Beyond “Freaky Friday”: An Appreciation of Mary Rodgers
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Sarah Larson Cressida Leyshon Jennifer Homans Haruki Murakami Tessa Hadley Condé Nast
Mary Rodgers Guettel, who died at the end of June, was not a household name like her father, the composer Richard Rodgers, but she had legions of …
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The New Yorker
Mary Rodgers Guettel, who died at the end of June, was not a household name like her father, the composer Richard Rodgers, but she had legions of fans—among them her lifelong friend Stephen Sondheim; Leonard Bernstein; the legendary children’s-book editor Ursula Nordstrom; Juilliard students, who chanted her name affectionately when she addressed them, as the chair of the school’s board in recent years; and a great many children. Rodgers published “Freaky Friday,” her freewheeling mother-daughter body-switch novel, in 1972, and followed it with two enjoyable sequels, “A Billion for Boris” and “Summer Switch.”

If you were one of those smitten kids, as I was, you might be a bigger Mary Rodgers fan than you even realized. Rodgers wrote for Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert series, which taught so many of us about classical music; she composed two terrific, eerie songs (“Girl Land” and “William’s Doll”) on the album “Free to Be You and Me,” which everybody in those days knew by heart; she wrote the lyrics to the “Captain Kangaroo” theme; and she wrote the music for that whimsical staple of high-school theatricals “Once Upon a Mattress,” the musical riff on “The Princess and Pea” (which, when it débuted on Broadway, launched the career of Carol Burnett). Playfulness, intelligence, and empathy characterized her work, especially the books. “Freaky Friday,” in its lessons about generosity and mutual understanding, was deeply reassuring. Though Richard Rodgers created incredible musical beauty—dozens of the most wonderful songs in the American Songbook—we learned a decade ago, when new biographies came out, that he lived under a dark cloud, which rained on everybody around him. Mary Rodgers created joy in her work and in her life.

Mary Rodgers was born in 1931, the year that Rodgers and Hart’s musical “America’s Sweetheart” opened on Broadway. When she was twelve, “Oklahoma!,” her father’s first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein, opened; “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “The Sound of Music,” and others soon followed. While Richard Rodgers was cheering America up through the Depression, the Second World War, and beyond, writing songs such as “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and “My Favorite Things,” he was depressed, alcoholic, solitary, despite being a married father of two. He hid liquor; he had one-night stands; he composed alone, while Hammerstein wrote alone, at his farm in Pennsylvania. As a Times Magazine piece put it in 2003, “Even Rodgers’s piano seemed desperate to escape: according to his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel … it flew from under his importunate fingers as he sat there composing during a California earthquake.” In “Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds,” a PBS documentary, Mary says, “I don’t think anyone really knew who he really was. I don’t think he knew. He was just all locked up in there, grinding out gorgeous stuff.” Despite this, Frank Rich, in a 2001 Times interview with Mary Rodgers and her sister, Linda Rodgers Emory, wrote that he heard in the sisters’ recollections not anger but a wistful desire to “make whole their relationship with a father whom they admire but never knew”:

I hear an echo of “Carousel”—Rodgers’s favorite show of his career, and by far his darkest—in which the hero, Billy Bigelow, fantasizes about having a son but instead fathers a desperately unhappy daughter who is born after his suicide. “Carousel,” which opened on Broadway when she was 14, is Mary Rodgers’s favorite show of her father’s as well. “I think for me it has to do with the father and daughter,” she says. “I’m not an easy crier, but there’s something about redemption between parents and kids and forgiveness that always makes me cry.”

“Freaky Friday,” in all its rebellious silliness, is another form of redemption between parents and kids. Mary met Ursula Nordstrom, whose motto was “good books for bad children,” through Sondheim, and they hit it off right away. (It was not the first such act of serendipity in the friendship with Sondheim: in 1949, at the opening of “South Pacific,” Mary Rodgers introduced him to his future collaborator Harold Prince; in 1957, at the opening of “West Side Story,” Sondheim introduced her to Bernstein, who hired her to write for his series.) Nordstrom had by then edited “Stuart Little,” “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Harriet the Spy,” “The Giving Tree,” and other ingenious books that treated young readers as real people: thoughtful individuals, possessed of a spirit of fun, who were capable of appreciating dark, strange material that adults might not approve of. (My friend’s mother banned “Stuart Little” from her household because she was repulsed by the idea of a woman giving birth to a mouse.) During their first meeting, Rodgers talked about all the bad things she’d done as a child, which resulted in her first book, “The Rotten Book,” about a boy who does a bookful of rotten things and decides to be good. Then came “Freaky Friday.” Nordstrom encouraged her to have fun with it, and she did.

“Freaky Friday” is a portrait of familial love disguised as a goofball romp. Its heroine, Annabel Andrews, is a messy, funny, grumpy thirteen-year-old Manhattan kid who wants to do things her own way, without her mother telling her what to do; one morning she wakes up having turned into her. “I had on my mother’s nightgown, and a ring on my left hand, and lumps and pins all over my head. ‘I think that must be the rollers,’ I said to myself, ‘and if I have my mother’s hair, I probably have her face, too.’ ” Annabel has to navigate the day as her mother, which she does gleefully, in an elegant velvet pants suit, eating macaroni for breakfast.

Annabel adjusts well to her new situation, which she considers her mother’s doing: “I was a little surprised of course, but mostly I just felt it was fantastically considerate of her. And imaginative. Instead of punishing me for rudeness, or crying phony tears like some mothers I know, she was just going to let me find out for myself. I could hardly wait.” By the end, after a few disasters, she has come to empathize with her mother; she realizes that she actually loves her little brother, whom she calls Ape Face; she manages to charm, through kindness and by proxy, Boris, the handsome fourteen-year-old upstairs, who resents Annabel for splitting his head open with a toy shovel in childhood; and she understands that there are adult problems, like real responsibility, that she’s glad not to have to worry about. Meanwhile, her mother, in Annabel’s body, has gone out and cared for it as a mother would like to: tidy haircut, smart new clothes, braces removed. At the height of a few disasters, Annabel cries out for her mommy, and suddenly all is made right: there she is, in the correct body, and Annabel, back to her true self, is sobbing into her mother’s lap. After they’ve sorted out their misunderstandings, Annabel has a realization: she is beautiful, and her mother has helped her see that. “I looked over at Ma. She had the faintest pleased smile on her lips. And she gave me the faintest small nod.” ” ‘I am the beautiful chick!’ ” Annabel says.

“ ‘Yes, my darling, you are indeed,’ ” her mother says. Annabel embraces her mother and cries again. “Ma’s lap is warm, and few more tears won’t harm the pants suit,” she writes.

Rodgers was a mother of five when she wrote “Freaky Friday” and its sequels. She dedicated “Summer Switch”—in which Ape Face, in the body of his dad, has to fly to Los Angeles and be a film executive while his dad, in the body of a thirteen-year-old, is indignantly shipped off to camp—to her husband, Henry Guettel, a film executive, and her oldest son, Tod. Rodgers and Guettel’s son Adam showed musical talent at a young age, and he grew up to be a composer. In a neat trick worthy of one of her parent-child-generosity novels, Rodgers gave her son his most successful idea: adapting Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella “The Light in the Piazza.” She’d suggested it to Richard Rodgers forty years earlier, but he’d passed it up; Guettel wrote a beautiful score and lyrics, and his 2005 Broadway production won six Tony Awards. As John Lahr wrote in this magazine, “Guettel’s tunes are richly textured and warmly atmospheric; like the Tuscan light of Spencer’s story, they create ‘the sense that everything is clear and visible, that nothing is withheld.’ ” After Mary Rodgers died, at home after an illness, at the end of June, Adam Guettel tweeted, “Here’s to mom.”

Above: Cover by Edward Gorey, 1972.