Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  I Remember Mama opened at the Music Box Theatre on October 19, 1944—while Dick and Oscar were in the middle of work on Carousel. The New York Times pronounced it “a delightful evening for the theater,” and it would run for 713 performances before being turned into a successful 1948 film directed by George Stevens, starring Irene Dunne as Mama. It was an auspicious first outing for the new producing team.

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  NOW, TEN MONTHS later, in August 1945, with Carousel up and running and the war ending at last, Dick and Oscar were again approached about a project to produce, and from the first the enterprise was a family affair. The inspiration came from Dorothy Fields, the most prominent female lyricist working on Broadway or in Hollywood, and the sister of Rodgers and Hart’s onetime librettist, Herbert Fields. Already a two-decade veteran of collaboration with composers from Jimmy McHugh to Jerome Kern, with a gift for deft, conversational lyrics, Fields had written the words for such standards as “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and she had won an Academy Award for “The Way You Look Tonight.” In addition to her family connections to Dick through her brother and her father, Lew Fields, she knew Oscar well from their shared involvement with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the songwriters’ collective that dispensed royalties for public performances of popular music.

  Fields’s current brainstorm was the result of a tip from an official at the New York branch of the Travelers Aid Society who told of a young sergeant who had come from Coney Island to Pennsylvania Station, “stoned, with kewpie dolls and lamps and cigars and candy, and across his tunic he had a row of sharpshooter’s medals,” Fields would recall. “And when I heard ‘sharpshooter,’ the idea struck: Wouldn’t it be marvelous to have Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley?” Merman was already fifteen years into her long run as the Broadway musical’s leading leading lady, and she was also a close friend of Dorothy’s. Her brassy bravura and heard-in-the-last-row-of-the-balcony voice had made her a favorite of composers from George Gershwin to Cole Porter, and a darling of critics and audiences alike. She seemed a natural choice to play Oakley, the plucky sharpshooter who had made her name touring with “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show in the 1870s. Her colorful story was in keeping with the World War II–era wave of nostalgia that had swept popular entertainment from Broadway to Hollywood.

  The real Annie Oakley had been dead for not quite twenty years, and young Oscar and Reggie Hammerstein had loved the Wild West Show when it played in New York. In yet another family connection, Dorothy Fields’s other brother, Joseph, had written the screenplay for a fanciful 1935 film biography of Oakley starring Barbara Stanwyck. Since Herbert and Dorothy Fields had a commitment to write a show for Mike Todd, Dorothy approached him first, but he was not interested. “A show about a dame who knows from nothing but guns?” was his skeptical reply.

  “So Herbert said to me, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to somebody else,’” Dorothy would remember. “Now, there happened to be a meeting at ASCAP after our meeting with Todd, and the first person I saw when I came in was Oscar Hammerstein. I said, ‘Ockie, what do you think about Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley?’ He said, ‘We’ll do it.’ That’s all! And then he said, ‘Talk to Dick after the meeting.’ I talked to Dick and Dick said the same thing—‘We’ll do it.’”

  There remained the small matter of getting the prospective star on board. Merman was in Doctors Hospital, having just given birth. Fields, herself the mother of young children, visited the star in the hospital. “I was having postoperative gas pains and felt like anything but a lady sharpshooter,” Merman would recall. “I asked Dorothy to give me time to get out of the hospital.” Fields did, and in short order, a salary offer of $4,500 a week plus 10 percent of the gross perked Merman right up and she said yes.

  The project gathered steam. The Fields siblings would write the book, and Dorothy the lyrics. All that remained was to find a composer. Rodgers himself had no wish to work with anyone but Hammerstein, and all the parties agreed on their first choice: Oscar and Dorothy’s old partner Jerome Kern, who was enjoying a satisfied semiretirement at sixty in Beverly Hills, working only when he wanted to. Dick and Oscar set out to woo him. IT WOULD BE ONE OF THE GREATEST HONORS OF MY LIFE IF YOU WOULD CONSENT TO WRITE THE MUSIC FOR THIS SHOW, Rodgers wired. For his part, Hammerstein held out the lure of a Broadway revival of Show Boat, his and Kern’s greatest triumph. Finally Kern agreed, and he and his wife, Eva, came east at the beginning of November, spending the weekend with Oscar and Dorothy at Highland Farm, then heading to Manhattan. On Monday, November 5, Eva Kern had an appointment for lunch with Dorothy Fields, and Jerry decided to do some shopping. As he was heading around the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street, he collapsed.

  Kern was carrying no wallet and was at first taken to the city hospital on Welfare Island in the East River. But Kern did have an ASCAP membership card in his pocket, and the ASCAP offices eventually tracked down Oscar, who rushed to the scene, where his own doctor and old friend Harold Hyman told him that Kern had suffered a stroke and might never recover. Jerry was transferred to Doctors Hospital, where Oscar and Dorothy took a room. On Sunday the eleventh, Kern’s breathing stopped. Oscar lifted the oxygen tent to whisper in his ear, “I’ve told ev’ry little star,” a lyric from Music in the Air, but there was no answer. At the funeral, Hammerstein had not quite finished his eulogy when he broke down.

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  KERN’S DEATH LEFT the Annie Oakley project in limbo and its creative team at a loss. Dick Rodgers had already reached out to another old friend about directing the show: Josh Logan, whose collaboration with Rodgers and Hart had started with I Married an Angel in 1938. Just thirty-seven years old, Logan was already a consummate man of the theater. In the early 1930s, the Southern-born, Princeton-educated director had co-founded the University Players, a distinguished summer stock company on Cape Cod that drew such standout talents as Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, and a college friend of Logan’s, a skinny architecture major and accordion player named James Stewart. Logan had even studied briefly in Moscow with the father of modern method acting, Konstantin Stanislavski, observing the master’s direction of grand opera—which aimed for a novel and “total integration of acting and music.”

  Logan also suffered from what was not yet known as manic-depressive bipolar disorder, in which bursts of incredible creativity alternated with periods of crippling doubt and depression, and he had had a serious breakdown in 1940. Still, he had uncanny instincts for showmanship, and during his tour of duty in the Army Air Corps he served as co-director of Irving Berlin’s all-soldier revue, This Is the Army.

  In a call with Rodgers from a pay phone at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, where he was waiting to be mustered out of the service, Logan heard the awful news of Kern’s death. Days later, he heard Rodgers’s idea for a substitute composer: Irving Berlin. “Everyone agreed there was no point in asking him,” Dick explained. “He’s a boss. It’s got to be his show all the way—his ideas, his money, his songs. He doesn’t work for other people. So we started on down our list, when Oscar said, ‘Wait! How can a man say no until he’s at least asked to say yes?’ So, we asked him and he said yes.” So, Dick added, “Get out of that goddamned camp and let’s get going.”

  If anyone could intimidate Dick Rodgers at this point in his career, it was Irving Berlin. He had had his first hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” in 1911, when Rodgers was just nine years old. And Rodgers remembered all too well Florenz Ziegfeld’s surprise interpolation of Berlin’s “Blue Skies” into Rodgers and Hart’s score for Betsy—a stinging humiliation at the time. When Mary Rodgers, who was several years behind Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin at the Brearley School for girls, came home one day and asked, “Mommy, who is the most famous, Mary Ellin’s father or my father?” Dorothy Rodgers was forced to reply, “I’m sorry to tell you but it’s Mary Ellin’s father.”

  But Oklahoma! had evened the score, and now it was
Berlin whose confidence was shaky. He had been touring battle zones all over the world with This Is the Army, and he was exhausted. He was the past master of the old school: the hit Tin Pan Alley song, the elegant topical revue, the musical comedy in which songs could be inserted at will. The idea of an integrated score—what he called a “situation show”—was alien to him, and he was not sure he could do it. Plus, what did he know about hillbilly music? Then, too, there was the matter of credit; the project was too far along to allow it to become an “Irving Berlin Production.” Berlin was an inveterate worrywart, fond of reciting a nervous couplet of self-awareness that he’d composed: “There goes Time with your last year’s prize / Whittling it down to its proper size.”

  So Rodgers sought to reassure Berlin. Writing songs that grew out of plot situations and character would be easier, he explained, than plucking them out of the blue. (Indeed, the Fieldses had already sketched out such song ideas as “You Can’t Get a Feller with a Gun.”) Oscar’s advice about how to write folksy music was just as direct: simply drop the g’s on the ends of words. Berlin asked for a weekend to think it over, then asked to see the early draft of Herb and Dorothy’s script. Finally, with his musical secretary, Helmy Kresa, he retreated to an Atlantic City hotel to see what he could come up with. He felt confident enough to accept—and in a matter of days, he wrote a batch of songs. In one, Annie would explain her family’s unlearned but wised-up ways in “Doin’ What Comes Naturally.” In another, she would bemoan the difficulty of getting a man with a gun. In a third, she would share a big romantic ballad, “They Say It’s Wonderful,” with her sharpshooting rival, Frank Butler.

  The producers’ reaction to Berlin’s demonstration of the first songs was ecstatic, so he pressed on. But, still insecure, he thought one number had drawn insufficient appreciation and discarded it. Only when Josh Logan asked about the missing song at the next meeting did Berlin’s secretary find the discarded manuscript under the office telephone. The title: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” In the end, Berlin turned out a score of such power and shattering effectiveness that at least eleven of its fourteen numbers became hits completely outside the context of the show, which by now was titled Annie Get Your Gun. In no small part, he would have Rodgers and Hammerstein to thank. Years later, when asked why Berlin’s score was such a standout, John Fearnley, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s longtime stage manager and casting director, explained that Berlin would come into a meeting with a new song and excitedly announce, “This will sell tons because it has the same chord progression as ‘White Christmas,’ and once he played it for Dick and Oscar they would say, ‘Irving, that’s great. Now what we need here is a song between Frank and Annie when they…’”

  Rodgers and Hammerstein might be the new kings of Broadway, but Berlin was an old street fighter. “I would say Irving Berlin wrote this tremendous score not just for himself but for Richard Rodgers,” the conductor Jay Blackton would recall. “The extra reach, again and again and again, to show he still had it in him.” And he showed he could be magnanimous, too: because his hiring had meant that Dorothy gave up the chance to write the show’s lyrics, and because he was grateful for the Fieldses’ inspiration in suggesting songs, he agreed to split the authors’ royalties fifty-fifty instead of the usual one-third each to the writers of book, music, and lyrics.

  Berlin also proved that Dick Rodgers had nothing on him when it came to speed of composition. At one story conference in Oscar’s East Side town house as the show was taking final shape, Josh Logan whispered to Oscar that he thought there should be a second-act duet for Frank and Annie, who had not sung together since their big first-act love song, “They Say It’s Wonderful.” In a flash, Berlin was at their side from across the room. “Listen, everybody,” he insisted. “Josh wants another song. Josh, where do you see this song?” When Logan suggested the second act, Berlin demanded, “If they’re not talking to each other in the second act, how can they sing together?” At this point Rodgers piped up. “Could they have a quarrel song or a challenge song?”

  “Challenge!” Berlin exclaimed. “Of course! Meeting over. I’ve got to go home and write a challenge song.”

  The meeting broke up and Logan took a taxi back to his own nearby apartment. When he walked in the door, the phone was ringing. It was Berlin, who began singing “Anything you can do, I can do better…”

  “That’s perfect!” Logan shouted. “When in hell did you write that?”

  “In the taxicab,” Berlin replied. “I had to, didn’t I? We go into rehearsal Monday.”

  Annie Get Your Gun would have none of the convention-breaking features of Oklahoma! or Carousel. There was no ballet, no soul-baring soliloquy, no pantomime prologue. Its depiction of Native Americans was cartoonish in its day and insensitive by modern lights. In the end, Annie would win her lover by purposely losing a shooting match—which could be seen as a gesture of traditional female acquiescence or a blow for female empowerment, depending on one’s interpretation. But the play had other overriding assets: a star turn, flawless showmanship, and all those wonderful songs. It opened at the Imperial Theatre on May 16, 1946, and astoundingly the first-night critics found the score disappointing. “A great big, follow-the-formula, fetch-the-crowd musical,” wrote Time magazine. “It bothers with nothing artistic or bizarre.” Brooks Atkinson in the Times called Berlin’s score “routine” and “undistinguished,” though he allowed of Merman, “By the time she is finished with either a song or a part she possesses it completely and very nearly possesses all the other performers and has, at least, a lien on the scenery.”

  History would prove the skeptics wrong. The show ran for 1,147 performances, became an indestructible vehicle for many other actresses besides Merman, and its songs passed into the everyday rhythms of pop culture, especially “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” Berlin’s hymn to the joys of performing, which became the entertainment world’s unofficial anthem. Twenty years later, with Merman nearing sixty, Rodgers would produce a splashy revival for the Music Theater of Lincoln Center. The show was a hit all over again.

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  IN THE WAKE of Annie Get Your Gun’s resounding success, Dick and Oscar teamed up with Josh Logan for two slight, well-made comedies that were solid commercial successes, owing at least partly to Logan’s canny direction. The first was Happy Birthday, a vehicle written for Helen Hayes by her friend Anita Loos. Hayes had tired of the hoopskirts and historical dramas that had made her famous and was looking for a lark. Loos, best known as the author of the Roaring Twenties novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, provided it with the story of Addie Bemis, a mousy librarian, who ventures into a dive bar in Newark, New Jersey, on a rainy night at twilight in search of the handsome bank teller on whom she has a secret crush.

  Over the course of the evening, the teetotaling Addie falls under the spell of a few Pink Ladies and other pixilating alcoholic concoctions and blossoms into an alluring heroine who makes friends with all the raffish denizens of the bar. Through Jo Mielziner’s scenic magic, the bar itself blossomed into an enchanted fairyland of twinkling lights and a telescoping bar stool on which Addie happily sways. She wins her guy, and even sings a jaunty tune, “I Haven’t Got a Worry in the World,” supplied, of course, by Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves.

  But the Boston tryout was a disaster. Audiences were unsure how to respond to Addie’s unsettling mix of sweetness and bitchiness. One night, everyone met in Oscar’s suite at the Ritz-Carlton. Logan feared the team would close the play. Instead, displaying the steeliness that a quarter century in the theater had instilled in him, Oscar just said calmly, “Let’s fix it.”

  “And,” Dick added in the same level tone, “by Monday.”

  “I don’t think I had ever seen dogged pride and fixed determination played in unison before,” Logan would marvel. “I vowed secretly to be always as emotionally tough as they were that night.”

  Logan and Loos carefully excised every other line, removing Addie’s nasty
qualities while retaining her endearing ones. The show opened in New York on October 31, 1946, and ran for a year and a half—563 performances. It might have run longer if Hayes had not decided she’d had enough.

  The second collaboration with Logan was a play recommended by the producer Leland Hayward, a comedy by Norman Krasna called John Loves Mary, which told the story of two army buddies dealing with complications in their return to stateside love. The show opened on February 4, 1947, and, while the critics were not especially impressed, it ran for 423 performances and became a film starring Ronald Reagan and a staple of summer stock and amateur productions for years afterward.

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  AS IF THIS frantic pace of producing were not enough, Oscar was also growing busier by the day with his many commitments outside the world of the theater. He had never been one who could say no to what he saw as a good cause and was one of the entertainment world’s most stalwart liberal voices. In his fallow years in Los Angeles, he had helped found the pro-Soviet Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and served as chairman of its cultural commission, helping to organize radio broadcasts and write articles to combat racial intolerance. After the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939 rendered the league obsolete, Oscar helped to found its successor, the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. In 1945, he helped start the Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions—which promoted participation in the democratic process and would later be denounced as a Communist front organization. In 1946, he joined artists and writers like Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie as a founding member of People’s Songs, which organized entertainment for progressive causes.