This recent culture feature on National Public Radio made . I didn" hear any "tell-all"our Mesazona blogger take a walk on memory's lane back in time to Mary Roger's spacious apartment on Central Park West for seated dinner parties with a chef-colleague.
I didn't hear or listen to any "tell-all things". Mary was a gracious and generous hostess with some very nice friends all around the table in the dining room.
✓
Published 8 years after her death, Mary Rodgers' memoir is a true tell-all book
Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green, co-authors of Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers
Courtesy of the Rodgers-Beaty-Guettel family; Earl Wilson/New York Times
Mary Rodgers was a songwriter, children's book author, philanthropist and — perhaps most famously — the daughter of theatrical legend Richard Rodgers. Though she died in 2014, her memoirs were published on Tuesday. Titled Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, they're co-authored by New York Times theater critic Jesse Green.
The book, the product of hundreds of hours Green spent with Rodgers, has extensive, entertaining, even gossipy footnotes on just about every page. There's an asterisk after the very first word, "Daddy," and the note explains: "If you've read this far, you probably know that Daddy was Richard Rodgers (1902-1979): composer, womanizer, alcoholic, genius."
"What I wanted was her voice," Green explains, saying he didn't want to clog the narrative with a lot of descriptions of the people, places and shows Mary Rodgers was talking about. So, he came up with the idea of footnotes. "I felt if people are going to read this book, what would I want them to get is the experience of sitting in that room and listening t
When he was assigned to write a profile of Rodgers' son Adam Guettel, composer of Floyd Collins and The Light in the Piazza, Green met Mary and her second husband, Hank Guettel. It was his introduction to Rodgers' alarmingly outspoken ways. "Their behavior was not demure, because during that meeting, just about any provocation from me, any slight little question would result in torrents of shockingly honest answers," Green says, "the kind you never expect as a journalist or really even as a partygoer... At one point, she handed me a kind of a dossier of material for my use in the story that included the kinds of things you would probably normally burn!"
Green and Rodgers hit it off and, several years before her death, she asked him if he'd collaborate on her memoirs. And true to its subtitle, the book is filled with alarmingly outspoken stories about some of the most prominent figures from the golden age of musical theater – not just "Daddy," but his collaborators, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. And members of the next generation, too: Readers learn that Rodgers dated both director/producer Hal Prince and lyricist Sheldon Harnick. There are some acid descriptions of librettist Arthur Laurents, and snapshots of Stephen Sondheim through the years.
Read more. . . it's delicious
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