Stage Door Canteen (7 page)

“You’re not going to play a cowboy, Ali Hakim the peddler is an Arab.” Jenny got to her feet and smoothed down the wrinkled front of her suit. She never knew what she was going to be called on to do those afternoons she pinch-hit for director Anne Bennett.

“Persian,” he corrected her. “Who knows if I’m an Arab? The peddler says he’s Persian.”

“All right, Persian, then. Let me fix you some coffee, Marty, it’s the least the canteen can do to express our thanks for bailing us out.” She laughed. “Literally.”

He smiled back. He was heavyset, handsome like his cousin, another Yiddish Art Theater actor, Muni Weisenfreund. Who had gone to Hollywood to become the film star Paul Muni.

They washed their hands at the sink and then discovered someone had made some fresh coffee; all Jenny had to do was pour it into mugs, which they took out into the main room. They sat down at a table in Siberia, far away from a volunteer from the stagehands’ union running a floor polisher over the dance floor.

“Alfred Lunt,” Jenny said, “says the problem is with the original play, Green Grow The Lilacs.”

He looked up at her, sharply. “Problem?”

“Well yes, haven’t you heard? The problem of getting backers. I don’t think it’s any secret that Dick Rodgers and Ockie are giving previews for anyone interested in the show.” She spooned sugar into her coffee. “They did a presentation of the show for a group at a mansion out on Long Island that Lawrence Langner and Terry Helburn arranged. Dick Rodgers played the piano and Ockie read part of the script, and everyone loved it and drank the champagne and ate the caviar, but the response was zero. They didn’t even open their checkbooks.”

He grunted, sympathetically. “Peddling one’s show to every rich Dick and Harry is not easy, believe me. I have done it myself, but I am not a big shot like the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein, who have a long list of Broadway hits to their credit.”

“I think they were a little—disconcerted by their reception. Dick Rodgers took it hard.”

The composer was a baffling individual to many people. Rodgers was often arrogant, sharp-tongued and sarcastic; there were some who found themselves unaccountably wounded after an encounter with him. But Jenny rather liked him. Dick Rodgers, who was rather good-looking, liked pretty women; with them, he was charming, quick-witted and funny. There was no doubt he was brilliant. Those lightning-fast bouts of composing were, as he was careful to explain anyone who would listen, the result of working on tunes in his head for days, even weeks, before he put them down. The quickness with which he ripped out a new song dazzled people. They thought that was all there was to it.

The composer freely admitted he hadn’t struggled the way, for instance, Irving Berlin. Who had had a poverty-stricken childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, homeless, sleeping on the streets, later as an adult living a hardscrabble life hammering out songs for the music business’s cutthroat Tin Pan Alley. Dick Rodgers’ father was a successful doctor, the family had a comfortable apartment in Manhattan and were able to take leisurely seashore holidays when the two Rodgers boys were growing up. Everything had come fairly easily to Dick, including his chosen profession. His parents, great lovers of the theater, got together in the evening at the piano to play and sing popular tunes. When little Dickie, at age four, could pick out melodies all by himself they encouraged him at every step, even supporting him into his late twenties, when he was still living at home, trying to get his start in the world of New York theater. Rodgers was so precocious musically as a child, being able to play virtually any tune by ear, that he put off learning music for years. Even now he acknowledged that as an adult he was not much more than an adequate pianist.

Jenny had been around him long enough in the past few weeks to know that for some, Dick Rodgers’ wicked sense of humor was his saving grace. She’d heard him tell the story himself—he was a great storyteller, entertaining any group around him during the long waits at rehearsals—about one of his pet peeves, the popular beliefs about “inspiration.” That is, that anyone involved in the arts must be unbalanced, since creative work and, as he put it, logical behavior, are somehow considered mutually exclusive. There was a woman at a dinner party one evening who kept pressing him about his working habits. The more Rodgers explained that he was a family man, had a regular schedule and liked to work in the morning after a good, restful night’s sleep, and that a couple of drinks made it impossible for him to work at all, the more skeptical she became. And the more she annoyed him. The woman didn’t know that Rodgers irritated was a force to be reckoned with. He finally had enough, and burst out, “Look, I’ve been lying to you. I never go to work before two in the morning, I have to be blind drunk before I get any kind of idea, and on top of the piano before I compose I have to place a small, naked little girl.” To Rodgers’ glee, the woman abruptly stopped talking to him.

“Tthere’s nothing wrong with the original play,” the Yiddish theater actor was saying. “Oh sure, it had a short run, I saw it myself in thirty-one and it didn’t bowl me over then, frankly. But it was nice, it was full of American Western talk that was like poetry, if you know what I mean. I understand the author, Lynn Riggs, lived in the Oklahoma Indian Territory at the turn of the century, and this is what he wanted to feature. The play had little folk songs here and there, enough to give it flavor but not hardly make it into a musical. When Dick approached Oscar Hammerstein about it last year, Ockie already knew about Green Grow The Lilacs and liked it. It was, as they say in the newspapers, an instant meeting of minds. I am indebted to Dick for remembering me and offering me the part of the peddler. A part which,” he said, breaking into a grin, “gives me the opportunity to make romantic overtures to a deliciously beautiful woman like yourself, Miss Rose.”

She laughed. “You’re ahead of me, I haven’t seen a word yet of what Ockie Hammerstein is doing except for Ado’s first song, which I think he’s going to call ‘I Cain’t Say No.’ That’s between Ado Annie and Laurey. At that point in the plot Ali Hakim’s not yet on the scene.”

She knew Marty Levin was right; it was impossible not to be aware that Hammerstein and Rodgers felt they were exploring totally new territory in American theater with their new musical. Currently they were working out of an office in Rockefeller Center getting songs and plot together. But even as the show built slowly around pages of newly-written material, everything else was still uncertain. The producers were being reminded by people they approached for financing that out of the past sixteen Guild productions only four had been successful. And a cowboy musical with a ballet in the middle was probably not the way to break the Guild’s string of bad luck. Speculation about Dick Rodgers working with Oscar Hammerstein, who’d also recently had a run of Broadway failures, was mostly negative. Dick Rodgers, it was being said, couldn’t work with a librettist who wrote the words first, and then expected him to compose a tune for them. The opposite of the way he had worked so successfully with Lorenz Hart. News that Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted to sign up Agnes de Mille, who’d had only one real success, her ballet Rodeo, to do the show’s choreography only made the picture gloomier. Rouben Mamoulian, picked to direct, was essentially a Hollywood film director; the last time he’d been on Broadway was as director for the unfortunate Gershwin show, Porgy And Bess.

Marty Levin put on his jacket and straightened his tie. As soon as they were cast for the Rodgers and Hammerstein show they’d had lunch several times, bypassing their agents, to keep up with what was happening with their roles as man-crazy Ado Annie and Ali Hakim, the lecherous peddler. It was going to be a close relationship; they were the second leads, and their parts involved a lot of flirtatious byplay.

Lynn Rigg’s original play was about Curly, the handsome young cowboy ‘stuck on’ beautiful Laurey, who owned a ranch with her Aunt Eller in Oklahoma Indian territory in the late eighteen hundreds. In the story, which Rodgers and Hammerstein were following closely in their musical adaptation, the ranch is run by their sinister foreman, Jud, who has eyes for Laurey, who is afraid of him. Laurey, trying to make Curly jealous, unwisely accepts an invitation by Jud to go to the box social. Laurey also has a friend, Ado Annie, a not very attractive, lightminded country girl who chases boys. Ado Annie sets her sights on Ali Hakim, an itinerant peddler.

Some of the changes that had taken place the past few weeks had to do with the characters of Ado Annie and Ali Hakim, although the composer and playwright had already come to the conclusion when they hired Jenny that Ado Annie needed to be changed from a shy fat girl to someone more appealing. In line with this, the villain also had his name changed from Jeter to a more acceptable Jud. And a new character, Will, as Ado Annie’s frustrated but likable cowboy boyfriend, had been introduced, somewhat altering the peddler Ali Hakim’s role. In addition, the controversy about the opening of the first act was still red hot. And being gossiped about all over Broadway.

Everyone knew that, in the long history of American musicals, one thing was written in stone—the first act opening. At the moment the curtain went up there had to be a lively ensemble number of principals and chorus singing and dancing, the traditional “ice-breaker” that also covered up the noise of late-arriving ticket holders getting to their seats. With a show like the one Rodgers and Hammerstein were working on, certainly the chorus would open with a rousing barn dance. Or even a boisterous hay ride.

By contrast, in 1931 the curtain had risen on Lynn Riggs’ play with only one character onstage, Aunt Eller, sitting and churning butter on the front porch of her ranch house, a slow, atmospheric beginning to get the audience accustomed to the frontier setting of Oklahoma, setting the stage for later action. However, a stage empty except for only one person as the opening of a musical, even a ‘musical play’ as it was now being called, was a revolutionary, even risky, idea. After weeks of discussing it from every angle, Rodgers and Hammerstein decided they wanted to keep that opening in the musical version, even if it broke all the rules. Shortly afterward Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics for a song that began with Aunt Eller on stage and alone and Curly’s voice offstage singing “Oh, what a beautiful morning-”

It had taken methodical, meticulous Ockie Hammerstein a week of stewing and vacillating before he decided to keep the “Oh” in the first line of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” It had taken Richard Rodgers, when Hammerstein gave the finished lyrics to him, just fifteen minutes to write the music.

“It is going to be good, very successful working with you, Miss Rose,” the Jewish actor was saying, “I feel it in my heart of hearts. And I have a very sensitive heart of hearts—ask anybody. Ask my wife!”

Jenny smiled. But he was right. Actors had a feeling working with each other, that they were either going to click, or they were not. The bantering comedy between Ali Hakim and Ado Annie, with the peddler being calculating and predatory, and Annie being just as aggressive in her desire to get married, had to be just right. There had to be some spark of sexual attraction. As Jenny connected with the roguish look in the Yiddish Theater actor’s eye she saw it was there.

“I, too, have a very sensitive heart of hearts,” she assured him. “Ask my husband.” They broke out laughing. “We’re on stage alone a lot in the first scene,” she reminded him. “It’s a lot to carry by ourselves.”

They hadn’t yet seen Ockie Hammerstein’s dialogue or read their lines together, but she already liked Marty Levin’s delivery. It was solid, as was his timing. She sensed that he was perhaps revising his opinion of her; that he might have thought her distant, or reserved, and was now finding that she could respond with a comic flair. She certainly hoped so. It would help dispel some of the uneasiness she felt about Ado Annie herself.

She saw he was looking over her shoulder, out into the main part of the room. “Who is that?” he said sharply. “What is that girl doing here?”

“Who?” Jenny craned to look.

The stagehand had turned off the floor polisher and was now standing at the edge of the dance floor talking to Elise Ginsberg. It was too early for their sometime interpreter to be in her Stage Door Canteen striped apron. She wore a black cloth coat with brown fur collar that hugged her slender figure, and a black beret over brown hair worn straight, very European gamine. Jenny found herself thinking, for the first time, that she was very attractive.

“That’s one of our volunteer junior hostesses,” she said, “her name is Elise Ginsberg. She speaks several languages, does some translating when we need her. I understand she’s a refugee from somewhere in eastern Europe, but I’m not exactly—”

Martin Levin interrupted her. “I know who she is. I know her father, David Ginsberg. All of the Jewish community knows them. Tell me, she hasn’t tried to show you anything, has she? If so, don’t pay any attention, it is all foolish stuff, believe me.”

She stared at him. He was suddenly suppressing some odd excitement. “Show me what?”

The actor half-turned in his seat, staring at the couple standing at the edge of dance floor. “What? What?” he growled. “What is she doing here? You say she is a volunteer?” He looked distracted. “Forgive me, as to your question, I don’t know what—photos, documents, maybe.”

Abruptly he lunged to his feet, almost knocking over his chair. “Take my advice, don’t look at them, whatever they are. Do me a favor, say you’re not interested. She’s a nice girl but she is deluded. Also her father.” He grabbed his overcoat and shrugged into it. “Forgive me, but I must leave. It’s very late, I just noticed, my apologies. No, no, don’t get up, I know my way out of here.”