The Theater: The Careful Dreamer

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Times Square lay in its nervous twilight of night and neon glow. The rubberneckers, the readers of the Daily Racing Form, the Liggett Romeos and the double-feature devotees opened a grudging path down 44th Street. From the cavalcade of tinny taxis and glossy limousines poured Broadway’s first-nighters, their faces as rosy and bland as cherries in a Manhattan.

Five new shows opened on Broadway last week, but this was the opening night most filled with expectant excitement. About to be unveiled at the Majestic Theater was the latest show by Rodgers & Hammerstein, the most smashingly successful writing-composing-producing team now in show business. Across the street, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Oklahoma!, in its fifth year, was still playing to standees. Playing a few blocks away were three other big hits which the team produced (Annie Get Your Gun, Happy Birthday, John Loves Mary). As the first-night crowd, fully as conscious of its looks as an Agnes de Mille ballet, jostled into the theater, the faintly malicious question in almost everybody’s mind was: Would the wonder boys do it again?

Curtain Up. Backstage, 140 actors, dancers, chorus girls, stagehands and all-purpose worriers went about their work in a state of controlled panic. In the dingy dressing rooms, the perfumed atmosphere was intolerably tense. A sudden gleam came into the dull eyes of 375 backstage spotlights. Almost imperceptibly, the curtain rustled up. On one side of the stage was a brass bed containing a mother & child. On the other side, a mixed chorus in turn-of-the-century costumes began to sing:

The lady in bed is Marjorie Taylor, Dr. Joseph Taylor’s wife.

Except for the day when she married Joe This is the happiest day of her life!*

In the ninth row orchestra, way over on the right side of the house (permitting a dash backstage in case of a crisis), sat the man responsible for this unconventional musicomedy opening scene. Oscar Hammerstein II, a bulky man with a friendly, roughcast face, kept his bright blue eyes fixed on the stage. Could it be that Oscar Hammerstein was worried?

1,000 Songs. He had already survived many such moments. No living American has fashioned so many rhymes that are familiar to so many people. Oscar Hammerstein (rhymes with fine) is one of the highest-paid men in show business (one estimate places his yearly income at $500,000).* He has written book and lyrics for 30-odd musicals, including Rose Marie, Sunny, Desert Song, Show Boat, New Moon, Carmen Jones, Oklahoma!, Carousel. He has written the lyrics for nearly 1,000 songs (which has earned him a coveted AA rating by ASCAP), including such imperishables as Indian Love Call, Who, Ol’ Man River, Only Make Believe, Why Do I Love You, Lover Come Back to Me, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’, The Surrey with the Fringe on the Top, People Will Say We’re in Love, June Is Bustin’ Out All Over, It Might As Well Be Spring.

But Hammerstein was worried about Allegro. Said he: “It’s the first play I have written. It’s the first time I have put myself into a show.” Next day, he should have been feeling pretty good. He had written something he had greatly wanted to write. He had heard a tough first-night audience salute it, time & again, with excited applause. He had been informed by some of the critics that Allegro was “perfect,” “a work of rare distinction,” something that “made history on Broadway” (the Times’s Brooks Atkinson found it a thing of “great beauty and purity [which] just missed the final splendor of a perfect work of art”). And Author Hammerstein had been informed by the box office that his show had a record advance take of $750,000 in the till. The talk of Broadway for long weeks before it opened, Allegro would still be talked about a long while after.

Perhaps some of the talk—like some of the reviews—would not be frenzied, or even favorable. Beyond doubt, Allegro was a real departure for Hammerstein & Rodgers, and perhaps they might better have stayed where they were. Beyond doubt, Allegro was something on a pretty big scale—but that something might be artistic failure.

Boy Meets World. The storyline of Allegro is simple enough; up to the halfway mark, in fact, it is the story of every middle-class American boy. Joseph Taylor Jr. (John Battles) is a small-town doctor’s son, born in a brass bed, brought up in a frame house, educated at a public school, packed off to a proper college, united with his father in the practice of medicine, united with his first love in the business of matrimony. His mother (Anna-mary Dickey) dies. His success-loving wife badgers him into moving to a big city, acquiring a fancy practice, mingling with a phony crew. But when she proves unfaithful, he turns his back on her and high life, and lights out for home.

The child of doting, well-to-do parents (the Theatre Guild), Allegro has been given every advantage that money can buy. For nursemaid, Joe Taylor has a full-sized Greek chorus singing Richard Rodgers’ pleasant tunes; for playing after school, a full-scale Agnes de Mille ballet; for wedding music, a virtual cantata. His most uninspired thoughts reverberate through loudspeakers; his quietest desires are wired for sound. As a result, Allegro gets too big for its roots and too elaborate to have an honest Our Town warmth. Snapshots in family albums lose some of their character and charm when blown up for public display. That way they show their defects more plainly, too.

But Allegro, with all its faults, is an impressive effort in a good cause: it is the latest sortie in that well-nigh-won revolution against cloak-and-daguerreotype operetta and June-moon musicomedy. In that revolution, Oscar Hammerstein is certainly one of the heroes. He put something like real people into Oklahoma! and Carousel; but Allegro is by far the most realistic of his librettos, by far the most deliberate manifestation of the New Look he gave to musical plays.

Stature for Solemnity. The New Look does not imply sophistication. Says Oscar: “The sophisticates have let us down.” The theme of Allegro is a simple, minor-key faith shared by many Americans: a kind of puzzled sympathy for the puzzled (“Poor Joe! The older you grow, the harder it is to know . . .”). Oscar is a sentimentalist who is repelled by the materialistic din of big city living. One lyric in Allegro says bitterly:

Our world is for the forceful

And not for sentimental folk

But brilliant and resourceful

And paranoiac gentlefolk . . .

The men who rule the air waves

The denizens of din . . .

The girls who dig for gold

And won’t give in for tin . . .

Brisk! Lively! Merry and bright! Allegro!*

On most Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths, the earnest philosophizing behind these lines would look like a Supreme Court justice’s robes on a race-track tout. On Hammerstein, who has the stature for it, it doesn’t look bad.

Very Healing Guy. The man his friends call Ock is 6 ft. 1½ in. of unassuming reticence. He has a shy smile that creeps out from under an almost constant frown. He walks slowly, with gangling dignity, like a freshman playing a Roman emperor. In a business where hysteria is honorable and neuroticism normal, he seems completely untemperamental. Baffled by normalcy as heathen are baffled by saintliness, show people from Sardi’s to Giro’s see him in an unearthly glow. Says Razzmatazzman Billy Rose: “What do I think about him? That’s like asking me what do I think of the Yankees, Man o’ War and strawberry sundaes.” Says his old friend, Librettist Otto Harbach: “He is a real gentleman of the theater.” Says the wife of one of his collaborators: “He seems to have everlasting arms to lean on in trouble.”

Says a Hollywood hack: “Yeah, I know what they mean. A very healing guy.” His teammate Dick Rodgers says: “He is a dreamer—but a very careful dreamer.”

Behind the careful dreamer lies a waking life somewhat similar to that of Allegro’s Joe Taylor, though Oscar was born in 1895, Joe in 1905. Like Joe, Oscar lost his mother when he was young and grew up close to his father. Like Joe, he married when he was making barely enough money to support a wife, and was divorced from her after he became successful. Like Joe and like millions of Joes throughout the U.S., he is easily dominated by the woman-on-the-pedestal. (Says Oscar: “Men are wrapped up in unrealities, like business and art. They are birds of plumage. Women are realistic. Battle of the sexes? There is no battle. I simply surrender.”)

Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein got no encouragement at home to gointo show business. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein I, was a kind of highbrow P. T. Barnum with a passion for opera. A short, stubby man with a truculent Vandyke and a shining topper, Oscar I roamed the world founding opera houses and losing fortunes in the process of trying to rival the Metropolitan. His sons, William (who managed the famed Victoria which Oscar I built) and Arthur (who became a well-known theatrical producer) were distressed by this operamania. “I wish the hell,” Oscar II remembers hearing them say, “the old man would stay out of opera.”

Milk Punch & Dubonnet. Oscar’s father was Jewish, his mother Episcopalian, the faith in which he was reared. He lived in Manhattan’s 125th Street, then a fairly well-to-do residential section. For a few years he lived with his maternal grandfather, a white-haired Scotsman named James Nimmo. Oscar fondly remembers rising with Grandfather Nimmo early every day and sharing the old man’s milk punch, which was spiked with Scotch. Evenings there was stout for both. At 52, Oscar’s digestion is perfect, his appetite enormous and he drinks little.

Before his father, William Hammerstein, died, he left instructions: “Watch over Oscar. He has a great name, but never let him get near the stage.” At Columbia, Oscar got good grades in his law courses, played first base (he was too light for football) and then—fatefully—wrote some varsity shows. His favorite contained a fat part for himself: a comic French waiter called Dubonnet (acting is still one of Hammerstein’s secret ambitions). Slowly, he began to dream of the theater. But he had the promise of a law job at $15 a week. Says he: “If they had offered me $20, I would have forgotten all about the stage. But they didn’t. So I went to my Uncle Arthur and said: ‘Forget that promise to Dad. I want to go into show business.’ ” Arthur gave him a job as an assistant stage manager at $20 a week.

The Magic Mechanics. For a year, Oscar slipped through the wings, cueing actors, switching lights and, once, ringing up the curtain prematurely to reveal the property man sitting on a gilded throne with a chorus girl on his knee. He learned the magic mechanics of the theater (“I may write bad scenes, but I never write impractical ones”). His first play (The Light, a drama about a small-town girl) left New Haven completely unmoved. His first success was Tickle Me in 1920. After three years and four flops came his first hit, Wildflower, and his first smash hit, Rose Marie (both with Otto Harbach).

Then he achieved his triple triumphs of Desert Song, Show Boat and New Moon.* There was nothing very revolutionary about any of these shows. But they were charming and carefully dreamed. In Show Boat (probably the alltime favorite U.S. musical), there was a song for which

Hammerstein wrote the words one after noon sitting on his bed ; he needed a number to pull the somewhat rambling plot together. And as long as Americans sing, they are likely to remember those simple lyrics:

Ah gits weary

An’ sick of tryin’,

Ah’m tired of livin’

An’ skeered of dyin’,

But ol’ man River,

He jus’ keeps rollin’ along.†

An Inner Conceit. In 1929, Hammerstein was divorced from his first wife and married mahogany-haired Dorothy Blanchard, daughter of an Australian sea captain. With her he answered a syncopated summons from Hollywood. He arrived on the Coast amidst expectant huzzahs. But soon he was weighed in Hollywood’s inexplicable scales, and found wanting. One M-G-Mogul passed the verdict around commissaries and conference rooms: “Oscar is a very dear friend of mine, but he can’t write his hat.”

Hollywood marked the beginning of a long, curious period of Hammerstein failure. He worked on a dozen musicals between 1930 and 1942, but few were hits. He suffered the lean years stoically. In 1940 he bought, as a sort of refuge, a farm near Doylestown, Pa. People said that Oscar Hammerstein was through; he claims that he was kept going by a “certain inner conceit.”

One day the Theatre Guild told him that they were redoing Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs with a score by Dick Rodgers. Would he do the lyrics? He certainly would. After ten years of uncertainty, Hammerstein found in Oklahoma! the modern touch that “they” wanted. It consisted chiefly of a captivating simplicity that revolutionized musicomedy.

The Perfect Marriage. Rodgers & Hammerstein are ebulliently happy that Oklahoma! brought them together (though they had known each other casually for years). Hammerstein’s towering calm and Rodgers’ agile dynamism nicely complement each other. Both agree that their partnership is a “perfect marriage.” Rodgers, who for 25 years had worked with the late, absent-minded Lorenz Hart, is continually amazed by Hammerstein’s punctualness (says a friend: “He is the only man I know who can tell you where he will be next August third at 5:30 p.m.”).

Until Oklahoma!, Hammerstein adapted his lyrics to his partner’s melodies (notable exception: The Last Time I Saw Paris, which Oscar first wrote as a poem, Jerome Kern later put to music). This system of creation puts the pinch on the lyricist; and it is in the pinches that Oscar has earned the awe of his fellow craftsmen, who refer to him as “The Master.” Oscar now writes his words first and lets Rodgers weave a song to fit.

Hammerstein regards writing as hard labor. He works peripatetically (he has been called one of the greatest pacers of his time), and writes in longhand; he explains that if he typed, the stuff would look so neat that he would not have the heart to change anything. He claims that his vocabulary is small and that words do not come easily to him (“The man I really envy is Winston Churchill”). He is a fanatical craftsman.

Family Man. The Hammersteins have a house in Manhattan, but he prefers Highland Farm, which was furnished by Mrs. Hammerstein, a professional interior decorator (“We didn’t get cute”). There he rises at about 7:30 and gets a massage by Peter Moen, a bald, powerful Norwegian, without whom he refuses to go anywhere (partly because Peter is homesick, Hammerstein has decided to take a trip to Scandinavia next month).

He is an intense family man, and a curiosity among show people because he begins to yawn around 11 p.m. He has patiently steered his children* through their emotional mumps and ideological measles (bursts of radicalism here, seizures of Oxonian ambitions there). He is their idol, up to a point. When son Jimmy, at 13, wrote a piece of music (he goes in for pretty serious stuff), his mother suggested that he show it to Dad. “Aw,” said Jimmy, “he’d just want to write the lyrics.”

The Hammerstein farm is usually full of friends. Says a fellow writer of Hammerstein: “He has probably never lost a friend. Every Christmas, they gather, dozens and dozens of them, at his house. The dullest goddam people you ever met. People with millions and people in ’34 Chevvies. And half of them, no kidding, are Oscar’s old grammar-school chums.”

The family delights in Hammerstein’s various human failings. For one thing, he dislikes physical labor. Recently, when he actually rose from dinner to get a glass of water, the whole table burst into wild applause. He has a modicum of vanity; when his name is mentioned on the radio, he cries to the rest of the family: “Shut up! They’re talking about me.”

Hit Parade Poet. Oscar Hammerstein now has new responsibilities. Together with Rodgers, he owns a music publishing company (Williamson Music Inc., through which the partners publish their own songs). The Rodgers & Hammerstein production firm have a stake at the moment in three New York shows, two on tour and one each in Australia and Britain. His words are as carefully worked over as ever, and his hopes are even a shade more careful.

Even to his own careful judgment of himself it must be clear by now that Oscar Hammerstein occasionally ceases to be a big librettist and becomes a little poet. His words, drifting through the Great American Living Room, through thousands of juke joints, through lonely stretches of night, carry a gentle insight and a sentimental catch in the throat to millions of people who are only dimly aware of his name. In a eulogy of his late friend George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein once unwittingly rendered a pretty good judgment of Oscar Hammerstein:

Lesser beings than geniuses

Leave their marks upon this earth.

* By permission of the copyright owners, Williamson Music, Inc.

* During the New York trucking strike last fall, one columnist sympathetically wondered how Rodgers & Hammerstein were going to get their money to the bank.

* By permission of the copyright owners, Williamson Music, Inc.

* Hammerstein’s chief composer-collaborators: Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, Herbert Stothart. His chief librettist-collaborators: Otto Harbach, Frank Mandel, Laurence Schwab.

† Copyright 1927, T. B. Harms Co., N.Y.

* William, 28, and Alice, 25 (by his first wife); Jimmy, 16 (by his present wife); Susan, 19, and Henry, 21 (his wife’s children by her first marriage).