Mary Rodgers

Interviewer: Okay, here’s one of my favorite people in the whole series. What do you remember about Larry Hart?

Mary Rodgers: Larry Hart was so short that I thought he was younger than my father, although he was older by about seven years. Because as a kid, you just assume that the shorter person is the younger person. He was absolutely adorable. He loved kids. He had a black chow called Kiki. No, it was a red chow with a black tongue. I’d never seen a dog with a dark tongue before. Every time he came to the house, he brought presents, which was very exciting, but we would have loved him anyway. He once brought us all watches, which is kind of a big deal for little kids. He had a, he obviously smoked cigars all over, not obviously, but he smoked cigarras all over the place and drove my mother crazy because it got into the curtains and everywhere, but he just kept on doing it. As a result, he had a permanent sort of cataral condition going on in his throat. He was always clearing his throat, And when something made him laugh, he would clear his throat, I will not try to do the sound for you, and rub his hands together with glee like that. And my sister, when she was about three or four began imitating him, which horrified my parents. But Larry loved it. He absolutely thought it was hilarious.

Interviewer: Was it funny? I mean, did you find it funny.

Mary Rodgers: I thought he was, yes, I thought that he was funny. I mean, he looked funny and he was friendly. And it occurred to me many years later that we did call him Larry. Now, everybody else was Uncle Somebody or Mr. Mrs. Somebody. He was just not anybody, even children, took seriously enough to call anything but Larry. He was Larry. And I guess he was fun. I don’t remember his telling any jokes to us or anything, but he was just adorable. We loved him.

Interviewer: What was the first Broadway show you saw of your father?

Mary Rodgers: First show I ever saw was Jumbo, which was in the Hippodrome, which is no longer here, as we all know. I think, aside from the fact that I was four years old and was not deemed suitable for theater experiences until that time, it was a particularly ideal thing to take me to because it was the circus. It had Jimmy Durante. It was the first time I ever got a joke, as far as I can remember, or at least certainly the first I ever I forgot a theater joke. Jimmy Duranty, I still remember, was stealing an elephant. And a cop came up and said, where are you going with that elephant? And he said, what elephant? Well, that was my dear humor. I was crazy about that joke. I also remember Little Girl Blue. I remember over and over again the absolute Divine Waltz. I loved the entire thing. I was mad about it. I don’t remember anything about the story. Because I never did. I mean, I think I was barely catching on by the time Pal Joey came along. I wasn’t listening to stories ever. I was just listening to the tunes.

Interviewer: We’re asking everybody if you can remember when you first heard, our show is Broadway the American Musical. When you first hear the word Broadway, when Broadway first occurred to you way back when, what did it mean to you then? What did you think of when you heard Broadway?

Mary Rodgers: I think I must have heard the word Broadway so early that it didn’t mean anything. And furthermore, I can hardly find it even now because I have no sense of direction. And the minute you get to about 44th Street and those two streets cross over, I’m completely lost. So I don’t think it meant anything for years.

Interviewer: And when you hear the word Broadway today, what do you think of?

Mary Rodgers: Today, Broadway has such a different connotation than it even had five years ago, because of 42nd Street and what’s happening there. And so it, to me, is a demarcation line between the old Broadway. The new Broadway is the huge extravaganza, sometimes very lovely things, like the Lion King. It’s pretty exclusionary in that the smaller works and straight plays have, are not really what you would think of as Broadway anymore. I think maybe the public in general all around the country thinks of Broadway as one great big thing and certainly it’s now lit up and looking wonderful the way it used to. But I don’t think it actually represents the same thing that it used too.

Interviewer: When you think of adjectives to describe the Broadway musical, which ones spring to mind?

Mary Rodgers: Adjectives to describe the Broadway musical.

Interviewer: As an art form.

Mary Rodgers: Well, it’s one of our major contributions, American contributions to culture all around the world, to be complimentary about it. At this point, I think you would also have to call it lavish, too lavish. It’s prohibitive for an awful lot of producers and writers. It’s simply daunting now because people, I think, think in terms of how to write small things because they know that nobody’s going to be able to afford to do the big things. Also, it’s become institutional now, or that’s not corporate is the word, I guess, I’m really looking for.

Interviewer: Let’s go way back to the house that your father grew up in. Give me a sense of, you know, I know his grandparents were there and a great-uncle Sam. It sort of had an old country flavor to it, didn’t it?

Mary Rodgers: My father grew up, first of all, in what was evidently the most dysfunctional household in the entire world. My grandfather, my father’s father, never talked to, I think it was his father-in-law, something to do with investments. It was very unpleasant there. My grandmother, whom I adored, my fathers mother, Mamie, which is what my grandchildren call me, was a little tiny woman who was afraid of her own shadow. And she would never go to the corner without her mother. She brought up my father and my Uncle Morty the obstetrician to eat lamb chops, steak and chicken, and that was it. And it wasn’t until he married my mother that he began to catch on to things like tripe and snails and maybe fish. I mean, something really unusual like that. It was a very gloomy place. I think the house was probably charming itself. Who isn’t. Nice little brownstone in Mount Morris Park, which is now pretty much Harlem. And the house itself, I’ve seen pictures of it, and it’s falling down. I had a moment of insanity thinking that our office should actually buy all those houses and put the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization offices up there and start a whole new theater trend up there because there’s a lot of stuff going on in Harlem. Good stuff.

Interviewer: And then Ted said, we’re happy here. It seems that so much of the musical theater is created by immigrants and their descendants, and specifically Jewish immigrants. How do you think that is?

Mary Rodgers: It’s funny, there are very few non-Jewish theater writers. For one thing, although I am not by any stretch of imagination, either a sociologist or any kind of expert, I wonder if that form of expression, musical, isn’t something that Jews carried around the globe with them for the century simply because they were for many years not allowed. Be painters, so that was an outlet that wasn’t available to them. I don’t know what. I think they had talent. I think there are certain inborn talents. God knows they were inbred a lot of the time, or not dangerously so, but they hung out together out of protection. So if you had some talented musical genes, it was likely to be something that was carried along. And they did whatever they knew how to do and could do. So when Irving Berlin was a kid, that’s what he knew how to do. There’s always Cole Porter, but as my father pointed out, Cole Porter’s, some of his most successful songs were written in the minor. They would move from the minor to the major. The minor is a typical mournful Jewish sound.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you. Your father, as you’ve mentioned in a number of interviews, had a great number of fears. Tell me about those.

Mary Rodgers: My father was afraid of an incredible number of things, one of which I’ve inherited, which is the fear of being a passenger in a car. I’m not afraid of driving, but I hate sitting in the driver’s, in the passenger seat. My father, was the worst passenger in the world. He was afraid cars. He was a afraid of planes. He was the afraid of heights. He was of afraid of tunnels. I think he was probably afraid of cancer until he finally got it. And then it was, well, now it’s here, all right, get that over with. He was a terrific patient. Once he got cancer, even the drastic one where they had to operate on his whole jawbone, it was as though he was very happy in the hospital for those 10 days because he was being taken care of. He was deeply neurotic man, but so what else is new? Name me any genius who wasn’t deeply neurotic. The writing the geniuses produce is an experience that alleviates their neurotic symptoms and their miserableness.

Interviewer: Questions coming up. Tell me about your parents relationship. How is your mother sounding bored and in some ways a mentor for your father?

Mary Rodgers: I don’t think my mother was a mentor. She was more of an acolyte, I think. She ran the place. I don’t mean his life. She didn’t run that. But she made life very comfortable for him, which is what he wanted. Comfortable and gracious and workable. That put a tremendous burden on her, in fact, as a parent, because she was the cop. And Daddy was never the cop, because like most fathers, he was protected from that by the cop. She gave great parties, which was important. She was always the first person to hear something that he’d written. She was very tactful about it. She never, to my knowledge, said, I don’t like that. But he could tell, because she would say, oh darling, that’s lovely. Actually, I think I prefer… That this other one that I just heard to play that for me again. And that was as obvious as saying this one stinks. But anyway, it was a very workable symbiotic relationship, I think, and I think they did love each other very much.

Interviewer: Why don’t you think your father liked, you mentioned the parties, why didn’t your father like being alone?

Mary Rodgers: Why didn’t my father like being alone? Hmm. You know, I never thought about his not liking to be alone before, but it’s interesting. He obviously didn’t because even on weekends in the country, my mother had to plan within an inch of everybody’s life. I mean, people for dinner and people for lunch and people for the next dinner. And it was, I don’t know why he didn’t like being alone. I’m sure he didn’t mind being alone when he was writing. Nobody ever does. Because then you’re complete. You’re a complete prison. You don’t need anything.

Interviewer: Your father was Jewish, but he wasn’t religious. What did he believe in?

Mary Rodgers: Oh, I have a perfect quote for you about my father on the subject of being religious. When I was 12, I said to him, daddy, do you believe in God? And he said, no, I don’t. And I said, good, because I don�t think I do either. Why? And he says, well, he said I believe in people. For instance, if you have a really sick kid, or if I have really sick kids, I do not pray. I get the best doctor in New York. So, actually, my mother, I don’t think… She wanted to be religious and she wanted to believe in God, whether or not she really did, I don’t know. But I went through a very interesting phase of my life when I was about 19 and I became a Catholic. I was baptized and confirmed and was an active Catholic for two years and it drove my parents crazy, which is probably one of the reasons I did it, but that’s beside the point. It drove them into joining Temple Emanuel. I think it shamed them. I never even, we had a Christmas tree. I never went to a Seder until I was 14 years old in somebody else’s house and I came home

Interviewer: I understand, I understand your father never really listened to music. How can that be?

Mary Rodgers: I think Daddy must have listened to music a great deal when he was younger. For some reason, and I have my own theory about why he didn’t do it a lot when he was older, you can tell that he listened to the music. He not only studied at Juilliard and studied period, but you hear so much Brahms and Puccini and Tchaikovsky and all kinds of people in what he writes and that of rich, dramatic, romantic sound. There’s there’s no way he couldn’t have listened to music at some point but except for very rare exceptions when when he would play something he particularly liked for me on the you know play the recordings i have a feeling that it was very emotional for him and now i’m only able to say that judging by the way i It’s so close to that thing I don’t believe in, God. Gorgeous music. I have a feeling that he was very protective about that. And that’s just a wild guess. I’ve never heard anybody say it. But I know it’s true of me. It’s very upsetting sometimes to me to listen to really gorgeous music. Lousy music or boring music or ballet music that I call diddly squat music doesn’t affect me at all. I just don’t want it on. We were both of us, my sister and I, brought up never to listen to music unless we were listening to music. There was none of this keep the radio on and listen to the top ten and hit parade and do your homework anyway. We were not allowed to do that. So we’re actually both of incapable of doing anything but listening to music when we’re doing that, which doesn’t really answer the question about why daddy didn’t do that, but on the other hand, he also never went to the piano. To play just for fun. And he never went to the piano to write just for fine. He didn’t go near the piano unless he had a project or unless he was at a party of his or somewhere else’s and somebody asked him to play. It was sort of a watertight compartment there.

Interviewer: From what I’ve read of what you’ve said and so on, he had difficulty finding ways to have fun. He was deeply unhappy most of the time.

Mary Rodgers: I think he was unhappy unless he was writing. That was what he loved to do. But that goes back to the theory that I also, I’m full of theories, that. People who are, are, have emotional problems and are lucky enough to be creative. Alleviate that pain by being creative. And if you’re not doing that, nothing else is any fun. I mean, he read, but he was more likely to read books if somebody gave a book to him and said this might make a good musical. He enjoyed going to art museums with my mother, kind of. I think he didn’t know how to say no, I’d rather not, thank you. But he didn’t like traveling. He wanted to write, and that’s why I think He continued to write long. Beyond the point when he actually should have. He was beginning to repeat himself. He wasn’t able to communicate as well with the people he worked with. I don’t think he ever worked successfully, except with himself in no strings once Oscar died. The average person says, well, why doesn’t he stop? He’s got plenty of money. Why doesn’t stop? Because that’s the only way he was alive. He would ask me about projects and I would say, sure, go ahead. Even when I didn’t think they were particularly good ideas because I knew that that was the only thing that was any fun for him.

Interviewer: In that same vein, what did theater mean to him? What joy did he get from it?

Mary Rodgers: My father adored theater, he loved everything about it, from auditions. The Greasy Spoon restaurants to the camaraderie which existed then and I think less so now among the people involved. He loved the pretty girls. He loved going out of town. I think he loved the adrenaline producing experience of having to ruthlessly cut something and then dangerously add something else. It was just fun and I don’t blame him. It’s the best kind of fun in the world. He used to say to me when I was little, you don’t know how lucky I am to get up every morning. To do something I love doing. Do you know how many people get up in the morning, go work in a factory and hate what their lives are? He never, never forgot how lucky he was to have that life.

Interviewer: Speaking of something he hated, tell me about your relationship to Hollywood.

Mary Rodgers: He loathed Hollywood because it was insulting to him. He and Larry were beginning to establish themselves quite nicely, thank you, at the age of 27, 28, which is sort of when he moved to Hollywood, I guess. And out there, I’ve worked in Hollywood. A lot of people have, and it’s crummy. First of all, you’re a hired hand. You don’t get no respect. People chuck your stuff in and out. Socially, it’s a company town. It still is. I think he was bored, constantly humiliated by the way he was treated. It’s not the same thing. It isn’t now.

Interviewer: When Steve Sondheim was 20, he said to you, I admire your father’s stuff so much that I talk to him. Tell me that story.

Mary Rodgers: Steve was a great fan of my father’s music and being Steve wanted to learn as much as he could about what daddy’s composing methods and motives were and asked me if I could set up a meeting. I mean he’d met daddy many times because he lived next door to the Hammerstein’s in Bucks County but I said sure and daddy was delighted to do it and an hour later After this meeting, Steve reappeared wherever we were going for dinner or something. And I said, well, how was it? He said, it was terrible. I didn’t learn anything. Well, he didn’t learned anything because my father never knew why he did anything. He could only probably justify it after having done it. Being, I mean, he was enough of a theoretician and trained enough to be able to analyze why it seemed to work later. But he, unlike Steve, who has a different approach to composing, had no idea why he did some Enchanted Evening. You may see a stranger up instead of down. And when you hear that, you think, oh, that’s not what I thought I was going to hear. And right after that, you think that that’s exactly what I wanted to hear, and that’s just instinct. That’s what you call talent. And you can’t analyze why you decided to pick that note. Or do that extraordinarily peculiar harmony that works.

Interviewer: With a lyric in hand, supposedly your father could just compose a song in minutes, but it’s not that easy, is it?

Mary Rodgers: Composing was always easy for him and came very quickly. But when people say, oh, he wrote Ballyhai in the length of time it took him to, you know, sit down and play it, it’s fallacious in that he and Aki had spent days discussing that scene. They knew Bloody Mary was going to sing it or whoever, you know it was originally for. They knew probably what kind of what rhythm it would be, what the sort of misterioso quality of it would be Oscar would work on it for weeks. And by the time it came, look how much he was presented with already. He had everything but the tune there. He had the rhythm, although sometimes he did surprise Aki by making something into a 4-4 instead of a waltz or the other way around. But he had all that stuff handed to him, All the emotional. Musical material was right there on a piece of paper and If he had to go out to dinner By the time Aki phoned in the lyric or mailed in the Lyric or whatever He wouldn’t say to my mother he wouldn’t dare Excuse me. I have to write a tune so forget dinner He went out to Dinner, but it was bubbling around in his head He probably knew exactly what he was about to do the next morning He never got up in the middle of the night and ran around playing the piano He would have awakened us and annoyed my mother and all. He didn’t have to. Just got up every morning, and by that time, it had been percolating in his head, asleep and awake. So he gets to the piano, and everybody says, what a miracle. Well, that’s why it’s not quite what it sounds like.

Interviewer: How much, your father, in terms of smoking and drinking, and drinking obviously, you know, it was a different world. We don’t drink the way we drank then. There was much more liquor around. But I’m curious about your perceptions of those habits of his as they reflect his personality.

Mary Rodgers: Well, my father, to begin with, I don’t know if you ever knew him, but he was obviously Mr. Oral Gratification. He loved food, he was always fighting the battle of what to eat and what not to eat, which my mother guarded very carefully. He also smoked three packs a day of Lucky’s. In fact, my earliest recollection, or one of them, was in California when I was about two. And I’d say, where are you going? Because he was in his business suit leaving. I think they actually wore business suits out there then. And I’d say, where are you going? And he’d say where do you think I’m going? And I would say to the studio and he’d said that’s right. And then he’d pat his jacket pockets to make sure he had all three packs of Lucky Strikes in there. He eventually stopped when I was about 15. He stopped and he never smoked again but unfortunately it was a little too late. The cancer was steaming away in there by that time. Drinking, yes, everybody drank. He had a drinking problem. I don’t know that he always did, but it’s interesting when you read the early letters that he wrote my mother when she was still in New York at one point and he was in Hollywood before she joined him out there. There was a lot of reference to drinking. I drank a lot, I didn’t drink a lot. Everybody else drank a lot. It became a problem, but I think it was not, it was just part and parcel of a bigger problem, which was that he was depressed.

Interviewer: Yeah, in the conversation you had with Amy Ash, you mentioned at one point, this is something I actually did, a different one with my folks, but that’s not for film. You handed him a yellow pill, and you said it changed his mood entirely. Tell me about that story.

Mary Rodgers: In the 60s, you are probably too young to be aware of this, if you were even around in the 60’s, but in the 60, you could get amphetamines of a reasonable kind. I’m not talking about heavy duty speed or what they call black beauties and things like that, which I never tried and don’t know anything about. But you could call your drug store and say, could I please have another bottle of Dapper Sal. Dapper sal was a fabulous combination of dexamyl and I think maybe Miltown and a little phenyl bar, whatever it was. It was really heaven. And I used to hand them out like popcorn to anybody when you could get them, it wasn’t a problem. I gave one to Lenny once, Bernstein, when I was working for him. He thought they were great. He used to ask me if I had one of those. So one day before lunch in the country, I said to Daddy, would you, you ought to try one of these. I mean, there was no sense of shame involved then. And of course, curiously enough, what they’ve discovered now is that if antidepressants don’t work, mild doses of amphetamines are prescribed. Method of coping with depression and all the concomitant ills that go along with it. So I don’t know why he said yes, but he did. And his entire personality changed during lunch. Suddenly we had Mr. Hyde. I was always a little afraid of him. He was, or do I mean Dr. Jekyll, whichever, I mean the good one. He was absolutely adorable and cheerful and happy. And I wasn’t afraid of him, which I often was. And after lunch, he said, hey, you want to come and hear something I’ve just done? He was a whole other person. So I said to my mother, did you notice what he was like? And she said, yeah, I did. And I said, I gave him one of my pills. She said, boy, I mean, I could see her thinking, this could change my life as well as his life. His doctor said, don’t be ridiculous. What an atrocious idea. It’s very bad for his blood pressure. I’ve often thought, oh, God, if he had had that kind of help, which wasn’t really available. I mean, shortly after that, they discontinued the easy availability of those things. And everything was in triplicate. And you began to feel like a criminal if you managed to acquire any of it. And it was a long time before things like imipramine and the tricyclic antidepressants. Followed by the Prozacs came in, it would have changed his life. And I don’t think it would’ve affected his productivity or his creativity at all. I don’t believe that you have to be miserable to write. As I’ve said before, I think it’s just the opposite. I think if you know how to write, you can stop being miserable while you’re writing.

Interviewer: Seeing the melody, how would he compose that way?

Mary Rodgers: My father never sang the melody, he played the accompaniment and whistled the melody which gave him virtually 11 fingers because instead of using various fingers to play the melody all the other delightful little curlicues and Lucky Strike extras were in his hands and he could whistle the tune and then he would prop the lyric up on the desk when he was demonstrating. The song to somebody else like my mother or my sister and me or whoever. So with him whistling and him playing and us reading the lyric, you knew what the song was. I don’t remember his ever singing. But he used to get my sister, who was a much better pianist and sight reader than I was, sometimes to play the melody, but it scared her to death because of course as she made a mistake he was furious.

Interviewer: I just remembered, I don’t want to forget about, you mentioned hockey, tell me, you know, about the nature of their collaboration and how you referred to Oscar Hamilton.

Mary Rodgers: Oscar was, I guess, called Oscar by most people, but his wife Dorothy called him Aki, and gradually, I think we all picked it up and called him aki, then I have to explain who aki is half the time. They had a very close collaborative marriage, which is not to say that they were especially close as people, that happens. For instance, I have no idea. How close John Kander and Fred Ebb are in terms of their social life. Probably not. I mean, they probably lead, they get along extremely well, but they probably live completely different lives. The Hammerstein’s and the Rogers were together when they were out of town on weekends. My mother usually was allowed to come to Boston or New Haven for weekends, but the rest of the time, daddy liked being on his own. They were both decorators, both wives, both called Dorothy. They had a good time antique hunting, and they had that to do together. They were together whenever they were in London or whatever, but they were not socially very close. And I don’t think Daddy and Aki ever knew each other very well. I don’t know how accessible Aki was, but Daddy was a pretty complicated piece of work. And he had, as far as I can make out, only one really good friend in the latter part of his life, Jerry White, who worked in the office and was a killer thug and an adorable man all at the same time. I loved him. He was a real Damon Runyon character and a procurer of everything my father should never have had or wasn’t supposed to have. And he ran Williamson in London. And had an enormous room on the Savoy overlooking the Thames, which was heaven. I think Jerry White was the only person he ever really opened up to in the latter years. My mother must have known a lot more about him than anybody else did, but I think he was a mystery to her some of the time too.

Interviewer: Tell me the story about being in grade school with Mary Ellen Berland and the rivalry between your family.

Mary Rodgers: I went to a school where every famous person who cared about the educating of a girl’s mind sent their kid if she was qualified to get in. So we were hanging out with all kinds of interesting types including the Berlin girls, all three of them at one point I think. Mary Ellen was four or five years ahead of me. And Linda was just behind me, and Elizabeth, the youngest, was quite a lot behind me. But I came home one day, because I’d heard about Irving Berlin when I was fairly young. And I said, who’s more famous, daddy or Irving Berlin? And my mother said, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Irving Berlin is. Then Oklahoma opened and it was 1943 and our school being sure like all the other schools in America that the place was going to be bombed any minute used to hold air raid drills in the corridors and the bell would go off and we would all sit down against the wall in the corridor for 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour or whatever until they decided that the fake danger was over with. And right after Oklahoma opened, everybody, Knew the score. All the kids knew it because obviously their parents had gone out to buy the sheet music or they’d seen the show. And the entire air raid drill consisted of everybody singing Oklahoma. So I went running home to my mother and I said, well, Irving Berlin’s probably not more famous than Daddy anymore. I was very pleased with myself.

Interviewer: Let’s start with the Rodgers and Hart shows. Just give me a sense of the general, you know, the books weren’t the way the books were later. What was your favorite one of those shows?

Mary Rodgers: I wonder what my favorite show was. I’m not sure I had one because I never paid any attention to the books and I often don’t know what songs were in what show because I was, you know, Pal Joey was what, 1939 or 40 and I was nine. So, I would just sit patiently and wait for the books to be, you know the book stuff to be over with. I remember Vivian Siegel once. Picking up a feather at the end of Act One saying, what did he do, marry an angel? So obviously we know what play that was. But I never really got the books. I just loved the songs. And Daddy always took me to the first orchestra reading, which was in those days in the theater, not in a studio. So I would sit in about the second row and that was heaven because you didn’t even have to listen to the words then. I wasn’t interested in the lyrics particularly. I really just liked them tunes. But… They were fun. I thought I wanted to be a chorus girl. So when I was taken backstage, I was really more interested in meeting, I’d pick one chorus girl that looked good and think I’ll be like that. Curious that I never thought I want to be star or anything. I clearly knew ahead of time that I was no actress or singer. But we’d go backstage and curtsy and meet everybody. That led to this thing that did not endear me to my father once when I was about nine and we left the stage door and there was a whole bunch of people waiting to get autographs and they said, oh, Mr. Rogers, could we please have your autograph? And I said, don’t bother, he has terrible handwriting, he’ll never be able to read it anyway, I can’t even read it. And he gave me such a look. I mean, I realized he did not like being put down by nine-year-olds, even his daughter.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about, in terms of Oklahoma, you said at one point you heard scales coming from the living room. What was going on?

Mary Rodgers: We had moved to Connecticut in 1940, in 1940 I guess it was, no 41, which was just about when Daddy was beginning to work on Oklahoma with Aki and I think what happened was that he realized that his piano skills were getting rusty and not that he wasn’t a good enough musician to be able to hear stuff in his head. I think he wanted to be able to demonstrate what he wrote. I think knew he was evolving into a different kind of writer at that point. He must have realized that the person, this was a different marriage than the one he had with Larry. So he went back and started piano lessons with this guy called Herman Wasserman. Fascinating thing is that in reading the Irving Berlin biography, I found out that Irving Berlin subsequently studied with Irving Wasserman, which was not Irving. Herman Wasserman, Herman Wassermann. But he, Daddy, was practicing every day, and I thought he was out of his mind. Who would voluntarily get on the piano and practice? He began to play some pretty good stuff. But I’ve always thought that something as lovely as Lonely Room in Oklahoma, which just thrilled me then and thrills me now because of the intricate, rich, expansive, daring. Kind of sound compared to what he used to write. I don’t think any of that would have been possible without waking up some more brain cells, which is clearly what he was doing when he went back to study.

Interviewer: What did Agnes DeMille bring to a call?

Mary Rodgers: Agnes DeMille brought two things, I think. I think she brought her own obvious talents as a choreographer, but she, for all her very complicated own life, was extremely realistic about everybody else’s life, including about sex. And she was the one who said dream ballet. Well That’s not a dream ballet, she said, reading whatever it was. She said, P, that’s not what people dream. People dream frightening things. They dream things that have to do with sex and love and bizarre things. And she brought along with what people think of now as those sort of overdone little charming gestures, she brought a kind of realism that had not been seen in the theater.

Interviewer: Um. Supposedly, there were free matinees of Oklahoma, which were attended by soldiers. What did it mean for soldiers to be seen in that show?

Mary Rodgers: Soldiers in 1943, 44 were obviously either on leave from something horrible or about to go off to something horrible. And something we’ve all forgotten about Oklahoma was, and by the way, we’re reminded of in the current production in London, Trevor Nunn’s one, which is absolutely beautiful. There’s something deeper about Oklahoma than just a frivolous, good-hearted story about a guy taking a girl to a box lunch and a sort of a nuisance hired hand who gets polished off in the end of the second act. There was something about the country, the idea that this was new territory. You feel this very strongly in Trevor Nunn’s production. I don’t think Daddy and Oscar probably ever talked. To each other about the fact that this was a form of patriotism that they were experiencing, a version of what Irving Berlin felt when he was writing God Bless America. But it’s there. It’s very much there. And I think it made those poor guys standing in the back of the theater or sitting in the seats in the theater realize that they, they were fighting for something that had been I’ve been in the works for a long time, and… By the 1940s, it was well worth protecting.

Interviewer: Tell me about, let’s jump to carousel. Again, Theater Guild, what did Roger and Hammerstein say when they were presented with this difficult challenge? How did they feel about the show?

Mary Rodgers: I was never, unfortunately, party to the conversations that Daddy and Oscar had. I was party to anything unless it was the opening night party and I didn’t get to those until I was about 15. But I think the idea was brought to them by the Theater Guild. I don’t think they questioned for a moment the advisability of doing something about a guy who was pretty rough on his wife and who committed suicide. They, what they were looking for was a cracking good story and I think they had gotten enough confidence from Oklahoma which was so ground breaking. They, if they didn’t know that they were ground breakers, certainly the newspapers and the audiences told them that. It gave them the confidence to say this is a great story. People don’t usually do stories like this in the musical theater but let’s do it. That’s what they always went for was good stories. And it was a hell of a story. They obviously felt more comfortable moving it to Maine. Neither one of them was familiar enough with Hungary or the original setting. But I don’t think they questioned what it was about or why they should do it or not do it. It just spoke to them.

Interviewer: How did your father feel about carousel?

Mary Rodgers: I think Carousel was his favorite show. It was always my favorite show, and then I got a little more familiar with The King and I, and thought, that’s one hell of a book. It’s a wonderful score, but it’s an incredibly subtle and terrific book. Although I love the book of Carousels. But then this recent Oklahoma, I thought, that’s pretty nifty. I think there are five major Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. I have five children. It’s sort of the same thing. You’ll love the one that you just produced, and you’ll love that one that’s around you right then, or hate it, as the case may be, depending on the… And they all have their separate, different virtues.

Interviewer: In terms of Carousel, it seems as though in Agnes DeMille’s work, there was a sense of the importance of the war and in New England, men leaving women. Can you fill me in on how she might have taken her experiences and invested it in that show?

Mary Rodgers: Well, Agnes, people were always leaving Agnes. Her father left her. Her husband, Walter Prude, was off, I don’t know where, in the army. She never felt like a very attractive young woman. And there is a degree of pathos in anything Agnes does that has to do with saying goodbye. And that the sailor dances, when those little girls were saying goodbye to their husbands or boyfriends or whatever who were going off, often to die in the sea. It’s all very well to have. This was a real nice land bank. But people were dying by the dozens in rough seas out there doing their job. She was very empathetic. About that, and I think it shows up in everything she does. The Bloomer Girl Ballet, for instance, is another war subject, and she felt those things very acutely.

Interviewer: What did they bring to the end of the piece, in terms of, and why?

Mary Rodgers: The carousel adaptation that Daddy and Aki did of the original or the London production.

Interviewer: Original.

Mary Rodgers: I don’t know. I know that whatever it was, they were very nervous that Molnar was not going to like it, and he loved it. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know the original Lilliam well enough to know what was actually changed but obviously it ended on a note of tremendous hope and that’s what reduced me to tears every time I went. It’s just unbearably touching that end and I suppose because you have the advantage of If you’re writing a musical, you know… If you’re that payer, how to make that pay off.

Interviewer: King and I, what do you think? No, no, no. I mean, we’re always looking, as I said to Jillian, more for emotional reaction to material than the specific. So.

Mary Rodgers: When you see the face I just made, you’ll laugh.

Interviewer: What drew them to the story of the King and I? Why do you think they were interested in that?

Mary Rodgers: The King and I, I think, was brought to them. Quite often things are brought to them or were brought to them and they responded, I don’t know why that is. It’s interesting that, and it’s also true of Steve Sondheim. I think quite often people bring things to him. He’s not sitting around saying, God, I’m dying to do this and I’m dying to that. I think they always recognized a good story. I think daddy had no idea. Well, Gertie Lawrence was not going to sing, or he might have thought twice about that, just as we might have though twice about Michael Hayden, who’s a brilliant actor, but whose voice wasn’t trained enough in this recent London carousel and Lincoln Center carousal to sustain itself for eight performances a week. Gerti couldn’t sustain herself through one performance of Hello Young Lovers. But she had such tremendous charm. And of course it was interesting because it was her show. When Yul Brynner became famous, it suddenly became The King’s Show. And the problem was how are you going to find a new king as subsequent productions happened. I think it’s getting back to a balanced state at this point because we’ve had some pretty good women lately.

Interviewer: Well, when do you think that sort of romance in the story was realized? Wasn’t that something that the original actors brought to the show up in Boston or?

Mary Rodgers: The evolution of the love for it, I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it wasn’t written in that dialog from the beginning. Because if you look at that book, those two guys, the king and Mrs. Anna, are playing with each other all the time. And it’s the hostility that goes on between them is, is cultural. But you sense that underneath there. They’re tying with each other. It’s like our dog and our cat. It is a love-hate relationship. And that’s what makes the end of the first act so perfect, when they’re doing their whose head is higher than who, and then he gives her her raise. I think the fact that they were secretly very attracted to each other and fond of each other must have been written in from the very beginning.

Interviewer: South Pacific. I mean, all these shows, as you point out, there’s cross-cultural things going on. In terms of South Pacific, was there any backlash against the story with this sort of serious intercultural, interracial theme?

Mary Rodgers: South Pacific produced quite a lot of backlash, particularly over the song, You’ve Gotta Be Taught, which a lot of people in the South felt was, because that was the mood of the day, a radical communist, just unacceptable. And then there were people up north who considered Oscar’s work in that instance, preachy. And they didn’t want to be told that. It was something he felt very strongly about saying. He was not looking for a show to say that in, obviously. But if you’re looking for bunch of cracking good stories and you pick Tales of the South Pacific and then you select which stories belong in the show South Pacific, you’d be pretty dumb not to pick that one. And that’s what comes out, that lyric came out of that story. Oscar had plenty of opportunity, because he was a very public-spirited guy who got involved in causes all the time. He had plenty opportunity to publicly state what he felt about bigotry. So he didn’t need to use the theater for that. And I don’t think they ever wanted to use a theater for them. They used the theater their own selfish purposes, which was to write great stuff.

Interviewer: Thank you. What was your reaction to South Pacific?

Mary Rodgers: I thought South Pacific was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Was an older guy with a French accent in a place that was nowhere near New York. I mean, what’s more fun? I thought the war was wonderful because I wasn’t in it, and I was about, I was furious that I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t even old enough to be one of those entertainers at the USL canteens. I wanted to be there. I had, I saw 30 seconds over Tokyo about. 15 or 20 times. I had fantasies of being involved in the war as a girl, of course. I wasn’t trying to be a soldier. I used to walk our dog down to Grand Central Station and just sit there and watch soldiers and sailors saying hello and goodbye to their girlfriends. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Obviously, I hadn’t seen Saving Private Ryan. I had absolutely no idea what this war was all about. It just seemed very glamorous to me. So, South Pacific. Was to me just the heart squeezer of all time.