It was a lot for a librettist to absorb, and with his usual meticulous attention to detail and his strong eye for plot and character, Hammerstein went through Michener’s book, story by story, underlining bits of dialogue, making red grease-pencil check marks in the margins, suggesting at one point that Cable, who in the book never meets Nellie Forbush, could have a scene telling her all about Bloody Mary’s improbable proposal. There is Ensign Bill Harbison, a snappy, ambitious, married officer from Albuquerque who takes a shine to a navy nurse from Arkansas, Nellie Forbush, loses his head and tries to rape her. There is Lieutenant Bus Adams, an American bomber pilot who is shot down and whose rescue mission costs the American taxpayers $600,000-”but it’s worth every cent of the money,” Michener’s narrator notes, “if you happen to be that pilot.” There is Luther Billis, a tanned, tattooed Seabee from the navy’s construction battalion, who is obsessed with a ritual ceremony on a neighboring island involving a native boar’s tooth. He figures in “The Cave,” one of the most dramatic stories in the collection, about a group of soldiers stationed on a small island, who are trying to keep the Japanese from retaking Guadalcanal. There is Tony Fry, a swashbuckling American officer with a penchant for acting outside the regular chain of command. Michener summons up a gallery of other compelling characters. Bloody Mary’s response as Cable heads off to duty in “Operation Alligator,” a major assault on a Japanese-held island, is unsparing, “Lieutenant one bullshit goddam fool!” But despite his deep love for the girl, he knows he can never marry her or take her home to his family in Philadelphia. With Mary playing an uncomfortable combination of matchmaker and procurer, Cable is drawn again and again to the mystic island. Making the acquaintance of handsome, young Lieutenant Joe Cable, she spirits him to the nearby island of Bali-ha’i, where the French planters have sequestered their daughters for the war, and where he promptly falls for Mary’s own lovely daughter, Liat. slang-who features prominently in “Fo’ Dolla,” the longest story in the book. Indeed, it is just such a woman, “Bloody Mary”-a wily, betel-nut-chewing entrepreneur and master of pidgin G.I. Telling about the old Tonkinese woman who used to sell human heads. What the steaming Hebrides were like and first thing you know I’m Talk about the South Pacific, people intervene. Jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. I wish I could tell you about the sweating Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the The infinite specks ofĬoral we called islands. But Oscar Hammerstein would somehow have to distill it all into a coherent libretto that could hold an audience for two and a half hours. Michener’s wartime service in the Pacific had left him with a notebook full of vivid impressions and memorable characters. The New York Times had pronounced it “truly one of the most remarkable books” to come out of World War II, and its appeal lay in its granularity-in its depiction of American types interacting with South Sea Island originals-more than in its inherent drama. Tales of the South Pacific was a neither-fish-nor-fowl creation-not a standard novel with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather an accumulation of atmospheric character sketches. What they had in front of them now was Michener’s first book. “They could make a great musical out of three pages of the Bronx telephone directory.” Rodgers and Hammerstein, the most successful songwriting team on Broadway, were angry because they’d just had their first flop, Allegro. “Those fellows are so mad,” James Michener would remember thinking about Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Mary Martin (center, in blue shorts) and cast members in 1949.
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