Max Wilk: When the great Jerome Kern was asked, what place does Irving Berlin have in American music? He said, Irving Berlin has no place in American Music. Irving berlin is American music.
Michael Kantor: Perfect
Max Wilk: God, I hope so.
Michael Kantor: Broadway is about making money. So tell us, you know, tell us that and tell us about that the old question musical theater which comes first.
Max Wilk: Oh, any songwriter will tell you if you ask him which comes first, the lyrics or the music, he says the first thing that comes is the check.
Michael Kantor: Why should anyone care about the Broadway music?
Max Wilk: Why? Oh, I think it’s probably the most typically American art form that we’ve ever developed. And nobody else really knows how to do it except us. I see the effect that Broadway musicals have on kids of 15 and 12 and 10. And they all fall madly in love with the Broadway musical. And everyone I’ve ever talked to about where did they first get interested in American musicals, they say, well, my mother took me to see a matinee when I was about five years old, when I was about seven years old. When I was about nine years old And I was totally infected from that moment on. And I know exactly what they’re talking about, because that’s what happened to me when I was seven. I came out of the theater and I said, I never had such a good time in my life. About 10 or 12 years later, I was still madly infected and I met a guy in California named Harry Ruby, who was a songwriter, a wonderful songwriter with Burt Kalmar. And I said to him, I love the musicals. He said, you know more about musicals than anybody I’ve ever met. How did you get, how did you started with musicals like this. And I said, well, when I was seven or eight years old, they took me to see a show. I can’t remember what the name of the show was, but there were two guys somewhere down in Mexico and they were being chased by a guy with guns, a Mexican bandit who was firing shots at them. And they were running around the stage and I was having such a good time. And he looked at me and he said, that was our show. I said that was your show? He said, yes, it was Clark and McCullough, two funniest men I ever saw, and the Rounders. I said, you infected me. He said hey, look at that. After all these years, we found out about it. I said it was, I never looked back. I couldn’t, I just loved it from then on.
Michael Kantor: What year was that, do you know?
Max Wilk: 19, I think it was 1927, I can look it up for you. I can’t believe I could remember anything from being seven years old, but there it was.
Michael Kantor: Set us up, now we’re jumping ahead to Rogers and Hart. But I wanna take it from the moment when World War II has begun. And set us by the time World War Two had begun, Rogers and Hardt had been working together for 20 years. Rogers without Hart was as difficult as you do in your book. It’s difficult to imagine as whatever comes to mind. So by the world War Two began, tell us how they were an institution. But begin with, by the World War two began.
Max Wilk: By the time World War II had begun, they had been writing together.
Michael Kantor: Sorry, you gotta give us Rodgers and Hart.
Max Wilk: Rodgers and Hart. By the time World War II had begun, Rodgers and Hart had had a long and very good career writing big hit musicals, one right after the other. But it wasn’t working anymore for some reason. They were having difficulties with each other. It wasn’t the fact that either of them had no talent or whatever it was, it was the fact that Larry was a very unhappy man and he had trouble working on shows. He began to drink more and more. He began disappear more and go on trips. He was not, you couldn’t find him. Rogers was a meticulous man who said, if I have to write a song, I will sit down and write a song. And he would write a song, and he would write wonderful songs. Larry Hart would be off somewhere in a bar or doing this or doing something else. And Rogers would say, where’s Larry? I need a lyric. And nobody knew where Larry was. So eventually this partnership, which had been so flourishing and so beautiful in the early days. Began to come apart. Rogers was very perturbed about Larry’s behavior and his inability to show up for work and all of the things that irritated Rogers, who wanted to work when Larry wasn’t around. So he was in Philadelphia with a show, and he went out to Bucks County to visit Oscar. And he said to Oscar, I’m having a great deal of problems. Larry, and I’m wondering, what could happen if we come apart? Would you work with me? And Oscar said, I would never break up your partnership. But if it ever comes to the point where you can’t function with Larry anymore, then call me. It was a very, very gentlemanly thing to do, but they’d all known each other. They all went to Columbia together. So this was not something that came out of the blue. They all knew each other very well. So that is why he called Oscar when Larry walked out on Oklahoma.
Michael Kantor: So take us to the last, the last new show that just set us in by Jupiter and Larry Hart having been taken out of the theater. It’s going downhill fast.
Max Wilk: I’m, I’m not sure I know what happened to break up this relationship. There was, there were more and more times when Larry would get very drunk, and there were more more times where he would just not be around to do the work. And there are times when they worked with George Abbott and Abbott said he remembered when Larry would finally show up at the rehearsal. And Dick would say, we need a lyric. And Larry said, give me the song. And he’d sit down on a table with a piece of yellow paper, and he’d scribble a lyric, and then he said, here. And give him the lyric and walk out. He could work like that, but he couldn’t function. And that’s a big difference, because when you’re working on a musical, you have to be there all the time, as you well know. And Dick couldn’t take that anymore. He just was unable to… Live with this kind of inadvertent disappearance all the time. And I’ve heard from other songwriters how difficult it is not to have your collaborator around. That’s exactly what happened. All of this took place when Richard Rogers was doing a show in Philadelphia, and Larry was not around, and he was very disturbed about it. So he went out to visit his old friend, Oscar Hammerstein, who had a farm. In Bucks County, and he said to Oscar, I’m having a great deal of problems with Larry. I don’t know how much longer we can function together as a team, and if anything happened, I wonder, would you work with me? And Oscar said, I would never be party to breaking up your team. You two guys have worked together for so long and so well, but if it comes to a point, where you can’t function with him anymore, then call me. And that was the way it went.
Michael Kantor: Agnes DeMille’s impact was so great on Broadway. Start with that.
Max Wilk: From then on, Agnes de Mille had the most important impact on the Broadway theater of anybody that ever happened. All they did from then on was do ballets with Agnes De Mille ballets. They were all, every show had to have ballets, and there’s a show that was produced in much later called Say Darling, where in the middle of the show, a tap dancer comes out to audition for a Broadway show. And the dance director says, no tap dancers. And the guy stands on the stage and says, doesn’t anybody want a tap dancer anymore? And gets off. And it was really the truth of the business. We were all dancing ballet, ballet, ballet. She did it. And it’s wonderful.
Michael Kantor: Great, great. Why did, in the broadest sense, Oklahoma
Max Wilk: Why? Well, it opened up at the Westport Playhouse as a revival of a show called Green Grow the Lilacs. And this story is well-known in Westport, especially because I’ve been telling it to everybody for years. And Dick Rogers lived in Fairfield. And the Theater Guild people called and said, you ought to come down and see this show we’ve got here. They had a dance number in the middle of the show. Which was a square dance that had been staged by a young fella named Gene Kelly. And the audience was liking it. So they called Dick, and Dick came down from Fairfield. And he looked at the show, and they said to him, don’t you think this would make a good musical? And he said, yes, I think it would. So it actually was Dick who figured this one out. And he gets a lot of credit for that in my book because that was a gamble.
Michael Kantor: Why was Oklahoma such, you used the word it was such a gamble. Give me the word Oklahoma.
Max Wilk: Oklahoma was an uphill fight from the minute they decided to do a show. Nobody wanted to put up the money for it. Nobody thought the idea was any good. People went to auditions all winter long and they didn’t like it. It was not anything that anybody thought would make a show There was an old lady on Park Avenue who sat through an audition and caught up and left and said, I don’t want anything to do with cowboys. She walked out of the room. Dick and Oscar and the people who sang the lyrics and the music auditioned for six months. They couldn’t get a nickel. The only person who gave them any money was Harry Cohn of Columbia because he liked the idea of the whole show being a musical. He was a musical nut. And so he put money in the show for Max Gordon, who worked with him, and they invested in the show. That was the only amount of money they had. They had a few other people. I can’t tell you how many people in the course of the last 20 years have told me how they passed up the chance to invest in Oklahoma. It was astonishing. Every inch of the way, it was a struggle.
Michael Kantor: Great. Tell us how, in the old days, the New York crowd would go to New Haven, Connecticut, to see a show. Just basically abbreviate the first chapter of your book.
Max Wilk: Back in the old days, Thursday night was opening night at New Haven. And all the New Haven people came filing in, sat down, and there was a new musical. And this was a musical that opened when the curtain went up and a bare stage, no overture, no nothing. And off on a… There was an old lady sitting there churning butter. Churning butter? That’s the opening of a musical? Off stage, you hear a voice saying, oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what beautiful day. I got a beautiful feeling. Everything’s going my way. The orchestra still wasn’t playing anything. Then it started. Dee, dee, de, de dee dee. And he started to sing. There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow. And everybody’s saying, what kind of a show is this? What kind of show is it? And believe me, it was a stunning change from any musical I ever saw in New Haven. I didn’t see the opening night, but I know from people who did that they were absolutely stunned by what happened in that show. Came out the intermission, and everybody’s standing around saying, what’s going on with this show? And Max Gordon, who was the manager for Columbia Pictures, for Harry Cohn’s investment, he stood there selling pieces of the show. To people who wanted to buy a hunk of the show, he got rid of some of Columbia’s investments. Millions of dollars later, he added up how much he lost on opening night in New Haven in the lobby of the theater. And then the show ended, and Walter Winchell’s secretary, who was named Rose Bigman, was up there checking it out for Walter Winchl, a columnist. She sent him that famous wire. No legs, no jokes, no chance. Wrong, wrong, wrong all the way. But that was that incredible opening night. That’s why it was such an uphill fight. Then they went to New Haven, then they went from New Haven to Boston and it still was an uphill fighting, but it got better and better and that’s how the show began to work. Imagine going to the Schubert Theater in New Haven to see a new show called Away We Go written by a new team that hadn’t worked together, Oscar Hammerstein and Dick Rogers, and you see a show about cowboys in Oklahoma and you have no idea what the hell you’re going to see and you see this show and little do you know that you’re sitting at the birth of an American classic. The American classic. That’s what happened that night.
Michael Kantor: Great, that was great. When the show gets to New York, talk about rounding up the service in the dark. In the dark?
Max Wilk: It was wartime. There was a blackout in New York. It was snowing. It was a miserable night. This is opening night of a new show. They hadn’t sold a lot of tickets. There were still tickets in the box office. And people went out on the street, on 44th Street, and started rounding up soldiers who were looking for something to do that night, and bringing them into the theater. And saying, you want to see a show, soldier? And a soldier would say, sure, I’ll see a show, free? Why not? That’s how they got to be in the opening night of Oklahoma. Agnes DeMille, that famous lady who came in and started creating dances with a group of dancers, chorus girls, that were dancers first. And they kept saying to her… You can’t have her. She’s not a chorus girl. And she’d say she’s a dancer. And finally, she got so angry, she threw her purse down on the floor and said, if you don’t take these, I quit the show. That’s how she stood up for her dancers. And all of those dancers were magnificent. And they all worked like crazy to get that show up. It created an entire new, an entirely new, let me go back to the beginning. Agnes DeMille really created a new American musical comedy venue. It was not a venue, it was an image of what you could do on a stage with dancers. Was it opened up an entirely new form of American musical. From then on, there were nothing but dancing on those stages. Everybody did them. You know them all, West Side Story. You know all the shows that came on after that. They all came from that wonderful night in New Haven when she first showed up with the dances.
Michael Kantor: I hope so. Tell us a funny story about how hard the tickets were to get. Oh. Oklahoma was such a phenomenon.
Max Wilk: Oklahoma was such a phenomenon that getting a ticket, getting two tickets for it was impossible. And Oscar Hammerstein was living in Bucks County and one of the farmers who lived nearby came up to him and said, would you do me a tremendous favor? Could you get my daughter two tickets for the show on her, the night she gets married, she wants to go see Oklahoma. And Oscar said, well, when is she getting married? He said, when you get her the tickets. The most important thing that Oklahoma ever did for the American musical was to create an entire show in which the book and the lyrics and the music all came together and became a piece of work. Up until then, the American musical comedy had been comedy driven. Musical comedy was exactly what it said. It had a musical comedy star who sang and danced, and the books of those shows were absolutely dreadful. If you ever go back to read a book from 1927 or 1930, you can’t believe that people could actually do those shows. You come to 1943 with Oklahoma and from then on There is a piece of unified work with music and lyrics. Which all come together and all become a piece of work, one cannot be done without the other. But you can take any song out of an American musical of the 20s or the 30s and play it, and you never have to hear the book of that show because the book is dreadful. It’s really, only a couple of shows, like Of The Eyes Sing and stuff like that, can survive because they were greatly, they were created by witty men who wrote witty stuff. But the general American musical of all that period was comedy driven. And you can’t tell people how funny that was because they don’t know. Now you can play Oklahoma any time you want to, 600 times a year is how many productions they have. And there is this piece of work and it’s having its effect on the audience. And it’s doing just what it did in 1943 when it opened in New York, which is stunning an audience. And that’s the difference between shows before Oklahoma and the shows after Oklahoma. The most interesting thing about Oklahoma on records is that Jack Kapp, who ran Decca Records, said, I wanna put the whole show into an album, and he sold the album of the whole Show, Oklahoma. For the first time that ever happened in the American musical theater. And there it was. You could go and you could buy an album with six or four records, I don’t know how many there were. On either side there was a number. And these were amazing because people could take them home and play the whole show.
Michael Kantor: Wild songs from the 20s. No energy like that today.
Max Wilk: No, no, the 20s, well that’s when the orchestra pit was playing wild jazz, the girls would come out and dance like crazy, tap dance mostly, that was it. And people like De Silva, Brown and Henderson were writing tremendously energetic numbers like button up your overcoat or the moon belongs to everyone, the best things in or life is just a bowl of cherries, don’t just take it serious. It’s too, don’t take it seriously, it’s too mysterious. And these songs had an impact on the audience. This was known as the Tired Businessman Show. And the tired businessman would come in with his lady friend, sit down in the second or third row and out would come the girls and they would dance and they were singing and everything else. And they do the numbers like the black bottom. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with this. It just doesn’t work anymore, except when you do a show like Thoroughly Modern Millie, which is doing exactly that. Carousel is based on a play by Ferenc Molnar, a very, very interesting play about the man who goes to heaven and can’t get into heaven. It’s a very sad story, but they took that play and turned it into one of the most glorious operettas. I think of it as an operetta. It has such warmth and love in it. And I love Carousel. I love watching it. I love hearing it. I love the duets between the two, the guy and the girl. I think they’re wonderful. And I loved the whole background of New England, which is what they set up. And, uh…
Michael Kantor: But it’s a rough, he’s a ruff guy, they sort of, how do they engage you emotionally in a guy who beats his.
Max Wilk: By writing him marvelous songs. The soliloquies are absolutely gorgeous. And when they’re done even today by anybody who does them, they’re absolutely brilliantly written and brilliant, and they perform so well. The one thing you keep forgetting about Oscar is the absolute truth of everything he talks about when he writes a lyric. And the way he and Rodgers work together in that show is just amazing. It’s so well done.
Michael Kantor: So sum it up for me the idea that Oscar with that truth could could dramatize things like An abusive domestic relationship or suicide in a way that was moving to people just give me those kind of big
Max Wilk: You know, the thing about Oscar, whom I knew, I didn’t know him well, but I knew him well enough to know what a wonderful, warm person he was. He wrote a lyric once called, They Call Me a Cock-Eyed Optimist. He was an optimist. He looked on the bright side of everything. I think Oklahoma has that wonderful, open kind of drive that you get out of people the frontier, but when you come to carousel, you’re dealing with a love story, a beautiful love story and the duets between him and the girl are so beautiful, you can take them out and put them on a stage today and they just, they sing out loud, they’re so beautiful. I don’t know whether I’m articulating what I really think about it, but I could sit through carousel again any time. And there are songs in there that just echo all the time, like, this was a real nice clam bake, or June is busting out all over, and the dances. It was such a wonderful piece of work. I think he did Carmen Jones, first of all, because he was trying to do something new. Which was to take a libretto from an opera and translate it into another language which was American and which was also with an all black cast. And I still love some of those lyrics a great deal because, you know, what he was doing was, again, he was trying to do something new and he was succeeding. I think Carmen Jones is a wonderful opera.
Michael Kantor: Great. What about, um, in get your gun.
Max Wilk: All right, I’ll bite. What about Annie Catcher?
Michael Kantor: Did Berlin think, you said earlier, what was Berlin, Berlin was looking around at the new book musical, did he think he could do it?
Max Wilk: Of course Berlin could do a book musical. He just hadn’t done one in several years. He was out in Hollywood making movies, and he had been with This Is the Army, and had done all kinds of other things. And he hadn’t a book in quite a while, but he had done book musicals all his life. He knew how to do a musical. I think he didn’t know whether he could follow Jerome Kern. And poor Jerome Kern who had died on the street somewhere and was taken to Potter’s Field, that was a terrible death and a terrible loss to the American theater. I think what happened was that Berlin decided he had to do something, and he wanted to show them he could do it. So he went home and wrote three songs and said, here are the songs I’ve written. And they said, perfect. And he had proved that he could it. But my favorite story is, you know, there’s no business like show business. He sat down and he sang it to them. And the way Berlin sang a song was he sat with his face right next to yours. And he sang it right to you, as I was told by several people. If you didn’t like the song, he could tell by looking in your eyes that you didn’t t like the song. And so they did the score again two or three days later. And somebody said, where’s there’s no business like show business? And he said, well, I played that for you, and I didn’t think you liked it very much. He said, what do you mean you didn t think I liked it very much? She said. Well, I looked at you and you weren’t really reacting very strongly to it. He said, we love that song.
Michael Kantor: I can do better story as quickly as you can.
Max Wilk: Well, there was a meeting at Josh Logan’s apartment, and they were talking about whether they needed a song or not. They needed a second song, they needed another song in the second act, and Berlin, who was on the other side of the room, came over and said, I know what you need, I heard. He said, you heard what? He said you heard you needed a, I hear you needed the song in a second act. And I said, okay, fine. He said we’ll work on it. And Berlin went home. In a taxicab back down to Beekman Place, and 15 minutes later he called Logan on the phone and he said, I know what, here’s the song you want in the second act, anything you can do I can do better, I can anything better than you. And it’s a challenge between him and her. And they said, when did you write that? He said, just now, coming down in a taxi cab. But that’s, that is a true story. It’s been told to me by three and they all were there.
Michael Kantor: Critics referred to Annie Get Your Gun as old fashioned. Tell us that and tell us it’ll interrupt.
Max Wilk: Critics all said it was an old-fashioned show, and Berlin’s answer was, yeah, an old fashioned hit. Nobody could challenge him.
Michael Kantor: South Pacific. What does South Pacific say about Osterhammer?
Max Wilk: Optimist, beautiful love story, and you’ve got to be taught to hate is the song that sticks out in South Pacific like a big sore thumb. You’ve got be taught hate, you’ve go to be carefully taught. You know, children are taught to to hate, is his major lesson. There it sits, that wonderful statement. And I loved it. I loved the show for that. And then, of course, they call me a cockeyed optimist. Mary Martin had the best time of her life in that show.
Michael Kantor: I was outdated, a throwback to the more sentimental shows. But it ran three years, wins the Tony, wins the Best Picture Award. So here’s the question. How was Sound of Music received? And then the follow up is, what does it say about Oscar Hammerstein?
Max Wilk: Question. What does it say about what? It says how brilliant they were to have written a show like that, which plays over and over and over again. And the first thing I ever learned in show business was never argue with a hit. And that is my answer to you about Sound of Music. I personally didn’t like Sound of Music. What difference does it make whether I liked it or not? Millions of people like it all over the world, all over country. And the fact is that the movie is one of the great successes of Hollywood. The backstory of that is, that that movie saved 20th Century Fox from going bankrupt and Oklahoma saved the theater guild from going bankruptcy. So you’ve got these patterns between these two shows. Whether I like the, I mean Sound and music. If you ever watched an audience and be entertained, there it is. They love the show. I can’t argue with that. Only a fool would argue with. I’m serious.
Michael Kantor: What about, this show’s being written as Oscar has cancer. Do you think somehow a song like Edelweiss or Climb Every Mountain, you know, it’s Oscar just laying it out there as- Oh yeah, it’s all there. Tell us how this show- Oscar.
Max Wilk: Oscar was saying things that were part of that optimistic life of his, and his internal feeling about climbing every mountain is true. Everything he wrote was like that. There was this conscious forward motion in everything he wrote, and it’s all there. And especially in the movie. It’s amazing how it resounds in the movies. I brought a tape of the movie home and showed it to my kids, my grandchildren. They sat there and rapped. They run it five or six times over and over again. That’s the feeling that Oscar put into that movie.
Michael Kantor: Great. Let’s go back to South Pacific. You mentioned you’ve got to be taught, but tell us how South Pacific helped define the career of Mary Martin and how, well, let’s start with that. I mean, it’s sort of the role, if we look at anything for Mary Martin, that’s what we’re going to learn.
Max Wilk: It’s hard to answer that question because she herself loved the show and she loved being in it and she was marvelous in it, and people fell in love with her in that show. My father used to go see that show every afternoon on a matinee. He would go into the theater just to see the two of them do their love song at the end. He adored. Pinza and Mary Martin doing it. He would sneak in there over and over again on the way home from his office just to see those two people. And he never got tired of it. And I never got tried of it either. But the thing that’s interesting about Mary is that Mary owned The Sound of Music. She bought the rights to The Sound Of Music, and she and our husband put it on. And they were the ones that found Dick and Oscar, and they found Howard Lindsay and Russell Krauss, and put them all together and made it into a show. So, you know, when you talk about a woman having really good judgment, there was where Mary Martin shone. I mean, Sound of Music was her show.
Michael Kantor: Tell us, now we’re jumping quickly to the Cradle Will Rock story. Oh God. The famous story. Cradle will rock. The WPA, tell us how the WPA guards actually locked the cast out of the Maxine Elliott Theater. They padlocked the door and they had to move the show.
Max Wilk: I wasn’t there, but I do know that the WPA people were locked out of the theater. The Maxine Elliott Theater was where they were planning to do The Cradle Will Rock. And the government put a clamp on the whole WPA and locked them out of theater. So Blitstein found somebody who found a piano, and they put the piano on a truck, and they brought the truck uptown. And they found another old theater that was empty, and they went into the empty theater and turned on the lights and dusted off the seats, and they all sat in the orchestra and the balcony, and Blitstein sat up on the stage with the piano, and these people could not perform in that theater, but they could stand up and do their numbers from the seats they were in, and that’s how they did the show that night. Cole Porter was deft and dirty and brilliant.
Michael Kantor: Tell us about how popular Rodgers and Hart were mid-30s after coming back from Hollywood.
Max Wilk: Oh, when they came back and they did a show, Jumbo, they left Hollywood, they left behind them a bunch of disasters that they had written for movies. And then they came to do, they did a show called Hallelujah I’m a Bum with Al Jolson. And in the middle of that show, in the movie, there’s a guy that Jolston sings I’ve gotta get back to New York. And that’s really Rodgers and Hart speaking. And they came back to New York, and they did a show called Jumbo, which had Jimmy Durante, and it was all about a circus, and it played at this huge theater on 44th Street. And it was a big hit. And they were back in New York. Thank God they were in New york, because they were miserable in Hollywood. And having done that, and it has some wonderful songs in it like Little Girl Blue and stuff like that which are just wonderful. They went on to do shows and for the rest of the 30s and into the 40s, right up until the end of the 30s and 40s they were always on Broadway with a show. Thank heaven. In the 20s you went to the theater to celebrate. And in the 30s, I think you went to the theater to get a few laughs and forget how terrible things were outside. And that was based on the hits that were around in the thirties and the forties, they were still the same hits. There were a lot more laughs in the shows than there are now. But the laughs in in the fortys were No, I’ll go back to the beginning. What I said was still the same thing. The 20s was to celebrate. The 30s was forget about the Depression.
Michael Kantor: And just kidding, people would come to see the comics and the stars.
Max Wilk: Comics and stars, that’s what they sold. They sold Ethel Merman, they sold Al Jolson, they sold Bobby Clark, and they sold Burt Lahr. I mean, all of those people were comedy. If you wanna know how important Rodgers and Hammerstein were in their era, you have only got to know the joke that used to be told around Broadway, which was that they, put up a sign on the Colonial Theater in Boston, and they said, coming Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new show. And people walked by, opened the lobby door, and threw money in the lobby. That’s a true story. People said, that was the joke that was going around Broadway. They didn’t even have the show yet. They just announced it, and people kept coming in and saying, I want tickets.
Michael Kantor: And tell us how these are the shows that now are, you know, the staple of the revivals around the country.
Max Wilk: Everywhere, over and over. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals are being done everywhere you go, somewhere tonight. They’re doing something by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and it’s gonna go on forever and ever and ever. It has to. You’re welcome.
Michael Kantor: I’ll hop the cab with you.
