Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  The King and I is a work whose inspiration and narrative origins are rooted in transfiguration, trickery, misdirection, deceit, artful poses. The musical is, according to its official source credit, based on Margaret Landon’s 1944 novel, Anna and the King of Siam. But when Rodgers and Hammerstein read the loosely plotted book, they weren’t sure it had a strong enough story. Then they saw the 1946 movie adaptation, also called Anna and the King of Siam, which starred Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne, and was written by Sally Benson and Talbot Jennings. Afterward, writes Frederick Nolan in The Sound of Their Music, “Dick and Oscar knew at once it was a perfect vehicle for a musical.” The movie offered a narrative line lacking in Landon’s novel and developed an explicit attraction between Anna and the King, making him more charming. It provided him with an eccentric way of speaking, enriched minor characters, and introduced a subplot of the doomed young lovers Tuptim and Lun Tha.

  But Landon’s novel, despite her prefatory claim that it was “seventy-five per cent fact, and twenty-five percent fiction based on fact,” was based upon two almost wholly fabricated memoirs written by Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872). Those memoirs, as exhaustively demonstrated in Susan Morgan’s 2008 book, Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the “King and I” Governess, were “preposterous,” an “invention.” Morgan writes of Anna’s arrival in the Far East: “At the moment Anna Leonowens disembarked, she reinvented herself. She simply made up a new ‘history’ of her origins and identity, a new biography.” Morgan hits the point hard: “Anna was not an English lady. She was a fake.”

  The real Anna had been born in India, not Wales, in 1831 rather than 1834. She was the child of a young Anglo Indian widow and a deceased English soldier rather than of fully British parents, one of whom was a noble major. Her father died of illness, not in heroic combat, as Anna stated, “cut to pieces by Sikhs who lay in wait for him.” Coming from a background of poverty and illiteracy, she “metamorphosed into the highly literate and polylingual Anna,” and her “fantasy autobiography” is little more than “a charmingly romantic story, complete with a shipwreck and rescue, all aimed at establishing her and her children’s racial and social claims to being British, white, and upper class.” In addition, little of what Anna reports about her five years in Bangkok withstands historical scrutiny. Her summary of Siamese history, biographical sketch of Mongkut, presentation of life in the country, and portraits of its inhabitants are profoundly inaccurate.

  So the enduring musical about a woman transformed by her experience in Bangkok, and transforming the world of Siam on the strength of her character and grit, is based on a movie based on a novel based on a memoir based on lies and falsehoods. Its heroine, so rigorous in defense of her authenticity and honesty, was in actuality a wizard of inauthenticity and dishonesty. Her character may have been strong, but not in the righteous way portrayed. Rather, it was strong enough to sustain an outlandish fraudulence.

  Since the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein wouldn’t have known about Anna’s true backstory, it’s ironic and prescient that Anna’s first song is all about deception. Cheery, charming, “I Whistle a Happy Tune” concerns Anna’s habit of pretending a calmness she doesn’t feel, of whistling to cover up her fears:

  The result of this deception

  Is very strange to tell

  For when I fool the people

  I fear I fool myself as well!

  Eerily, given the real-life Anna Leonowens’s practices, the musical’s Anna closes the song by urging her son to follow a similar course. She’s passing along the legacy of deception as a social tool.

  Hammerstein, who also wrote the play’s dialogue, included numerous scenes in which Anna uses deception. She colludes with the young lovers, abetting their escape from the palace and Tuptim’s liberation from the King’s harem. She stages an elaborate dinner for visiting British dignitaries—with all the trappings of Western manners, behavior, customs of dress, and modes of dining, none of which are in fact customary within the palace—in order to suggest the King’s European civility and to cover up what she knows to be his barbarity. She teaches the children songs and proverbs about the importance of a home, using her lessons as a means to remind their father of his broken promise to provide her with an independent apartment rather than a space in the palace. Her songs routinely celebrate various acts of subterfuge, not only whistling a happy tune to deceive yourself and others, but in “Hello, Young Lovers,” when “you fly down a street on the chance that you meet, / and you meet—not really by chance,” or in “Shall We Dance?,” when a man and woman “say goodnight but mean goodbye.”

  Transformations, ruses, secrets, schemes, an overall mood of foxy cunning dominate the entire play. You’re never sure who’s being straightforward or honest. When we first meet the Kralahome—the King’s prime minister—he pretends not to understand English, duping the newly arrived Anna into revealing too much about her thoughts and judgments as she speaks openly to her son and acquaintances. Called upon to advise the King in matters of diplomacy, Anna gains acceptance only by fooling him into believing her ideas to be his own. Lovers meet clandestinely, hiding from the moonlight. In one of its most memorable scenes, a dinnertime entertainment is presented to the British guests in which Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is transformed into “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a Siamese ballet replete with masks and jeweled headdresses and a buddha who changes a silk scarf into a frozen river. A celebration of Siamese culture and civility is turned into a critique of its barbaric practice of slavery.

  Much of the music written for The King and I was composed to disguise its star’s limitations as a singer. It was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical written for a specific performer, Gertrude Lawrence, who played Anna. According to Rodgers’s autobiography, Musical Stages, Lawrence’s lawyer brought Margaret Landon’s novel to the composer’s attention and “we were concerned that such an arrangement might not give us the freedom to write what we wanted the way we wanted.” Despite this, they went ahead, further troubled by the fact that, as Rodgers knew, Lawrence was a poor singer. “We felt that her vocal range was minimal and that she had never been able to overcome an unfortunate tendency to sing flat.” So Rodgers wrote songs for her “that were of relatively limited range while saving the more demanding arias and duets for those singers whose voices could handle them.”

  Then, in a play designed for Lawrence, and with her appearing as both star and central point of view, they wrote a part for the King and cast the charismatic, versatile Yul Brynner, transforming the play into a vehicle for him instead. Brynner became so identified with the role, performing it on stage nearly five thousand times, winning the leading actor Tony Award, then winning the best actor Oscar in the 1956 film version, and even starring in a short-lived 1972 television series called Anna and the King, that he hijacked a show in which his role was conceived as secondary. As Ethan Mordden notes in Coming Up Roses, his 1998 book about the Broadway musical in the 1950s, “Yul Brynner began to crowd the Annas, and, in two major revivals, it was he who got solo headline billing.”

  Something wonderful

  In our community theater production, my mother played Lady Thiang, the King’s head wife, described in the novel as “the most important of the royal wives.” It was in many respects a dream-come-true for her, because my mother adored the notion of being royalty, even if only through pretense, and she felt quite comfortable being the most important royal woman around. I remember her telling friends of course I’m really almost the Queen, and queenly is how she portrayed the character. It was unjust, my mother said, that the program didn’t bill her, along with Mildred and Blanche—the woman who played Anna—among the show’s stars.

  The role required my mother to perform one operatic piece, “Something Wonderful.” Sung directly to Anna, it’s crucial to the plot, allowing Lady Thiang to reveal why she loves the difficult, capricious King, de
spite his many flaws. “This is a man who thinks with his heart, / His heart is not always wise,” she explains to Anna. Few of his dreams will be realized, but at least he has dreams and believes in them. The King needs love, is capable of giving love, and if loved “he’ll do something wonderful.” These insights soften Anna’s view of him and convince her, at least temporarily, of the King’s humanity and the worthiness of her own role in his kingdom.

  “Something Wonderful” is a tough song to perform. As Thomas Hischak notes in The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, it “has a direct and unfussy lyric while Rodgers’ music soars with emotion.” So its delivery requires both technical precision and a deep clarity of feeling. The song works best if the singer underplays, trusting the power of Rodgers’s music. It was one of those “demanding arias” Rodgers mentioned, “written for a singer whose voice could handle them,” and it presented my mother with a serious challenge. She had good vocal chops, had performed on radio and in the 1930s and in our home for friends, but years of Chesterfields had lowered and coarsened her voice and had combined with extra weight and lack of exercise to limit her breathing capacity. I didn’t know what kind of singer she’d been in her heyday, but for as long as I’d been hearing her, she used song as a means of self-display. Playing for friends in our living room, she would bat her eyes and roll her head, pound on the piano, stand abruptly, and flop back down onto her bench. I was prepared to be embarrassed by her Lady Thiang. But her performance was impressive, and though she had to talk-sing much of “Something Wonderful,” that only made more powerful the moments when she let her voice soar. Having imagined her winking, wiggling her hips, and overemoting, I was astounded by her command.

  I was also muddled by the premise behind the song and its delivery. My mother was being moved to such unprecedented grandeur by her feelings for Mildred Levine? Sure, it was a transmogrified Mildred Levine, but still, I was having trouble seeing past the artifice. And look what Mildred as the King had done to my mother as his wife: married her, shunted her aside for twenty-two other wives, favored the children of other wives, and yet inspired her to maintain this tenacious love. Where was that loyal, loving, forgiving, self-contained version of my mother when we were all at home, where my mother was so angry, volatile, and bitter?

  I couldn’t help wondering about that because, when wearing her bald headpiece, Mildred brought to mind my father. Sometimes I imagined my mother was singing “Something Wonderful” about him, though she always made it clear that she thought he was the most un-wonderful and undeserving man among the hundreds who had courted her. The Greatest Mistake of Her Life.

  While we were rehearsing and performing The King and I in our synagogue on Long Island, my wheelchair-bound father was living five nights a week in a New York City apartment with my brother, having spent the previous two years recovering from injuries sustained in a car wreck. With my brother’s support, he was able to return to work as a factory foreman in Manhattan’s garment district, but commuting two hours a day was impossible. So they came home on weekends, exhausted, and the whole way of life in our family—in the Skloot Kingdom—remained in flux. My father, the diminished leader, seemed nearly powerless, confined, dependent, and my mother was now cavorting with a new and strange leader, Monday through Friday, greeting my father’s weekend returns as a burden, an interruption of her more real life in the theater.

  I tried not to resent him for putting me in the situation of bit player in The King and I and in my mother’s theatrical life. But because my father and brother were gone all week and my mother was going to be at rehearsals, and because my parents were unwilling to let me be at home by myself those evenings, I was forced to participate in the show. I had one line to speak during a classroom scene (“What is that green over there?”), one line to sing solo in “Getting to Know You” (“Suddenly I’m bright and breezy”), and a formal bow to master in “The March of the Siamese Children.” For that, I had to be at rehearsal every night, not at home alone where I promised to do all my homework and three extra-credit reports per week, where I could watch Surfside Six or The Rifleman, Rawhide, or Hawaiian Eye. Or where, as my teenage years began, I could explore feelings connected with seeing Tuesday Weld as Thalia Menninger on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis rather than dealing with Mildred Levine in her various manifestations. Well, at least there was Jacqueline, who did look a little like Tuesday Weld.

  To this day, more than fifty years after The King and I finished its two-night run, I remember all the lyrics to all the songs and can speak most of the dialogue along with the actors on stage or screen. In 1998, when Beverly and I saw Maureen McGovern’s traveling production in Portland, I wept and whispered my way through it despite the glares from those sitting nearby.

  When he has looked at me what has he seen?

  Tuptim, the young woman transported from Burma and given as a gift to the King, voices one of the play’s central themes when she sings “My Lord and Master.” This is a song whose lyrics are completely open about the subject of hiddenness, speaking directly about the gulf between a character’s appearance and reality. Because the King has told her so, Tuptim knows he’s pleased with her. But, she asks, “What does he mean? / What does he know of me?” What pleases him are her youthful looks, smile, and shining eyes, which he assumes to be shining solely for him. These appealing visible signs make Tuptim an acceptable addition to the King’s collection of wives. But she’s withholding her essential self, the part she has given in love to Lun Tha. And though the King may study her as hard as he can, “The smile beneath my smile / He’ll never see.” She has masked her true persona and offered him a conventional, formal image instead. “When he has looked at me what has he seen?” Hurt, sad, abused, Tuptim nevertheless sings a delicate, yearning melody, all the more powerful for its tenderness and poise.

  Ironically, given its roots tangled in inauthenticity and false identity, and its many instances of fraudulence, The King and I is about maintaining an authentic and truthful identity, about knowing and being true to yourself, especially during times of great personal and societal change. It’s concerned with the integrity of the self when that integrity is threatened.

  Anna, newly widowed, newly relocated to a strange and alien culture, is under intense pressure. She’s lonely and grieving, far from home and familiar ways, challenged to instruct the King’s children while also looking out for her son’s best interests, which may not always coincide with the royal family’s. She’s overwhelmed by feelings for her students, for their mothers within the harem, and eventually for the King himself, for whom she feels both attraction and repulsion. He places mercurial and sometimes humiliating demands on her, demands that seem aimed at shattering her pretensions: she’s ordered to grovel like a toad, her head kept in a lower position than his own even when he’s lying on the floor; she must live in his palace rather than in the independent apartment agreed to by contract; she must acknowledge herself as his slave; she’s ordered to be a diplomatic advisor in addition to schoolteacher. These threaten Anna’s sense of independence, authority, and purpose, and she nearly loses herself in the swarm of commands, responsibilities, and conflicts. At the beginning, she can distract herself from it all, whistling her tune. But eventually the threat to her identity is too serious for such remedies, and her musical soliloquies become cluttered with confusion, contradiction, and the feeling that she must leave Siam—with nowhere else to go—before it destroys everything she believes about herself.

  The aging King rules at a time of cultural upheaval as his country, exposed to modernization and foreign influence, threatened by British colonial expansion, drifts away from the certainties that sustained his power. And Anna, whom he has invited into his sanctum, only deepens the threat even as she gains his trust. As Meryle Secrest notes in Somewhere for Me, her biography of Richard Rodgers, the King is “a man at the crossroads: inheritor of a feudal tradition who takes his godlike status for granted, yet cannot help being thrown into doubt by th
e challenge to his set of values that his European schoolmistress represents.” It’s a time when the absolutes that supported his core beliefs are no longer credible. He expresses the dilemma in his great solo number, “A Puzzlement,” about the difference between his simple understanding of the world when he was a boy and the more nuanced understanding he has as King:

  Now I am a man;

  World have changed a lot:

  Some things nearly so,

  Others nearly not.

  The drama being played out by both main characters is one of honest presentation of self. How can each remain true to that self when it is no longer stable? When outside circumstances shift the very basis of self-knowledge? This drama is echoed by the issues affecting other characters as well: the spurned royal wife sustaining herself by love and pride; the young lovers forced apart by an arranged marriage to the King; the Kralahome, resistant to change but recognizing its necessity. All must figure out how to act with integrity, how to change without losing touch with who they are.

  Here at the onset of my teen years, when the chief struggle was to make identity coalesce and stabilize, and then to find an honest presentation of self, I was for two intense months immersed in the inauthentic. Looking back across the five decades, I see that those months were important in shaping my sense of what love might be.

  There was, of course, the music, particularly the haunting, hopeful love songs that give The King and I a quality Ethan Mordden calls “tragic rhapsody.” I was particularly drawn to the young lovers’ two passionate songs, “I Have Dreamed” and “We Kiss in a Shadow.” Both celebrate the power of romantic and erotic imagination, something I was just beginning to appreciate myself.

  Lun Tha opens “I Have Dreamed” by revealing that he has pictured himself in Tuptim’s embrace, has fantasized in ways that even 1950s euphemisms can’t obscure: “I have dreamed that your arms are lovely, / I have dreamed what a joy you’ll be.” He has imagined her intimate voice (“every word you whisper”) and, indeed, feels sure he knows and will enjoy how it will feel to be loved by her. I was pretty sure I understood what he was singing about. And then Tuptim sings the same things back to him. What a revelation that was for me: girls have the same thoughts! Even now, in 2012 and after hearing the songs hundreds of times, when both lovers sing together in the song’s final moment, saying they will love being loved by each other, I feel genuine sensual joy. Imagining love liberated from constraint is at the heart of “We Kiss in a Shadow,” too. The clandestine lovers, unable to express their passion openly, long for freedom: