Laurie Winer—
Oscar Hammerstein II seems to have been born with a healthy sense of self-worth, which he maintained for most of his sixty-five years. But he never developed excessive self-regard; the megalomania of his grandfather, the impresario Oscar Hammerstein I, produced in him a distrust and dislike of bragging. The boy rarely saw his famous namesake, but his grandfather’s presence loomed. Oscar II’s father, Willie, and his Uncle Arthur spoke constantly of “the old man,” usually joking about how crazy he was, but Oscar II “could discern quite easily the awe and fear” he engendered. Much later Oscar II figured out that his Uncle Arthur did not like his own father, Oscar I, and “now, at the age of eighty, still has a frightened look in his eye when he speaks of him.”
Strangers often inquired about the impresario, causing the grandson to wonder what was so great about him. “My other grandfather was so much nicer. . . .He bought me hard candy and took me for walks in the park.”
Much of what we know about Hammerstein’s youth comes from a series of letters he sent to his son Billy in late 1952 and 1953. These missives are the closest he came to writing an autobiography. They are notable for everyday details about New York at the start of the twentieth century (like the horse-drawn cart that sold Moxie, a syrupy sweet drink for children that Oscar was not allowed to have) and for young Oscar’s flashes of insight about the workings of the world and of his own humming consciousness. They suggest that, had Hammerstein ever published a memoir, it would not have been a best seller. He portrays himself as an observant child who kept himself on a consistently even keel, even after the sudden death of his adored mother.
Of course, these missives were written in tranquility by a celebrated artist in his fifties, someone who felt that life had worked out rather as it should have. Some passages are the literary equivalent of portrait sitting and are at best candid-adjacent: “If peace means peace of mind, I have this to an amazing degree compared to all the other people I know. I have always had this somehow. I have never been harried or extremely worried except for temporary specific causes. In a confused world I am confused, but I am not thrown into a panic by confusion. I am not unduly distressed by it.”
And yet there was tumult. The history of the Hammersteins taught me that two activities were more common among urbanites in the aughts than I assumed: fisticuffs and the packing of belongings. Apartment-and tenement-dwelling New Yorkers changed residences often in the early twentieth century—the less-well-off Gershwin family, for instance, moved more than twenty times when Ira and George were boys. In Oscar’s first nine years, the Hammersteins occupied at least six homes, all in Harlem or the Upper West Side. Oscar was largely unaware of how much all this moving had to do with the family’s financial fluctuations, all tied to the unpredictable decisions of Oscar I, for whom Oscar’s father worked.
Of his mother Oscar II wrote, “I don’t know which she enjoyed most—dismantling a house preparatory to moving or setting up in a new house.” But really, how fun could that have been?
“We never had poverty, and yet we never had luxury” was how Oscar described their economic situation. Until his grandmother Janet Nimmo died in 1902, Oscar lived with his parents, maternal grandparents, and younger brother Reggie. They all shared one bathroom, which was “luxury enough in those days,” wrote Oscar. “I was made to know that one had to do without things, and this never bothered me very much. I just did without them. It always seemed to me that I had a great deal anyway, and as a matter of fact I had. I had the security of a family of adults who were at my beck and call and seemed to be doing everything for me always, and always with the attitude that I was worth doing it for. I was brought up like a crown prince, not materially, but spiritually.”
As his grandmother tucked him in at night, she reminded him to keep his legs straight so he would grow tall. When he had a cold, she rubbed goose fat on his chest. She made sure he knew the alphabet and rudimentary math before he started school. “I quickly amassed a large vocabulary for my age,” Oscar wrote, adding, “Now I have a very small vocabulary for my age.” His mother, Allie, was equally protective. She promptly returned the red wagon she got him for his fourth birthday after the boy fell off it.
Oscar knew enough to sense that the outside world might not think as highly of him as did his mother and her parents. He wrote that as a boy he was never certain if his confidence was real: “I somehow always sensed that things were too good at home, and that things would be tougher outside, and I was always steeled to meet more resistance outside. I knew I would have to work harder among strangers, and happily I worked harder. I might have run from the task. I didn’t and I can’t tell you why.”
This work ethic, combined with a belief in his innate worth, stayed with him until the end.
From Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical by Laurie Winer. Published by Yale University Press in 2024. Reproduced with permission.
A founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Laurie Winer has been a theater critic for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
Surely but Slowly: NATO Adapts to Strategic Competition