‘Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers’
By Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

While I was privileged to meet Mary Rodgers a few times, for me to claim that we were friends would be stretching it. I did have one cute and memorable experience with her, though, and I will share the details below.

For those who don’t know, Rodgers (1931-2014) was a composer, a songwriter, an author of fiction and nonfiction for both young readers and adults, an educator, a wife (twice) and a mother (of five now adults who are still with us), a major philanthropist, and lots of other credentials and occupations one could list here.  

It seemed like she did everything one could do in the worlds of theater, publishing, and the arts, except write her memoir. Finally, nearly 10 years after her death at 83, it has arrived.

The Mary Rodgers I knew frequently described herself as a conduit between generations, a reference to her famous son, Adam Guettel, the Tony-winning musical theater composer, and to her even more famous father, Richard Rodgers, the legendary Broadway composer, producer, and all-around icon of American culture. 

Rodgers wrote the book with Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for the New York Times. Even the title hints at her multi-layered personality, “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers.”  

“Shy” is a reference to what might be the most famous song from her most successful work, the 1959 Broadway musical hit “Once Upon a Mattress.” Yet the discrepancy between describing herself as “shy” and referring to the autobiography as “alarmingly outspoken” is not only accurate, but underscores the willingness of both collaborators to embrace the apparent contradictions, and that’s what gives the book its strength.

Rodgers was primarily known for two major works in two very different fields, “Mattress” and “Freaky Friday”; both proved so popular that they spawned mini-franchises unto themselves. “Mattress,” which she describes as a “Borscht Belt retelling of ‘The Princess and the Pea,’” has been produced three times for television, making it a rival with her father’s “Cinderella,” and also was revived on Broadway in 1996. “Friday,” a now-classic tale of a mother and a teenage daughter switching bodies and lives, has launched even more sequels, adaptations, and spin-offs; I lost count after about six movie and TV versions, including a “comedy slasher” variation titled “Freaky” from 2020 that I decided to skip.

“Alarmingly outspoken” is indeed the phrase; Rodgers tells us bluntly that the autobiographies of both of her parents were at least partly works of fiction, or did not accurately reflect who they were and what they actually felt. Rodgers was determined to make her own memoir as candid and honest as possible, and doesn’t spare us any painful or inconvenient details: people she liked and didn’t (playwright Arthur Laurents does not fare well), her affairs, her genuine opinions on the work of friends and colleagues, and her largely but not entirely unrequited lifelong crush on “Steve” Sondheim.

Rodgers’s take on her parents is especially revealing; her father is, to put it mildly, a cold fish. There are some who will wonder how a man could be so distant to his children and yet be so overwhelmingly warm and emotional in his art. Clearly, what feelings Richard Rodgers had he saved for his music and his shows. 

We’ve already seen in various biographies that he was a serial womanizer and a serious drinker. His daughter’s portrayal is filled with moments such as when he puts her down by telling her, “You are so fat, that your arms swing out on either side like an ape.” Yet the memoir is most touching in those rare moments when Rodgers Senior acts like a genuine human being and does something nice — yes, it occasionally happens.

I never really got to know Mary Rodgers as well as I would have liked to, but after reading this book, she feels like a dear old friend. Mr. Green, who interviewed Rodgers extensively for two years prior to her death and spent almost all the time since then fashioning her words and memories into a book, is to be commended for capturing her unique and highly personal voice.

I promised you a quick anecdote: In the year 2000 or so, I had a girlfriend — at least I like to think that she was — who worked in Mary Rodgers’s office. I called her there at least once a day, and I knew that, sooner or later, Rodgers herself was bound to pick up.  When it finally happened, I was ready.

“Is Heather there?” I asked.

“No, she’s out at lunch.” 

“Oh, is this Mrs. Guettel?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, please tell her I’ll call back.” And then I started to sing “In a little while — just a little while.”

There was a very brief pause. I had genuinely caught her by surprise: Rodgers wasn’t expecting to hear some anonymous guy on the phone sing part of her classic love song from act one of “Mattress.”

She laughed and hung up.