Hart joined Rodgers in Fairfield, staying sober, working at reasonable hours, and producing some of the best lyrics he ever wrote, including “To Keep My Love Alive,” a sparkling comic catalogue in which Morgan Le Fay lists the many ways in which she has dispatched all her husbands to an untimely demise. But the moment rehearsals were over and Hart’s work was done, he fell apart once more. The night of the Philadelphia opening, October 28, he went on a bender from which he never recovered. The New York critics liked the show, but it’s not clear that Larry Hart ever got to read the reviews. The night of the New York opening, Hart arrived at the Martin Beck Theatre already drunk, standing, as was his usual custom, at the back of the house, jangling coins in his pocket, at one point even singing along with Vivienne Segal. At intermission, not bothering to retrieve his checked overcoat, he ducked out into the rainy night for a drink or three at a nearby bar, returning for the second act singing still louder. Acting on orders left by Rodgers, who had feared just such a scene, two men escorted Hart out to the lobby, and his brother Teddy’s wife, Dorothy, took him back to her apartment, where he eventually fell into a sweaty, troubled sleep. But when Dorothy and Teddy Hart woke the next morning, Larry was nowhere to be found.
A search of all the usual haunts turned up nothing, until finally the composer Frederick Loewe found him sitting in the gutter outside a bar on Eighth Avenue. The next day, he was admitted to Doctors Hospital, his face flushed, laboring to breathe, with a temperature of 102 degrees. By Sunday, his white blood count had plummeted, and mutual friends intervened with Eleanor Roosevelt, who arranged for the War Production Board to have a supply of the still scarce new wonder drug, penicillin, flown in. But it was too late. On the night of November 22, Dick and Dorothy Rodgers and other friends and family members were gathered in the hospital corridor outside Hart’s room when an air-raid drill suddenly blacked out all the lights in the building except for shaded emergency bulbs. The doctor had just emerged from Larry’s room to say that he was dead when the all-clear siren sounded and all the lights came back on at once. “To those of us in the hospital that night, the lights going on again at that moment was some sort of cosmic assurance that the darkness which had always surrounded Larry had suddenly disappeared,” Rodgers would recall. “That in death he could at last enjoy the warmth and brightness that had eluded him all his life.”
* * *
OSCAR’S OWN PET project was an idea he had been toying with for years. In 1934 he had seen a concert version of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen at the Hollywood Bowl, and he was certain that such a gripping story—the tale of a straight-arrow Spanish soldier, Don Jose, who is seduced by a sultry gypsy—and such stunning music could find a modern mass audience much wider than that for traditional opera, especially if it was written in English and updated to a contemporary setting. Sitting alone at Highland Farm one day in January 1942, just after the abysmal failure of Sunny River, he listened to a recording of the opera by Milan’s La Scala company, playing it over and over, while studying the libretto along with an English translation and the complete piano score. Without confiding his plans to anyone, he began working on an adaptation.
Oscar seized on the idea of transferring the gypsy setting in southern Spain to the black American South; instead of being a cigarette factory worker in Seville, Carmen would be Carmen Jones, a parachute factory worker in South Carolina in a contemporary setting, while Don Jose would become Joe, an army corporal. His rival for Carmen’s affections, the bullfighter Escamillo, would become Husky Miller, a heavyweight prizefighter.
Oscar hewed closely to the original score, dropping some arias that did not fit his condensed two-act libretto, but his new lyrics brought a thrilling intensity to what had been the stiff and stilted English translation that then prevailed. Consider just these few lines from Carmen’s signature “Habanera” (in the original French, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,” or “Love is a rebellious bird”). The standard English translation of the aria began:
Ah! Love thou art a willful wild bird,
And none may hope thy wings to tame,
If it please thee to be a rebel,
Say, who can try and thee reclaim?
Oscar’s version, in conversational black dialect, remade the song:
Love’s a baby dat grows up wild
An’ he don’ do what you want him to,
Love ain’ nobody’s angel child
An’ he won’t pay any mind to you …
Hammerstein finished the libretto in July 1942, just about the time he met Dick Rodgers for lunch at the Barberry Room and agreed to work on Green Grow the Lilacs. Despite his recently expressed aversion to producing any more Broadway musicals, Max Gordon took an option on Carmen. But he could not initially raise the needed money, and Oscar was busy with the Theatre Guild project in any case. Finally, that November, even as Rodgers and Hammerstein were deep in the midst of work on what would become Oklahoma!, an unlikely backer emerged: Billy Rose, the blustery songwriter and producer responsible for Rodgers and Hart’s Jumbo. Rose had been raised by an opera-loving mother, and when Hammerstein sent him the libretto for Carmen Jones, he was entranced. Rose was committed, but production would have to await completion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show.
By July 1943, with Oklahoma! selling out every night, Hammerstein was at last immersed in rewrites of Carmen Jones—he thought he could improve it about 25 percent after not having looked at it for a while. He wrote to his son Bill with excitement about the creative team being assembled to mount the show. The director would be Hassard Short, a British veteran considered a master of stylish stagecraft, and Bizet’s orchestrations would be adapted by Robert Russell Bennett. Hammerstein also reported that the show’s public relations team had turned up a critique of Carmen by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had “said that the music was neither French nor German but African!” so Hammerstein added, “I am not as original as I thought and Nietsche was ahead of his time. Furthermore, I am pretty sure I am misspelling his name.” (He had.)
John Hammond, a Columbia records executive who was a jazz and blues aficionado (and would one day sign a young Bruce Springsteen), agreed to help recruit the needed cast of a hundred black actors, no mean feat in that segregated era, especially since—in the usual manner of opera casting—two singers would be needed for each of the principal roles, to avoid voice strain. Luther Saxon, who was working in a naval yard, was cast as one of the Joes, while Glenn Bryant, a six-foot-three-inch New York City police officer, took the role of the boxer Husky Miller. Muriel Smith, who would play one of the Carmens, worked as a film scraper in a photographic lab.
Oscar gave his copyright in the show to Dorothy as a present, and after tryouts in Philadelphia and Boston, the New York opening was set for December 2 at the Broadway Theatre. Hammerstein was worried—especially about the verdict of the classical music critics—but Broadway’s most hardened reviewers reached over each other for superlatives. “Bravo!” wrote the Herald Tribune. “The theatre and music have had a memorable wedding … as wonderfully exciting as it is audacious.… The libretto has been brilliantly translated … something more than a major theatrical event.” The show would run for just over five hundred performances.
“It looks as if I will make more in 1944 than in any other year of my career,” Oscar wrote to Bill. “You understand, naturally, that only a small part of this remains mine—80 to 85% will go to build planes, destroyers, etc. and help repair boats that recline on reefs. But, God knows, I don’t kick. I’m in favor of these taxes, for the good of the nation and the good of my own soul. Furthermore, I am luckier than most lucky earners, for beyond what I am making now, I have created, this year, two catalogue properties which will bear fruits every year for the balance of my life—and a good part of yours and Alice’s and Jimmie’s. Also, after the big Broadway grosses start to fade, these properties are natural record-breaking picture sales. All in all, your old man is sitting pretty, at last—after some struggles and not a
few disappointments.”
That Christmas, Oscar took out an ad in Variety that would become one of the most famous in the trade paper’s history:
Holiday Greetings
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, II
author of
SUNNY RIVER
(Six Weeks at the St. James Theatre, New York)
VERY WARM FOR MAY
(Seven Weeks at the Alvin Theatre, New York)
THREE SISTERS
(Six Weeks at the Drury Lane, London)
BALL AT THE SAVOY
(Five Weeks at the Drury Lane, London)
FREE FOR ALL
(Three Weeks at the Manhattan Theatre, New York)
*******
I’VE DONE IT BEFORE AND
I CAN DO IT AGAIN
The notice was seen as a sign of Hammerstein’s endearing humility, a great joke, and the talk of the town. But years later he confessed that he hadn’t meant it that way at all. “I thought it was quite the opposite and I didn’t mean it as a modest gesture,” he would say. “I really meant it as a rebuke to all the people who had concluded I was through and who were now concluding that I was a genius. Neither was true. I wasn’t through because I had had a succession of flops, and I wasn’t suddenly a different man or a better writer because I was on a wave of successes now. I wanted to remind everybody in the theater that success or failure is always just around the corner.”
* * *
OSCAR’S POST-OKLAHOMA! boast that his head had not been turned by Hollywood notwithstanding, he and Dick had in fact accepted one irresistible offer from the movies in the summer of 1943: to write a musical remake of 20th Century Fox’s warmhearted 1933 family comedy State Fair, which had starred the beloved Will Rogers as the patriarch of an Iowa farm clan, Janet Gaynor as his daughter, and Lew Ayres as the newspaper reporter who woos her at the annual Iowa State Fair. Given their mutual loathing of Hollywood, the partners extracted just one condition from the studio chief Darryl Zanuck: they must be allowed to write the picture in the East, without taking up residence in Hollywood. Zanuck agreed, with the result, as Rodgers would put it, that a story about Iowa would be filmed in Southern California and written in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. The team would be paid handsomely for its efforts: $50,000 each. But the larger import of the deal was that it established a happy working relationship with Fox, a collaboration that would result in that studio’s making the film adaptations of all but one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows.
Oscar began writing the screenplay in January 1944, after taking a Christmas break to luxuriate in the success of Carmen Jones. The job was no great challenge but a pleasant diversion. Charles Winninger, Show Boat’s original Cap’n Andy, took the Will Rogers part as Abel Frake, the proud owner of a champion Hampshire boar, while Jeanne Crain, a Fox contract ingénue, played his daughter, Margy. The band singer Dick Haymes, who had replaced Frank Sinatra as Tommy Dorsey’s vocalist, was cast as Margy’s brother, Wayne, and Dana Andrews as Pat Gilbert, the reporter. Fay Bainter rounded out the cast as Mrs. Frake, maker of prizewinning mincemeat (into which she and her husband have each surreptitiously spirited a snifter of good brandy).
Zanuck’s one condition, when the score was done, was that the authors make a weeklong visit to Los Angeles, to review screen tests and help with casting, and the studio footed the bill for first-class travel and hotel for Dick and Oscar and their Dorothys. Once they arrived, Zanuck ignored them for days, until the eve of their departure, when he summoned them to his office on the Fox lot to regale them with stories of his wartime experiences in the Army Signal Corps in North Africa. “He had paid us a lot of money and had acceded to our working conditions,” Rodgers would recall, “but wanted the satisfaction of being able to make us do as he wished. It was one more example of the kind of ego-satisfying extravagance that eventually helped contribute to the downfall of the Hollywood studio system.”
Rodgers’s score included a batch of carefree, winning tunes, some invoking the spirit of Larry Hart, including “That’s for Me,” “Isn’t It Kinda Fun,” and “A Grand Night for Singing,” together with a couple of appropriately corny numbers, including the title song whose opening lines
Our state fair is a great state fair,
Don’t miss it, don’t even be late!
It’s dollars to doughnuts that our state fair
Is the best state fair in our state!
ranked as subpar Hammerstein wordplay. The standout song, the score’s most enduring hit, was the wistful, lovelorn ballad “It Might As Well Be Spring.” The song was a resourceful nod to the reality that while the character of Margy was agitated as if she had spring fever, state fairs are routinely held in late summer and early fall. It is also the only Rodgers and Hammerstein song for which a complete alternate melody, different from the final version, is known to exist. Rodgers’s initial take was a legato musical line, but as he pondered Hammerstein’s words
I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm,
I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string!
I’d say that I had spring fever
But I know it isn’t spring …
he thought better of his first idea, and instead substituted a syncopated melody that jumped from interval to interval, as if the notes themselves were puppets on strings. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song of the year. The film, directed by Walter Lang, opened in August 1945, just as the war was ending, and was a solid hit, grossing $4 million. It remains an eminently watchable example of workmanlike skill, but it was not a pioneering piece of art. Oscar himself was under no illusions about it; after seeing an early screening he wrote to its producer, William Perlberg, “My overall disappointment was the fact that the story and the characters were presented with less realism than I had anticipated and that the picture emerges as more of a ‘musical comedy’ than I hoped it would be.” John McCarten’s verdict in the New Yorker was succinct. “Nice, I believe, would be the word for it,” he wrote. “I don’t think you could use anything stronger.”
* * *
EVEN AS DICK and Oscar were writing State Fair, Terry Helburn and the Theatre Guild began digging into their trunk yet again, to find a project that could follow Oklahoma! Helburn’s new idea was a musical adaptation of Liliom, the well-loved 1909 drama by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, which at first had confused European audiences because its hero dies ignobly halfway through the action. But after the mass loss of life in World War I, theatergoers began to take the play to heart, and the Guild had first produced it on Broadway in 1921. It ran just sixty-five performances but left an impression, becoming a staple of amateur theater companies and a 1934 film directed by Fritz Lang and starring Charles Boyer.
Billed as “a legend in seven scenes and prologue,” the play tells the story of the title character—in Hungarian, Liliom means “lily” and is an ironic slang term for “tough”—a ne’er-do-well Budapest carnival barker, and Julie, the unlucky servant girl who loves him unconditionally, even though he abuses her. Within minutes of meeting, they fall in love, and Liliom loses his job because Mrs. Muskat, the carnival boss who has been keeping him, is jealous of Julie. With no prospects, the young lovers marry, and Julie promptly becomes pregnant. Desperate for money, Liliom agrees to commit a robbery, but he bungles it, killing himself to avoid arrest. He arrives in a night court version of purgatory and is given one last chance to set things right on earth—a chance he also bungles, by striking his teenage daughter, Louise, just as he had struck her mother. The play ends with one of the most famous curtain lines in theater history, with Louise asking, “Is it possible for someone to hit you—hard like that—real loud and hard—and not hurt you at all?” and Julie replying, “It is possible, dear—that someone may beat you and beat you and beat you—and not hurt you at all.”
To modern ears, such a misty, sentimentalized depiction of spousal abuse is so off-putting as to be revolting—and indeed changing attitudes have made modern productions of Liliom problematic, at best.
But a generation of twentieth-century audiences viewed the story differently, and the critic John Mason Brown summed up the property’s hold: “Few plays to have come out of the modern theater have equaled Molnár’s fantasy in imagination or pathos, in charm or universality, in tenderness or timelessness.” As it happened, no small part of that tenderness and charm was attributable to Larry Hart. Though he received no public credit, the multilingual Hart had translated the play into English.
And just as with Green Grow the Lilacs, there had been a recent revival of Liliom—in this case on Broadway in 1940, with Burgess Meredith and Ingrid Bergman as the doomed lovers and Elia Kazan as the villain, Fiscur, who cons Liliom into the robbery. The production ran just two months, but Helburn believed it demonstrated the play’s enduring appeal.
So now, in November 1943, at one of their weekly “gloat lunches” to discuss Oklahoma! business and future projects, Terry asked Dick and Oscar what they thought of her idea. The answer, at first, was not much, in part because the play’s Hungarian setting seemed anything but timeless in 1943, with World War II raging across Europe and events unpredictable. But Helburn persisted. How about changing the setting to New Orleans? she proposed. Liliom could be a Creole. “And I studied that and then I gave that up because I did some reading and that dialogue gave me a pain,” Oscar would recall. “Zis and zat and all those z’s seemed a little corny.” Discussions went on for some weeks. Finally Rodgers lit upon the idea of setting the story in New England in the late nineteenth century, which everyone agreed might work. Liliom, the title character, would become the euphonious Billy Bigelow, still a carnival barker. Julie would be a millworker instead of a housemaid.
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