On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (2 page)

On Sondheim

An Introduction to Sondheim’s Life and Art

The essential fact in understanding Stephen Sondheim is that he is a classically trained composer who chose the theatre over the concert hall and Broadway over the opera house: as if Claude Debussy had written musicals. Further, because of expert verbal skills, Sondheim decided to write his own lyrics: as if Debussy had been as much a wit and poet as a musician.

Born the only child of an upper-middle-class family in New York City in 1930, Sondheim enjoyed the advantage of private schooling, a wide cultural perspective, and a secular worldview, free of the occult confusions that religion invents. The Sondheim marriage broke up when Stephen was twelve, and his mother moved with him to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. The area had been colonized by New Yorkers in search of second homes and thus boasted a sub-population of folk connected to the arts; just a year before, in 1941, in the song “Farming,” Cole Porter poked fun at the likes of Katharine Cornell, Fanny Brice, and Clifford Odets shelling peas and driving tractors. Porter even slipped in an “encoded” line addressed to sophisticates, concerning the failure of George Raft’s cow to produce a calf: “Georgie’s bull is beautiful but he’s gay.” This was the age of the magnificent closet, when the homosexual artist had to observe a cautious etiquette, moving among straights as if one him- or herself and doing what came naturally in secret.

Some of the Bucks County weekenders so enjoyed the rustic life that they virtually lived in the country; Manhattan was their second home. One such was Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist-librettist of smash twenties musicals like
Rose-Marie
,
The Desert Song
,
The New Moon
, and, above all,
Show Boat
, to Jerome Kern’s music and the first of the incontestably great American musicals. By this time, 1942, Hammerstein had recently teamed up with Richard Rodgers to write
Oklahoma!
, the first of their pioneering series instituting story content over diversion as the musical’s first element. An enthusiast of the tennis court and the vast sunny calm of a rural morning, Hammerstein maintained an informal hostel in which the guests included his family, a few wards, and young Steve. Mrs. Sondheim had introduced her son to the Hammersteins because James Hammerstein, Oscar’s younger son (the older, Bill, was away in uniform), seemed a likely companion for Steve. Only a year younger, James would presumably share Steve’s arty interests. After all, James represented the fourth generation of a theatrical dynasty. His father was actually named Oscar Hammerstein II: the grandson of Oscar I, a cigar magnate who obsessively plowed his fortune into producing opera and vaudeville on the grand scale. Oscar II’s father and uncle had gone into show business as well.

As it happened, Steve and James were ill-suited, for the younger boy could not keep up with the precocious Sondheim, twelve years old but an accomplished chess player, an aficionado of esoteric corners of classical music, and in many other ways a bright and confident young man. It was Oscar with whom Sondheim forged a bond, for here was a being on Steve’s own level. Often folksy in his lyrics (one reason why Hammerstein preferred operetta to musical comedy was the former’s emphasis on romance over flash), Hammerstein was in real life a worldly man, given to withering sarcasm and somewhat heedless of his power to hurt. Like Sondheim, he loved games and was extremely competitive. James he found unequal in contest, unwilling to battle in the first place.

But Sondheim was keen. He taught Oscar to play chess, and in three matches the older man had become the practiced boy’s equal. Sondheim told this story to his biographer, Meryle Secrest: he executed a trap to create checkmate in just a few turns, but, as Hammerstein was about to fall into it, the older man looked at Sondheim for a bit and then made a different move, foiling the trap. “You saw what I was setting up,” Sondheim told him. “No,” said Hammerstein. “I heard your heart beating.”

Thus the bond between Steve and Oscar grew intense, as each learned from the other. Most important, Oscar gave Steve the stable relationship of an appreciative “parent.” Steve did not get along with his mother, and while he loved his father and stepmother (and got on well with his two younger half-brothers), Steve was an artist growing up in a conventionally business-minded family atmosphere. Steve’s father sold women’s clothing—but Oscar was a maker of theatre. As the cliché phrase has it, they spoke the same language. Years later, Jamey (as he came to be called) told me, “Oscar Hammerstein was a wonderful father to everyone except his children.”

Besides music and the stage, Sondheim nurtured a love of Hollywood movies, especially the dark and thrilling kind. (Oddly, he had no use for musicals.) Anyone who writes about Sondheim makes a port of call out of a title Steve was especially fond of,
Hangover Square
(1945), because it is replete with references to Sondheim’s later life. For one thing, its protagonist, a classical composer of Edwardian England named George Harvey Bone (played by Laird Cregar), makes his name (like Sondheim) writing the music for popular songs—“All For You [I’ve changed my way of living]” and “So Close To Paradise.”

Bone is caught between two women; the nice one (Faye Marlowe) encourages him to write a piano concerto, but the bad one (Linda Darnell) turns him into her love slave to juice more pop tunes out of him. He even writes her a musical (and here’s another apropos reference) called
Gay Love
. Like Sondheim’s later anti-hero protagonist Sweeney Todd, Bone becomes a serial killer, murdering in a kind of waking coma, always set off by wildly shrill sounds, like the factory whistle that goes off when Todd cuts someone’s throat. Then, too, Bone’s concerto, when we finally hear it (as composed by Bernard Herrmann), sounds—as movie concertos were bound to, in the 1940s—like Rachmaninof, one of Sondheim’s favorite composers.

Sondheim also loves Ravel, who makes an interesting pairing with Rachmaninof. The latter was the last of the Romantics, while Ravel was one of the outstanding Neo-classicists. That is, the former represents rhapsodic melody and emotionalism while the latter stands for more intellectualized composition, tightly structured and controlled, scorning emotion-driven communication. To put it another way, the Romantic gushes with music; the Neo-classicist reins it in. A third way: Mahler versus Stravinsky. A fourth way: Sondheim himself, rich in sheer songmaking yet intent on craft and the challenge of matching music to its subject. In short: a Neo-classical Romantic.

At sixteen, Sondheim enrolled at Williams College, which, with Amherst and Wesleyan, created the “Little Three,” small men’s schools on a par with the big Ivy League universities. Williams supported a lively student theatre scene, and Sondheim acted, most notably in Emlyn Williams’
Night Must Fall
. Sondheim played Dan, an appealing vagrant who ingratiates himself with the village tyrant, an old woman in a wheelchair who is nothing but nags, complaints, self-absorption, and irritation at the slightest suggestion that things won’t go her way. Dan captivates as well the beldam’s frumpy, repressed niece, and he does seem a charming rogue. In fact, he’s another of Sondheim’s favorite types, a psychotic serial killer. Yet it’s a glamor role—MGM had filmed it in 1937, with Robert Montgomery opposite Rosalind Russell as the niece—written full of sneaky subterfuge cut by outbursts of passionate honesty. Once Dan enters, he owns the show. “I been around,” he says. “You’d be surprised.”

Steve must have seen the film at some point (he was only seven on its original release), and we know that he was determined to play the part. It’s tempting to note that Dan is, above all, gifted in his own unique way—and musical as well, constantly singing snatches of popular song. He also murders an irritating mother figure. Still, Dan is above all a fabulously showy role that no young artist could resist.

Elswhere at Williams, Sondheim found a music class taught by Robert Barrow so invigorating that it pushed him toward seeking a career as a composer, as opposed to a movie director (which must have been on his mind as a possibility). Still, the overwhelming influence in Sondheim’s life continued to be Oscar Hammerstein, who, in Steve’s junior year, proposed a course of informal study in the writing of musicals. Practice makes perfect: first, write a musical based on a play you admire. Then a musical based on a play with problems, so you can log experience in resolving them: a dry run for what happens when you go out of town with a musical that isn’t playing well. Then adapt a show from some non-theatrical form—that is, learn how to dramatize from a lyrical point of view. Last, write an original.

Amusingly, Hammerstein was running through the experiments himself, on the professional level; they became the first four Rodgers and Hammerstein titles:

Oklahoma!
(1943), which launched the cycle, was the play with problems, based on Lynn Riggs’
Green Grow the Lilacs
, a Broadway failure in 1931.

Carousel
(1945) was the play you admire, because the adaptation hewed closely to its source, Ferenc Molnár’s
Liliom
, adding in an uplifting final scene.

South Pacific
(1949) was the third adaptation, taken from a non-theatrical form, James Michener’s story series
Tales of the South Pacific
.

And
Allegro
(1947) was the original.

Even then, Sondheim was ambitious: the play he admired was George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s
Beggar on Horseback
and the one with problems was Maxwell Anderson’s
High Tor
—“art” plays rather than the farces and romantic comedies that had provided typical source material for musicals for some thirty years.
High Tor
is a verse play (and a fantasy) and
Beggar on Horseback
is an expressionist comedy, an oxymoron in that expressionism belonged to the visionaries of the serious progressive forms, from Eugene O’Neill to German horror cinema. The eponymous beggar is a composer who, like Laird Cregar in
Hangover Square
, is trapped between the music he yearns to write and the music that “everyone” wants to hear, classical versus popular. And of course this is a very basic dilemma in American culture, where art and commercialism intermingle in a kind of panic. First staged in 1924,
Beggar on Horseback
remained a vital memory for many, though expressionism’s dreamy distortions appeared to lock it into its time. For years, people would approach Kaufman with “You know what play of yours should be revived?” and Kaufman would immediately snap back, “It’s dated.”
^*

After being graduated from Williams, Sondheim received three thousand dollars a year for two years from the Hutchinson Prize in which to pursue his musical studies, and he undertook a private course in composition with Milton Babbitt, one of the most experimental of musicians. Oddly, Babbitt and Sondheim would analyze a song by Jerome Kern as often as a movement of a Beethoven symphony. But then Babbitt, like many other “ivory tower” composers, sought financial security in creating something popular, even, say, a musical for Mary Martin. One of the genre’s two biggest stars (Ethel Merman was the other), Martin was so versatile that almost everyone offered her the top part in his show, first dibs, from
My Fair Lady
to
Funny Girl
. Again, it’s that American dilemma: if you have the skills, shouldn’t you invent something dazzling—a
Porgy and Bess
, for instance? It’s classical, but it’s popular, too.

So: you’re twenty-two, smarter than everybody, and ready to start. You’ve been living rent-free in your father’s New York apartment, but he isn’t offering an allowance and the Hutchinson money is spent. What next?

For Sondheim, it was scriptwriting for television’s
Topper
series, mostly collaborating with George Oppenheimer. A spinoff of Thorne Smith’s two
Topper
novels and the films they engendered, the video adaptation told of starchy banker Cosmo Topper (Leo G. Carroll), his fluttery wife (Lee Patrick), and three ghosts (Robert Sterling; his then wife, Anne Jeffreys; and their vast St. Bernard, Neil). The half-hour episodes were based less on plot than on the interaction between the soigné Sterlings and the befuddled Carroll, with his English accent and clipped mustache. Thus, the show’s writers had only to mix character ingredients as if tossing a salad. It was labor for money rather than for love, and today
Topper
looks quaintly ho-hum next to its coevals, especially the daffy
George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
and
I Love Lucy
. The commercials, however, are bizarre. As so often in the 1950s, the series stars were expected to serve as spokesmen for the sponsor, Camel Cigarettes, staying more or less in character while delivering encomiums:

JEFFREYS
:
(as Sterling lights her up) Uum, this is going to taste
so
good.

STERLING
:
(with his own cigarette) And
this
is going to taste even better.