Show Boat wasn’t the only boat transporting Oscar Hammerstein II on life’s journey. When Ziegfeld reneged on his promise to open his new theatre with Oscar and Jerry’s show, Oscar had decided, in early March 1926, to head to London, where he could watch over the Drury Lane production of The Desert Song. He booked passage on the Olympic (the nearly twin sister of the Titanic). Oscar, now thirty-one, had sailed on the same ship when he went to Europe for the first time in 1913.
Myra was “too busy” to accompany Oscar, and while on board the Olympic, he met Henry and Dorothy Jacobson. Born in Tasmania, Australia, one of five daughters, Dorothy was a striking blue-eyed beauty and as independent as she was tall, slim, and attractive. After boldly leaving home when she was twenty-two, she had modeled in London and acted in silent movies before moving on to New York City, where she was, now that Ziegfeld had seen her photo, to become one of the girls in his Follies. This would not come to be, however. Dorothy’s mother disapproved: “Please deny you are going into the Follies,” she had pleaded as soon as she found out. Dorothy had complied and backed out of the Follies (the theatre bug hadn’t really bitten her), but not out of going to America.
Dorothy Blanchard (c.) and her four sisters, 1923
Now twenty-seven, married, and herself a mother, Dorothy would walk each morning around the ship’s deck and would meet Oscar, who was circling in the opposite direction, during each orbit. One morning Dorothy, wishing to end what seemed like the endless “good morning”s, sought refuge in a deck chair—Oscar joined her soon thereafter.
Dorothy Blanchard
They talked and talked: about musicals, which Dorothy thought were silly, and their marriages, which they both admitted were not so hot. Oscar was resigned to his marriage, Dorothy less so. They fell in love: “That was it. It was like the rivers rushing down to the sea,” she thought. “If I were a schoolboy, I’d carry your books home from school,” he thought.
They saw each other in London, and when Myra came over, the Hammersteins and the Jacobsons got together. Not-so-shy Myra casually asked Dorothy if she had a lover and coolly added that she had left hers behind in New York.
Once he returned to New York, Oscar plunged back into working on Show Boat with Kern and saw Dorothy from time to time—at parties they both attended, and alone. When apart, they agreed to look at the moon at the same moment. Dorothy’s husband, who knew what was going on, thought, rather hopefully, that renting a summerhouse near the Hammersteins in Long Island might allow the infatuation to run its course. But it was too late: a furtive but deeply romantic love had blossomed between Dorothy and Oscar. Dorothy talked about divorce, but Oscar, the master of personal indecision, who preferred to indefinitely postpone emotional issues, didn’t. While Oscar, unable to acknowledge the hell at home and certainly unable to ask for a divorce, concentrated on not doing anything, Dorothy became pregnant with her second child, a complication that put their romance on hold.
Oscar and Dorothy
Oscar’s relationship with the headstrong and domineering Myra, which had never been good, was deteriorating further. She no longer even tried to get him to pay attention—good or bad—to her. Workaholic Oscar was spending less and less time at home, anyway. When he was home he frequently slept in the other twin bed in his son Billy’s room.
Although Myra’s infidelities were common knowledge, when a friend finally told Oscar about them face-to-face, even Oscar felt compelled to say something to his wife. He struggled not so much with Myra’s tawdry behavior as with his own inaction: Why was he allowing this to go unchallenged, unmentioned even? Was he afraid? Of what—confrontation, conflict, his own imperfections, the mundane fact that life is not a play and can’t be composed and staged? When Oscar finally asked for a divorce, Myra not only refused to consider it but threatened to blacken Oscar’s name by exposing their sordid lives. This would have showered the very private Oscar Hammerstein II with torrents of unwanted publicity.
Directing his emotions inward, as always, Oscar had a nervous breakdown and voluntarily entered a sanitarium on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There he was subjected to state-of-the-art psychiatric treatment: wet sheets and cold baths. There was no “talk therapy,” which suited him just fine. Two weeks later, after discussing what had happened with no one, he left the sanitarium and returned to his life.
Oscar and Myra were through. Obeying the legal niceties of the day, Oscar feigned an adulterous act, which ended with the hotel manager confronting a semiclothed Oscar and throwing him, and his cohort, out of the hotel. Myra finally granted the divorce. Dorothy agonized leaving her innocent husband, but finally did—he retained custody of the boy and she the baby girl (for which her son never forgave her). At last, on May 13, 1929, Oscar Hammerstein and Dorothy Blanchard Jacobson were married.
