Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  Even after all Oscar had already done to buck established conventions, the show gave him a lasting lesson in the perquisites of performers, who demanded their turn regardless of the exigencies of the plot. Years later, he would describe working with Miller. “I told her everything—gave her the dialogue, acted out scenes, ran through tentative lyrics,” he remembered, “—and when I was through, she looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Hammerstein, when do I do my tap specialty?’” Needless to say, a tap dance was written into the script. Another challenge came when Kern played a bouncy, repetitious melody for Miller that began with a long, sustained high note, a B-natural held for nine beats. What word could be easily sung at such length? Oscar’s answer was “Who,” and the song became a highlight of the first act.

  The show had a raft of troubles in its out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia, but by the time it opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York on September 22, 1925, the kinks had been ironed out and it settled in for a fifteen-month run. Hammerstein plunged into new shows in quick succession, including Song of the Flame (1925), in collaboration with Harbach and with music by Stothart and a hot young composer named George Gershwin; The Wild Rose (1926), with Harbach and Friml; and, most successfully, The Desert Song (1926), with Harbach and Sigmund Romberg. Romberg, a Hungarian Jewish émigré whose Student Prince had been a hit in 1924, had contributed to Broadway revues during the World War I years and would remain a frequent collaborator and lifelong friend to Oscar. The Desert Song was a swashbuckling tale of intrigue in French Morocco, owing more than a little to the Rudolph Valentino “Sheik” craze of the day. It ran for 471 performances and was a critical success but was yet another frivolous and fanciful operetta with a plot that bore only the slightest passing resemblance to real life. Oscar’s next project would be on an altogether different plane and would change the American musical theater forever.

  * * *

  EDNA FERBER’S NOVEL Show Boat had been a sensation upon its publication in 1926, remaining on the bestseller lists for three months. Kern loved the book, and one day in the fall of that year he telephoned Oscar, saying that while he had only finished half the story, he thought it would make an ideal show for them. After working separately to make outlines of the plot, they found that each had chosen the same basic scenes as the spine of the drama, and they set about acquiring the rights from Ferber. Because of the success of Sunny, Broadway’s reigning impresario, Florenz Ziegfeld himself, was willing to take a chance by producing a show that departed dramatically from his usual frothy displays of female pulchritude. That said, Ferber’s book in no way seemed a natural source for a musical play.

  Show Boat is a sprawling, episodic novel, chronicling three generations in the life of a Mississippi River family, from the 1870s to the 1920s. The ebullient leader of the clan is Andy Hawks, captain and owner of the Cotton Blossom, a floating show palace, and his comic foil is his doughty battle-ax of a wife, Parthy Ann. When their leading lady, Julie LaVerne, is revealed to be of mixed-race ancestry and forced off the boat for being married to her white leading man, the Hawkses’ virginal daughter, Magnolia, steps into the spotlight and falls in love with Gaylord Ravenal, a ne’er-do-well riverboat gambler who becomes her own co-star, before abandoning her and their child when his fortunes fall. Working with Kern over many months, Oscar proved a master of artful adaptation, condensation, and plotting. “It isn’t just the controversial subject matter,” Stephen Sondheim would recall. “It’s the fact that he was trying to do something based on reality, instead of some fairy tale.”

  Oscar was delighted to be working with such rich and rewarding material, and he dug into the libretto and lyrics. In one small but typically telling example, Hammerstein turned one of Ferber’s almost throwaway asides into a revealing scene that helped propel the story. In the novel, Magnolia loves to sing Negro spirituals in the kitchen with Queenie and Jo, the showboat’s black servants. Catching them all singing one day, Mrs. Hawks is appalled, declaring, “I don’t know where you get your low ways from! White people aren’t good enough for you, I suppose, that you’ve got to run with blacks in the kitchen.” In his libretto, Oscar heightened this moment by having Julie sing to Magnolia an old folk song she loves, only to have Queenie interrupt, demanding to know why Julie is so familiar with a song that she herself has never heard anybody but black folk sing. This not only has the effect of foreshadowing the dramatic confrontation to come, but “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” is a song of marvelous power and economy.

  In this helpless lament of a lover who knows all too well the pain she’s in for, Oscar also employed a device he would use over and again in his career: repetition to heighten the impact of a sentiment. The first two renderings of the phrase “Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine” do not rhyme with anything that comes before them, and thus stand out. Only at the very end of the refrain does Hammerstein rhyme “mine” with “fine” and “shine” in a final resolution.

  Seeking to tie the story of Show Boat together with the geographical feature that runs through it, Oscar devised a hymn to the Mississippi itself—a notion that appeared nowhere in Ferber’s book, and one that he made powerful by an even more sparing use of rhyme. The opening lines of the song, “Ol’ Man River,” written in dialect that may fall heavily on today’s ears but was intended to be a sympathetic hymn of weary resignation and “implied protest,” prove the point. The first rhyme comes ten lines—and forty words—into the song. Hammerstein himself explained his aim: “If a listener is made rhyme-conscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song. If, on the other hand, you keep him waiting for a rhyme, he is more likely to listen to the meaning of the words.”

  For her part, Ferber would never forget the first time she heard Kern play and sing the song, in his true but reedy voice. “The music mounted, mounted, mounted, and I give you my word my hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama,” she would recall. “This was great music. This was music that would outlast Jerome Kern’s day and mine.” They were great lyrics, too. Once, a perhaps apocryphal story goes, someone within earshot of Hammerstein’s second wife mentioned “Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River.’” She was quick to retort, “Oscar wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’ What Mr. Kern wrote was la-la-dum-dum, la-la-dum-dum.”

  Oscar himself was ambivalent about whether lyrics could properly be considered poetry. Though written in verse, a lyric’s words are not meant to be read silently or recited aloud, but sung—and their cumulative power is inextricably linked to the music that accompanies them, and that inevitably heightens their effect (or exposes their weaknesses). In his best work, Hammerstein seemed to understand this instinctively, keeping the words as simple and conversational as possible, allowing the music to do the work. In this, he was the polar opposite of the most pyrotechnic wordsmiths among his peers (Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, E. Y. Harburg), who called attention to their work in ways that he did not. Richard Rodgers, attempting to contrast the work of Hammerstein and Hart, whose lyrics could express both joy and heartbreak through complex and coruscating internal rhyme schemes, once said, “I think the basic difference between the two men was that Oscar was interested in the what. And I think Larry was interested, even more, in the how. How do you say it. Oscar was interested in what do you say. Larry had a peculiar, exciting way of saying things. Oscar said them with a great deal more purity.”

  That purity went hand in hand with a simplicity that Stephen Sondheim would call “naked plain-spokenness,” a quality that has left Hammerstein’s lyrics vulnerable to the barbs of sophisticates over the decades. “Hammerstein’s work is full of life, but not liveliness,” Sondheim once wrote. “He is easy to make fun of because he’s so earnest.” Hammerstein himself once explained his success as a lyricist by saying that his own vocabulary was not enormous, and that a bigger one might well have hampered him, or persuaded him, as Philip Hamburger wrote in the New Yorker at the height of his success, “to substitute ‘fantasy,’ ‘reve
rie,’ ‘nothingness,’ ‘chimera,’ ‘figment,’ or even ‘air-drawn dagger,’ for the simple word ‘dream.’”

  Show Boat opened on December 27, 1927, to rave reviews. John Byram in the New York Times declared that the show had “about every ingredient that the perfect song and dance concoction should have.” The Herald Tribune pronounced it “a beautiful, colorful and tasteful production.” But the New York American’s reviewer may have been the most perceptive: “Here at last we have a story that was not submerged in the trough of musical molasses; here we had a ‘book’ the humor of which emerged naturally and the unusual quality of which struck one as something peculiarly different.… Show Boat is going to have a wonderful sail—no storms—no adverse winds—nothing to keep it from making port—goodness knows when. I don’t.”

  Broadway would never again be quite the same. Neither would Oscar Hammerstein.

  * * *

  MONTHS EARLIER, HAMMERSTEIN’S personal life had taken a tumultuous turn. An unexpected delay in the opening of Show Boat (Ziegfeld had initially wanted it to christen his new Ziegfeld Theatre, but when a show called Rio Rita was finished first and proved a solid hit, he changed his mind) had left Oscar at liberty. On March 2, 1927, his marriage to Mike increasingly strained, he headed alone to London on the SS Olympic to supervise production of The Desert Song at the Drury Lane. His boyhood friend Howard Reinheimer, who was now also his lawyer, had come to see him off. As they boarded, Reinheimer introduced Oscar to Henry Jacobson, a diamond merchant, and his wife, Dorothy, a tall, red-haired, blue-eyed former showgirl who didn’t pay much attention and hoped she’d not be stuck with an unattached stranger on the crossing. But the next morning, when she saw Oscar again on deck and got a good look at him, she would recall, “it was like the rivers rushing down to the sea.” “He looked at me and I looked at him, then I really saw him, and he said, ‘If I was a little boy at school and you were a little girl at school, I’d carry your books home for you.’” It was love at first sight, a love of the sort Oscar would later describe so powerfully in the song “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  Dorothy Marian Kiaora Blanchard had been born in Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia, the daughter of a ship’s pilot who would ply his trade in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. When she and Oscar met, she was just shy of twenty-seven, four years younger than he. She had had a brief early marriage to an Australian infantry officer whom she divorced for desertion in 1922, before heading to New York where she joined the cast of André Charlot’s Revue of 1924, an English musical starring Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie. She toured for a year as Lillie’s understudy, then met Jacobson, with whom she now had a young son, Henry Jr.

  On the ship, Oscar and Dorothy compared notes on their marriages, neither of which was particularly happy, and in London they met often, realizing that the bond between them was no mere fling. When Myra herself later arrived in London, Dorothy was shocked to hear her privately confess that she’d just left a lover in New York. Once the two couples were back in America, Oscar and Dorothy saw each other when they could, and Henry Jacobson, who knew about the affair, even proposed renting a house near the Hammersteins in Great Neck, in the apparent hope that Dorothy would get Oscar out of her system. Late that summer, she asked Henry for a divorce, but he refused, still certain that the infatuation would pass. That is how things stood as rehearsals for Show Boat began in September, with all parties miserable and unable to resolve the situation. To complicate matters even further, by the end of the year Dorothy was pregnant with a second child, willing to give Henry and her marriage another chance, and told Oscar she couldn’t see him again. Months of agony followed. Dorothy’s daughter, Susan, was born in March 1928, and still Dorothy refused to see Oscar, who could not bring himself to ask Myra for a divorce. Finally, that summer, Dorothy began seeing Oscar again, and in September sympathetic friends felt compelled to tell him of Myra’s long string of affairs.

  “Oscar snapped,” wrote Hugh Fordin, Hammerstein’s biographer. “He couldn’t eat or sleep. He worked all night after working all day in the theater. A few days after his confrontation with Myra, he voluntarily entered Leroy Sanitarium, a small private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Wrapped in sheets, he was given cold baths to calm him and wheeled back to his room, shaking, crying, muttering the names of baseball players. He cried himself to sleep, repeating, ‘It’s not going to lick me,’ over and over to himself. He had no psychiatric treatment, discussed his problems with no one. Within two weeks, he was functioning again, leaving the hospital on occasion in white tie and tails to dance with Dorothy.”

  The next week he checked out of the hospital, and soon after, Myra at last agreed to a divorce. Two months later, Dorothy told Oscar she herself had resolved to divorce Henry and would leave for Nevada, then famous as the capital of the quick divorce, as soon as possible. Her period of required residency in Reno was hellish for Oscar. He wrote fervent love letters, referring to her as a goddess and his “dear, dear, dear darling prize,” and pining for her “dear, lovely breasts.” In another letter he complained that the average cost of a long-distance phone call was running $30 to $100. (Their bill would exceed $3,000, about $42,000 in 2017 dollars.) Two weeks later, he expressed his feelings after a minor spat on one of those calls. “I’ve plunged everything on one horse—shot the works on one roll—and of course I watch it anxiously,” he wrote, adding that he longed to hold her in his arms in “silent, contented hours of understanding.”

  His union with Dorothy would provide the stable domestic foundation that anchored the rest of Oscar’s creative life. Writing to her from Jerome Kern’s yacht Show Boat in Palm Beach on April 29, 1929, he all but ached. “My dear little baby, the strain is getting harder and I can hardly wait until next Monday to kiss you and hold you and realize that I shall never live away from you again,” he told her. They were married in Baltimore two weeks later (the legal complications surrounding Oscar’s own divorce from Myra made a wedding outside New York advisable), and over the Fourth of July weekend, aboard the Show Boat anchored off Connecticut, Oscar distilled his emotions into a love song written for his and Kern’s new show, Sweet Adeline. The title said it all: “Don’t Ever Leave Me.”

  To the end of her life, Dorothy would save the little cards that came with flowers or jewelry, in which Ockie would sometimes address her in a kind of baby talk, signing, “I lud you.”

  * * *

  OSCAR’S HAPPY REMARRIAGE laid the foundation for a loving home environment and cemented his reputation as a friendly paterfamilias, a reputation that he himself would echo in sentimental songs about domestic bliss. Hammerstein’s friend the songwriter and producer Billy Rose once explained, “Asking me what I think of Oscar is like asking me what I think of the Yankees, Man o’ War and strawberry sundaes.” But for those closest to him, especially his children, he was not always so easy to be around. At the end of his life, when he won an award as Father of the Year, he confessed that such an honor might “be a big surprise to our children.” He was hopeless with tools or routine household chores. If his water glass was empty at the dining table, he expected someone else to fill it and it never occurred to him to fetch the pitcher himself. He engaged in verbal and physical teasing with his children that could edge into taunting. James, the son he had with Dorothy in 1931, allowed that Oscar was “a wonderful father to everyone except his children,” and once described him as “a ferocious, mean-spirited, but funny, competitor,” not above stooping to any bit of strategic psychological warfare to win a chess game or tennis match.

  And after his marriage to Dorothy, Oscar was also a frequently absentee father to his two older children, Billy and Alice, who spent time in boarding schools or living with their mother as she shuttled between New York and Europe, while Oscar and Dorothy lived with Jimmy and Susan, her daughter from her first marriage. (Henry Jacobson Jr. lived with his father.) His letters to Myra in this period paint a painful portrait of the practical realities of a broken home.
In one notable case, he quarreled with his former wife’s wish that Billy and Alice spend the summer together. “They are not companionable to each other,” Oscar wrote. “They have a brotherly and sisterly affection that is sufficiently fed by the several visits a year they have been having together. They have not the same interests. They are always picking at each other. Why be theoretical about these things? It is hard enough to figure out how each of them can divide time between you and me without adding a third and unessential consideration.”

  The Kern-Hammerstein partnership had continued profitably, though not exclusively, in the wake of Show Boat, and Oscar also kept writing shows with Romberg—notably The New Moon in 1928, which featured such hit songs as “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Stouthearted Men,” and “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” But the advent of talking motion pictures with The Jazz Singer in 1927 had created a fresh—and highly lucrative—market for musical movies in Hollywood, and by the end of 1929 Oscar had joined the parade of Broadway songwriters and actors who headed west, lured by the promise of easy money and a relaxed lifestyle. He signed a contract with Warner Bros. in which he would write four operettas over two years at $100,000 per picture against 25 percent of the profits, with final approval of each film. But his first effort, Viennese Nights (written with Sigmund Romberg), was a box-office bust, a casualty of Hollywood’s sudden flood of musical offerings. Another film, Children of Dreams, was already in the works and would be released in 1931, but soon after Viennese Nights’ release in November 1930, Jack Warner offered Hammerstein and Romberg $100,000 to buy out the remaining two films on their contracts. Public tastes had changed, and studios now took to advertising movies by promising that they contained no music. Hammerstein found himself on the eastbound Santa Fe Super Chief headed back to New York.