He is an intense family man, and a curiosity among show people because he begins to yawn around 11 p.m. He has patiently steered his children through their emotional mumps and ideological, measles (bursts of radicalism here, seizures of Oxonian ambitions there). He is their idol, up to a point. When son Jimmy, at 13, wrote a piece of music (he goes in for pretty serious stuff), his mother suggested that he show it to Dad. "Aw," said Jimmy, "he'd just want to write the lyrics."
The Hammerstein farm is usually full of friends. Says a fellow writer of Hammerstein: "He has probably never lost a friend. Every Christmas, they gather, dozens and dozens of them, at his house. The dullest goddam people you ever met. People with millions and people in '34 Chevvies. And half of them, no kidding, are Oscar's old grammar-school chums."
The family delights in Hammerstein's various human failings. For one thing, he dislikes physical labor. Recently, when he actually rose from dinner to get a glass of water, the whole table burst into wild applause. He has a modicum of vanity; when his name is mentioned on the radio, he cries to the rest of the family: "Shut up! They're talking about me."
Hit Parade Poet. Oscar Hammerstein now has new responsibilities. Together with Rodgers, he owns a music publishing company (Williamson Music Inc., through which the partners publish their own songs). The Rodgers & Hammerstein production firm have a stake at the moment, in three New York shows, two on tour and one each in Australia and Britain. His words are as carefully worked over as ever, and his hopes are even a shade more careful.
Even to his own careful judgment of himself it must be clear by now that Oscar Hammerstein occasionally ceases to be a big librettist and becomes a little Poet. His words, drifting through the Great American Living Room, through thousands of juke joints, through lonely stretches of night, carry a gentle insight and a sentimental catch in the throat to millions of people who are only dimly aware of his name. In a eulogy of his late friend George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein once unwittingly rendered a pretty good judgment of Oscar Hammerstein:
Lesser beings than geniuses
Leave their marks upon this earth.
