Missing ‘My Fair Lady’ songs resurface, along with memories

By Michael Riedel

Modal Trigger

Julie Andrews and Robert Coote in 1956's "My Fair Lady" at the Mark Hellinger Teatre. Rex Harrison is visible in the shadows at the rear center, as he leans against a pole and takes notes. Photo: Getty Images

Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at England’s University of Sheffield, was researching “My Fair Lady” at the Library of Congress in 2008 when he came across 15 boxes of material no one had seen in 50 years.

The boxes contained six songs and a seven-minute ballet cut from the show after its Feb. 4, 1956, preview at Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Conn.

Those Lerner and Loewe songs were performed in a concert in Sheffield Monday night — for the first time since Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and the rest of the cast sang them in the original production.

My friend Richard Seff, Andrews’ agent at the time, attended that first preview in New Haven. He remembers two of the cut songs, the ballet and just about everything else that happened that night.

“I was working for David Hocker, who was Rex’s agent,” Seff says. “My job was to look after Julie. We got a frantic call from the manager of the theater who said, ‘Get your ass up here. Harrison doesn’t want to go on tonight, and you have to convince him that he must.’ ”

During a tech rehearsal the day before, Harrison had an attack of nerves: He’d never done a musical before, and after rehearsing only with a pianist, he couldn’t follow the orchestra.

“Obviously, we’ll have to cancel the first preview,” he said. Everybody agreed, and he went off to bed.

The manager of the theater, however, objected. The performance was sold out, and he wasn’t going to cancel it.

Hocker and Seff boarded the train at Grand Central. It was beginning to snow. By the time they arrived in New Haven, the city was covered in four feet of snow.

The manager told them: “I cannot tell my audience, who have come out in a blizzard, to go home. If Harrison doesn’t go on, I’ll make sure everybody right up to Walter Winchell knows he’s got stage fright!”

Hocker went into Harrison’s dressing room to relay the threat. “I want someone up here representing me, not them!” Harrison yelled. But he agreed to perform, provided director Moss Hart would speak first, reminding the audience that this was the first preview.

The audience tensed the moment Hart came onstage. But he immediately calmed them down by saying, “Mr. Harrison and Miss Andrews have never been in better health.” The audience applauded. Then, Hart told them there were technical problems: “Our revolving stages are behaving very badly. But you’re all pros, and you’ve all seen early previews.” (“Not a word of it was true,” Seff says, “but [Hart] was brilliant.”)

THE CURTAIN WENT UP AT 8:30, AND THERE WASN’T A SINGLE TECHNICAL GLITCH. BUT THE CURTAIN DIDN’T COME DOWN UNTIL FIVE MINUTES BEFORE 1 IN THE MORNING

The curtain went up at 8:30, and there wasn’t a single technical glitch. But the curtain didn’t come down until five minutes before 1 in the morning.

“It was wonderful, and Rex and Julie were wonderful, but it was ridiculously long,” Seff says.

After the performance, Hocker and Seff took Harrison to a diner, which was open late. Harrison wanted something that wasn’t on the menu. He told the waitress, “I would like my eggs lightly poached, really only two minutes, nothing more.”

The waitress replied: “Mr. Harrison, I’ve been working all day. I don’t have time for this. I’m afraid you’ll have to have your eggs the way they are on the menu.”

Harrison had them scrambled.

The next day, Hart began to cut the show. He threw out the ballet and the songs “Come to the Ball” and “Say a Prayer for Me.” A reworked version of “Say a Prayer for Me” later wound up in the 1958 movie “Gigi.”

Nothing escaped Hart’s eye. When Andrews entered at the top of the stairs in a ball gown, a third of the audience couldn’t see her because a railing was in the way. Hart had a new staircase built overnight, and at the next performance, the entire audience applauded her entrance.

As for Harrison, his performance became legendary. A year into the Broadway run, after the cast recording had sold millions, Seff went backstage to say hello.

“Gee, Mr. Harrison, it’s wonderful how you vary your performance from the record,” he said.

Harrison erupted. “What are you talking about? Do you mean they’re comparing me to what they hear on the record? They want me to do it the same way every night?”

“I meant it as a compliment,” Seff says. “But it upset him. Dear Rex. He was impossible.”