Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  “Oklahoma,” in the big eleven o’clock slot near the end of the show, had been conceived as a solo for Curly (after Aunt Eller’s introduction), but Mamoulian thought it was falling flat. Then a member of the ensemble, Faye Elizabeth Smith, had a suggestion for Rodgers: What if the whole chorus joined in? Dick liked the idea, and to carry it out he turned to the show’s incomparable orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett.

  An orchestration is to a melody line what a finished oil painting is to an artist’s first charcoal or watercolor sketch, the polished composition that fleshes out the subtle harmonies of color and sound that surround and expand and enhance the painter’s flash of inspiration. Leonard Bernstein once described the cadre of top-flight Broadway orchestrators as a corps of “subcomposers who turn a series of songs into a unified score.” Even a symphonically trained composer like Bernstein did not generally arrange his own music for the theater, and while Rodgers theoretically possessed the technical knowledge to have done so himself, he much preferred to focus on the thousand and one tasks that creating an original musical play required, instead of deciding what the oboe part should sound like. “Arrange me a hit!” Rodgers liked to say, quoting an apocryphal songwriter who threw down a blank piece of manuscript paper to his orchestrator. The assertion was true enough, as Bennett himself was the first to acknowledge, noting that no orchestrator could work his magic “when the tunes are not good tunes and the poor desperate souls look up to you with big eyes and say they know you will make it all sound wonderful.”

  But Bennett, a musical polymath who grew up playing piano, trumpet, trombone, violin, and organ in dance bands and silent movie houses before establishing longtime collaborations with the likes of Jerome Kern and Cole Porter (and a close friendship with Hammerstein), knew that the reverse was just as true. He had been born in Kansas City in 1894 and by age ten was playing cornet in his father’s band. He went on to study composition in Paris and remained a lifelong musical snob. He once wrote that “twenty-seven bars of Beethoven’s Opus 84” was “worth the whole output of musical comedy since I started working on it.” He explained modestly that his trade secret was to approach a Broadway composer’s music “with the least possible embellishment,” but he was also under no illusions about the ultimate importance of his work to the success of a show. “Mother brings a beautiful baby into the world, nourishes it, brings it up into a radiant, enchanting young girl,” he wrote of a typical Broadway composer. “But she suffers because she never learned to design her daughter’s clothes.”

  On this show, Bennett’s contributions were palpable and essential. Working with de Mille and using Rodgers’s basic tunes, he wrote the score of the ballet, including its ominous, funereal finale, and he was still frantically orchestrating the piece on the eve of the New Haven opening. An orchestrator’s pay was good—perhaps $100 for a typical ballad, more for a complicated dance number—in an era when $100 a week was a more than respectable salary even in Manhattan. But not until the mid-1950s would orchestrators receive royalties on even the longest-running or most successful shows, from which a composer might make millions, so the work was grueling and often thankless. “Either write fast or do without much sleep, or both,” was one of Bennett’s rules for success in his trade.

  When Rodgers summoned him to rework the “Oklahoma” number, Bennett had already returned to Manhattan from the tryout run. So he hopped a train for Boston on Sunday morning, March 21, and by the time he reached Old Saybrook, Connecticut, he had worked out the basic eight-part vocal arrangement of the song—including an inspirational ending all of his own devising, in which the chorus undertook a driving, rhythmic spelling lesson—chanting “O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A” before singing a final, glorious, “Oh-klah-HOHHHH-mah!”

  When Bennett arrived at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, he handed his chart to the conductor, Jay Blackton, who taught the harmonies to the chorus as quickly as possible, while de Mille staged the song with the entire cast moving down to the footlights in a kind of flying wedge. When the revised number went into the show on Monday night, the effect was electrifying. Blackton, conducting in the pit, couldn’t see the reaction of the audience behind him. “But I certainly could hear it!” he remembered. “Amazing!”

  * * *

  MEANTIME, DE MILLE and a big chunk of the cast fell ill with German measles, while Dorothy Hammerstein was hospitalized with a raging fever of unknown origin. Still, Oscar was cautiously optimistic, writing to his son Bill, “I think I have something this time.” A few days later, on March 25, Hammerstein elaborated, saying that the show had suddenly taken on “the aura of a hit” and would be a worthy heir to Show Boat. “I don’t believe it has as sound a story or that it will be as great a success. But it is comparable in quality and may have a very long life. All this is said in the hope that a handful of beer-stupefied critics may not decide that we have tried to write a musical comedy and failed. If they see that this is different and higher in its intent, they should rave. I know this is a good show. I cannot believe it will not find a substantial public. There! My neck is out!”

  There was one last change to come. Before leaving New Haven, the producers had already decided that Away We Go was the wrong title for the show, but there was no time to alter the playbills and posters for the Boston run, so an alternative would have to await the New York opening. Among the options floated by Langner and Helburn: Swing Your Honey, One Two Three, Party Tonight, and Singin’ Pretty. It is not clear who came up with the idea of calling the show Oklahoma. Betty Garde would insist she had been the first one to broach it, over dinner at Gallaghers Steakhouse while the show was still in rehearsal in Manhattan. By the middle of the New Haven run, everyone was on board with the idea. But now there was another fillip: Late one night, Helburn called from Boston to tell Joe Heidt and Helene Hanff of the Guild’s publicity department, who were working in unheated offices to save money, to say that the decision had been made to add an exclamation point, to make the title Oklahoma! The word had already been reproduced three times on each of the ten thousand press releases that had been prepared for mailing to Guild subscribers, so Hanff set about inking in thirty thousand exclamation points by hand, while Heidt called printing firms and sign painters all over town to get them to change the copy.

  A lot was riding on that single burst of punctuation. Would Broadway audiences be carried along?

  On Wednesday, March 31, Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein went for a walk around the farm in Doylestown before heading into Manhattan for the opening that night. “I don’t know what to do if they don’t like this,” he told her. “I don’t know what to do because this is the only kind of show I can write.”

  * * *

  IN NEW YORK that morning, it had begun to snow, and it continued to snow all day, turning into a cold, wet drizzle as night fell. The fourteen hundred–odd seats of the St. James Theatre were far from full. Cast members were urged to invite their friends to see the show for free, to fill the house. Agnes de Mille had bought ten front-row balcony seats and couldn’t figure out how to get rid of them all. Servicemen headed for the nearby Stage Door Canteen on West 44th Street were dragged in off the pavement, and some young dancers roped in three of their friends—Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Judy Tuvim (soon to be Judy Holliday), who performed in a comedy troupe called The Revuers—and bundled them into the theater under a marquee blacked out by wartime regulations. The management had given strict instructions that no one was to be seated during the opening number. De Mille, who was standing at the back of the house holding Rodgers’s hand, would recall that “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” “produced a sigh from the entire house that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in a theater; it was as though people hadn’t seen their homeland, it was perfectly lovely and deeply felt.” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” drew comparable appreciation, but it wasn’t until “The Farmer and the Cowman” at the top of the second act that the house went wild, “and the audience just screamed and hollered and Dick and I were the
re hugging each other, and somebody rapped me on the back and said, ‘Stop making love to Rodgers and look what’s happening to the theater.’ And they were just whooping and hollering.”

  From there, the excitement only built until Russell Bennett’s rousing choral version of the title song, and the curtain rang down around eleven twenty, and the audience floated out into the night. The cast and creators repaired down the block to Sardi’s to await the reviews, but even before they arrived, a little man wedged his way through the crowd and flung his arms around Rodgers. It was Larry Hart, and he was exultant. “Dick!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never had a better evening in my life! This show will still be around twenty years from now.” He was only wrong by at least half a century.

  The critics were just as effusive. “Wonderful is the nearest adjective, for this excursion,” wrote the New York Times. The Herald Tribune declared, “Songs, dances and a story have been triumphantly blended … a jubilant and enchanting musical,” while the Daily News called the show “the most thoroughly and attractively American musical comedy since Show Boat. It has color and rhythm, and harmony plus.”

  Jules Glaenzer, a Cartier executive who had played host at some of the early backers’ auditions, gave an opening night party in his apartment after the gathering at Sardi’s. When Rodgers arrived, Glaenzer offered him a drink. “No, thanks, Jules,” the composer said. “I’m not going to touch a drop. I want to remember every second of this night.” He stuck to ginger ale.

  The next morning, Mary and Linda Rodgers would recall, newspapers were spread all over their parents’ bedroom at the Volney Hotel on East 74th Street. Though it was a school day, their mother took them horseback riding and to the Central Park Zoo to celebrate with a lunch of frankfurters. Dick and Oscar met at the St. James around noon, and there was pandemonium, with a line of ticket buyers stretching down the block and a policeman struggling to keep order at the box office.

  “Shall we sneak off to someplace quiet where we can talk,” Dick asked, “or shall we go to Sardi’s and show off?”

  “Hell,” Oscar answered. “Let’s go to Sardi’s and show off.”

  * * *

  THE SHOW WAS a sensation, and the seemingly endless demand for tickets quickly became the stuff of legend. For years, the story circulated that Rose Bigman, the secretary of the Broadway columnist Walter Winchell, had seen the show in New Haven and wired him with the discouraging verdict: “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” Winchell did circulate that line in his column, but his secretary was not his source. In fact, as Winchell and Rodgers would confirm in an exchange of letters years later, it was Rodgers himself who, after the New York opening, told Winchell that some unnamed wag had dismissed the show in New Haven with a racier putdown, “No legs, no tits, no chance!” to which Rodgers had added, “And now no tickets!”

  But the cold facts alone were more than impressive enough. A somber black-and-white placard in the St. James lobby told the tale: “We have no tickets for Oklahoma!” There were a few vacant seats for the first weekday matinee, Terry Helburn would recall, but “that night the house sold out for the next four years.” The first five shows alone had 151 standees. When Oscar’s tenant farmer, Peter Moen, asked for a pair of tickets for his son’s forthcoming wedding, Hammerstein asked, “When’s the wedding?” Moen’s answer: “The day you can get the tickets.” At one point in the run, Armina Marshall of the Theatre Guild lost her Tibetan terrier, Chang. She let the newspapers know she was offering a reward of two seats to Oklahoma! to anyone who found him, and he was returned the following day. By May, Helburn and Langner were writing Dick and Oscar, asking them to set aside each Thursday lunch for the foreseeable future, to discuss Oklahoma! business matters.

  The show won a special honorary Pulitzer Prize and would run for a record-breaking 2,212 performances—five years and nine weeks—in an era when no musical had ever run longer than 1,400 performances, much of the time with a touring national company playing to packed houses in major cities all across the country. The road company began in New Haven in October 1943 and closed nine and a half years later in Philadelphia. By 1949, a year after the Broadway run ended, Hammerstein estimated that the producers and backers had collectively earned more than $4 million, presumably not counting his and Rodgers’s authors’ royalties. The producers had exercised their option to buy the film rights back from MGM in virtually the first hours after the Broadway opening, and they resolutely refused all early offers for the movie rights, confident that demand would only grow. Press reports noted that the creators had set an asking price of $500,000 for a seven-year movie option, simply in an effort to deter any would-be buyers.

  But Oklahoma! was much more than a Broadway hit; it was a huge cultural phenomenon, and much of that had to do with World War II. When Celeste Holm was cast in the show, her grandmother, the chairman of the drama committee of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, told her that it would be “the most wonderful musical for right now, when people are going out to fight for this country, and may die for it, to be reminded of the kind of courage, the unselfconscious courage, that settled this country.”

  And indeed, at every performance, there were rows of men in uniform, sitting in reserved seats or taking standing room. Sometimes, the New York City Fire Department would bend the rules and let a couple of them stand in the wings backstage. The theater historian Ethan Mordden would recall that his parents “showed up at the St. James box office, hoping against hope that there might be something—a cancellation, perhaps? Nothing.” Mordden’s father “was in uniform, and he mentioned that he was shipping out for Europe the next day. The ticket seller silently pushed over a pair, fifth row center.”

  Just as Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” from the 1942 film Holiday Inn, spoke to GIs stationed in distant battlegrounds, Oklahoma! became a symbol of home and hearth and the values that the Allies were fighting for. A “brand new state”—indeed, a brave new world, one with “plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope.” A grand land that was standing firm against dark threats from Germany and Japan. A parliament of man where folks might all behave theirsel’s and act like brothers. In the succinct summation of the theater historian Max Wilk, the show presented wartime audiences with “a lovely two-hour promissory note set to music that we could take back home.”

  In a letter to Richard Rodgers in December 1979, after the opening of a smash-hit revival of Oklahoma!, thirty-six years after its debut, the writer John Hersey would recall a morning on the battlefront in Sicily in 1943.

  “I’d had a pretty crummy night,” Hersey wrote, “sleeping on the ground, muddy and damp, nothing to look forward to but cold C-rations for breakfast. A G.I. who might perfectly well get killed that day (because though the Italians were retreating there were some nasty skirmishes) got up and stripped to the waist and poured some cold water in his helmet and began to shave. The sun hit us. Everyone was grumbling as usual. Suddenly the soldier stood up and began singing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning.’ A pretty good voice. There was a fair amount of irony in his singing, and his pals laughed. All the same, it was a beautiful morning, and all of a sudden there was an almost unbearable intensity in the way the men looked around at the view.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Bustin’ Out

  I have a story. I see a stage. I know what my settings are going to be. I know in most cases who will be the performer. I am standing in the orchestra pit. The lights are beginning to dim, the curtain is going up. I must have a song here with the proper music. I sit down and write that music.

  Richard Rodgers

  The immediate and overwhelming success of Oklahoma! changed everything overnight for Rodgers and Hammerstein, especially for Oscar, whose long unlucky streak had ended with the biggest possible bang. “I am suddenly a much cleverer man than the dope who wrote Sunny River and Very Warm for May,” he wrote his son Bill on April 12, 1943. Offers from Hollywood came pouring in. “Of course the red carpet was rolled out at the entrance of all st
udios and I could have made enough deals to keep me very busy for five years—and keep me very rich, too,” Hammerstein wrote again later that summer. “But I didn’t make any, for which I am very proud of myself.” Having endured so much disappointment and failure, Oscar was determined not only to savor his success, but also to think carefully and strategically about his next steps. In yet another letter to Bill around this same time, he explained his thinking. “Dick and I don’t want to start on another show unless we see the chance in it for writing another blooming masterpiece,” he wrote. “This may require some time to find.”

  For his part, Rodgers would recall, “Since Oklahoma! was still playing to packed houses, we didn’t want to step on our heels by writing a new musical.” And he, too, felt the same pressure to deliver another smash. Shortly after Oklahoma! opened, Rodgers got a call from the producer Sam Goldwyn, who had just seen the first act of the show and asked Rodgers to meet him after the performance for a drink. When they met, Goldwyn “drooled to Dick for an hour, about every detail and department of the show,” Oscar would recall. “Then he got on the music and said it was wonderful, finishing with a question: ‘Do you know what you ought to do next?… Shoot yourself!’”

  So what did the new partners do next? They split up—at least temporarily—to pursue projects of their own. For Dick, this meant one last attempt to save Larry Hart from total self-destruction. His idea was a revival of their 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee—not just a reproduction, but a re-imagination of the original show, with an updated book and a half dozen new songs. Rodgers and Herb Fields, the author of the original book, hit upon this approach as one that Larry might find manageable, and even appealing—especially since they proposed to cast Vivienne Segal, his favorite actress, in the expanded role of Morgan Le Fay.