Broadway Love Story
In cowhide cowboy shirt, tie from Brooklyn.
Watching Ethan Hawke's riveting portrayal of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart in the movie “Blue Moon” triggered long-forgotten memories of another love story on the Great White Way.
The more details I remembered, the more unbelievable the story got.
But it was all true.
“Blue Moon” takes place on March 31, 1943, the night “Oklahoma!” opened on Broadway. Not quite three years later, I was born in nearby Brooklyn to a father who had been a scientist on the Manhattan Project in World War II, and a mother who was a modern dancer and left-leaning political protester.
Broadway and the real Oklahoma were worlds apart, but they would intertwine in my life in a love song as good as any Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote.
Like the iconic songwriting duo, my parents were New York kids, first generation Americans born to Jewish immigrants fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe. New York was the only world they had ever known, but four years after my birth, my father accepted a professorship teaching petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and our family moved to Norman.
As far as our New York relatives were concerned, Oklahoma in the early 1950s was still cowboys and Indians … which turned out to be a fair appraisal. You could still find motels – they were called motor courts in those days – with cottages shaped like teepees on highways marked by Burma Shave signs on barbed wire fences passing fields of what the songwriters imagined – they had never been to the actual state – of wavin' wheat that sure smells sweet …
With its corn as high as an elephant's eye, their imaginary Oklahoma! was a place where there was nothing more urgent for you to do with your honey lamb than sit alone and talk … and watch a hawk…makin’ lazy circles in the sky.
The actual Oklahoma had been designated Indian Territory – the god-forsaken end of the “Trail of Tears” forced march from the Southeastern U.S. – before a land rush opened it up to statehood in 1907. The names of the counties still bore the legacy of those early plains dwellers. Osage …Washita …Seminole… Pawnee…
The names were poetry. Atoka … Cado … Cherokee … Choctaw … Like Walt Whitman, you could hear America singing as the radio announcers listed the counties in the tornado warnings that always came in the spring.
OK-lahoma! Where the wind comes right behind the rain …
My parents and I navigated the segue from Brooklyn to Norman in our own ways. When I was chosen to play Joseph in the nursery school Christmas play, I referred to my holy offspring as the Baby Cheesus.
My parents corresponded with the New York relatives, trying to downplay the differences between the world they had left and the one where we now lived.
… We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand …
Gradually an Okie accent replaced echoes of Brooklyn in my young voice.
If only … is a pointless way to think. But if only my parents hadn't moved away from New York City with its state-of-the-art medical resources, maybe my mother wouldn't have died when I was six.
She succumbed to eclampsia giving birth to my sister and brother, twins.
Six is too young to know much. But when I was told of her passing there were certain things I knew instantly. Namely that the first chapter of my life was over, and, ready or not, this was the next one.
My father never remarried. He didn't split up the family among the relatives. He didn't move back to New York. He was a single dad, a bachelor father, a Mister Mom before any such concept existed.
Even without a mother, my boyhood felt idyllic. (It would be years before I even heard the words traumatic loss, with their implications of lingering denial.)
But I could navigate most of Norman on my bike. I had plenty of friends. We'd play outside all day long, then sit on the curb after dinner watching the big black dome of night fill with stars.
There were no such thing as bicycle helmets. Our parents didn't wonder where we were. We drank water from garden hoses. When a jeep came through the streets spraying thick white clouds of DDT for mosquito control, we'd jump on our bikes and ride in the funny-smelling smoke for blocks.
We weren't well educated in things to fear.
Besides the Boomer and Sooner movie theaters where I was a regular for Sunday matinees, the center of my biking universe was the University of Oklahoma campus, block after block of three-story red brick architecture with gargoyles along the eaves and musical chimes ringing out in the afternoon.
The center of the campus – not physically but spiritually for sure – was Owen Field, the football stadium.
The population of Norman was 40,000. The stadium could hold 60,000, and was sold out every Saturday the team played at home.
During my boyhood, guided by inspiring silver-haired coach Bud Wilkinson, the Oklahoma football team ran up a forty-seven game winning streak between 1953 and '57. It's still an NCAA record. We had season tickets, never missing a game.
A long way from my Brooklyn-Jewish roots, the son of an agnostic scientist father, believing in the Oklahoma Sooners was as close as I got to religion.
And every time the team played, at halftime, in brass-buttoned crimson uniforms under high white-plumed hats, the marching band would fill the crisp fall air with joyful sounds, spreading across the white-limed stripes on the glistening green grass in perfect synchronization, spelling out in cursive letters Oklahoma, playing Richard Rodgers' mighty melody from one end zone to the other.
Every summer we'd drive back to Brooklyn to visit the relatives.
The highways were two lanes, motels were owned by actual moms and pops, hamburgers didn't taste the same from one town to the next. Geography and terrain and foliage changed as we followed squiggly lines on well-folded maps from one state to the next.
There were no such thing as franchises. Just separate states, loosely united, individuality in tact.
On the narrow roads head-on collisions were a risk every time you passed. There were still what were known as tourist attractions that we would stop and check out. Homes of presidents were big on our trips – Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon in Virginia.
And at the end of the road, its last stretch measured in black and white mile markers along the futuristic New Jersey Turnpike, was New York City.
The first few summers are dim memories, but as I got older there were more day trips into Manhattan. The twins were still babies, but little Ricky got to visit museums and zoos and Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers. Radio City Music Hall and the Rockefeller Plaza Skating Rink. There were sleek, stately ocean liners like the Queen Elizabeth or the SS United States you could tour in port. There was Central Park and elegant Fifth Avenue and Broadway and the toy department when there was only one Macy's, on 34th Street.
It wasn't too many years later that I started going to the city by myself, catching the subway near my grandmother's apartment on Bay 22nd Street in Bensonhurst and getting off at Times Square or Grand Central Station. I would walk Manhattan all day long, absorbing the city through each of my senses.
I was years younger than Holden Caulfield when I read “The Catcher in the Rye,” but the book felt like an instruction manual. I hadn't been well educated in things to fear. But from an early age I rode the subways and walked the streets, and when I was 12, I rode a Greyhound bus from Oklahoma City to Manhattan, and was never touched or threatened or bothered by anyone.
One summer in Brooklyn, maybe 1956, we learned the daughter of my aunt's best friend “was in show business.”
Her name was Marilyn Siegel. She was a year younger than I was. She had dark hair, she was kind of tiny and cute. She took music and dance lessons, and her parents would take her to auditions for Broadway productions and TV shows.
I don't remember how we met. Her parents lived just around the corner from my aunt and uncle's home where we stayed when we visited each summer. They were brick, single-family row houses with awnings and little brick patios, just a block or two up from the Belt Parkway along the Atlantic shoreline where ocean liners and freighters steamed in and out of the Narrows.
I'd play punchball and stickball with the boys in the neighborhood with the pink rubber balls they called Spawldings withtheir Brooklyn accents. I wasn't very good, but for some reason I got noticed by Barry Siegel's kid sister. Marilyn.
The next thing I heard was that she liked me.
The next summer she was in “The Music Man.”
Marilyn Siegel, age 10, played the role of Amaryllis when “The Music Man” opened in Broadway's Majestic Theatre on Dec. 19, 1957.
Amaryllis was the little girl taking a piano lesson from Marion the Librarian in the scene where Barbara Cook sang “Goodnight My Someone.”
Sweet dreams be yours, dear, if dreams there be
Sweet dreams to carry you close to me
I wish they may and I wish they might
Now goodnight, my someone, goodnight
Destined to become an iconic classic in its own right, “Music Man” could also pass for the second coming of “Oklahoma!” Its River City setting, after all, was in Iowa, a place whose reputation far exceeded the Sooner State's for corn.
Professor Harold Hill winked at the audience as he worked the rubes, before getting blindsided by their sincerity. The sentiments were similar to the fragile optimism that soothed “Oklahoma's” audiences in the early years of World War II.
Harold Hill's warnings of Trouble right here in River City may have been steeped in turn-of-the-century traveling salesman razzmatazz, but Meredith Wilson's Midwestern smooth talkin' was more sophisticated than it let on. It probably laid the foundation for rap a half-century later.
Back in Oklahoma my dad bought the original cast recording, which I quickly committed to memory. When you're in fifth grade, boyfriends and girlfriends is a nebulous concept, even more so from great distances. Letter writing was an ordeal. Families had one phone, on a wall or table, with a short coiled cord. Long distance was an expensive luxury saved for special occasions and emergencies.
And besides, eleven-year-old boys and ten-year-old girls didn't have a lot to say to each other anyway.
I just knew I had a girlfriend and she was a Broadway star. I had no idea what her thoughts were of me, unless she was as great at imagining as I was.
True love can be whispered from heart to heart
When lovers are parted they say
But I must depend on a wish and a star
As long as my heart doesn't know who you are
When we returned to New York the next summer, she got me tickets to see the show. She took me backstage to meet Barbara Cook and Robert Preston in his dressing room.
The Majestic Theatre was on 44rd, in the same block as the famous Broadway hangout, Sardi's. The theater's stage door was in an alley off 45th Street. That stage door would become the final stop on my Manhattan wanderings. I would show up and Marilyn's parents, Dottie and Seymour, would drive us home in their Oldsmobile, through the gauzy lights of the city, past the Brooklyn shipyards, Marilyn and me in the back seat with low jazz on the radio.
I was so in love as to be totally tongue-tied in her presence. We weren't even teens yet, our intimacy consisting of awkward hugs, maybe a kiss on the cheek once. (Seems like I'd remember …)
It was Romeo and Juliet 101, presexual, as pure as love gets.
We lost touch after that summer. When I was finally there in person she probably realized I was more River City than anyone in the cast.
After “Music Man,” she changed her name to Marilyn Rogers before originating the role of Brigitta von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.” In “Fiddler on the Roof,” she was Shprintze. She managed to work in a few screen appearances including a guest spot on my favorite TV show, “Route 66.”
Last thing I heard was that she was having some health issues and her family moved to Florida. She died in 2010 in Miami, miles and decades away from her brilliant career.
The movie “Blue Moon” takes place one night in Sardi's, across the street from the Majestic Theatre.
When I reviewed the movie I wrote, “Lorenz Hart was a lover of love, an appreciator of beauty, a chaser of make-believe.”
Was I writing about him … or me?
Marilyn Rogers wasn't solely responsible for the distortions in my vision, but she certainly had a starring role.
Maybe this is finally the chance to say thanks.
Marilyn Rogers in an episode of “Route 66.” Shout! TV screenshot.
Wonderful story, Rick. Love the pics. Thank you.
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