More About Lucy and Desi

Back in September, I wrote a post here I called "Thoughts About Labor Unions."

Among the thoughts I shared at the time was one about the origin of "I Love Lucy," and a story indicating that those negotiations might be considered an example of collective bargaining in a microcosm.  I know more about that story now then I did in September, so I'd like to fill that in a bit.

I wrote in Septrember that when a certain CBS bigwig saw the pilot, his first reaction was: "Keep the redhead, but ditch the Cuban."

Actually, that line didn't come from any CBS exec, but from a consultant to whom CBS had turned.

Television was new in 1951, and nobody really understood what would work in this strange medium and what wouldn't.  The executives should be given credit for "knowing that they didn't know," the Socratic virtue.  They had all acquired their prominence within a radio-based corporation, after all.

Who was the consultant?  Turns out it was one-half of the phenomenal Broadway team that was re-making the whole idea of a musical at around this time:  it was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein.   I can imagine the thinkig of the network bigwigs as they called him in.  Oscar knows theatre.  Theatre is a visual medium.  This new box is visual, too.  Must be pretty much the same.  (It isn't, but I'll leave that aside for now.)

What I really want to set straight is this:  In September, when I didn't know who I was talking about, I wrote: Maybe the CBS exec was worried about the public acceptance of some televised "miscegenation," as they called such things back then.

Knowing that it was Oscar Hammerstein, the author to the lyrics to "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" and the other songs in "South Pacific," a musical with a mixed-race marriage at its heart, I have to apologize for that.  I was way wrong.  

Just to atone to his spirit, here are those lyrics:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

Lyrics From Spelling Bee

In the musical "Spelling Bee," each major character gets one big character-establishing song. For Olive Ostrowsky, that song is "The 'I Love You' Song". This title is a neat little irony in itself, because Broadway's audiences know that the legends, Rodgers and Hammerstein, made a point of never writing a song for any show that contained the phrase "I love you." They obsessed over how to avoid it.

The title is ironic in another sense, internal to this show, because Olive has just been asked to spell the word "chimerical," a word meaning fastastic or unrealistic. At this point in the play, it's becoming clear to the audience that Olive has in effect been deserted by both her parents -- geographically by Mom, and psychologically by Dad. But she longs to hear "I love you" from them, and so she does. In the course of preparing to spell the word "chimerical."

Olive's Mom is living in India now. In her fantasy, Mom appears, and sings, "We always knew you were a winner/ we saw it when you smiled."

Later, Olive expresses her own frustrations about her mother to the fantasy stand-in.

"When are you returning?
I know we agreed
Tell me what you’re learning
Ma, I had forgot, this neeeed."

To what did Olive and her Mom 'agree'? That Olive wouldn't ask when she was returning? Or that Mom would explain what she has learned, when she did? Does the line "I know we agreed" look forward or backward within that stanza?

We can, of course, hear it either way or both ways. It's a wonderful song.