From lips I’ll never own
And all the lovely adventures
That we have never known …
* * *
JUST BEFORE THE company embarked for the out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, there was a near disaster. Mary Martin had been doing cartwheels since she was a kid, and in the dance break of “A Wonderful Guy” she had inserted a long, whirling cycle of them—clean across the stage. But on this day Logan had replaced the usual stage work lights with hot show lights, and Martin was temporarily blinded. She missed the edge of the stage and struck a glancing blow on the head of the conductor, Salvatore Dell’Isola, before thudding to a stop on top of Trude Rittmann at the piano. “Oh, God, my neck is broken!” Rittmann cried.
Fortunately it wasn’t, and the next day Martin brought an apology, a football helmet covered with flowers—which Trude promptly plopped on her head. But from then on, Logan recalled, “We substituted a good, safe high note.”
Only Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan knew the details of Logan’s painful credit-sharing arrangement, but as the show took on the air of a sure-fire hit, there were rumblings along Broadway about whether Dick and Oscar had shortchanged James Michener with a mere 1 percent royalty. The columnist Walter Winchell called to say he was looking into the matter, but Michener begged him not to make a stink about the arrangement. That same night, after a full dress rehearsal, Oscar Hammerstein called Michener with an offer as generous as his treatment of Logan was stingy: while the producers could not change his royalty arrangement, they wanted to let him buy a share of the show, which would cost $4,500. “I don’t have one thousand,” Michener replied. Not to worry: the producers would advance him the funds, to be repaid when proceeds came in. “Tears came to my eyes,” Michener would remember, “and I think Oscar knew it, for he waited for me to say, ‘That’s wonderfully generous.’” On March 5, Howard Reinheimer wrote a memo for the files, memorializing the “unusual courtesy” of granting Michener his stake, “by means of funds advanced by producers.” In short order, the proceeds from that unusual courtesy would allow Michener to quit his day job at Macmillan and become a full-time writer, a career he would pursue with stunning success for the next forty-eight years.
* * *
THE NEW HAVEN opening was set for Monday, March 7. From Williams College, Stephen Sondheim sent a cheeky telegram of congratulations, asking, DO YOU NEED A GOOD BARITONE? But Josh Logan, whose emotions could veer wildly from exultation to despair, was on edge. On Taft Hotel stationery, he scrawled a note to Oscar. “Thank you for the show & the fine time I had working with you—and the credit sharing and all the boosts and gooses,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t let’s make too quick decisions tomorrow night.” Referring to the group of lawyers, investors, agents, and other kibitzers who were in town for the opening, he went on: “I will fix anything [underlined twice] in this show—toward the happiness of all three of us but I cannot give full satisfaction to Leland [Hayward], Nancy [Hawks, Hayward’s wife], Gilbert Miller, Howard Cullman, Howard Reinheimer, Lew Wasserman, Morrie Schrier and people of that kidney.”
As if validating his qualms, Logan watched that evening’s performance with growing trepidation. First “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” which he’d felt sure would be a smash, landed with a fizzle. Then “A Wonderful Guy,” sung by Nellie and a bunch of nurses, also seemed to fall flat. His mood was not improved at intermission, when he learned from Nedda and his lawyer, Morris Schrier, that when the Reinheimer office had messengered his contract for signature the day before the first rehearsal, it came with a note stipulating that if it was not signed within two hours, Logan need not report for duty but would be replaced. Oblivious to the audience’s applause, Josh retreated to his hotel room after the show, refusing all visitors and phone calls, until finally Dick Rodgers talked his way past Nedda to insist, “Josh, you don’t seem to know we have a hit.” Logan was somewhat reassured but still had the taste of ashes in his mouth. Rodgers himself was annoyed that Pinza had flubbed a line in “Some Enchanted Evening.” “Oscar put it down as one of those minor errors,” the playwright Marc Connelly recalled years later. “But Dick, oh Dick was relentless. What the hell was Dick so worried about? His notes weren’t confused—it was the lyrics.”
The next night, when “Wash That Man” and “Wonderful Guy” produced the same underwhelming reaction, Logan was again puzzled, until his friend Molly Williams, whose actor-playwright husband, Emlyn, had come to New Haven to help trim the show’s running time, confessed that no one seated around her had heard “Wash That Man” at all because they were all abuzz, talking to each other and wondering whether Martin was really washing her own hair. Logan’s solution was easy: Have Mary sing one full chorus of the song, to put over the lyrics, and then get out the shampoo. It took him about ten days, with the show in Boston, to solve the riddle of “Wonderful Guy.” He thought the problem might be that Nellie was confessing her innermost thoughts to her fellow nurses, spoiling an intimate moment. “Too bad the song can’t be a soliloquy,” Josh mused to Oscar, who promptly agreed, and switched the pronouns in the song. “That night she tore the house apart,” Logan would recall.
There were a few other small changes. On March 9, Oscar’s old friend Essie Robeson (the wife of Paul Robeson) wrote to wonder why Archie Savage, the sole black dancer in the show, and a spectacular one at that, was always jitterbugging. “It is very possible that I am unduly sensitive, racially, but so are a lot of us, and it would help enormously that if just once he appeared with his comrades NOT cutting up.” Oscar immediately replied, “Since you have seen the play, and before I received your letter, we have inserted an episode in which Archie Savage is not jitterbugging.”
Hammerstein was less sympathetic to Lieutenant Commander Thomas McWhorter of the navy, who fired off an early broadside against the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” asking that it be cut. “It is like drinking a scotch and soda and suddenly swallowing the ice cube!” McWhorter wrote. “You could not have interrupted the beautiful flow of entertainment any more effectively had you stopped the show for a VD lecture.” Oscar wrote back, “I believe I get the point of your letter very clearly, and I realize very well the dangers of overstating the case. But I just feel that the case is not fully stated without this song. I wish it were true that all these things are accepted by the public. You say, ‘the theme is wearing very thin,’ but in spite of this, I see progress being made only very slowly.”
The show opened in Boston on Tuesday, March 15, and Dick and Oscar could have written the reviews themselves. “More dramatic than their Oklahoma!, more solidly realistic than their Carousel, and bears no burden of social message as their happy Allegro did,” was Elliot Norton’s verdict in the Post. “It is like their other creations only in this: That it is wonderful.” Don Fellows would recall knowing that the company had something special in hand when ticketless theatergoers outside the Shubert began offering cast members $100 for a pair.
* * *
THE NEW YORK opening was set for Thursday, April 7, 1949. Oscar happened to leave his overcoat in Ezio Pinza’s dressing room, and by the evening’s end considered it such a lucky omen that he left it there whenever he came to visit the show. The night was lucky in another way, too: Mary Rodgers introduced a young friend of hers named Harold Prince to Steve Sondheim, and within just a few years, they would make musical theater history of their own. Oscar and Dick were confident enough of the critics’ verdict that they abandoned theatrical superstition and booked their own opening night party, an elegant supper dance at the St. Regis Roof, and ordered a couple hundred copies of the New York Times to pass out to their guests. They had not miscalculated: the critics offered raves all around. Brooks Atkinson in the Times called the play “a magnificent musical drama,” Richard Watts Jr. of the Post found the show “an utterly captivating work of theatrical art,” and Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune pronounced it “a show of rare enchantment.”
Predict
ably, “Carefully Taught” came in for its share of criticism, with John Mason Brown of the Saturday Review complaining that it smacked of “dragged-in didacticism,” while the New Yorker found it “just a little embarrassing.” But Rodgers and Hammerstein’s theatrical peers and colleagues were ecstatic. Helen Hayes wrote Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, “Words won’t do it—flowers failed to say it—there’s just no way to express the gratitude I felt for last Thursday night. And for the many other wonderful times you’ve given me with your talent. I’m just humbly thankful to be living in the same period with you. ‘South Pacific’ tops everything you’ve ever done.” For his part, James Michener paraphrased Lord Byron’s famous response to his poem, “Childe Harold”: “I went to bed an unknown and woke to find Ezio Pinza famous.”
An advance sale of $500,000 quickly grew to $700,000 after the show opened. South Pacific had come in about $60,000 under its projected $225,000 budget, so the forty-eight original investors, who included the Hollywood director Billy Wilder, the philanthropist Albert Lasker, and Kenneth MacKenna, the MGM story editor who had started the whole thing, not only got their first payout on opening night but stood to make back their entire investment by Labor Day, with the show’s operating profit of around $12,000 a week. Howard Reinheimer had set up the production so it was owned by a corporation, which was in turn owned fifty-fifty by Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves. The advantage of this arrangement was that revenues from the show flowed into the corporate shell, where they were taxed at the rate of 38 percent, far lower than Dick and Oscar’s personal income tax brackets. (And if, by some strange chance, the show had failed, the corporation would not have any limit on the losses it could deduct.)
Tickets immediately became all but unobtainable, and scalping was rife. At one point, New York City’s commissioner of investigation threatened to close the Majestic Theatre’s box office because its treasurer refused to answer questions about inflated prices, and for any given night’s full house, Dick and Oscar estimated, theatergoers had paid $25,000 for tickets with a face value of $7,000. Each morning at seven o’clock, a line formed at the box office for the thirty standing-room seats available for that evening’s performance. One day not long after the opening, Mr. and Mrs. George Fitzsimmons of Detroit arrived by train at Pennsylvania Station at 8:45 a.m., hopped into a taxi, got in line, and made the cut. It was their golden wedding anniversary, “and neither could think of a better way to observe the day,” reported the New York Post. The demand was so intense that Michener himself stood in the wings to see the show, and as late as September 1951 he would tell the columnists Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg that he had only seen it once from out front.
Even more than Oklahoma!, South Pacific became a huge cultural and social phenomenon. Virtually every American adult had some palpable connection to World War II, which meant that they also had a natural connection to the show. If Oklahoma! had satisfied wartime America’s longing for a simpler time and Carousel had tapped into the returning servicemen’s familiarity with death, South Pacific offered a dramatization of a conflict that was still visceral for millions. Souvenir shops sold fake ticket stubs, so that people who were unable to get in could display them on their coffee tables, as if to suggest they had seen the show.
The producers also licensed a wide range of consumer products with a South Pacific theme, from a “Knucklehead Nellie” doll, to a line of sheets, towels, pillowcases, and bathrobes; silk ties and clothing; toiletries; hairbrushes; compacts and cigarette cases; and a home hair permanent formula. Howard Reinheimer pointed out that never before had a Broadway play undertaken such merchandising for any purpose other than free publicity. Now South Pacific’s marketing licenses would soon bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues to the manufacturers—and tens of thousands in royalties to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action. In September 1949, Norma Terris, the original Magnolia in Show Boat, who was then forty-five years old, wrote Oscar to inquire about playing Nellie in the national company. In the end, Janet Blair, a popular singer and film actress, got the part, and when the 118-city national tour opened in Cleveland in April 1950, there were 250,000 requests for 48,000 available seats. The problem was so severe that Oscar urged Claudia Cassidy, the powerful drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, to tell readers to write in for mail-order tickets to avoid disappointment. “I know it sounds arrogant to complain about there being too much demand for tickets to a play,” Oscar wrote. But it was true.
In the spring of 1950, the show swept every major category at the fourth annual Tony Awards, and on May 1 came the crowning honor: South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and not just a special citation, as Oklahoma! had received. Of Thee I Sing had won the prize in 1931 but, bizarrely, George Gershwin had not been cited for his music. Now Richard Rodgers was. But true to Josh Logan’s worst fears, his name was missing from the citation. The error was corrected, but the oversight stung.
South Pacific ran for 1,925 performances on Broadway. Ezio Pinza left the cast for Hollywood when his contract was up in June 1950, but Martin stayed on another year, before leaving to head up the London company. She was replaced by Martha Wright, who was herself later briefly replaced by a lissome blond newcomer from Iowa named Cloris Leachman. Myron McCormick was the only principal from the original cast to stay with the show till the end. By the time of his one thousandth performance as Luther Billis, he had lived through three sets of actors playing the de Becque children; witnessed ten marriages in the cast (none to each other), and was on his third pair of shoes. He still had his original coconut bra, but the rope straps had been patched. On the closing night, January 16, 1954, he led the cast in singing “Auld Lang Syne” with tears in his eyes. By design, the curtain never fell, and the audience, hoping for one last promise of paradise, lingered on for half an hour, before finally drifting out into the night.
CHAPTER 7
Parallel Wives
I think the point is that it isn’t necessary to love one another. The necessity is to understand one another, because understanding, I think, is a block to hatred. We mustn’t hate one another. But love is not the only alternative.
Oscar Hammerstein II
It was not a press agent’s fancy, just a much-remarked-upon coincidence, that Dick and Oscar had both married women named Dorothy, who both happened to be skilled and successful interior decorators. And in the summer of 1949, in the wake of South Pacific’s success, both women had new homes to design: Dorothy Hammerstein an elegant East Side town house at 10 East 63rd Street, just off Fifth Avenue, and Dorothy Rodgers a new country estate on forty acres in Southport, Connecticut—a rambling, gray-shingled Colonial house with white chimneys called Rockmeadow, after a giant boulder in an adjoining field.
Dorothy Rodgers had stumbled into her avocation by accident and necessity. Returning from their three-year Hollywood sojourn in the mid-1930s, she and Dick found their New York apartment, which they had sublet, in shambles, with furniture gnawed by teething puppies, carpets ruined by chewing gum, and a general state of wreckage. “‘Oh,’ I moaned to Dick as I waved a tragic arm at the mess all around,” she would recall years later. “‘I wish there were some magical place I could call and say, “There it is—you fix it,” and have everything back together again.’ ‘Why don’t you start one?’ he countered quite reasonably.” So was born Repairs Inc., the first business of its kind in Manhattan, relying on an army of skilled craftsmen and -women that Dorothy had assembled: experts in china, glass, and silver; cabinets, and carving; needlework and reweaving; piano tuners and clock repairmen. With offices on East 57th Street, the company quickly took off, attracting a steady business from insurance companies forced to repair damages of just the sort the Rodgerses had suffered, and performing such everyday miracles, she would recall, as “reactivating miniature waterfalls and songbirds in a mad, marvelous Victorian clock that belonged to Helen Hayes.” Eventually clients wanted not simply to repair torn
draperies and stained carpets, but to redo rooms from scratch, so Dorothy, who had studied sketching and sculpture as a teenager in Paris, expanded into interior design. Her style was austere and formal, though she did favor an eclectic blend of periods and provenances in assembling the pieces of a room.
Her rooms—and her menus, and her wardrobe, and her hair, inevitably worn in a fashionable chignon—reflected a white-gloved meticulousness that led the publisher Bennett Cerf, one of her beaux before Dick, to christen her “La Perfecta.” She would insist that this reputation was overblown, but she did acknowledge that she Scotch-taped canceled checks back into her checkbook so she’d always have a record of her expenditures, and she decreed that the medicine cabinet of any good guest room should contain two drinking glasses, an emery board, an orangewood stick, mouthwash, aspirin, disinfectant, Band-Aids, and enough room for the guest’s own toiletries. Her standard wedding present to the children of friends was the Columbia Encyclopedia.
Dorothy would wind down Repairs Inc. during the materials shortages of World War II, but she kept up her decorating business for such clients as the writer Ben Hecht, for whom she produced a bathroom-cum-writing room featuring flocked velvet walls and a marble washstand. In the fifteen-room duplex cooperative apartment on East 71st Street that she and Dick had bought in 1945 when they outgrew their cramped pied-à-terre at the Volney Hotel, nothing was ever out of place, from the two grand pianos in the living room to the flowers carefully arranged to mimic the palette of the paintings in front of which they were placed. Indeed, she was such a germaphobe that she invented a disposable toilet brush—called the Jonny Mop—that could simply be flushed away when its work was done, without the user’s having to touch it again. She won an arbitration case against Johnson & Johnson when it tried to tweak the design to avoid paying her for it. “I always felt that I hadn’t washed carefully enough when I was with her,” the lyricist Sheldon Harnick would recall. But under the perfect surface, Rodgers’s daughters believed, she was uptight, anorexic, and a chronic abuser of laxatives and Demerol.
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