'Shy' by Mary Rodgers

 

[I’m posting three pieces related to the publication of Mary Rodgers’s memoir Shy, written with Jesse Green of the New York Times.  First is a report on the book by my friend and frequent Rick On Theater guest blogger Kirk Woodward, then an excerpt from the book from the Times, and finally, Daniel Okrent’s review of Shy, from the New York Times Book Review. 

[Why Shy?  Unless you know the 1959 musical play Once Upon a Mattress (music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, book by Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller), you probably don’t get the implication of the title of her memoir.  “Shy” is the name of the song Princess Winnifred the Woebegone sings at her entrance.  It introduces her and sets up her personality and the plot of the play.

[Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875) classic fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” Rodgers’s play is set in 1428 (according to the lyrics of the Jester’s wonderful soft-shoe number, “Very Soft Shoes”) in a fairy-tale kingdom where the prince is looking for a princess to be his bride.

[Candidates arrive, and one by one, Queen Aggravain nixes them—until Princess Winnifred from the Kingdom of Farfelot in the swampland—Fred to her friends—shows up . . . dripping wet.  So anxious to meet the prince, she arrives by swimming the moat—and in a voice that shakes the palace rafters, she belts out that she’s “actually terribly timid, and horribly shy.”

[And that’s why Mary Rodgers’s “alarmingly outspoken memoir” is called Shy—because neither Fred nor Mary were.]

MARY, MARY RODGERS
by Kirk Woodward

Shy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) by Mary Rodgers (1931-2014) and Jesse Green (b. 1958), is a lively and vivid autobiography. Mary Rodgers was the daughter of Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), an enormously significant figure in American music.

Richard Rodgers, you probably do not need to be told, composed musical scores with first Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) and then with Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), among others, contributing to American musical theater such important shows as The Boys From Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959), to name a few.

One can imagine it might be intimidating growing up in the household with a legend (Richard) for a father and a severe, dominating society figure (Dorothy, who lived from 1909 to 1992) for a mother, especially if one were female, not particularly aggressive in personality, and – as fate and heredity would have it – interested in theater.

That would be correct - “intimidating” is the word, and a great deal of Shy is about exactly that, but her father’s and mother’s grandeur and severity didn’t turn Mary Rodgers into a milquetoast, as you can gather from the book’s subtitle: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers.

“Alarmingly outspoken” is the right phrase. Mary Rodgers was, to judge from her book, a pip. She sounds a great deal like the late Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980), daughter of the late President Theodore Roosevelt (1856-1919). Alice Roosevelt was a notably acerbic wit, known for her famous saying embroidered on one of her pillows, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

One response to having a world-famous father might be to choose another line of work. In fact, to a notable degree, she followed in her father’s footsteps. When she apprenticed at the Westport (Connecticut) Country Playhouse in 1950, she says,

I wasn’t there more than twenty minutes before I thought: This is what I love. These are the people I want to spend my life with. They were theater people, you could smell it, the way dogs smell certain things, only instead of meat it was imagination, iconoclasm, fearlessness, a gift for fun. They were visible, exposed, making the gray groups I’d been forced to hang out with at school seem like pencil sketches of people. . . . They didn’t care if I was Jewish and, even better, they didn’t care who my father was.

The Westport Playhouse was also where she became close friends with the great Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), who also became, it’s clear from the book, the love of her life. One of the revelations of Shy is that Rodgers and Sondheim tried out a “trial marriage” that lasted nearly a year. As far as I know this revelation is news to nearly everyone.

Rodgers is aware of the unlikeliness of the arrangement – she knew perfectly well that Sondheim was gay, as had been her first husband – but they tried, and she remained devoted to him all her life. She writes of the end of their experiment that 

I’m not sure he would have known how to call it off himself. He was probably looking for a kind way to unhook the fish. That’s me all over:  The fish did it for him.

That quotation contains in itself many of the elements of Mary Rodgers’ personality that assert themselves in her book: thoughtful evaluation; self-deprecation; humor; and the ability to write things that you want to read out loud to other people. She is funny and pithy:

However snide I am in private, I know the limits when a microphone’s in front of me. And then I step over them just a bit.

Music did not pour out of my fingers; the process was more like wringing a slightly damp washcloth.

Because Fred [Ebb] was easy to work with and completely sane, we began that fall to talk about a book musical I’d first broached with Marshall [Barer], who was neither.

(Fred Ebb, who lived from 1928 to 2004, was the lyricist for, among other musicals, Cabaret in 1966 and Chicago in 1975, working with John Kander, who was born in 1927. Marshall Barer, who lived from 1923 to 1998, frequently collaborated with Mary Rodgers, notably on Once Upon a Mattress in 1959.)

So Mary Rodgers started writing tunes as a teenager, writing occasional songs and summer camp musicals. Her father’s name didn’t make success easy, much less automatic, and she spent years doubting her abilities.

Possibly as a result, she appears to have taken on nearly every project offered to her. One of those, begun as a one act musical at camp, became Once Upon a Mattress (1959), which became an off-Broadway success, and it’s still frequently performed (and has also been shown in three TV versions).

Another was The Mad Show (1966), a long-running revue for which she wrote most of the music (although the number from the show best known today, “The Boy From,” was written by Sondheim – one is tempted to say, “of course.”)

She also wrote the musical scores for several less well-known and less successful shows, including Davy Jones’ Locker (1959), From A to Z (1960), Hot Spot (1963), and The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), a one woman show starring Phyllis Newman, who lived from 1933 to 2019.

None of those shows were particularly successful, but she also contributed songs to Free to Be... You and Me (1972), a children’s project by actress Marlo Thomas (b. 1937), and Working (1978), a musical based on the Studs Terkel (1912-2008) book, both of which are still frequently performed around the country. In other words, she had what by most standards – if not the standard set by Richard Rodgers – would be considered a successful career in theater, with the usual mix of successes and failures.

With the awesome standard of her father’s success in mind, however, one can imagine that Mary Rodgers might have found that particular mountain too high to keep climbing and might have wanted to move into other fields of work.

She did exactly that, eventually, and with distinction. She wrote children’s books including the highly popular Freaky Friday (1972), which was followed by sequels and television and movie adaptations. Still later she became a member of the board of several schools and performing organizations, including the Julliard School, where she was the chair of the board from 1994 to 2001.

Through it all she remained very much herself, and the book she left behind is proof. It is the product of interviews primarily conducted from 2009 through 2013 by Jesse Green, now the lead theater reviewer for The New York Times. Green has arranged the material Rodgers provided in chronological order, and where appropriate he has added his own footnotes, which are funny and well worth reading in themselves.

Green writes of Mary Rodgers’ intentions:

. . . it became clear that if she was going to talk about herself for a few hundred pages, she wanted two things to happen: She wanted readers to have a good time, even when learning about the times she did not, and, on the assumption that those readers were no saints, she wanted them to know that she wasn’t, either. You could have a good life without being dull and without being perfect or great, she said, if you jumped in and kept your eyes open. Niceness was not, on its own, a virtue: It needed to be expressed in action.

I knew Mary Rodgers’ name before reading Shy – my wife Pat directed a production of Once Upon a Mattress, the show from which the song comes that gives the book its title – but I always thought of her as a peripheral character on the theater scene. Shy corrects that impression as Rodgers almost glancingly admits to accomplishment after accomplishment, and it also introduces us to a remarkable woman – and a character, as she certainly was.

[At the top of Kirk’s report, he presents a short list of Richard Rodgers’s works.  I saw the original production of The Sound of Music (with Mary Martin as Maria, Theodore Bikel as Captain von Trapp, and Kurt Kasznar, one of my favorite character actors, as Max).  I also saw the original production of Flower Drum Song sometime in ’59. 

[My mother saw Carousel on its second night, 20 April 1945; I have the letters she wrote my future dad during World War II and she told him about the evening with her family because that was her younger sister’s 18th birthday.  (Her father wanted to take her to see Pal Joey in 1940, but the ticket broker wouldn’t sell him a seat for his daughter.  The broker decided that the show was too risqué for such a young girl!  My mom-to-be was 17 at the time.)

[My dad told me that he took Mom on a date to Oklahoma!, though that would have had to be later in its long run (2,212 performances).

[It’s astonishing to me, but that play opened over a year-and-a-half before my parents even met and ran through some mighty significant bits of my early family history: my parents’ meeting; the end of Dad’s army service, including his combat duty in Europe at the end of World War II; his occupation service as a Nazi-hunter; cooling his heels in North Carolina waiting to get out of the army; his return to New York and New Jersey; my parents’ engagement, wedding, and honeymoon; their move from New York/New Jersey to Washington, D.C.; establishing their first home; Dad’s starting his new, civilian job; Mom’s pregnancy with me; my birth; my folks’ first anniversary; and my first birthday.  Oklahoma! closed five months after that; my little brother was just making his presence known.]

*  *  *  *
“THE PRINCESS AND THE POCONOS”
by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green 

[This excerpt from Mary Rodgers’s book ran in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times on 14 August 2022.]

In this excerpt from “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” a Broadway musical is born at a summer camp.

_______________ 

A hundred-mile drive from New York City, on the fringe of the Pocono Mountains, Tamiment was for much of the last midcentury a resort for singles and a summer intensive for emerging theatrical talent. During the first half of each season, writers assembled an original musical revue every week; in the second half, if they were interested in cranking out a show with a story — and if Moe Hack, the barky, crusty, cigar-smoking sweetheart who ran the place, thought it was a good idea — they would be free to try.

Among those who tried in the summer of 1958 was Mary Rodgers, a young composer whose father’s reputation preceded her; he was, after all, Richard Rodgers. Also at Tamiment was the lyricist and book writer Marshall Barer, her mentor and tormentor. Together, with assists from Dean Fuller and Jay Thompson, they would write the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” a perennial favorite that grew from a summertime opportunity into an Off Broadway and Broadway success starring Carol Burnett. “Mattress” was also an unintentional self-portrait of a displaced young princess trying to find happiness on her own terms.

“Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” written by Rodgers (1931-2014) and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times, is the just-published story of that princess. Over the course of two marriages, three careers and six children, sometimes stymied by self-doubt, the pervasive sexism of the period and her overbearingly critical parents (not just Richard but the icy perfectionist Dorothy), she somehow triumphed. But in this excerpt about the birth of her first (and only) musical hit — there would be substantial successes in other fields too — she recalls how triumphs can sometimes depend on little more than scrappiness, high spirits and a castoff from Stephen Sondheim.

Marshall [Barer] found me a nice four-bedroom cottage for very little money, right down the hill from Tamiment’s main buildings and near a rushing river. He even saw to it that an upright piano was waiting in the living room. And Steve [Sondheim], now flush from “West Side Story,” sold me his old car for a dollar. Off we went like the Joads [main characters in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1939 novel by John Steinbeck and the 1940 film adaptation depicting migrant refuges of the depression] in early June: 27-year-old me; the kids, ages 5, 4, and 2; and the Peruvian nanny — all of us scratching westward thanks to Steve’s itchy fake-fur upholstery.

My von Trapp-like cheerfulness in the face of uncertainty soon crashed, though. [The von Trapps are the family at the center of the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music.] The whole first half of the season was, for me, demoralizing. Everybody was more experienced than I. Everybody was, I felt sure, more talented. Everybody was certainly more at ease. At the Wednesday afternoon meetings to plan material for the coming week, when Moe [Hack] would fire questions at us — “Who’s got an opening number?” — the guys would leap up to be recognized like know-it-alls in math class. If they were little red hens, I was the chicken, silently clucking Not I. “Who’s got a comedy song?” More leaping; more ideas. “Who’s got a sketch?” Woody Allen always did.

At 22, Woody looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl [Popeye’s extremely thin girlfriend in the classic comic strip], with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.

I would spend eight hours a day plinking out tunes to accompany Marshall’s lyrics. These were revue songs, with titles like “Waiting to Waltz With You,” “Miss Nobody,” and “Hire a Guy You Can Blame,” fitted to the talents of particular performers with no aim of serving a larger story. “Miss Nobody,” for instance, with its super-high tessitura, was written for a thin little girl named Elizabeth Lands, who couldn’t walk across the stage without falling on her face but was a knockout and had an incredible four-octave range like Yma Sumac [1922-2008; Peruvian-American singer with a reported vocal range of over 4½ octaves].

Music did not pour out of my fingers; the process was more like wringing a slightly damp washcloth. With Marshall’s lyric propped up on the piano desk, precisely divided into bar lines as a road map, I would begin with some sort of accompaniment or vamp or series of consecutive chords, then sing a melody that matched the lyric and went with the accompaniment, then adjust the accompaniment to service the melody, which began to dictate the harmony, until I had a decent front strain that satisfied me and, more important, satisfied Marshall, who wouldn’t stop hanging over my shoulder until he liked what he’d heard. Then he’d leave me to clean it up and inch it forward while he took a long walk on the golf course to puzzle out the lyrics for the bridge. Back to me, back to the golf course, back and forth we went, until the song was finished.

Even when I did that successfully, I had another problem. My abandoned Wellesley education had taught me the rudiments of formal manuscript making, but Daddy had ear-trained me, not eye-trained me. As a result, I kept naming my notes wrong, calling for fourths when I meant fifths, and vice versa. This made the orchestrations sound upside down. I could just imagine the guys saying, “Get a load of Dick Rodgers’s daughter, who can’t even make a lead sheet [a form of written music that contains the melody, lyrics, and harmony].”

Actually, the orchestra men, kept like circus animals in a tent apart from the rest of us, were the merriest people at Tamiment. They weren’t competitive the way the writers were. They just sat there with a great big tub filled with ice and beer; you tossed your 25 cents in and had a good time. And I had the best time with them. Especially the trumpeter.

Elsewhere at Tamiment, I felt patronized. It didn’t help that Marshall tried to dispel my parental paranoia by preemptively introducing me to one and all as “Mary Rodgers — you know, Dorothy’s daughter?” Between that and the chord symbols, it was enough to drive me to drink.

Or pills, anyway.

“What’s that you’re taking?” Marshall asked, when he saw me swallowing one.

“Valium,” I told him.

“Valium!” he screamed. “Why Valium?”

“I asked the doctor for something to help me write.”

“And he gave you Valium?” said Marshall. “Here. Try this.”

He handed me a pretty little green-and-white-speckled spansule [extended-release capsule].

Bingo! I wrote two songs in one day, and, whether because of the Dexamyl [a stimulant (no longer marketed; Valium is a tranquilizer (used as an anti-anxiety remedy)] or the songs, felt happier than I’d ever been. It completely freed me up. Whatever inhibitions I had about playing in front of Marshall or feeling creative and being able to express it were suddenly gone.

The story of me and pills — and, much more dramatically, Marshall and pills — can wait for later; what matters now is that Marshall had for a couple of years been nursing the notion of turning the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” into a musical burlesque for his friend Nancy Walker. Nancy, a terrific comedian, liked the idea but was too big a star by then to be summer-slumming at Tamiment. Still, since Marshall was stuck with me anyway, he figured it was worth a try. Did I like the idea? he asked.

As it happens, I did, very much, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I hated it. I did what I was told. At Tamiment, even Marshall did what he was told. Moe said we could write this “pea musical” on the condition that it would accommodate his nine principal players with big roles. Nine big roles? Moe had hired them at a premium, he said, and he wanted his money’s worth.

The deal struck, Moe scheduled the show for Aug. 16 and 17 [1958]. It was now late July.

To save time, we custom-cast the show on the cart-before-the-horse Moe Hack plan, before a word, or at least a note, was written. There was, for instance, a wonderful girl, Yvonne Othon, who was perfect for the lead, Princess Winifred: appealingly funny-looking, very funny-acting, and the right age — 20. But there was a significant drawback: She wasn’t one of Moe’s principal players. Meanwhile, Moe wanted to know what we were going to do for Evelyn Russell, who at 31 was deemed too ancient to be the Princess but was a principal player. OK, OK, we’d cast Evelyn as the Queen: an unpleasant, overbearing lady we just made up, who is overly fond of her son the Prince and never stops talking. We would give her many, many, many lines and maybe even her own song. And to seal the deal, even though the Princess was (along with the Pea) the title character, we would cut her one big number; we’d been planning to have her sing “Shy,” a revue song that hadn’t worked earlier in the summer. That was just as well because it was a tough, belty tune and Yvonne couldn’t sing a note. She was a dancer.

Lenny Maxwell, a comedian and a schlub [also zhlub, Yiddish for a clumsy, stupid person], would be Prince Dauntless, the sad sack who wants to get married but his mother won’t let him; since he had limited singing chops, we’d only write him the kind of dopey songs any doofus could sing. We created the part of the Wizard for a guy who, I had reason to know offstage, was spooky; he was practically doing wizard things to me in bed. Meanwhile, Milt Kamen, by virtue of his age (37) and credits (he’d worked with Sid Caesar), was considered by Moe, and by Milt, to be the most important of the principal players, but he too had a couple of drawbacks: He couldn’t sing on key and couldn’t memorize lines. He claimed, though, to be an excellent mime, so Marshall and Jay invented the mute King to function as counterpoint to the incessantly chatty Queen. Marshall brilliantly figured out a way to make his lyrics rhyme even though they were silent: They rhymed by implication.

In this way, one role at a time, we wrote the show backward from our laundry list of constraints: a dance specialty for the good male dancer who played the Jester, a real ballad for the best singer, even a pantomime role for Marshall’s lover, Ian, who moved beautifully but, well, fill in the blank.

Soon all personnel problems were solved except what to do with Elizabeth Lands. You remember, the gorgeous but klutzy Yma Sumac type? When Joe Layton, the choreographer, and Jack Sydow, the director, started teaching all the ladies of the court — who were meant to be pregnant, according to Marshall’s story — how to walk with their hands clasped under their boobs, tummies out, leaning almost diagonally backward, Liz kept tipping over. Pigeon-toed? Knock-kneed? We never discovered what exactly, but she was a moving violation. Thus was born the Nightingale of Samarkand, who was lowered in a cage during the bed scene while shrilling an insane modal tune to keep the Princess awake.

Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made.

[I saw the first national tour of Once Upon a Mattress (at the National Theatre in Washington, with Imogene Coca as Fred and Buster Keaton, the renowned silent-film star known as “The Great Stone Face,” as the mute King).  That was in May 1960; I was about 13½! 

[The Broadway production was still running, so I didn’t see Carol Burnett do Winnifred until the first TV adaptation in June 1964, though I did have the original cast album which featured Burnett, of course.

[I loved Mattress.  It was just so cute and fun—even for a 13-year-old.  I liked the fractured fairy tale plot and the off-beat characters, especially in a play based on a story meant for children (an unmarried-and-pregnant Lady Larkin, Prince Dauntless who was dim and naïve—no Prince Charming he!—a King who couldn’t speak; a Queen who couldn’t shut up, and, at the center, a Princess with no graces or refinement whatsoever!).

[But I really liked the songs, and sang them all the time after I saw the show.  As I've recounted before (see my post “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010 – not to be confused with the book review below), in those days, I came out of a show literally singing the score—and I mean all of it.  (I could actually sing in those days.) 

[I’m sure many of you think I’m exaggerating, or even lying, but I really did remember the lyrics and melodies to all the songs, and I sang them regardless of whether they were solos or ensemble numbers, women’s songs or men’s.  I didn’t care! 

[On the way home or back to the hotel if we were in New York City, I gave an impromptu recital of the score of whatever show we’d just seen—“Very Soft Shoes” and “Yesterday I Loved You,” my faves from Mattress, and “In a Little While,” “Sensitivity,” and “Normandy.”

[The first few times I did this, my parents were stunned.  After a few shows, they acted like that was just me doing my thing!  To this day, I have no idea how I did it.  I can’t anymore.  I can still remember lots of the lyrics—I just can no longer carry the tunes.

[Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. His latest book is Shy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with and about the composer Mary Rodgers. He is also the author of a novel, O Beautiful (1992), and a memoir, The Velveteen Father (1999).] 

*  *  *  *
“BROADWAY BABY”
Book Review
by Daniel Okrent 

[Daniel Okrent’s review of Rodgers’s memoir appeared in the New York Times Book Review on 7 August 2022.]

The daughter of Richard Rodgers, confidante of Stephen Sondheim and composer of “Once Upon a Mattress” holds nothing back in “Shy.”

Let’s start with a full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Broadway — one of those theater fans who will see five different productions of the same show, who genuflect before cast albums from the ’50s, who inhale theater gossip as if it really mattered. I’m also a sucker for books about Broadway, books as different from one another as Moss Hart’s “Act One,” William Goldman’s “The Season” [see Kirk Woodward’s reports on ROT on “William Goldman’s The Season” (30 April 2013) and the stage adaptation of “Act One” (25 June 2014)] and Jack Viertel’s “The Secret Life of the American Musical.” But I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s “Shy.” Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.

Written in collaboration with the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, who completed it after Rodgers’s death at 83 in 2014, “Shy” relates the life story of a successful songwriter-scriptwriter-television producer-children’s book writer. And also the mother of six, the wife of two, an occasional adulterer, a credulous participant in an earnest trial marriage to Stephen Sondheim (!) — and the daughter of two of the most vividly (if scarily) rendered parents I’ve ever encountered.

“Daddy” is the first word in the book, and it provokes the first of Green’s many illuminating footnotes, which enrich the pages of “Shy” like butter on a steak. This one grasps Richard Rodgers in four words: “composer, womanizer, alcoholic, genius.” The composer part we all know, and if your tastes run in the direction of “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific,” “Carousel,” et many al., the genius as well. As for the other two elements, the womanizing was unstoppable, racing through chorus girls, Eva Gabor, apparently Diahann Carroll [1935-2019; Tony-winning star of Richard Rodgers’s 1962 No Strings] and definitely the original Tuptim in “The King and I” [Doretta Morrow (1927-1968)] — according to Mary, “the whitest Burmese slave princess ever.” The drinking was equally prodigious. Dick (as he was known, and will be known here to keep the various Rodgerses straight) hid vodka bottles in toilet tanks — a clever ploy for an aging man whose bladder wasn’t likely as robust as it once had been. Lunches were lubricated with a 50-50 concoction of Dubonnet and gin. Evenings heralded a continuous parade of Scotch-and-sodas. A depressive who once spent three months in a psychiatric hospital, he was also remote and inscrutable, with a capacity for cruelty. Mary writes, “He hated having his time wasted with intangible things like emotions.”

Compared with Dorothy Rodgers, though, Dick (whom Mary eventually forgives and understands) could have been one of the Care Bears. But “Mummy” (given Dorothy’s desiccated rigidity, it’s a word that can be read as both a name and a noun) was vastly self-centered and brutally critical. Mary had so much to work with you understand why one chapter is called “I Dismember Mama.” She was a Demerol addict, a melodramatic hypochondriac, a neat freak (and, only somewhat incidentally, the inventor of the Johnny Mop [absolutely true: she held a patent (1945) on a device for cleaning bathroom bowls called the Johnny Mop]). “Mummy’s idea of a daughter,” Mary writes, “was a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog; Daddy’s, Clara Schumann as a chorus girl.” In 1964 Dorothy published “My Favorite Things,” a high-end homemaker’s guide that told readers, as summarized by Green, “how to decorate their apartments and serve aspic.” Conveniently, he adds, “her marriage was just as cold and gelatinous.”

Dick and Dorothy are at least implicitly present throughout “Shy,” and Mary’s takes on them are alternately horrific and hilarious (she liked Dick’s earlier work, but “later, with all those goddamn praying larks and uplifting hymns for contralto ladies, I sometimes hated what he got up to”). But it’s the showbiz world they all lived in that lifts the book into the pantheon of Broadway narratives.

When I’m preparing to review a book, I highlight particularly strong material and scribble the relevant page numbers on the endpapers. For the first 17 pages of “Shy,” my list has 13 entries — and now, looking back, I see there’s also some pretty delicious stuff on 4, 7, 15 and 16. And even though my pencil was fairly inactive in the chapters about her two marriages (the second one happy, the first disturbingly not), I never bogged down. How could I resist a voice so candid, so sharp? You’re not even 10 pages into the book when she introduces the man who wrote the books for both “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” and directed “La Cage aux Folles” as “Arthur Laurents, the little shit.” (Later in the book, she goes deep: “Talent excuses almost anything but Arthur Laurents.”)

About Hal Prince, with whom she had an early affair: “Hal was born clasping a list of people he wanted to meet.” Leonard Bernstein, with whom she collaborated on his Young People’s Concerts for more than a decade: “It was hard not to pay attention to Lenny, who made sure that was always the case by always being fascinating.” Twenty-one-year-old Barbra Streisand, whom Mary first encounters backstage at a cabaret: “this gawky woman gobbling a peach, her hair still braided up like a challah.” Improbably, Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo [1927-2004; children’s TV host, 1955-1984], for whom she wrote lyrics when she was just starting out: “a fat guy in a bowl haircut who named himself for a marsupial and looked like a little child molester.” And the 22-year-old Woody Allen, with whom she overlapped at a summer stock theater [Tamiment; see above]: He was “already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later,” spending much of the summer on the porch practicing his clarinet or inside (with his first wife, Harlene) “practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.”

Mary has choice things to say about Bing Crosby, Truman Capote, Judy Holliday, Elaine Stritch, George Abbott (everyone who worked in the theater in the 20th century has George Abbott stories, but none quite so chilling as Mary’s). Even Roy Rogers and Dale Evans [1911-1998 and 1912-2001, respectively; married singing cowboy/cowgirl stars of The Roy Rogers Show, 1951-1957] show up in this book. (She wrote songs for them, as she did for “Lassie” and “Rin Tin Tin” — the shows [popular children’s adventure series “starring” canine actors, 1954-1973 and 1954-1959, respectively], she points out, not the dogs.) Similar work for the Bil Baird Marionettes enabled her to learn how to write for “certain wooden humans.”

But arching over the cast of interesting thousands who populated her world and this book, the central figure in her life, apart from her parents, was Sondheim. They met when barely teenagers; Mary was immediately, and permanently, smitten. They remained close for seven decades, relishing and relying on each other to such a degree that the almost-marriage seemed almost logical. The idea, which arose while they were still in their late 20s, was a one-year experiment (“I know what you are saying,” she tells the reader. “Mary, don’t!”). His homosexuality was a given, so although they often slept in the same bed, they never touched each other, both of them “frozen with fear. We just lay there. We didn’t discuss anything; we didn’t do anything.” Eventually, confusion, resentment and reality combined to declare it a mistrial, but it didn’t disrupt an abiding closeness that lasted until Mary’s death. “Let’s say it plainly,” Mary concludes. Sondheim “was the love of my life.”

Chronology is imperfect when a life like Mary’s is rendered by a mind like Mary’s; one of the book’s alternative titles, Green tells us, was “Where Was I?” She jumps back and forth between her many decades, digression dangling from an anecdote, in turn hanging from an aside. Sometimes, you’re left in slightly irritating (if amusing) suspense: About one family member, “I have nothing good to say — and I will say it later.” Would I have preferred a more straightforward narration? Not a chance, for it could have deadened her invigorating candor (which provoked another possible title: “What Do You Really Think?”).

Mary’s greatest theatrical success was “Once Upon a Mattress,” her musicalization (directed by Abbott) of “The Princess and the Pea,” which launched her Broadway career in 1959 (not to mention that of its relatively unknown star, Carol Burnett). The story line certainly fit her own life: The princess, she writes, “has to outwit a vain and icy queen to get what she wants and live happily ever after.” For Mary, the outwitting paid off. More than 50 years after its original run, her “Mattress” royalties still exceeded $100,000 a year. (If that seems impressive, consider this: Even into the 21st century, the Rodgers and Hammerstein families were each collecting $7 million a year.) As Mary used to say to friends as she reached for the check in a restaurant, “When your father writes ‘Oklahoma!’ you can pay for dinner.” Green notes it was a line she used frequently “because it acknowledged the awkwardness of the situation and swiftly walked straight through it.” Pure Mary.

But what is also pure Mary, I became convinced, lies beneath her slashing revelations and dishy anecdotes: an inescapable element of rue, particularly regarding her parents. After one notably acidic snipe at Dorothy, Mary writes, “It was too late to go back — it always is.” And Dick? “It was all about his music; everything loving about him came out in it, and there was no point looking anywhere else. It’s also true I didn’t have any choice — but it was enough.”

Dick and Dorothy are dead, and Mary’s dead as well. Their legacies, though mixed, are intimately entwined. Although I’m still looking for something to like about Dorothy Rodgers, I’ll acknowledge that Richard Rodgers left behind some songs I love. But Mary Rodgers left behind this book, which I love even more.

On the other hand, I never quite found out why she despised Arthur Laurents.

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SHY: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green | Illustrated | 467 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

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[Daniel Okrent, the author of Last Call (2010) and The Guarded Gate (2019), is writing a book about Stephen Sondheim.]