Getting to know Oscar Take two!

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A titan of American musical theatre

Ian Dickson

The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II

edited by Mark Eden Horowitz

Oxford University Press

US$39.95 hb, 1,076 pp

In the history of the American musical, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) presents us with what his Siamese king would have described as a puzzlement. Lacking the sophistication of Cole Porter, the verbal dexterity of Lorenz Hart, and the sly wit of Ira Gershwin, his lyrics, taken out of context, can seem hokey and sentimental. Will he ever be forgiven for The Sound of Music’s ‘lark who is learning to pray’? And yet it is his works, written in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, that are constantly revived rather than the flimsier concoctions of his more favoured contemporaries.

Early musicals were built around stars. The plots were insubstantial affairs that allowed the leads to perform their individual shtick between songs. The standard view of the musical is that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943), revolutionised the form by integrating the songs and dances into a strong plot with three-dimensional characters, but Oscar – we are going to be meeting many Hammersteins, so first names will have to do – always considered the book of a musical to be of vital importance and to the end of his life complained about the lack of acknowledgment for its creator. Here he is in an early letter to his uncle Arthur on a mooted musical version of the Dybbuk. ‘If the play is a success the praise will go to the producer, the composer, Ansky who conceived it … Otto [Harbach] and I will be away off in some little dark corner. On the other hand – if … the play does not win critical favour you know what they’ll say. “Why did Arthur Hammerstein bring in two musical comedy hackwriters to spoil this fine thing?”’

Oscar’s great strength was as an adaptor. His original works were never really successful, and long before his association with Rodgers, Oscar wrestled Edna Ferber’s baggy novel Show Boat into a workable, coherent theatrical piece in which the songs served and contributed to the plot. He writes that the adaptor is ‘[a] craftsman in his own right, it is his function to create in his own world and with his own tools the characters and situations created by the original author’.

Oscar Hammerstein II was born into a major theatrical family. His grandfather, the opera-obsessed impresario and rumoured lover of Nellie Melba, Oscar Hammerstein I, created a company to rival New York’s Metropolitan Opera; for a while it was so successful that the Met suggested a merger. Both his sons – William, Oscar’s father, and William’s brother Arthur – followed their father into the theatre, Arthur eagerly, William less so. The dying William made his brother promise that he would prevent his son from joining the business, but faced with his nephew’s determination, Arthur surrendered and invited the young man to join his organisation.

Oscar quickly moved from backstage duties to the creation of musical shows and had a series of successes in collaboration with Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and, especially, Jerome Kern, his collaborator on Show Boat (1927) and one of his closest friends.

After his considerable early success, the 1930s proved to be a barren era for Oscar owing to a series of Broadway flops and a frustrating period in Hollywood. By the early 1940s, Oscar was being written off as a has-been. All this changed dramatically when he teamed up with Rodgers, who had finally lost patience with his erratic lyricist, Lorenz Hart. The phenomenal reaction to their work enabled them to set up a company that produced not only their own works but those of others and they became a formidably powerful theatrical operation.

Mark Eden Horowitz’s compilation of the letters of this Titan of the American musical theatre is not for the faint-hearted: it clocks in at 1,076 pages. Horowitz has included letters from Oscar, letters to Oscar, and letters to and from other people entirely. As a compiler, Horowitz is exorbitantly thorough, but perhaps he could have unleashed his editorial blue pencil more rigorously. He delves into the minutiae of Oscar’s life. One letter reads in its entirety ‘Dear Miss Glatterman, Here are the bills. The show looks fine so you can pay them. Best regards, very truly yours, Oscar Hammerstein.’ Do we really need a letter to his brother-in-law thanking him for the gift of a razor that Oscar has no intention of using?

However, if one is willing to wade through the superfluous correspondence, an absorbing picture emerges of Oscar as creator, producer, and man. For anyone interested in the American musical, it is fascinating to watch these famous shows come together. Oscar was prepared to take advice from those he trusted. His frequent collaborator, Josh Logan, had some suggestions for The King and I (1951): ‘May I make a suggestion? Is it possible in the classroom scene ... the children … could be given … a gay, happy dancing song?’ They were – ‘Getting to Know You’.

Oscar was confident enough to handle with panache the negative comments that came his way. Replying to the critic John Crosby who declared that the line ‘and I’m certainly going to tell them’ was the most awkward line he had written, Oscar replied. ‘The merit of the line is, of course, a matter of opinion. You don’t like it and I do. Neither of us can prove the other wrong. I can, however, prove without a shadow of a doubt that it is not the most awkward line I have ever written. I didn’t write it.’

As a public figure, Oscar was always prepared to take a stand for causes he believed in. A fervent anti-racist, he was outraged when he was accused of firing a performer for racist reasons. ‘Any suggestion we took him out of the cast because of his stand on racial intolerance is fantastic, unjust and evil. The play [South Pacific] itself is an argument for racial tolerance … I have no patience with anyone so thoughtless and cruel as to make an assumption like this, entirely against the evidence of my life and work.’ To a correspondent who considered the song ‘You’ve Got to be Taught’ too blatant, he writes: ‘I am most anxious to make the point not only that prejudice exists … but that its birth lies in teaching and not in the fallacious belief that there are basic biological, physiological and mental differences between races.’ With Pearl Buck, he supported an organisation called Welcome House, a refuge for Asian-American orphans, one of whom his daughter Alice adopted.

Oscar became an ardent supporter of United World Federalists, which advocated an expansion of the United Nations to enforce world peace. This admirable if naïve project led to a correspondence with, of all people, General Douglas MacArthur, who by the 1950s appears to have turned into a fervent pacifist.

In person, Oscar could be considered reserved. Apparently, until they reached adulthood, his children found him remote. But the letters he writes to his second wife, the Australian Dorothy Blanchard Hammerstein, show a man of passion: ‘Here I am with my guard down and I confess I can not do anything without you. My soul’s existence depends on you.’

Mark Eden Horowitz’s compilation will surely appeal to American musical completists, but for those who want a straightforward account of Oscar Hammerstein’s life, Hugh Fordin’s splendid biography (Getting to Know Him, 1977) is the book to read. g

Bedazzled

Ghastliness between writers

Jacqueline Kent

Lives of the Wives: Five literary marriages

by Carmela Ciuraru HarperCollins $49.99 hb, 324 pp

This book has one of the most off-putting jackets of recent memory. Elizabeth Jane Howard, glass in hand, is gazing attentively at her celebrated novelist husband Kingsley Amis, who is beaming with self-congratulatory pleasure at someone out of shot. Howard, no mean writer herself, seems to be performing the good wife’s duty of smiling at a joke she has heard at least ten times. It is a photo that invites the reader to buckle up for five essays about the wives of prominent writers who gave up their own ambitions for the greater good of being ‘handmaidens to genius’.

Lives of the Wives is a little more nuanced than this. In setting out to document marriages of varying ghastliness between writers, Ciuraru was smart enough not to be bogged in the familiar thickets of Ted-and-Sylvia, Vera-and-Vladimir. She does not reject the usual suspects, however: apart from Howard and Amis, she deals with Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, as well as Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. But the addition of less well-known couples – Elsa Morante/Alberto Moravia and Una Troubridge/ Radclyffe Hall – is refreshing.

Troubridge was a talented painter and linguist who fell intensely in love with Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe, known as Radclyffe Hall and now remembered exclusively for her heartfelt lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Hall wrote nine other novels, most of which sold very well at the time. Troubridge did all the grunt work for these: research, typing manuscripts, and editing, as well as running the house while her partner devoted all her time to writing. It was a gruelling life for which she received little thanks from Hall, and Troubridge suffered greatly from jealousy and suppressed anger. (The photograph in this book does not suggest that they had much fun together.) Nevertheless, their relationship endured until death – the only one of the five to do so.

Elsa Morante spent a great deal of angry energy trying not to be known as the wife of Alberto Moravia, a difficult task since, as Ciuraru points out, he was one of the most successful Italian writers of the twentieth century. Morante was a novelist too, but with a literary sensibility very different from her husband’s. His astutely observed and sparely written examinations of sexuality and social alienation lent themselves to acclaimed films such as The Conformist and The Woman of Rome; Morante’s work was altogether knottier and more psychologically engaged. Theirs was a stormy relationship, mostly because of Moravia’s signature detachment and Morante’s determination to develop her own voice. According to Ciuraru,

Morante was a nightmare to work with, but even so it’s impossible not to be on her side. Morante is now widely admired as well as being credited as a mentor by Elena Ferrante, among others.

Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy were celebrities whose alcohol and drug-fuelled evisceration of each other could have had Edward Albee taking notes for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

They are probably the most tedious of the couples described here, though it is cheering to report that Dundy gave as good as she got. In a portrait markedly less affectionate than Martin Amis’s in his memoir Experience (2000), Ciuraru presents Kingsley Amis as a dedicated misogynist as well as a faithless drunk, with Elizabeth Jane Howard as little short of heroic in keeping their marriage together. Heroism is also a feature of the marriage of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. It is a story that has often been told, comprising illness, dreadful accidents, the death of their eldest child and Neal’s debilitating stroke. Dahl was nobody’s gift as a husband and probably not as a man, but his persistent and intelligent care of his family – including his often bullying efforts to ensure that Neal did not become ‘a vegetable’ – cannot be denied. Ciuraru doesn’t quite know what to make of Dahl, and settles for describing him as ‘complex’, which doesn’t much help.

Lives of the Wives a frustrating book in some ways. What attracted these women to these men? It’s not enough to say that they were all ‘dazzled’. What possibilities did they see for themselves and their partners? What about the question of children (only two couples produced them)? Did these relationships feed into the work these writers produced, and how? Ciuraru’s stories raise intriguing questions, but she skates around most of them. Ciuraru quotes Howard’s comment that ‘It’s true to say all writers are selfish people. All artists are, really. But it’s not quite enough of an excuse’. Yes, and ...?

The marketing department of HarperCollins must have thought this book would be an easy sell, especially for book clubs. It may well be, but short biographical essays are deceptively difficult to bring off. Ciuraru does attempt to show the dynamics of these marriages, but she doesn’t quite manage it. Her writing, though clear, is matter of fact and rather flat, and she depends wholly on published biographies and letters. Because she offers little analysis and few insights of her own, it’s hard to see what this book is trying to do. What message is it giving the reader, apart from saying that if women have literary or artistic ambitions, marriage to a well-known writer is likely to end in tears?

A hardback with back-of-jacket praise from the likes of Francine Prose, Lives of the Wives has the air of serious literary biography. But with its mixture of narrative, gossip and other people’s opinions, it sometimes reads like a series of magazine articles. Though interesting enough, it leaves very little trace behind. g