The Sound of Music

by Hirsch, Julia Antopol;

  Still, watching everyone going out on the town every night made her a bit lonely. “I felt fairly isolated. Oh, there was a lot of socializing on the set and a lot of fun, and everyone invited me to go along with them. But at night I had a responsibility for my daughter, whom I hadn’t seen all day. So the nights were fairly quiet.”

  “We were great pals.”

  The city itself seemed to contribute to her solitude. “Salzburg gives you the feeling of isolation. You’re surrounded by a ring of mountains. It’s a private, magical place, and I adored it, but it does give you a lonely feeling.”

  Working with six children might have posed a serious problem, but surprisingly the children were very well behaved. Oh, they had their little pranks.

  “We were awful,” said Heather Menzies in a 1990 Los Angeles Times interview with Libby Slate. “We played tricks on people. We baby-sat each other in the hotel when our mothers went out, and we’d throw things like wet toilet-paper pieces out the window to the cars below.”

  A kiss for “big sister.”

  Even the hotel guests became unwitting victims of the children’s mischief. Every evening the patrons would place their shoes outside their doors to be polished. One night the children gathered all the shoes from the second floor and took them up to the third. Then they took the third-floor shoes down to the second. It took quite a while for the guests to sort them out.

  When the hotel proprietors had finally had enough, the children were asked to leave. That’s when Robert Wise stepped in. “Bob Wise had to sit us down and read us the riot act,” continued Menzies. After that, the children calmed down and the hotel allowed them to stay.

  The children united into a loving, supportive family. On the Fox lot an office building had been their schoolhouse; in Salzburg their schoolhouse was the city itself. They traveled all over with their teacher, Jean Seaman (who filled in for the Fox teacher, Frances Klamt). They had two minivans at their disposal, and they went to puppet shows, a children’s production of The Magic Flute, the salt mines, and museums. They did science projects and art projects. Seaman taught them all to speak some German, and at times the children even acted as interpreters for the grown-ups.

  “Salzburg was a fun place to be as a little kid,” remembered Kym Karath. “There were all kinds of interesting cultural events.” One of her funniest memories was that of a castle they visited. “The castle belonged to someone named ‘Mad Something-or-other,’ who happened to be a practical joker. Apparently he had a lot of popes and dignitaries visiting him, and he designed a special banquet table outside that had jets of water shooting up through the middle of the chairs. So during dinner he would have a servant turn them on, and everybody would get their pants wet. Now that’s hilarious to a kid!”

  Charmian Carr spent her time more with the adults than the children and passed her leisure time working on a travelogue about filming the movie in Salzburg, titled Salzburg, Sight and Sound. This documentary was aired on television just before the movie was released and was also used as a trailer in the theaters to advertise the picture.

  The mothers line up their kids for a picture.

  All six of the younger children brought their mothers to Salzburg (Carr was already twenty-one years old and came by herself), and it seems the mothers had a good time as well. Karath remembered, “The mothers would meet in the room late at night and drink various brandies that they’d picked up at the stores. They’d sit around and gossip. Sometimes they’d go to the casinos. I think they had as much fun as we did.”

  A few headaches arose from having six children on a long production. Though none of them got sick, the children, like all youngsters, kept growing. But the problem was that one or two would grow more than the others and so, to keep the continuity, some of their shoes had to have special lifts.

  “All the children kept growing, except me,” Carr recalled in 1990 for the British This Morning. “By the end of the film I was standing on apple boxes.”

  “I grew six inches in six months,” said Nicholas Hammond in the same interview. “I started on lifts and ended up in my bare feet!”

  Kym Karath not only grew taller; she grew rounder. “I gained so much weight during the filming,” said Karath, “that they had to keep adjusting my costumes. I didn’t like any of the German food, so the only things I would eat were bananas, rolls, and fried artichokes.”

  A supply of junior baby teeth was also brought along in case a child lost a tooth or fell and cracked one. Debbie Turner, who lost some of her baby teeth during shooting, had to have them replaced with false ones and then found she had difficulty singing. “I had a lisp because I couldn’t get used to the dentures,” she told Tracey Morgan in a 1990 Us magazine interview.

  Turner wasn’t the only actor to have trouble with teeth. Larri Thomas, Julie Andrews’s stand-in, recalled, “Richard [Haydn] came downstairs one morning with his hand over his mouth, embarrassed. He had lost his false teeth down the toilet, and he didn’t have an extra set. So my husband, Bruce, saved the day. He reached down into the toilet and rescued his dentures!”

  Wise showing off his technique.

  Ted McCord and Robert Wise.

  The children became such close friends that they reunited for a Sound of Music party every year on Kym Karath’s birthday until she turned thirteen. In fact the production went so smoothly for the children that, when filming was completed, Reggie Callow received a letter from the local board of education. The letter stated that, in all of its years in the picture business, no filming had ever had as few problems in handling children as The Sound of Music.

  Virtually every exterior scene in the film was shot in Salzburg. There were a few exteriors, however, that Wise and director of photography Ted McCord realized simply could not be shot outside. Wise had had Boris Leven build the glass-enclosed gazebo down near the lake at Bertelsmann but then found that they couldn’t shoot inside the gazebo for the “You Are Sixteen” and “Something Good” numbers; the eight-sided glass made the light bounce into the camera from eight different angles. Furthermore, so many visual effects were required in these scenes—rain, lightning, and night lighting—that it would be too costly to shoot the scenes on location.

  Call sheet.

  Ted McCord.

  So they decided to duplicate the entire gazebo on the Fox lot and shoot the scenes at home. Weighing the difficulties and expense of shooting “day for night” (the process of shooting a nighttime exterior scene in the daytime) on location in Salzburg, they also elected to duplicate at Fox the rest of the set that Leven had built down near the lake at Bertelsmann. Thus every bit of the “You Are Sixteen” and “Something Good” numbers was shot on a soundstage back at the Twentieth lot.

  Even the scene where the Captain comes down from the house, meets Maria on the bench, and tells her he’s not engaged anymore was shot in Los Angeles. Leven’s Bertelsmann gazebo was still used; they needed it for “point of view” scenes. For example, when the Captain stands on the balcony (actually a Hollywood set) and stares down at Maria walking along the lake—that scene was shot from the Captain’s “point of view” onto the actual location set.

  Another difficult scene for McCord to shoot was the nighttime scene at the Rocky Riding School. They had to pull in lights and generators from all over Europe to light the hundreds of archways carved into the mountainside. The extras weren’t thrilled with the location either. One thousand Salzburg residents were hired to play themselves in the festival scenes—and they all had to wear summer clothes even though the scenes were filmed from 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM and the temperatures were hovering just above freezing. Everyone was uncomfortable, even the star.

  “The Riding School was cold and dank, and we seemed to be there forever!” said Julie Andrews.

  But Kym Karath loved every minute of it. “I got to stay up all night and play gin rummy with the Nazis,” she recalled with a laugh.

  One of the most frightening memories for Karath was the canoe scene. “We all had
to fall off the boat,” she remembered, “and I couldn’t swim. They were going to use a double, but they really wanted to use me. Mr. Wise took me aside and talked me into doing the scene by telling me that Julie was going to catch me. I did the first take, but it was no good. So I screwed up my courage, and we did it again. But this time, when the boat rocked, Julie went off in the wrong direction, so she couldn’t catch me. The water was very murky, and I went down. Luckily Alan Callow was there, and he actually jumped in and caught me.”

  But that wasn’t the end of Karath’s troubles. “We had to go in again, just to get a take of us as we were struggling out of the water. But by that time I’d had enough! Poor Heather was supposed to carry me out of the water, and I threw up on her shoulder!”

  “So Long, Farewell.”

  The City of Salzburg was very cooperative with the film crew and even went as far as issuing a The Sound of Music postmark commemorating the picture. But there was one scene in the movie that the town elders did not support—the depiction of the Anschluss, where Nazis march across the Residenzplatz and take over Austria. One of the requirements for this scene was that swastika banners hang from the sides of the buildings. “Pia Arnold went to the town fathers and told them we needed to hang up swastikas in the square,” recalled Zuberano. “They said, ‘Oh no, you can’t do that, because the people of Salzburg were not sympathizers.’ I insisted, but they wouldn’t budge. Then I remembered the newsreels of Hitler marching into Austria and seeing all the people out there with their little flags, cheering him on. So I told Pia to go and tell the fathers, ‘Never mind, we’ll use the newsreels.’ “Well, they were cornered. They didn’t want us to use a newsreel showing the Austrians cheering Hitler, so they gave in. But they insisted that we take down the banners as soon as the shot was over. The only thing we still weren’t allowed to do was use a crowd cheering, but I think we made our point without it.”

  Divers standing near the boat. They would go underwater and rock the boat so that the actors could topple over.

  By far the scene that caused the most difficulty was the last scene filmed on location. Ironically, it was the first and, later, the most famous scene in the picture. And the one reason that scene was so much trouble was the one sticking point for everyone on location in Salzburg.

  “Someone told us it rained a little,” said Wise.

  It rained a lot.

  And it was an especially frustrating rain; a day that started out beautiful and sunny would gradually turn cloudy and gray until, at the time the shoot was scheduled to start, the rain would finally come. Frequently, by the time it cleared up, the sun was on its way down.

  “The problem with this kind of weather on any location,” Wise explained, “is, even if the weather forecast says it’s going to rain all day, you can’t sit around in your hotel. You have to move your troupe out to some location, and some of these locations were thirty to forty minutes away. And if you do stay in the hotel and then it breaks unexpectedly, it takes you forever to get the whole company out in time to use the good weather. You may leave the actors in the hotel because they can get out faster, but you need the crew to set up.”

  Maria and Reverend Mother. Filmed in a “cover set.”

  If it was early enough in the day that rain would be a problem, the company would move to a cover set. If not, they would sit around and play cards, play backgammon, do crossword puzzles, or rehearse the dances. But time is money, and every wasted minute made Wise more nervous.

  “I can’t tell you how long we sat around,” Wise continued, “in buses and in cars, reading, sleeping, whatever, waiting for the rain to let up. Sometimes, if it was just overcast, you still couldn’t shoot because you had started the sequence in the sunlight and you needed the continuity. The guys used to go out and play baseball and whatnot, but the minute the sun came out, we’d rush out and get going.”

  If they had time to rush to a cover set, the company would transport everything to the Dürer Studios. All the scenes with Peggy Wood in the Mother Abbess’s office were shot on location at Dürer, including her most memorable number, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” But even though this was to become one of the most beloved songs in the picture, Wood had trouble with the number.

  “Peggy felt the song was too pretentious,” said Portia Nelson. “She wanted to speak the first words before going into the song.”

  Even Robert Wise admits, “This was the one scene in the play that embarrassed me.”

  When the rain on the mountaintop became too heavy during the filming of the “Do-Re-Mi” sequence, the cast would escape to a barn where they would rehearse the song.

  Nelson, on Wood’s behalf, went so far as to ask Saul Chaplin if Wood could speak the lines first. But Chaplin said that he couldn’t change it because Richard Rodgers, in deference to the late Oscar Hammerstein, wouldn’t allow any changes in the lyrics. So Wise had the idea of filming Wood in dark shadows, with her head turned away from the camera. That way the pretentiousness would be diffused.

  There were only so many scenes with the Reverend Mother and Maria, and after the company had completed them all they ran out of cover sets. A director knows he’s really in trouble when he runs out of scenes to do on a cover set.

  “When you don’t have a day when you can do an insert [a shot of an object that is later edited into a scene], anything,” said Wise, “that’s terrible.”

  When the weather was bad in the outdoor scenes, a tarp would be set up over the scene and they would use artificial light. This setup was used in the scenes on the terrace, where Elsa played ball with the children, or in the scene where Max ate his three pieces of strudel. But shooting under the tarps required extra time, and time was a precious commodity.

  The star descending from her carriage.

  The company (and friend) on top of “Maria’s Mountain.”

  The original location schedule called for the company to shoot in Salzburg from April 20 to June 11. On June 28, twenty-two days behind schedule, they finally started filming the opening number, in which Maria bursts onto the screen and begins singing the title song.

  “Maria’s Mountain” was located outside Salzburg, about ten kilometers into Bavaria. The crew set up camp at an inn at the bottom of the mountain. Their plan was to transport the equipment, cast, and crew up the mountain by Jeep, but the constant rain had washed out the roads. So they were forced to resort to a more old-fashioned method of transportation—the ox cart.

  Setting up a tracking shot to follow Julie Andrews.

  “One of my favorite memories of Julie,” recalled Wise, “is when she traveled up that hill in the ox cart with her fur coat wrapped around her against the cold.”

  If traveling in an ox cart seemed primitive, it was nothing compared to trying to maintain some decent hygiene. “Filming on the mountain-tops was the hardest,” said Andrews. “We were miles away from any toilets. So when we had to go, we’d just say, ‘I’m going to the woods now.’ Everyone understood what you meant.”

  To film what is one of the most famous openings in movie history, a helicopter swooped down just as Maria rushed up to her beloved mountain. The timing on that shot had to be perfect. So, to make sure Andrews came up the hill at the moment required, Marc Breaux hid in the bushes nearby. As the helicopter ascended, Breaux, using a megaphone, cued Andrews and she rushed up the hill and began singing.

  “I remember running out to sing ‘The hills are alive …’ and shivering in my boots.”

  “The funniest memory I have of the movie,” said Breaux’s wife, Dee Dee Wood, “is of Marc hiding in the bushes yelling ‘Go, Julie!’”

  “The helicopter was a jet helicopter,” Andrews recalled. “The cameraman was strapped onto the side of the helicopter, hanging out so he could get the shot, and he came at me sideways. I’d start from the end of the field, and I’d hear Marc yelling ‘Go!’ from a bullhorn. The helicopter would come at me, clanking away, then it would go around me to get back to the beginning to repeat the scene
. But when it circled around me, the downdraft from the jets was so strong that it would literally knock me over. I couldn’t stay up. They had to do this shot about ten times, and finally I got so angry I yelled, ‘That’s enough!’”

  The rain was a constant frustration throughout the filming of the opening sequence. But they were stuck. Not only was Maria’s Mountain across the Austrian border and into Bavaria, but to get to it the company had to travel around the Untersberg Mountain and drive up the other side; they couldn’t easily travel to another location when it started to rain. And by this time, they had only this one scene left to shoot. All the actors but Andrews had already returned to Los Angeles.

  The June 29 production report states, “Mountains clouded and fogged in—unable to shoot.”

  Planting birch logs to suggest that Maria is at the edge of a forest.

  July 1: “Attempted one scene—rain, Rain, Rain!”

  Wise described, “We had designed that whole number to be shot in about six or seven sections. Julie walks up the hill and twirls, she walks through the field, she dances around the trees, etc. I kept chewing away at them. We would line up our shot, we’d have the playback ready, and maybe we’d get one section. Then we’d come out the next day and set up for another section. But then it would start to rain, and it would be no good. We’d sit up there under the tarps and wait. You don’t want to go down the hill, because it’s such a big deal to get everything down there and then up again.”

  “The rain was awful,” Andrews remembered, “and it was freezing cold. I remember running out to sing ‘The hills are alive …’ and shivering in my boots.”