* * *
BY THE SUMMER of 1952, Dick and Oscar had patched up, or at least papered over, whatever temporary freeze had divided them and were ready to work together again. Dorothy Hammerstein chartered a Circle Line boat in honor of Dick’s fiftieth birthday on June 28, and a glittering black-tie crowd of friends and celebrities cruised up the Hudson after nightfall, stopping along the way to be serenaded by the chorus of “Siamese children” from The King and I. Oscar wrote a gently teasing tribute to his partner for Town & Country magazine, noting that becoming fifty was only a “mild achievement.” “A better reason for doffing one’s hat to you is the fact that at the age of fifty you are Dick Rodgers,” Hammerstein wrote. “I think this is a very good thing to be.… I congratulate you for your capacity to enjoy all the lovely things you have written, and I thank you—on behalf of the world—for the enjoyment that all the rest of us have had from them.”
The team’s next project was Dick’s idea, and at first Oscar was not at all enthused. The notion was one that had long appealed to Rodgers—a backstage musical that might explore the realities of daily life in the theater. “One of our aims was to avoid all the clichés usually found in backstage stories,” Rodgers would recall. “The backer didn’t pull out, the star didn’t quit and the chorus girl didn’t take over.” The show could depict action on two planes at once: a musical play onstage, and the trials and tribulations of the cast and crew backstage. Oscar couldn’t see it, but he had talked Dick into Allegro and now felt an obligation to meet his partner halfway. He, too, told an interviewer that the goal was “to do our utmost to avoid the usual clichés of show business musicals.” As it happened, those were the clichés of Hollywood musicals about Broadway; with the exception of Kiss Me, Kate, there hadn’t really ever been any backstage musicals on Broadway. Unfortunately, the original libretto that Oscar produced amounted to an overheated melodrama more suited to a Hollywood B-movie than a first-class Broadway show. The story centers on Jeanie, a chorus girl who aspires to stardom, and Larry, the assistant stage manager who loves her. When Bob, a stage electrician who is Jeanie’s former lover, learns of her new relationship, he is so consumed with jealous rage that he drops a sandbag from the flies in an effort to kill Larry. It was hardly the stuff of Cable and Liat, or Tuptim and Lun Tha.
Perversely, the partners once again fell prey to some of the same mistakes that had dogged them on Allegro, locking in the Majestic Theatre for an opening in May 1953, forcing Oscar to rush the book, and conspiring with the ever-resourceful Jo Mielziner to devise an elaborate series of two-sided set pieces that could show multiple locations at once, but that sent the budget ballooning to $350,000. In all, there would be twelve separate sets, together with some three hundred costumes designed by Irene Sharaff.
Still, Rodgers was excited, seeing a chance to write the kind of snappy tunes that had been the hallmark of his work with Larry Hart—and there would be a live jazz trio onstage. Don Walker—not the stately Russell Bennett—was signed to do the orchestrations, which would employ the sexy wail of saxophones for the first time in a Rodgers score since By Jupiter. To direct, the partners enlisted that past master of the rollicking, lighter-than-air musical comedy, George Abbott. But when Oscar sent Abbott a draft of the script in the early fall of 1952, the director had his doubts—particularly about Me and Juliet, which was the title of the play within the play and ultimately became the name of the whole show. The show inside the show was a gauzy, semi-surrealist story featuring characters named Carmen, Don Juan, and Juliet, much of it told in dance. It was meant to look so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable as something other than the actual action of the plot. But sixty-five years later, even repeated close readings of the published script leave the point of the effort profoundly unclear.
“Where is this?” unseen voices demand at the beginning of the internal show.
“It doesn’t matter,” Juliet replies in a kind of spoken verse.
The scene of the play
Is neither here nor there.
All the things
About to happen
Are things that are always happening everywhere.
“From the start we ought to have known that was no good,” Abbott would recall. “It was based upon the fact that there was a show within a show—a show onstage and there was a show offstage. The symbolism of the ballets made no sense whatsoever. So the damn thing was a pipe dream. I thought that Oscar had some notion that he was going to develop here, but he never did—it didn’t mean anything.” Abbott hoped that when the action, which was barely described in the script, was fully staged by the veteran choreographer Robert Alton, the show would come alive. He swallowed his doubts and forged ahead.
Jeanie was to be played by Isabel Bigley, a soprano fresh from her success as Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls. Bill Hayes, a young actor making his name on Broadway and in television, took the role of Larry, while Mark Dawson would play the murderous Bob. To play the characters in the show’s comic subplot—Mac, the stage manager who makes it a policy never to date any woman in one of his shows, and Betty, the saucy dancer who woos him—Rodgers and Hammerstein cast Ray Walston, who had made a most effective Luther Billis in the national and London companies of South Pacific, and Joan McCracken, a brilliant dancer who had first won their hearts as the girl who took a pratfall in “Many a New Day” in Oklahoma! Oscar was still working on the book when chorus auditions began on March 10, 1953. There were forty-two parts for singers and dancers, who would be paid $90 a week in Manhattan and $100 a week on the road. More than a thousand hopefuls showed up.
The first rehearsal was March 19, and by mid-April, Hammerstein was engaged in furious rewrites, with the way forward not entirely clear. “In some quarters we may be criticized because it is not as high-falutin’ as our more recent efforts,” he wrote John Van Druten. “It is, in fact, an out and out musical comedy. If this be treason, make the most of it.” For his part, Rodgers would recall, “Anybody can fix things with money. It’s when things need brains that you have a little trouble.” A week before the out-of-town tryouts began, two production numbers were dropped, including the original opening number, “Wake Up, Little Theater,” which began with the less than poetic phrase, “Julius Baum is sweeping up the stage.” Oscar was also discreetly functioning as an informal director outside Abbott’s purview. Bill Hayes would recall that while Abbott always demonstrated precisely how he wanted Hayes to deliver line readings, “Hammerstein would wait for a quiet moment to whisper, ‘Think of it this way’ … and then he would explain succinctly and precisely how the character was feeling.” Rodgers was also his usual punctilious self. He had set “Under the Southern Cross” from Victory at Sea to a lyric by Oscar; “No Other Love” would become the only hit to emerge from Me and Juliet.
No other love have I,
Only my love for you,
Only the dream we knew—
No other love …
Into your arms I’ll fly.
Locked in your arms I’ll stay,
Waiting to hear you say:
No other love have I,
No other love!
“To this day, if I sing it,” Hayes would remember, “or even just hear it playing in the background of some restaurant I hear Dick Rodgers saying ‘No, Bill. It’s written eighth-quarter-eighth-quarter-eighth, with the whole note preceded by an exact eighth-note syncopation.… Don’t linger on the word “love” and then come in on the downbeat. Do it the way I wrote it, thank you.’”
Throughout the rehearsal process, Oscar dictated notes on yellow legal pads: “Larry’s waistcoat should be a sweater.” “Bigley’s bodice should be fitted.” “Take the tag off stepladder.” Hammerstein also wrote a lyric that offered a revealing window into his view of the theater, and of the one critic that he had always believed could never be wrong, the audience:
A big black giant
Who looks and listens
With thousands of eyes and ears,
A big
black mass
Of love and pity
And troubles and hopes and fears;
And every night
The mixture’s different,
Although it may look the same.
To feel his way
With every mixture
Is part of the actor’s game.…
That big black mass
Of love and pity
And troubles and hopes and fears,
Will sit out there
And rule your life
For all your living years.
Because Mielziner’s sets were so cumbersome—eighty-five tons of scenery on five giant tracks with synchronized motors—the first out-of-town tryout was booked not into the Shubert in New Haven but into the more commodious Hanna Theatre in Cleveland. Opening night was April 20, and Dick and Oscar took up their usual positions: Rodgers in the last row of the orchestra, Hammerstein down front to listen for signs of trouble in the crowd. In rehearsals, Oscar tended to be impassive, waiting to deliver notes at the end of the performance, while Dick flitted everywhere. Now, their demeanors were reversed, with Dick calm the moment the curtain went up and Oscar agitated. But Cleveland seemed to love the show. “Nobody could ask for more!” Rodgers shouted backstage to anyone in earshot.
The show then moved to Boston, where the rewriting continued, and it wasn’t going well. Jimmy Hammerstein, who joined the company there as an assistant stage manager, would recall telling his father in their suite at the Ritz-Carlton one night that the show wasn’t working, only to have Oscar explode in a “slam-bang” fight that sent Jimmy from the room in tears.
The Boston critics were divided: three strongly positive and one mildly unfavorable. Me and Juliet headed to its May 28 opening in New York with trepidation all around. The second-act opening number, “Intermission Talk,” had been intended as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s winking take on the vagaries of audience reaction. They had always believed that if theatergoers talked about anything other than the show at intermission, it was a bad sign. So their song had a woman arguing with her husband about a bill from Saks; another patron complaining about garlic breath wafting from the couple behind him; a bored businessman hoping for a tax cut …
I think the production is fine,
The music is simply divine!
The story is lovely and gay—
But it just isn’t my kind of play.
The number proved prophetic. Brooks Atkinson judged that Me and Juliet “has just about everything except an intelligible story.” John Chapman of the Daily News allowed that there were “many lovely and miraculous things.… Yet it does not strike me as a major work because its story is either too involved or incapable of competing with the remarkable scenic plot.” Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune called it “perilously close to … a show-without-a-show,” one that “seems more deeply in earnest and a lot less lighthearted than their more significant works.”
If Rodgers had wanted to recapture some of the carefree sparkle of his days with Hart, the result was disappointing. On the strength of its $500,000 advance sale, Me and Juliet managed a ten-month run of 358 performances, and turned an eventual profit of $100,000, followed by a seven-week engagement in Chicago. Its greatest legacy may well have been its employment of a nineteen-year-old redheaded dancer from Richmond, Virginia, named Shirley MacLaine. In his memoir, Musical Stages, Rodgers devoted just two terse pages to the show. Oscar’s verdict was even more succinct. Returning to his town house after checking out a matinee one day, he stopped in the ground-floor office of his secretary, Mary Steele, who asked him how it had gone. He paused for a moment or two, then said, “I hate that show.”
* * *
IN THE SUMMER of 1953, Oscar’s worries went beyond the artistic. When his passport expired that July, in order to receive a new one, he was required to sign and file an affidavit attesting that he was not then, and never had been, a member of the Communist Party. Even then, he was issued a limited passport—good for only six months, and not the two years that was then standard. He was told that the State Department had information that reflected on his loyalty as an American, and that in order to be eligible for a regular passport again, he would have to file a statement of his beliefs. His first reaction, according to family and friends: “The hell with them.”
That response was hardly surprising. Hammerstein had been a political liberal—and a staunch civil libertarian—for years. In the 1930s and during World War II, he had supported any number of leftist causes that, in the harsh light of the Cold War, would come to be seen as reflecting “pre-mature anti-Fascist” views, in the Orwellian terminology of the day. When Oscar’s old friend the screenwriter and producer Hy Kraft returned to New York after being blacklisted in 1950 for taking the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Oscar and Dorothy made a point of inviting him to dinner and a movie, and then insisting that the three of them drop by Sardi’s afterward for a drink. “The gesture of hosting a Fifth Amendment friend was a defiant commitment that raised plenty of eyebrows,” Kraft would remember.
Over the years, Oscar and Dick had employed such Communists or former party members as Howard Da Silva, the original Jud Fry in Oklahoma!, and Jerome Robbins, the choreographer of The King and I. But while Dick had taken a hands-off approach to most political issues, Oscar had been much more outspoken. In 1950, as president of the Authors League—a consortium made up of the Dramatists Guild, the Radio Writers Guild, and the Screenwriters Guild—Oscar had spoken out strongly against the Hollywood blacklist, saying that to “black-list writers on the basis of their personal political views, however repellent those views are, is more in accord with the practices of the Soviets than with our democratic traditions.” In February 1953, when a touring company of South Pacific began a one-week engagement in Atlanta, some members of the Georgia state legislature denounced the song “Carefully Taught” and proposed a bill to outlaw entertainment works having “an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.” Oscar told reporters he was surprised by the notion that “anything kind and humane must necessarily originate in Moscow.”
Now, Hammerstein’s outspoken advocacy was catching up with him. He could not have known the full details, but confidential government records show that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been interested in Oscar’s political views for at least two years. On June 29, 1951, Alan H. Belmont, the head of the bureau’s domestic intelligence division, notified D. M. Ladd, the agency’s No. 3 official under J. Edgar Hoover, that Hoover’s deputy Clyde Tolson had been advised that an unnamed member of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security had raised questions about Oscar. Scrutiny at this level was no idle matter. Ladd, himself the son of a Republican senator from North Dakota, had been an expert on German espionage in World War II and had served as the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, supervising its investigations into Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Belmont’s memo went on to note that Oscar had been “affiliated with or participated in the activities of seventeen organizations” that had been cited as Communist by the attorney general of the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or the California Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities. These suspect organizations included the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Congress, National Committee to Win the Peace, and the United American Spanish Aid Committee. The memo quoted a snarky 1950 newspaper column in the Daily Mirror by the scurrilous Hearst correspondent Lee Mortimer, who reported in an article headlined, “Reds, Pinkos and Fronters in Entertainment Field,” that “the name Oscar Hammerstein II appears frequently, but I find no record of his advocacy of sharing the profits from his big hits.”
Belmont recommended that the bureau’s Internal Security Section should initiate an investigation of Hammerstein, to determine if he should be recommended for listing in the FBI’s security index of known risks. Tolson initialed the memo with his ap
proval. But in December 1951, still another memorandum, this one from the special agent in charge of the New York office, informed Hoover that, “inasmuch as all leads in instant investigation have been covered this case is being placed in a closed status by the New York Office.” The following month, some unnamed army official asked the FBI again for information on Hammerstein, prompting yet another memo from Belmont, with a regurgitation of the earlier notes.
What had changed by 1953 was that Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president and he was eager to appease the Republican Party’s right wing, large segments of which believed the federal government was riddled with Communists and fellow travelers. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had installed a former FBI agent and Republican Senate aide named R. W. Scott McLeod as assistant secretary for security and consular affairs, with a mission to root out miscreants and potential security risks from the foreign service. On McLeod’s watch, Ruth Shipley, the longtime head of the passport division, denied or restricted the passports of anyone who might be a security risk. Oscar was caught in the net.
Because Hammerstein had important business interests in England that might require spur-of-the-moment travel—four Rodgers and Hammerstein productions were then running simultaneously in London—he reconsidered his initial reluctance to defend his patriotism to the authorities in Washington. In a draft letter dated October 1953, he began by making just that practical point about his business interests. But in a thirty-page typewritten affidavit written the following month, he abandoned this line of reasoning and couched his arguments on a higher plane. He staunchly defended his patriotism, explaining his membership in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the 1930s by noting that it was one of the few American organizations willing to take on Hitler at the time. He wrote that he never saw Communist influence in the league’s affairs, but he acknowledged:
It would be dishonest of me not to confess that on several occasions I was warned that there were Communists in the anti-Nazi league. I remember what my answer was. I said in effect: “My interest now is to do all I can to stamp out Nazism, which I think is the greatest threat to our culture and our safety. If there are Communists in this organization and they are willing to help me do this, I can work with them without being a Communist myself. If there were a forest fire outside of Los Angeles and we all ran out with buckets to pour water on it, I would not ask the man at my shoulder what his political philosophy was.”
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