“Pretty soon we were all shipped back on the Chief, with settlements in our pockets, but having lost not only several years on Broadway but having lost our touch, it was hard for us to get back,” he would recall. “Many of us took several years before we could really get back in the swing of the success we’d enjoyed before.”
That was an understatement. Hammerstein and Kern would have one more success, Music in the Air, a 1932 backstage romance about the music publishing business, but after that, Oscar hit a dry patch that would last for eleven years. He tried a move to London, where his and Kern’s Three Sisters lasted just forty-five performances in 1934. After its failure, Oscar asked Jerry, “What next?” and the answer was “Hollywood. For good.” So the Hammersteins returned to California with high hopes and a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
“Their chief interest is developing me as a producer,” an optimistic Oscar wrote to Myra, explaining, “A producer guides a production from its inception, chooses a story, casts it, confers with the writers and director and supervises their work. He is regarded as much more important than a writer. The money I’m getting now is very nearly the maximum for a writer, but if I make good as a producer I can command more.… Since it is usual to call in several writers on a picture (and I am beginning to see virtues in the idea) it is hard for a writer to build up an individual reputation as he does in the theater. Hence the producer, as the captain of the team, runs off with the honors. For some reason or other I have made a big hit with Louis B. Mayer. He looks upon me as a kind of protégé and keeps talking about grooming me as a producer, telling me to take my time and learn the business at his expense.”
The reality was more discouraging—and, in the end, much more depressing. “The saddest word I know is ‘but,’” Oscar once told an inquiring journalist, and throughout the 1930s his career was one long disappointing but. Hammerstein would work for MGM, Paramount, Columbia, and RKO Radio Pictures, contributing to a half dozen not especially distinguished original films (and some good adaptations, among them a first-rate Show Boat for Universal in 1936), while shuttling back and forth to Broadway to work on a like number of flop musicals with Kern and others. On contract to one studio or another, he was paid by the week, churning out lyrics and treatments, whether they were good or bad, and whether a film ever got produced. “I was selling words instead of gambling with them, speculating with them,” he would say years later. “That wasn’t good for me.” As his successes dwindled, and he felt deepening financial pressure to support two households and a demanding, perpetually restless ex-wife, Oscar’s mood darkened. He complained bitterly to Myra about the cost of keeping up appearances. “In Hollywood above all other places,” he wrote, “their psychology is to think a man unimportant and undeserving of big money if he lives at a modest level and does no entertaining, though God knows I do as little as possible either to give or go to parties.” Later that year, in a letter to his lawyer Howard Reinheimer, Oscar sounded a frankly self-pitying note. “When you come out here,” he wrote, “will you bring my insurance policies and my will, so that we can have a survey of that situation? Also bring the document that I keep asking for, telling me what, if anything, I am worth.”
With his creative energies stymied, Hammerstein channeled his efforts into political activity, helping to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to fight the rise of Hitler, and lending his support, writing skills, and money to a raft of other liberal or left-wing efforts. But he would never forget this fallow period, and correspondence from the time shows him to be hypersensitive about credit, quibbling with a writer for the New Yorker who had failed to give him credit for Show Boat and who answered Oscar’s second letter of complaint by noting his surprise “that you have the interest or the leisure to pursue a matter such as this.”
As failure piled on top of failure, Hammerstein grew more depressed but did not lose his sense of humor. In November 1938 he wrote to his old friend the playwright and producer Hy Kraft, “Forgive me for not writing sooner. I have been so busy producing flops that I haven’t had time for anything else.” And a month later, he told Lester Jacobs of Variety, that “three flops in a row have knocked me out as a possible advertiser” in the trade bible’s forthcoming commemorative edition. In 1939, his and Kern’s Very Warm for May closed on Broadway after only eleven weeks, though it did produce one hit song, “All the Things You Are.” Royalty checks from past successes kept coming in, and Oscar’s muse had not deserted him altogether. After Paris fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Oscar was moved to write a hymn to the city he loved. Kern set the lyrics to music and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1941 after being sung by Ann Sothern in Lady Be Good.
But a hit song here and there could not compensate for a decade’s worth of failed plays. The last straw was Sunny River, a nineteenth-century New Orleans love triangle written with Romberg, which opened three days before Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and lasted just thirty-six performances. Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker pronounced it “a majestic bore,” while Burns Mantle of the Daily News called it “one of the worst books with which musical comedy has been burdened in recent years.”
Oscar was forty-six years old, and his career in musical theater seemed at an end. In 1940 he and Dorothy had bought a seventy-two-acre cattle farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, two hours by car from Manhattan, where Broadway figures like George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart already had country homes. “I was pretty blue,” he would recall. “I just wanted to come down here to the farm and sit around and be alone and think. It’s not easy to hear people say the parade has passed you by.”
On January 2, 1942, a day before Sunny River closed, the show’s producer, Oscar’s friend Max Gordon, wrote to him from Hollywood. “I want you to keep your courage because you and I will still do great things in the theater together but they won’t be musical comedies,” Gordon said. “It is just silly to risk a hundred thousand dollars on what six men are going to say about it in the paper the next day.… I would like you to try to find a play for next season, or to write one. If I have any plays that need an excellent director, you certainly will have a crack at that and, if you set your mind down to write a play, I know you can do it. You cannot afford to waste your time any more with musical shows and I cannot afford to produce them.”
Gordon had no way of knowing just how wrong he was. Only a few weeks earlier, Hammerstein had welcomed a visitor to Highland Farm, an old acquaintance from his Varsity Show days. It was Richard Rodgers, with an intriguing proposal, and Oscar’s luck was about to change.
CHAPTER 2
A Quality of Yearning
There’s a common misconception that you can stand on the top of a mountain and look at a sunset and sit down and write something beautiful. I don’t think it goes that way. I think the sunset, the mountain, the experience all go inside and may not come out for fifty years. But they become part of your knowledge, part of your personality … part of your education, part of your technique … and, eventually, you express yourself.
Richard Rodgers
Richard Rodgers was once asked what he had done before he became a composer. His answer: “I was a baby.” If that is an exaggeration, it is only the slightest one. From his earliest consciousness, he was surrounded by the sound of music, in a “passionately musical family,” and he was, in fact, something of a prodigy.
He was born on June 28, 1902, to William Rodgers, a stolid, respectable upper-middle-class physician, and his wife, Mamie, in the summer bungalow colony of Arverne, on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Like Oscar Hammerstein, he spent his early childhood in Harlem, a prosperous Jewish neighborhood that, he would recall, was then “quite rural,” in the shadow of the same Mount Morris Park where Hammerstein watched the old man climb the bell tower each morning. And like Oscar, he was raised in the household of his maternal grandparents, Jacob and Rachel Levy, who had prospered in the silk trade. That arrangement was an everlasting sore point for Dick’s proud fa
ther, who had struggled to achieve his professional status as his family’s first doctor—indeed, its first educated man—and who chafed at living with his in-laws.
Will Rodgers was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant—the family’s original name was Rogozinsky—who first settled in Missouri, then made his way to New York where he worked as a barber at Delmonico’s, the most elegant Manhattan restaurant of its day. His father died when Will, the firstborn of eight children, was only eighteen, leaving him as the family’s provider. He worked variously as a cloak-and-suiter and a customs inspector on the New York City docks before putting himself through college and medical school, changing his name along the way to William Abraham Rodgers and hanging out his doctor’s shingle in 1893. Three years later, he met and married Mamie Levy and, upon returning from a European honeymoon, set up housekeeping with her strong-willed, frequently feuding parents in a tense ménage, dominated by Dr. Rodgers’s long stretches of hostile silence.
But around the piano, where Dick and his older brother, Morty, gathered with their parents each evening before and after dinner, “there was music every day, every day, every day,” Dick would recall, adding that his mother was the best sight reader he ever knew. “And, curiously, it was show music,” not heavy classical pieces, but the latest piano and vocal arrangements from the popular operettas of the day: The Chocolate Soldier and The Merry Widow, whose lilting waltz score Dick had memorized by age five without ever having seen the show. By age six, he was fiddling around with “Chopsticks,” adding improvised chords and rhythms. His first teacher was his father’s sister Tily, but soon enough he had exceeded her skills and was playing tunes by ear. Around the same time, he saw his first live theater, a children’s production of The Pied Piper, and he was hooked. For the rest of his life, he would equate being in a theater with being in a good mood. “If I’m unhappy,” he would say, “it takes my unhappiness away. If I’m happy, I get happier.”
Dick’s piano playing came to an abrupt halt early in 1910, when he was not yet eight. He awoke one night in agonizing pain, his right index finger swollen to nearly the size of his wrist. When his parents returned home from the theater, his father plucked a scalpel from his office and made “one terrifying slash in the finger to allow the pus to escape.” The cause was osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone marrow, and in those days before antibiotics, there was a real risk of amputation if the wound did not heal and drain properly. For months, Dick’s right arm was in a sling, the wound kept open to drain, until finally a specialist was able to extract a quarter-inch-square piece of pitted bone fragment, and—a year later—reconstruct a new fingertip so that Dick was once again able to play the piano. Decades later, he would wonder if his lifelong tendency to hypochondria was born of the night when a “loving father” suddenly appeared to “cut me savagely with a knife.”
* * *
AS DICK RODGERS matured, so did his musical tastes. His unquestioned idol was Jerome Kern, already considered the quintessential American composer of popular music, whose melodies had an insinuating simplicity that made the filigree of European operettas sound antique. “The Kern scores had the freshness, and I think even as a child I knew that, and it did something for me and to me,” Rodgers would recall. “I think he was a father to a lot of us.” With his collaborators Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, Kern had written a pioneering series of intimate, modern musicals—with titles like Very Good Eddie, Leave It to Jane, and Oh, Boy—staged at the tiny Princess Theatre. Dick first saw Very Good Eddie on its tour of the then-prevalent “subway circuit,” in which recent shows toured New York City’s boroughs after the end of their Broadway runs. He went back half a dozen times. It is difficult to describe the inner mathematical and melodic workings of music in mere words, but Rodgers summed up his feeling for Kern this way: “The sound of a Jerome Kern tune was not ragtime; nor did it have any of the Middle European inflections of Victor Herbert. It was all his own—the first truly American theatre music—and it pointed the way I wanted to be led.”
Dick was an indifferent student. Like Oscar Hammerstein, he spent a summer at the Weingart Institute camp. But the academic institution that fired his imagination was Columbia University, where his older brother, Morty, was a student and fraternity brother of Hammerstein’s. After a matinee of the 1917 spring Varsity Show, Morty took Dick backstage where he met “a very tall, skinny fellow with a sweet smile, clear blue eyes and an unfortunately mottled complexion,” who accepted “my awkward praise with unaffected graciousness and made me feel that my approval was the greatest compliment he could receive.” Dick resolved then and there to go to Columbia, too, and he started out by promptly writing his very first copyrighted song, “The Auto Show Girl,” commemorating Manhattan’s annual automotive exhibition.
The song went nowhere, but Dick was on his way, and by the end of 1917 he had written his first complete musical show, One Minute, Please, for the Akron Club, a social-athletic group to which Morty Rodgers belonged. In his autobiography nearly sixty years later, Rodgers would confess that he really had no idea whether the show was any good or not, “but I thought it glorious.” And so began a long and often disappointing apprenticeship of one amateur production after another, including Up Stage and Down, a 1919 benefit for a charity known as the Infants Relief Society, which played for one night in the ballroom of the old Waldorf-Astoria hotel at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. The lyrics for three of Rodgers’s songs (including one called “There’s Always Room for One More”) were written by that same tall, skinny fellow who had inspired Rodgers two years earlier: Oscar Hammerstein himself. So twenty-four years before their collaboration revolutionized Broadway, they had already taken each other’s measure and worked successfully together.
Rodgers now knew that his unswerving ambition was to write songs for the theater, but he lacked one essential: a collaborator to write the words. He found one on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1919, shortly before Up Stage and Down opened, when Phillip Leavitt, another classmate of Morty’s, introduced him to a twenty-three-year-old Columbia graduate named Lorenz Hart, who was looking for a composer. Dick’s vivid first impressions, recorded decades later, are worth quoting in detail. “The total man was hardly more than five feet tall,” he would remember. “He wore frayed carpet slippers, a pair of Tuxedo trousers, an undershirt and a nondescript jacket. His hair was unbrushed and he obviously hadn’t had a shave for a couple of days. All he needed was a tin cup and some pencils. But that first look was misleading, for it missed the soft brown eyes, the straight nose, the good mouth, the even teeth and the strong chin. Feature for feature he had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was a bit too large for his body and gave him a slightly gnomelike appearance.”
But what really dazzled the sixteen-year-old Dick was Larry’s talk, which was animated, opinionated, and seemingly endless. Leavitt recalled that when he and Dick arrived, Hart was at work on a lyric called “Venus,” with a first line that went something like, “Venus, there’s no difference between us!” and was “always rubbing his hands together, piston-like.” Hart already had firm ideas about what was missing in the Broadway lyrics of the day, having not only written and performed in Varsity Shows himself but having translated the lyrics of German operettas for the Shubert brothers, among the Great White Way’s leading producers. Hart told Rodgers that most contemporary lyrics were childish and witless, poorly rhymed if not actually illiterate, and that the theatergoing public deserved something better. The younger man sat rapt, instantly captivated; then he played a few of his own melodies, at which Hart immediately brightened. As Dick would famously recall years later, “I left Hart’s house having acquired in a single afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a source of permanent irritation.”
Lorenz Hart was born in 1895, the elder son of Jewish immigrants from Hamburg who liked to say they were descended from the poet Heinrich Heine. His father, Max, was a Tammany ward heeler who was no taller than his son, and almost as wide as he wa
s tall. He claimed to be in the real estate business but had actually been convicted for both grand larceny and fraudulent use of the mails, and Larry would genially describe him as “a crook.” Max Hart was variously flush or flat broke, but when in the money spent generously on Larry; his kindhearted wife, Frieda; and their second son, Theodore Van Wyck, named in part for a mayor of New York whom Max had helped to elect, and always known as Teddy. To all of Larry’s friends, the Hart household was a warm and welcoming place, full of food, drink, good fun, and conversation—the polar opposite of Dick Rodgers’s staid and silent bourgeois family. Years later, Rodgers would fondly recall the Harts as “unstable, sweet, lovely people.”
Max Hart’s friends included theatrical luminaries like Lillian Russell, and Larry had begun going to the theater and vaudeville when he was six. Like Dick Rodgers (and Oscar Hammerstein), he immersed himself in the world of show business, seeing every show he could, reading hungrily, learning foreign languages, and falling in love with Kern’s Princess Theatre shows. He was already mastering the intricacies of interior rhymes (in which the matching sound falls in the middle of a phrase, not the end) and feminine endings (in which the rhyme comes on the penultimate syllable of a word, not the last). “I think of him always as skipping and bouncing,” Oscar Hammerstein would recall. “In all the time I knew him, I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his face in repose. I never heard him chuckle quietly. He laughed loudly and easily at other people’s jokes, and at his own, too. His large eyes danced and his head would wag. He was alert and dynamic.” But he was already falling prey to the curse that would cripple him and cut his life short: an inability to control his consumption of alcohol that left him unable to work in the morning, capable of short bursts of productivity after his first drink before lunch, and by late afternoon unable to function. After Larry left the Rodgers family apartment one day, Dick’s mother declared, “That boy will never see twenty-five.” And at a time when homosexual acts were still a crime, Larry Hart was also privately, painfully, and guiltily gay—a secret that he believed would kill his mother if she ever found out.
Something Wonderful Page 5
