Word: oscared
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Behind the careful dreamer lies a waking life somewhat similar to that of Allegro's Joe Taylor, though Oscar was born in 1895, Joe in 1905. Like Joe, Oscar lost his mother when he was young and grew up close to his father. Like Joe, he married when he was making barely enough money to support a wife, and was divorced from her after he became successful. Like Joe and like millions of Joes throughout the U.S., he is easily dominated by the woman-on-the-pedestal. (Says Oscar: "Men are wrapped up in unrealities, like business...
...Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein got no encouragement at home to go into show business. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein I, was a kind of highbrow P. T. Barnum with a passion for opera. A short, stubby man with a truculent Vandyke and a shining topper, Oscar I roamed the world founding opera houses and losing fortunes in the process of trying to rival the Metropolitan. His sons, William (who managed the famed Victoria which Oscar I built) and Arthur (who became a well-known theatrical producer) were distressed by this operamania. "I wish the hell," Oscar II remembers hearing them...
Milk Punch & Dubonnet. Oscar's father was Jewish, his mother Episcopalian, the faith in which he was reared. He lived in Manhattan's 125th Street, then a fairly well-to-do residential section. For a few years he lived with his maternal grandfather, a white-haired Scotsman named James Nimmo. Oscar fondly remembers rising with Grandfather Nimmo early every day and sharing the old man's milk punch, which was spiked with Scotch. Evenings there was stout for both. At 52, Oscar's digestion is perfect, his appetite enormous and he drinks little...
Before his father, William Hammerstein, died, he left instructions: "Watch over Oscar. He has a great name, but never let him get near the stage." At Columbia, Oscar got good grades in his law courses, played first base (he was too light for football) and then-fatefully-wrote some varsity shows. His favorite contained a fat part for himself: a comic French waiter called Dubonnet (acting is still one of Hammerstein's secret ambitions). Slowly, he began to dream of the theater. But he had the promise of a law job at $15 a week. Says he: "If they...
...Magic Mechanics. For a year, Oscar slipped through the wings, cueing actors, switching lights and, once, ringing up the curtain prematurely to reveal the property man sitting on a gilded throne with a chorus girl on his knee. He learned the magic mechanics of the theater ("I may write bad scenes, but I never write impractical ones"). His first play (The Light, a drama about a small-town girl) left New Haven completely unmoved. His first success was Tickle Me in 1920. After three years and four flops came his first hit, Wildflower, and his first smash hit, Rose Marie...