rodgers and Hammerstein have just missed the final splendor of a perfect work of art.” Robert Coleman, in the New York Daily Mirror, added: “Allegro is perfection, great.”
But most didn’t see it that way, citing the absence of any real drama and calling it uninspiring, slow, preachy, antiurban, and worse. Cecil Smith claimed:
In Allegro (1947), ushered in by the longest and most persistent barrage of advance publicity any musical attraction had ever received, Rodgers and Hammerstein went arty. The enterprise brought expensive elaborations of music, dance, and stagecraft to a trivial life chronicle of a young doctor who, at thirty-five, was forced to chose between a rich but empty practice in Chicago and a poor but honorable career of humanitarian service…. That he chose the nobler course amounted to the final affront in a story that all evening piled a cliché upon bromide and stock character upon contrived situation.
The staging of Allegro consisted largely of gadgetry raised to the nth power … The stage was frequently monopolized by a verbose speaking chorus ready to commit itself on any subject …
Allegro had been described in advance as an adventure into the domain of serious lyric theatre. Actually its heavy superstructure of external production rested upon an excessively weak substructure of ideas. After the first flurry, the public saw through its pretenses, and its patronage lasted less than a full season.
Allegro would live on, becoming a cult classic (meaning that no one sees it but they think it’s great) and one of the Broadway Theatre’s most influential plays for two reasons: First, it showed, as Dick Rodgers put it: “You have to have a smash or you have nothing.” And second, it became a cult classic that taught Stephen Sondheim, watching from the wings, a lot: “It was a seminal influence on my life, because it showed me a lot of smart people doing something wrong … That’s why I’m drawn to experiment … I realize that I am trying to recreate Allegro all the time.”
Allegro playbill
Chapter 14
THE BOY WHO CAME TO DINNER
As the United States had entered the war the previous winter and rationing was now the rule of the day, [Oscar] felt his family would be secure at Highland Farm. Knowing they could raise ample food from the land, he stocked his barns with enough livestock to remain self-sufficient should the conflict come to American shores. That was one of the main reasons he bought the property in 1940.
—STEPHEN CITRON,
The Wordsmiths: Oscar Hammerstein 2nd and Alan Jay Lerner
Not a lot of Americans bought seventy-two-acre working farms (for $23,000, with an 1818 farmhouse) as a response to the coming of World War II. Of course, as stated earlier, the other reason Oscar and Dorothy bought it was the rainbow.
An aerial view of the Hammerstein home at Highland Farm, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1948
Highland Farm
The farm’s history cites that,
While driving up the hill to Highland Farm, Dorothy spotted a rainbow and sensed this would be a magical place for … their family … The home was constantly alive with many guests and children. Mr. Hammerstein was known to fly different-colored flags as a message to the local children. One said, ‘Come and swim.’ Another meant, ‘Let’s play tennis.’ And still another said, ‘Stay away today.’ In addition to their own children, the Hammersteins were also known to take in other children in need of a home. As a young boy, Stephen Sondheim spend considerable time at Highland Farm and … Mr. Hammerstein became a mentor to young Stephen and encouraged him to hone his talents as a songwriter.
Stephen Sondheim, aka Stevie or Sonny, had a less than nurturing childhood: his father had fallen in love with another woman and walked out on his family, leaving his ten-year-old son to the not-so-tender mercies of his deeply disturbed mother. Stephen later recalled, “I had a difficult childhood because my mother was a genuinely monstrous woman, and my father, whom I liked a lot, left me in the dragon’s lair. I can’t blame him—but I blame him.” After a bitter divorce, Stevie’s father married the other woman and raised a family with her in nearby Stamford, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Stevie’s mother, in the unfortunately time-honored tradition of many mothers before and since, tormented him in various ways—psychologically, physically, and sexually—while they lived in a succession of ritzy Manhattan apartments. In the summer of 1942, Mrs. Sondheim bought a house in Bucks County, not far from the Hammersteins; by then she was already friendly with interior designer Dorothy Hammerstein, who had formed her own company in the 1930s and at one point owned a shop in New York.
Oscar and Dorothy holding hands in the gazebo
[Sondheim] believes his mother moved to Bucks County because it was chic, and that only a coincidence brought [them] so near the Hammersteins … but there is at least the possibility that she, ever alert to the value of connections, decided to place Stephen where he could have easy access to these important friends. Since he seems to have inherited his father’s talent for music, it could not do any harm.
—Meryle Secrest,
Stephen Sondheim: A Life
That move would change Stevi
e Sondheim’s life and the course of American theatre.
Highland Farm
He was supposed to go off to camp for the summer, but he had such a good time that he said, “Do I have to go to camp?” and his mother cancelled it and he came to us instead. He was the boy who came to dinner.
—Dorothy Hammerstein
Jimmy and Oscar
It wasn’t long before Stevie was spending summer weekends with the Hammersteins and their extended family. Their son Jimmy, age eleven, was home from boarding school in the summer and was a year younger than Stevie. The two became fast friends: riding their bikes together, going to the movies in town, raising rabbits, and playing golf on the nine-hole course adjacent to the property. They were at various times joined by the two children from Oscar’s first marriage, Billy, age twenty-four, and Alice, age twenty-one; as well as Dorothy’s two children, Henry, age sixteen, and Susan, age fourteen. When Dick Rodgers came down for a working weekend, he and his wife brought their two girls, Mary, age fourteen, and Linda, age nine. Mary and Stephen would become lifelong friends. Added to the mix was an assortment of cousins and local kids. They all played any number of games, both indoor (bridge, backgammon, Scrabble, Monopoly, chess, checkers, double acrostics, and highly competitive spelling games) and outdoor (croquet, swimming, and tennis). Jimmy and his father, whom he called the “Old Man,” were particularly competitive when it came to tennis.
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