Stage Door Canteen by Maggie Davis Page B

then discovered someone had made some fresh coffee; all Jenny had to do was pour it into mugs, which they took out into the main room. They sat down at a table in Siberia, far away from a volunteer from the stagehands’ union running a floor polisher over the dance floor.
    “Alfred Lunt,” Jenny said, “says the problem is with the original play, Green Grow The Lilacs.”
    He looked up at her, sharply. “Problem?”
    “Well yes, haven’t you heard? The problem of getting backers. I don’t think it’s any secret that Dick Rodgers and Ockie are giving previews for anyone interested in the show.” She spooned sugar into her coffee. “They did a presentation of the show for a group at a mansion out on Long Island that Lawrence Langner and Terry Helburn arranged. Dick Rodgers played the piano and Ockie read part of the script, and everyone loved it and drank the champagne and ate the caviar, but the response was zero. They didn’t even open their checkbooks.”
    He grunted, sympathetically. “Peddling one’s show to every rich Dick and Harry is not easy, believe me. I have done it myself, but I am not a big shot like the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein, who have a long list of Broadway hits to their credit.”
    “I think they were a little—disconcerted by their reception. Dick Rodgers took it hard.”
    The composer was a baffling individual to many people. Rodgers was often arrogant, sharp-tongued and sarcastic; there were some who found themselves unaccountably wounded after an encounter with him. But Jenny rather liked him. Dick Rodgers, who was rather good-looking, liked pretty women; with them, he was charming, quick-witted and funny. There was no doubt he was brilliant. Those lightning-fast bouts of composing were, as he was careful to explain anyone who would listen, the result of working on tunes in his head for days, even weeks, before he put them down. The quickness with which he ripped out a new song dazzled people. They thought that was all there was to it.
    The composer freely admitted he hadn’t struggled the way, for instance, Irving Berlin. Who had had a poverty-stricken childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, homeless, sleeping on the streets, later as an adult living a hardscrabble life hammering out songs for the music business’s cutthroat Tin Pan Alley. Dick Rodgers’ father was a successful doctor, the family had a comfortable apartment in Manhattan and were able to take leisurely seashore holidays when the two Rodgers boys were growing up. Everything had come fairly easily to Dick, including his chosen profession. His parents, great lovers of the theater, got together in the evening at the piano to play and sing popular tunes. When little Dickie, at age four, could pick out melodies all by himself they encouraged him at every step, even supporting him into his late twenties, when he was still living at home, trying to get his start in the world of New York theater. Rodgers was so precocious musically as a child, being able to play virtually any tune by ear, that he put off learning music for years. Even now he acknowledged that as an adult he was not much more than an adequate pianist.
    Jenny had been around him long enough in the past few weeks to know that for some, Dick Rodgers’ wicked sense of humor was his saving grace. She’d heard him tell the story himself—he was a great storyteller, entertaining any group around him during the long waits at rehearsals—about one of his pet peeves, the popular beliefs about “inspiration.” That is, that anyone involved in the arts must be unbalanced, since creative work and, as he put it, logical behavior, are somehow considered mutually exclusive. There was a woman at a dinner party one evening who kept pressing him about his working habits. The more Rodgers explained that he was a family man, had a regular schedule and liked to work in the morning after a good, restful night’s sleep, and that a couple of drinks made it impossible for