Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

By Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green.

This one sounded like fun from the getgo. Mary is the daughter of famous musical writer Richard Rodgers--and her parents were real lulus to deal with growing up. Mary went into the same business for the most part, writing musicals/songs herself, "Once Upon A Mattress" being the most famous of them as far as I can tell ("Some people have a medley of their hits;  I have a memory of one."). After her musical-writing career started to go to crap, she switched to writing children's and young adult books and had a few hits with the "Freaky Friday" series. Mary is VERY frank and honest about probably almost everything she experienced (except whatever went down with Arthur Laurents, which will remain a mystery apparently), including marrying a gay abusive guy in her first marriage and the sleeping around she did in between husbands one and two, and the "trial marriage" she had with Stephen Sondheim (Vulture link), who she was VERY close with but sexually incompatible with, so that never went anywhere. She describes herself as shy, but one wonders.

She wasn't great at writing her own memoirs, so what happened was that she partnered with Jesse Green to dictate interesting stories from her life and have him turn them into a book, which is about how it reads (it's published posthumously in her case). Jesse's primary obvious contribution to the book is to put footnotes explaining who Mary's talking to (for those who don't know every famous theater person that Mary does) and occasionally making his own personal asides regarding the action or Mary herself. 

Jesse notes in his afterword that he'd expected that the stories in the book might not be true or memories might be off--but "research bore out pretty much everything she told me, no matter how outre, or perhaps even more so the more outre it was. What research did not bear out I corrected." What areas he couldn't verify, "my aim has been to say: This is how Mary saw it. Or really, with one more wrinkle: This is how I saw her see it." Her writing notes: "Make it funnier. Make it meaner." Why? "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." He notes that the stories are often in her exact words, "albeit cherry-picked from multiple conversations separated by months. When the words are not hers, they are, at her suggestion, my best ventriloquism of them; she encouraged me to think of "Mary" as a fictional character of my own devising, but one who happened to have lived within a true, if unusual, story."

Quotes from Mary:

• "...ask my kids who taught them all the bad words. I told them they could say fuck, shit, and cunt to me all they liked, but maybe not so much to an Episcopalian priest. The trick children need to learn is how to determine the right context."
• "Please excuse the loopy way I tell stories, one hooking into the next until it's hard to find the way back."
• "I don't go in for cheap psychology, only the expensive kind, but some things are just too true, too solid state, to ignore. Everyone becomes a kind of monster of what they failed to get." 
• "I know you're supposed to go in order, but chronology is no fun. It doesn't explain much, either. In real life it sometimes happens that effects come before causes--before causes are uncovered or understood, at least. And sometimes things string together across decades so tightly you'd think they had happened together."
• "Let's face it, most of childhood is the most boring prison sentence in the world, and you can't get paroled. Is it a surprise that I became, as the nursery rhyme says of me, quite contrary?"
• Mary says her parents weren't ALL bad and that there's "pushmi-pullyu" stuff going on for awhile. "They did love me, even if (as I learned) they didn't like me. I guess I could say the same about my feelings for them."... "Straight through my life, everywhere you look, they were horrible, especially my mother, about little things, but important things they were wonderful about. The trouble is, and this is key, it doesn't even out. Even in my admittedly rather eventful life, there weren't as many big things as little." 
• Why Mary got (very spontaneously) engaged to her first husband: "I didn't like the pickle I was in, a pickle in which every available boy was dull and every exciting boy was forbidden."
• "I can only say I was desperate to have some kind of life that felt like my own. I didn't yet understand how hitching your horse's ass to someone else's wagon was just another kind of servitude, worse even than being a  child. I just wanted to start." 
• "Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made."
• "Why are so many men so awful? Or at least the one who came flocking to me?"  
• Mary recounts a story in which an African-American woman auditioned for a show and was rejected for guess why. The workaround devised for this shittiness was to find a makeup artist to made her up as white and then she auditioned again. THEN she got the part. I'm not sure from reading this if she had to be made up as white to do the role all the time (I hope not, it isn't clarified) but I guess it proved their point to get around the jerk who claimed that her "features" would stick out?
• "Joe Bova, whom we hired as Prince Dauntless, was a moron. Playing opposite him, Carol never knew from one night to the next what the arrogant, undisciplined little shit was going to do. He was worth it, though, if only because he was the instigation for one of the most famous ripostes in theater history. At one point he stopped a rehearsal to ask, as he made a cross that Albert had blocked, "What's my motivation?" Abbott snapped back, "Your paycheck." 
• On her various hookups: "Oh, don't look at me that way. Now everyone hooks up on aps, and Instagrams their hickeys....In a way, I was writing my obit: "a woman who tried everything." I damn well didn't want anyone else writing it for me." 
• Re: Sondheim: "He wasn't in love with me, certainly, and I wasn't really physically attracted to him. I just loved him, thoroughly enough for nothing else to matter. Do you not believe in that? Have you never seen Carousel?"
• "No one can say I didn't do everything I could, opening every door and flying through it even if I immediately fell into a pit or just smacked my face on another door."
• Upon meeting Carson McCullers: "She was a mess, the ugliest thing I'd ever seen, with scrambled teeth and short, greasy hair. When we arrived, she was lying in bed drinking Maker's Mark, with an enema bag festooned over a shower rod in full view. Whether she was drunk or not, she certainly wasn't interested in what I had to say about our approach in the project. All she wanted to do was talk about the party that the play's producers had thrown after the 1950 Broadway opening, and ask, like a demented child, whether we'd be having a party as nice as that one. I said, "Well, first we have to write the musical," but she kept on asking about the food and liquor."
• "I also told Ursula and Charlotte--in that braying way I have--that I was, despite all appearances, shy. That the shyness is what restrained the badness, except when it didn't. That if I'd only been bad, I'd have been a monster. That if I'd been only shy, I'd have been no one. I didn't know at the time that I'd struck a chord with Ursula, whose motto at Harper was "good books for bad children." All she said then was, "Write about that." 
• "Be careful of hits! They are nicer, of course, than bombs, but require so much more aftercare." 
• "It's a mortifying genre, this self-hagiography humbly disguised as an "and then I wrote" memoir. And now we come to the most mortifying part of it." I note that this is referring to her writing "Freaky Friday: The Movie," where other people added in plot elements she hated. "Everything I swore not to let happen in writing a movie, all the sexism and sitcommery, happened."
• "I wound up talking to Cosby for four hours about the "meaning" of his role. Boy, did he have theories. But so did I: that he was the most arrogant, pompous pain in the ass I'd ever met."
• On her mother again: "She was amazing and awful. It's just that her good qualities had little to do with parenting and her bad ones certainly did."
• "I always thought I'd be a better sport about my own demise." 
• "So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
• Mary's farewell words to Jesse at their last session: "You have to face facts. This may be the last time we see each other. You cry so easily! I hoped we would finish this together, but you know what to do. Just please don't make it dull like Mommy's and Daddy's. Include everything, except what we can't. Otherwise, what's the point? We all fuck up and eventually putrefy, but at least I had fun. And didn't you, too?"

Quotes from Jesse:

• "In case you are wondering, Mary loved the idea of being annotated but, as was the case with the rest of the book, didn't love the actual writing. What you are reading here in the margins, and sometimes outside the margins, too, is therefore a compound of hers, mine, and ours."
• "...the time in third grade that Mary burst into French class, saying "I have something very important to announce," and then recited, "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice." The school called Dorothy, who said, "You know she comes from a family where people write lyrics all the time."
• Mary, her sister Linda, and Mary's daughter Nina all wore the same wedding dress and got divorced. Mary offered it to a son's fiancee, and then thought better of it. "Actually, all the marriages from that gown were a disaster. You can't have it." 
• Jesse's most personal footnote: "No, Mary, I don't, and I'm going to come out of this footnote closet to say so. You're too hard on yourself, or hard on yourself for the wrong things." I won't type up everything he said about how women were still being raised to get married, and how people wanted her to be demure, such as her parents. "But "demure" -shy!--is something a woman of ambition cannot afford to be. To be demure is to accept the idea that one's gifts are not for opening. What kind of heroine would you be if you complied?" 
• "Mary was right about two things: I did have fun and I did not see her again." 
• "Why should anyone want to hear about the daddy (and mummy) issues of a second-drawer composer and children's book author whose greatest contribution to art, she said, was being a midwife to it?"

I dunno, I'd barely heard of Mary Rodgers (just Freaky Friday/A Billion For Boris) before this, and once I started seeing reviews of this book, I insisted on ordering it immediately, and from Amazon because I couldn't get it from any local bookstores for some reason. So I thought it was very cool :) 

Anyway, I really enjoyed it and it was fun to read. Four stars--

No, wait, let me tell you something: I'm writing this after having called in sick from work today so I could just go back to bed. I'm in shows for one musical on weekends and started another on weeknights and have had pretty much no downtime except for meals and in between scenes of the one show for a few weeks, which is where this got read. I have three books I need to write very long, in-depth reviews for and only about an afternoon (once I got out of bed/showered/laundry/ate/cleaned up a month's worth of possible outfits that are on the floor by the closet) to do them in, and I won't get them all done, for sure. I apologize to all the Seanan McGuire fans in particular because "Be The Serpent" is fucking amazing and I seriously don't have the time to write it all up yet for a review or to update the fan blog. I started this review, looked at all the bookmarks I had of stuff to mention, and thought, "No, I need to write a review skimming all this stuff, I am too tired and don't have the time." And yet I have spent most of THREE DAMN HOURS writing down all these notes, because the book is that good. I had to take the damn time I don't have to do it. So, read this if you are a theater person, for sure.