The New Autobiography of Mary Rogers Looks Like Datalounge GOLD!

[Sorry - Rodgers]

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.”

Image Carol Burnett, Mary Rodgers and a mattress. Carol Burnett, Mary Rodgers and a mattress.Credit...Bettmann/Getty Images

Dick and Dorothy are at least implicitly present throughout “Shy,” and Mary’s takes on them are alternately horrific and hilarious (she liked Dick’s earlier work, but “later, with all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies, I sometimes hated what he got up to”). But it’s the showbiz world they all lived in that lifts the book into the pantheon of Broadway narratives.

When I’m preparing to review a book, I highlight particularly strong material and scribble the relevant page numbers on the endpapers. For the first 17 pages of “Shy,” my list has 13 entries — and now, looking back, I see there’s also some pretty delicious stuff on 4, 7, 15 and 16. And even though my pencil was fairly inactive in the chapters about her two marriages (the second one happy, the first disturbingly not), I never bogged down. How could I resist a voice so candid, so sharp? You’re not even 10 pages into the book when she introduces the man who wrote the books for both “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” and directed “La Cage aux Folles” as “Arthur Laurents, the little shit.” (Later in the book, she goes deep: “Talent excuses almost anything but Arthur Laurents.”)

About Hal Prince, with whom she had an early affair: “Hal was born clasping a list of people he wanted to meet.” Leonard Bernstein, with whom she collaborated on his Young People’s Concerts for more than a decade: “It was hard not to pay attention to Lenny, who made sure that was always the case by always being fascinating.” Twenty-one-year-old Barbra Streisand, whom Mary first encounters backstage at a cabaret: “this gawky woman gobbling a peach, her hair still braided up like a challah.” Improbably, Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo, for whom she wrote lyrics when she was just starting out: “a fat guy in a bowl haircut who named himself for a marsupial and looked like a little child molester.” And the 22-year-old Woody Allen, with whom she overlapped at a summer stock theater: He was “already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later,” spending much of the summer on the porch practicing his clarinet or inside (with his first wife, Harlene) “practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.”

Mary has choice things to say about Bing Crosby, Truman Capote, Judy Holliday, Elaine Stritch, George Abbott (everyone who worked in the theater in the 20th century has George Abbott stories, but none quite so chilling as Mary’s). Even Roy Rogers and Dale Evans show up in this book. (She wrote songs for them, as she did for “Lassie” and “Rin Tin Tin” — the shows, she points out, not the dogs.) Similar work for the Bil Baird Marionettes enabled her to learn how to write for “certain wooden humans.”

But arching over the cast of interesting thousands who populated her world and this book, the central figure in her life, apart from her parents, was Sondheim. They met when barely teenagers; Mary was immediately, and permanently, smitten. They remained close for seven decades, relishing and relying on each other to such a degree that the almost-marriage seemed almost logical. The idea, which arose while they were still in their late 20s, was a one-year experiment (“I know what you are saying,” she tells the reader. “Mary, don’t!”). His homosexuality was a given, so although they often slept in the same bed, they never touched each other, both of them “frozen with fear. We just lay there. We didn’t discuss anything; we didn’t do anything.” Eventually, confusion, resentment and reality combined to declare it a mistrial, but it didn’t disrupt an abiding closeness that lasted until Mary’s death. “Let’s say it plainly,” Mary concludes. Sondheim “was the love of my life.”

Chronology is imperfect when a life like Mary’s is rendered by a mind like Mary’s; one of the book’s alternative titles, Green tells us, was “Where Was I?” She jumps back and forth between her many decades, digression dangling from an anecdote, in turn hanging from an aside. Sometimes, you’re left in slightly irritating (if amusing) suspense: About one family member, “I have nothing good to say — and I will say it later.” Would I have preferred a more straightforward narration? Not a chance, for it could have deadened her invigorating candor (which provoked another possible title: “What Do You Really Think?”).

Mary’s greatest theatrical success was “Once Upon a Mattress,” her musicalization (directed by Abbott) of “The Princess and the Pea,” which launched her Broadway career in 1959 (not to mention that of its relatively unknown star, Carol Burnett). The story line certainly fit her own life: The princess, she writes, “has to outwit a vain and icy queen to get what she wants and live happily ever after.” For Mary, the outwitting paid off. More than 50 years after its original run, her “Mattress” royalties still exceeded $100,000 a year. (If that seems impressive, consider this: Even into the 21st century, the Rodgers and Hammerstein families were each collecting $7 million a year.) As Mary used to say to friends as she reached for the check in a restaurant, “When your father writes ‘Oklahoma!’ you can pay for dinner.” Green notes it was a line she used frequently “because it acknowledged the awkwardness of the situation and swiftly walked straight through it.” Pure Mary.

But what is also pure Mary, I became convinced, lies beneath her slashing revelations and dishy anecdotes: an inescapable element of rue, particularly regarding her parents. After one notably acidic snipe at Dorothy, Mary writes, “It was too late to go back — it always is.” And Dick? “It was all about his music; everything loving about him came out in it, and there was no point looking anywhere else. It’s also true I didn’t have any choice — but it was enough.”

Dick and Dorothy are dead, and Mary’s dead as well. Their legacies, though mixed, are intimately entwined. Although I’m still looking for something to like about Dorothy Rodgers, I’ll acknowledge that Richard Rodgers left behind some songs I love. But Mary Rodgers left behind this book, which I love even more.

Richard Rodgers was the ultimate womanizer.

He made Harvey Weinstein look like an altar boy.

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.”

Dick and Dorothy are at least implicitly present throughout “Shy,” and Mary’s takes on them are alternately horrific and hilarious (she liked Dick’s earlier work, but “later, with all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies, I sometimes hated what he got up to”). But it’s the showbiz world they all lived in that lifts the book into the pantheon of Broadway narratives.

When I’m preparing to review a book, I highlight particularly strong material and scribble the relevant page numbers on the endpapers. For the first 17 pages of “Shy,” my list has 13 entries — and now, looking back, I see there’s also some pretty delicious stuff on 4, 7, 15 and 16. And even though my pencil was fairly inactive in the chapters about her two marriages (the second one happy, the first disturbingly not), I never bogged down. How could I resist a voice so candid, so sharp? You’re not even 10 pages into the book when she introduces the man who wrote the books for both “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” and directed “La Cage aux Folles” as “Arthur Laurents, the little shit.” (Later in the book, she goes deep: “Talent excuses almost anything but Arthur Laurents.”)

Why is it repeating?

MARY!

[quote]she liked Dick’s earlier work, but “later, with all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies,

Didn't she know her father didn't write the lyrics?

R10 You know he did write some of the lyrics for TSOM movie and for other shows.

I especially liked the part where she talks about how she convinced him to change the title of the show from The King and Me.

You idiot, OP. You spelled Theatre the American way and the thread isn’t easilycc by searchable. What am asshole.

Mary trashes Sarah Jessica Parker:

[quote]It's a very hard part to cast. You need a real clown with a great voice, someone with a huge personality but immediately likable, and there aren't many performers like that, as we unfortunately found out in the 1996 revival, when Sarah Jessica Parker got one of those four things right [footnote: Parker was immediately likable].

Who didn't Mary trash?

I'm reading it now. She is very funny. And has absolutely no filter.

R15 She has not trashed Sondheim. Indeed, she does the opposite. I wonder if that would be the case if she had written this AFTER he died.

R16, He outlived her by seven years.

We already have a huge and terrific thread on this, which I'm sure you couldn't have found even if you looked (which you didn't) because you don't know how to spell Mary Rodger's name correctly.

You didn't either, sweetie. ^^

The other thread is paywalled.

I'm laughing thinking of Sarah Jessica Parker telling theater people how much she is looking forward to reading Mary Rodger's new book.

Just finished it, and its ultimately a bunch of empty, bitchy calories. She was a very unhappy, semi-talented person who treated her fucked up children like shit, just as she was treated like shit. I'm surprised this book is being so celebrated. She really is awful.

You were expecting Tolstoy?

R22 = SJP

[quote]treated her fucked up children like shit

I was a bit shocked how she would blithely remark how her young children were on Long Island all summer with the nanny while she was searching for cock in the Caribbean and Europe.

She never should have had children. Particularly so many.

It was shocking to me how every other man she met in the 1940s & 1950s was gay.

I always assumed that men would be deeply closeted back then. But, apparently, not in the circles she ran in.

r26

well she worked in the arts

The other thread is reaching its limit, partly because it was hijacked with posts that have nothing to do with with Mary Rodgers. Sadly, that seems appropriate. So much of her life was about other people.

R28 It has also been paywalled.

[quote]It was shocking to me how every other man she met in the 1940s & 1950s was gay.

R26 She grew up around musical theater...

Although she writes about taking responsibility for her many, many, many mistakes, she never really seems to learn anything, and you can tell she died very alone and bitter. I mean if Jesse Green becomes your best pal, you know there's a problem. There's literally no mention of her kids caring for her...

All the hatred (justifiably) aimed at her mother, and then she writes a book with her? WTF was that?

She was always sleeping with gay men. Did that include Hal Prince?

Did Sondheim actually like her?

R33, She ended her affair with Hal Prince partly because he smelled bad.

R35 Wouldn't she have known that before starting an affair with him?

R36, Their affair was resumed after a long lapse in time, which is when his foul odor manifested.

She was fugly. And interesting how she doesn't write how her second husband was sorta gay too...

I read it. She writes that her parents told her they loved her but didn’t like her and she seems to have been a nightmare as a child. Terrorized nannies and maid and tormented her kid sister. She told her children the facts of life and told them what women and men liked to do in bed! Her first husband was a gay man; revealed after they’d been married. She’d been warned not to marry him but no one would tell her why. She dated and had sex with gay men between marriages and liked their company. She wrote that she understood why they were closeted in general because society was brutal but had great working relationships with gay men. She seems to have been a fascinating monster. There’s a few interviews with her on YouTube.

Why do people who have no interest in being a parent keep having children?

I suspect in her case it was to hang on to a man.

[quote]she doesn't write how her second husband was sorta gay too...

How do you know that?

He was an actor who was in a play with Mae West, which seems really gay.

It's funny that Mary calls Mae West "wasp-waisted."

Mae was pretty dumpy. The thin waist was an illusion created by making her stand on boxes and using a dress design to make it look as if she was curvier.

R42...

R43 I know.

Why do people say "The King And I" is bad English? Wouldn't you say, "The king and I went to the ball?"

Btw I just read most of this book (I skimmed some of it, she's a little verbose. So are some of the notes). I did laugh out loud, at times, though I think she tries too hard to put things in a dry, witty way. It's almost overkill. I guess it's just her style, but at times just stating things simply works, too. I did think it was interesting, though. Her father and mother were interesting in their various snobberies. They actually didn't seem bad, in some ways (the big ways, as she puts it - in the small ways, they were mostly awful. I've always heard Richard Rodgers and his partner, Oscar Hammerstein, were very shrewd businessmen - maybe an unusual trait in such artistic people. It comes out in the book.

Close parentheses.)

R16 She does have one filter. She does say she will not reveal the last name of her best lay ever, only that his first name was “Jack.”

Could it be?

very likely it was that Jack.

It could have been Jack Lemmon...or Jack Nicholson...

...Jack Klugman, Jack Palance, Jack Albertson, or Jack Hawkins.

Jack Kennedy?

Kennedy was not supposed to have been a good lay, but it's possible. I think she'd have named Cassidy.

I just read the book. "Jack" is not Jack Cassidy or anyone in entertainment, iirc. There's no index and it's a very dense book so - hard to find it now.

The book is readable. The constant footnotes - some pages have 4 or 5 - are a little annoying (by her and her co-witer). It's full of relationship stuff with the rich and famous, and not so rich and not so famous. It's the kind of book where we're supposed to relate to the fact that her husband thought of himself (as did she) as a failure because he was "only" a vice president of Columbia pictures.

She was talented - apparently. I haven't seen her biggest hit show in years and I never read her big book, Freaky Friday. But a lot of what she fell into was because she was the daughter of Richard Rodgers - even if he didn't particularly open doors for her, personally - and knew a LOT of other successful and famous people who were always calling her up with job offers. Still, she never became anything like a household name. She comes across as both likeable and unlikeable at the same time.

[quote]Just finished it, and its ultimately a bunch of empty, bitchy calories. She was a very unhappy, semi-talented person who treated her fucked up children like shit, just as she was treated like shit.

I just finished it as well and that was my main takeaway. She's frank about her affairs and her constant search for dick into middle age — and then we get sections like "after that show closed, I left the children with the au pair and spent the summer in London." Even the section where her toddler suddenly dies right in front of her has a detached quality.

"Freaky Friday" and its reincarnations are brushed off in a short chapter; it sounds like the only version she liked was the Jamie Lee Curtis one.

I still could read tons more on her gorgon mother. Apparently she and Kitty Carlisle were what would now be termed "frenemies." After Kitty and Moss Hart invited Richard and Dorothy Rodgers over for the weekend, Kitty asked Dorothy if she'd slept well. Her response was DL-worthy:

"Oh, yes, I did manage, but I must tell you the best place to get pillows is Bloomingdale's."

So "Richard Rodgers" isn't a name; it's a noun and a verb!

No, R57. Not really.

"Richard Rodgers" is still a proper noun among the literate.

"Dick Roger" is the verb form.

[quote]She writes that her parents told her they loved her but didn’t like her

Later, she writes that she eventually grew to believe the opposite was true: they loved her, but didn't like her...

I thought it was a fun read. Very self-aware, but fun. I was shocked & thrilled to be mentioned in it.

R46, they were working songwriters and musical theater creators. Artistry, of a sort, was what was required.

ALL of the successful New York show-business people were shrewd business people of show. Read about Irving Berlin some time. Almost frightening.

R59 That isn't the opposite.

True, thanks.

R58, Aren't you just the literal-minded pedant! Did you really think I don't know what a proper noun is? I did a 6th-grade Show-and-Tell on it (I picked the Shah and Empress Farah Diba)!

My play on "Richard Rodgers" was simply to note the man's sexual profligacy, as in "Richard [noun] rogers [verb]."

It was an interesting read, she sounds like she was fun to hang with for an evening, but I didn't get the sense she was all that good of a person. For all her endless mostly non-specific bitching about her mother, she didn't seem any less self-absorbed, just less cold. Meanwhile, she lets her father off the hook for his behavior. She sounds like she had a good old-fashioned Oedipus complex and was competing with mom for dad's attention. I mean, nothing like a lifelong fixation with the very gay Stephen Sondheim . . .

Very privileged and only semi-aware of how many advantages she had as a result--she knew everyone and that meant doors were opened. Mary Rogers from Podunk would never have gotten to the receptionist desk.

Even though she didn't write the lyrics, it makes a weird sense that Once Upon a Mattress was her big success--she really is kind of a version of Winifred--earthy, ordinary looking, over-eager, into nebbishy guys and still a princess with all of a princess' advantages, nonetheless.

And, wow, renaming the character "Mary" in Merrily We Roll Along really looks like a hat tip to her.

I think Sondheim's been very clear that, while the characters didn't specifically represent Mary and Hal and himself, their lives and their friendship in their 20s when they were just starting out were front of mind when he was writing the show. So yeah, maybe a little hat tip. (but all the characters were re-named).

[quote]I was shocked & thrilled to be mentioned in it.

You're a little shit, too!

I already commented on the book, but want to add...it's hard to put my finger on it, but there are just so many anacdotes and quips where you want more. For instance there are a few lines about Leonard Bernstein talking about Sweeny Todd and how it was (I forget the exact words) disgusting or vulgar, something like that, and she says he was jealous. Then she adds, but in his heyday, he was great. Personally I would have liked to hear more about why Bernstein felt that way, maybe he really had an interesting take. But it's just, well, he was jealous. Nothing more complex than that. Maybe true, but not that interesting.

R68, Many found Sweeney Todd’s subject matter “disgusting and vulgar”.

There were walkouts.

R69 I would think so, but she refused to beleive Bernstein's reaction was anything but professional jealousy of her boy, Sondheim, who was having hits when Bernstein was creating flop musicals.

*believe

The Kennedy Center Honors 1978 tribute to Richard Rodgers in its initial class.

On behalf of her father, Mary announced from the stage (at 49::00) as accepting the (co-winining, with Fiorello) 1960 best musical Tony for The Sound of Music. Once Upon a Mattress was also nominated in this category.

The book observes that Marc Blitzstein was murdered by some sailors he was trying to pickup. Yet, contemporaneous accounts attributed his death to a car accident.

Similarly, Larry Blyden's death was said to be the result of yet another auto accident in a foreign country. That account has come into question. Perhaps with good reason.

Mary Rodgers was one of the cuntiest cunts who ever cunted and was only outdone by the supreme cunting of Arthur Laurents.

Mary's much-mentioned (maternal) cousin, Judy Feiner Crichton on IGaS, after accompanying the previous week's guest, a student of a young LBJ, to a reunion with his childhood teacher, now the new president, in the White House.

Many years after her stint on the production staff on Secret, Judy Crichton became the executive producer of PBS's American Experience.

I just listened to this as an audiobook read by Christine Baranski & Jesse Green. I don’t know how well it captured her voice, but it was very entertaining. Green’s comments (footnotes) add a lot to the story. He was her friend and admirer, though it is clear there was a lot about her that wasn’t admirable. She lived an interesting life, though, and knew everyone in theater because of her father and her own work. It would be interesting to know how her children turned out and what they think of her. She admits she wasn’t a very good mother, but the only child says much about is Adam Guettel, whom she is very proud of.

Have any if the kids said she was a terrible parent, or did y'all just project a bunch of shit on her because she wasn't a helicopter parent, worked, and had an identity of her own?

You all really are a bunch of misogynist cunts.

I didn’t know until reading the Afterword that essentially none of the text was written by Mary, but rather by Jesse Green based on his many years of knowing Mary and a series of formal interviews in preparation for the book. According to Green, she died before she had written much of anything that was useable.

I recall being sad that I hadn’t actually been “listening” to her about her take on her life. I had no idea how much of the wit and shit hurling was hers versus Jesse’s. I’ve never felt quite so let down at the end of reading a biography.

I realize that plenty of autobiographies have co-authors or even ghost writers, but the way Green wrote as both Mary’s voice and himself as the footnoter made me think I was reading Mary’s text and Jesse’s footnotes.

I read this as a Kindle book, and maybe it was made clear on the physical book’s jacket, or it was in the voluminous small Kindle pages that precede every book. In retrospect, I became glad that I thought I was “listening” directly to Mary even if I wasn’t!

Fear not, R80. I've been watching a lot of Mary's interviews on YouTube after reading the book, and it seems Green was faithful to the conversations he had with her. A lot of these stories (SJP, Sondheim, etc.) are old chestnuts she brought out frequently with some extras added in. It reads to me like he took a lot from verbatim transcripts.

R81 Thank you! Very glad to hear that!