The finale from the Broadway stage production, 1959. In this version, Mary Martin leads the von Trapp family to safety.
The other side of the mountain: in reality, the von Trapps would have marched straight into Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat.
When Ernest Lehman set up the structure for the movie version, he independently went back to Lindsay and Crouse’s original impulse to end the first part of the story at Maria’s silent farewell to the von Trapp family, one scene earlier than “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” When the movie was first shown in movie theaters in 1965, there was an intermission and, as a result, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” became the first major song of the movie’s “second act.” Director Robert Wise felt he had to restage the song to take advantage of the increased intimacy of a movie performance, as opposed to the expansiveness of a theatrical production. “We had to find some way to do it that wasn’t quite so obvious. So we got the idea of shooting it up against the wall [of the Mother Abbess’ office],” he recalled on the audio commentary for a home version of the movie. It is quite unusual for a major number to begin with the singer’s back to the camera, but that is exactly how Wise filmed Peggy Wood as she began “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” (Or, more accurately, as Margery MacKay began the song; although Wood had been an accomplished operetta star early in her career, her singing was dubbed for the movie.) “We just shot her singing and she walked over to the window,” recounted Wise. “We pan with her to this window and she finishes it over there, and I think it worked very well.” In addition to the simplicity of the camera movement, the chiaroscuro lighting—worthy of a Rembrandt— makes the scene both intimate and touching.
When the reprise of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” makes its inevitable appearance in the finale, Hammerstein’s words take on a literal, as well as a figurative, meaning—the von Trapps must indeed journey over mountains and rivers in order to find their freedom. The actual von Trapp family has always been bemused that the show’s creators took them over the Alps to Switzerland for the final escape: “Don’t they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!” complained Maria von Trapp to a reporter in 1967, although the dramatic license in topography existed in the original Broadway show.
When shooting the movie, the film crew compounded the problem further. Looking for the proper location for their final shot of Christopher Plummer leading the children and Julie Andrews to sanctuary, they found a mountain called Obersalzberg in Bavaria, Germany. It certainly looked the part. But back in the 1930s, on the other side of that mountain was Hitler’s mountain retreat, in Berchtesgaden. So, if strict geography were being followed in the movie, Baron von Trapp was leading his family straight into the headquarters of the Nazi high command—”not exactly where we wanted to be,” quipped Johannes von Trapp, dryly.
The movie finale: Here, it is Baron von Trapp who leads the way to freedom.
CHAPTER THREE
AMERICA TO BROADWAY
Mary Martin perched atop a steamer trunk in Cole Porter’s Leave It To Me! The particularly glowing chorus boy to her right is Gene Kelly, in his first Broadway show.
When the von Trapps disembarked from the SS American Farmer in autumn 1938, they dragged their paltry few pieces of luggage to the Wellington Hotel on West 55th Street. Ten blocks south, at the Imperial Theater, a steamer trunk was all the rage on Broadway.
Well, not the steamer trunk exactly. The sensation was the pert, gamine ingénue sitting on top of the steamer trunk, wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and a wolf-fur parka, seductively trimmed mid-thigh to reveal her shapely legs. The scene was set in a railway station in Siberia; a stopgap in the story while the stagehands changed the scenery behind a curtain. These were the merry years of the musical comedy, when shows were silly and undemanding, filled with beautiful girls and beguiling songs. If the songs were entertaining enough, audiences might not mind being distracted from the story; if the songs were really entertaining, they wouldn’t mind the story. Thank goodness the song this ingénue was singing was written by Cole Porter.
And what a song it was. The soubrette disarmingly recounts how she entertains a bevy of young men, “but my heart belongs to Daddy / ’Cause my Daddy he treats me so well.” It made an overnight star out of Mary Martin, who was perched so fetchingly atop the steamer trunk. Leave It to Me!, a mildly satirical confection about an American ambassador in the Soviet Union, was Martin’s Broadway debut. Born in Weatherford, Texas, Martin had tried Hollywood and the nightclub route with mild success before landing the inconsequential part of the ingénue in Leave It to Me! She was cheerful and perky, and projected an appealing innocence. Perhaps too innocent; the story goes that Martin’s co-star, the buxom and bawdy Sophie Tucker, had to explain the song’s manifold double entendres to her. Martin’s uncloying innocence would come in handy two decades later when she would cross paths with Maria von Trapp.
In a more domestic role, Martin prepares the children for the Act One party.
While Martin was enjoying life as the toast of the Great White Way, the von Trapps were struggling with only four dollars to their name and an even more meager command of the English language. Ensconced in the Wellington, while their concert manager put their tour together, the family resisted the temptation to visit the sites, skyscrapers, and sensations of New York City. When the family immigrated to America, Maria fulfilled her natural function as head of the performing family. She would set the priorities, manage the finances, and determine the artistic direction of the Trapp Family Choir, as they were now known professionally. In many ways, the fictional roles of Maria and Georg were reversed when they came to America. Maria was the stern martinet of the troupe, dictating economy, discipline, and focus during the arduous days and nights of touring. Georg—whose performing role was largely limited to being introduced to the audience before the finale—attended to domestic details and family rituals and provided moral support.
The first national tour of the Trapp Family Choir was yet another series of wanderings across a large and frequently bewildering country. The tour started in Pennsylvania, and traveled west as far as Oklahoma before finally concluding at New York’s Town Hall—one of the city’s first-rank venues for classical performers— two weeks before Christmastime. With their Town Hall appearance, the von Trapps made their debut in New York’s Theater District nearly twenty years to the day before the musical based on their lives would open on Broadway. The family rested briefly with friends living outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Johannes—the only von Trapp born in America—made his debut in January 1939.
Soon the von Trapps’ visitors’ visas expired, and it was time for them to leave America. Returning to Austria, let alone to their villa, was an impossibility, so a brief but successful Scandinavian tour was organized. During that tour, World War II broke out, but they were lucky to get on a ship and secure passage back to America in October of 1939. Surrounded by refugees in far worse straits than they, the von Trapps were profoundly grateful to return to New York; unfortunately, they were detained at Ellis Island for three days, after Maria made an injudicious remark about wanting to stay in America forever. Finally sprung from their detention thanks to the intervention of a Catholic charity, they were on their way to tackle another series of concert tours.
Although the nationwide concert tours were successful with audiences and critics, Maria had a suspicion that they might do better, and she contacted the manager of Columbia Concerts, Inc., one of the most formidable booking agencies in the country (they are even more formidable now as Columbia Artists Management). Their manager at CCI, Freddy Schang, had his own suspicions—that the von Trapps might be more commercially successful if they could meet their American audiences halfway by adding more Englishlanguage folksongs to their repertoire, sprucing up their costumes and makeup, and behaving less formally and more spontaneously with audiences. Normally, Maria would have planted her feet and refused to change her routine, but wisely, she listened instead an
d sealed the deal with Schang. He redubbed them the Trapp Family Singers—a more accessible name, considering “von” was not a big help during World War II—and started them on a series of concert tours that would bring them fame and accolades from coast to coast.
In addition to their undeniable talent, the Trapp Family Singers were lucky in that their American concert tours coincided with a new nationwide fascination with folk music and the way that it broke down the wall between highbrow and popular culture in America. American audiences also sympathized with the von Trapps as a group of refugees who had made something of their lives in their new country, and celebrated their endangered culture by singing about it. By 1944, the von Trapps had become as acclimatized as possible in America; with their first $1000 in profit they bought a farm in the ski country of Stowe, Vermont, and began extensive renovations. Maria and the children also formally applied to become United States citizens. Perhaps most indicative of their new status as Americans, they became, as Schang had hoped, a commercial success. The Trapp Family Singers were Columbia’s most successful choral group, averaging more than a hundred concerts a year during the war, and averaging fees of $1000 per concert.
The rechristened Trapp Family Singers on a 1946 tour to San Francisco. The group’s resident musical genius, Father Wasner, is seated in front of the tour bus, to the left of Georg von Trapp.
The Trapp Family Singers’ career continued after World War II and they made sure to portray both their family and religious traditions in their advertisements.
Both families and performing groups grow and change, and a performing family might well evolve more than most. When the war was over, the von Trapps grew in unexpected directions. The family was offered the chance to move back into their villa in Aigen but during the war it been had commandeered by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the nefarious Gestapo, who had turned it into a mini-fortress. Best to let it go, thought the von Trapps, and they sold it to a religious group, St. Joseph’s Seminary, who control the estate to this very day. Some of the children decided to move on to other professions or start families of their own, and so the Family Singers, with the help of the inestimable Father Wasner, altered the vocal arrangements and brought in new recruits, including the three youngest children. Then, on May 30, 1947, the family suffered its greatest loss to date—the death of their dear patriarch, Georg von Trapp. He was interred on the Stowe estate, buried with the regimental flag of his submarine command which meant so much to him.
The Trapp Family Singers persevered, in various incarnations, for nearly another decade, touring three seasons a year, then summering at their home in Vermont, which they had turned into a massive Alpine chalet and resort lodge. One thing that had always made the von Trapps distinct from other vocal groups was the depth of their religious devotion. After a tour to Australia and New Zealand, Maria began to see that there was a higher purpose in life: “we thought our work had come to an end, [and then] we began to see a new beginning,” wrote Maria in her memoirs. Exhausted after nearly two decades of touring and trying to hold an expanding family together, Maria heeded the call of a Catholic charity in New Guinea and disbanded the Trapp Family Singers after their 1955 tour. She, Father Wasner, and three of the children devoted themselves to God full-time and became missionaries on the other side of the world.
The saga of the Trapp Family Singers might well have ended there, leaving behind as their only cultural legacy a few long-playing albums of their repertoire and some happy memories in the hearts of a few hundred concertgoers. But, in 1948, Maria von Trapp was commissioned by an American publisher to recount the saga of her journey to America with her talented family. The Story of the Trapp Family Singers became a bestseller and its appeal did not go unnoticed.
During the twenty years that the von Trapps performed in America, much had changed in the country’s cultural landscape. There had been several musical revolutions, such as bebop and rock ’n’ roll, although the Trapps’ repertoire would have kept them far above the fray. One of the greatest evolutions in form had been visited upon the world of musical comedy. Beginning in 1943, an influential style of musical narrative took over the world of Broadway. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in Oklahoma!, a show’s story would become the most important guiding principle of the musical rather than its stars, songs, or dance numbers. One might still encounter a throwaway musical number such as “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” but that kind of moment was getting rarer and rarer, thanks in no small part to the standards promoted by Rodgers and Hammerstein in subsequent shows, such as Carousel and The King and I. By the end of the 1950s, the shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein were not only the most critically acclaimed of Broadway musicals, but the style of their shows became the dominant theatrical form for musicals around the world.
The focus on musical narrative challenged Rodgers and Hammerstein’s peers to produce ever more sophisticated work. In 1943, Mary Martin herself returned to Broadway after a brief sojourn in Hollywood to star as a goddess thrust into wartime Manhattan in One Touch of Venus, scored by another émigré who had escaped Hitler, German composer Kurt Weill. A decade later, she played the ageless sprite in a musical version of Peter Pan, which was subsequently restaged for network television to huge acclaim. But her greatest success of this period came when she joined Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1949 as the heroine for their groundbreaking look at romance and racial prejudice in South Pacific. Martin’s uncloying innocence was thrown a complex challenge when her all-American, corn-fed character is forced to confront the depths of her own racial prejudice. The musical was nearly as great a success as Oklahoma!, running 1,925 performances and, for her efforts, Martin was awarded the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical.
Martin had known, revered and adored Oscar Hammerstein II since her early Hollywood stint in the 1930s, and South Pacific only cemented her mutual lovefest with, as she referred to them, Dick and Oscar. As friends and colleagues, the three were eager to work together again at some point. By the late 1950s, Martin was sorely in need of a successful project; a European tour and American revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, in which she starred, had crashlanded on Broadway. She and her husband/manager Richard Halliday let the word go out that Mary Martin would indeed be interested in returning to the musical stage—if the project were attuned to the sensibilities of a musical-comedy leading lady in her early forties, and if it could be up to the standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein, so much the better.
Vincent J. Donehue was a friend and colleague of Martin’s and a Tony-winning director. In the late 1950s, he was under contract to Paramount to develop projects for movies and television. One day, Donehue had an appointment to look through various properties owned by Paramount to see if anything might be made of them. He was shown two German movies based on the memoirs of the Baroness Maria von Trapp; they were called Die Trapp Familie and its sequel Die Trapp Familie in Amerika. Neither movie had been released in America, but they were quite successful in Europe, and Paramount wondered if an English-language remake could be made out of them, maybe as a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn. Donehue thought the story of the von Trapps would indeed make an excellent vehicle, but not for Hepburn and not for the movies; he went back to the East Coast and promptly screened the movies for Mary Martin and Richard Halliday.
It was exactly the kind of vehicle that the Hallidays had been searching for. They set about trying to contact Maria von Trapp’s agent to make her an offer for the stage rights to her story, but they had no way of knowing that Maria had essentially renounced show business and was now deeply engaged in performing missionary work in, of all places, the South Pacific. Maria and Father Wasner were working in various jungle missions and every time they checked in at a major mission station there was a letter from two people named Martin and Halliday in America about something called a Broadway show. She simply tore up the letters and concentrated on her chosen vocation.
Months later, Maria and Father Wa
sner returned to the United States by ship and docked in San Francisco. Astonishingly, they were met there by Richard Halliday and were given two tickets to see Mary Martin at the Curran Theater in a touring production of Annie Get Your Gun. What a change of pace from Papua New Guinea! Maria was impressed by Martin’s talent, but could no more see Martin playing her than she could picture herself going onstage and singing about target shooting. She confessed to the couple that she had negotiated away the stage and screen rights to the German producers of Die Trapp Familie for the paltry sum of $9,000. She told the Hallidays that they were welcome to give it a go, but she herself had more important work to do and returned to the family lodge in Vermont.
The Hallidays were extremely close to Broadway producer Leland Hayward, a former agent who had been equally popular with serious dramas, such as A Bell For Adano, and musical comedies, such as Ethel Merman’s Call Me Madam. Hayward also had a huge success as a co-producer on South Pacific. It was there that he began his professional collaboration with Martin and went on to work with her on Peter Pan as well as on an extremely successful television “spectacular” starring Martin and Merman, Martin’s only contemporary rival for Broadway fame. The Hallidays presented their dilemma to Hayward; they had found the perfect property for Martin’s next starring vehicle, but the German producers were proving intractable—and expensive.
Leland Hayward’s producing powers were more well known than his piano-playing abilities, but that didn’t stop a publicist from wrangling a snapshot with Mary Martin leaning on a baby grand.
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