Having fit, or tried to, just about the whole history of English rhyme into a recent essay, I nonetheless left out a section about perhaps the most influential of all American rhymesters—who, ironically, had no particular gift or even interest in sound or in language for its own shimmering sake, and who basically hid his rhyme away. I refer to the lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein, the author of “South Pacific” and “The King and I” and so many other musicals, who is now the subject of a just published, and fascinating, collection of letters, “The Letters Of Oscar Hammerstein II,” edited by Mark Eden Horowitz, from Oxford University Press. (He was always the second, named after his grandfather, who, like most of his family, was a major figure in theatre, very much the family trade.)
Of all the great makers of the American song, none has undergone so drastic a change in educated—O.K., call it “élite”—opinion in the past twenty years as Hammerstein. The collaborator on “The Sound of Music”—the movie version of which was dismissed as mere “gigantic sniffles” by our own Pauline Kael—had been a figure to condescend to, the postwar suburban bard of ersatz Americana. In Wilfrid Sheed’s “The House That George Built,” his delightful amateur history of American song, the moment in the early nineteen-forties when the composer Richard Rodgers escapes from the dissolute and inspired lyricist Larry Hart to join up with the starchier Hammerstein, to collaborate on “Oklahoma!,” is the postwar settlement in a nutshell, all greeting-card sentiments and phony mythmaking. Alec Wilder’s epoch-marking and groundbreaking 1972 book, “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” treated the early Rodgers worshipfully, and post-Hart Rodgers disdainfully—Wilder hated the “South Pacific” song “Some Enchanted Evening” (“pale and pompous and bland”), and although he didn’t directly blame Hammerstein for the badness you could hardly miss the point.
But then both Wilder and Sheed were invested in American song because of its jazz affinities, invested in the “swinging” interpretations of a Mabel Mercer or a Peggy Lee or a Frank Sinatra, far more than in the original cast recordings. (Almost the only one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs to become a popular jazz standard was “My Favorite Things,” which was not so much swung as swept away in John Coltrane’s imagination.) In fact, the lovers of popular song tend to break into two schools without quite knowing it: a school of Hart, which loves theatre music for the songs that it makes and wants them swung, or at least illuminated; and a school of Hammerstein, which loves theatre music for its theatricality and is almost proud to sacrifice songfulness, let alone swing, for the sake of character and story. (Rodgers, the greatest genius of the musical theatre, pivots between these two kinds.)
In the years since Sheed and Wilder wrote, two things have altered in the theatre world. First, there have been many startlingly successful revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which may have dated in attitude but haven’t dated onstage: “South Pacific,” “Carousel,” and “Oklahoma!” all still live in ways that none of the Rodgers and Hart musicals quite do (“On Your Toes” somewhat and “Pal Joey” significantly excepted). The Hammerstein shows need “updating”—the famous slap-from-beyond-the-grave in “Carousel” reads very differently now than it did then—but that’s not the same as needing wholesale rewriting or being outright rejected. In fact, of all the great shows of the period from 1940 to 1965, when Broadway was still the place where hit songs came from, Hammerstein’s are perhaps the only shows that do reliably work in revival, and, though Rodgers was the genius of the pair, that the shows live on is Hammerstein’s doing. (Other great shows, as recent productions of “West Side Story” and “The Music Man” have shown, are harder to revive, more dependent on original circumstances and the original cast than one might have hoped.)
There is a central truth of American theatrical history—that, after “Show Boat,” Hammerstein’s integrated song-dance-and-story musical, which was written with Jerome Kern and opened in 1927, there had been a long desert of “sung through” shows, with Broadway dominated by revues and lighter productions. These kinds of shows produced so many great and swinging and American songs that it is hard to regret them, but they were, as attempts to revive them reveal, stuck together with tape and glue and glamour, rather more like variety shows on nineteen-sixties television than like achieved plays. Rodgers, turning to Hammerstein, was anticipating with his genius the demands of an audience, in mid-war, who needed something reassuringly “American.” “Oklahoma!”—the title arrived at the last moment, as good titles sometimes do—was both a completely reactionary, backward-looking show and a forward-looking one, which remains, in its integrated storytelling and dark turns, the template of nearly every successful musical since.
The other reason for the uplift of Hammerstein’s reputation is more serendipitous; as the mentor of Stephen Sondheim, whom he more or less adopted—taking him in as a lonely schoolboy and tutoring him in the art of musical-making—Hammerstein escaped Sondheim’s often ferocious strictures on other lyric writers, and, more important, left his imprint on Sondheim’s work, one that was much stronger than the superficial differences between the two artists might have made it seem. Though the younger was lexically rich and sarcastic and city-bound, while the older was given to pseudo-rural hymns to edelweiss and bluebirds, they shared a belief in the unified sung-through show, where all was sacrificed to scene and story, even if the musical touched the precarious edge of operetta. They also shared a faith in a certain kind of occasionally bromidic moral uplift: “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (from “The Sound of Music”) and “No One Is Alone” (from “Into the Woods”) are sister spirituals. The deserved scale of Sondheim’s reputation has produced at times something of a Sondheim cult, of a kind he never wanted—a breath of critical appraisal of his work, of the sort that Sondheim, that most cheerfully opinionated of men, savored in person, can cause undue alarm among his acolytes. This worked to Hammerstein’s advantage: challenge the father and you insult the son.
Yet Sondheim’s own bon mot still resonates: Hammerstein was a man of limited talent and unlimited soul; Rodgers a man of unlimited talent and limited soul. Limited and artisanal as Hammerstein’s talent may have been, what the collected letters reveal is what letters of any great artisan of any kind always reveal: that what seems like serendipity is the result of relentless work. Everything in a craftsman’s life is always earned. Hammerstein worked ridiculously hard to make shows work—the songs were secondary to them. Page after page in his letters is devoted to the inner mechanics of theatricality, with surprisingly few words devoted to the songs that one might think would superintend them. This is in part, an observer effect: the work that he did with Rodgers on the music and lyrics wasn’t accomplished in letters, so there is very little trace of it. But this is also partly a track of where Hammerstein’s passion lay. There is, for instance, a letter from Hammerstein asking Rodgers, apropos a number from “Cinderella,” if it is musically grammatical to start in the minor key and then go to its relative major—a practice frequent enough in Rodgers’s writing (cf. “My Funny Valentine,” from the Hart collaboration “Babes in Arms,” or the soon to be written “My Favorite Things”; for that matter, the great Kern and Hammerstein “All the Things You Are” is of the same kind) that not knowing this seems weirdly untuned, coming from his partner. But that wasn’t where Hammerstein lived.
In his letters, Hammerstein emerges as just as limited an artist as one had thought but far more interesting a man of the theatre than one had grasped. He understood play structure, play creation, and playmaking with near absolute authority, even if his prose is as plodgy as his lyrics can be. Hammerstein never discusses a song except in the context of the success of the show, and he obsesses over details of story construction. He writes a long letter to the producer of “State Fair,” after the movie had already been cut, begging him to make necessary trims and additions to enrich the story, which he fears “degenerates into musical comedy”—the worst thing he can say. (Of course, they mostly ignored the advice.) He writes to the producer Herman Levin about Levin’s show “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” in 1950, urging him to insert a blackout after Carol Channing sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”: “If Helen Hayes, Ezio Pinza and whatever stars you can think of made an entrance following that number, nobody would listen to what they had to say. . . . Believe me, Herman, the show falls from one of its highest peaks to one of the lowest valleys in the space of a split second.” He is much more opinionated, and far firmer in his verdicts, than one had known or anticipated. Of the work done in Boston on “Carousel,” he itemizes crisply, “We injected more of Billy and Julie into Act One. We shortened and dove-tailed Act Two, integrated the ballet, and entirely changed our conception of God. In fact, we cut Him and Her out of the play and put in a little old man who is a keeper of Heaven’s back door—a sort of service entrance St. Peter who speaks New England dialect.” Cutting God out of the book in Boston must be one of the greatest of all out-of-town trims—but he’s right, and, though people have criticized it since, the change worked: the Starkeeper we have in “Carousel” may be corny; the Mr. and Mrs. God we lost would have been kitsch.
Hammerstein had a sharper edge than one might have imagined. In the letters, he is discouraging to the point of rudeness with People Who Send Him Plays, and sharp to the point of crudeness with Actors Who Want to Participate in the Process, two frequent bêtes noires of playwrights. He knew how to tell actors and their agents firmly, “No.” (Shirley Booth is “a very good actress and completely unsuited for the part of ‘Julie.’ ”) How to tell them softly, “No.” (To Judy Holliday, he writes, “The bad news is that both ‘Julie’ and ‘Marie’ have to sing ‘legitimate’ but just how illegitimately you sing, I don’t quite remember.”) And how to tell them “No” without telling them “No”: of a proposal to write an operetta version of “Othello” (!) for Paul Robeson, whom he greatly admired, he writes, “Writing anything for Paul Robeson would be an agreeable task for me because of my admiration for him as an artist and my feeling of friendship for him as a man. I am sorry, however, but it doesn’t look as if we can be of any help to you or him on this one.” If the “sorry” didn’t tell you, No, the “agreeable task” would.
A particularly heartbreaking and, in retrospect, painful series of such letters occurs with and around Gertrude Lawrence, the great British star who originated Anna in “The King and I.” Famously flat in her singing—no one cared, too much; she was also famously fabulous—she was consistently chided by Hammerstein, first when he refused to have the company pay her doctor’s bill in full, then in a long, sternly reproving letter (which may or may not have been mailed) threatening to fire her if she continued singing so ineptly. She was, unbeknownst to Hammerstein, or to her, at the time dying of metastasized liver cancer—no wonder her notes were misshapen. That she continued to perform at all was miraculous, and the tone of exasperated doubt that she was greeted with, some actors will think, is sadly too typical of author-to-actor condescension.
But, for good or rarely ill, Hammerstein never let up. He revisited his own shows when they were already fully onstage and huge hits, giving notes to the performers—even to the replacements for the stars after the show was in the middle of a long run. (“Last week I sat through the performance in row 4 and had a wonderful time. In every way.”) He even, astoundingly, in response to a letter of complaint from a stranger who didn’t like the seats they got at the St. James Theatre, goes, deep in the run of “The King and I,” to check on the view. (“After receiving your letter I paid a visit to the theatre and sat in your seats, and it is true that on the same side of the stage on which you sat, there are details that must have been missed. . . . Again, let me express my sincere regret that you did not see every detail of ‘The King And I.’ . . . I assure you that there is very little that you did not see—I mean very little of real importance to the plot.”)
No man of the theatre has ever been more of the theatre, to the last row. This is both a blessing and curse. His commitment to the show meant a commitment to the stories he was choosing to tell, which were, for the most part, retrospective, if not nostalgic, takes on prewar times past (“South Pacific” excepted). Sondheim learned from him that the first ten minutes of a musical are its life and death, establishing the rules, and Hammerstein never got those minutes wrong—even in “Oklahoma!,” when the show starts with two oddly anti-dramatic descriptive songs, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” they set the people you care about spinning in motion.
The other preoccupation that communicates throughout his letters is his commitment to civil rights, which was real and rare. The sentiments expressed in the “South Pacific” song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”—which, though worthy, are unfortunately false (you don’t have to be taught to hate and fear; people do it naturally)—are at least entirely sincere. The liberal spirit behind those words infused his life and work: he not only supported Robeson—a lefty pariah to many in those days—but also, in the fifties, sent letters “to dozens of prominent figures” in order to protest housing segregation in his own seemingly idyllic Bucks County. (“The question is, of course, how to stand up against the prejudice which lies at the root of housing segregation, unequal job opportunities, etc.”) He was hardly the only civil libertarian in the theatre crowd—Yip Harburg, the co-writer of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and writer of “Over the Rainbow,” was as well and got blacklisted for his efforts—but for Hammerstein to come out for equality as clearly as he did, with his impeccable middlebrow and Americana credentials, took courage, and gave his words more weight.
It isn’t the sentimentality that can diminish Hammerstein’s musicals—love songs are supposed to be a sentimental medium, and have been since at least the twelfth century—it’s the occasional disingenuousness, the schnitzel-with-noodles part, the distance of his work from his own hard-edged and complicated experience. Hammerstein was a worldly man writing about unworldly people, all those “cockeyed optimists,” and the strain sometimes shows. He knew this himself, and it’s telling that he tried a couple of contemporary “city” shows (“Allegro” and “Me and Juliet”) about disillusion and compromise, and it’s also telling about his time, those supposedly halcyon fifties, that neither show seemed to work at all. By filling the American musical with “Americana,” Hammerstein helped divorce it from living American speech, and New York show-making from New York, in a way that Sondheim later fitfully fixed. And, although the religion of character and scene is a good one, Hammerstein’s success brought about a certain slippage of vitality, of idiomatic energy and wonderful words for their own sweet sake, a quality that we love in the earlier Hart and Cole Porter work. The strictures of story and scene were essential to show business, but they remain a little strangulating to songs.
Still, no one who cares about what makes theatre work can miss this collection. In one exchange, Hammerstein even apologizes for one of the most famous bad lines in the American songbook. Generations of listeners have cringed at the line “I’ll know that moment divine,” in that otherwise glorious “All the Things You Are,” originally written for the lesser-known musical “Very Warm for May.” A stranger wrote Hammerstein a letter suggesting that “sublime” would have been better than “divine”—and Hammerstein took the time to patiently explain that it might be a better word, but it would . . . not be a rhyme. He was, he knew, ruining the penultimate line, but only in order to serve the final statement. All that mattered was the drama. To alter Pope’s famous aphorism: if an honest man is the noblest work of God, an honest craftsman may be the sweetest servant of the muses. ♦
