Mr. President Hit New York and Washington Big 50 Years Ago and Landed Hard
by John Aquino on 08/23/12
Fifty years ago, a Broadway master wrote a musical about a president. It tried out in Boston and Washington in September and opened in New York in October. It was a strong attempt by old Broadway hands to write a fresh and new musical, one that was reflective about the country’s young and new president. That it failed says a lot about high expectations and how hard it is to do something new.
In 1962, most of the legendary Broadway composers were dead or otherwise inactive. Cole Porter had not been involved in a Broadway show since 1955’s Silk Stockings; his last score was for the TV musical Aladdin, which was completed in 1958, shortly before his leg, injured in a 1938 fall, was finally amputated. He spent his remaining six years in virtual seclusion. Lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II of “Rodgers and Hammerstein” had died in 1960, a year after the premiere of The Sound of Music, his last musical with Richard Rodgers. George Gershwin had died in 1937, and his brother Ira had not written lyrics for Broadway since 1946’s Park Avenue. After having lost Hammerstein, Rodgers was struggling to write his own lyrics for No Strings that year and for additional songs to be included in a new version of State Fair, his 1945 film musical with Hammerstein, starring rock and roll idols Pat Boone and Bobby Darin. Composer Frederick Loewe, who suffered a heart attack during the tryouts for Camelot in 1960, had retired after that show’s premiere. His partner Alan Jay Lerner was attempting to set up collaboration with Rodgers, which never materialized. After 1957’s West Side Story, composer Leonard Bernstein had left Broadway, claiming that that had established the path for contemporary “operatic” musicals that he now expected others to follow.
This really left just Irving Berlin. He had written his first big hit—“Alexander’s Rag Time Band”—in 1911 and his first Broadway score in 1914—Watch Your Step. He had composed revues for Ziegfeld and the Music Box and left Broadway for Hollywood in the thirties and forties, composing scores for Dick Powell, Astaire and Rogers and Bing Crosby, including Holiday Inn in 1942, which featured “White Christmas,” one of the most popular songs ever written. He returned to Broadway in 1946 to help out his friends Rodgers and Hammerstein, who were producing Annie Get Your Gun, when the show’s composer Jerome Kern died. The musical was based on the life of American legend Annie Oakley, who was a sharp-shooting entertainer in the late 19th century, and included an anthem to Berlin profession—“There’s No Business Like Show Business”—and made Berlin, then approaching 60, more popular than ever.
But by 1962, Berlin had not written for Broadway since 1951’s Call Me Madam. His last film score had been for White Christmas starring Crosby and Danny Kaye in 1954, which also included his last hit song, “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.” Belin contributed the title song for the 1957 film Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando, but that had actually been written for an earlier, unproduced show. The announcement, then, that Berlin would emerge from this self-imposed exile from Broadway with a new show titled Mr. President, which would premiere late in 1962, was big, big news.
And he was not returning alone. Berlin's collaborators included the producer Leland Hayward--lately of Gypsy and The Sound of Music, and Joshua Logan—director of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific. The authors of the libretto were to be Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, whose credits included, Life With Father (1940), which still holds the record as the longest-running straight play on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama State of the Union (1946), and the book for Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (1959), as well as for Porter’s Anything Goes (1934) and Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1951).
The subject of the musical was to be the President of the United States and his family. Its impetus was the public’s fascination with its youthful and seemingly robust President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, who was very much in the public eye. He held nationally televised press conferences almost every day—which ended with a concluding, “Thank you, Mr. President,” established the Peace Corp, and advocated physical fitness. The First Lady—Jackie Kennedy—had also caught the world’s attention with her bee-hive hairdos, pill-box hats, Cassini gowns, emphasis on “culture” in the White House, and a triumphant tour of Paris in which she stole the limelight from the president. The Irish-Catholic Kennedy family—of whom there were very many--itself was the talk of the town—if only for their ambition, nepotism, and great numbers. The president’s brother Bobby was attorney general and had ten children. One of his brothers-in-law was in charge of the Peace Corps, and another was Hollywood actor Peter Lawford. The Kennedy family was lampooned in the best-seller comedy album First Family, starring Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader.
The planned show also evoked memories of I’d Rather Be Right, a 1937 musical that had a singing and dancing George M. Cohan playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt—in a dream sequence, since in reality President Roosevelt was paralyzed by polio—and which had its own legendary creative team: Rodgers and his pre-Hammerstein partner Lorenz Hart wrote the score and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart the book. Although not a huge hit, the show was memorialized in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the film biography of Cohan in which James Cagney as Cohan sang and danced “Off the Record” from I’d Rather Be Right’s score. A more famous ancestor of Mr. President was Of Thee I Sing (1930), with a score by the Gershwins and a book co-written by Kaufman. It had satirized presidential politics—candidate Wintergreen promises the nation he will marry if he wins the election, the vice president has to go on a White House tour to see what it’s like since he’s never invited to anything—and was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for best drama.
In short, Mr. President promised a return not only of Berlin but of the Golden Age of Broadway. Cementing this was its opening number, titled “Prologue,” which was sung by David Brooks, who had played the romantic lead in Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon in 1947. Berlin even quoted his “The Girl That I Marry” from Annie Get Your Gun in the new song “Meat and Potatoes.”
But there was also something new about the enterprise, a new beginning—like the Kennedys. Lindsay and Crouse had dealt with presidential politics in their Pulitzer Prize-winning State of the Union and with U.S. ambassadors—with Berlin—in Call Me Madam but had never written about a president in office. Berlin had satirized Congress and Louisiana politics in Louisiana Purchase (1941) but had just flirted with presidential themes in Call Me Madam. There was a sense of everyone returning home, to familiar themes, and yet with a difference.
The demand for Mr. President was so great that over a million dollars worth of tickets were sold before the stars were even announced. For its three-week pre-Broadway run at Washington, D.C.’s National Theater in September 1962, the theater’s manager refused to accept mail orders and returned 4,000 pieces of unsolicited mail, much of it containing blank checks. The advance-sale box office was opened on Labor Day to avoid jamming downtown Washington streets on a business day, and the entire D.C. run was sold out by noon two days later. The real Mr. President and his wife Jackie agreed to host a charity-benefit opening night in Washington, D.C.
Berlin wanted Nanette Fabray to play the First Lady and movie actor Robert Ryan to portray the president. Fabray was an experienced stage and film actress who had appeared in the 1947 Broadway musical hit High Button Shoes with Phil Silvers and with Fred Astaire in the 1953 film The Bandwagon. (She achieved her success in spite of the fact that when she was a teen she was diagnosed with otosclerosis, which causes the bones in the ear to calcify. She performed with hearing aids.) Ryan, however, had never been in a musical and had, in fact, specialized in playing movie villains. In fact, in 1962 he was on the screen as Mister Claggart, the epitome of evil, at war with Terence Stamp’s angelic title character in Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. There was scant indication in Ryan’s film work that he could play in a musical or even in a comedy. He had, however, like Fabray, although very early in his career, co-starred with Fred Astaire in a film musical—The Sky’s the Limit (1943). He had played a few non-villains--the understanding counselor in the 1947 film fantasy The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and, most recently, John the Baptist in Nicholas Ray’s The King of Kings (1961). Berlin reportedly felt that Ryan had the handsome looks of a Kennedy but also a weary businessman like quality reflective of the previous decade and of its president and Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was also, perhaps, something of Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president who had lost the 1960 election to Kennedy—straight-laced, good family man -in the musical’s president. Ryan’s president might as well have anticipated by three decades the 41st president, George Bush.
Ryan would be a non-singer in the recent tradition of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1956) and Richard Burton in Camelot (1960), who both won Tonys as best actor in a musical although neither had ever appeared in one before. And so, on its face, Ryan’s non-experience in a musical was not necessarily a minus.
As he often did, Berlin, who composed very quickly, wrote some songs from an outline supplied by the authors who were still completing their book. Berlin, who wrote both music and lyrics, was used to writing songs independently. He had, after all, spent thirty years composing for Broadway revues—a collection of songs and sketches in which there was no plot—before 1943 when Rogers and Hammerstein produced Oklahoma, what was then perceived as the first integrated musical. Even though Annie and two subsequent Berlin musicals—Miss Liberty (1949) and Call Me Madam were “integrated” book shows, he usually wrote the songs before the books were done and created numbers like Madam’s counterpoint “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love,” almost on the spot to fill a hole.
According to composer and music analyst Alec Wilder, Berlin’s flexibility was the amazing thing about him, to the extent that, according to Wilder, while you can write about a “typical” Cole Porter or Gershwin song, you can’t discuss a “typical” Berlin song because he so effortlessly blended with the singer or the show he was writing for. Wilder notes in particular “Moonshine Lullaby” from Annie Get Your Gun, claiming that it sounds as if Berlin had been writing hillbilly music his whole life. But this ability to blend with his singers and shows could have drawbacks—depending on his singers and shows.
As for Lindsay and Crouse, they were not exactly writing at their peak. Although they had been the librettists for the Sound of Music and the show was still running on Broadway after two years, the book had been widely criticized as saccharin. Their previous collaboration with Berlin—Call Me Madam—had satirized the Truman Administration in its dying days, and so quickly became dated.
One of the strange things about the show’s book is that, while it was partly prompted by the election of the country’s youthful new president, the president loses his re-election bid in the first act and the second act deals with his difficulties in being out of office. Lindsay and Crouse were evidently thinking more of Eisenhower, who, after having commanded the armed forces in World War II and led the United States in the 1950’s, was suddenly retired in 1961. It was also a theme from a previous Berlin musical—the 1954 film White Christmas, where a general struggles through his retirement as an innkeeper in Vermont. The movie features what some think is Berlin’s least memorable song—“What Do You with a General (When He Stops Being a General”—which he had inserted in White Christmas from the score of an unfinished musical on this topic.) Dealing with retirement after being in the national spotlight was an issue that Berlin, coming out of retirement, apparently felt an affinity for. Also, in something that, as we will see, occurs a great deal with this show, there was something prescient about the theme. The expansion of the life span also affected ex-presidents. In 1994, there were five former U.S. presidents alive, all of whom dealt with prolonged retirement in different ways.
When the show premiered, Brooks opened with “Prologue,” in which he told the audience whom the show is not about—
Not the Eisenhowers no,
This is not that kind of show,
Not the Kennedys,
No, not the Kennedys,
Just a family of four, so it couldn’t be the Kennedys,
With the Kennedys there’d have to be more than four.
Fabray, playing First Lady Nell Henderson, while the rest of those at a presidential gala dance the then popular rockish twist, sang “Let’s Go Back to the Waltz,” a somewhat listless song about dancing from the man who wrote “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
Fabray was then given a comic number, “The First Lady of the Land,” the type Berlin could write from the show’s outline, listing stereotypical complaints of a First Lady, such as standing in a receiving line with an aching spine, having to smile all the time, being able to keep mundane gifts like an unhousebroken poodle and a dehydrated skunk but having to send back the diamond.
Finally, there was a show stopper. The president’s daughter Leslie complains of how the Secret Service—spoils her romantic life:
The Secret Service
Makes me nervous.
When I am dating
They are waiting to observe us.
When I get ready to hold steady
For a kiss he’ll plant,
The Secret Service makes me nervous and I can’t.
Berlin caught the problem children of presidents or any family that gets secret service protection face rather nicely, showing an unexpected playfulness. Ethel Kennedy, wife of the president’s brother Bobby, told Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin Barrett in 1968 when Bobby was running for president that “‘The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous’ is our family theme song.”
But it soon became clear that if this cute, comic song is your show stopper, you have problems.
Today, what seems most interesting about the show is its prescience about U.S.-Soviet relations. In Mr. President, the Russians try to cancel the First Family’s trip to Moscow—recalling the awkward moment when Eisenhower had to turn back from a visit to Russian during an incident involving a U.S. U2 spy plane, but the First Family insists on continuing and land in a village where they speaks words of peace to a few Russian workmen. The workmen remain alone on stage and plaintively wave as the President’s plane takes off. In retrospect, this emphasis on détente with the Russian may seem bold and daring and, again, prescient. The year before, the Russians had divided the city of Berlin with a wall. Countries under Russian communist rule were seen as oppressed and downtrodden. Dissidents were executed or exiled to Siberia, the frozen wastelands of Russia. By having this Reaganish/Bush-like president seek out the Russian people and preach words of peace, Lindsay and Crouse were anticipating the end of the Cold War under Reagan and Bush (‘41), and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But at the time, this portrayal produced no heat.
Returning home, the Hendersons find that his election opponent is using the Russian refusal to meet with him as a sign of his ineffectiveness as president. He loses the election and spends the second act as an ex-president, again, an anti-climactic choice for Lindsey and Crouse to make.
The play received poor notices in its August 1962 Boston run. The Record American critic Elliot Norton wrote, “Dreadful is the only word. Anything milder would be misleading, not to say dishonest. . .Never in his whole career has Irving Berlin written so many corny songs.”
Ryan’s singing voice was thin in his big solo “It Gets Lonely in the White House.” He was respected but not liked, although Fabray was loved.
At the urging of his collaborators, Berlin labored and inserted a song for the president’s daughter to capitalize on the dance craze of the twist and perhaps mitigate the effects of the show’s opening “old fashioned” waltz:
Congressmen's lips that are pucked
Waiting for plums to be plucked,
Legal concerns, making out their returns
With expenses they'd like to deduct,
Drinking a toast to the host with the most
While they're doing the Washington Twist.
In Washington, on Sept. 25, 1962, the gala benefit performance was held. The Secret Service sealed off the block around the National Theatre. One major problem was that the president missed the first act to, tellingly, watch a closed circuit broadcast of the Liston-Patterson heavyweight championship fight back at the White House. Both the audience and cast were continually looking back to the presidential box to see if he had arrived. (When the show was produced in Kansas City in 1964, former president Harry S. Truman attended, was stricken by an appendicitis attack, and taken away by ambulance, suggesting that presidential attendance at the show has not been a blessing for anyone.)
The reviews in Washington were as negative as they had been in Boston.
Mr. President opened at the St. James Theater on Broadway on October 20, 1962 with a $2.6 million advance. The reviews for the show were bad, although Fabray was praised. Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Mr. Berlin’s hand seems to rise and fall thoughtlessly, as though he weren’t looking at the keys. More seriously, the words—which always were simple, but simply evocative—are prosaic, mere wooden soldiers keeping up with the beat. . . ‘It gets lonely in the White house when you’re being attacked, And the loyal opposition gets into the act’ isn’t good Berlin, it is just weak editorial writing. Strangely, the number of harsh, consonant line endings which are turned into rhymes increases wildly, and against all the old fashioned rules of song writing.”
In fairness to Berlin, Kerr either cheated a bit to make a point or misheard the lines, and his rendition makes them sound more prosaic than they are. The real lines of President Henderson’s song are, “It gets lonely in the White House when you’ve been attacked, with the loyal opposition getting in the act.”
On October 22, two days after the Broadway opening, the world was plunged into the Cuban Missile crisis and nuclear war with the Soviet Union was thought to be imminent. Whatever the show’s problems, the events of the day made a singing and dancing president seem out of place.
Mr. President was almost completely overlooked at the 1963 Tony Awards. Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum won the best musical award, and Lionel Bart was voted best composer/lyricist for his work on Oliver! Nanette Fabray was nominated for best actress in a musical but lost to Vivien Leigh for her turn in Tovarich. Berlin was given a special award for his life achievement.
The show closed in April 1963 after its advance sales had run out. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. The show has never been revived.
Berlin contributed one more song to a Broadway musical—again, a counterpoint, “An Old Fashioned Wedding” to the 1966 revival of his 1946 hit Annie Get Your Gun—and dabbled with other shows that were never produced. Just like his friend Cole Porter, he became a recluse but for a much longer period. He died in 1989 at the age of 101. Ryan died in 1973 and never performed in another musical, although he did do a film comedy with Sid Caesar in 1967. In the 1980’s, Fabray’s hearing was restored through operations. In 1976, Leonard Bernstein returned to Broadway with Alan Jay Lerner—who had been continually hunting for a new collaborator after Loewe’s retirement—with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which told the history of the White House and its occupants. It also failed.
One thing is clear. Berlin and Lindsey and Crouse were old dogs and this was a new trick, trying to write something new and youthful and sharp and biting. They were indeed were sometimes looking back to Eisenhower and not ahead to Kennedy. It might have been better if Berlin, who was born in Russia, had written Fiddler on the Roof two years later about an aging Russian dairyman and his family.
In looking back, Mr. President did not fail so much but maybe just could not live up to expectations. The book was surely no stronger than Lindsay and Crouse’s had been for The Sound of Music, but as noted, it took positions about U.S.-Russian relations that may have seemed naïve in 1962 but did not when the Berlin Wall came down 27 years later. Berlin’s score shows signs of carelessness, especially in its rhymes, and is occasionally perfunctory, but he was dealing with age and the changing times in his own way and found resources that many did not know he had. Songs like “The Secret Service” sounds fresh after nearly 40 years, and Berlins adds new colors to his musical palettes, especially with his “Washington Twist.” If it had been written in the late fifties or even mid-seventies, the show might have fared better.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
