Who would have guessed that the memoir of Mary Rodgers, the composer of the Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, the author of the children’s novel Freaky Friday, and the offspring of the co-creator of The Sound of Music, shows its author to be the monarch of the sardonic?
Sure, those who knew her would have an idea. Stephen Sondheim, a pal since adolescence, would not have been surprised in the slightest. But it’s doubtful that mere civilians not enmeshed in the New York theatrical world would have had a clue. When Rodgers achieved theatrical immortality, it was with Once Upon a Mattress, a sugar-sweet confection derived, after all, from The Princess and the Pea. Yet despite the overwhelming mildness of her works, as well as her status as the daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, who, with his lyricist partner Oscar Hammerstein II, preferred pleasant sentiments over caustic thoughts, Mary produced an autobiography that displays, on nearly every page, her sharp-elbowed wit, ruthless assessments of family members and colleagues, and clear-eyed, self-deprecating humor.
She will now be remembered for this singularly astringent memoir. It’s one of the most bracing books of the year.
Mary, who was born in 1931 and died in 2014, undertook the project in collaboration with New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, who wrung the manuscript out of numerous meetings with the composer, starting in 2011 and continuing until the year of her death. “The stories ‘Mary’ tells in this book are the stories she told me,” Green writes, referring to his co-author as a kind of character they both concocted. “They are often in her exact words, albeit cherry-picked from multiple conversations separated by months.” In fact, Green’s only misstep was to include a kind of running commentary on the book in the form of cutesy-pie footnotes that sometimes provide useful, contextualizing information. But more often, they underestimate the reader (“if you’ve read this far, you probably already know that Daddy was Richard Rodgers”), are excessively digressive (do we need biographical sketches of author Truman Capote?), and are amazingly unfunny (a Morris Minor is described as “a British car that looked like the love child of a Volkswagen and Winston Churchill”). Hey Jesse, let’s let Mary do the jokes.
In her telling, Mary was miscast virtually from birth in her role as the daughter of the great composer of Oklahoma! and South Pacific. It was no better fit with his wife, the former Dorothy Feiner. “Mummy’s idea of a daughter was a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog,” Mary writes. “Daddy’s, Clara Schumann as a chorus girl.” At first, Mary’s insistence on her black sheep status within the Rodgers family comes across as leftover adolescent griping, unworthy of a woman of achievement in her 70s and 80s.
We quickly realize, however, that if she was anything like she said she was, it’s entirely possible that Richard and Dorothy didn’t know what to make of her. She admits she was “always doing rotten things,” including setting fire to some curtains in her bedroom when she was in the third grade, and recounts her relations with her kin dispassionately. “They did love me, even if (as I’d learned) they didn’t like me,” Mary writes of her parents. “I guess I could say the same about my feelings for them.”
Much of the book’s power comes from Mary’s trenchant observations of the people she encountered in her rarefied milieu. About her father’s brother Morty, “I have nothing good to say … except that he was a talented obstetrician, if you include sleeping with lots of your patients and thus landing in Mary Astor’s diary as a talent.” And about her father’s famous works, she is admiring of many but withering about some: “Later, with all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies, I sometimes hated what he got up to.” Yet Mary does not spare herself, either. She gamely admits to her struggles with her weight — the mother of six admits to relishing being pregnant more than even writing music because it gave her a pretext to put on weight (“I wish I’d been pregnant at fifteen!”) — and entertainingly recounts her various pretensions and affectations.
These include, as the rebellious member of an atheistic Jewish household, her ill-fated conversion to Catholicism. “I was looking for a loving father — not in Jesus, particularly, but in God,” she writes. “And God, as the Catholics presented him, with all his theatrical accoutrements, was the best showbiz father I could find.” Reciting this largely comic episode, Mary notes her “sanctimonious refusal” of her mother’s filets and lamb chops on Fridays when home from Wellesley College, where she was equally ill at ease: “Some of the girls had never seen a musical; some of them had never seen a Jew.” Although a proud liberal by any measure, Mary appears to have been completely un-woke: Defending her preference to work with male colleagues on shows, she offers no apologies: “The erotic part of songwriting, the way you mate words and music, is for me very heterosexual.” Perhaps, to have lived the life of Mary Rodgers, one needs to have retained a sense of humor.
Mary’s failed first marriage was to Jerry Beaty, who despite fathering the first three of her children was gay, like many of her friends. Her subsequent marriage to Henry Guettel was more successful and resulted in three more children, including composer Alec Guettel. Along with details of these events, we also get the story of her own nascent show-business career, including the lowlight of writing an Easter song for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, about which she says: “‘Easter Is a Loving Day’ was treacly enough to make your teeth ache.”
As she guides us through the contours of her career, her mean streak remains intact. About conductor Leonard Bernstein, with whom she worked as a script editor, she notes, “He wriggled around like a puppy on the podium.” About the first wife of Woody Allen, with whom she worked on a theatrical revue, she observes, “She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids.” And she calls Richard Halliday, the second husband of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s much-loved actress Mary Martin, “one of the gayest people I ever met in my life, which is saying something.” She bemoans the “typical Disney shit” added, against her will, to the movie version of Freaky Friday, “like a car-chase sequence and a sexy-secretary subplot.” She shares with her father a fastidiousness about language, admitting to correcting her daughter Kim’s newlywed husband who, during a speech at their wedding, referred to “Kim and I”: “Out of my mouth flew ‘me!’”
And out of her mouth flew much else. Though not, strangely, any musical or show or book as cutting or incisive as this memoir. It remains a sadness that she toiled on largely trivial, kitschy, benignly satirical works. Once Upon a Mattress and Freaky Friday are fun and all, but they don’t exactly stay with you. Yet in telling of her life and times with such invigorating candor and nastiness, Rodgers came up with her greatest, most lasting achievement.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
