WE ARE SITTING in the main office of Williamson Music, Inc. It is a large room, tastefully furnished with antiques, and its windows look down on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. This might be the board room of a major American corporation, except that such corporate GHQs rarely house the company’s major assets; they’re usually tucked away in downtown vaults. Not here. Across an antique desk sits Williamson Music’s corporate cornerstone, Richard Rodgers. Over there in the corner is the company’s entire stock of machinery—one grand piano.
In truth, Rodgers does resemble a chairman of the board. He wears banker’s gray suits, discreet button-down shirts, and soberly striped ties. But when he sits down at the grand piano and begins to play, that corporate image vanishes. Rodgers has lately celebrated his seventieth birthday, but none of his mental processes has slowed down one beat. His mind is brisk, sharply tuned, and as agile as his fingers.
He has been writing major song hits for along time now. Somewhere in the world tonight there will be a performance of his and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! or Carousel or South Pacific. The King and I is a regular at Jones Beach during the summer. In the movie theatres their film The Sound of Music has long since become the top-grossing musical of Hollywood’s history. The most superfluous question one could ask Mr. Rodgers is that old chestnut. Which comes first, the music or the lyrics?, because he’s functioned both ways. When he wrote hit songs with Larry Hart, the words usually came after the time; with Hammerstein the process was reversed. One thing remained constant—the vast number of popular hits he had with both.
Is he not the logical man to answer a far more basic question: What is it that makes a song a popular success? What is the secret ingredient that plucks at a mass nerve, that makes some sort of electrical contact with the listener? And why is it that composers like Rodgers or Kern or Berlin can make that electrical contact with their audience quite regularly, while others can go through their whole lives and never connect more than once or twice, if at all?
“I don’t think this is a very esoteric situation,” he said. “It is quite simple. If you have any integrity, you start out by writing what you like, otherwise you wouldn’t have written it. Or, having written it, you’d tear it up. But you say to yourself, this is the tune that ought to go in this particular spot, whether as a popular song, or part of a play, or a motion picture, or TV. You are writing for yourself. Now, if your taste is lucky enough to be a common denominator, and coincides with the tastes of the public, you have got it made. If it isn’t, if it doesn’t coincide, then you are that fellow you were just talking about who never makes it, or makes it very infrequently … so infrequently that he isn’t anybody.
“Say you have thirty-two bars that the composer really likes himself. Then he gives it to the public. If the public likes it, that’s the only criterion that one has to go by. It doesn’t mean anything necessarily if I like it, either. But if I write enough songs that the public also likes, then I have established what you call that electrical contact, over a broad spectrum.”
Once he has established that contact with the audience, does he have the feeling that it diminishes, or does it stay steady?
“You begin all over again, every time you do a piece of work,” he said. “The next one may establish no contact whatsoever, but that doesn’t put you out of the business.”
In other words, those creative juices that have been sustaining him from the days of The Garrick Gaieties back in the ’20s are still flowing reliably every day?
Rodgers shrugged. “Not necessarily. They may not flow until next week, or next month. But you keep looking for new projects … and doing what you enjoy.”
John Fearnley, who was closely associated with Rodgers and Hammerstein while that team was writing successful shows and even producing the works of others (Annie Get Your Gun, The Happy Time, and others), once recalled a production meeting during the preparation of South Pacific. It was at a time when Rodgers was suffering from severe back trouble, and he was lying on the floor, resting against a pillow. Mr. Hammerstein entered the room, brining the first lyric he’d written for their new show; Rodgers, lying supine, read his partner’s lyric and, after a few moments’ thought, said, “I can hear the beginning of the show.” He got up from the floor and went over to his piano. “When the overture starts, you’ll hear these notes,” he said, and played the first three notes of “Bali Ha’i.” The rest of the song followed very rapidly.
Richard Rodgers
A rather extraordinary demonstration of the interaction between the two creative men. “Except that very little of the story happened that way,” said Mr. Rodgers. “What John left out was that Oscar and I had known for months that we were going to do a song called ‘Bali Ha’i,’ and something must have been going around in my head about it without the lyric actually being written. But I knew that I had a certain approach to the way the music should sound in describing this exotic island with the two peaks rising from it. We were at Josh Logan’s apartment, and at lunch Oscar did take the typewritten piece out of his pocket and hand it to me, the lyric to the song. And I went into the next room and I wrote. The melody took me very little time because I knew so much about it already. And I had his lyric to build on. That may account for the speed.”
But hasn’t it always been legendary, that rapid “shorthand” between the two men—Hammerstein handing Rodgers a new lyric he’s sweated over for days, and Rodgers quickly supplying the required tune?
“Only if I knew what it was about in advance,” said Rodgers. “I knew that Oklahoma! was going to open with the cowboy coming onstage, singing a song about what a beautiful day it was. I knew it had to be in 3/4 time. I knew it had to have a certain taste … long before I ever saw the lyric. Now, all these preconditioning items can force you into a certain grove.”
A groove which produces “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” can hardly be faulted.
“It was flying around subconsciously, I’m sure,” he remarked.
“When we started to do Oklahoma! Oscar meant to be helpful. I’d never been to Oklahoma. And I certainly wasn’t in the Southwest in 1906; I was only four years old at the time. So he sent me a book about the subject. And I opened it up, took one look at it, and then closed it and never opened it again. The only thing I could do was what any self-respecting artist would do. I put on music paper my idea of how Oklahoma sounded in 1906. The way Indian Territory sounded at the beginning of the century. Did it again in The King and I. I certainly hadn’t been to Siam before I wrote that. But I wanted to express my feeling about the way Siam sounded.”
The same thing with Carousel?
“Sure,” he said, “but that’s a little closer to home. I expected that a fellow who’d lived in Connecticut as long as I have could make sounds like New England.”
Mr. Rodgers’ description of how he never opened the book on Oklahoma again has an uncanny parallel to Mr. Hammerstein’s own remarks on the writing of lyrics. In his book Lyrics, written in 1949, Hammerstein said, “A rhyming dictionary is of little use and may, in fact, be a handicap when one is writing a song…. If you would achieve the rhyming grace and facility of W. S. Gilbert or Lorenz Hart, my advice would be never to open a rhyming dictionary. Don’t even own one.”
So, in a sense, the work patterns of Hammerstein and Rodgers did have that inherent parallel?
“Absolutely,” said Mr. Rodgers. “Once you have learned the rules, you then have the need to break them. Unless you’re like a song publisher I used to know many, many years ago, who said there was only one way to write a popular hit and that was to begin writing the chorus, the refrain of the song, on the first note of the bar, with the first note of the diatonic scale and with a major chord. In other words, the first note of the song couldn’t be the second note of the tune. And he insisted you couldn’t start with a musical rest; it had to be dominant, from the beginning, the first note! And furthermore, he insisted that it had to be a major chord in the key of C— and that chord had to be C, E, and G! Now, think of the limitations he already had imposed on you. If you were trying to say something, it was an impossible situation. That had to be the most inhibiting thing you could possibly think of to lay on a songwriter.”
It sounds like those iron rules Hollywood producers used to hand down about what makes a good picture. All those old formulae—story has to be upbeat, boy has to meet girl, then lose girl, then get girl….
A grimace crossed Mr. Rodgers’ face when the subject of Hollywood surfaced. He obviously had few pleasant thoughts on the subject of the so-called “golden era” of the mid-1930s, when so many New York composers and lyricists became resident in the Hollywood canyons, writing for the seven film factories which were churning out musical films.
“One of their pet procedures,” he recalled, “was to assign four or five different songwriters to the same spot in the same picture, and then to take the song they liked the best. So you found yourself working in competition with other writers. They did it to Larry Hart and to me, to everybody, even to Jerry Kern—and if they would do that to Kern, for God’s sake….” He shook his head sadly. “This was sheer suicide for a composer.”
And yet, the early film work of Rodgers and Hart, especially for Love Me Tonight, was remarkably innovative and lasting (“Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Mimi,” “Love Me Tonight,” “Lover”).
“All of that depended on the director. In Love Me Tonight it was Mamoulian. At that time he was God at Paramount. Whatever he wanted to do, he did. He believed in Larry and me, and we believed in him and got along beautifully,” said Rodgers. “So we were able to do something new and, fortunately, successful. In those days they used to plant the camera in front of the boy and the girl and start to grind, and they’d sing, and that was it. But in Love Me Tonight we took numbers all over the place. It was the first time that musical sound track was cut—dialogue and music interspersed. As a matter of fact, in the opening song, ‘Isn’t It Romantic,’ we went from Chevalier’s tailor shop in Paris to Jeanette MacDonald’s castle, far away. Various people or groups sang the song, passed it along, so she heard it on the balcony of her castle and learned it, and picked it up. We established a romantic contact between two people who not only had never met but were in different parts of France. All done through the use of the music, sound track cutting, and so forth. But only because Mamoulian believed in this technique.”
I mentioned Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, which Rodgers and Hart wrote for Al Jolson in 1933, a motion picture years ahead of its time in the use of rhyming couplets instead of spoken dialogue.1 Among the joys of this almost-forgotten film was a chorus of Central Park hoboes, led by Jolson, strolling through the green and singing “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum;” a haunting love ballad, “You Are Too Beautiful;” and a delightful scene in which a postcard from the hero is delivered to the leading lady. As she reads it, we hear Jolson’s voice, off screen, singing the contents of the message in rhyme: “Dear June, I got to Cleveland okay, the weather’s fine … “ and so on.
“It has a certain number of partisans who remembers it,” said Rodgers. “Once in a while it shows up on the Late Show or plays downtown at the little Elgin Theatre. We just went down to see it a couple of weeks ago.” He smiles at the recollection. “We did all sorts of things that had never been done before. But, again, they were totally dependent on having a director who was sympathetic. In that case, Lewis Milestone.
“But that picture and Love Me Tonight and, many years later, the one I did with Oscar, State Fair [from which score came such musical jewels as “It Might as Well Be Spring”] were the only three experiences I ever had with California that were enjoyable. They made many good moving-picture versions of stage shows of ours, but these are the only original ones for film that worked well. And that’s hardly a career,” he added sardonically.
“The most terrible lies have been all those Hollywood musicals which purport to be the life story of people like Gershwin, or Porter, or Kern. They give no insight whatsoever into the working patterns of the men they’re supposedly about.” Rodgers shrugged. “They did it to Larry and me.” (He was referring to Words and Music, in which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer somewhat improbably cast Tom Drake as Rodgers and Mickey Rooney as Hart). “The only good thing about that picture was that they had Janet Leigh play my wife. And I found that highly acceptable.” He grinned.
It is well-known that Rodgers never went back to see the second act of Hair. Is it true that he doesn’t like the music or lyrics that are being written for the theatre today?
“It’s true,” he admitted. “There’s only one current score that I have real respect for—this is my own opinion, not necessarily the public’s—and that is Company. I know I was very much affected by that score.” (Company was written by Stephen Sondheim, who a few years ago collaborated with Mr. Rodgers on the score of Do I Hear a Waltz?)
What about popular music?
“There I’m left high and dry,” said Rodgers ruefully. “With a few exceptions. Burt Bacharach is one, and Jim Webb is another. I think these two are extremely musical and original. I think they are great. But the hard-rock stuff … I don’t pretend to understand.”
Twenty years ago the late Howard Lindsay, playwright, director, and producer, took it upon himself to chair an organization called the New Dramatists Committee. Its function was to encourage and sustain tyro playwrights. The group was a no-nonsense operation, dedicated not to theory but to pragmatic learning about the theatre (something which anyone on Broadway will tell you is extremely hard to come by).
One evening Lindsay brought his friends Rodgers and Hammerstein into a cluttered room above the Hudson Theatre where they held still for several hours of question-and-answer. It was the fall of 1951, and the state of the theatre—especially the musical theatre—seemed particularly parlous. In the course of the evening a question was asked of Hammerstein: “Where do you think the new songwriters and lyricists and book writers are going to come from if they don’t ever get a chance to be heard?”
“Well,” said Hammerstein, “I’ve been around a long time now, and the only thing I can tell you is that it always looks this way—dark and depressing. But somewhere, somebody new always crops up. It may be in a new form, or he may write in a new way—you never can be sure exactly how— but sooner or later a new guy shows up and he comes through. Does that help answer your question?”
“I’d almost forgotten that,” admitted Rodgers when reminded of that evening. “But obviously Oscar, as usual, made a lot of sense.”
True enough. For since those dark days of 1951 the Broadway theatre has seen the emergence, in the musical field, of such exciting new talents as Steve Sondheim, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), Kander and Ebb (Cabaret), and Galt MacDermott (Two Gentlemen of Verona).
“No, I don’t believe that the theatre is dead at all,” he said. “If No, No, Nanette can happen, then a new work can happen. Who would have thought that the biggest hit in town would be a forty-year-old musical show? If the public will accept that, they will accept something that is new. I am sure of it. It just has to be good of its kind. The public is amazingly flexible.”
Then the whole secret is to keep writing. That’s what Hammerstein really meant, isn’t it?
“Oh, sure,” said Rodgers. “And I think you have to stick t it, and if what you write doesn’t become popular, then you are not going to do well in the music-writing industry. But if what you have to say coincides with what the public wants to hear—then you are in pretty good shape.”
We were back again at that indefinable something which vaults across the space from the composer’s keyboard into the public ear and causes some intuitive response. That secret ingredient. Can it ever be defined?
Perhaps not. But, whatever it is, Rodgers’ music has always contained more than a fair share of it, ever since those days back in 1925 when he was setting Larry Hart’s couplets to the melodies of “Manhattan” and “Mountain Greenery,” through all those years of Rodgers-and-Hart shows, then to the succession of hits he wrote with Oscar Hammerstein—and even now, after No Strings, for which he did both music and lyrics, and Do I Hear a Waltz? with Sondheim, right up to Two by Two.
“The only way I can define it,” said Robert Russell Bennett, who has been orchestrating for Rodgers for many years, “is that down deep somewhere in that soul of his there must be a warm, beautiful thing … to come out with all these melodies.”
“It’s funny,” said Rodgers, half to himself. “I remember wanting to quit at the age of twenty-two. I felt I was getting old!”
He stood up and glanced at his watch; we’d been talking for more than an hour. The man who supervises the operations of Williamson Music and of all the other operations allied with such a large commercial enterprise clearly had other things to do besides answer metaphysical questions about talent. Questions which over the past half-century he’d discussed many times, and yet over which, like his late partner Hammerstein, he showed no impatience on this busy spring afternoon.
“I hope these questions haven’t bored you,” I said.
“They’re very good, very valid questions. I hope the answers were all right.”
Now that there isn’t, for the first time in years, a Richard Rodgers musical score playing in a Broadway theatre, there was one more question for him, and one for which we all hope there’s an answer (to borrow a Rodgers-and-Hart title) “Soon”:
What, Mr. Rodgers, is your next?