A Conversation with Richard Rodgers

Arnold Michaelis (1916–97) was an independent producer/documentarian working in New York from the late 1950s on. An executive with Columbia Records, he also taught at New York University and served as host-writer-producer of Music Magazine on WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times. In addition to many commercial radio and television programs, he produced such shows as CBS’s Invitation to Learning, Of Men and Books, For the Love of Music, and Adlai Stevenson Reports. He sought, as he put it, “to record for today and posterity, the flavor of the thinking and the essence of the ideas of the men and women whose lives will be studied by future generations.”

His broad interests allowed him to ask probing and intelligent questions of world leaders, politicians, athletes, writers, actors, and musicians. A few of his many interviews were with Bernard Baruch, Jack Benny, Norman Corwin, Indira Gandhi, Arthur Grumiaux, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Artur Rubinstein, and Bruno Walter. One of Michaelis’s signatures was interviewing such notables in their own homes, putting them at ease and allowing them to open up a bit more than they might otherwise do in a studio setting.

An avid and knowledgeable music lover, Michaelis interviewed Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1958 and also interviewed Rodgers alone in his home in 1961 for the television program Heritage, distributed by National Educational Television (NE T), transcribed here in its entirety. At the University of Georgia Libraries’ Media Archives, home to Arnold Michaelis’s archives, this interview exists on three reels of 16mm black-and-white film prints (parts 1, 2, and 4), and one three-quarter-inch videotape copy of film reel 3 which Michaelis believed was lost.¹

Winner of a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1962, Michaelis donated his archives to the University of Georgia Libraries—home of the Peabody Awards Archives—in 1995. The Libraries holds his papers, photographs, and approximately 75 cans of film, 900 reels of quarter-inch reel-to-reel audiotape, and 100 videotapes. We at the UGA Libraries’ Media Archives are indebted to the Michaelis family for their continued support of our mission and in remembering Arnold Michaelis and those he so ably interviewed.

Margaret Compton
Film Archivist,
University of Georgia Libraries

am: Dick, among the many extraordinary and incredible things that Oscar [Hammerstein] said and did in this world, one of the things that he had to say, which I know you’ll find of interest, is that only three times in the course of theatrical history had there been a permanent arrangement among an author and composer. And the three cases he cited were Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hart, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. That’s a pretty unique concept of collaboration.

rr: Uh, yes. It’s unique enough to be talked about. I’m in two of these . . .

am: [laughs] You’re the kingpin.

rr: . . . and there’s a great difference between my two collaborations and Gilbert and Sullivan’s.

am: In what respect?

rr: In this respect: I got on fine with both my partners. [laughs] And Gilbert and Sullivan used to correspond, as Oscar and I did, because he lived in Pennsylvania and I live in Connecticut. But this is geographical. It’s not emotional, it wasn’t professional. Gilbert and Sullivan loathed each other.

am: Well, I think their output is doubly significant because they did loathe each other; where you, with both Oscar and Larry [Hart], had an affinity—a different kind of affinity to be sure . . .

rr: Different, but nevertheless an affinity. We understood each other and worked very cozily together.

am: Well Dick, one aspect of your collaboration interests me, in the respect of Larry really being a—what we would call today a “way out” character. Larry was anything but what you would call . . .

rr: He was then . . .

am: He was then, too. Yes.

rr: Way out.

am: Whereas Oscar was diametrically opposite. Therefore, in thinking of your association with Larry, you took on the complexion of being a very sane, sober, quiet...