The partners invariably treated each other with respect, but little annoyances had a way of creeping in. During the preparation of the text for The Rodgers and Hammerstein Songbook in the late 1950s, Oscar wrote to Henry Simon, their editor at Simon & Schuster, unhappy with his treatment at the hands of Newman Levy, who had contributed brief interstitial essays about the creation of their major shows. “You will note that throughout these articles, Dick seems to play a more prominent part than I in making decisions,” Hammerstein wrote. “Newman Levy also quotes him several times, and I am given the feeling that I am sort of a junior partner. On this particular page, for instance, it is Rodgers who whispers, ‘There’s our King,’ when we see Yul Brynner. Well, as a matter of fact, we both recognized immediately that that was our King and it really wasn’t Dick who turned to me and said it. I think I spoke first. Although this doesn’t make any difference, it seems to me that in this one place, perhaps, we do not have to ascribe the discovery to Dick. He has enough credit in the course of the articles, and I have little enough. Maybe I should say, “There’s our King.” As a matter of fact what I did say was, ‘Papa, I want him.’” It was typical of Oscar’s loyalty, though, that in the next breath he objected to Levy’s description of “The March of Siamese Children” as a “Prokofieff [sic] type march,” adding, “It seems to me that it is a wonderful Rodgers march, with really no debt to any other composer.” The book’s finished text is a testament to the kinds of compromises that kept the partners together: in it, it is Oscar who says, “There’s our King,” while Levy describes the Siamese march as “one of Rodgers’ happiest achievements.”
On rare occasions, the partners would confess their anxieties and frustrations—to others. Dorothy Hammerstein told Stephen Sondheim that Oscar “would come home from a working session with Dick so tense that he wouldn’t be able to talk to her until he’d had a drink and a chance to cool down.” On the other hand, Dorothy Rodgers once told Mary Martin that Dick could be so tense after playing a song for the first time that he would go in a bathroom to throw up. When Rodgers learned from a stage manager that the Hammersteins would not be attending the opening of Annie Get Your Gun—it had been postponed due to structural damage at the Imperial Theatre—because they’d be on their way to Australia, he was deeply hurt that Oscar hadn’t told him himself. If Oscar was capable of wearing his emotions on his sleeve from time to time, Dick was much more guarded. Their office secretary, Lillian Leff, once told Russell Bennett of Rodgers, “I’ve seen him cry, I’ve seen him happy, worried, angry, thrilled, even. But never once did I know what was going on inside. With the other man I always felt I could help him think, if he needed me, but not with Rodgers.”
It’s a poignant truth that the two men seemed able to confess their shared vulnerabilities only to third parties. After Hammerstein acknowledged to John Van Druten that his lyrics for The King and I were coming very slowly, and Rodgers made the same admission about the music, a sympathetic but bemused Van Druten wrote Oscar in reply, “I am sorry that the lyrics have been giving you trouble. I had a letter from Dick, telling me that the score was giving him trouble, too. You two, whom I always took to be such highly inventive boys!”
* * *
IN THE WAKE of the chill that descended after The King and I, the partners went their separate ways, each to pursue projects of his own, much as they had done after Oklahoma!, when they were first finding their way. They had already stopped producing plays written by others, after two big disappointments—The Heart of the Matter, based on a Graham Greene novel, which closed out of town; and Burning Bright, by the novelist John Steinbeck, which ran for just thirteen performances in New York.
Oscar’s new project was a revival of Music in the Air, his 1932 hit with Jerome Kern, with his brother, Reggie, as producer, Billy Rose as sole backer, and his son Jimmy as second assistant stage manager. For the new production, given post–World War II sensibilities about Germany, Hammerstein transferred the story’s setting from Bavaria to Switzerland, cut some of the book, and interpolated “All the Things You Are” from Very Warm for May into the score. For James Hammerstein, the experience was a revealing window not only into the practical mechanics of production but into the world in which his father was most relaxed and most at home: the theater. He remembered watching a disastrous technical run-through during the end of summer tryout at a regional theater in Olney, Maryland, and was impressed to see that Oscar, who was directing, remained calm and stoic for four hours, speaking up only when necessary. The show opened on Broadway on October 5, 1951, and ran for a disappointing fifty-six performances. “Mr. Hammerstein was writing tender, effortless lyrics in those days, with a little star-dust shaken over them,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the Times. “But the plot has a lot of hackneyed playwriting in it. He writes with much greater simplicity now.”
Dick took up two solo efforts, both of which proved much more substantial. The first was a smashing revival of Pal Joey that starred Vivienne Segal repeating her original role as Vera; Harold Lang, a brilliant dancer and fine vocalist who had made a big success in Kiss Me, Kate, as Joey; and Elaine Stritch in a tour de force performance as Melba, the reporter who interviewed the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The passage of time had more than vindicated Rodgers and Hart’s and John O’Hara’s original faith in the material, and Brooks Atkinson recanted his original critique. “No one is likely now to be impervious to the tight organization of the production, the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score and the easy perfection of the lyrics,” he wrote. The revival opened in New York on January 3, 1952, and ran for 540 performances—the longest Broadway run of any Rodgers and Hart show.
Rodgers’s second outing was farther afield. In the fall of 1951, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the head of NBC’s entertainment division, approached Dick about writing a musical score to accompany a twenty-six-part documentary film series that the network had commissioned about the Allied naval campaign in World War II, to be called Victory at Sea. At first, Rodgers was wary. The project would require something approaching thirteen hours of music, by most measures the longest single symphonic suite ever composed, comprising nine major movements—longer, as the critic Deems Taylor pointed out—than Richard Wagner’s scores for Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal combined.
Of course, Rodgers composed nothing like that much music himself. The best estimate is that he wrote about an hour’s worth. “I had neither the time, patience nor aptitude to sit in a cutting room hour after hour going over thousands of feet of film with a stopwatch in my hand in order to compose themes that fit an inflexible time limit,” he would recall. Instead, the series’ producer-writer, Henry Salomon, created written logs of the on-screen action, for which Rodgers composed “musical themes” appropriate to the situation—a landing on an aircraft carrier, a fleet of ships under way. These tunes were given evocative names like “Song of the High Seas,” “Guadalcanal March,” “Theme of the Fast Carriers,” and “Under the Southern Cross,” a seductive tango that would soon make an encore appearance on Broadway. “For the difficult task of timing, cutting and orchestrating,” Rodgers acknowledged, “I turned to my old friend Russell Bennett, who has no equal in this kind of work. He fully deserves the credit, which I give him without undue modesty, for making my music sound better than it was.”
Rodgers’s self-deprecation is charming, and there was nothing clandestine or unacknowledged about Bennett’s contributions. Indeed, his efforts were crucial to the project’s success. But in his memoir, Bennett would acknowledge the extent of his work, noting that it would be difficult to describe where Rodgers’s efforts left off and his own began.
Victory at Sea aired Sunday afternoons from the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953. For his efforts, Rodgers won Emmy and Peabody awards, and the navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award. He also won the undying loyalty of one very prominent fan: Richard M. Nixon, who two decades later would retreat to the Lincoln Sitting Room of the W
hite House during some of the darkest moments of his presidency, crank up the air-conditioning, light a fire, and play the score of Victory at Sea into the wee hours of the morning.
* * *
EVEN AS THEY pursued their own projects, Rodgers and Hammerstein could not ignore their obligations to the partnership’s ongoing ventures. The London company of South Pacific, starring Mary Martin, opened in the fall of 1951, after yet another unhappy tangle with Josh Logan, who had thrown Martin into a tizzy by trying to restage scenes and songs that Dick and Oscar thought had worked just fine. British critical reaction was muted, with many reviewers expressing puzzlement that such a fuss was made over interracial romance, which was hardly unheard of in British colonial outposts, and others just finding the story slow-going (“South Soporific,” in one estimation). But audiences embraced Mary Martin, and the show ran for 802 performances. The British production was also notable for marking the professional debut of two young actors who would go on to bigger things. The first was Martin’s own son, Larry Hagman. The second was a Scotsman who would never be known for his singing but who had the perfect kind of beefcake physique for Logan’s burly chorus of Seabees. His name was Sean Connery.
Of course, Dick and Oscar also had to tend to the day-to-day realities of The King and I’s sold-out Broadway run. There was a nightly parade of celebrities backstage—General Douglas MacArthur, Farley Granger, Joan Crawford—and requests for tickets from the likes of Ogden Nash and Gloria Swanson. And from almost the opening night, there came new demands from the show’s breakout star, Yul Brynner, who by May 1951 was seeking a $500-a-week raise, doubling his salary, retroactive to the Boston opening. And soon there were further demands: additional weekly raises on a set schedule to bring his salary to $2,000 a week by the end of 1952; co-star billing under the title (Gertrude Lawrence’s name remained above the title); the same $75 a week for his dresser that Lawrence got for her maid; and two separate ten-week leaves of absence to make movies. This last request was not an idle notion: Cecil B. DeMille appeared backstage at intermission one night to offer Brynner the part of Ramses in his forthcoming film of The Ten Commandments, and he was willing to wait till the star was free. In the end, Brynner got the raises, but only one eleven-week vacation in the spring of 1952, when he was spelled by Alfred Drake.
Soon enough, Brynner was given to other displays of star temperament, chief among them a propensity, when tired or not feeling well, to skip his character’s main musical number, “A Puzzlement.” This became such a problem that the stage manager, John Cornell, would complain that “there are periods when it is out as much as it is in.” Cornell wondered whether the management should consider sending Brynner’s understudy on a few times to shame him. In the fall of 1953, a father whose daughter had seen the show wrote to Rodgers, complaining that the number had been dropped and adding that orchestra members had told his daughter that Brynner, a demon baseball fan, had skipped it to watch the World Series on television in his dressing room. The accusation was forwarded to Cornell, who thought it was unlikely to have occurred. “Well as I know and mistrust this man and his motives,” Cornell wrote, “it is simply inconceivable to me that he would cut a 5-minute number to watch a ball game.” Still, by the end of the Broadway run, Brynner had skipped the number 116 times, according to one count.
As for Gertrude Lawrence, she was doing her best. Days after the opening in April 1951, Oscar wrote to thank her for the gift of a lucky gold piece. “This is my official and documentary expression of thanking you for generous behavior,” he wrote in the voice of the king. “This does not, however, give you right to ask me for new cue to ‘Young Lovers’ of which I have already given exorbitant sum.” Days later, Lawrence wrote him to thank him for “everything,” and adding, “‘Getting to know you’ has been a most warm and remarkable milestone in my career—and your great patience and understanding has caused me constant solace.”
The summer of 1951 was beastly hot in New York, a special burden for Lawrence in her heavy hoopskirts, as the temperature in her dressing room often reached the mid-nineties. “The Messrs (and I mean the word) Shubert only put ice in the front of the theater once a day around 11 AM,” she wrote John Van Druten. “This is fanned into nothing by 3 o’clock on matinee days, so from then on the odor of frying ham is terrific but hardly succulent.” But she soldiered on, borrowing an air-conditioned town house from a socialite friend. That fall, she took on an outside assignment teaching drama at Columbia University, which seemed to restore her. Only at Christmastime did an attack of pleurisy force her to miss performances. After the death of King George VI in February 1952, she hung on even harder, determined to take The King and I to London for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation season the following year.
But it was not to be. An attack of bronchitis followed the pleurisy, and by the spring of 1952 Lawrence’s singing had deteriorated to such a marked degree that audiences were beginning to murmur during her performances, and discontented theatergoers were writing to Rodgers and Hammerstein to express their displeasure and concern. In April, Dick and Oscar asked Noël Coward to intercede. “Lunched with Gertie,” he recorded in his diary on April 29. “Advised her to leave The King and I for good. I did not say they were anxious to get rid of her because of her singing, but I think I convinced her that she ought to do a straight play.” Her friend Daphne du Maurier would later write to Coward of Gertie’s “dreadful straining after the high notes,” so much that “one’s belly ached in agony for her.”
By May 20, Rodgers and Hammerstein had come to the end of their rope. They had got no satisfaction from Lawrence’s agents Fanny and David Holtzmann, and had tried in vain to arrange a meeting with the star herself. Writing from Oscar’s return address in a stern voice that sounded very much like Dick at his most exasperated—and that, for better or worse, amounted to a unified front—they told Lawrence, “We are sorry that you were unable to see us either Monday or Tuesday, because we were anxious to record with you our deep concern over what seems to us a crisis in your theatrical career.” They said that while her dramatic performance as Mrs. Anna was better than ever, her singing was not, and then they lowered the boom:
Eight times a week you are losing the respect of fifteen hundred people. This is a serious thing to be happening to one of the great women of our theatre, and it would be dishonest and unfriendly of us to stand by any longer without making you aware of the tarnish you are putting on your past triumphs, and your future prospects. Whether you want to face up to this problem, or allow the situation to drift on as it is doing, is a decision you will have to make. It may be that you will resent our telling you this. If you do it will be childish on your part. We have neither motive nor desire to worry you. We are trying to protect you from a danger that faces you, and at this moment, as we do this, we are the best friends you have. Our love, always.
The surviving copy of this agonizing letter is marked “Not Sent.” Lawrence hung on until her scheduled summer vacation, when Celeste Holm replaced her. Lawrence wrote Dorothy Hammerstein from Cape Cod that she had “found it very hard to get un-wound when I got here,” but she felt well enough to resume her role on August 11. Three days after her return, however, she doubled over in pain while arranging flowers at home, and two days after that, after the Saturday matinee on August 16, she collapsed while crossing the stage and told her dresser she could not go on that night. After a few days in New York Hospital, doctors diagnosed hepatitis, a debilitating but seldom grave disease of the liver. But Lawrence herself had a premonition, telling Fanny Holtzmann, “I don’t think I’m going to get out of this place, Fan,” and adding, “About the play—see that Connie Carpenter steps in. She has waited so long for her chance. See that she gets the role. And see that Yul gets star billing. He has earned it.” On Friday, September 5, Howard Reinheimer wrote Holtzmann a stern letter, saying that Lawrence was obviously now much sicker than previously known, and that she must return to the play within three weeks or withdraw permanently.
If she withdrew, Reinheimer said, Rodgers and Hammerstein were willing to keep paying her 5 percent of the box-office net for the balance of her contract, “as a gesture of goodwill.” Otherwise, he warned, they would have no choice but to ask Actors’ Equity to break her contract and relieve them of any further obligations.
Lawrence died the next day.
Only after an autopsy did her doctors realize that a virulent cancer of unknown origin had taken over her liver. She was fifty-four years old. She would be buried in Irene Sharaff’s billowing mauve ball gown from “Shall We Dance,” and her star-studded funeral was held at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Oscar delivered the eulogy.
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