The following year’s show, The Peace Pirates, witnessed a bigger milestone for Oscar, who had written a few of the sketches for his friend Herman Mankiewicz and had made an impression as a black-face comedian. After one Saturday matinee he met a dark-eyed teenage boy, the younger brother of Oscar’s fraternity brother Morty Rodgers. In later years, there would be lighthearted disagreements over whether young Dick Rodgers was wearing short pants or long, but the result of their first meeting is clear: that very afternoon, Richard Rodgers resolved to go to Columbia and write Varsity Shows himself.
For his part, Hammerstein transferred to the Columbia Law School after his junior year and continued to write for the Varsity Shows, but his work was juvenile, betraying few traces of the craft he would later hone so painstakingly. The 1917 show, written in partnership with Herman Axelrod, was called Home, James, and it featured an ethnic comedy number, of the sort typical at the time, called “Annie McGinnis Pavlova,” about a shanty Irish girl who tries to pass as “the pride of the Ballet Russe.” Another effort included this inelegant rhyme:
I want to be a star in moving pictures
Like Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and the other fixtures.
Oscar spent time as a $5-a-week process server for a law firm called Blumenstiel and Blumenstiel, but he was a miserable failure and the job didn’t last. So in the summer of 1917, he approached his uncle Arthur, who had taken over the family theatrical business from Willie, and begged for work in one of his shows. Arthur had promised his brother that he’d keep Oscar out of show business, but his nephew was adamant. “It’s in my blood,” Oscar insisted, “and furthermore I need the money.”
Oscar needed the money, in part, because he had fallen in love with Myra Finn (as it happened, a distant cousin of Richard and Morty Rodgers), whom he had known for years but had recently reencountered at a weekend party at the New Jersey shore. Petite at four feet eleven inches, and two years younger than Oscar, she was known to her friends and family as “Mike” and had a quicksilver personality that was by turns attractive and off-putting. Her parents opposed the match, skeptical of Oscar’s prospects, but the couple persisted, and they were married in the Finns’ apartment on August 22, 1917.
Uncle Arthur had also finally relented, hiring Hammerstein as assistant stage manager for his long-running show You’re in Love, at the princely salary of $20 a week. (Oscar was lucky: the chorus girls of the era earned $18 a week and had to supply their own shoes and stockings after the first pair wore out.) When the show closed that summer, Arthur rewarded Oscar with the permanent staff job of production stage manager, and the younger man quickly set about learning every facet of the trade, working as an office boy and play reader in the daytime and stage manager at night, and looking for any chance to contribute during the rehearsals of new shows. Though Arthur had made him promise not to try to write anything for at least a year, an opportunity arose that fall when the latest Hammerstein show, a bit of fluff called Furs and Frills, ran into trouble out of town. The overworked authors assigned Oscar to write lyrics for the second-act opening. In the end, he wrote only the opening chorus, intended to help the audience returning from intermission get seated as dancers hoofed across the stage at a house party:
Make yourselves at home,
’Neath our spacious dome.
Do just as you please
In twos or threes if you’d rather—
But rest assured you’ll be no bother.
“In those days, it was more of a free-for-all, slapdash kind of thing—the musical comedy,” Hammerstein would recall. “Someone would find a theater un-booked, and someone else would try to whip up a book and music and lyrics and fill the theater if they could.” There were rigid rules of composition: an opening chorus number to let late-arriving audience members be seated, followed by the “ice breaker,” a not very important second number to get the show on its way. The second act of any show was usually written during rehearsals. In time, Hammerstein himself would break and rewrite all of these rules, but for now he was simply soaking up all he could.
“I don’t think I had any high-minded notions that I was going to revolutionize the theater,” he would say. “I think I just did my best with each play. Sometimes it was all right, and sometimes it wasn’t any good at all.”
The newly minted man of the theater stood six feet one and a half inches, quite tall for his day, and, weighing just under two hundred pounds, was slim enough that spring to have been turned down for army service in World War I for being underweight. He was built, as one writer put it, like a football coach, with a face deeply pockmarked and a small gold signet ring on his left little finger. In his prime, he favored English shoes from Peal & Co., and shirts from Turnbull & Asser, and when white dinner jackets were in vogue, he dared to wear a salmon pink one to a Hollywood party. But his principal touch of sartorial flash was a weakness for brightly colored bow ties, “not that he was a dandy,” as his protégé Stephen Sondheim would put it, “he just always looked perfect, patrolling that delicate territory between the casual and the formal.” He spoke in an accent that, to the modern ear, sounds almost dese, dems, and dosey (pronouncing “board” as “bawd,” “working” as “woiking,” and “fast” as “fay-ast”), but that was typical of his social class. He also had a slight speech impediment that tended to blur l’s and r’s.
By the spring of 1919, Oscar was at last at work on a play of his own. Uncle Arthur had read a melodramatic story about a young woman whose efforts to escape her tyrannical family and a drunken lover led her to an engagement to a man she didn’t like and a job in a gambling house before an eventual happy ending with her now-sober true love. Titled The Light, it opened on May 19, 1919, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the headline in the local paper proclaimed it was “not destined to shine very brilliantly,” before moving on to New Haven, where it winked out altogether after just seven performances. But Oscar was undaunted. “When I went into the Saturday matinee, I knew I had a big flop,” he would recall. “There must have been about twenty people in the Shubert Theatre that day. When the ingénue came on, one of her lines was, ‘Everything is falling down around me…’ and at that precise moment her petticoat started falling down. I didn’t wait for the yell that followed. I just ran out of the theater, went into the park, and sat on a bench. While I was sitting there, an idea came to me for a new show, so I started writing it.” Oscar’s determination proved fateful. Barely two months later, Oscar Hammerstein I died of complications from kidney problems at age seventy-three. Soon enough, the grandson’s fame would rival the old man’s.
* * *
THE SHOW THAT Oscar started writing on the park bench was a World War I romance about a veteran of the American Expeditionary Force torn between his love for a woman he’d met in France and his hometown sweetheart. Hammerstein was prepared to write the book and the lyrics, but he needed a composer. He found one in Herbert Stothart, Uncle Arthur’s staff music director. A veteran of the University of Wisconsin music faculty, Stothart was ten years older than Oscar and would go on to acclaim as a Hollywood composer and orchestrator. But the new team’s first task was to persuade Arthur that their show, tentatively titled Joan of Arkansaw, was bankable. They did so by having Oscar read the script aloud, while Herb laughed uproariously on cue at the jokes. The gambit worked, and the pair was off and running, working in the standard method of the day, with the music coming first and the words following. This practice was partly a carryover from the widespread American importation of European operettas, in which English words had to be fitted to preexisting tunes, and Hammerstein would follow the pattern through all his collaborations over the next quarter century, until reversing the order with Rodgers.
The show, by now retitled Always You, opened in New York on January 5, 1920, and the results were pleasing enough to produce sixty-six performances and a ten-city national tour that summer. The music was “catchy and a pretty chorus of girls help to put ‘pep’ into it,” the New York Times decl
ared, adding, “Also, the lyrics are more clever than those of the average musical comedy.”
Always You also taught Oscar a hard-won early lesson. The plots of most musical comedies of this era were paper-thin and often nonsensical, and while the writer of a show’s libretto was typically blamed for its failure, he was given no credit for its success. Yet even the slenderest story lines had to be artfully constructed to make a show work. At the opening night performance of Always You, Oscar was annoyed that some of his favorite jokes prompted only feeble laughter, whereas a joke he’d expect to cause little reaction made a big stir—because the punch line depended on a careful setup in the previous scene. This discovery gave birth to a lifelong conviction: that an audience follows the plot, and is gratified only when the story is well wrought. This was a skill Oscar began honing in earnest with his next collaborator, who would become one of his most important teachers.
Otto Harbach, twenty-two years Oscar’s senior, was the son of Danish immigrant farmers and a graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he was a friend of the prairie poet Carl Sandburg. A onetime aspiring English professor, Harbach had kicked around various jobs in newspapers and advertising before teaming up with the composer Karl Hoschna to contribute songs to Broadway shows. Their notable successes included “Cuddle Up a Little Closer” and “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own.” After Hoschna’s premature death in 1911, Arthur Hammerstein hired Harbach to write the book and lyrics for The Firefly, a project intended for the composer Victor Herbert, who walked out on the job, to be replaced by Rudolf Friml. As Always You embarked on its national tour in the summer of 1920, Arthur was already planning his next show, Tickle Me, a vehicle for Frank Tinney, a famous vaudevillian of the day. Oscar wanted to write it, but his uncle decided to team him up with the more experienced Harbach, who was an advocate of integrating songs into the plot of a show, and of elevating the role of lyricist, who had tended to be subordinate to composers, stars, and spectacle.
It was a fateful collaboration. Harbach, a kind and generous mentor, insisted that Oscar, whose instinct was to write quickly, slow down and think seriously about his goals before putting words on paper. He likened the construction of a musical play to building a fire, in which all the elements—logs, kindling, matches, a good flue—had to come together. Harbach would not only impress upon Hammerstein the importance of strong dramatic values but would also stamp his lyrical diction with the floridity then common in operetta—a litany of dreams, moons, stars, and dew that would resurface in Oscar’s later work, long after he had otherwise moved on to more modern forms of expression.
Together with a third collaborator, Frank Mandel, and with music again by Stothart, Hammerstein and Harbach cooked up a plot in which Tinney, playing himself, accompanied a movie company to Tibet, which provided a backdrop for elaborate production numbers, including one of a giant horseshoe waterfall of glistening soap bubbles, from which a chorus of beautiful girls emerged in the first-act finale. The show opened in New York on August 17, and while the reviews were mixed, they were good enough to sustain a run of 207 performances, no mean feat when the Broadway competition included W. C. Fields and Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.
The next four years of Oscar’s career read like an old-fashioned movie montage, in which calendar pages flip by or front-page newspaper headlines spin around with dizzying speed to denote the passage of time: show after show at the pace of one, two, or even three a year, sometimes written in collaboration with Harbach, sometimes with others. There was Jimmie (1920) about a missing heiress; Pop (1921), a straight comedy about an elderly husband and his thrifty wife; Daffy Dill (1922), a Cinderella story about a poor girl and a rich boy; Queen O’ Hearts (1922), a musical vehicle for Nora Bayes, the vaudeville star who had introduced “Shine On, Harvest Moon”; Wildflower (1923), about a capricious Italian heiress who must control her temper if she wants to inherit her father’s millions; Mary Jane McKane (1923), a musical about a pretty country girl who poses as a plain Jane to get a job in the big city; Gypsy Jim (1924), a drama about a failing attorney and his hypochondriac wife who are saved by an eccentric millionaire; and New Toys (1924), a comedy about a marriage that turns unhappy with the arrival of children.
In this last work, there was more than an element of autobiography, since by now Oscar’s marriage to Myra was on the rocks. They had begun their life together in a small apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan and their first child, William, named for Oscar’s father, was born in 1918. A daughter, Alice, followed in 1921. (Both children were delivered by Richard Rodgers’s father, a leading Manhattan obstetrician.) By 1923, the Hammerstein family had decamped to Long Island’s north shore, first to Douglaston in Queens, and the following year to Great Neck, a leafy enclave on the west shore of Manhasset Bay. Oscar did not yet know it, but Mike had already begun a string of infidelities, including an affair with one of his own collaborators, the British librettist Guy Bolton. Their son William, who was known as Billy, would recall the simultaneous pleasure and discomfort at waking up to find Oscar beside him in the other twin bed in his childhood bedroom instead of the master suite. Many years later, Oscar himself would sum up his feelings in a terse autobiographical jotting. “False values—My fault as well as hers. I am an idiot, but work hard.”
Oscar was later frank to confess that much of his work in this period was none too good. “A Long Island commuter, I prided myself that I could often write the refrain on one trip into New York and the verse on the way back that night,” he would recall. “Not many of these were good songs. I was too easily satisfied with my work. I was too often trying to emulate older and better lyric writers, saying things similar to the things they were saying. It would have been all right if I had been content to imitate the forms of their songs, but the substance should have been mine and it was not. I know that insincerity held me back for several years, and I know that even after I’d had a period of success, it again handicapped me and caused me to have failures.”
As early as Always You, Oscar had diagnosed the shallowness of much of current Broadway fare—the appetite for comely maidens and high-C tenors, jokes and hokum—in a song called “The Tired Businessman.” But he had long aspired to something higher. Oscar admired works like The Merry Widow, Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta, because of its then-daring plot. Its heroine was a widow (and thus not a virgin) who married to save her fictional principality’s fortunes, not for love. Such a story may seem quaint and creaky in the twenty-first century, but it was what passed for realistic in its day. In 1924, Oscar would at last have a crack at such a story himself.
* * *
AS USUAL, THE inspiration came from Uncle Arthur, who had heard tales of an annual winter carnival in Montreal, featuring a spectacular ice castle on the outskirts of town that, at the end of a week’s festivities, was melted by citizens carrying torches. Oscar and Otto Harbach entrained for a Canadian field trip and promptly learned that the story was fiction, but they proceeded to gather local color all the same. Rudolf Friml and Stothart were engaged to write the music, while Oscar and Otto devised a plot that proceeded to break with any number of musical comedy conventions. For one thing, it features a murder. For another, it ends with just two people left standing onstage instead of the usual chorus in full array. The show centers on Rose-Marie, the house singer at Lady Jane’s Hotel in Saskatchewan, who is the darling of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the itinerant fur trappers who frequent the lodge. Though she pines only for the trapper Jim Kenyon, a wealthy rival named Edward Hawley fancies her. He witnesses a murder and scapegoats Jim, but promises to spare him if Rose-Marie will consent to his proposal of marriage. She does, but in the end, the real murderer is revealed and the true lovers reunited.
When Rose-Marie opened at the Imperial Theatre on September 2, the playbill contained an unusual note of aspiration: “The musical numbers of this play are such an integral part of the action that we do not
think we should list them as separate episodes.” The critics liked the results. The New York Herald Tribune was rapturous: “A beautiful and highly colored composite photograph of a three-ring circus and shown to the accompaniment of the most entrancing music it has long been our privilege to hear.” The Evening World singled out Oscar’s contributions: “The fertile brain of Oscar Hammerstein has lent valuable aid to the more experienced Harbach and the collaboration has spelled Efficiency with a capital E.” The show clocked 557 performances, a record-breaking run for the time.
Four months later, in January 1925, Oscar, Myra, Billy, and Alice sailed for England, where Oscar would supervise the London production of Rose-Marie before taking a solo six-week holiday in Paris, cementing a love for that city that would stay with him forever. Returning to New York, he asked Harbach to collaborate on a new show he had in mind. Otto was amenable but asked Oscar first to collaborate on an assignment he had already accepted: a new musical with Jerome Kern, at age forty already the dean and most admired of American popular composers, whose soulful ballads like “They Didn’t Believe Me” and “Look for the Silver Lining” broke away from the European waltz tradition to incorporate contemporary dance rhythms. Classically trained in New York and Heidelberg, Kern was known for lush and soaring melodies that still managed to have a peculiarly American sound. He and Hammerstein had met only once or twice, but at the start of his career Kern had been a piano accompanist for Oscar’s father, Willie. Kern and Oscar hit it off immediately, united by a shared work ethic and love of dramatic storytelling. Their new project was Sunny, a vehicle for Broadway’s reigning musical star, Marilyn Miller, and it told the story of the tangled love life of an English circus performer who comes to America.
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