There’s Something About Mary

About three-quarters through her memoir, Mary Rodgers manages to distill the volume—and her life—into a single line.

“If I’d been only bad, I’d have been a monster … if I’d been only shy, I’d have been no one.”

Rodgers, who died in 2014, sprinkles a healthy dose of such quips in between the funny, outrageous, and heartbreaking stories that comprise Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers.

The eldest daughter of one half of the famed theatrical duo Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers is the kind of person who was born to write a memoir. Descended from Broadway royalty, she grew up determined to emerge from her father’s creative shadow and her mother’s judgmental glare. Shy takes the reader along for the journey, through various careers, numerous affairs, and revealing encounters with well-known figures.

Written “with copious annotations, contradictions, and interruptions” from New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, Shy is bound to take its place among the great memoirs. Theater fans will delight in gossipy digressions, but one need not be a musical fanatic to appreciate Rodgers’s revealing and captivating tale of art, parenthood, and life in mid-century America. Honest and breezy, Shy has something for everyone.

Rodgers’s memoir has a leg up on the competition from the beginning—literally. The early chapters of a memoir are usually bogged down with childhood laments and digressions on irrelevant people and places. Rodgers does engage in a bit of reminiscence and amateur Freudianism, but is saved by the fact that she had famous—and terrible—parents.

It has already been reported, in Todd S. Purdum’s 2018 biography Something Wonderful and elsewhere, that Richard Rodgers was a Grade A bastard. Still, Mary Rodgers manages to shed new light on the Sound of Music composer’s personal darkness, detailing his alcoholism (“a bottle of vodka a day. Sixteen Scotch-and-sodas after dinner”), his philandering, and his prejudice, sometimes at the same time: “During the entire civil rights movement, I don’t remember him speaking up for Black people, though he loved sleeping with them.”

Rodgers is similarly, if not more, brutal with her mother, Dorothy, an ice queen who frequently told a young Mary, “We love you, but we don’t like you.” But the book is largely focused on Rodgers’s relationship with her father: her attempts to make it as a composer without trading on the family name; her acknowledgment that most of her career would not be possible