Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Michael Bennett. When I was a little kid, we were staying in Montego Bay with my father and he. And he picked up a magazine from the American Airlines complementary magazine. And he was reading a how to do the cha-cha in the magazine. And as he was holding it, he would get up and he would start doing it. And then he would add steps to it. And before long, about five minutes into… His own interpretation of the cha-cha, this thing became a beautifully choreographed dance piece. And it was just amazing how he could just make nothing turn into something, and he was only 22 at the time. I think, I mean, it was unbelievable. He was a scorching talent.
Michael Kantor: And what’s the only Mammoth in the musical theater body?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: In the musical theater business, the only commandment is the show must go on.
Michael Kantor: About what your grandfather was thinking about in 1940.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: In 1942, my grandfather was, at that point, at a low point in his career. He was desperate to refocus his craft. He was no longer working with anyone. He was considered something of a has-been, a champion, and a relic of an earlier time. His greatest hits were a good 11, 12 years behind him. And he had no one with which to collaborate at that time. So he began working on a… An adaptation of Carmen Jones by George Bizet and that he was attempting to update it and Americanize it and in so doing he was dipping into the family well of opera, of trying to take deep themes and make a go with them, quite in contrast to the style of the times, to the light fluffy musicals that were either operatic or Cinderella story escapes. And in this regard, he was honing what was important to him. I don’t think he was doing this for anyone but himself at that point in his career. At that time, his wife, Dorothy, had given him a copy of Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs, which she had read and which she thought would make a wonderful show. It’s an interesting story that both Rogers and Hart… And Hammerstein and Kern, what was left of that collaboration. Both had their eye on Lin Riggs’ Green Bro the Lilacs, but in the case of Kern and Hammerstine, Kern was not interested in doing a western musical, as he called it. Whereas at the other side of it, Hart was not very interested in doing western musical with Rogers, as well as the fact that Kern was no longer really working with Hammerstein so much anymore, and Hart was self-destructing. So you had a situation where a vehicle was there to bring two people together. I should add also that this is not the first time that they collaborated in some regards. Rogers and Hammerstein both went to Columbia and worked on the varsity shows there. And way back in, I think it was 1920, I’m not perfectly sure about the date, maybe 1918, 1920. Oscar was on the nominating committee to put together musical pairings, and it was Hammerstein who had a great say in the pairing of Rodgers and Hart, and they went on to do the Vaudeville Varsities for Columbia University and stayed together for the next 17 or 18 years.
Michael Kantor: No, that’s good. So, again, your grandfather, what’s going on in 1940?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: In 1942, my grandfather was considered passe, and he was trying to refocus his craft. And he was alone up in Bucks County and working on an adaptation of Carmen, which was Carmen Jones. This was, I think, an exercise for him, as much as anything else. It was an attempt to stay practicing and and to and to work out the what he considered to be important issues in musical theater which are very similar to those issues that are important in opera and i think that that was a way in which he reconnected with with what was important to him what was important to them was uh… Plots that made a lot of sense that uh… That would leave an audience transformed that a person going into the theater would come out feeling. Better about life and about people than when they came in. That it wasn’t just a way to pass two hours. That in a way it was like opera can be a religious experience or a spiritual experience.
Michael Kantor: And just take it in when Richard Rogers called.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: When Richard Rogers called about Oklahoma, he was a… In 1942, when Richard Rogers called Oscar about the possibility of collaborating on Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs, this was not an unknown property to Oscar. Oscar had read it and was interested in doing it, though his sometime collaborator, Curran, was not. On the other side of the equation, Richard Rogers was interested in doing but Larry Hart was self-destructing and was unable to do it. The show had, by the way, been done about six years earlier, up in Westport, which was then a straight play with folk music added. It wasn’t a musical per se. Both Rogers and Hammerstein had seen that show. So they were familiar with the property and they were both interested in working on it together after a certain point. Oscar told Dick, I will not break up your partnership. You know, you have the most successful partnership. Of the last 17 years bar none, but there came a time when Larry Hart could not go on. I can go here. I want to talk about that and I want to add something that you might find interesting. Interesting. When Carousel came out, it hit the mood of the time. At the time, we had just come back from World War II, and everybody who had gone through World War II had lost a loved one, at least one. The idea of somebody trying to make amends from beyond the grave was something that resonated deeply with everybody in America. So a man trying to makes things right with the world that he’d left behind. Was a can’t miss emotional powerhouse of a drama for Americans to soak up. It’s a testament, in fact, to how a show can be considered successful in the time that it comes out. When that show was made into a movie in the 50s, the resonance was of a different type. The story was exactly the same, but what became the resonant quality was how the daughter didn’t fit in, and how he could help her fit in. So in a sense, the same story is used to resonate differently for different generations. For the forties, it was the trauma of coming out of a world war, and for the fifties it was conformity. In a sense it was never going to be as popular in the firties as it had been in the fortys. Had that show come out in the 50s, it wouldn’t have been as popular.
Michael Kantor: Take us, give us just a topic sentence about Oscar found a way to merge drama and musical comedy. Okay. With the stakes being love death and we end with soliloquy where he’s singing about how’s his child with me. So if you can just.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: I don’t know where to start, but I’ll try.
Michael Kantor: Here we go. Oscar found a way.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: The best, Oscar loved Carousel. It probably was his favorite show. And it was his favorite show because the plot was welded to the music and to the words. There, it was one of those shows where the songs don’t really sit apart. They don’t become top ten hits on the hit parade as easily because they are not about John loves Mary. They’re about… Billy and Julie, and they’re about carnival barkers and seamstresses, they’re about real people, not general people, and about particular circumstances of plot. That show best illustrates the difference between a show tune and a popular tune, which many people overlook. But in a case of a song like My Boy Bill, it illustrates the best that show tunes can be, because it drives the plot. Take, for example, this song. In My Boy, Bill, a carnival barker is given the concept that his girlfriend might be pregnant. He fantasizes about everything that this boy could become, with a heavy emphasis on manly things. What this does is it tells us all about Billy Bigelow’s character, what he thinks is important. Being a carousel barker is important, being president is important too, but he knows what he wants from this boy. He’s going to have a lot of fun with this boy, then he has this break where he realizes it could be a girl. All of a sudden The entire fantasy shifts. You can have fun with a son, but you’ve got to be a father to a girl, is the lyric. And all of a sudden, he starts realizing that he hasn’t anything to offer her. He’s a bum with no money. And he starts contemplating what he’s going to have to do. He completely treats boys and girls different from each other. He has stressed what’s important to him in the song. And now he’s gonna tell you in the songs what he is gonna do next. He’ll get the money one way or another. So we’ve gone from, my girlfriend is pregnant, to I’m going to rob a liquor store and be dead before the beginning of the second act. Now, that is a great use of a song to propel a plot. That kind of exposition would take an hour, but it was done economically in an eight-minute song.
Michael Kantor: Put that in a topic sentence, Oscar Hammerstein managed to what?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Oscar Hammerstein managed to convey plot in the song, and that is something that popular songs aren’t meant to do, and the best of show tunes will do that. They’re not just expositional or character songs. They will be a character song that takes the plot around a corner.
Michael Kantor: Beyond that, Oscar’s particular plot points were mistakes. Give us that, too.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Oh, I think that in Oscar’s best stories, especially where he worked the libretto, you have a situation where you not only have a boy meets girl cute type story, but you also have the element of danger and death. In Oklahoma, you have death. In Carousel, in South Pacific, and in King and I, you all have these deaths which tends to give weight to the love, which tends to give a dimension. Hold on a second. Oscar was brought up in a family. His father was a vaudeville manager and his grandfather was an opera impresario. In a sense, if you were to mate the two, can you say that out if you can, if were to make the two you would have musical comedy or musical theater. It’s the best of two worlds where you have funny and deep and mixed together. And he was able to bring these two elements of his family background into his career and into the discipline that he, you know. Wrong words. Into his discipline.
Michael Kantor: So how did Oscar merge drama?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: I think Oscar was an old fashioned romanticist. His feelings about man, woman, love was cemented back in the 20s and 30s. It wasn’t modern love, it wasn’t fast and loose, there were no flappers in his mindset. It was something that he believed was the single most important thing. What we would call co-dependent relationships, he would stock the most value in. That you weren’t whole unless you found that other half that would make you whole. And I think he honestly believed it. And because it was honest and heartfelt, he resonated with other people who felt the same way. And in that regard, he’ll stay timeless for the people that feel that way. And it’s kind of sweet. And sometimes it’s called old fashioned now, but it’s not really going to go away.
Michael Kantor: Take us to that soliloquy at the end of the first act in Carousel, where Oscar, in his songs, is choosing to dramatize. In one case, it could be life or death, but in another case, is the birth of a child. That’s a sort of perfect.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Well, I think it’s funny how he deals with children in his many musicals. In the case of Carousel, he gives a voice to a man’s double standard, and I think it might even be Oscar’s double-standard, and that’s okay, he’s a man from his time. But men are the doers, and the women are the homemakers, and he believes that a man job is to provide for the family. And this whole song doesn’t deal with that while he has a boy in his mind because while he’s having a boy he’s fantasizing about what he was like as a boy it’s got really nothing to do with being a father in fact he only thinks about being a farther when he starts to realize that it could be a girl then he starts measuring his own inadequacies against what he thinks a father should be And, but for Oscar, these things are very important. These things called family life, having all the kids in the king and I, having all the kid in the sound of music, these are not props, these are important parts of what he considers to be important.
Michael Kantor: I’m concerned about racial tolerance, what have you, but tell us what you’ve got to be taught, says about Oscar.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Well, Oscar was very interested, very champion of the themes of racial and social tolerance. And that started very early in his career with Show Boat, depicting post-Civil War Reconstruction South and themes of Missing Nation. And goes all the way to You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught from South Pacific. These are themes that were important to him, not just musically, musical theater wise, but also in his own personal life. Back in the early 30s, he founded the Anti-Nazi League in California and was a champion of the League of Nations, primarily because he was attempting to get America involved in World War II earlier, in terms of fighting the Nazis in Europe, and tried to do that from a very early point. In fact, he was… His day was spent, every day, he spent writing editorials and writing his opinions for different magazines that would promote religious, racial, social tolerance. And these themes were very important to him.
Michael Kantor: And just wrap it up, so you’ve got to be taught, just sum it up in a nutshell, speaks to those.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Well, you’ve got to be carefully taught, if you look at the song very carefully, it’s unironically racist in a way. He’s not saying that you shouldn’t be taught, he’s describing you’ve gotta be taught to hate and fear. And that is basically saying that if you’re taught, it wouldn’t happen naturally. It’s like an instruction for racism. And when it’s put that way, it shows how absurd it is. And I think that putting it in that sort of positive way makes it seem really awful. And these are issues that he championed throughout his life.
Michael Kantor: Very briefly speak to, there was real backlash against this.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Uh, there, yes, uh, there was. There was backlash along two different lines. There was a backlash among intolerant people, and there was a back lash among sophisticated musical theaterites who thought it might be too saccharine. And this is where often he was at odds because he was a romantic, idealist type of guy who wanted to insert a message into his show. And a lot of, you know, the Broadway sophisticates were going, You know, that’s really not necessary to be, you know, being, to, uh… Be uh… Lecturing us really we we don’t really need to hear that you’re slowing the showdown uh… But and then of course the people just upset that anybody should tell them how to believe about you know uh… About people who are not like themselves uh…
Michael Kantor: Those kind of arguments came back to him. Was he just simply a man who trusted his own feelings and principles on that kind of thing?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Oscar came out of a theater family. Oscar came of a theater family and the theater was traditionally and historically a place where people who couldn’t otherwise get employed found employment. So he had to be pretty tolerant of black people and Jews who went from panhandling to soft shoe to vaudeville to having their own theaters. This was a world where people couldn’t get a break elsewhere made it big. And If you came into this business with an intolerant attitude, you’d be drummed out of it pretty quickly. It’s probably the one place historically where you’re not going to find a lot of racism or anti-Semitism simply because it’s truly impractical from a business point of view. So that’s how he grew up. That was his social culture. And I think he just extended that. He felt that if he could enjoy all the hoofers he saw as a child, regardless of race or religion. Why shouldn’t the rest of the world learn that they’re just humans like everybody else? He took it, he incorporated it. He internalized it. It wasn’t something that was an add-on.
Michael Kantor: Just again, you could briefly recap some of that thing, like he was always concerned about racism and so on. And then tell us about how the…
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Well, Oscar’s last show was Sound of Music, and it was a very popular show, especially the movie. He collected two Academy Awards for that posthumously. He never lived to see his Academy Awards. But again, he returned to the themes of love and death and danger and dealt with the Nazis. And I’m losing my focus here. Sorry.
Michael Kantor: He’s always been concerned about racial tolerance and the Nazis and so on and his last song.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: His last show, which dealt with racial and religious intolerance, was Sound of Music. And in so doing, he pretty much capped up his career by returning to a theme that was very important to him. That theme being, you have to fight this where it shows its head. And that’s what Sound of music is pretty much about. It’s also interesting that historically, he is a German Jew. Which if you, I don’t know if you’re going to use this, historically, he was a German Jew, which puts him in a very self-contradictory kind of position, which was something that the captain of the Austrian army found himself in, in Sound of Music. He wanted to be loyal to the army, but he found he couldn’t because the positions the army took were just incompatible with the way he was brought up. Oscar’s last song, the last song that he ever wrote, was Edelweiss, and EdelWeiss is a song about rebirth. Here’s a man who’s on his deathbed pretty much, he’s sick, he has terminal cancer, and he’s writing a song about things that always are blooming and always are growing. And it’s a lot like life. Life can end, but life goes on. And flowers bloom and die, but they bloom again. And I think it hits. I think about that song being so devoid of jazz or devoid of complexity, it’s such a very simple lullaby of a song, ending on a very lovely tonic, major tonic chord, that it basically says to me, the song might end, but the song doesn’t end. The life might end but life doesn’t. And I think he was trying to say something there. He was trying say, this show is going to go on without me. It’s okay
Michael Kantor: How many shows did they do?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Dick and Oscar wrote nine shows, about five of which remain golden standards. I think that they are not only good music and good lyrics, but they are good stories. And I think it is the story that allows us to remember these shows for the last 50 years, that they’ll live another 50 years because of these stories.
Michael Kantor: In 1942, when the war started, Oscars won its first award.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Oscar is sitting on his farm. My grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein, is sitting in his farm in 1942. His best days are over as far as the industry is concerned. He is wondering what to do with himself. He doesn’t really have anybody to work with him. Kern is probably having a better time with Bolton and Woodhouse. So he has to make himself useful. So he starts collaborating with the long-dead George to say on Carmen. He’s going to update it, make it an all-black musical, set it in a parachute factory, and call it Carmen Jones. And it’s an attempt on his part to refocus his craft. And his craft really was, his style was of an older school that had seen its heyday and had passed, whereas he might have been considered the king of the 20s. That it was now. Way into the thirties and he was not really seeing any success the the the uh… The movie form that he had gone out to to hollywood to to practice wasn’t his style he was no interested he was he was brought up by people like harbock and stothert and to be taught that there’d be an intermission and a short second act and you had to have a climax a lot of the things people said about his stuff was that it was a it was and be it was stagey, which is true. You don’t see a lot of people who are both theater directors and movie directors, they’re different animals. And he was a theater bird and he was stuck in the film business and when he came back, he was pretty much a loner. So when Oscar and Dick began their collaboration, Oscar made certain that he explained to Dick that he do the lyrics first and that he write the libretto. This was not just fancy on his part, he believed that he had to bring. The importance of the story to the forefront and that without a good story you didn’t have a good show. Like any person who is a real opera lover, you have to make that story make the audience gasp when they come out of that story and and make them feel different about life than when they went in. He took it really seriously. Like a guy who needs to shoot the moon. He’s not interested in just winning a few hands. He has got to go for the whole… He’s a desperate man. He’s got to go for the whole ball of wax. And that’s really why he insisted that they stop making, like, passe entertainment, just, you know, at two hours. But to do something important.
Michael Kantor: He’s a flop, the world passed him by, but.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: But Oscar had something to give still. And the thing that I think he had to give was that the theater experience could be more than just escapist entertainment. And he made certain that his collaboration with Dick Rogers would provide the kind of entertainment that would be memorable and that would leave a person emotionally satisfied, drained, and uplifted. I have often said that the show Showboat is a triumph of content, and the show Oklahoma is a form of triumph. In the case of Showboat, what you had during the late 1920s was a plethora of shows that were swashbuckling crossed swords, crossed letters in the mail, they aren’t who they appear to be type stories, full of daring do and high seas romance, or you had the girl finds that she really loves the lout while she’s looking for the sugar daddy only to find out that the louts is the sugar daddy kind of story. These are what you’d call escapist fare and it was pretty much cluttering up Broadway for the whole decade. I think that for Oscar to be dealing in such heavy topics about a whole cast of characters growing and changing over a 40-year period, some making it, some not making it. It’s a little bit real. It’s very real for people to be deal with something that doesn’t wrap itself up within a two-hour or a two week plot format. And I think that this was something that people found. Breathtaking, a sucker punch conceptually for the New York City audience, and they were stunned on opening night, that’s for certain.
Michael Kantor: It was Kern’s idea, but Oscar wrote the lyrics, the libretto, and directed. Tell us about that, and tell us about Ziegfeld in a little bit.
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: Okay. Well, there is a story about Ziegfeld in the wings of the opening night of the show. Ziegfelde was famous for his Ziegfeld Follies, the glorification of the American girl. Basically, very classy nudity was his stock in trade. And I don’t know how he beat Arthur Hammerstein out of being the producer for this, but for some reason, he got the nod. And he was perhaps the wrong producer for the job, because he was not aware of what kind of a hit he had. He was constantly meddling that this show was going too long, didn’t have enough legs in it, didn’t have enough jokes in it. And he he was scared that he’s going to lose all his money. On opening night, he was watching. And when the curtain dropped on the final act, you could hear a pin drop. It was quiet as mouse. And he took that to mean that people hated the show. And what he didn’t understand was is that they were pretty much catching their breath, that they had never seen anything like it, and that slowly but surely an ovation rose in the auditorium that lasted as a standing ovation for 20 minutes. So at first his panic turned to elation, but he did not recognize what he had on his hands. Until it was validated by the audience.
Michael Kantor: Was Oscar interested in cutesy girls and live entertainment?
Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: No, Oscar was an idealized romance. He was a monogamous man. He was an old-fashioned man. And he was a liberal with a small L. And he was, or is it with a large L? I don’t know. Sorry. Oscar was a Liberal. It’s not that being liberal is dangerous unto itself, but the fact that it’s in his hands made it very dangerous because he was very bright. Very articulate and very public man. If he put these feelings into his shows, they would be seen by a wide range of people. And as a result, when Showboat came out, two things happened. One, the US government briefly revoked his passport for fear that such an articulate liberal would get out on the national stage and start promoting values that would pressure America. And on the other hand, He was barred from visiting certain southern states because the themes of misignations with which he dealt, interracial marriage and dating, were things, were laws that were still on the books in many of these southern states. So he was basically espousing what was then technically and in many cases for them, morally illegal. And so they considered him to be a threat. Not because he felt this way, but because he was persuasive enough to be able to change people’s minds. Rodgers and Hammerstein also was a triumph of content and form. In terms of content, they dealt with love and death, two things that make each other more valuable. Oscar Hammerstein represents the triumph of the content, in that he dealt with real issues, real people. He did not deal with sophisticates. He preferred to deal with people who lived a simple life. Farmers, servicemen, people, or teachers, people that you, people that were not self-conscious, not urban, sophisticated types, but people who, when they broke into song, expressed what they believed. And by expressing what they believe, they ended up expressing what Oscar believed. And what Oscar believe was decent values, treating people as you would have them treat you. You know, not prejudging people, and these, I think, were fundamentally important to him.
