Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

Mary Rodgers is the daughter of Richard Rodgers, the composer who, with lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein, wrote music for some of the most enduring Broadway shows of the 20th Century. Mary, had her own career as a Broadway composer, best known for writing the score to Once Upon a Mattress. Later, (I didn’t know this) she wrote the novel Freaky Friday, a bestseller made into several movie versions by Disney. She ended her career serving on the Board for Julliard. She was married twice. She had six kids, including a third Broadway composer (I didn’t know this either) her son: Adam Guettel. (Jim and I just saw his show, Days of Wine and Roses, on Broadway last month, and loved it.) Given her father’s connections and her own show business career, she knew everyone. Add in her wit and irascible personality and her memoirs are a hoot.

Add in, also, Jesse Green. This is not a ghostwritten or an “as told to” memoir. Notice the “and” in the credit line on the title page. The book came about, which we don’t find out until the last chapter, because Jesse Green, theater critic for the New York Times, in 2004, asked to interview Mary and her husband Henry Guettel for a piece he was writing on their son Adam. They enjoyed meeting each other. A few years later, Mary called Jesse asking for his help with her memoirs. She had written a few chapters but they weren’t going well. Jesse saw the problem. Mary needed a collaborator. She was lifeless, solo, on the page, capturing none of the exciting raconteur she could be when she laid out her stories conversationally with a dialogue partner. So over the next several years Jesse met regularly with Mary. She told stories. He kept her going, kept track and wrote notes. And what emerged is a book mostly in the voice of Mary, but with two or three footnotes at the bottom of nearly every page where Jesse responds and piles on. The footnotes allow Jesse to annotate, fact check, and organize Mary’s memories without interrupting her flow and end up being half of the fun.

Mary died in 2014. Jesse took the next several years to shape the book and write the final chapter, including describing Mary’s final years and death, and the crazy disposition of her ashes in the planters in front of Joe Allen‘s. Shy was published in 2022.

Mary wrote a lot more music than I was aware of. She wrote children’s songs. She wrote music for a puppet show, which was her first appearance on Broadway, actually. She wrote music for The Mad Show, a review sponsored by and in the spirit of Mad magazine which I knew about from a song that Stephen Sondheim contributed called, “The Boy From.” Mary met Stephen Sondheim when they were both in their teens because he was connected to Oscar Hammerstein and she was connected, obviously, to her father. Sondheim makes regular appearances as a good friend and musical-writing colleague. They even experimented with a sort of trial marriage when Mary was divorced from her first husband and not sure a smart, creative, woman with three kids pushing thirty would have much luck finding a second husband, and Steve was trying, on the advice of his psychiatrist, to not be gay. Steve had just bought a house in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan with the money he made writing the lyrics for Gypsy. Mary never moved in but she often spent uncomfortable nights sharing an incompatible bed until they realized that marriage required more than just two mutually admiring friends. Later, when Mary was married a second time, Steve would interview her for research on the subject of marriage for his musical, Company.

The Broadway stuff is fun, and takes up the bulk of the book. The famous names she rubs shoulders with, hunkers down with, mentions in passing, or gossips about, are awfully fun. But a lot of the story is about her relationships with her parents, and her two marriages, and her children. Motherhood is its own kind of career, Mary’s fourth if you’re keeping track, and she loved being a mother. She is unsparing in her praise and also her criticisms, of herself and others, and she knows where she fits in the spectrum of geniuses to hacks that surrounded her.

I could tell more stories but I encourage you to read the book yourself and let Mary and Jesse tell the stories. It’s a long book, 458 pages, but a quick read, and she lived fully for 83 years so there’s much to tell.