“You sang very beautifully, but—”
I cut Oscar off. “Don’t say it, I knew the second I did it that you’d get on me for it!” We had a great laugh.
Oscar had a shy quality about him. He was a big man, while Dick Rodgers was shorter, and both had wives named Dorothy. Whenever we were together, they were all incredibly kind to me. I had the chance to spend the weekend at the Rodgers home in Fairfield, Connecticut, right after doing a concert for them in the area. I took the opportunity to ask Dick a question about how he worked with Oscar.
“Do you write to Oscar’s lyrics or does he write them to your music?” I was curious to know.
He walked me through the process. “I’m very disciplined. I get up in the morning and write. I write the music first, then Oscar does the lyrics.” He mentioned that sometimes Oscar would write a dummy melody to his lyrics, but the music, according to Dick’s opinion, was not that memorable. Whatever dynamic they had, it created unquestionably the greatest catalog of theatrical music and some of the most beloved and timeless songs in history.
Unfortunately, my time with Oscar was limited. He passed away in 1960 shortly after the opening of The Sound of Music on Broadway. I continued to work and sing with Dick all the way until the end when his health deteriorated in the late 1970s. I will never forget the time in 1962 when he asked me to come over to his home to sing a song. Some big producer from Hollywood was interested in doing a remake of State Fair and wanted to hear some of the music Dick had written. I sang “I Love a Pig.” Despite all of his great accomplishments, I could see that Dick was nervous about this “audition.” To make matters worse, he threw his back out when he sneezed the wrong way. But the deal was done, and the film got made.
Off the road from Oklahoma! and back in New York, I sublet a lovely apartment on 58th Street from a singer named Genevieve that had a living room with a wonderful view of Central Park. The transition was hard in the beginning. It was a time of loneliness and insomnia. After a couple of months, I brought Babby to live with me. I also started seeing more of Ira. He lived with his parents at the Gorham Hotel, occupying a small apartment. “How do you manage?” I asked him. His family had lived in a lovely home in Brooklyn, but when his brother was killed in the war, things were difficult for his mother, so they moved to the city. His father was one of the biggest press agents on Broadway.
I went and auditioned for West Side Story for Leonard Bernstein. He was lovely. I sang well, and they were pretty serious about me. But there was one problem—I didn’t look very Puerto Rican. Next up, I was called in to audition for the lead in the musical Fanny with a high recommendation from Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was for Josh Logan and composer Harold Rome, who certainly remembered me from Wish You Were Here. It was a dramatic role, playing a young woman whose childhood love goes to sea for five years. Right after his departure, she finds out she is pregnant and is pressured by her mother to marry an older man. It was certainly a big departure from Laurey in Oklahoma! to say the least. I had the chance to play a serious love scene, taking a guy to bed and getting pregnant. Hmm, would I be setting a bad example from a religious standpoint? I ultimately decided to not let that stand in the way.
I felt fairly confident, despite having my slip fall down in the middle of the audition. (Yes, we wore underslips in the 1950s.) I discreetly crouched behind a sofa on the stage to pick it up. I had not been home to Rockport for quite a while and would be leaving town right away, I told them, as I finished the final audition. “We’ll let you know,” they said.
The minute I got to Rockport, there was a telegram waiting for me. It read, “Congratulations, Fanny. Come back.” It was unbelievable. After a hello and goodbye to my family, I returned immediately to New York.
Becoming a leading lady on Broadway for the first time felt a bit like Alice entering Wonderland. Walking through that doorway, I was suddenly working with the best of the best. We started rehearsals in August 1954 and worked out the kinks in Boston and Philadelphia in advance of the premiere that November. The Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza and Austrian-born actor Walter Slezak were my costars. Lehman Engel was the musical conductor. Trude Rittman wrote the dance music. Everybody in the crew was also at the top of their craft.
Fanny was my introduction to the legendary producer David Merrick. The British singer/actor Anthony Newley once said of him, “Hitler didn’t die at the end of World War II. He went into show business.” Phyllis Diller went even further: “If anybody needs a heart transplant, try to get David Merrick’s. It’s never been used.”
Merrick was the biggest producer of them all, and he had a well-deserved reputation for being strong and tough. He possessed such an intense drive for success that he would kill you if you got in his way. I had a healthy respect and admiration for strong people, so he never really intimidated me.
He said to me once in the break in between two shows in one day, “You should go out and be seen. We need publicity.”
I told him getting prepared for the show was my most important priority. I also had to eat something, and he could see that I had a
