Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) by Mary Rodgers & Jesse Green

—Reviewed by Jan Farrington

Yes, I listened to NPR’s “teaser” for this book—and yes, I wanted to read about Mary Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim.

So sue me.

Turns out…but no, you’ll have to read Shy to get the skinny. (Or are we calling it the “tea”?) And anyway, even without the Sondheim story I’d have snatched this book off the shelf in a New York 42nd Street minute. What a life!

Mary Rodgers, daughter of Broadway legend Richard (Pal Joey, Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I—et cetera, et cetera), and mother of another Broadway composer, Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, Light in the Piazza) will try for a moment to tell you she’s the squashed little “filler” in this sandwich of family genius. But then the real Mary comes out: “What am I, bologna?” she snorts.

You might not know (and this book will fix it) that Mary Rodgers was the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress (1959), eternally onstage at high schools and community theaters. (The Off-Broadway original made Carol Burnett a star.) She wrote the popular teen novel Freaky Friday (which became a movie in 1976, and a few times after). She wrote a string of books and songs for young people, including some for the landmark children’s album Free to Be…You and Me. At a time when well-off young wives stayed home, she kept plugging away at the edges of show-biz: writing songs for kids’ producer Little Golden Records (like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, featuring Bing Crosby); jingles for TV; songs for a musical version of Mad Magazine, The Mad Show (1966) that had a decent run in New York. She worked with Leonard Bernstein for years on his series of televised Young People’s Concerts.

She had a bunch of kids, two husbands, amazing friends (famous and not), plus some interesting “other” men in her life. We’ll let Mary tell about that. She once borrowed a friend’s apartment so she could work for a few house in a place where “five people weren’t asking me for lunch.” Much later, she followed her interests into work for some important educational institutions: notably, she served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Juilliard School from 1994-2001. At convocations, Green notes, the students liked to greet her with chants of: “May-REE, May-REE!”

In the last years of her long life—Rodgers died in 2014 at age 83—this remarkable woman worked with New York Times chief theater critic Jesse Green on a dictated memoir. “For as long as it took to cover her entire life in conversations, we’d meet and gab while I typed and prodded,” says Green. “Eventually, when we had enough, we’d use the typescript as raw material.” Over the past few years, Green has taken time to check stories and memories, add tons of funny, fascinating footnotes at the bottom of pages—and as he says, be sure Mary’s own “voice” came through loud and clear.

It does. This is an open, blunt, let-it-fly book, but it isn’t mean or angry. Her “Daddy” wasn’t the type to give hugs or piggyback rides—but Mary says she always felt he sent love to her through his music. “Mummy” was obsessed with looks and status, and clearly disappointed by her pudgy scamp of a daughter. But Mary says while both parents were “horrible” at little things, they always came through for her on the big stuff.

Her chilly childhood made Mary insecure and timid—but that wasn’t her nature. Good thing there were lots (and lots) of theater people around, full of life and talent and noise, to draw her into the spotlight.

The comparison is too easy: like her own Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress, Mary Rodgers may try to tell us she’s “Shy”—but we aren’t buying it. You can see her backbone and humor even in this remembered exchange, with the Manhattan “shrink” her mother sent her to at age eleven:

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Because I don’t get along with my mother.”

“That’s right.”

“So why isn’t she here?”

That stopped him for a moment. “That’s a very good question.”