Shy by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers
By Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022

Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have loved Mary Rodgers. The President’s—Teddy’s, that is—daughter was famous for a wicked tongue and unabashed opinions, even immortalizing a sofa pillow slogan: “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, come sit by me.” Mary implicitly makes the same invitation in her memoir, Shy, although here she does most of the talking, interrupted by kibitzer-in-chief Jesse Green, a New York Times theater critic, whose footnotes augment, explain, comment, and occasionally contradict her story. (After attempting without success to write her history, Rodgers turned to Green to fashion the book from a series of conversations they held over a number of years.)

Accept the invitation. You’re in for a treat. Rodgers is witty, intelligent, self-effacing—and often lethal—and Shy makes for a lengthy, delicious read in the company of a woman you may wish you had known, provided you stayed on her happy side.

So who is Mary Rodgers?  Theater fans (of a certain age) need no introduction.  As a composer, she wrote the 1959 Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, one of the most frequently produced shows (mostly by high schools and community theaters) in the canon. As a writer for children, her Freaky Friday books spawned multiple sequels and feature films. There were other kids books, other songs, other musicals, but none to match those titles in quality or popularity. And in theory nothing to warrant a 400+ page memoir by a prestige publisher.

But lineage: Like Alice Roosevelt, Rodgers grew up in the imposing shadow of a powerful and legendary father. When Mary was born in 1931, Richard Rodgers was already sailing high as one of the most revered and best-loved composers of popular songs for the theater. With his partner, Lorenz Hart, he flooded Broadway and Hollywood with a cascade of smart, tart, musical masterpieces (albeit in shows almost all of which are now too silly to endure). And the songs! “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “Manhattan,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” to name but a few from their enormous and immortal catalog.

By the time Mary was 12, her father had teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II to refashion the American musical to a standard nearly impossible to have foreseen decades earlier—richer, more serious, and more complex. Oklahoma! In 1943 would be the first, followed by, among other lesser works, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music—all recently revived with a surprising sturdiness and viability. R&H, as they came to be known, were their own imposing brand, one of the sturdiest tent poles of midcentury popular culture. If most of the populace couldn’t travel to New York to see the original productions, there were numerous touring companies, original cast recordings on millions of turntables, wildly popular movie versions, and ubiquitous radio and television play for songs that achieved almost instant immortality: “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” “If I Loved You,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” “Do Re Mi,” “Bali Hai” . . . the soundtrack of countless lives.

So imagine the plight of an enormously talented daughter, with musical theater her chosen métier, struggling to find her place in the theater world. Difficult enough under any circumstances, but further hampered by a father resistant to her in every way—professionally, emotionally, paternally. “Daddy” is the book’s first word (she was still referring to him as such in a television interview decades after his death) and it doesn’t take long—page 11 to be exact—before she references a home video on the beach with father looking adoringly at the one-year-old Mary. “Where did that nice man go?” she muses. This icon—Noel Coward enviously said of him, “He could pee melody”—had little time (or inclination) to support or admire Mary’s gifts. When later it was rumored that Rodgers père had to have ghosted the music for Once Upon a Mattress—it was that good—she responded, “Why in the world would my father want to write my music? He doesn’t even want to listen to it.” When she once played him a portion of a song that made her proud, his only response: “Well, that’s not how I would have done it.” This in addition to having shattered her fragile teenage ego by frequently complaining about her weight and at one time likening her to an ape.

Well, there was always Mummy—alternately La Perfecta and the Toilet Queen, so dubbed because of her invention of the Johnny Mop, a wildly successful commode cleaner—to turn to for solace. But Dorothy Rodgers—a punctilious snob in love with her social status, and eternally distressed and embittered by her husband’s endless womanizing (he enjoyed a constant supply of chorus girls)—was also even more demanding of her daughter and critical of her taste in men.  And there were many. Her frank and often hilarious escapades bedhopping among theater folk are a refreshing contrast to the typical guilt-soaked memoir from the 50s and 60s.  

There were two husbands. The first six-year marriage was to a closeted gay man and produced three children. The second lasted more than five decades; this, too, led to three children, including Tony-winning Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, Light in the Piazza), one of the most gifted theater songwriters of his generation, and one whose success complicates the mother/son relationship.

Much of the early attention Shy has received grew from Rodgers’ well-known lifelong friendship with Stephen Sondheim. Since his death last year, devotees have been hungry for the kind of intimate accounts that he kept deeply private. Mary doesn’t keep us waiting. By page 6, she’s describing their first meeting as young teenagers: “I was dazzled by Steve, completely stunned…he just reeked of talent.  ....But at that moment I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again. Which turned out to be true.”

Their lives intertwined frequently: collaborating on the occasional song, socializing at elaborate puzzle parties, and hosting citywide scavenger hunts that have become the stuff of legend. Sondheim wrote lyrics to Richard Rodgers’ music (at Mary’s encouragement and to Sondheim’s dismay) for a failed production (Do I Hear a Waltz?) that made no one happy. And in the book’s showstopper, they decide on a “trial marriage”—sleeping together, but remaining abstinent. Sondheim was gay, but took his own sweet time coming out publicly. When she suggested that there were people who could help him “change,” he replied, “What if I don’t want to?”  (Ironically, years later, Sondheim sought her advice as he co-created the musical Company, a dissection of marital mores c. 1970. He had never been married, she was freshly on her second try. “She knew enough to know what she didn’t know,” he wrote in his own book, “which made her comments fresh. . . . I took notes—literally—as we talked.”)

 “Alarmingly outspoken” is no tease. (The title, drawn from a Mattress song, is the book’s first colossal irony). Rodgers takes aim at dozens of her peers, with a particular ferocity for writer Arthur Laurents (Gypsy, West Side Story, The Way We Were). Some of her memorable barbs: “Talent excuses almost everything but Arthur Laurents.” “Arthur is honest so he can be mean.” More than once he’s just “the little shit.”  (She doesn’t offer a specific incident as the source of her enmity, but from many contemporary reminiscences, to know him was to loathe him.)

Those who come for the gossip will undoubtedly stay for the impressive portrait of a complicated, accomplished woman. In addition to her literary and musical efforts, she was a board member of ASCAP and served a lengthy period as chairperson of the board of directors of The Julliard School. She was famously generous to young artists, championed political causes (including as an early AIDS activist).  Her long life (she died in 2014 at 83) offers an expansive look at 20th-century upper middle-class mores, with all of its attendant prejudices and privileges. Her wealth and famous name did not inoculate her from sexism or anti-Semitism, and her tribulations among both the theater and publishing worlds are revelatory—and often hilarious.

Parties thrown by Mary and her husband were said to be “an aristocracy of talent.”  There’s Leonard Bernstein (almost always ostentatious; in one scene he seethes with jealousy at Sondheim’s success with Sweeney Todd); a frail but game Judy Holliday valiantly trying to make a hit of a musical about the Peace Corps (!); a very young Carol Burnett plucked out of nowhere to star in Mattress and making a giant step to stardom; the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom. And Mary Martin, George Abbott, Mae West, Liv Ullmann, Larry Kramer. Demigods are not spared: she disabuses the world of the notion that Hammerstein was the embodiment of his most lofty, sentimental lyrics (he had a long-time mistress and was often a distant, if not cruel, parent), And she characterizes her on-again off-again affair with theatrical giant Harold Prince by describing him in bed as smelling “like a dirty wash cloth.”

Her disapproval can border on cruelty. A meeting with a dying Carson McCullers to ask permission for a musical adaptation of The Member of the Wedding (which subsequently bombed) is rendered with needless explicit detail: “She was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.” (And that’s just the beginning of her toxic assessment. Honest in order to be mean?)

But the award for Best Supporting Appearance must go to Marshall Barer, her Mattress collaborator, dubbed by Green as “lyricist, librettist, nutjob, genius.” Barer (whose antics cry out for his own biography) was a deeply eccentric soul who once covered his car with form-fitting denim to avoid having to wash it, and decorated one party with 30 plaster penises. Erect. (The decorations, not Barer. We assume.) 

He was also bisexual (one of his previous relationships was with Anaïs Nin), so naturally Rodgers slept with him and the two considered marriage. (Our Mary had a type!) A wiser head prevailed when he informed her that he had no intention of giving up men during the marriage. That, and perhaps the fact that “you could write your name in the dirt on him.”

Shortly before she died, Rodgers told Green that she had two goals in writing Shy—for readers to learn that she was no saint, and for them to have a good time.

Missions accomplished.

Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.