Something Wonderful

by Todd S. Purdum

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING MONTH, Dick and Oscar went to Los Angeles to check up on one of their most important properties: the national touring company of Annie Get Your Gun, featuring Mary Martin, who was fast becoming a star to rival Ethel Merman herself. A onetime dance instructor from Weatherford, Texas, Martin had first met Hammerstein in Hollywood in the 1930s. At an audition at Oscar and Dorothy’s elegant home in Beverly Hills, she sang for him “a song you probably don’t know, ‘Indian Love Call.’” When she finished, Hammerstein told her, “Young lady, I think you have something. I would like to work with you on lines and phrasing, if you could come to my house every week.” Then he added, “Oh, and by the way, I know that song. I wrote it.” Hammerstein promptly arranged for Martin to sing for Jerome Kern. She chose a flashy coloratura soprano selection, “Les Filles de Cadix” by the French composer Léo Delibes. Kern’s advice was succinct. “Miss Martin,” he asked, “why do you want to be a prima donna? They are a dime a dozen and most of them have better voices than yours. Why don’t you find your own métier, your own style, and perfect it? Learn to be you.”

  Martin found her style, taking Broadway by storm singing Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Leave It to Me in 1938. She performed the number’s litany of risqué double entendres about a kept woman and her older patron with the straightest of faces, dancing the accompanying striptease with the most innocent of miens. The result was a sensation. When Rodgers and Hammerstein were in search of a star for the road company of Annie Get Your Gun, Martin and her manager-husband, Richard Halliday, made a proposal unusual for an actress of her rank: let her lead the national company, with her own softer, more gamine interpretation of the part, beginning in her home state of Texas. Dick and Oscar and Josh Logan leapt, and the tour had been a smash.

  Now as the partners sat by the pool at the Hotel Bel-Air, they fell to talking about the Michener book. From the beginning, the interracial romance of “Fo’ Dolla” had been envisioned as the central plotline of their show. But they were having second thoughts, concerned that the tale of Cable and Liat might come off as yet another twist on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. What about that other story, “Our Heroine,” with its appealing Frenchman and the young navy nurse? That would be a novelty: two serious love stories in a single play, instead of comic foils like Ado Annie and Will Parker or Carrie Pipperidge and Enoch Snow.

  What happened next seems too improbable even to have been scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter. That same day, out of the blue, Rodgers got a call from Edwin Lester, the West Coast’s leading musical theater impresario and the founder of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. Lester had worked with Hammerstein for years, and was presenting the very touring company of Annie Get Your Gun that Dick and Oscar had come to see. Now, he told Rodgers, he had a big problem: He had signed Ezio Pinza, the beloved Metropolitan Opera basso, to a twelve-week, $25,000 contract in anticipation of producing a musical called Mr. Ambassador. The project had collapsed, but Lester was still on the hook for his guarantee with Pinza, who at fifty-six had decided to retire from grand opera.

  “Do you and Oscar have anything cooking that might be suitable?” Lester wanted to know.

  Years later, Rodgers would recall, “The whole picture suddenly began to take shape before my eyes.… I hung up and ran back to Oscar, who saw exactly what I saw.” Ezio Pinza as Emile De Becque.

  But what about Nellie Forbush? The perfect candidate was right in their own backyard: Mary Martin. But Martin was reluctant. For one thing, singing Irving Berlin’s raucous songs for months on the road had lowered her vocal range. “What on earth do you want?” she asked. “Two basses?” The Annie Get Your Gun tour was ending in San Francisco that summer and Martin and Halliday would be driving home to Connecticut. The partners agreed to give her time to think.

  Meantime, Dick and Oscar set to work in earnest. Rodgers had promised Martin that she would not have to sing in competition with Pinza, so instead of a standard duet, he and Hammerstein created a pair of “Twin Soliloquies” in which the lead characters would explore their growing attraction in parallel melodies. As usual, Oscar went straight to the original source. In his copy of Tales of the South Pacific, he had underlined a passage and penciled “Song//” in the margin next to it: “‘I was looking at the cacaos,’ Nellie said in a sing-song voice. To herself she was saying, ‘I shall marry this man. This shall be my life from now on. This hillside shall be my home. And the afternoons he and I will sit here.’ Aloud, she continued, ‘They are beautiful, aren’t they?’” From this, Hammerstein fashioned a lyric of tentative inquiry in which Nellie sings her private thoughts aloud:

  Wonder how I’d feel,

  Living on a hillside,

  Looking on an ocean,

  Beautiful and still.

  Emile, unhearing, offers his own vision:

  This is what I need,

  This is what I’ve longed for,

  Someone young and smiling

  Climbing up my hill!

  They go on, alternating verses, with Nellie acknowledging:

  We are not alike;

  Probably I’d bore him.

  He’s a cultured Frenchman—

  I’m a little hick.

  And Emile adding:

  Younger men than I,

  Officers and doctors,

  Probably pursue her—

  She could have her pick.

  Nellie:

  Wonder why I feel

  Jittery and jumpy!

  I am like a schoolgirl,

  Waiting for a dance.

  Emile:

  Can I ask her now?

  I am like a schoolboy!

  What will be her answer?

  Do I have a chance?

  By the time the Hallidays got back to Connecticut, Dick and Oscar had finished two more songs, “A Cockeyed Optimist,” in which Nellie sums up her sunny vision of the world, and “Some Enchanted Evening,” in which Emile declares a love for Nellie that is as intense and instantaneous as it is improbable. Martin and Halliday were summoned to the Rodgerses’ nearby country house to hear Josh Logan read the early dialogue, Dick play piano, and Oscar sing in his genial foghorn of a voice. It was a pleasant evening, and as the Hallidays headed home, Dick and Oscar asked for an answer within seventy-two hours. At three o’clock the next morning, Martin woke up Rodgers with a phone call: “Do we have to wait seventy-two hours to say, ‘yes’?”

  Now Rodgers and Hammerstein had only one problem: after reviewing the salary requirements of their two major stars, they concluded, “We had just cast ourselves out of a show.” Given what they had already committed to pay Pinza, combined with Martin’s established star salary from Annie Get Your Gun, “there was no way that South Pacific could be anything but an economic disaster, no matter how long it ran.” After some initial reluctance on Pinza’s part, both stars agreed to reduce their salaries and percentages, each settling for 7 percent of the gross box-office take, with a $2,000-a-week guarantee.

  * * *

  WITH HIS USUAL skills of synthesis, Oscar sketched a detailed outline of the show. Picking and choosing characters and incidents from Michener’s stories, he wove together the lives of Nellie, Emile, Cable, and Liat into a single narrative. For comic relief, he seized on the character of Luther Billis from the story “Dry Rot” and asked Michener for some additional material on how a guy like that might operate. “I suggested that he would probably run a laundry of some kind,” Michener would recall. Hammerstein softened Bill Harbison’s character into the capable executive officer of a new character, Captain George Brackett, the local navy commander. He changed the number of Emile’s children from eight to two (a boy and a girl); raided their names (Jerome and Ngana) from an unrelated story; and changed the spelling of the family’s surname to use a lowercase d. He linked Cable and de Becque by making Cable’s assignment the surveillance mission that Michener had described in “The Cave,” and when Nellie rejects Emile’s proposal of marriage, de Becque
joins Cable on the mission, taking the role originally given to the plucky British trader Anderson (“the Remittance Man”). He flagged Operation Alligator, the pending assault on the Japanese-held islands, early in the action, allowing all the major characters to be caught up in its wake. In the end, Cable dies under enemy fire, but de Becque survives and returns to Nellie, who has overcome her biases and joins the Frenchman and his family as the curtain falls.

  But as the summer of 1948 turned to fall, Hammerstein was stuck. Having been rejected for military service in World War I, he knew nothing of life in uniform. Meanwhile, Rodgers was getting antsy to compose the rest of the score, so he called Josh Logan and suggested he ask if Oscar needed some help. Hammerstein did. He had written just twenty-six pages: the opening scene between Nellie and Emile and one other.

  “What do sailors do when young Lieutenant Cable comes onto the beach?” Oscar asked Josh. “I had them snapping to attention. But that seemed wrong.”

  “Good God, yes,” Logan replied. “They’d pretend he wasn’t there.”

  “I hate the military so much that I’m ignorant of it,” Oscar explained.

  Logan had no such problem. Not only had he been a cadet at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where his stepfather was on the faculty, he had served in the Army Air Corps during the war and had just finished co-writing Mister Roberts. He offered to drive down to Doylestown to help. “Oh, please do, Josh,” Hammerstein said. So Josh and Nedda and Jim Awe, Logan’s secretary, arrived at Highland Farm, where Josh introduced Oscar to a new tool: a portable Dictaphone. They got to work fleshing out the story, with Awe and Oscar’s secretary, Shirley Potash, transcribing the dialogue and Dorothy Hammerstein and Nedda collating the pages. A visit planned for only a couple of days stretched into ten as the collaborators worked every afternoon into the night, while Hammerstein spent the mornings focused on the lyrics. By Logan’s later account, “I realized that Oscar was throwing me lines for Emile de Becque, Bloody Mary, and sometimes for Captain Brackett, and I was doing all the rest.” It is difficult to gauge the precise extent of Logan’s contributions, but some estimates suggest that he wrote as much as 30 to 40 percent of the finished script. It is beyond doubt that he did enough to count as a full collaborator—a point that his worried wife would make to him night after night as she urged him to ask Oscar for credit. Nedda Logan was especially sensitive to the point, as Josh had just finished a difficult collaboration on Mister Roberts with Tom Heggen, who had initially wanted to deny him a co-author credit. But Logan was so excited by the work with Oscar that he was reluctant to rock the boat, and he went back to Manhattan with the issue unresolved.

  “If this isn’t the damnedest show that’s ever been written, I’ll eat my hat,” Josh said when they were done. And in fact, the show was shaping up with unusual excitement all around. One evening at the Logans’ apartment, Rodgers first played Nellie’s exuberant confession of love for Emile—“A Wonderful Guy”—for Mary Martin, sitting beside him at the piano, and she sang it with such growing enthusiasm that she fell off the bench at the end. “Never do it any other way,” Dick said.

  Rodgers had at first been worried about the music, because he hated the stereotypical sounds of what he took to be South Seas music: slack-key guitar, marimba, and so on. “This is a particularly mushy, decayed sound and one that is entirely abhorrent to me,” he would recall. “The prospect of having to deal with it for a full evening was far from enticing.” Rodgers met Michener for lunch to ask his advice, and “I could hardly get my martini down because I was so anxious to find out just what kind of steel guitar they used on Mr. Michener’s particular island.” He was relieved to find that the only instrument Michener recalled was some drums of hollow logs, but “no music in the accepted occidental sense of tonality.”

  The emerging show was also a true collaboration among all the artists involved, as evidenced by “Bali Ha’i,” Bloody Mary’s song about the alluring island to which Lieutenant Cable would be drawn. Oscar had written a lyric and presented it to Dick at a production meeting over lunch in Logan’s apartment one day. “I spent a minute or so studying the words, turned the paper over and scribbled some notes, then went into the next room where there was a piano, and played the song,” Rodgers would recall. “The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.” But in recounting the tale in later years, Rodgers was also typically defensive about the so-called speed of his composition. He had spent weeks if not months thinking about the song, its place in the story, the languorous Oriental feel it should have, the fact that it would be sung by a contralto. All this suggested the use of notes from the five-tone pentatonic scale common in Asian music. In fact, the first three notes of the song, on the syllables “Bali Ha’i,” repeated with insistent rapidity, would become the first sound audiences heard at the beginning of Robert Russell Bennett’s stirring overture, and a kind of leitmotif for the whole show.

  Meantime, Jo Mielziner was so excited by the new song that he rushed to his studio to make a watercolor sketch of Bali Ha’i, with its twin volcanoes rising in the distance. Not satisfied with his first effort, he dipped his brush in water and blurred the tops of the peaks, as if they were obscured by clouds. That in turn inspired Oscar to write another verse:

  Someday, you’ll see me,

  Floatin’ in de sunshine,

  My head stickin’ out

  F’um a low-flyin’ cloud …

  Mary Martin herself came up with another idea that turned into a song. As she was showering one day, it occurred to her that she had never seen any actress wash her hair, really wash her hair, onstage. She ran stark naked to ask her husband what he thought. “Don’t you dare tell that to anyone,” he said. “Not a soul. If you do, they’ll go for it, and then you’ll have to do it onstage eight times a week.” But the next thing they knew, Josh Logan was on the phone and they promptly told him about the idea, swearing him not to pass it on to Dick and Oscar. “So, naturally,” Martin recalled, “we all told them both. They said I was balmy but if I was willing to do it they loved the idea.” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” became Nellie’s brief declaration of independence from Emile. (And because Martin could never get all the soap out of her hair onstage, she washed it again in her dressing room after every performance, and then again at home before the next day’s show, so she calculated that she wound up washing it not just eight times a week but more than twenty times—for three and a half years in New York and London.)

  Martin was also the inspiration for another number, “Thanksgiving Follies,” in which the nurses put on a morale-building show for the sailors. A friend had sent her an old picture, taken at a summer camp in Texas, of Martin in baggy men’s striped shorts, a sailor hat, and necktie, and Hammerstein was so taken with the hapless image that he tucked a copy of it beside his shaving mirror with the caption, “This proves there is hope for everyone.” Logan told Martin that she had come a long way in show business, but that for all her stardom and couture gowns, she was still a baggy-pants comedian at heart. He devised an oversize sailor costume with falling-down pants and tie to the knees, and planned a dance for Martin and Myron McCormick, who would play Luther Billis in a coconut bra and grass skirt, with a full-rigged ship tattooed on a bare belly that he had taught himself to undulate in a parlor trick to get free beer in college. Oscar had appropriate fun with the words for “Honey Bun”:

  My doll is as dainty as a sparrow,

  Her figure is something to applaud.

  Where she’s narrow, she’s narrow as an arrow,

  And she’s broad where a broad should be broad …

  “I will never forget the half-embarrassed, very pleased look on Oscar’s face when he first sang me the lyrics,” Martin remembered. “Never in his life had he written such corny words but I shrieked with joy.”

  * * *

  FOR OSCAR, PART of the strong appeal of Michener’s book was its frank treatment of racial prejudice, which was anything but a theoretical
issue for the Hammerstein family. Dorothy’s sister Eleanor, nicknamed Doodie, was married to Jerry Watanabe, the son of a British mother whose father had once been his country’s ambassador to Japan, and a Japanese father, who was a director of the industrial trading firm, Mitsui & Co. Jerry had been raised to be the very model of a proper Englishman, educated at Cambridge, and was a fine tennis player and golfer. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, he was working in the New York offices of Mitsui and, as a Japanese national, was interned at Ellis Island. Even after he was released, he could not find work, so Dorothy hired him to manage the accounts of her decorating business. During Jerry’s internment, Doodie and their daughter, Jennifer, lived for a time with the Hammersteins in Doylestown, and when Dorothy and her sister took the girl to be enrolled at the local school, they asked the principal for assurances that she would not face discrimination. “She’ll have to pay the price for her antecedents,” the man answered, and Jennifer went instead to a local Quaker school and then to the George School in Newton, Pennsylvania (which Jimmy Hammerstein and Steve Sondheim also attended), where she was enrolled as Jennifer Blanchard.

  In his work with the Writers’ War Board, Oscar had also made a particular point of combating prejudice. And in 1949, Oscar and Dorothy joined James Michener and another Pennsylvania neighbor, the author Pearl Buck, in helping to create Welcome House, the country’s first interracial, international adoption agency, begun with the particular mission of placing Amerasian children—many of them the offspring of broken wartime romances—in American homes.

  Segregation was still a fact of life not only in the Jim Crow South but in much of the urban North as well. It had only been in 1947 that Jackie Robinson had broken big league baseball’s color line. In the draft of the South Pacific script that Logan and Hammerstein completed in time for the first cast rehearsal, after Nellie has broken off her relationship with Emile in horror at his mixed-race children, and Cable finds himself unable to marry Liat, despite his love for her, the young Americans share their feelings.