"A Healing Guy"

"When I was very much younger," wrote Oscar Hammerstein II in the introduction to a collection of his lyrics, "I thought that if I ever made all the money I needed out of writing musical comedy, I would then sit back and turn to straight dramatic plays in which I could say whatever I wanted to say and state my reactions to the world I live in." His rhyming verse made him a millionaire many times over, but Hammerstein never stopped writing it. While becoming the most popular lyricist in the history of American musical theater, he learned that he could say all he wanted to in song.

With his collaborator, Richard Rodgers, he set a new standard for the modern musical play, integrating verse with dialogue, music with plot, in a theatrical form that once demanded little more than a loose collection of songs, skits and dances. Hammerstein's lyrics were almost always written first, often completed after weeks of agony walking mile upon mile on the blacktop roads near his Pennsylvania farm, searching for phrases to be wrapped in melody by Rodgers. Whether he was writing about Austrian singers, New England factory workers or a Siamese king, there was always a steady undertone of old-fashioned American positivism in Hammerstein's lyrics. As he frequently admitted: "I just can't write anything without hope in it."

Short & Simple. "When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high," he wrote in Carousel, "and you'll never walk alone." In a hurricane, he could unerringly find the calm center: in 1943, when wartime headlines were black with death on coral beaches, Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, and Hammerstein's words carried across the world the picture of a beautiful morning, "a bright golden haze on the meadow." Just then, many people everywhere were grateful for the reminder that such a thing existed. In a slicker mood, he could be both cute and funny. As the Hammerstein June busts out all over,

All the rams that chase the ewe sheep Are determined there'll be new sheep.

Master of stylized vernacular and the dropped g, he was also a minor poet, attaching long insights to short, simple words:

Who can explain it? Who can tell you

why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never

try.

Like Cole Porter, he could dip into a source play, borrow a line and spin a lyric. In Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, the heroine wonders aloud what it would be like "if I loved you," then pauses to reflect silently. Adapting the play as Carousel, Hammerstein and Rodgers filled the pause with unadorned grace: If I loved you,

Time and again I would try to say

All I'd want you to know . . .

As a musician's collaborator, he was himself alive with music, using dummy tunes of his own invention to coax his words along toward a completed lyric. Hearing some of these mock-up melodies, Richard Rodgers staggered backward in amused horror, but he stood in awe, too, of Oscar Hammerstein's enduring awareness of the music all around him, from the observation in Oklahoma! that "all the sounds of the earth are like music," through The King and I's invitation to the dance--"On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?"--and ultimately to the exultation that "the hills are alive with the sound of music."

"It Fits, It Fits." To younger generations, who hummed and danced through the '40s and '50s in the amiable glow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it sometimes came as a surprise that Hammerstein had an earlier, equally prodigious career in the operettas of the '20s. Son of Variety House Manager William Hammerstein and grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I, the Johnny Appleseed of grand opera who roamed the world founding new Covent Gardens, Manhattan-born Oscar II contributed to varsity shows at Columbia University (class of '17), was barely in his 30s when he had written the lyrics of Rose Marie, The Desert Song, New Moon and Show Boat. Introducing himself to Broadway immortality with such songs as Indian Love Call, he secured his position forever with Stouthearted Men and Ol' Man River.

He had many collaborators, and from them learned his craft. Otto Harbach, with whom Hammerstein worked on The

Desert Song, taught him the basics of writing for the musical stage. Sigmund Romberg, confining his highest praise to the words "It fits, it fits." taught him the virtues of a 16-hour work day.* Jerome Kern, who gave him the tall captain's table on which Hammerstein thereafter wrote standing up, taught him--ordered him, rather--never to use the word Cupid in a lyric. After hearing Kern's next melody for Show Boat (the music came first with Jerome Kern; words were filled in later), Hammerstein fired back lyrics that began:

Cupid knows the way,

He's the naked boy

Who can make you sway . . .

When Kern recovered, he was given an alternative:

Why do I love you? Why do you love me? Why should there be two Happy as we?

It was some alternative.

From his home in Bronxville, N.Y., Jerome Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, L.I.; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires, as Oscar picked out the pure Kern from the blip-blap-bleep of the Bell System, and made preliminary notes for such Showboat masterpieces as:

Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, I got to love one man till I die--Can't help lovin' dat man of mine.

Although Kern and Hammerstein were close friends, Hammerstein's loyal wife

Dorothy could not abide hearing the composer praised at Oscar's expense. When people at parties referred to "Jerome Kern's Ol' Man River," she would snap: "Oscar Hammerstein wrote Ol' Man River.

Jerome Kern wrote Ta-ta dumdum, Ta ta-ta dumdum."

Wind Behind the Rain. Hammerstein was so successful that during a ten-year period in the '30s and early '40s when he lost his touch and failed repeatedly in Hollywood and on Broadway, his income withered to $1,250 a week. Retreating, he bought his Bucks County, Pa. farm, settled down in relative isolation with his wife and five children. Broad way's wise heads decided that he would never return, but he did--with Richard Rodgers, whose partnership with Lorenz Hart was foundering in Hart's increasing mental and physical ills. Hammerstein came professionally alive again with a swelling exuberance that was nowhere more evident than in the title song of the first R. & H. show: Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain And the wavin' wheat: can sure smell

sweet When the wind comes right behind the

rain.

And there was an absolute Tightness in his swift, clear sketches, as of country people who liked to

Sit alone and talk

And watch a hawk

Makin' lazy circles in the sky.

After Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hammer stein piled hit on hit -- Carousel came along in 1945, South Pacific in 1949, The King and I in 1951. There were some flops, most notably 1947's Allegro, wherein the pair dipped disastrously into Freudian psy chology. Yet even in the failures, the critics often blunted their darts, wondering if perhaps Broadway had not come to expect too much.

Eccentric on Broadway. Through the '50s to last year's The Sound of Music, the vein of mellowness in the collabora tors' work began to expand. How much was sentiment and how much sentimental ity was for others to decide, but Oscar Hammerstein was the unashamed source.

"The sophisticates have let us down," he once said in a rare display of contempt. He was in love with his work, and when he heard his songs in the theater, he would often rush to the lobby to weep unreservedly. Once, after watching a revival of Carousel, he cried all night.

A Broadway eccentric because he was shy, lived quietly, behaved calmly, drank sensibly, and generally went to bed by 11 p.m., he wore his genius unobtrusively, controlled himself so well that when an actor sang the same line incorrectly seven nights running during the Boston tryout of Flower Drum Song, Hammerstein showed unusual aggravation by warning him: "I'm not very good-natured about this any more." In his way, he did get mad. His wife remembers with alarm the night he foamed with fury at an uncooperative Venetian blind.

A huge, shambling man well over 6 ft. and 200 Ibs., with a rough-complexioned face and a gentle, nervous smile, Hammerstein was known backstage as "a healing guy." "He seems to have everlasting arms to lean on in trouble," said Mrs. Jerome Kern. And to hundreds of performers like Mary Martin, whose first New York audition was held before him nearly 30 years ago, he was nothing less than a guardian. When word came last week that 65-year-old Oscar Hammerstein II was dead of cancer, Mary Martin needed heavy sedation to help force herself through a performance of The Sound of Music, and as far away as London, theater lights dipped low.

*At home, though, Hammerstein was luxuriously lazy. His family once burst into a spontaneous ovation when he arose from the dinner table to get himself a glass of water.

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