Something Wonderful
Page 13
“I began to see an attractive ensemble,” Hammerstein would recall. “Sailors, whalers, girls who worked in the mills up the river, clambakes on near-by islands, an amusement park on the seaboard, things people could do in crowds, people who were strong and alive and lusty, people who had always been depicted on the stage as thin-lipped puritans—a libel I was anxious to refute.” As for the two main characters, he said, “Julie, with her courage and inner strength and outward simplicity, seemed more indigenous to Maine than to Budapest. Liliom is, of course, an international character, indigenous to nowhere.”
But even before this crucial decision on locale was made, Helburn and her colleagues had had to grapple with more fundamental concerns about the dark nature of the plot, and the all too unsympathetic central character. After a meeting with Dick and Oscar in December, Helburn summarized her own informal survey, which found that people liked Liliom, despite his flaws. “When I say, ‘Why? He was such a bastard,’” she reported, “their replies vary, but it’s usually, ‘Yes, but he was so human,’ or ‘such a cute bastard’ or ‘such an insolent and charming devil.’” She added, “I’m sure he gets over much closer to Clark Gable than to Pal Joey.” By the next month, Helburn was advising the partners that the mood and tone could be halfway between Carmen Jones and Oklahoma! “with great audience appeal,” and after another meeting with Dick and Oscar she allowed that “the general feeling at the end of the conference seemed to be that while the play was a challenge, it would be an inspiring one to meet.”
There was one other obstacle: Ferenc Molnár had resolutely refused to allow a musical adaptation of Liliom, turning down Puccini himself on the grounds that he wanted the property to remain his play, not someone else’s opera. But nothing was too good for the authors of Oklahoma!, and the playwright, who had emigrated to New York to escape the Nazi persecution of Hungarian Jews, relented the very day after seeing that show. Now the challenge was how to transform his dark and delicate drama into a compelling piece of musical theater.
* * *
AS USUAL, DICK and Oscar began at the beginning. The play had started with a silent prologue, set in the amusement park, which introduced the principal characters. Hammerstein went further, devising a detailed pantomime that swiftly sketched out Billy’s magnetism; his complex relationship with the carousel owner, Mrs. Mullin (Mrs. Muskat in the original); Julie’s fumbling, intense attraction to Billy; Mrs. Mullin’s jealousy of Julie; and Billy’s studied nonchalance toward both of them. In eight minutes, the central dynamic of the plot is laid bare, to the accompaniment of a sweeping set of waltzes by Rodgers. Dick had long felt overtures were wasted on Broadway audiences, with an auditorium full of distracted, rustling latecomers still taking their seats, and was eager to try something new. So the curtain would rise as the first notes of music sounded, and though Rodgers liked to insist that he didn’t employ the standard songwriter’s trunk of stored-up tunes that could be plucked at will to suit a new purpose on short notice, in this case he did seize on a bubbling suite of waltzes he had first written more than a decade earlier, for the film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. “There will be no dialogue or lyric,” Oscar wrote to Bill in August 1944, “only pantomimic action set to a waltz suite which Dick wrote.”
And just as he had done with Green Grow the Lilacs, Oscar hewed closely to the original playwright’s scheme, while deftly turning spoken dialogue into sung lyrics. By the time of the producers’ story conferences in December 1943, Terry Helburn wrote that Hammerstein had regarded the crucial early scene in which Liliom and Julie meet on a park bench and tentatively explore their mutual attraction “as almost too beautiful and too tight to tamper with in any way, but he did feel that the curtain with the falling acacias might lend itself to a beautiful number.” This number would become perhaps the greatest “conditional love song” of any Broadway score, and once again, Hammerstein found his inspiration directly in Molnár’s words, in which Liliom queries Julie: “But you wouldn’t marry a rough guy like me—that is,—eh—if you loved me—”
“Yes, I would,” Julie replies. “If I loved you, Mister Liliom.”
Oscar’s first stab at a lyric was as halting as the would-be lovers’ exchanges:
If I loved you
I would tremble ev’ry time you’d say my name,
But I’d long to hear you say it just the same.
I dunno jest how I know, but I ken see
How everythin’ would be
If I loved you …
If I loved you
I’d be too a-skeered t’say what’s in my heart
I’d be too a-skeered to even make a start
And my golden chance to speak would come and go
And you would never know
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
Through his usual painstaking process of condensation, sharpening, and refinement, Hammerstein eventually produced the far more powerful final result:
If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longin’ to tell you, but afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances pass me by.
Soon you’d leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
The scene continues at length, with sung dialogue in the manner of opera—not in the typical singsong of recitative, but with a natural conversational tunefulness. Rodgers once boasted that “what Kurt Weill calls recitative, I call melody,” and the claim was not misplaced in the case of “If I Loved You.” Stephen Sondheim would call “The Bench Scene” “probably the singular most important moment in the evolution of contemporary musicals” as Billy sings of the lovers’ cosmic insignificance:
There’s a helluva lot o’ stars in the sky,
And the sky’s so big the sea looks small,
And two little people—
You and I—
We don’t count at all.
The scene ends as it did in Molnár’s original, with acacia blossoms softly falling. But Hammerstein one-ups Molnár’s suggestion that “the wind brings them down” by having Billy point out that there is no wind, and having Julie acknowledge that they are “jest coming down by theirselves—Jest their time to, I reckon.” For better—and for worse—it is Julie and Billy’s time, too.
* * *
A TOUGHER CHALLENGE for Oscar was what to do about what he called the central “tunnel” of the play, the grim depiction of Julie and Liliom’s early married life, as they sponge off Julie’s aunt Hollunder, who runs a decrepit photography studio, and bustles in and out complaining of Liliom’s shiftlessness. Hammerstein kept the thrust of this section—Billy’s sullen unwillingness to learn any other trade besides that of barker, and his refusal to take his old job (and his old protectress, Mrs. Mullin) back. Yet Oscar lightened the mood by making the newlyweds the guests of Julie’s cousin Nettie Fowler, who operates a seaside spa where local sailors, fishermen, and mill girls gather for recreation. This provided a logical setting for ensemble numbers. And as in Oklahoma!, Hammerstein created a secondary pair of comic lovers, beefing up Molnár’s original characters so that Julie’s friend Marie becomes a fellow millworker, Carrie Pipperidge, and her suitor, Wolf the porter, becomes a self-satisfied fisherman, Enoch Snow, whose stolid bourgeois respectability stands in contrast to Julie and Billy’s dangerous passion.
Oscar’s portrait of Victorian New England was greatly aided by a raft of period details dug up by his new research assistant, his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Alice. Since Hammerstein couldn’t envision Victorian New England by looking out his window at the grazing cattle in Doylestown, Alice uncovered information on all manner of Yankee customs, mores, and history, drawing up long lists of local flo
ra (gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries) and fauna (moose, caribou, wolf, fox, beaver), figures of speech (“Fixin’ to make a quick getaway”), and dialect (“blesh” for “blush,” “bespoke” for “engaged”); explaining the difference between sloops and yawls; and cataloguing actual names of the era that would make their way into the script: Bascome, Pipperidge, Bigelow. She compiled summaries of the spread of cigarette smoking after the Civil War, the manufacture of revolvers, the working hours and conditions in cotton mills. So exhaustive were her labors that at one point Oscar rebuked her: “I don’t need all that. You have research poisoning.”
But consider her careful précis of the loose-limbed collection of recipes-cum-travelogues in Mainstays of Maine, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning New England poet Robert P. T. Coffin, describing the ingredients necessary for a seaside island clambake:
A good New England cook uses no book. “Put in what you think is right.”… CODSHEAD CHOWDER … Catch the cod and cook them, still flapping, in an iron kettle. Onions, salt pork. Cook till the fish begin to flake apart.… Split sticks or bayberry and clamp them on clamshells, and these are the only proper spoons for this chowder.… After this come the LOBSTERS. They have been broiling on the coals. Rake them out, split them down the back, pour in the butter, salt and pepper. After the lobsters come the CLAMS. Cook these in rockweed thrown over coals of driftwood.…
And consider how Oscar transformed that descriptive litany into an ebullient ode to gluttony in “A Real Nice Clambake”:
Fust come codfish chowder,
Cooked in iron kettles,
Onions floatin’ on the top,
Curlin’ up in petals!
Throwed in ribbons of salted pork—
An old New England trick—
And lapped it all up with a clamshell,
Tied onto a bayberry stick!
Oh-h-h
This was a real nice clambake …
Remember when we raked
Them red-hot lobsters
Out of the driftwood fire?
They sizzled and crackled
And sputtered a song
Fitten fer an angels choir …
We slit ’em down the back
And peppered ’em good,
And doused ’em in melted butter—
Then we tore away the claws
And cracked ’em with our teeth
’Cause we weren’t in the mood to putter!…
Then at last come the clams—
Steamed under rockweed
And poppin’ from their shells—
Jest how many of ’em
Galloped down our gullets—
We couldn’t say oursel’s!
For yet another song, a big choral celebration of New England spring to be sung by the ensemble in the middle of the first act, Oscar proved himself utterly heedless of not only research—but of some immutable biological realities. In “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” he catalogued the effects of warming temperatures on the amatory activity of humans and animals alike, at one point declaring:
June is bustin’ out all over!
The sheep aren’t sleeping any more.
All the rams that chase the ewe sheep
Are determined there’ll be new sheep,
And the ewe sheep aren’t even keepin’ score!
After a backers’ audition at Jules Glaenzer’s apartment in February 1945, Hammerstein received a letter from one prospective investor: Gerald M. Loeb, a founding partner of E. F. Hutton. Loeb noted that he himself had been raising sheep at his country house in rural Connecticut, “and seemingly the females are in heat just once a year—autumn—and lambs are born only in late winter. By Easter they are in the language of the market place ‘spring baby lambs.’” A sheepish Oscar replied: “I was delighted with the parts of your letter praising my work and thrown into consternation by the unwelcome news about the eccentrically frigid behavior of ewes in June. I have since checked your statement and found it to be true. It looks very much as if in the interest of scientific honesty I shall have to abandon the verse dealing with sheep.”
In fact, Peter Moen, Oscar’s tenant farmer in Doylestown, had told him the same thing, but in the end, he didn’t change the line, explaining to someone else who inquired, “What you say about sheep may all be very true for most years, sir, but not in 1873. 1873 is my year and that year, curiously enough, the sheep mated in the spring.”
* * *
WITH THIS NEW show, the Guild had no trouble raising money, and the $180,000 budget was quickly secured. Most of the creative team responsible for Oklahoma! was also reassembled, looking now not like a risky bet but a sure thing. Jo Mielziner, already one of Broadway’s most prolific scenic designers, replaced Lemuel Ayers to do the settings, and Robert Russell Bennett had to beg off completing the orchestrations because of the demands of a radio contract, so the work was finished by Don Walker and an important new talent found by Agnes de Mille: Trude Rittmann, a German-born, classically trained composer and arranger, who would work with de Mille to create the dance music and perhaps also the dramatic underscoring played beneath some of the dialogue.
Rouben Mamoulian balked at first when asked to direct the show—perhaps still smarting from his bitter wrangles with de Mille, or from an equally bitter quarrel with Dick and Oscar in the aftermath of Oklahoma!’s success, in which he arranged a series of press interviews that, in the partners’ eyes, took too much credit for the show. He held out for a percentage of the new production, but it was already sold out. Eventually, Dick, Oscar, and the Guild gave him a cut of their own shares, and he signed on.
Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves tangled with Langner and Helburn over the financial terms of their deal. So eager was the Guild to re-sign their winning team that they offered to pay the partners 7.5 percent of the show’s weekly gross, in an era when the standard was 2 percent each for composer and lyricist, and 1 percent for the book writer—plus 50 percent of the producers’ profits after repayment of investors. Sometime later, in October 1944, Helburn sent Rodgers and Hammerstein a letter attempting to renege on part of this generous deal, arguing that it would shortchange the Guild. Oscar’s reply was a brisk dismissal. “This was not a deal we extracted from you by any grim bargaining,” he wrote. “It was your own proposition made to us by people experienced in producing and familiar with the mathematical contingencies of all kinds of shows.”
Though by this point Dick and Oscar could have had their pick of Broadway’s biggest stars, they once again chose to cast the show they now called Carousel largely with unknowns. For Julie, they recruited Jan Clayton, a young singer and actress from New Mexico who had been knocking around in minor movie roles after being discovered by an MGM talent scout. She auditioned for Terry Helburn in Los Angeles and then flew to New York for a session with Rodgers and Hammerstein in which she sang “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis—which did not go well. Mamoulian agreed to work with her for a couple of days, while Rodgers taught her “What’s the Use of Wondrin’?,” a rueful solo in which Julie acknowledges the helplessness of her love for Billy:
Common sense may tell you
That the endin’ will be sad
And now’s the time to break and run away.
But what’s the use of wond’rin’
If the endin’ will be sad?
He’s your feller and you love him—
There’s nothin’ more to say.
At the end of Clayton’s next audition, Oscar said simply, “Well, shall we all go over to Sardi’s and have a little glass of champagne to celebrate our new Julie?”
For the role of Billy, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Guild turned to one of their own discoveries: John Raitt, a former track star at the University of Southern California who had been singing at schools and YMCAs around Los Angeles and had won a radio contest on which Armina Marshall’s niece had heard him perform. He was promptly hired as Curly in the national company of Oklahoma! for ten months, and
auditioned for Carousel singing Figaro’s entrance aria from The Barber of Seville. “There is our Liliom!” Dick Rodgers told Langner on the spot.
From the outset, Carousel’s creators envisioned Billy’s big moment as the scene at the end of the first act when he realizes he is going to be a father, and it was Rodgers—the father of two daughters—who imagined that Billy sings “first with pride of the growth of a boy, and then suddenly realizes it might be a girl, and changes completely with that thought.” The song would show how the burdens of impending fatherhood impel Billy to find a way to get the money to care for his child—to “go out and make it, or steal it, or take it, or die!” as Oscar would write—and at the same time would demonstrate to the audience how Julie could ever have fallen in love with such a seeming loser to begin with. The “Soliloquy” Rodgers composed would be a tour de force, nearly eight solid minutes of soaring music tailor-made for Raitt’s ironclad baritone. Raitt would never forget the first time he saw the piece, written on a long stretch of music manuscript paper, folded accordion-style, and thought it must have been fifteen minutes long.
Well into January and February 1945, as casting proceeded, Oscar worked on revisions of the book. From the start, he and Dick had been determined to provide a more uplifting ending than Molnár’s fatalistic conclusion, in which Liliom returns to earth with a stolen star, only to make a hash of things once more by striking his teenage daughter. The play ends with his life unredeemed. “It was not the anxiety to have a happy ending that made me shy away from that original ending,” Hammerstein would recall. “But because I can’t conceive of an unregenerate soul, I can’t conceive of a dead-end to any kind of existence. And to indulge myself, I changed the ending.” In Oscar’s version, Billy still strikes Louise when she rejects his proffered gift of the star, but this is immediately followed by a scene at her high school graduation, in which Billy reappears—invisible to her and Julie but seen by the audience—and whispers, “I loved you Julie. Know that I loved you!” Louise’s classmate puts her arm around the girl, and we sense that her life will be all right.