Word: hammersteins
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Although Kern and Hammerstein were close friends, Hammerstein's loyal wife...
...Fits, It Fits." To younger generations, who hummed and danced through the '40s and '50s in the amiable glow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it sometimes came as a surprise that Hammerstein had an earlier, equally prodigious career in the operettas of the '20s. Son of Variety House Manager William Hammerstein and grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I, the Johnny Appleseed of grand opera who roamed the world founding new Covent Gardens, Manhattan-born Oscar II contributed to varsity shows at Columbia University (class of '17), was barely in his 30s when he had written the lyrics...
...many collaborators, and from them learned his craft. Otto Harbach, with whom Hammerstein worked...
Desert Song, taught him the basics of writing for the musical stage. Sigmund Romberg, confining his highest praise to the words "It fits, it fits." taught him the virtues of a 16-hour work day.* Jerome Kern, who gave him the tall captain's table on which Hammerstein thereafter wrote standing up, taught him-ordered him, rather-never to use the word Cupid in a lyric. After hearing Kern's next melody for Show Boat (the music came first with Jerome Kern; words were filled in later), Hammerstein fired back lyrics that began...
From his home in Bronxville, N.Y., Jerome Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, L.I.; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires, as Oscar picked out the pure Kern from the blip-blap-bleep of the Bell System, and made preliminary notes for such Showboat masterpieces...