* * *
THE EXPECTED CONDOLENCES poured in from all over. “It must be gratifying to know that his music will give pleasure for whatever forever there is,” Lauren Bacall wrote Dorothy. Perhaps unaware of her opinion of his pedigree, Sammy Cahn wrote to her as well. “No one, I repeat, no one,” he declared, “will ever nearly match his great contributions.” There were notes from New York’s mayor, Ed Koch, and Jerusalem’s, Teddy Kollek. Ginger Rogers, Beverly Sills, and Frank Sinatra all wrote, the last giving Dorothy his private telephone number should she need anything at all. “His medium was his music, and that lasts,” Agnes de Mille told Rodgers’s widow. “That is with us. His music will be with us for hundreds of years, fresh, ebullient, persuasive, adorably rhythmic, incomparable.” One note stands out years later. “Dear Dorothy,” it reads. “In spite of our differences, please accept my condolences and let me add that it was a privilege not only to work with Dick but also merely to be around when such a composer was alive. Sincerely. Steve (Sondheim).”
The funeral at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue was private but the congregation was filled with famous faces. Helen Hayes wrote Dorothy to apologize for bungling by mistake (with Lillian Gish) into the family’s private gathering place before the service. Shirley Verrett, the Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano, whose musical education Rodgers had quietly helped to finance, sang. The presiding rabbi, Ronald Sobel, eulogized Rodgers as “a very gentle man” and “a very private person.”
“I don’t think anybody ever knew who he really was, with the possible exception of one of the five psychiatrists he went to,” Mary Rodgers would recall many years later. “And I’m sure they didn’t know either. And he certainly … I don’t think he knew. He was just all locked up in there grinding out gorgeous stuff.”
In fact, he wasn’t all locked up, at least not always. A decade before his death, he received a remarkable letter, handwritten on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria, from a woman named Terrell Dougan, who had seen him in a Manhattan restaurant that day.
Dear Mr. Rodgers,
There you were, having lunch at Le Valois today, when you see a lady across the room recognize you. You smile and nod to her.
Did you notice the stupid lady start to cry?
That particular moment happened because all my life I have felt your music so much a part of me.
I would like nothing more, when I come to be older, than to think it has mattered very greatly that I have lived at all; to see that it has mattered so much to a girl from Salt Lake City that she burst into tears at the sight of me would help.
It is important to me that you know this, even though I must be one of millions who would agree.
Days later, Rodgers sent an equally remarkable reply.
I remember the short scene at Le Valois very well indeed. I should tell you that I thought you had either recognized me or that you were someone I had known slightly in the past. But in any event, I felt that it was important that I should smile. I had no idea that this would, or did, make you cry, but I am delighted that you did. This ability to let an emotion have its way is all too rare in this restricted life that we lead and I must congratulate myself for being the cause of it in this case. You must lead a satisfactory life to be able to react in this way and I hope you’ll keep on doing so.
Epilogue
BLOOM AND GROW FOREVER
Richard Rodgers lived long enough to see his own best work recognized as immortal, but also long enough to see the musical theater that he had revolutionized and dominated pass him by. Fairly or not, the critical eclipse had begun with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last shows. The sophisticated critics and creative forces that came to dominate Broadway in the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s increasingly looked askance at Dick and Oscar’s achievements. A combination of factors was in play: the too often second-rate, middlebrow film versions that minimized their shows’ sophistication and maximized their schmaltz; the rise of “concept” musicals that emphasized style over plot; and, of course, The Sound of Music.
Even as a twelve-year-old boy in 1959, Timothy Crouse could sense the attitude inherent in the smart set’s dismissal of the show his father helped create. “I’m talking about people in the business who acted as if Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lindsay and Crouse were one of those big food conglomerates who do testing in the lab to create a snack with just the right combination of salt and fat and especially sugar to make it a tour de force of empty calories that consumers can’t stop eating,” Crouse says. “It was as if the four authors had sat around saying, ‘Oh, we’ll toss in so many grams of nuns, and so many grams of Nazis, and so many of adorable kiddies, and we’ll have the hit of all time.’ People really thought that. What these people were incapable of seeing was that the key ingredient of the secret sauce was sincerity. Whether or not you agree with the vision offered by The Sound of Music, it was a sincere vision, sincere on the part of all four guys. They believed in what they’d written.”
Rodgers himself contributed to the calcification of the canon, often insisting that revivals and touring companies display an amber-like fidelity to the original staging. Barbara Cook would recall how when she played Carrie Pipperidge in a revival of Carousel in the 1950s, Rodgers wanted her to waddle her bustle just the way Jean Darling had done in the original production. “And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that because that’s the only time she ever walks like that, it’s not true, right?’ And he said, ‘No, you’re right,’ and he went along with me.”
By 1967, the critic Martin Gottfried would judge that Hammerstein’s plays were “embarrassing and childish, but considering the ludicrous boy-meets-girl books of the period, his were at least attempting to do more than kill time between songs and dances,” before giving way to “increasingly cynical money makers” in the late 1950s. “If Hammerstein’s books were soggy, cliché-ridden, unadventurous melodramas,” Gottfried wrote, “his lyrics were their equal. Reflecting his foursquare morality and greeting-card sentimentality, they marched evenly along to the even-tempoed thoughts that matched Rodgers’s increasingly even-tempoed scores.
“But while their seriousness was middlebrow,” Gottfried allowed, “it was not sham. The team believed it. They were convincing the public that a musical could be serious, and perhaps it was just as well that it was they who did the convincing. A little elevation mixed with a lot of pap was needed and the only way it would work was if the creators could swallow it themselves without throwing up.” Those were harsh words, but they set a trajectory that critics would increasingly follow as Vietnam and Watergate divided the country, and Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, and Michael Bennett revolutionized the Broadway musical in thrilling but dark works like Follies and Sweeney Todd. Some scholars went so far as to suggest that the romantic views of Southeast Asia—and of Western exceptionalism—promoted in South Pacific and The King and I had a hand in forming the mind-set that led to America’s misadventure in Vietnam.
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Oklahoma! in 1993, Stephen Holden of the New York Times would write that Rodgers and Hammerstein had celebrated “a kind of secular catechism that sweetly but firmly instructed people on the rules of behavior in a world where America knew best and good triumphed over evil.” In that “wholesome, cheery land,” Holden wrote, employing a mash-up mouthful of Hammerstein’s lyrics, “nothing could be more desirable than to be as corny as Kansas in August and as normal as blueberry pie. If you kept on whistling a happy tune, you would never walk alone. And on some enchanted evening, you might even find your true love. Those who climbed every mountain, beginning with foothills that were alive with the sound of music, would surely find their dreams.” Holden concluded that the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows reflected a perspective “that was considered liberal in the 1940’s and 50’s but that in the light of today’s sexual and racial politics seems slightly right-of-center, especially in treating relations between men and women.”
* * *
YET EVEN AS Holden w
rote those stinging words, the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue was poised for a striking critical comeback. The previous year, in 1992, the Royal National Theatre in London had staged a stunning revival of Carousel, the play that Holden had implied was most outdated in its outlook. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the production had explored the doomed relationship of Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan with a sexual frisson that seemed fresh in the age of Fatal Attraction. The show featured Clive Rowe, a black actor, as Enoch Snow, an unconventional casting choice that the eighty-three-year-old Dorothy Rodgers had at first adamantly opposed. Bill Hammerstein was skeptical, too, but James Hammerstein and Mary Rodgers were all for the experiment, as was Ted Chapin, the young theater executive who had been recruited to head the Rodgers and Hammerstein office in the early 1980s, after Dick Rodgers’s death. After Hytner said that he would cancel the production (and would explain why, if asked), Dorothy Rodgers relented. Two years later, Lincoln Center Theater imported the Hytner production to Broadway, where it featured an African American newcomer named Audra McDonald as an indelible Carrie, and won raves. “Forget every other Carousel you may have seen,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times.
“I think it’s all about the productions,” says André Bishop, who oversaw the Lincoln Center Carousel and later produced equally pioneering revivals and re-imaginations of South Pacific and The King and I. “I think what happened was that the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows in the sixties and seventies and early eighties were mostly in summer stock and in tours with stars—Robert Goulet in South Pacific, Brynner in The King and I—and the fact of the matter is, a lot of them weren’t very good. And these shows seemed earnest and rather long for an audience that had changed since the 1940s and 1950s. Somehow the shows were not being done in a way that reflected that change.
“There had been huge changes in theatrical craft—how you move scenery, how you move lights—and a whole new visual way, and a faster way of presenting these shows,” Bishop adds. “Directors like Bartlett Sher have dug into those books and realized that they’re superbly well-crafted, and extremely political. They’ve uncovered things that maybe people never knew were there when the shows were first produced. They have managed to bring new things to these shows, while still honoring what they are, treating them with reverence but not sanctimoniousness.”
Some critics had never wavered, of course. Nearly twenty-five years after the premiere of South Pacific, Brooks Atkinson wrote that, compared to the froth of most musical comedy, “The fundamental humanity of South Pacific cannot be ignored. It is interested in the character of its chief men and women. It discusses race prejudice in ethical terms. It belongs to the literature of the human race in music as well as in words.” Whatever instinct guides creators to know just which stories will make satisfying and successful musicals, Dick and Oscar possessed it in spades. Like even the greatest sluggers, they produced their share of doubles. But their home runs have more than withstood the sternest test of all: the test of time.
By 2006, the revolution in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s reputation was so complete that when Andrew Lloyd Webber produced a revival of The Sound of Music at the London Palladium, the critical reaction was one of overwhelming approval. Reading the London papers the morning after the opening, Ted Chapin and Mary Rodgers were astounded.
* * *
WELL INTO THE twenty-first century, Rodgers and Hammerstein remained very much a family operation. Dorothy Hammerstein died in 1987, and by then her stepson Bill had long since become his family’s representative on company business (and had stepped in to run the office during Rodgers’s final illnesses). After Dick’s death, Bill worked with Dorothy Rodgers, who died in 1992 and was succeeded by her elder daughter, Mary, who was not only a composer but also a successful novelist, the author of Freaky Friday, a charming tale of mother-daughter role reversal that surely owed something to her own complex relationship with her mother. James Hammerstein took over from the aging Bill in the late 1990s but died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1999, and Bill died two years later, leaving his sister, Alice, to represent the Hammerstein interests.
When Ted Chapin took the reins in 1981, it seemed as if the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire might be relegated to summer stock, star tours, and high school and community theater productions. There was a reluctance among a new generation of top-notch theater artists to reexamine the venerable shows in first-class productions. That all changed with the Royal National Theatre’s Carousel. In the meantime, Chapin extended the brand by taking on the management of the catalogues of other artists—most notably the works of Irving Berlin—and paving the way for the first-ever Broadway production of Cinderella in 2013. Among the latest experiments: an Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Oklahoma! featuring gay, lesbian, and transgender characters in the principal roles.
In 2009, with Dick’s and Oscar’s surviving children aging and their grandchildren’s generation scattered and pursuing careers of their own, the families sold the business for a reported $225 million to the Imagem Music Group, the investment arm of a giant Netherlands-based pension fund. Mary Rodgers died in 2014; Linda Rodgers and Alice Hammerstein died the following year. In 2017, Imagem was in turn acquired by Concord Bicycle Music, a recording and music company whose holdings include the catalogues of Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Still, the DNA of Richard Rodgers has a prominent place in the contemporary Broadway theater. In 2005, Mary Rodgers’s son Adam Guettel won the Tony Award for the Best Original Score for his original production of The Light in the Piazza, the tender story of a mentally disabled girl who falls in love in Florence—the same property that the dying Oscar Hammerstein had found such a “tempter” forty-five years before.
* * *
TODAY, THE SOUND of Dick and Oscar’s music is as ubiquitous as ever, generating tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues. On a single spring evening in 2014, in the United States alone, there were 11 productions of Carousel, 17 of The King and I, 26 of South Pacific, 64 of Oklahoma!, and 106 of The Sound of Music.
“If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally,” Rodgers wrote in his memoir, “and surely that’s what theater music is all about, he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.” In some nine hundred songs, that is just what he did. In the estimation of the critic Jonathan Schwartz, Rodgers ranks as the most-played composer of any kind of music, ever.
As for Hammerstein, the naked simplicity that his detractors are so quick to mock may be the very quality that has given his work such staying power. “Hammerstein rarely has the colloquial ease of Berlin, the sophistication of Porter, the humor of Hart and Gershwin, the inventiveness of Harburg or the grace of Fields,” Stephen Sondheim once wrote. “But his lyrics are sui generis, and when they are at their best, they are more than heartfelt and passionate, they are monumental.… The flaws in Oscar’s lyrics are more apparent than in those of the others because he is speaking deeply from himself through his characters and therefore has no persona to hide behind. He is exposed, sentimental warts and all, every minute and in every word, especially in the songs he wrote with Kern and Rodgers. In the end, it’s not the sentimentality but the monumentality that matters.”
“They thought big, and wrote about important, and quite often uncomfortable themes,” Julie Andrews says simply. “Bigotry in South Pacific, for instance, or cultural and societal differences in The King and I and Flower Drum Song—which was brave and gave each musical a spine. Rodgers’s music was always melodically glorious, simple yet soaring. It hooked you and lodged in your gut with huge satisfaction. His waltzes were as beautiful as any of Strauss’s. Hammerstein’s lyrics were equally rich, brilliantly constructed and so very specific to the worlds they created together. Their shows managed to be both timely and timeless—the epitome of classic.”
Will people ever tire of the compelling dramatic stories Rodgers and Hammerstein created together? Will they ever tire of their somber, soaring, sent
imental, sly, sad, sunny, uplifting songs? The evidence of three-quarters of a century suggests that “many a new day will dawn, many a red sun will set, many a blue moon will shine” before they do.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
Unless otherwise specified, all quotations of lyrics and libretti from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s plays are taken from authoritative published versions of those works, or from The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, and are used with permissions listed in the back of this book.
The Library of Congress holds the vast bulk of Oscar Hammerstein’s writings and Richard Rodgers’s musical manuscripts, while the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center holds an important collection of Rodgers’s correspondence. The Hammerstein collection arrived piecemeal at the Music Division of the Library of Congress in the decades after Oscar’s death, and at the time of this research, it was open to scholars but had never been fully catalogued or processed—with material on any given subject scattered widely among dozens of cardboard shipping containers and archival boxes. As this book was being finished, the library was undertaking a comprehensive reorganization of the collection, which means that many, if not most, of the citations to boxes and folders listed here will be out of date. Whenever possible, I have included the date on which documents were created, and the library’s new classification scheme should ultimately make everything much easier to find.
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