But from the beginning, Logan made a fatal mistake. The director’s manic streak sometimes led him to conclude that more was more. Just as he and Jo Mielziner had borrowed the technique of the cinematic lap-dissolve for the scene changes in the stage version of South Pacific, so he now sought a way to echo the mood-altering power of stage lighting for the songs in the film. His solution, in consultation with the skeptical cinematographer, Leon Shamroy, was to use color filters in front of the camera to tint the negative itself, with the result that when Nellie sings about a sky of “bright canary yellow,” the scene itself turns a bilious hue. What is more, solo shots of the singers would be framed in a gauzy-edged border. At first, Logan and Shamroy shot each scene protectively, with and without filters—in much the way that Fred Zinnemann had photographed Oklahoma! in both Todd-AO and CinemaScope. But soon enough, by Logan’s later account, Buddy Adler decreed that any undesired color could be removed in the photographic lab in postproduction, and that the picture could be shot much more quickly and cheaply without double takes. “As he left,” Logan would recall years later, “I watched him with a funny feeling that I had just had my head cut off with a sharp razor—so sharp it seemed painless.”
Logan was nervous enough about the process that he asked Hammerstein for his “definite” opinion. But Hammerstein hedged. “This could be wonderful and truly blazing,” he wrote Logan, but added, “On the other hand there is some merit in asking the question, why should we stick our necks out too far, when by simply not sticking them out we are going to have a smashing success.”
One contemporary witness who remained highly skeptical of the color was Ken Darby, the film’s associate music director. He was playing chess on location with Oscar one day when Hammerstein made a move that trapped him on the board. Darby acknowledged Hammerstein’s skill but said his chess move had produced “not nearly the trap that Josh and Shamroy are building with their damned color filters.” Why? Oscar wanted to know. “Because,” Darby explained, “with the filters in front of the lens, the negative is being tinted irrevocably, and that’s a mistake. If they shot the film normally, without filters … the laboratory back in Hollywood could add any degree of rainbow tint Shamroy or Josh or Buddy Adler thought was effective … and they wouldn’t be trapped with a pre-printed negative. It’s like … in recording … you can put reverberation into a track when you record it, but you can never take it out once it’s in.” During the next break in shooting, Hammerstein walked over to consult with Logan and Shamroy, and Darby could see vigorous hand gestures and an apparently heated discussion. Soon enough, Hammerstein returned, confessed that he had fingered Darby as the source of concern about the filters, and passed on the word that Logan had shouted, “Go back and tell Darby to keep his nose where it belongs—in the music! I’ll shoot the picture!”
When the film opened on March 19, 1958, the critics had a field day with the filters. William Zinsser in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Fox had “wrapped a fancy package—and lost the story inside,” while John McCarten of the New Yorker allowed that the film was “full of technical razzle-dazzle, but it never comes anywhere near expressing the simple charm of the work from which it stems.” Time was perhaps the toughest, noting that it was “almost impossible to make a bad movie out of it—but the moviemakers appear to have tried,” especially with Logan’s decision to “smear ‘mood’ all over the big scenes by shooting them through filters.”
For his part, after the premiere, Logan sent Darby a terse telegram: YOU WERE RIGHT. In later years, Rodgers would say he found the movie “awful” and the use of color “atrocious.” But the story was indestructible, Gaynor and Brazzi gave authentic performances, and the public made the film a worldwide blockbuster. The soundtrack album stayed in the No. 1 slot for a year. The film would make more money than all of Logan’s other movies and plays put together and, because of his percentage deal, would help him survive a long career dry spell during the last two decades of his life. “Unfortunately,” he would confess, “that doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”
* * *
IN THE SUMMER of 1957, during South Pacific’s production, Oscar wrote Dick, then still at Payne Whitney, discussing the possibilities for their next project. “I went over my personal income figures with my accountant,” Hammerstein reported. “They must be similar to yours. The income, without a major theatrical company running for us, was staggering. God knows, we don’t need money!” The movie of South Pacific would soon bring in even more. So, Oscar continued, “I am reminding myself and you that we have no time pressure—only our permanent desire to write something when we find something we want to write and to produce it when we damn please!”
As it happened, the next project grew out of a chance encounter in the Fox commissary between Hammerstein and his old friend Joe Fields, the eldest of the theatrical Fields siblings. Like his brother, Herbert, and sister, Dorothy, Fields was a veteran playwright—the co-author of such Broadway hits as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town—and he was now negotiating to buy the stage rights to The Flower Drum Song, a recently published novel by C. Y. Lee. The book told the story of a Chinese American family in San Francisco grappling with the challenges of assimilation and generational conflict. Oscar read the novel and liked it, describing it as “sort of a Chinese Life with Father.” Dick liked it, too, and they decided to make it their next musical. Oscar was willing to collaborate with Fields on the book, with Fields acting as an associate producer.
Turning the novel into a dramatic musical play would require a good deal of the trademark Hammerstein skills of compression. Lee’s book had highlighted the family patriarch, Wang Chi-yang, a traditional Chinese paterfamilias who is resistant to Americanization and is exasperated by his elder son, Wang Ta. Ta is himself torn between three women: May Li, an old-fashioned Chinese girl; Linda Tung, a thoroughly Americanized playgirl; and Helen Chao, a serious-minded friend who has long been pining for him—and who eventually commits suicide when he rejects her. Hammerstein and Fields put the spotlight on Ta and invented a new character, Sammy Fong, a slang-slinging nightclub owner who is Ta’s rival for Linda’s affections. (They also renamed this character Linda Low.) The newly spelled Mei-Li became a Chinese “picture bride” whom Sammy’s tradition-minded wealthy parents have arranged for him to marry—and whom Sammy attempts to fob off on Ta instead. The elder Wang’s meddling sister-in-law, Madam Tang, was renamed Madame Liang, and the two of them became slightly befuddled comic foils for the younger generation of Chinese Americans. And Helen Chao, an elegant dressmaker and seamstress, would no longer kill herself when Ta jilts her; she simply disappears from the story. In the end, Ta realizes that it is really the sweet and tender Mei-Li he loves, and Sammy and Linda wind up together, too. It was a slender enough reed of a plot—an old-fashioned musical comedy story about two couples and love conquering all. No one dies, no one bares his soul, and the prevailing weather—even in foggy San Francisco—is sunny and fair.
By April 1958, Dick Rodgers could give Arthur Hornblow a progress report on the new show. “We have some score finished, and a large chunk of the book is completed, too,” Rodgers wrote, “but it’s a pretty difficult job, especially where casting is concerned. We want to cast the piece as much as possible with Orientals as we both feel that a lot of the fun would go out of it with a conventional cast made up to look Chinese. The score is less of a problem in this direction and the difficulties in writing it are actually easier to cope with.” Indeed, opportunities for Asian actors had been so limited that of the principal cast, only two characters would be played by Chinese Americans: Key Luke, who had long portrayed the detective Charlie Chan’s “No. 1 Son” in the movies would be the patriarch Wang Chi-yang, and Arabella Hong, an opera singer, was cast as Helen Chao. Pat Suzuki, a Japanese American nightclub performer who had been interned in World War II, would play Linda Low, making a splash with her sexy (if sexist, by modern lights) solo, “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” (Years later, Rosema
ry Clooney would insist that the song’s lines about a “brand-new hairdo” and “a pound and a half of cream upon my face” had been inspired by Temple Texas’s beauty routine.) A Hawaiian-born actor, Ed Kenney, won the role of Wang Ta. Mei-Li would be played by a winsome young Japanese-born actress, Miyoshi Umeki, who had been discovered on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and cast by Joshua Logan in Sayonara, his film adaptation of James Michener’s novel about interracial romance during the Korean War. She and Red Buttons had won Supporting Actor Oscars for their portrayals of doomed young lovers, and Rodgers approved of her “slight but adequate voice.” For the role of Madame Liang, Dick and Oscar chose an old reliable: Juanita Hall, the original Bloody Mary. Sammy Fong would be played by a Caucasian actor, the rubber-faced comic Larry Storch.
To round out the creative team, Rodgers and Hammerstein hired a younger generation of talent: Oliver Smith, a veteran scenic designer for ballet whose work on the film of Oklahoma! they had admired; Carol Haney, a hot young Broadway dancer from The Pajama Game as choreographer; and Gene Kelly, who had not worked on the Broadway stage in years, as director. Their first choice had been Yul Brynner, but they hired Kelly in late April, a choice that Rodgers would acknowledge was “unexpected.” Years later, Kelly himself would recall the assignment as “one of those things that I, I did without any other idea but, ‘Hey, this is a good idea—to work with Dick Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and do this lovely story about the Chinese girl.’ It seemed to me so lovely, and such a good change of pace.”
The show’s score was a mash-up of pentatonic, Oriental-sounding numbers, hot American show tunes, and nightclub pastiche songs, and not all of it was top-drawer by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s standards. Oscar’s lyrics for “Chop Suey,” in which Madame Liang explains to Mei-Li the rich melting pot of modern American life, are a case in point:
Chop Suey,
Chop Suey,
Living here is very much like Chop Suey:
Hula Hoops and nuclear war,
Doctor Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor
Harry Truman, Truman Capote and Dewey—
Chop Suey!
But other efforts were striking. For Mei-Li’s first-act solo, “I Am Going to Like It Here,” Hammerstein used a Malay verse form called pantoum, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next, creating a kind of elegant, lazy-eight effect and requiring considerable skill and economy to propel the song forward:
I am going to like it here.
There is something about the place,
An encouraging atmosphere,
Like a smile on a friendly face.
There is something about the place,
So caressing and warm it is—
Like a smile on a friendly face,
Like a port in a storm it is!
The preproduction period had its challenges. In July 1958, Oscar underwent a gall bladder operation and then the removal of his prostate, which resulted in some painful urological complications and left him hospitalized and out of commission for a month with the score unfinished. Rehearsals began in September, with Oscar still recuperating at home and Dick sometimes so apt to drowse off that the crew would have to turn off the houselights in the theater to avoid the indignity of having the composer be seen snoozing. The truth is, the partners were slowing down and showing their age. In mid-September, Dick wrote to Dorothy, who had gone to Europe, “Oscar has slowed up again, Joe is doing nothing, Gene is paying too much attention to details in directing, and I’m the only one who’s faultless. Aren’t you proud?” In fact, Kelly, long accustomed to the atomized working realities of Hollywood, was having trouble directing for the stage, and it showed. Jimmy Hammerstein would remember that Kelly sometimes seemed confused and uncertain, and as Oscar recuperated, he played his usual quiet role of backstop director behind the scenes. Kelly tried to keep up a good front and to buck up the cast. “Think of the fun we’re having,” he exhorted after one late-night rehearsal. Rodgers’s progress reports to Dorothy continued to sound grim, with complaints that the score was coming very slowly, with not enough music for him to teach the assembled cast. “The show is horribly rough,” he wrote in late September. “But the cast, badly unrehearsed, is full of charm and potential talent. Even the intrinsic book doesn’t appear to be too bad for this stage.”
But the pressure was definitely on. The advance sale had now topped $1 million, and the work continued as the Boston tryouts began on October 27 in anticipation of a December opening in New York. While the show was in Boston, Joe Fields suffered a heart attack. Larry Storch’s characterization as Sammy Fong was not working out, and he was fired, to be replaced by Larry Blyden, Carol Haney’s husband and an old college friend of Jimmy Hammerstein’s. Blyden asked for a new comic number to be sung with Umeki. Dick and Oscar delivered the song, “Don’t Marry Me,” in under two hours, with Dick working out the tune on a piano in the ladies’ lounge of the Shubert Theatre. “Dick was always fast,” Gene Kelly would remember, “but so was Oscar that day.” There were other problems, though. Perhaps the most beautiful song in the show, a soaring Rodgers ballad called “Love Look Away,” is sung in the second act by Helen Chao, who realizes she can never have Ta and later vanishes from the plot. Haney had created a de Mille–like second-act ballet, in which Ta is torn between his potential lovers, and winds up dancing off with Helen—a muddled affair that the theater historian Dan Dietz would acidly describe as “Ta Doesn’t Quite Make Up His Mind Because Despite His Choice in the Ballet He Later Chooses Someone Else.”
The company more or less held its breath and the show opened on December 1 at the St. James Theatre in New York. Critical reception was decidedly mixed. Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune called it “a modest and engaging leaf from a very full album.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times pronounced it “not one of their master works” but allowed that it was “a pleasant interlude among some most agreeable people.” But Kenneth Tynan, the New Yorker’s newly appointed critic, delivered what may have been the first-ever all-out mockery of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show. In a review titled “Tiny Chinese Minds,” he noted that Flower Drum Song contained “more than a smidgen of pidgin,” and he didn’t stop there. He viewed the show as “a stale Broadway confection wrapped up in spurious Chinese trimmings.” Insidiously comparing it to The World of Suzie Wong, Paul Osborn’s recently opened Broadway adaptation of the popular novel about a British artist and Chinese prostitute in Hong Kong, Tynan concluded that “Rodgers and Hammerstein have given us what, if I had any self-restraint at all, I would refrain from describing as a world of woozy song.”
And yet audiences flocked to the show, the advance sale held up, and it would run for 600 performances, with a London company opening in 1960 and clocking 508 performances of its own. The play was made into a commercially successful film in 1961—notable for being the first Hollywood movie made starring a virtually all-Asian cast. Today, Flower Drum Song is often considered old-fashioned, even condescending, but to a younger generation of Asian American artists the show became a kind of cultural touchstone, an affirmation that Asians could have a place in popular culture beyond slant-eyed villains and exotic half-castes. For a 2002 Broadway revival, the playwright David Henry Hwang, who had discovered the movie on television, radically overhauled the play’s book and proved that the property was worthy of a respectful rehearing.
Oscar Hammerstein understood just what a bullet Flower Drum Song had dodged. It was skillful but retrograde entertainment in a changing Broadway environment—an environment that only the year before had seen the gritty, pathbreaking realism of West Side Story, with lyrics by his protégé Stephen Sondheim. “I’ve had some unlucky flops in my life,” Oscar told his son Jimmy a month or so after the opening. “I’ve had some plays that deserved to run better than they did. And then I’ve had some well-deserved hits. But this is the first lucky hit I’ve ever had.” For Dick Rodgers, the show represented something else: confirmation that he had conquered his dep
ression. “My only thought was to keep on doing what I was doing,” he would recall, “and I saw nothing in the future that could stop me.”
CHAPTER 10
Auf Wiedersehen
I’m not very interested in urban irony. I’m not that kind of man, I’m not very ironic, I’m not very urban. I love trees. I hope I’ll never stop loving them. Trees, green meadows … who cannot love them?
Oscar Hammerstein II
Rodgers and Hammerstein had their next project lined up well before Flower Drum Song was even finished. It came to them as a package deal from their most reliable star—Mary Martin—who, in the years since South Pacific, had not only scored a major Broadway triumph in a musical version of Peter Pan in 1954 but had become a celebrated television performer in a series of one-off “spectaculars.” These included two live broadcasts of Peter Pan for NBC, a TV version of Annie Get Your Gun co-starring John Raitt for the same network in 1957, and Together with Music, a ninety-minute music and comedy special with Nöel Coward for CBS in 1955—in addition to the 1954 all-network tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein sponsored by General Foods, for which she played hostess. Still another small-screen outing was her 1955 appearance in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, with Helen Hayes and George Abbott. The director of that project was a former actor named Vincent J. Donehue, who by 1958 had gone to work as a story scout at Paramount Pictures and had come across a property that the studio had optioned, which he thought would be a perfect stage vehicle for Martin.
Donehue’s find was Die Trapp Familie, a 1956 German film that told the only-slightly-too-good-to-be-true story of the famous Austrian singing group that fled Hitler on the eve of World War II and became a touring sensation in the United States and beyond with its choral performances of madrigals, motets, and folk songs. The family had eventually settled in Stowe, Vermont, where it ran a summer music camp and built a ski lodge. Donehue saw the von Trapps’ story as a dramatic play, with Martin portraying the young postulant who marries a widowed naval officer with seven children. Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday, agreed, and they sought out their old colleague Leland Hayward as producing partner, and Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who were to straight Broadway plays what Rodgers and Hammerstein were to musicals, to write the script. The original idea was to include authentic Baroque music from the real von Trapp family repertoire in the play. Then someone—most accounts say it was Hayward—had a bright idea: Why not commission a new song or two from Dick and Oscar to round out the tale?
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