Something Wonderful
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For my parents, who taught me these songs
And for Dee Dee, Kate, and Stephen, who make my heart sing them
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Prologue
ALL THEY CARED ABOUT WAS THE SHOW
At the stroke of 8:00 p.m. on the rainy Sunday evening of March 31,
1957, in a converted vaudeville house on Upper Broadway in Manhattan,
timpani rolled, herald trumpets blared a fanfare, and soon a chorus sang
out, “The prince is giving a ball!” The crowded old theater at the corne
of West 81st Street was the CBS Television Network’s smallest colo
studio, No. 72, but the program beaming live from its transmitters was
eing
oadcast over the largest network ever assembled—245 local
stations from coast to coast, including twenty-nine in Canada. The
network had bigger, better studios in Hollywood, but this one had been
chosen for its proximity to New York’s theater scene. For the real hosts
of the evening were no mere princes, but the kings of Broadway
themselves: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the reigning
creators and impresarios of the modern musical theater, and two of the
most influential producers of mass popular entertainment in Eisenhower-
era America.
This evening’s production was Cinderella, a ninety-minute original
musical play created especially for television, and it found Rodgers and
Hammerstein at the very height of their powers. With a budget of
$385,000, a live orchestra of thirty-three pieces, and an all-star cast,
Cinderella preempted The Ed Sullivan Show and General Electric
Theater, two of the most popular programs of the day. Sponsored by
Pepsi-Cola and the Shulton Company, makers of Old Spice toiletries, the
special
oadcast was ballyhooed in full-page newspaper advertisements
across the country and promoted in more than a hundred announcements
over CBS stations alone. Shulton had offered a portable television set,
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two clock radios, and ten recordings for those station managers who did
the most to promote the show. Letters were sent to the principals of
public schools, urging them to encourage their students to watch the
program, and Kenyon & Eckhardt, Pepsi’s advertising agency, sponsored
prizes for a letter-writing contest in which people were asked to
nominate “the nicest person I know” or to suggest “my wish for my
town.” Five million four-page color Cinderella comic books were printed
for insertion into cartons of Pepsi, and a long-playing album of the
show’s score would be on sale from Columbia Records first thing
Monday morning.
By now, this level of interest, attention, and dominance was par fo
the course for Rodgers and Hammerstein. After all, this was the team
that had revolutionized the American musical theater, integrating song,
story, and dance as never before with their blockbuster Oklahoma! in
1943, and then gone on to create the beloved and enduring hits Carousel,
South Pacific, and The King and I—a new show every other year fo
fourteen years and counting. Their songs, a bursting catalogue written fo
specific characters and dramatic situations in individual plays, had
nevertheless produced a powerhouse lineup of popular hits, from “People
Will Say We’re in Love,” to “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” to “Getting to
Know You,” that had become part of the soundtrack, the background
music, the very vernacular of America. The titles themselves—“There Is
Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “I Whistle a
Happy Tune”—evoked the infectious, ebullient, can-do optimism of the
era.
What is more, Rodgers and Hammerstein were also universally
egarded by even their envious peers and competitors as perhaps the best
(and richest) pair of businessmen in show business—with their own
music publishing house, sole ownership of their dramatic properties, and
a casting and producing organization that held open auditions every
Thursday morning to spot new talent and fill out long-running and
touring productions of their shows. They had pioneered the practice of
ecording original cast albums of Broadway musicals and were the first
to exploit lucrative merchandising tie-ins for their shows, with themed
pajamas, dolls, and tropical fashions from South Pacific. Just three years
earlier, in 1954, the General Foods Corporation had chosen to cele
ate
its twenty-fifth anniversary with an all-star tribute to Rodgers and
Hammerstein, a program ca
ied on all four extant television networks.
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Now the boys were aiming even higher,
inging Cinderella to CBS
in an effort to top NBC’s highly successful live productions of a musical
version of Peter Pan, sta
ing Mary Martin, in 1955 and 1956. Thei
package deal with the network called for them to bear the “above the
oard” costs of the show—that is, talent, costumes, scenery, and so on—
while the network would pay for cameras, lights, sound, and technical
equipment. Rodgers and Hammerstein would own the finished show
outright, with an option for a single re
oadcast by CBS. And they had
scored a casting coup: Julie Andrews, then the hottest star on Broadway,
moonlighting from her role as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, to play
Cinderella.
Rodgers and Hammerstein had first met Andrews two years earlier,
when she auditioned for a role in what turned out to be their biggest
commercial and critical flop, Pipe Dream, a musical set among the
affish characters of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Rodgers had
sarcastically pronounced her singing “absolutely adequate,” and asked if
she was up for other parts. She had replied that Frederick Loewe and
Alan Jay Lerner had approached her about a musical version of George
Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which they would in fact transform into My
Fair Lady. So now a happy reunion was possible, and Andrews managed
to squeeze rehearsals for Cinderella into her days and afternoons off. The
creative team rounded out the cast with a roster of some of Broadway’s
most reliable names: Howard Lindsay, the co-author and co-star of Life
with Father (to this day the longest-running nonmusical play in
Broadway history) and his wife, Dorothy Stickney, as the king and
queen; Edie Adams, fresh from her triumph as Daisy Mae in Li’l Abner,
as the fairy godmother; the comediennes Kaye Ballard and Alice
Ghostley as the stepsisters; Ilka Chase as the stepmother; and an
unknown newcomer named Jon Cypher as the prince. (The production
floor manager was also just getting his start in show business, but he
would go on to big things: Joseph Papp, founder of the New York
Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater.)
Hammerstein, who wrote the li
etto, had kept the Cinderella story
simple and sweet: no modern touches, no anachronistic interpolations, no
wised-up twentieth-century idioms. But the logistical demands of the
production were daunting. Studio 72, a former Keith-Albee-Orpheum
vaudeville house and later a movie theater, was a cramped space of just
forty-two hundred square feet whose orchestra seats had been removed
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and filled in with concrete to make a level playing surface with the stage.
Into this shoe box would have to be fit at least seven sets (of necessity,
vertical ones) in tones of lavender and chartreuse, bulky color cameras,
dressing areas for men and women, and a walled-off echo chamber for an
orchestra that included violins, various woodwinds, horns, and a harp. “I
just thought it was going to be the greatest train wreck in the history of
show business,” Adams would recall.
To guard against that possibility, a rigorous rehearsal schedule was
laid out, including two full-scale dress run-throughs that the producers
efe
ed to as the New Haven and Boston out-of-town tryouts that were
then standard practice for Broadway-bound musicals. At one rehearsal
Rodgers himself, always a stickler for having his music performed
exactly as written, inte
upted the director, a television veteran named
Ralph Nelson. “Yes, Mr. Rodgers, what is it?” Nelson asked. “That boy
in the second row in the back, you’re singing an E-flat instead of an E-
natural,” Rodgers replied.
The special effects were crude by modern standards—a shot of a
urning sparkler superimposed over a shot of the fairy godmother to
herald her a
ival; a comparable effect for the pumpkin-turned-ca
iage;
and a system to administer a small shock to the four white mice who
were about ready to be transformed into horses but had a tendency to
grow somnolent in their cage under the hot studio lights. And because of
the technical limitations of the time, viewers on the West Coast would
not see the full-color production at all, only a kinescope—a black-and-
white film version shot off a television monitor, which is the record of
the evening that survives today.
The final run-through ended at 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of the
oadcast, and a few minutes later, Ralph Nelson assembled the cast for a
pep talk. “I love television,” he told them. “The trouble is, it’s the closing
night. I want it to be your best performance.… I’m wo
ied about people
eing nervous.… It’s there in the control room also.… I want this
performance for myself.… Do exactly what I’m expecting you to do.… I
love you all.… If I said anything more, I’d cry.”
Nelson needn’t have wo
ied. There were a few glitches, yes. At one
point, Cypher, who would go on to fame as Chief of Police Fletche
Daniels in Hill Street Blues, sang over some lines that were supposed to
e Dorothy Stickney’s. Critical reception would prove to be somewhat
mixed, with Jack Gould of the New York Times complaining that “the
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warmth of ageless make-believe sometimes was submerged in the
efficiency of the modern touch.” But the audience? The audience was
stupendous. More people watched Cinderella together than had eve
collectively watched any event in the history of the planet to that point.
At least 107 million people saw part of the program, in a country whose
population at the time was roughly 172 million. Even today, only the
Super Bowl draws an audience close to comparable. The viewers on that
single Sunday evening would have filled a typical Broadway theate
seven nights a week—for 165 years.
“I walked outside the theater Sunday night … and