Mary Martin and her beloved collaborators, Rodgers and Hammerstein. This is the opening night party for The Sound of Music at New York’s St. Regis Hotel.
Jean Bayless leads the London company of The Sound of Music in “Do Re Mi.” The West End version would run years longer than its Broadway counterpart.
By the time the Broadway version closed in 1964, it had run 1,443 performances, with Mary Martin playing the lead in nearly half of them. The touring company with Florence Henderson performed in thirty-five American cities, canceling its run early, sadly enough, on the day after President Kennedy died. November 23, 1963. A successful production opened in Melbourne, Australia, in October 1961, starring the glorious soprano June Bronhill, and another opened in South Africa in 1963.
Impressive as they were, these triumphs paled next to a brief article in June 1960 in the showbiz bible, Variety. The Sound of Music had been sold to 20th Century Fox for the record sum of $1,250,000. Had the Broadway production, which eventually cost $480,000, not already recouped most of that at the box office, the sale of the movie rights would have instantly put the show in the black. Rodgers and Hammerstein, in their dual capacities as co-creators and producers, made almost $700,000 between them from the movie sale. Among other perks negotiated by the fabled Irving “Swifty” Lazar, agent for the creative team behind The Sound of Music, was a 10 percent share of any motion picture gross in excess of $12,500,000. That negotiation point seemed a waste of time to Howard Lindsay—what picture ever made more than that? Still, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s vehicles did very well at the box office and 20th Century Fox had successfully produced most of the movie versions, winning a slew of Academy Awards in different categories, including five for The King and I in 1956. Any immediate expectations were moot, anyway; contractually the movie could not be released until the end of 1964, to ensure the maximum potential run on stage.
While Maria von Trapp was entertaining little children on Broadway, Elaine Stritch was being tormented by them in Noel Coward’s shipboard musical, Sail Away, in 1961.
The influence of The Sound of Music was starting to be heard in the sound of American music. The original cast album enjoyed a tremendous success. Recorded by Columbia Records the Sunday after the opening, the album was ranked number one for sixteen weeks and remained on the charts for 276 weeks—nearly long enough to share the charts with the movie soundtrack album, which itself stayed on the charts for 233 weeks. The original cast album ranks with My Fair Lady and the soundtrack album to West Side Story as one of the most enduring recordings of Broadway material ever made. The combined sales of the Broadway and movie recordings of The Sound of Music make it the most popular musical score of all time.
Success of any kind brings with it both tribute and mockery and, in 1961, Noel Coward set his expert hand to the latter in his brand-new Broadway show, Sail Away. Although both Rodgers and Mary Martin were fond colleagues of Coward’s, the witty playwright-songwriteractor—who could be quite sentimental himself, given the occasion—had very little tolerance for children, on or off stage. Supposedly, during a very long West End musical with a particularly egregious kiddie actor at the center of it, Coward remarked, “Two things should be cut— the second act and that child’s throat.” He had his chance to get back at all stage moppets—von Trapps, included—in Act Two of Sail Away. The perfect instrument of his revenge was the tart and cynical star Elaine Stritch, a kind of anti-Mary Martin. Playing the beleaguered entertainment director of a transatlantic cruise, Stritch had, at one point in the show, to entertain a score of raucous kiddies in the ship’s playroom. To get them to be quiet she teaches them “The Little Ones’ A.B.C.”:
MIMI:
Try, if it’s possible to keep on key,
Sing the letters after me.
CHILDREN:
Just how corny can you be?
MIMI:
If you sing when you are blue
You find you
Never have to care a rap,
When the skies are dark and grey,
You just say—
CHILDREN:
What a load of crap!
Even without a movie version of The Sound of Music, audiences across the country were familiar enough with the show by 1962 to laugh at a more direct parody. In June of that year, CBS televised a live concert featuring both Broadway’s reigning leading lady and its most recently celebrated comedienne. Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall was a supreme showcase for the singing, dancing, and comic talents of Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett. Although neither woman had yet starred in a feature film or a television series, the Carnegie Hall audience (and their living-room counterparts) ate up Julie and Carol’s antics, which included many duets and several parodies. One of these featured Julie and Carol in Tyrolean peasant frocks and aprons, accompanied by what look like several dozen chorus boys in lederhosen and Peter Pan hats. Andrews stepped forward and announced, “We are the happy Swiss Family Pratt. We sing you a happy song that I used to sing when I was a happy nun back in Switzerland.” As far as Julie Andrews knew at the time, she was simply making fun of the smash-hit musical that was running concurrently with her stint as Guinevere in Camelot. Walt Disney came to see a matinee performance of Camelot and immediately thought of Andrews playing the magical nanny in his next movie, Mary Poppins. During rehearsals of the television concert, Andrews asked Burnett if she thought the Disney movie was a good idea. Clearly she thought it couldn’t hurt, and soon Andrews was off to Hollywood to make her first feature film.
However, by the time Andrews was in front of the cameras, Hollywood seemed to have forgotten completely about The Sound of Music. 20th Century Fox had left its $1,250,000 investment sitting in a file cabinet on the studio lot in Culver City. In 1962, a major box-office smash would have meant the difference between life and death for Fox Studios. Fox was in a precarious financial situation, having installed some less-than-savvy executives who had sunk millions of dollars into the epic movie biography Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As millions of good dollars were being thrown after bad at the Cinecetta Studios in Rome, where Cleopatra was shooting, Fox founder and producer Darryl Zanuck returned to Hollywood with a plan to seize control of the studio, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. The Fox board was thrilled to give the reins back to Zanuck, and he installed his son, Richard, to take over as vice president of production in California.
Julie Andrews’ first encounter with a dirndl: Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall (1962) and “The Swiss Family Pratt,” spoofing another well-known folk-singing group, Carol Burnett is the unenthusiastic “Cynthia.”
Faced with minimal funds, Richard Zanuck pared Fox down to a skeletal staff which roamed the vast studio back lot like it was a graveyard. Resources had to be marshaled to put something into production and Zanuck scoured the studio’s script library to find a potential blockbuster. It had been sitting there all along. “I thought The Sound of Music was such a wonderful piece of family entertainment,” recounted Zanuck to Julia Antopol Hirsch for her comprehensive The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. “And it had been so hugely successful, it was just an obvious thing to do. Even though the studio couldn’t release the picture until the play closed, they could have put a writer on it. What you want to do is have your movie ready for release when your date comes.”
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman had written some of the most hard-boiled screenplays in town; still, he thought there might be a terrific movie in The Sound of Music. Here he is, scouting locations in Salzburg.
It was obvious which writer Zanuck would put on the project. Ernest Lehman was one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters; he had scripted Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and adapted acclaimed screen versions of the Broadway musicals West Side Story and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Besides his impeccable reputation as an adaptor of remarkable fidelity to the original material, Lehman also thought The Sound of Music had huge potential to be a movie success. He an
d his wife had seen it on Broadway a few weeks after it opened and, during intermission, it occurred to Lehman that, despite the drubbing that the musical had taken from the New York intelligentsia, it might work even better on screen. Lehman was as sharp as they come—based on his own hardscrabble experience as a Broadway press agent, he wrote (with Clifford Odets) one of the most cynical movies of all time, Sweet Smell of Success—and if he could open up his heart to a cinematic The Sound of Music, maybe audiences could as well.
After Lehman was officially signed in December 1962, he and Zanuck moved forward to put the pieces of the production together. During their first lunch date to discuss the assignment, Zanuck was approached by Swifty Lazar, who offered to buy the property back for $2 million. Rumor had it that Jack Warner, the head of Warner Bros, wanted to keep The Sound of Music off the market so it would not compete with his upcoming multi-million-dollar My Fair Lady. Zanuck refused the $750,000 windfall. (Fiscal instability must have been on many people’s minds at the Fox studio; when Burt Lancaster encountered Lehman at the Fox commissary a few weeks after the screenwriter had signed his contract for The Sound of Music, Lancaster reportedly snarled at him, “Jesus, you must need the money!”) Zanuck and Lehman now concentrated on directors. Their first choice was Robert Wise, a much-respected director who started as an editor and, early in his career, edited Citizen Kane. Wise had just won an Academy Award as Best Director for West Side Story (with codirector Jerome Robbins); Lehman had enjoyed his collaboration with Wise on that picture, but Wise was busy preparing a huge blockbuster for Fox already, a naval epic called The Sand Pebbles.
Zanuck and Lehman went down the list of successful directors of movie musicals and were rejected by both Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. Then, Zanuck’s father, Darryl, suggested William Wyler. Although Wyler had never directed a musical before, he was a titan of Hollywood’s golden age, having helmed such classics as The Little Foxes, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur. He was also a German émigré, having arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s, and paid his dues working on Westerns. Lehman thought it an inspired idea and took Wyler to see the show on Broadway, which proved not to be such a great idea—Wyler hated it. But he kept asking Lehman to talk him into the project, so in May 1963, armed with an outline of the script, Wyler, Lehman, and Roger Edens, a highly regarded musical supervisor and arranger during the glory days of the MGM musical, flew to Salzburg to scout locations that could bring the project to life. The trip would later prove to be a profitable one for the eventual look and success of the movie, but when they returned in September and Lehman submitted a first draft to Wyler, Fox was no closer to sealing the deal with the director. Suddenly, books on martial history appeared on Wyler’s desk, and Zanuck and Lehman were concerned that Wyler had become preoccupied with the events of the Anschluss. It became clear that, for Wyler, the historical events were more persuasive than the musical ones in The Sound of Music. Zanuck and Lehman’s concerns were rendered moot by the fall of 1963; Wyler took another movie, The Collector, and left the partners holding the bag of a multi-million-dollar movie without a director.
Director Robert Wise had made his initial reputation as a movie editor—one can practically see him cutting the movie together in his head as he helms the early Hollywood shoot of The Sound of Music. Sadly, Lehman and Wise, the two men who contributed so much to the success of the movie, died within three months of each other in 2005.
As luck or chance would have it, Robert Wise’s picture for Fox, The Sand Pebbles, was experiencing production difficulties and had been postponed. Lehman used this opportunity to unofficially slip a draft of The Sound of Music to Wise. Wise, to his surprise, was impressed by what Lehman had done and started listening to the cast album of the Broadway show. He sought advice from a friend and colleague, Saul Chaplin, whose musical acumen on movie projects was second to none. Chaplin, who had worked as associate producer on the movie of West Side Story, had not loved the Broadway version of The Sound of Music but he loved what Lehman had done with it, so he encouraged Wise to go ahead. The director signed his contract in November 1963. With the hopes of getting cameras rolling by spring 1964, Wise and Chaplin took a jaunt to Salzburg to scout locations.
With Wise signed, the new creative team had to think seriously about casting. Mary Martin, who had not made a movie in nearly twenty years, was clearly not an option to play Maria. Doris Day, then at the height of her box-office power, was being pitched heavily by her agent. Other names considered were Leslie Caron, Anne Bancroft, and Shirley Jones, but the name of Julie Andrews kept cropping up. Andrews had been notoriously passed over for the chance to reprise her famous role as Eliza Doolittle in the movie of My Fair Lady, in favor of Audrey Hepburn. Still, by early 1964, she already had two movies in the can awaiting release— Mary Poppins and The Americanization of Emily, initially slated to be directed by William Wyler. Robert Wise recounted the talent search in a 2005 documentary:
I knew about Julie. I heard about her. I’d never met her, never seen her. There was a certain rumor around town that she might not be as photogenic as she ideally could be. Well, this gave us pause. So we got an okay to call the producer of Mary Poppins, asked if we could come over and see some of the cut film to see how she was. So I went over there with Ernie Lehman and Saul Chaplin to see it. And we saw two or three minutes of it, and the minute she came on, that was it, no question. We went right back to the studio and said, “That’s our girl. Sign her.”
Soon after contract negotiations began with Julie Andrews, Wise, Lehman, and Chaplin visited Richard Rodgers in New York. Rodgers was so averse to having his properties tampered with by Hollywood that he and Hammerstein produced the movie version of Oklahoma! themselves. It still did very little to mollify his unease about the movies, but as the only living member of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team, not only was his permission required to make certain changes, but his creative advice would be invaluable. Rodgers was very open to writing two new songs for the movie—in the years since Hammerstein’s death, he had tried his hand at crafting lyrics as well as music—and the movie team was thrilled by his enthusiasm and collaboration. Then, the conversation steered round to casting the part of Maria von Trapp.
Rodgers, who could be as cynical as anyone, looked at Lehman and snorted, “I suppose you’re going to cast Doris Day, huh?”
The King and Us. Robert Wise (center) and his associate producer Saul Chaplin (right) pay a crucial visit to Richard Rodgers in New York.
MY FAVORITE THINGS
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings—
These are a few of my favorite things.
Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels,
Doorbells and sleigh-bells and schnitzel with noodles,
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings—
These are a few of my favorite things.
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,
Silver-white winters that melt into springs—
These are a few of my favorite things.
When the dog bites,
When the bee stings,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad!
Amazingly, this key number in the movie was filmed on the second day of shooting.
“Happy Song” is not much of a title, but in Oscar Hammerstein’s early outline for the show, he clearly intended for Maria to sing something upbeat in the middle of Act One. Audiences who know “My Favorite Things” only from the movie version would be very surprised at how this quintessentially upbeat number appears in the Broadway show. Before Maria ventures forth to the von Trapp villa for the first time, she and the Mother Abbess bond by sharing a song about their favorite things from their respective childhoods, so, originally, the
re was nary a von Trapp child in sight during the entire number. (And no Salzburger worth his salz would ever think fondly of schnitzel with noodles—the dish does not exist in Austria.)
Nearly a year after the show opened, the sound of a different kind of music was recorded. John Coltrane was the major avant-garde saxophonist of his time, but as the 1960s dawned, he was actually experimenting with a return to melody. Coltrane went into the Atlantic Records studio to lay down some tunes for a new album. For his first cut, he chose Rodgers’ lilting waltz, “My Favorite Things.” With his sidemen McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Steve Davis, he doubled the time to 6/8 and turned the tune into an extended fourteen-minute riff, weaving in exotic East Indian phrasings and transforming it into a jazz standard. At once respectful and iconoclastic, Coltrane brought the sheer pleasure of Rodgers’ musical architecture to thousands of listeners who would not be caught dead inside the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.
In the movie version, screenwriter Ernest Lehman made a simple and brilliant “swap” between “My Favorite Things” and “The Lonely Goatherd.” In the stage version, Maria sings “The Lonely Goatherd” on her first night at the villa in order to cheer up the children during a thunderstorm. According to Julie Andrews, in the 2005 documentary “My Favorite Things:”
Ernie thought that it would be so much better, from the point of view of the lyrics and everything else, to use “My Favorite Things.” What better way to cheer children up than to take their mind off the storm outside and to talk about all the things that you love and that make you feel cozy and comfy? I think it was an inspired decision.
The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical Page 7