The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical

by Laurence Maslon

  To director Robert Wise’s great pleasure, Lehman, who obviously had to craft some original dialogue for a completely different setting, made the transition into the song effortless: “Ernie rewrote the dialogue leading into the songs in almost every instance so you could just slide into it. It was very effective and very important.” In fact, Andrews simply speaks the first few lines of the lyrics.

  For such a key number in terms of the movie’s development of character, it is somewhat surprising that “My Favorite Things” was shot on only the second day of filming. Andrews had to work overtime to create the necessary rapport with the children, but if anyone could build a relationship with seven young actors quickly, it was Julie Andrews. “She put the kids at ease and made them easy to work with,” recounted Wise. “She even taught them to sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” ’ And that was half a year before Mary Poppins was released by the Walt Disney Studios, thereby adding yet another item to the long list of favorite things people admire about Julie Andrews.

  Oscar Hammerstein’s initial list of “favorite things.”

  Like a star who is learning to pray: Robert Wise gives his leading lady some religious instruction.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOLLYWOOD TO SALZBURG

  Richard Rodgers helps Julie Andrews prepare for her television debut as Cinderella, 1957.

  When Julie Andrews gave her first audition for Richard Rodgers in 1955, she was just like Mary Martin in 1938—a bright, pert, engaging young singer and the toast of Broadway, thanks to the import of a British spoof of 1920s musicals called The Boy Friend, which had opened the season before. Rodgers and Hammerstein were casting a rather different kind of musical, Pipe Dream, set among the hard-luck heroes and riff-raff of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Andrews auditioned for the role of Suzy, a prostitute in Steinbeck’s original stories, but here she was more of a hard-bitten dreamer, drifting through the louche Monterrey scene. Although the thoroughly charming Andrews was born in England, Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had frequently gambled on new talent, were eager to see what she could do.

  As Rodgers sat in the middle of that “big black giant”—Hammerstein’s phrase for the theater—Andrews belted out a semi-operatic song. As she recounted on the Thirteen/ American Masters documentary on Rodgers, The Sweetest Sounds:

  I gave it my all. And he came up onstage afterwards and he looked at me and he said, “that was absolutely . . . adequate” and I went “Oh!” Then he said, “No, no I’m just teasing you. It was lovely.”

  Rodgers asked her if she were auditioning for anything else, and she admitted she had been auditioning for the long-awaited musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

  And he looked at me for a very long time, and then he said, “Oh. I tell you what. If they ask you to do that show, I think you should. But if you don’t do that show, I wish you would let us know because we would very much like to use you.”

  It was not only, as Andrews admitted, generous advice, but also a close shave. Pipe Dream, which opened in November 1955, was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s only real commercial flop. My Fair Lady, the musical treatment of Shaw, opened four months later, starring Andrews. It was, in its time, the greatest success the Broadway musical had ever brought forth into the world, and it made Andrews, in the words of Richard Rodgers, “Broadway’s most radiant new star—there wasn’t a composer or lyricist who didn’t start dreaming of songs for her to sing or roles for her to play.”

  Not Salzburg, but a magical re-creation: the Fox lot provided the landscape for the von Trapp villa. One can glimpse the gazebo—re-created from the one left behind at the Salzburg location.

  When the original television special Cinderella was broadcast on March 31, 1957, it was watched by 107 million people in the United States—more people than there were television sets. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a charming score, full of sentiment without being sentimental, and Julie Andrews had the opportunity to share the soundstage with playwright Howard Lindsay, who, in one of his forays into the acting world, played the befuddled King. The show introduced Andrews to a far wider audience than had admired her on the Great White Way.

  Six years later, when Robert Wise went to Julie Andrews with the offer to star as Maria von Trapp, she had not yet appeared in a feature film. The opportunity presented by The Sound of Music was a huge one, but Andrews was not immediately sure she wanted to be in another musical. Mary Poppins had yet to be released and she was enjoying filming the straight dramatic lead in The Americanization of Emily. Andrews had another concern, as well: she thought the original material might be too saccharine to play well on the big screen. However, once she agreed to take the part (according to Julia Hirsch’s history of the movie, Fox eventually offered her $225,000 for a two-picture deal), she sat down with Wise at the Fox studio restaurant and expressed her reservations. He explained to her that he wanted to take a less sentimental, more textured approach to the material. Apparently, a spoonful of medicine helped the sugar go down and Andrews was both appeased and inspired to begin her work with Wise, whom she later credited for giving her a master class in movie-acting technique.

  With Andrews signed (Wise and Saul Chaplin first discovered the news in Louella Parsons’ gossip column while they were scouting locations in Salzburg), the attention turned to casting Captain von Trapp. Fox executives were keen on Bing Crosby, but Wise never took that suggestion seriously. William Wyler, during the time he was considering directing the picture, courted Rex Harrison. (Although the thought of a My Fair Lady reunion with Julie Andrews is a provocative one, Harrison would have been badly miscast.)

  Other names submitted to Wise included Sean Connery, Peter Finch, Louis Jourdan, and Maximillian Schell. Yul Brynner lobbied extensively for the part. The notion of having Brynner reprise a stern patriarch in a Rodgers and Hammerstein score might have seemed like a sure thing at the box office, but Wise was determined not to weigh down The Sound of Music with more clichés than it could already handle. He had been impressed with a classical actor who, while only thirty-five years old, had taken the stages of London, New York, and his native-born Canada by storm: Christopher Plummer.

  Plummer had extensive experience performing onstage and in serious drama on television, but his movie career, in 1963, was nothing to write home about. Still, he was lukewarm to Wise’s advances; for an actor who had played Hamlet, Mercutio and Cyrano de Bergerac, Georg von Trapp seemed to Plummer stiff and dull—in his own words, “a frightful square.” Scriptwriter Ernest Lehman was sent to convince Plummer, and together they collaborated on drawing out some of the Captain’s (and Plummer’s) ironical sense of humor, adding a pervading sadness that gave the character some additional depth. Lehman was thrilled to have Plummer’s suggestions and it was Lehman’s enthusiasm that convinced Plummer to sign on the dotted line.

  Wise now had two youthful, attractive, talented leads who were largely unknown as international movie stars, so he filled the rest of the adult roles with a mixture of familiar faces. Richard Haydn, a beloved character actor from the 1940s, took on the role of the self-serving impresario Max Detweiler (although it is intriguing to imagine what one of Wise’s suggestions—Noel Coward—would have done with the part). The stylish and elegant Hollywood star Eleanor Parker was cast as Baroness Elsa Schraeder. Parker, also a Hollywood fixture since the early 1940s, was probably the most wellknown cast member prior to the movie’s release.

  For the children, Wise and his casting consultants interviewed hundreds of young actors and actresses in London, New York, and Los Angeles before asking nearly 200 of them to audition for him. Casting one child actor is difficult enough; casting seven who must be credible as a family—in addition to being personable, musical, and the right height—is a huge challenge. Unlike the previous stage incarnations, Wise decided the von Trapp children should not all be blond and Aryan-looking, but have a physical and emotional variety among them. He whittled the number of actors
down to fourteen—two families of seven each—mixed and matched them, and finally chose his seven children in time to begin rehearsal on February 10, 1964.

  Well, six children. The part of Liesl was proving difficult to cast. She had to appear to be a naïve sixteen (going on seventeen, of course) and still be engaging enough to hold down the romantic subplot. Wise auditioned such future stars as Mia Farrow, Victoria Tennant, Lesley Ann Warren, and Teri Garr, but Wise and the casting people kept coming back to Charmian Farnon, a poised and fetching young woman who had no previous acting, singing, or dancing experience. Farnon was signed nearly two weeks after the other children were already in rehearsal on the Fox lot. There were two slight problems: Farnon was actually twentyone, going on twenty-two, and her last name simply would not do. The latter issue was resolved with a name change to Charmian Carr and the former would have to be settled by costumes and lighting—Carr certainly would not be the first movie ingénue to not act her age.

  Do they love her because she’s beautiful? Or talented? Or charming? Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers pay a visit to Andrews during the photo call for Cinderella. Sadly, Hammerstein would never get to see Andrews play the lead in The Sound of Music.

  “Willowy” describes the background, the dress, and the essence of Julie Andrews in this studio portrait taken in Salzburg. The Sound of Music would establish her reputation as one of the 1960s’ leading film actresses.

  Christopher Plummer, along with such greats as John Barrymore (whom he portrayed in a one-man Broadway show) and Laurence Olivier, was one of the few great classical actors who could also make the transition into a dashing film matinee idol.

  A product of the Hollywood system for the previous twenty-five years, Wise had nothing but respect for the craftspeople in the industry and he staffed his movie with some of the best. The director of photography, Ted McCord, had a career that started in the 1920s. He had cut his teeth shooting hundreds of Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s—his mastery of outdoor locations would come in handy—and he had just worked for Wise on Two for the Seesaw. So had Russian-born production designer Boris Leven, who had coordinated the complicated interior/exterior designs for Wise’s West Side Story and was rewarded with an Academy Award for his work. Costume designer Dorothy Jeakins knew how to put together a complicated epic: she worked for Cecil B. DeMille on several movies and designed the movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Jeakins’ work on The Sound of Music was both bold and subtle. Her playclothes for the children, pasted together from heavy curtains with gold satin sashes, were unforgettable and the transition in Andrews’ costumes from youthfully awkward to a solid maturity demonstrated a brilliant grasp of character. That might be why Wise rewarded her with a cameo in the movie—she plays a nun in the opening sequence.

  Producer/director Wise also surrounded himself with the two gentlemen who had done so much to make West Side Story a resounding, award-winning success: associate producer Saul Chaplin and screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Chaplin, a musical jack of all trades, was instrumental in envisioning the musical numbers for the screen, especially for the Salzburg locations. Lehman’s contributions were inestimable. Not only did he do an inspired job of restructuring the musical numbers so that they serve the needs of cinematic narrative, he skillfully took the best of Lindsay and Crouse’s book and supplemented it with his own dialogue and invention in a seamless way.

  The von Trapp children, cinematic version (from left)

  • Kym Karath (Gretl) was five years old when filming started and impressed Robert Wise immediately with her confidence. She now divides her time between the East and West Coasts of the United States, and has returned to acting.

  • Debbie Turner (Marta) was seven when filming began. She currently lives in the Midwestern United States, where she has a career as a floral designer.

  • Angela Cartwright (Brigitta—or Louisa, if you’re being fooled) was eleven and had already enjoyed a successful television sitcom career. She now lives in Los Angeles and is an artist/photographer as well as an aspiring producer.

  • Duane Chase (Kurt) was thirteen years old. He now lives in Seattle, Washington and works as a software engineer.

  • Heather Menzies (the real Louisa) was fourteen, playing a thirteen-year-old. She made a few more feature films in her twenties, but now works for a cancer foundation in Los Angeles, established in honor of her late husband, TV star Robert Urich.

  • Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich) was thirteen when filming began, and remembered seeing Julie Andrews on stage in the London production of My Fair Lady in the late 1950s. He went on to do some television work (he was the first live-action Spider-Man on American TV), but has since moved to Australia, where he works as a screenwriter.

  • Charmian Carr (Liesl) was actually twenty-one going on twentytwo when she was cast in the film, without any prior acting experience. She has continued her relationship with the movie to this day, serving as hostess for numerous performances of Singalong Sound of Music across America, and as the author of two related books: her best-selling memoir, Forever Liesl, and its sequel, Letters to Liesl. She now resides outside of Los Angeles, where she has a thriving practice as an interior designer.

  We all know that Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer went on to international stardom…

  And I’ll sing once more. Under the baton of Irwin Kostal, Julie Andrews does another prerecording take for her friend and mentor, associate producer Saul Chaplin.

  Surely Lehman’s greatest contribution is the way he opened up the stage version for the movies. “Opening up” is a slightly misunderstood phrase—it is not just substituting an outdoor location for an interior one. All one has to do is watch the movie version of My Fair Lady to see how earthbound a movie musical can be. Although My Fair Lady makes extensive use of the Warner Bros. backlot, it feels suffocatingly claustrophobic; there does not appear to be an inch of real blue sky. Once Lehman realized how important Salzburg would be to the texture of the movie, he did an exemplary job of marrying the exterior locations to the narrative. Robert Wise and his crew were able to realize Lehman’s vision in a masterful way; rather than reproduce the clichés of a movie musical, Wise and company made a first-class movie that just happened to be a musical.

  First, though, were the rehearsals for the principals at the Fox lot in Culver City. They began with the children rehearsing their musical numbers with Chaplin, music supervisor Irwin Kostal (also a West Side Story alumnus), and the choreography team of Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood. Breaux and Wood had already worked with Andrews on Mary Poppins and they had a superb sense of how the cameras could take their work into another dimension. Wood explained to Julia Hirsch, “As opposed to a proscenium on the stage, where you just have a picture that you look at, one picture—boom, boom—audience and the performance, right there. Now, when we’re doing a film, we can go all over the place.” (But there was room for improvement—when Lehman saw an early run-through of the pillow-throwing segment of “My Favorite Things,” he thought it was far too meticulously choreographed and suggested that Breaux and Wood create something more spontaneous. They agreed and, by and large, the movie is mercifully devoid of that “hey-look-at-me” quality that mars so many movie adaptations of Broadway material.)

  Nicholas Hammond and Duane Chase take the California surfing craze of the 1960s to the Fox lot.

  In March, the complex process of pre-recording began under the baton of Irwin Kostal. By then, both Andrews and Plummer had reported for duty. Prerecording musical numbers with a full orchestra is difficult in any motion picture, but the cast of The Sound of Music had to record their songs weeks before filming began (not to mention before filming in a city not one of them had set foot in). Julie Andrews explained the complexity: “You have to try to imagine exactly what you might be doing without knowing in any way what you’ll be doing.” In other words, if you get to the location shoot and want to chuckle as you skip across a meadow, it must synch up to the playback recorded mont
hs before or you are pretty much out of luck. Still, pre-recording went particularly smoothly (Andrews is an acknowledged pro at laying down tracks) and, some issues of dubbing notwithstanding (see the section on “Edelweiss”), cameras were ready to roll on 26 March 1964.

  The first week of initial shooting in Los Angeles began with the storm sequence in Maria’s bedroom and included “My Favorite Things” (revised pillow fight included). Next, most of the Nonnberg Abbey interior sequences were filmed. (From their location scouting the previous November, Wise and his crew knew that the nuns at the actual Nonnberg would not let them film interiors there.) Boris Leven had done such an impressive job with recreating the cloister and graveyard that, for years, tour guides in Salzburg thought the graveyard was a location site near St. Peter’s Church. By April 17, initial filming was completed and they would shoot the remaining interiors—the von Trapp villa, the outdoor pavilion, etc.—during the summer.

  Finally it was time for the cast and crew to be introduced to their co-star. She had been around for many years, acquiring an intimidating reputation for beauty and charm. No matter how talented the cast was, the movie of The Sound of Music would never come alive unless the actors knew how to handle this majestic leading lady. She could make or break the movie.

  It was time to face Salzburg.

  Robert Wise sets up the shots for “The Lonely Goatherd.”