Shall I tell you what I think of you?
You’re spoiled!
You’re a conscientious worker
But you’re spoiled.
Giving credit where it’s due
There is much I like in you
But it’s also very true
That you’re spoiled!
Everybody’s always bowing
To the King,
Everybody has to grovel
To the King.
By your Buddha you are blessed,
By your ladies you’re caressed
But the one who loves you best
Is the king!
By the fall, Oscar would be exchanging detailed letters with Jo Mielziner and John Van Druten about the technical aspects of the script. He had sounded out Mielziner about the possibility of using a live elephant onstage, but the report from Fairfield Osborn, the head of the New York Zoological Society, was not encouraging: even the best-trained elephants prefer to work in groups; they tend to shift their weight from leg to leg unpredictably (with potentially dangerous consequences for anything but the most strongly reinforced stage) and are exceedingly sensitive to cold temperatures. “I hope my memo to you on the emotional idiosyncrasies of the elephant did not get to you just at the point when you had decided to use a live animal in the show,” Mielziner wrote a few days later.
On December 5, Oscar wrote to Van Druten to say that Irene Sharaff needn’t worry about how to get Lawrence out of her cumbersome Victorian hoop skirts to sing her soliloquy about the king; she could just undress to her bodice. But Oscar also confided his own frustrations. “I have had a very tough time with the lyrics so far,” he wrote. “They have not come very well. I can tell you that I think I have sketched in Anna’s background rather well in lyrics leading up to the song ‘Tom and I.’ I am about to embark on the King’s song, ‘Sometimes I Nearly Think I am Not Sure etc.’ ‘Tom and I’ held me back a long time. I am spending all my days on the lyrics now, and at night when I am not too tired, I go back to the script.”
The “King’s song” to which Oscar referred would be the bookend to Anna’s own monologue, a soliloquy in which the monarch could confess feelings of doubt he is unable to share with Anna or his son, Crown Prince Chulalongkorn, who is outraged that the new schoolteacher has explained that the world is a “round ball which spins on a stick through the middle,” when “everyone knows that the world rides on the back of a great turtle, who keeps it from running into the stars.”
“How can it be that everyone knows one thing, if many people believe another thing?” the king tentatively asks his son.
“Then which is true?” the puzzled prince demands.
“The world is a ball with stick through it … I believe,” the king answers.
“You believe?” the prince counters. “Does that mean you do not know? But you must know, because you are king.”
“Good,” the king says, settling the question. “Some day you, too, will be king, and you too will know everything.”
But the moment he is alone, the king’s tune changes abruptly, and he sings his soliloquy, now titled “A Puzzlement.”
When I was a boy
World was better spot.
What was so was so,
What was not was not.
Now I am a man—
World have change a lot;
Some things nearly so,
Others nearly not.
There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago.
In my head are many facts
That, as a student, I have studied to procure.
In my head are many facts
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!
As deft as that song was, the one that Hammerstein called “Tom and I” would become a minor masterpiece. Oscar struggled mightily with the number, in which Anna attempts to explain her background to the king’s head wife, Lady Thiang, and describes her great love for her late husband, whose picture she wears in a locket. Lady Thiang has just told Anna that the slave Tuptim, a gift to her husband from the king of Burma, is secretly in love with another man and is foolish for being so. “But you can’t help wishing for a man, if he’s the man you want,” Anna replies, before launching into a gentle reminiscence that makes her sympathies with Tuptim clear. By Oscar’s own account he had spent a month on this single song, writing at least five separate versions, not all of them for the same melody. Finally, in a forty-eight-hour burst of effort, he produced this final version, its refrain a mix of two tempos, a six-bar barcarolle (a staple of operetta) followed by eight bars of a classic Rodgers waltz:
When I think of Tom,
I think about a night
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
And the soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill—
I remember this,
And I always will …
There are new lovers now on the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea,
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all,
And they’re all a part of Tom and me.
Hello, young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight—
I’ve been in love like you.
Be brave, young lovers, and follow your star,
Be brave and faithful and true;
Cling very close to each other tonight—
I’ve been in love like you …
Hammerstein was uncharacteristically proud enough to send the typed lyric to Rodgers by special messenger, with instructions to wait for a reply. None came. For three days. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, Dick called to discuss some other business. Only at the end of the conversation did Rodgers allow, as an afterthought, “Oh, I got that lyric. It works fine.”
Oscar was crushed. Shaking with emotion, he summoned Josh Logan and demanded, “It’s my best lyric, isn’t it, Josh?”
“Well, certainly I’ve never read anything better,” Logan replied. “But why do you seem so upset? You should be happy.”
Oscar explained, pouring out years of frustration, insisting that Logan was the only one who could understand. Finally, he stopped abruptly and stuck out his hand.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s it. You’ve helped me. Thanks.”
* * *
MEANTIME, RODGERS WAS having troubles of his own. In a November 28 letter to John Van Druten, he confessed, “Work on the score is coming along very, very slowly indeed. I spent a good part of today trying to get some incidental music and found myself turning out stuff that sounded as though it had been composed for a stage show at the Music Hall. This doesn’t exactly satisfy me, and I’m praying for better luck.” An initial challenge was how to produce an Oriental-sounding score that would not be off-putting to American ears. He approached the problem in his typically sure-footed way, “writing the best music I could for the characters and situations without slavishly trying to imitate the music of the locale in which the story is set.” Since tinkling bells, nasal strings, and percussive gongs could not create the desired effect, Rodgers decided to handle the problem “the way an American painter like Grant Wood might put his impressions of Bangkok on canvas. It would look like Siam, but Siam as seen through the eyes of an American artist.” The technical trick was a liberal use of intervals of open fifths (without the intervening third tone of the scale) and their inverse, open fourths, for songs sung by the Asian characters, while reserving more traditional diatonic melodies for Anna and her son. The effect of an open fifth on Western ears is an incomplete, unresolved, exotic sound. Rodgers also harmonized the Asian characters’ songs using chords well outside the usual vocabulary of the keys in which they were written. This, too, has the effect of making those melodies sound o
therworldly. Finally, Rodgers, ever stretching his craft and always striving to surprise audiences by now accustomed to the standard thirty-two-bar format of a typical popular song, set some numbers in unexpected tempos. For example, the words of “We Kiss in a Shadow,” a duet for Tuptim and her lover, suggest by their natural stresses a waltz in three-quarter time:
We kiss in a shadow,
We hide from the moon,
Our meetings are few
And over too soon …
But Rodgers set the lyric in four-four time, with even emphasis on each word.
One song that blended East and West musical sounds—indeed, in the same way its singer and subject did—was set to a soaring Rodgers melody, in which Lady Thiang begs Anna (in the aftermath of her angry soliloquy) to help defend the king against foreign accusations that he is a barbarian. She explains her loyalty to her husband, even when he disappoints her:
This is a man who thinks with his heart,
His heart is not always wise.
This is a man who stumbles and falls,
But this is a man who tries.
This is a man you’ll forgive and forgive,
And help and protect, as long as you live …
He will not always say,
What you would have him say,
But now and then he’ll say
Something wonderful.
The thoughtless things he’ll do
Will hurt and worry you—
Then all at once he’ll do
Something wonderful …
As always, Rodgers contributed to the overall shape of the show in ways that went far beyond the music alone, notably with the second-act ballet. In November, writing from Paris, Jerome Robbins told Hammerstein that he had been to see some Indonesian dancers and had been transfixed by the pulsating minimalism of their movement, and by one piece in particular in which a man and woman stood on opposite sides of the stage, never making contact, but still creating an effect he found “terrifically sexy,” almost “as if he had been touching her all over.” This performance also got Robbins thinking about a broader role in the production. “I am completely pleased to do just the ballet, but in reading the script over and over I felt very much that all the movement should be of a particular style, and maybe by this time you have arrived at the same idea yourself,” he proposed. “I think that the entrances of the servants and the entrances of the children and the manner of deportment around the court should all be of one style which should really be connected with the ballet ultimately.”
Robbins would hire Yuriko Kikuchi, a Japanese American veteran of Martha Graham’s dance company, as principal dancer for the ballet, and he devised movements of flexed feet and hyperextended fingers that, while not authentically Thai, created an impression of Eastern exoticism. Nevertheless, Robbins struggled to find the right tone for the ballet, and Rodgers arrived for an early rehearsal one day to find him sitting alone on the stage, seemingly stumped. The scene was one in which the king, like Claudius in Hamlet, would be forced to watch a play that depicted his own misdeeds—in this case, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which would be a pointed commentary on the king’s status as an enslaving autocrat. But Rodgers suggested that the ballet need not be ponderous; what if Robbins approached the ballet from a comic viewpoint—and yet delivered its serious message? The result was a stylized cartoon, now titled “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” in which masked dancers play Simon Legree’s pursuing bloodhounds and the runaway slave Eliza crosses a frozen river of shimmering silk scarves suddenly pulled taut.
Rodgers sometimes chafed at Trude Rittmann’s elaborations on his melodies in her dance and vocal arrangements, insisting at one point, “It’s Rodgers and Hammerstein, not Rittmann and Hammerstein.” But in The King and I, he allowed Robbins and her far greater leeway than he had ever given Agnes de Mille, whose ballets invariably used strung-together versions of Rodgers melodies, adapted to the dramatic or rhythmic needs of the dance. In this case, Rittmann would create a wholly new composition for the ballet, while being credited only with “arranging” the dance and incidental music. True, Rittmann would quote both “Hello, Young Lovers” and “A Puzzlement,” the latter rendered dissonantly as Prokofiev might have composed it, but the great bulk of the music in the fifteen-minute ballet was hers alone, even if the name on the published score was Richard Rodgers.
* * *
THE KING AND I was budgeted at a lavish $360,000, much of it going to pay for Irene Sharaff’s resplendent costumes. She had worked with Jim Thompson, a former American OSS officer in World War II who had settled in Bangkok after the war and almost single-handedly revived the moribund Thai silk industry. Jo Mielziner’s sets were fairly spare and simple, using drops and small movable pieces to create the king’s study, Mrs. Anna’s schoolroom, and other locations. And as with every show since Oklahoma!, the partners once again had no trouble raising money. They could rely on their now-regular stable of angels, plus the single largest chunk—$40,000—from 20th Century Fox. In fact, Rodgers and Hammerstein had to turn down would-be investors, including Helen Strauss and their friend the playwright Russel Crouse, who had attempted to buy shares for his children, Timothy and Lindsay, whom he described in a letter to Rodgers as “your two most satisfied angels.” “Having had plenty of experience trying to get money for shows when none was forthcoming,” Rodgers wrote back, “it’s kind of heartbreaking to have to turn down people like you, especially in view of the fact that inevitably we will need help sometime in the future.”
Abetted as always by Howard Reinheimer’s eagle eye on the bottom line, Dick and Oscar were in a stronger position than ever to dictate terms to their investors. In January 1951, Reinheimer wrote to the show’s backers, explaining that unlike the typical arrangement, the producers of The King and I would share only in “first class rights” in the United States and Canada—meaning the major New York production and subsequent national tour—and would have no piece of the sales of subsidiary rights—for motion picture or foreign productions—which would be “reserved to the authors for their own account.”
Despite the high anticipation about the new show—or perhaps because of it—its creators were insistent that the public should understand what the play was intended to be, and what it was not. On January 11, 1951, Helen Strauss passed along to Oscar a letter from Margaret Landon, who had not liked the libretto Hammerstein had allowed her to see. In essence, her complaint was that The King and I lacked the charm of South Pacific. This was a line of critique sure to irritate Hammerstein, who unwaveringly rejected the comparison out of hand. “I’m sorry that Miss Landon did not like my play,” he replied, “but I cannot help feeling that there is much more to my script than meets her eye. I hope when she comes up to New York to see it on the stage that she will be pleasantly surprised.” In fact, Hammerstein insisted to anyone who would listen, “By its very nature, the story will not permit the pace and lustiness of a play like South Pacific, and I am now sharpening a very long knife for the first one who tells me that it hasn’t the qualities of South Pacific. It is a very strange play and must be accepted on its own terms.”
Rehearsals got under way that same month, and from the start Dick Rodgers stepped off on the wrong foot with Gertrude Lawrence. The day before the first all-company rehearsal, the composer showed off the score for his star. In an effort to make sure his music was heard to the best effect, he asked Doretta Morrow, a ravishing lyric soprano who had been hired to play Tuptim, to sing it. That was a big mistake. Lawrence listened politely but was already insecure about her vocal capacities, and Rodgers’s choice left her feeling worse. At the next day’s rehearsal, she greeted Oscar and other cast members warmly, but “cut me dead,” Rodgers would recall. A chill set in that would last for weeks—indeed, in some ways, for the rest of her run in the play.
By January 18, the production team was confident enough to play the score for Josh Logan. He was so thrilled that he stayed up until three a.m. composi
ng his thoughts. He pronounced “Hello, Young Lovers” “the single greatest dramatic song I have ever heard in my life, and probably ever will,” topping even “If I Loved You” and the “Soliloquy” from Carousel. But he had one major qualm. “I am also a little bit worried to hear that there is going to be no mass singing in the first act, and no dancing except for a tiny bit at the opening,” he wrote Dick and Oscar. “May I make a suggestion? Is it possible in the school room scene when the children are learning that they could be a given a dancing lesson by Gertie and a gay, happy dancing song with a lot of kids singing with her? If this could be inserted and give some chance for a little more fun in this act. It would be nice to have something quite Western, as for instance a polka or gallop or whatever could be done in that period.” That would turn out to be prescient advice.
One of the joys of the production was the large cast of children, many of them Puerto Rican, made up to look Asian. But in close quarters in the winter weather, they were a breeding ground for colds, and by February, as the company prepared to decamp to New Haven for the first tryout, much of the company, including Lawrence, was sick. In the week of February 14 alone, Oscar’s friend and doctor Harold Hyman and his colleagues paid a total of fourteen house calls to the star, plus two fourteen-hour visits to New Haven after the company arrived there.
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