To some of Kern’s friends of the theater he appeared to have been strongly affected by the artistic acclaim of Show Boat. They feel Kern now began taking his music and himself much more seriously than heretofore; that though he was always saying he was not writing for posterity, he had begun to give more thought to the less temporal value of his work. These friends remark that the gift for laughter and gaiety which continually enlivened Kern’s scores for the Princess Theater Shows was only passingly and infrequently encountered in his scores after Show Boat. Kern had now begun to search more and more for deeper content in his writing, for greater musical perspectives, for finer workmanship.
Be it as it may, Show Boat unquestionably gave Kern both the heightened strength and the growing curiosity to continue pursuing new paths in the theater. Two musicals following Show Boat are among the proud achievements of the musical stage in the 1930’s. In each the theater continues upon its adventurous explorations of the unconventional and the untried, while stripping itself further of much of the encumbering paraphernalia which had been burdening it for so many years.
The Cat and the Fiddle, in 1931, dispensed with chorus girls, production numbers, and formal comedy routines. Set in Brussels, it unfolded a tender love story between a serious Rumanian composer (enacted by Georges Metaxa) and an American girl wild about jazz (played by Bettina Hall). The idea for the play had originated with Otto Harbach, who wrote both text and lyrics. He had hoped to get Sigmund Romberg to write the music, but Romberg was either too busy or too disinterested. But when Kern first heard Harbach outline the idea he rubbed his hair with his hands, betraying his inner excitement. Together, Kern and Harbach worked out some of the plot details, making a conscious effort not merely to create fresh characterizations but also to provide a strong motivation for the music. The English writer, John Agate, later pointed up their success in this aim by maintaining that The Cat and the Fiddle was “the first real musical play.” In portraying a Rumanian composer in the process of writing an opera Kern was able to spread his wings and venture toward new horizons. At one point he introduced a fugue into his musical texture. A delightful canzonetta, “The Night Was Made For Love” served as a kind of catalyzing agent for the whole play. Equally eloquent lyric moments were achieved with “She Didn’t Say Yes,” “Poor Pierrot,” and “One Moment Alone,” to prove that Kern’s more ambitious approaches to musical writing did not alienate him from the kind of seductive melodies for which he had so long been famous.
Music in the Air—book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and a cast that included Walter Slezak, Tullio Carminati, Al Shean, and Katherine Carrington—was even more striking than The Cat and the Fiddle, for its charming informality and for the way in which music was an inextricable part of play and characters. On the surface it appeared that Music in the Air was but one more European-type operetta. It had a picturesque, storybook setting: a small Bavarian town, Edendorff. Its characters were colorful and Germanic: a small town schoolmaster, a conductor of a local choral society, his attractive daughter, an operetta star, the writer of successful operetta librettos. Even the usually stilted operetta plot is not completely avoided: young schoolmaster and his Fräulein are in love; he gets enmeshed in the big city with an operetta star, while his girl friend from Edendorff succumbs to the ambition of becoming a stage star and to the sophistication of a successful writer of operettas. She proves a failure, has to go back home to Edendorff and to her first love, who by this time has also returned to his senses.
Such material is surely shop-worn stuff. But skillful tailoring made it a strikingly attractive garment—at any rate for 1933, however outmoded it might appear at a later day. Hammerstein’s dialogue, lyrics, and characterizations were filled “with sentiment and comedy that are tender and touching without falling back into the clichés of the trade,” remarked Brooks Atkinson. And for his part, Kern produced one of his most lovable scores. “Almost every minute of it is full of...mesmeric airs,” wrote Percy Hammond. With an increasing expansiveness of style Kern could produce beer hall tunes and simple songs resembling German folk music, melodies which lent authenticity to the play’s esoteric setting. On the other hand Kern could gracefully shake from his sleeve such delights as “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” “The Song Is You,” “I’m Alone,” and “And Love Was Born,” all four with an American identity, but all four so basic to the characters and situations for which they were written that there is never a feeling of incongruity between the American song and the play’s Germanic background.
“Mr. Kern and Mr. Hammerstein have discovered,” said Brooks Atkinson further in his review, “how musical plays, which used to be assembled, can now be written as organic works of art.” He also exclaimed: “At last, musical drama has been emancipated.”
Music in the Air played eleven months in New York, was presented in Los Angeles and San Francisco by a West Coast company, and was produced in London in the spring of 1933 by C. B. Cochran.
It cannot be said that time has been as kind to the text of Music in the Air as it has been to Show Boat. When handsomely revived in 1951 with Dennis King, Jane Pickens, and Charles Winninger, its book was found by most of the critics to be “sparse and dated,” hackneyed playwriting,” and “incredible corn.” What had once proved so engagingly spontaneous and charming had, in less than two decades, become trite to audiences and critics grown up to plays like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But about Kern’s music there was still no dissenting voice. In 1951, as eighteen years earlier, it had the fresh bloom of youth. “Although ours is a graceless world,” reported Brooks Atkinson, “the lovely Kern score is still full of friendship, patience, cheerfulness and pleasure....The immortal songs...still flow through it [the play] like enchanted improvisations. They are part of the theater’s richest treasures.”
It has often been publicized that Kern derived the basic melodic refrain for “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” from the song of a finch. Most such stories are fables, but this one is grounded in fact. The episode occurred in 1932 when Kern was a guest at Walter Pollak’s summer house in Nantucket. The bird awakened him late one night with its enchanting refrain. Kern went back to sleep. The following morning he tried unsuccessfully to recall the bird’s song. For the next few nights he stayed up until the early hours hoping the bird would return. It finally did, and Kern swiftly put down the motif on paper. From his friend Dr. Oliver Austin, a dedicated ornithologist who had a research center in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Kern discovered that the bird was a finch.
While this story is familiar it is not quite so well known that the opening scene of Music in the Air had also been inspired by this bird episode in Nantucket.
Several times before this Kern had found stimulation in bird calls. In his notebook one such fragment appears under date of May 20, 1934, with the following remark: “6 A.M. Bird song from willow tree outside east room.” That melodic fragment was used by Kern for something called “Bird of the Peewee.” An important two-tone phrase in “Leave it to Jane” is actually a cuckoo’s call. In Sally Kern had originally intended using the call of the whippoorwill in the melody of his song of the same name, but was finally dissuaded from doing so because a similar phrase appears in George M. Cohan’s “Over There.”
Despite The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air, Kern did not abandon a more traditional kind of musical theater. In 1929, two years before The Cat and the Fiddle, the partnership of Kern and Hammerstein, which had come into being with Sunny and had ripened with Show Boat, was revived with the same kind of escapist musical theater with which both had long been identified. Their musical was Sweet Adeline, an American period piece described by its authors as “a musical romance of the Gay Nineties.” Helen Morgan, now a stage personality of first importance by virtue of her success as Julie in Show Boat, was cast as a singer in her father’s beer garden; she becomes a musical-comedy star, gets involved with the backer of her show, but falls in love and marries its composer. To her Kern assigned two of his most winning ballads; the plangent “Why Was I Born?” and “Here Am I.” But the tuneful score was also a nostalgic backward glance into the Gay Nineties, especially in such numbers as the waltz ballad, “The Sun About to Rise”; “Play Us a Polka” (a song and dance routine with which the play opens); and a song with a simple American folk character, “‘Twas Not So Long Ago.”
Sweet Adeline, as Richard Lockridge described it, was a “very pretty and lilting show”; or as Percy Hammond said of it, “a semi-serious and smartly old-fashioned musical, one of the politest frolics of the year.” It would surely have enjoyed a success far in excess of its run of 234 performances but for the fact that the stock market crash, in the fall of 1929, made a gay, light, sentimental evening in the theater an anomaly in a world sobered by the harsh realities of an economic debacle. The play would not even have survived these two hundred odd performances were it not that it had profited from an unusually large advance sale.
After Kern had written The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air he reverted again to a more conventional type of musical production with Roberta in 1933. The original plan had been for Hammerstein and Harbach to collaborate on the stage adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s popular novel, Gowns by Roberta. (When the Kern musical tried out in Philadelphia it was still called Gowns by Roberta. But the title was simplified to Roberta by the time the show reached New York because many had mistaken the play for a fashion show.) But since Hammerstein was busily occupied in London, Harbach took on the job himself. To meet certain specific stage needs Harbach made basic changes in the novel. He invented two characters to make more reasonable the presence of music and dance within the play: a crooner-band leader and the manager of the dress establishment who had a gift for dancing. While the play was being cast the decision had been reached to place the venerable Fay Templeton in the title role, in what was to be her last stage appearance after almost half a century of stardom in burlesque and musical comedy. Harbach had to delete her role entirely from the first act and make logical the fact that she was seated throughout the second; such concessions had to be made because in 1933 Fay Templeton weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and could no longer move about freely.
Other significant performers in minor as well as major parts helped make the text of Roberta appear livelier, more arresting, and more entertaining than it actually was. Tamara stepped into her first starring role as the designer, Stephanie; she had been discovered in a downtown New York restaurant, the Kretchma. A fresh new comic named Bob Hope appeared in the part of Huckleberry Haine; in 1958 Bob Hope revived Roberta and his role for television. A young and unknown actor, Fred MacMurray, cast as a member of Hutch’s jazz band, proved remarkably adept at imitating the styles of various popular crooners including Rudy Vallee. These three—as well as Ray Middleton as the hero, and George Murphy and Lyda Roberti in secondary roles—lifted a cumbersome and stodgy play out of the doldrums. For despite the efforts of the producer to conceal the fact through a change of title, Roberta was little more than a glorified fashion show, its setting a Parisian modiste shop. Even the central love interest seemed incidental to the gowns. That interest involved an American football player—come to Paris to visit his aunt, Roberta, owner of the dress shop—and the shop’s designer, Stephanie, who in reality is a Russian princess.
There was something else besides the acting to make Roberta a box-office success: a song, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” one of Kern’s greatest. Kern had first written that melody as a signature for a radio series that never materialized. When a simple, melodious number was required for Stephanie in the second act, in which she recalls her childhood, Kern turned his melody over to Harbach for lyrics. In view of the song’s immediate success in the sale of sheet music and records (one of the greatest ever enjoyed by Kern), and since it played so decisive a part in making Roberta a box-office success it is interesting to remark that the song was almost dropped from the production even before it was used. At rehearsals, Kern had played the song for the producer, director, and the cast—but in its original version, in strict march rhythm. The decision was negative. Kern was about to reject the song completely when he decided to try it out in a more leisurely tempo and in a sentimental style. Everyone around him realized at once that this was it; this was a “natural” for Tamara’s caressing, brooding voice. And her delivery was the spot that stopped the show regularly.
Kern often pointed to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” as one of his favorites, and it is easy to see why. The diatonic skips in the broad upward sweep of the melody and the seductive change of key in the release that follows never seem to lose their capacity to win the ear and heart. The song was still able to win ear and heart even in an era in which Rock ‘n Roll sent ballads into virtual discard. Revived in 1958 by The Platters, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” still had the potent appeal of selling over one million records, and occupying the number one spot among the nation’s leading song hits for several weeks in 1959.
The immense and sustained popularity of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” has tended to obscure the fact that the Roberta score possessed another gem in the ballad “Yesterdays” (Fay Templeton’s poignant valedictory to the stage; almost as if she herself were casting a nostalgic look backward into her own rich career now coming to an end), with its haunting minor-key mood; and still a third unforgettable Kern song in “The Touch of Your Hand.”
When Roberta was first transferred to the screen in 1935 by RKO—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in leading roles—Kern consented to include two numbers not in the original stage score. One was “I Won’t Dance,” an infrequent exercise on Kern’s part in rhythmic dexterity, planned for Astaire’s nimble toes. The other was an aristocratic ballad, “Lovely to Look At.” Pandro Berman and Zion Myers, in charge of production, one day came to Kern’s suite at the Beverly-Wilshire to complain that although “Lovely to Look At” was a haunting melody they felt it could never become popular because the refrain was only of sixteen-bar length and also due to the subtle and complex structure of the last four bars. But Kern refused to make any changes. As it turned out, this song became such a hit that when Roberta was screened a second time—in 1952 by M-G-M with Kathryn Grayson, Red Skelton, and Howard Keel—it was called Lovely to Look At.
Six years separated Roberta from Kern’s next Broadway musical, Very Warm for May, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. As it turned out, Very Warm for May was the last musical Kern wrote for Broadway. One would have hoped that the end of one of the most lustrous careers in the history of the American musical theater had taken place under happier auspices and had been more worthy of a man, who more than any single person had helped to direct the destiny of that theater. Very Warm for May suffered from a trite and rambling yarn about a badly managed New England stock company, and the love complications of two children of its performers for two people of high society. (It should, however, be pointed out that when the play first tried out in Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., it had a far different, far more original, and far more appealing text than the one with which it opened in New York. But the producer, Max Gordon, and the stage director, Vincente Minnelli, both became convinced that the play as originally written had no commercial appeal and insisted upon drastic revisions during which the play was emasculated—completely changed and not to its advantage.) “The book,” said Brooks Atkinson, “is a singularly haphazard invention that throws the whole show out of focus and makes an appreciation of Mr. Kerns music almost a challenge.” Other critics also did not mince words. Richard Watts, Jr. found the book “excessively tedious and humorless,” and Richard Lockridge considered the plot “thoroughly exasperating.” (A lonely vote in favor of the play was cast by John Anderson.) In the face of such onslaught Very Warm for May collapsed after only fifty-nine performances. On the second night there were only twenty people in the theater. A day after that, when Kern went down to the theater to console the cast, he found Max Gordon in the lobby frantically computing how much he was losing on the production.
But Very Warm for May was not completely a deficit as far as Kern was concerned. His inventive score—highlighted by some strikingly original dance episodes, including a classic gavotte—boasted one of the greatest songs to emerge from the American musical stage, “All the Things You Are.” Original in its intervallic structure and subtle and magical in its enharmonic changes, “All the Things You Are” was written by Kern more for his own artistic satisfaction than to woo a public, since he himself was convinced when he wrote it that it could never become popular. Yet after its appearance “All the Things You Are” became one of Kern’s hardiest successes in the sale of sheet music and records.
Very Warm for May, in 1939, marked the end of what might reasonably be described as the Kern epoch in the American musical theater. That epoch spanned thirty-five years. Nobody before Kern had enjoyed such an extended activity as a composer for the American musical stage; nobody before him had been personally involved in and responsible for such dramatic changes in the traditions of the American musical comedy; and nobody before him—not even the redoubtable Victor Herbert—had produced so much music and had achieved with it such striking successes.
In those thirty-five years Kern had written either the complete or the major part of the scores of thirty-eight Broadway musicals; he had also interpolated songs in about fifty other productions. From the perspective of time, musicals like The Girl from Utah, Very Good, Eddie, Oh Boy!, Sally, Sunny, Show Boat, The Cat and the Fiddle, Roberta, and Music in the Air shine against the background of the American theater like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Within these productions were found hundreds of songs. “They Didn’t Believe Me,” “Till the Clouds Roll By,” “Who?”, “Bill,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” “Ol’ Man River,” “Why Was I Born?”, “The Night Was Made for Love,” “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” “The Song Is You,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” “Yesterdays,” and “All the Things You Are”—these are only an armful of the many songs by which Kern’s majestic place in American music was made secure.
A supplementary word on the Kern epoch in the American theater should be added at this point. The music to three other significant Broadway productions might have been written by Kern but for varying circumstances. Since each of these three musicals in its own way has had historic importance in the American theater, the fact that they might have been Kern’s provides a fascinating footnote to the history of the Broadway theater and to a Kern biography. The Kern admirer can hardly resist succumbing to the fascinating, if fruitless, speculation of what each of these plays might have been like if Kern, instead of other composers, had been involved with them.
The first was George Gershwin’s monumental folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Gershwin and DuBose Heyward had for several years been discussing the plan to transform the latter’s novel and play, Porgy, into an opera, before finally settling down to work. Suddenly, the Theater Guild—producers of the play—began formulating plans of its own. It was considering converting Porgy into a musical comedy starring Al Jolson. With this in mind it wanted Kern to write the score and Oscar Hammerstein II the book and lyrics. Since Gershwin recognized the financial potential of such a venture for DuBose Heyward (who, at the time, was in a difficult financial position) he graciously offered to step aside from their projected opera collaboration to permit the musical-comedy version to achieve fruition. But despite his desperate need for money, DuBose Heyward was more interested in the serious artistic venture that the Gershwin opera promised to be than in a commercial bonanza that a Kern-Hammerstein musical comedy with Al Jolson certainly would have become. The deal for the musical comedy, consequently, fell through.
A decade later Oscar Hammerstein II approached Kern with a new project close to his heart: the adaptation of still another Theater Guild play, Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs, into a musical. Hammerstein read Kern the play at Kern’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills, hoping to fire him with his own excitement. But Kern remained cold. He felt the musical problems posed by that play were too tricky for successful resolution. Green Grow the Lilacs was, nonetheless, carried triumphantly into the musical theater as Oklahoma!, book and lyrics by Hammerstein but with music by Richard Rodgers.
The third historic production on which Kern might have been engaged was Annie Get Your Gun. When the new producing firm of Rodgers and Hammerstein first planned a musical based on the colorful personality of Annie Oakley they asked Kern to do the music. Kern, absent from Broad-way for over half-a-dozen years, eagerly consented. But before he could put a single note on paper he was stricken by his last fatal illness. The musical assignment was inherited by Irving Berlin who achieved with it the greatest stage score of his resplendent career and his most resounding box-office triumph (1,147 performances in New York).