Let’s start with a full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Broadway — one of those theater fans who will see five different productions of the same show, who genuflect before cast albums from the ’50s, who inhale theater gossip as if it really mattered. I’m also a sucker for books about Broadway, books as different from one another as Moss Hart’s “Act One,” William Goldman’s “The Season” and Jack Viertel’s “The Secret Life of the American Musical.” But I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s “Shy.” Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.
Written in collaboration with the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, who completed it after Rodgers’s death at 83 in 2014, “Shy” relates the life story of a successful songwriter-scriptwriter-television producer-children’s book writer. And also the mother of six, the wife of two, an occasional adulterer, a credulous participant in an earnest trial marriage to Stephen Sondheim (!) — and the daughter of two of the most vividly (if scarily) rendered parents I’ve ever encountered.
“Daddy” is the first word in the book, and it provokes the first of Green’s many illuminating footnotes, which enrich the pages of “Shy” like butter on a steak. This one grasps Richard Rodgers in four words: “composer, womanizer, alcoholic, genius.” The composer part we all know, and if your tastes run in the direction of “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific,” “Carousel,” et many al., the genius as well. As for the other two elements, the womanizing was unstoppable, racing through chorus girls, Eva Gabor, apparently Diahann Carroll and definitely the original Tuptim in “The King and I” — according to Mary, “the whitest Burmese slave princess ever.” The drinking was equally prodigious. Dick (as he was known, and will be known here to keep the various Rodgerses straight) hid vodka bottles in toilet tanks — a clever ploy for an aging man whose bladder wasn’t likely as robust as it once had been. Lunches were lubricated with a 50-50 concoction of Dubonnet and gin. Evenings heralded a continuous parade of Scotch-and-sodas. A depressive who once spent three months in a psychiatric hospital, he was also remote and inscrutable, with a capacity for cruelty. Mary writes, “He hated having his time wasted with intangible things like emotions.”
Compared with Dorothy Rodgers, though, Dick (whom Mary eventually forgives and understands) could have been one of the Care Bears. But “Mummy” (given Dorothy’s desiccated rigidity, it’s a word that can be read as both a name and a noun) was vastly self-centered and brutally critical. Mary had so much to work with you understand why one chapter is called “I Dismember Mama.” She was a Demerol addict, a melodramatic hypochondriac, a neat freak (and, only somewhat incidentally, the inventor of the Johnny Mop). “Mummy’s idea of a daughter,” Mary writes, “was a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog; Daddy’s, Clara Schumann as a chorus girl.” In 1964 Dorothy published “My Favorite Things,” a high-end homemaker’s guide that told readers, as summarized by Green, “how to decorate their apartments and serve aspic.” Conveniently, he adds, “her marriage was just as cold and gelatinous.”
(CONT.)
