Our world is for the forceful
And not for sentimental folk
But brilliant and resourceful
And paranoiac gentlefolk . . .
The men who rule the air waves
The denizens of din . . .
The girls who dig for gold
And won't give in for tin . . .
Brisk! Lively! Merry and bright! Allegro!
On most Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths, the earnest philosophizing behind these lines would look like a Supreme Court justice's robes on a race-track tout. On Hammerstein, who has the stature for it, it doesn't look bad.
Very Healing Guy. The man his friends call Ock is 6 ft. 1/2 in. of unassuming reticence. He has a shy smile that creeps out from under an almost constant frown. He walks slowly, with gangling dignity, like a freshman playing a Roman emperor. In a business where hysteria is honorable and neuroticism normal, he seems completely untemperamental. Baffled by normalcy as heathen are baffled by saintliness, show people from Sardi's to Ciro's see him in an unearthly glow. Says Razzmatazzman Billy Rose: "What do I think about him? That's like asking me what do I think of the Yankees, Man o' War and strawberry sundaes." Says his old friend, Librettist Otto Harbach: "He is a real gentleman of the theater." Says the wife of one of his collaborators: "He seems to have everlasting arms to lean on in trouble."
Says a Hollywood hack: "Yeah, I know what they mean. A very healing guy." His
teammate Dick Rodgers says: "He is a dreamer--but a very careful dreamer."
Behind the careful dreamer lies a waking life somewhat similar to that of Allegro's Joe Taylor, though Oscar was born in 1895, Joe in 1905. Like Joe, Oscar lost his mother when he was young and grew up close to his father. Like Joe, he married when he was making barely enough money to support a wife, and was divorced from her after he became successful. Like Joe and like millions of Joes throughout the U.S., he is easily dominated by the woman-on-the-pedestal. (Says Oscar: "Men are wrapped up in unrealities, like business and art. They are birds of plumage. Women are realistic. Battle of the sexes? There is no battle. I simply surrender.")
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein got no encouragement at home to go into show business. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein I, was a kind of highbrow P. T. Barnum with a passion for opera. A short, stubby man with a truculent Vandyke and a shining topper, Oscar I roamed the world founding opera houses and losing fortunes in the process of trying to rival the Metropolitan. His sons, William (who managed the famed Victoria which Oscar I built) and Arthur (who became a well-known theatrical producer) were distressed by this operamania. "I wish the hell," Oscar 11 remembers hearing them say, "the old man would stay out of opera."
