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Grand Tour. They have, in fact, made the grand tour of Hollywood—Warner Bros., Paramount, United Artists, MGM. This assortment of alliances comes from their disliking to sign for more than a one-picture contract. Of their six pictures they, like the public, vote Love Me Tonight, with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, the best. There pours out of them an old familiar tale—of a Hollywood cockeyed, imbecile, exciting, exasperating. The medium: marvelous. The methods: terrible. "Music," they insist, "must be written for the camera. People can't just stand around and sing songs." For Rodgers, the usual experience was to hand in a score and, when the picture was produced, to find the score either missing or massacred. Once they worked for 15 months at M-G-M., and turned out only five songs. Says Rodgers: "In New York we often write five songs in one week. In three weeks we did the entire score of I'd Rather Be Right."
According to Rodgers & Hart, Hollywood's trouble is stupidity, not malice. "And you can no more resent stupidity in a movie director than in an elevator boy." Headline boner where they were concerned came when, in the sheet music made for Mississippi, Swanee River was credited to "Rodgers & Hart." They differ concerning Hollywood's financial rewards. Hart believes they could make more money there than on Broadway, but prefers to forego it because he loves the theatre. Rodgers feels that a Hollywood income may be more certain but that only in the theatre can musicomedy writers really strike oil.
They have struck oil in the theatre often enough, but there have been a few spills. There was Betsy, the flop they did for Ziegfeld. "Ziegfeld should have been a movie producer. He didn't know the first thing about music, yet he constantly butted in on the scores." Ten Cents a Dance, the biggest plum they got out of another Ziegfeld show, Simple Simon, they "practically slipped in over Ziegfeld's head."
And there was Chee-Chee, the musicomedy made from Charles Pettit's witty, bawdy Son of the Grand Eunuch, which Lew Fields produced in 1928. Lew Fields's son Herb, who wrote the books of several of their early hits, was sold on the Son of the Grand Eunuch, talked Hart into liking it, the two of them talked Herb's father, all three talked Rodgers. Rodgers believes it had the best score he ever wrote, that what killed it was the idea itself: "You just can't talk about castration all evening. It's not only embarrassing, it's dull."