“Damn it to hell!” Cable shouts to Nellie. “Why do you look so damned shocked? What’s the difference if her hair is blonde and curly or black and straight? If I want her to be my wife, why can’t I have her?”
“You can!” Nellie replies. “It’s just that—people—I mean they say it never works. Don’t they?”
“They do,” Cable answers in disgust. “And then everybody does their damnedest to prove it. A hell of a chance Liat and I would have in one of those little gray stone and timber houses on the Main Line. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cable entertained, last Tuesday, with a house-warming. Nobody came!’”
This dialogue would be dropped before the first performance, perhaps considered too raw. But not the song that followed, which Cable sings in response to Nellie’s assertion that her prejudice is “something that is born in me!” and Emile’s insistence that it cannot have been. Indeed, Joe explains, “it happens after you’re born”:
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
In Oscar’s original draft, Emile continues the song, declaring, “Love is quite different. It grows by itself,” and then singing:
It will grow like a weed
On a mountain of stones;
You don’t have to feed
Or put fat on its bones;
It can live on a smile
Or a note of a song:
It may starve for a while,
But it stumbles along,
Stumbles along with its banner unfurled,
The joy and the beauty, the hope of the world.
Rodgers rejected the last verses as unnecessary (Hammerstein substituted words about Emile’s feeling cheated “by a mean little world of mean little men”) but stood lockstep behind the song.
* * *
ONE IMPORTANT MATTER remained to be resolved before the start of rehearsals: the question of Logan’s credit for the script. After a run of sleepless nights, more hectoring from his wife, and a consultation with their doctor, Josh finally steeled himself for a confrontation with Hammerstein in which he stammered out a demand for half credit for the book. “Oscar’s face was immobile but I thought he blushed slightly,” Logan would recall many years later. “After the briefest of pauses, he said, ‘I wish I’d said it first. I’m sorry you had to. Of course you must have credit. After all, you wrote it as much as I did. We’ll work out the exact credits later.’”
But the next day, a stern-looking Oscar returned with bad news. After consulting with Dick Rodgers and presumably Howard Reinheimer, he agreed to co-credit for Logan, but with penalties. In their original contract, Logan’s name as director was to have been in the same size type as Dick and Oscar’s as authors. Now Logan’s director credit would be reduced to 60 percent of that size, and his and Hammerstein’s co-author credit would appear the same way. If that seemed petty, Oscar justified the punishment, telling Logan that the public had expected him to write the book alone and giving credit to a co-author had diminished him. Moreover, Oscar informed Logan that he would not share in the copyright or author’s royalties of the play; only his director’s royalties for the run of the original company. “Jesus, Oscar,” a stunned Logan said, “that’s a body blow.” Hammerstein was pained but resolute. “Josh,” he explained, “Rodgers and Hammerstein cannot and will not share a copyright. It’s part of their financial structure. Including you would weaken our position.” A memo from Irving Cohen in the Reinheimer office on February 1 spelled out Logan’s new billing and noted matter-of-factly: “Your name shall appear in the foregoing form whenever and wherever the names ‘Richard Rodgers’ and ‘Oscar Hammerstein II,’ as authors, appear.”
Logan was crushed but would remember that “I also saw by Oscar’s expression how hard he must have fought to secure for me as much as he did, and how equally hard it was for him to look me in the eye as he said what he had to say.” The decision would haunt Logan till his dying day.
But for the moment, there was work to be done. Besides Myron McCormick as Billis, the rest of the supporting cast had been rounded out. Betta St. John, who had been a replacement Louise in Carousel, would be Liat, and Juanita Hall, a mixed-race African American actress and singer who was a veteran of the original chorus in Show Boat and of the famed Hall Johnson Choir, was cast as Bloody Mary. William Tabbert, a young singer, took on the role of Joe Cable.
In addition to scenic designer Jo Mielziner, much of the established creative team was reassembled, including Russell Bennett to do the orchestrations and Trude Rittmann as vocal arranger and creator of the musical underscoring that would play beneath some of the dialogue, in the style of a movie.
The first rehearsal was on Monday, February 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street. “The New York opening may be a musical’s most exciting moment, but close to it is the first reading of the full score and book,” Logan would recall. “Will it or won’t it?” From the first moment, South Pacific did. Martin and Pinza sang their “Twin Soliloquies,” and as the music swelled, Logan recalled, “This was the moment when for me the show became great.” But he thought the number ended too soon. So he asked Trude Rittmann to improvise music based on what the actors were doing, and she added a thrilling orchestral climax that rose grandly up the scale as Nellie and Emile downed snifters of brandy.
* * *
LIKE RUSSELL BENNETT, Trude Rittmann was a vital part of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team, though her contributions to the sound of their music and the success of their shows have been even less acknowledged. She had first been recruited by Agnes de Mille to write the dance arrangements for Carousel and is believed to have contributed musical underscoring for some of that show’s dramatic scenes as well. Now she would work hand in glove with Josh Logan to heighten the cinematic style of South Pacific. A native of Mannheim, Germany, classically trained in composition and piano, she had fled to England in 1933, eventually emigrating to the United States, where she was hired as a pianist for George Balanchine’s American Ballet Caravan. She became de Mille’s regular rehearsal accompanist in 1941 and would eventually work on more than sixty shows, sometimes writing dance music, sometimes vocal arrangements, sometimes incidental music, while often being credited for only one or two of those tasks, or even not at all. For South Pacific, Rittmann would write lush underscoring for the most intense dialogue scenes, going off at night to elaborate on themes from Rodgers’s tunes and then rehearsing over and over with Logan until the music was set. De Mille herself would complain that Rittmann was sometimes treated like an electrician or seamstress, a technician needed only for a discrete task. “As her role in the shows increased,” Rittmann’s great-niece Susanna Drewry would recall, “she took great satisfaction in the creative collaboration with the choreographers she worked with. She grew to accept her lot but she also didn’t want the limelight. She was very much an introvert, and she couldn’t deal with the battles and intrigues of theater life.”
Rittmann’s own account of her contributions was matter-of-fact. “The composer usually has a certain wish as to what should happen to his songs,” she would recall late in life. “Some of them—not everybody—but some of them—would have a certain vision of what he would like to do. Rodgers cared only that his song didn’t disappear.” Starting with South Pacific, she remembered, “He had made a carte blanche to me and said, ‘Do.’” But like Russell Bennett,
Rittmann was also under no illusions about the difference she made. She would continue to work with Rodgers off and on until the 1970s. Once, when she felt a new orchestrator was being mean to her, she asked Rodgers what he thought of the man. “Dick looked me right in the eye,” she recalled, “and said, ‘He’s afraid of you.’ And then he added, ‘Sometimes, I’m afraid of you, too.’”
* * *
AS THE FIRST reading continued, it was Pinza’s turn to sing “Some Enchanted Evening.” The song was always envisioned as the evening’s big ballad, and it would become the undisputed hit of the show. It captured the power of Emile’s instantaneous attraction to Nellie, and Hammerstein wrote it with the coup de foudre that had struck him and Dorothy on the boat to England all those years earlier clearly on his mind:
Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger,
You may see a stranger
Across a crowded room.
And somehow you know,
You know even then,
That somewhere you’ll see her again and again.
Even with just a piano accompaniment, the power of Pinza’s voice was overwhelming. “We used to stand in the wings and marvel when he sang ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’” remembered Don Fellows, the young actor who played Buzz (formerly “Bus”) Adams, “because I swear we could feel it in our feet, you could feel the vibration.”
The only problem was Pinza’s appalling English pronunciation. “Enchanted” came out “enshonted” or, worse, “exchang-ed” in his thick Italian accent, while “sugar” was “sooker.” Pinza himself would recall the rehearsal period as “the strangest and most trying month of my entire professional life.” Everything was new to him: working with a living composer (instead of the long-dead author of a classic opera) and absorbing new music and dialogue almost daily, on the fly. “I had expected that I would have to make certain readjustments, but it had never occurred to me that they might be so difficult,” he said. “No sooner would I adjust myself to the new changes than still newer ones would come, aglow with creative inventiveness, yet living hell and embarrassment for me.” Rodgers would recall that at one point Logan and Hayward were so exasperated, they considered replacing Pinza, and Pinza himself acknowledged that as late as the eve of the first tryout in New Haven, he had considered dropping out of the show.
But for the rest of the cast, Logan’s brisk direction could seem like magic. The creative team had long ago made the decision not to have any formal, choreographed dancing in a show that strove for realism. “You can’t have a really moving and believable romance with a chorus line getting in the way,” is how Rodgers put it. So Logan staged “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” the sailors’ lustful lament about their lack of female companionship, as an impromptu crosscurrent of prowling cats. “I started pacing as I imagined a caged animal would pace,” Logan would recall. “The men followed me, restlessly pacing back and forth—killing time till the end of the war, till the chance of seeing women again. Then I asked Trude to repeat the song, and motioned one man to pace in one direction, another to go the other way, breaking the pattern constantly. Within fifteen or twenty minutes I had staged it. It didn’t exactly fall into place, but it looked as if it had.” The movements were so complicated that there was no way for a stage manager to note them; only the actors themselves knew the drill, and when an ensemble member was replaced, his predecessor was given a day’s rehearsal pay to teach him the required steps.
Josh and Oscar had also made an important decision: Virtually every actor in the show would be playing a named character, with a specific rank or role. There would be no faceless singing-and-dancing ensemble. Logan sent the men in the cast who were veterans to the local army-navy surplus store with $25 each, and instructions to choose the sort of costume their character would wear. Don Fellows would remember that all the proceedings took place under Dick Rodgers’s watchful eye. “Mr. Rodgers would sit in the rear of the theater and then we would hear, only occasionally, we’d hear, ‘Josh, Josh, may I have a minute?’” Fellows remembered. “And Logan would trot up the aisle and they’d talk and talk and talk and talk, and then Josh would come down and say, ‘Well, no, I think what we’re gonna do…’”
Within a couple of days, much of the show was up on its feet. At this point Logan wanted to restore a second song for Bloody Mary, one that Oscar had called “Happy Talk,” in which she would sketch out the agreeable life that might await Cable and Liat if they married. An early lyric fragment went like this:
Talk about breakfus’ coffee and toast
Opposite de one you love de most
Dinner an’ supper an’ plen’y to eat,
Gravy an’ potatoes on your meat.
Oscar told Logan he’d decided to scrap the song; he didn’t see how it could be staged and didn’t want to cause more headaches for the director. “You write it, I’ll stage it,” Logan rejoined cockily, and when he heard Oscar’s words
Happy talk,
Keep talkin’ happy talk,
Talk about things you’d like to do.
You gotta have a dream;
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
sounding against the insistent rhythm of Dick’s melody, he thought of two birds talking. Logan took Betta St. John, Juanita Hall, and Trude Rittmann to the theater lobby and, putting his thumbs and forefingers together to mimic opening and closing beaks, promptly devised a charming pantomime for the song, with Liat resting her head on her open palms on the word “dream.”
* * *
EVEN AS THE show took shape, work continued on the script and score. Hammerstein and Logan had debated how to handle the scene in which Cable and Liat first make love—an encounter that Michener had written offered “incarnadine proof” that the marine had taken the young girl’s virginity. Oscar and Josh knew there would have to be a blackout at the moment of truth, but how to make sure the audience had not missed the point? Josh came up with the idea of having Cable remove his shirt during the blackout, so that when the lights came up again, it would be clear the couple had just had sex. “Well, you’re nothing if not bold,” the straitlaced Oscar exclaimed. “You’re emphatic, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Logan answered. “Would you rather not do it?”
“No, no,” Oscar assured him. “It’s a good idea. It’s just that I had to catch my breath, that’s all.”
But there was still the matter of a song for Cable to sing to Liat when he realizes she has changed his life. At an early rehearsal one day, Dick and Oscar took Josh to the theater lobby and played and sang their proposal:
Well, my friend,
Our day is at an end
Our next kiss will have to be our last.
Soon, my friend,
I’ll be around the bend,
Alone with a dream already past.…
“That’s awful!” Logan blurted out. “That’s the worst song I ever heard. Good God, that’s terrible.”
The partners responded in shock; Logan thought Dick’s face looked “stricken.” But the next day, they tried again, returning with a burbling schottische tune, a slow polka, whose lyrics began:
Suddenly lucky,
Suddenly our arms are lucky;
Suddenly lucky,
Suddenly our lips have kissed …
“When they finished,” Logan would remember, “I was thinking so hard I didn’t speak.”
“Well, have we passed the test this time, Teacher?” Oscar demanded.
“You’re close,” Logan said. “I love the tune, but isn’t that song a bit lightweight for a hot, lusty boy to sing right after making love to a girl who will change his life?” Remember, Logan added: He’s a marine.
Rodgers rebelled, and “announced uncharmingly that he was not going to go on writing till ‘this guy’ agrees on a tune,” Logan recalled. But Dick remembered an unused tune from Allegro that his wife and daughters had liked and still asked him to play from time to tim
e. Its original title was “My Wife,” and now Oscar wrote new lyrics:
Younger than springtime are you,
Softer than starlight are you;
Warmer than winds of June are the gentle lips you gave me.
Gayer than laughter are you,
Sweeter than music are you;
Angel and lover, heaven and earth
Are you to me.
At last Logan was satisfied. Generations of audiences would be, too.
* * *
JUST A FEW days later, another problem arose. Dick and Oscar had written a stirring march for Emile and Cable to sing as they at last agree to embark on the dangerous surveillance mission, “Now Is the Time.”
Now is the time,
The time to act!
No other time will do.
Live and play your part
And give away your heart
And take what the world gives you.
But Logan was bothered. “If Cable and Emile were going on a mission to save Allied lives, why didn’t they get a goddamn move on instead of standing and singing?” he asked. After seeing an early run-through of the show on February 20, Nedda Logan agreed. “As a matter of fact, my honest opinion is that Dick could get a better song here,” she wrote in a memo to her husband. Something more on the order of Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy” in Carousel. Josh had an idea: What if Cable and de Becque’s mission came out of the song? Out of Emile’s dejection at Nellie’s rejection of him. Dick asked for a title line he could work on, and someone called out, “This nearly was mine.”
“That’s it,” Dick said. “A big bass waltz.” Oscar sketched an early fragment of just such a waltz:
I planned a lovely tomorrow
That someone lovely would share
But now tomorrow is fading
Like laughter on the air …
By February 25, the complete lyrics for “This Nearly Was Mine” had been typed out, and as usual, Oscar’s refinements were an improvement:
I’ll keep remembering kisses
Something Wonderful Page 19
