The Sound of Music

by Hirsch, Julia Antopol;

  Early production reports for the first few days in Salzburg are sketchy, but one of the first scenes shot on location was the wedding scene at Mondsee. It was filmed April 23 and took only one day to complete. The company hired about six hundred extras, all brought down from Salzburg. Wise sent extra electricians there a day ahead of schedule to prelight the cathedral, and all went very smoothly—nothing out of the ordinary.

  But there was one cast member who admits that April 23 was the most extraordinary day of his life. That was the day Dan Truhitte, Rolf, met his future bride. “I met Liesl’s stand-in at the wedding scene,” remembered Truhitte twenty-seven years later. “I think that was the only scene she stood in for. Gabriele Henning. She was an actress from Salzburg. We spent the next three months together. In fact, one of the posters that promoted the movie showed a picture of the kids playing together in the foreground, and I was sketched somewhere in the background riding up to the mountains on my bike. That kind of described me then. The kids were always going everywhere together, and I was always running off to the mountains with Gabriele.”

  The Truhittes were married for twenty years before divorcing. They are still close friends. “What was really weird,” said Truhitte, “was that Gabriele’s parents were named Liesl and Rolf. It was like a premonition.”

  The romance and beauty of Salzburg touched other hearts as well, for there were two other marriages whose courtships began that spring. Kym Karath’s sister, Francie, who had come to the location with her mother and sister, fell in love with Alan Callow, the son of Reggie Callow.

  “I met Alan on the plane,” recalled Francie, “and he just swept me off my feet.” Francie Karath was then twenty-one, and Alan Callow was twenty-two. Callow, who had come on the trip with his father, was put in charge of organizing the children and making sure they got to the set on time.

  “Salzburg was in its prime back then, and we went all over. We double-dated with Dan and Gabriele and with Charmian and an Austrian assistant director she was going out with.”

  Callow and Karath were married about a year and a half later in Las Vegas, but the marriage lasted only a year. “I was brought up that after high school you get married,” said Karath, “and we were just too young.”

  But one marriage that began on location of The Sound of Music lasted for thirty years. Betty Levin was hired as Wise’s script supervisor on the film, and she just loved chamber music. When she arrived in Salzburg, she called the Austrian tourist bureau and found out when they were having concerts. On her free nights, she made plans to go. When Saul Chaplin heard that he and Betty shared the same passion for music, he invited himself along.

  Setting up the shot on location in Salzburg.

  “Everyone saw Saul and Betty’s romance developing,” said Pia Arnold. “The whole company saw them fall in love, I think before they even saw it. They were both shy in realizing what was happening to them. But we saw the intensity of their feelings.”

  Saul and Betty spent all their free time in Salzburg together, and four years later they married.

  But Salzburg wasn’t all fun and romance. It was a lot of hard work. The company stuck to a rigorous six-days-a-week schedule. And no one worked harder than Robert Wise. Reggie Callow, in his interview with Behlmer, remembered, “Bob Wise is the most prepared director I’ve worked with. He retires early. He gets up at five o’clock in the morning and prepares his work for the day.”

  Running off camera … and into the arms of choreographer Dee Dee Wood.

  Every morning Wise would meet Callow, and they would compare notes. Did they have to set up twelve shots that day or seventeen? “Whatever it was,” said Callow, “Bob would know precisely what he was going to do all the time.”

  “I’ll never forget,” recalled Dee Dee Wood, “Bob had this pocket watch, and he’d look at it every five to ten minutes to keep on schedule. But he never got impatient.”

  “Bob was a real commander,” Portia Nelson reminisced, “but you didn’t feel directed. It was effortless.”

  Wise had begun his career as an editor, so, armed with that experience, he covered his scenes from as many angles as he could.

  “People think that because you were an editor, you know in your head exactly how each scene is going to play,” said Wise. “It’s just the reverse. You want to cover as much as you can with as many angles as possible. That way you have more flexibility. And then in the previews, if a scene doesn’t work, you can go back to the editing room and pick and choose from other angles to make the scene work. So much can be done in the editing room.”

  As discussed earlier, all the scenes were shot in pieces and edited together later. As with any film, a number of takes were required for each scene. And retakes are especially common when filming a musical. The actors have to sing along to a playback of the prerecording they made earlier at the studio. During filming, the microphone is turned off, so the quality of their voices as they walk or dance does not matter, but their mouths have to move in perfect synchronization with the playback. If they are off, even a fraction of a second, the shot has to be retaken. Wise, who had also been a music editor, was a master at spotting something even half a frame out of sync.

  “We had three of us watching very closely all the time for that sync,” said Wise. “You do take after take. You might have a perfect take up to the end, and then suddenly you go off.”

  The actors had tapes of their prerecording and would practice. Andrews was already a master at synchronization, and the children also became very adept. Wise remembers one amusing incident that happened when they were shooting the “Do-Re-Mi” sequence up on Winkler’s Terrace. “We were up high, looking out over the city,” he recalled. “The terrace overlooks the whole main part of Salzburg. We had our playback up there with these big speakers. You play these songs very loud so your actors can sing back to it. My wife, Pat, was below, in the city, and she said the music came flooding down from up in the hills, and all the passersby kept looking around, wondering where the music was coming from!”

  They shot “Do-Re-Mi” all over the city, but in the other Salzburg locations Wise had more control over his environment. “When we were shooting Julie and the kids in the carriage,” he said, “we had our own extras and everything, so we didn’t have a problem with people looking into the camera, and we didn’t have to worry about our loud music disturbing anyone.”

  Reggie Callow got a surprise one evening when he found out that he was going to be the carriage driver in that sequence. According to Behlmer, Callow recalled, “We had hired a Norwegian actor to drive the buggy. We were shooting, I think, on a Saturday. On Friday night, very late, the actor called me up at the hotel and said, ‘Look I can’t work tomorrow morning because my sister just died and I have to leave for Norway immediately.’ I called Bob and he told me not to worry. I was fat at that time, so he said to me, ‘You’re the only man in the company who will fit his wardrobe. You drive the coach!’”

  One sequence of “Do-Re-Mi” drove Julie Andrews crazy; she had to learn how to play the guitar for the scene that was to be filmed on the mountaintop. “For some reason I just couldn’t play the guitar and sing at the same time,” Andrews related with a laugh. “Saul and Marc and Dee Dee kept on me to practice, but I kept putting it off and putting it off. Finally the big number was coming up, and Saul got very angry with me. ‘You better get with it,’ he yelled at me. So one of the farmers, up near the area we were shooting, made the best schnapps. It was pure one-hundred-proof liquor. I remember one day it was so cold and I was in such a bad temper about the guitar, I had a glass. It was firewater! But oh, it was heaven. I finally practiced the guitar, rather sulkily.”

  A director is always part “commander,” part psychiatrist, and as such Wise had to deal with the diverse personalities of his actors. Andrews and Plummer, for instance, had two completely different acting styles. Andrews was often a perfectionist, but she could also be very silly at times. And she tried everything, from classic vaude
ville tricks like stepping out of the bus and having her guitar get stuck in the door to dancing the flamenco—partly to see what would work for the character and partly to relieve stress on the set. Wise nixed some of her routines, but she didn’t give up trying to get a rise out of her director. She finally won in the puppet-show sequence.

  “For some reason I just couldn’t play the guitar and sing at the same time.”

  “At the end of the puppet show, I came around the corner and showed how exhausted Maria was,” Andrews said. “Bob at first said not to do it, but I said, ‘Come on, Bob, I’ve just done a whole puppet show, with seven children, singing “The Lonely Goatherd!’” He let it go.”

  After about five weeks of intense nonstop filming Andrews finally had a couple of days off and decided to celebrate. She hired a bus and took a group of thirty company members to the Royal Ballet Theater in Munich, leading a chorus of show tunes along the way.

  Christopher Plummer, on the other hand, was intense. “His style was more ‘Let’s see what can explode out of me today,’” said Dee Dee Wood. “He was dark.”

  But, according to Andrews, these two diverse styles were exactly the right mix to create the chemistry between her and her costar. “His intensity was just right for his part,” said Andrews. “I didn’t find his style at all threatening. In fact, in the canoe scene where we come out of the water and have a big fight—Chris worked with me a lot on that scene. We rehearsed it a number of times to build it up. As far as I’m concerned, he couldn’t have been nicer or more professional.”

  Not everyone shares that view. Plummer, who wasn’t too thrilled with doing the film in the first place, became even more disenchanted while on location. He began calling the film The Sound of Mucus, although he swears that everyone, including Julie Andrews, used that phrase.

  “I never called it The Sound of Mucus,” said Andrews.

  Plummer’s sour attitude was not lost on the rest of the company. Saul Chaplin remembered, “His relationship with the other actors left a lot to be desired. He behaved as though he was a distinguished legendary actor who had condescendingly agreed to grace this small, amateurish company with his presence.”

  A rare moment of relaxation for a very intense actor.

  “I remember absolutely nothing about Christopher Plummer,” said Kym Karath. “He stayed so far away from us.”

  Even Wise admits that Plummer’s relationship with the kids was not very close, but he is adamant about his professionalism. “Chris was marvelous to work with because he never came into a scene where he didn’t add something. Not that he was trying to take over, but more in a creative way. Even in the scenes with the kids, he always had good ideas or suggestions on how to improve the scene. He’s a very intelligent guy.”

  Everyone, even Plummer, agrees that when the cast was shown the rushes (unedited footage of the days of shooting) of the opening scene, his attitude changed. “I was staggered by that opening,” said Plummer.

  “He was very impressed and for a few days forgot who he was,” said Chaplin.

  “No one realized what we had until we were shown the rushes and saw how beautiful it was going to be,” said Anna Lee. “We were awestruck.”

  But even with all the tension, Plummer and Andrews got along famously. “She threw herself into the part with four times the effort,” said Plummer. “Julie was great fun. Terribly professional, with a healthy attitude. We were great pals.”

  “We had some lovely scenes,” Andrews reminisced. “One of them was the scene after Chris sings ‘The Sound of Music’ with his children. I’m going up the stairs, and he comes up and asks me to stay. I thought that was a nice scene. I suppose you always fall a little in love with your leading man. Nothing went on between us, but I adore him to this day.”

  Wise also had to contend with another strong personality when an unexpected visitor arrived one day and announced that she wanted to be in the movie. Maria von Trapp was visiting Austria with her thirteen-year-old granddaughter and dropped by the set. She told Wise that one of her secret ambitions was to be in a movie and asked if that was possible. Wise had dealt with von Trapp earlier, through phone calls and letters, when she wanted him to change the film character of the Captain. The outcome had not been pleasant, but Wise decided to use her anyway, as an extra in the scene where Andrews walks down toward the fountain in the square singing “I Have Confidence.”

  “I suppose you always fall a little in love with your leading man.”

  Wise recalled, “We got her a costume and everything, but like in every film, we had to do a number of takes, and it took, I think, three hours. She didn’t know you have to do it again and again.”

  “Maria” meets Maria.

  Maria von Trapp was so exhausted when the scene was finally over that she declared, “That’s one ambition I’m giving up.”

  How did Maria react when she met “Maria”? “She was instantly friendly and easy,” said the fictional von Trapp. “Years later I brought her onto my musical series, and she sang with me. Even then she was always easy and pleasant.”

  Christopher Plummer first met Maria von Trapp that day she visited the set, and he couldn’t help comparing the real von Trapp with her movie counterpart. “I couldn’t put the Maria of the story and the real Maria together,” said Plummer. “[Von Trapp] was the antithesis of Julie, physically. Maria was this big, athletic woman, and Julie seemed so slight by comparison. Julie gave the part lots of spunk, which of course Maria had. But Maria was a big version of Queen Victoria!”

  Plummer met Maria von Trapp a couple more times over the years, and they grew very fond of each other. He even remembered that, as a child, he used to ski at her lodge in Stowe, Vermont. One day, Plummer recalled, he was visiting a friend in Nassau when his host announced that he had invited a surprise visitor over for tea.

  A publicity shot photographed the day Maria von Trapp visited the set.

  “In walks Maria von Trapp,” said Plummer, still tickled by the memory. “She had just swum the Nassau Channel! She must have been in her late sixties by then, but she bounced in, after swimming the channel, changed her clothes, and was ready for tea!

  When she saw me, she ran up to me shouting, ‘My husband! My husband!’”

  Plummer crossed paths with von Trapp again years later in Hollywood. “I was playing the piano onstage for something or other, and she sat beside me at the piano. I played ‘My Favorite Things,’ and she sang with me. It was very sweet. I miss that jolly face.”

  After an intense twelve- to fourteen-hour day on the set, nerves were a little frayed, and each company member had his or her own routine for unwinding and letting off a little steam.

  “My favorite memory of the picture was what I called ‘magic hour,’” Pia Arnold recalled. “That was when Bob invited a select group of people over for a martini after the day’s shooting. He created a special warmth.”

  While Wise’s group met each evening over martinis, another, somewhat noisier group met at the Hotel Bristol. The Bristol was to become the major night spot for many of the cast members.

  “It was run by an American general,” Portia Nelson reminisced, “or so he called himself. I think his name was General MacCrystal. He was a big fan of mine, so he turned part of the bar of the hotel into the ‘Blue Angel’ after the club in New York where I used to perform.”

  “Gretl Hubner was the general’s wife, and I think she owned the hotel,” said Christopher Plummer. “Every night she had opera stars and musicians coming in. A real bohemian bunch. She even employed the local aristocracy. They worked as bellboys and waiters.”

  “We called it the ‘Crunch Bar’ because of a joke that Marc [Breaux] told us,” said Larri Thomas, Julie Andrews’s stand-in. “Chris played the piano. Sometimes he’d stay up all night and then go to work from the bar, but he never forgot his lines.”

  Plummer’s nights at the “Crunch Bar” became legendary, but they never affected his work. In fact, most everyone that stayed at
the Bristol and even those who were booked into one of the other hotels ended up at the Bristol night after night. Peggy Wood, Eleanor Parker, Larri Thomas, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, Portia Nelson, Anna Lee, and Pamela Danova would all drink Dom Perignon and sing around the piano while Plummer played.

  Saul Chaplin, Pat Wise (Mrs. Robert Wise), Dorothy Jeakins, Marc Breaux, Pamela Danova, and Richard Haydn.

  Even nuns love to sightsee.

  Buying postcards to send home.

  Never too young to learn the trade.

  She can juggle, too!

  Charmian Carr may have been twenty-one and an adult, but she was not above playing patty-cake with “Herr Dad.”

  Saul Chaplin, Julie Andrews, and Pamela Danova.

  Julie Andrews, Dorothy Jeakins, and Charmian Carr.

  “The more he drank, the more beautiful his music was,” recalled Anna Lee. “The music just poured out of him.”

  Julie Andrews participated only occasionally in the nightly festivities at the Bristol. This was her first long separation from her husband, set designer Tony Walton. He was doing back-to-back shows in New York and couldn’t travel with her on the shoot. She did bring along her nineteen-month-old daughter, Emma Kate, and preferred to spend the evenings with her. Even if she had wanted to go out at night, it would have been difficult.

  “I was in every scene,” explained Andrews, “and my schedule was exhausting. I’d start work at six or seven in the morning, and the day would end about seven at night. You can’t imagine how exhausting it was to be out in the fresh air all day long, either baking in the sun or, more often, drenched in the rain. When I got back to the hotel room, I felt grubby and filthy and dusty and dirty. Then I’d take my makeup off, and it just didn’t make any sense to put it back on and go out again. Instead I would eat in the hotel room and put my feet up.”