Why was Helen Lawson fired from THE SOUND OF MUSIC?

I believe Mary Martin intervened at some point. She'd made a bunch of passes at Helen in their youth, all rebuffed.

She insisted on singing her own version of "My Favorite Things", and let's just say that raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens weren't among them.

She insisted that the opening scene be filmed in a studio, where she would be surrounded by colorful mobiles representing the "sound of music."

She demanded that “I Am 16” be cut - along with the twat singing it

[quote] She insisted on singing her own version of "My Favorite Things", and let's just say that raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens weren't among them.

Yeah, when she rhymed "mended sock" with "uncut cock" it didn't go over well.

[quote] There are conflicting reports as to why, and whether she was playing Maria or the Baroness.

I thought she quit when she found out she was to play Fraulein Schweiger.

Helen was originally cast as the Baroness, but she couldn't play a single scene with Max Detweiler (Richard Haydn) without giggling and muttering "cocksucker" under her breath. There were several complaints from the mothers of the two young boys playing Kurt and Friedrich about inappropriate and suggestive comments. Fans of the film may recall the studio-edited trivia about Charmian Carr's sprained ankle during the filming of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" but now the truth can be told: she kicked our Helen in the cunt bone.

She actually was the original choice for Mother Superior rather than Peggy Wood. They had to bring Peggy in her stead when Helen's "improvisations" of lines to Julie Andrews got out of control.

But just guess which improvised line of Helen's for the part of Mother Superior they worked into the final screenplay anyway.

Helen's interpretation of 16 going on 17 was stagehands in one hour which traumatized the younger children. Especially Gretl.

She demanded that she be Liesl and that the story gets told from her point of view. Rolf becomes a captain in the Nazi party, she becomes his mistress while spying for the allies. She escapes by riding a motorcycle and pops a wheelie over bobbed wire fence after which she meets a hot american soldier in France and they move into a Park Avenue duplex where she holds theatrical salons in 1950s and 60s New York. By 1970 she stops wearing a hat(though she finishes one) and spends the rest of her life on booze and dope having given up any hope of a career on Broadway.

Let's just say that the lonely goatherd wasn't lonely while Helen was on the set.

She didn’t know how to ride a bicycle for that crucial scene of Do-Re-Me.

[quote] Let's just say that the lonely goatherd wasn't lonely while Helen was on the set

Oh my

"Look, it TWIRLED up during the opening scene, okay?!!"

Helen was outraged that a star of her magnitude would be reduced to playing a secondary character as Baroness Schraeder, especially one who loses out in love to a younger filly, so she demanded that her part be expanded. The producers, at first, entertained her idea that the Baroness be rewritten as a Nazi spy, but when she and Julie Andrews rehearsed their big fight scene, Helen, in the throes of method acting madness, took things too far and kicked poor Julie in the cuntbone, while adlibbing "Die, you Jew-loving whore!!!" There were audible gasps, and director Robert Wise immediately had her thrown off the set.

[quote] She didn’t know how to ride a bicycle for that crucial scene of Do-Re-Me.

I heard that she was just drunk and fell off (the wagon).

During the test screening of earlier scenes shot in the graveyard the audience kept shouting out to the Nazis “She’s behind the tombstone! She’s behind the tombstone!” They knew then and there they would need to recast.

There are so many legends about this, it's hard to determine what the truth really was. Clearly, someone was kicked in the cunt bone, foul language was used on-set in front of the children, and Helen refused to say her lines as written. Surprisingly, Richard Rodgers was on location, and had nothing but praise for Helen and her performance. In an interview with an Austrian newspaper he was quoted as saying, "I have no idea how she'll come across on screen, but she certainly comes across in my office."

Those weren't all kids in those trees.

I heard she couldn’t sew.

La Lawson kept insisting that several nude scenes be written into the film so that she could hold on to her sex symbol status as the new group of sex goddesses started crowding her out. She wanted to “show off her hills of music”, let the audience see her “favorite things”, and show the world she still had the WAP of a barely legal 18 who looked liked she was “going on 16”.......

La Lawson was nearly 75 years of age at the time.....

Because the movie wasn't called The Sound of Queefs.

Oddly enough, the real reason was a rare bout of good taste on Helen's part: She was indeed hired to play the Baroness in the film, but she insisted that both of that character's musical numbers from the stage version --"How Can Love Survive?" and "No Way to Stop It"--be reinstated. She did get the chance to pre-record both songs, and those tracks are now collectors' items.

She and Plummer didn't get along.

When they walked into the grand hall of the house, he looked around and said, "Finally, a room bigger than Lawson's twat."

I know Helen can't remember a lyric to save her life.

But really, Helen - it was not OK to sing "Maria shows her asshole in the Abbey."

Or "She's a jawache! She's a pisser! She's a WHORE!"

Because some of her favorite things include Marlboros, Whiskey, Anal, Cocaine, Fisting and Opiates.

Rolf got all huffy cause I grabbed his ass! He didn't mind when I grabbed his twig and berries, though.

Nice one on him. Shame he finished off before I could even get my licks in! Always a risk with the inexperienced ones, dammit.

She asked Robert Wise and his wife if they had ever tried group sex or fisting. “I never go ANYWHERE without my Crisco”, she purred suggestively to Mr. Wise during the audition.

Yes, R25, Helen's penchant for ad-libbing did not endear her to anyone even remotely associated with the picture.

She insisted on saying the line “What is it you can’t face?” as “What is it, you cuntface?” Didn’t exactly endear her to Mare.

The final straw had to be when she lifted her skirt and flashed Liesl.

"Hey there, big eyes. Ever run through a lady's edelweiss before?"

Helen already turned down the part, that Julie played.

Helen was so undependable, so unprofessional.

Booze and dope.

Helen got into a fight with Peggy Wood who played the Mother Abbess. Miss Lawson misunderstood her when she said "Maria. What is it you can't face?" Helen thought she said "Maria, What is it, you cuntface?" Helen stood up and hit her with a roundhouse punch. She was released that day.

This is all very amusing, but I assure you, no one would have had the poor judgment to cast Helen Lawson in a wholesome family film. Certainly not Robert Wise after the disaster with Helen as the cellmate in “I Want to Live!”

It was all much more innocent that you people are making it out to be. In point of fact, Helen was already under contract to make the latest in the wildly profitable "Flying Fucks" series. Efforts were made to rearrange the schedule, but in the end it didn't work out.

R37, Who Gives a Flying Fuck?

Rolf never did get that stain out of his lederhosen.

Helen demanded that her signature song “I’ll Plant My Own Tree”, should be added to the film. Rogers and Hammerstein wouldn’t allow it, though they greatly respected her as a great star.

[quote] Rolf never did get that stain out of his lederhosen.

Is “hosen” what Helen called Rolf’s hose?

After Helen, they offered it to Lucille Ball, but, well, we all know what happened there.

Helen thought Maria didn’t have that hard core, like she had. Maria would never learn to roll with the punches. She never had it rough before. Maria was a church mouse, not a barracuda.

Vienna didn't go for the booze and the dope, so Maria came crawling back to Salzburg.

[quote] Maria was a church mouse, not a barracuda.

Is “barracuda” what Rolf called Helen’s snatch?

She's lying about Rolf. Everyone knows he was feasting on Captain von Trapp's schniedel.

Cellmate? Is that what she told you, R36? The truth is Helen was desperate for a work and no one would touch her after the fiasco of the Helen Lawson Live broadcast. Robert Wise did her a favor and let her work as Susan Hayward’s stand-in because you know the resemblance is rather remarkable. She didn’t last 24 hours. She and Susan never spoke again.

I hated Lawson. I wanted to kick her in the cunt.

[quote]Is “barracuda” what Rolf called Helen’s snatch?

Douching with sauerkraut juice was probably not the best idea.

Many people have mistaken Christopher Plummer's reluctance to talk about this film as being due to its saccharine nature. Not so. It's PTSD after returning to his dressing after a scene and finding a nude, and obviously drunk, Helen in his chair with her feet propped up on his makeup mirror -eyeing her freshly-douched privates. She looked at him in the mirror and said, "I brought you a little snack to help you get the taste of all those sugary words out of your mouth." He has never uttered a word about this, from the moment he was revived. Very classy gentleman.

All these myths.

The truth is she walked on set, saw the kids, and snapped: I don't do remakes and even if I did I'm not replacing Judy fucking Garland twice!

Helen also tried out for the crazy bitch in the asylum in "The Nun's Story," but was just too wild and unhinged.

Wise was perfectly satisfied with her performance, and she behaved beautifully on set. But she stormed off when she found out her songs would be dubbed by Lucille Ball.

I heard she quit when the loungewear she had ordered specially for the nuns turned see through under the studio lights.

Nuns lounge?

Helen only made it as far as the wardrobe screen test for the SoM before she was unceremoniously canned. Notoriously, she made off with the full wardrobe and in fact married husband number five in Maria’s wedding dress.

Helen Lawson? Dyke, y’know.

Is it true she tried to get Richard Haydn fired because she had a "better idea for the whole gag"?

No, no, no, R58! What she actually said was, "They should fire the battered-hole fag."

Nuns do a lot of things that aren't talked about.

Helen wasn't fired. She turned down the role because she won't appear in anything in which the word 'cunt' is used particularly when it is directed at her character.

The funny thing is that she also was cast in the original stage musical, when her career was less *cough* specialized and dependent on Bulgarian insurance coverage. Rodgers owed her because she was the one who suggested he "help" Hart ("that fat cocksucker," was her endearment for Larry) by grabbing his copyrights and estate while he was in a drunken stupor.

It all ended fast, when Lawson insisted that, while she was sewing up the draperies for the kids, Maria make her own "simple smock" out of a clear shower curtain. "Show 'em the goods," she kept shouting.

It also did not go well with the Catholic monsignor hired to counsel the production on "Catholic matters." "We should know Katlick crap from liver paste?" Hammerstein explained. Lawson kept singing "Dicks It Domino" into llustrissimo e Reverendissimo Monsignore's face.

Martin cackled with the news. Martin always cackled.

Helen saw Neeley's screen test for the role of Liesl and knew there'd be trouble.

[quote] Why was Helen Lawson fired from THE SOUND OF MUSIC?

Uncontrollable flatulence.

That was a QUEEF, you dumb bitch!

Her payout clause was triggered when word got back to Fox she was calling it Lawson's Fifty Load Weiner Schnitzel.

Her payout clause wasn't the only thing that got triggered. When she saw the dress she would have to wear when Maria first shows up at the Von Trapp house she kicked costume designer Dorothy Jeakins in the cunt bone.

She offended some members of the European press who overheard her at a press conference on set.

"Finally, I get into a movie that ain't filled to the rafters with fags and darkies," she said. "Instead, it's overstuffed with little brats and all these dykes in nuns' robes! Who's a lady gotta blow to get a decent part?"

Christopher Plummer had a decent part -But he sure as hell wasn't going to give it to Helen!

R65, meet R22.

Interesting legal trivia—a clause in an entertainment contract that provides for escalating penalties for kicking another member of the cast or crew in the balls or cunt bone (as the case may be) is known as a “Lawson Provision.”

Word on the street has it that Tom Cruise has paid more than a few fines for that.

Helen was supposed to play the Shelley Long part in Losin' It but she and Tom got into a fight on set with multiple kicks to balls and cunt bone on both parts. Poor Jackie Earle Haley was out several days with injuries when he tried to break it up and John Stockwell was so traumatized, he left acting for directing.

Hellen and Tom kicking each other in the balls/cunt. It's quite an image! Though I wonder who had the cunt and who had the balls...

What I want to know is why Helen was dropped from "Mame"? A "Mame" with Helen in the lead would've been ten times better than the shit-show we were given. Even Jerry Herman would agree.

Actually, Helen Lawson turned down the part. It was offered to Neely O’Hara, but she was drummed out of Hollywood. She went crawling back to Broadway.

Can one imagine working with someone as....unclean and unstable as Miss Lawson?

I, for one, can not. Perhaps Bette can handle that sort of unfocused chaos.

The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that's ME, baby, remember?

Rodgers started to have enough of her when on the first read-through Lawson demanded that they drop the children and rewrite things so Baron von Trapp was the headmaster of an all-male college. The kids' songs were sung by the hunky students, all of whom were in love with her. She wanted "So Long, Farewell" to show the young men each trying to get Maria to "go upstairs to bed" with them, shooting each one down until she finally heads up the stairs to *uck them all in. "NO FUCKING KIDS!" she wailed.

"CAN'T THEY ALL BE IN COMAS AND MARY CAN BE A NURSE?!?"

I WANNA BE A FUCKING DUCHESS NUN FUCKING THE HOT CAPTAIN AND A NUN CAN'T HAVE KIDS! THAT'S IMMORAL YOU MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTS!!!"

Hammerstein had one of his heart attacks when she yelled at him in the melee that followed that he was lucky to be born considering how tiny his father's cock was. She said she could blow Oscar Sr. and sing scales at the same time.

Somehow she STILL lasted another two weeks. The story was she was "dating" Sam Giancana at the time. Thus the infamous "Phyllis McGuire Nearly Drowns in Freak Accident in Stark Club Toilet" incident later that year.

I don't lend your story much credence, R79, as Oscar Hammerstein was long dead by the time they got around to making the film of The Sound of Music.

R80, I was referring, of course, to the original stage musical. See R62. Oscar didn't have much time left during the prep and opening of the show on Broadway, and many people believed that dealing with Lawson expedited his demise from "his rotten gut" within the year.

But it's good of you to draw attention, again, to the fact that Miss Lawson was fired from "The Sound of Music" productions more than once.

In fact, she was fired seven times from stagings and the film, including the catastrophic 1982 Nagasaki staging in which director Ken Russell made Maria a Buddhist nun and the Baron a samurai warlord who had killed the mothers of his children in a tragic fit of madness.

Lawson's surreal appearance in white geisha makeup in the wedding scene and her frequent anti-Japanese ad libs led to governmental threats to recall the Japanese ambassador from the UK and to an injunction forced by the Rodgers and Hammerstein estates to shut the production down.

Lawson shrugged, having an iron-clad six-month contract at full pay, saying "It's not like it was the first big bomb ever to hit that lousy city. I mean, look at it. No history. All new buildings. Sheesh."

All of this is pure speculation, with bits of hearsay and just plain vicious gossip thrown in. Helen Lawson is one of our finest, most professional actresses, and no director would ever dream of firing her for any reason! She wasn't in the film of The Sound of Music because she simply wasn't interested in the property.

[quote] the catastrophic 1982 Nagasaki staging in which director Ken Russell made Maria a Buddhist nun and the Baron a samurai warlord who had killed the mothers of his children in a tragic fit of madness.

Is that the one where the critic referred to Helen as “Madwoman Buttercunt” at an after party?

R79/81, does your count include her infamous and unexpected walk-on during the 1981 London production that starred Petula Clark? According to the press, she had been entertaining friends in a pub next to the theatre, and accidentally wandered through the stage door in search of the ladies room. Somehow she ended up onstage just before the start "No Way To Stop It." The cast was stopped cold when Helen appeared and started shouting , "Pussy! Pussy!" Most in the audience assumed she was excited to see legendary Bond beauty Honor Blackman, but I always suspected she was referring to John Bennett, who played Max.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

You can hear a wee bit of the copter noise as it comes down near Julie. They've hidden it with music but they couldn't edit it all out in post.

Yeah, I was fired. What of it?

At least I got to Climb Ev'ry Mountain in the cast, if you catch my drift. Ha ha ha ha!

And poor Kurt has been in therapy ever since!

Helen got her revenge selling bootlegged outtakes from the opening scene to Stanley Kubrick 20 years later.

Is there any truth to the rumor that Helen invited Herr Zeller and all of the Nazis back to her hotel room for... schnapps?

It's true, R90, sadly. The scandal wasn't the Nazis and schnapps. It's when she tried to serve her "spongecake" and the Nazis melted, like in the Indiana Jones film.

They weren’t real Nazis, you fool.

And that was a spongecake, r29 you asshole.

Was this before or after in the infamous Grand Marshall of the Rose Bowl parade fiasco?

That Pampas Grass "malfunction"..... epic.

Angela Cartwright is a friend of a friend -and she swears the children filmed the falling-out-of-the-canoe scene with Helen as the Baroness. Kym Karath always swore that Helen filled her pockets with stones -which is why Julie Andrews had to dive in after her.

[quote]She actually was the original choice for Mother Superior rather than Peggy Wood. They had to bring Peggy in her stead when Helen's "improvisations" of lines to Julie Andrews got out of control.

Just tell us what the line was, you cunt face!

Wasn’t she up for the Patrica Neal part in BreaKfast at Tiffany,’s but kept going on that a lady of her beauty and stature would never be hiring gigolos, even ones as attractive as George Peppard?

When it came to the part of the song that went “When you know the notes to sing...” they realized in her drunken haze she did NOT know the notes to sing and she was promptly fired.

She was also up for the role as the elder Rose Dawson in TITANIC. She invited Kate Winslet to her house to “bond” with her; it consisted of making Kate get into the waterbed, forcing her head underneath the blankets and giving her a Dutch Oven.

Nearly a hundred posts and no one has stated the obvious (and true) reason: the bitch can't sing!

Has anyone seen the disastrous screen test Neely O’Hara did after refusing to test for the role she believed to be hers? Her interpretation of Maria as a drugged up Weimar-era chanteuse was ahead of its time.

That’s a filthy fucking lie! I never tested for this garbage kiddie flick, i was shooting my smash hit Love and Let Love. It’s now playing at the Music Hall and I sing some great songs in it. Everyone in town knows I’d never be attached to a Helen Lawson project. I don’t do B movies.

R100, let me plant this tree right down your ugly throat.

Helen watched the first rushes and could see the Variety headline "THE WOUND OF MUSIC" looming.

So she walked through that glass door at the Hotel Pennsylvania, dropped out of the contract, collected the insurance pay-off, had "extensive reparative surgeries," and took a spa summer.

By the next year she was set to appear in CAMELOT and pretty much pulled the same ruse. And the fact that Burton smelled like stale urine expedited the scheme.

Within the first week she gave the cast and crew crabs. It spread across the Fox lot light, well, crabs. The cost to treat the entire studio roster and fumigate the entire facility almost cost as much as the Harmonia Gardens and elevated train for Hello Dolly.

Let's just say that wherever Ms. Lawson goes, everyone finds an abundance of shellfish salad...

Ms. Lawson made sure the nuns took a powder. "Why when you’re young you think you’ll always be young. Then one day you suddenly wake up and you’re over fifty. And the names in the obituary columns are no longer anonymous old people. They’re your contemporaries and friends." None of these penguins were her favorite things.

That's why Julie, or whatever her name was, had to go. Also, not enough milk.

Richard Haydn lobbied Richard Rodgers heavily for the role of Maria, presenting hole whenever they were in the same room. Helen was favored over Haydn because she, at least, was willing to shave off her mustache. But it was all for nothing, as Mrs. Rodgers -after her third case of crabs since pre-production started - put her foot down.

If you watch very closely, the background nuns are really singing “Helen” and not “Maria” in the “How Do You Solve a Problem” song, but it was dubbed out.

They told her she was only supposed to tear the curtains, not chew the scenery.

She was rooting for the Nazis.

Miss Lawson wasn’t fired! She left; it gave her “stature” to walk out on a highly anticipated movie. She didn’t settle for crumbs. She left the film, with dignity.

(Her SOB agent didn’t get his lousy 10%.)

She'll show up at Plummer's funeral with a bottle of Helenesque in her cooze.

Just like she did the day she did the Muppet Show.

[quote]Just like she did the day she did the Muppet Show.

Hey Henson, I got something warm and fuzzy to put your hand up!

She's the one who pushed poor Christopher Plummer.

[quote]Let's just say that the lonely goatherd wasn't lonely while Helen was on the set

Neither were the goats.

As mentioned above, Lawson was released from several productions of Mame. Below is a rare photo from previews of the original production, which a Connecticut newspaper published with a caption by a local wag "No, no, Miss Lawson! Knees together! Remember what happened last time!"

Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope--and chirpy brits with no talent!

Locked the doors and burned down the Abbey with the nuns inside.

Making fun of Miss Andrews was one thing, but that improvised song rhyming "merkin" and "gherkin" wasn't appropriate for the children OR the nuns.

She climbed every mountain

Well, I got rid of the gay in Ge-org! Ha ha ha! Rolf was pissed. And I don't mean literally! Ha ha ha!

If you listen carefully, I said "cunt" just as that bulldyke Mother Superior said "can't." And it made it into the final cunt. I man cut! "What is it, you cunt face?" Ha ha ha!

Good times.

Fix me a drink luv.