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TLS signed “Jerome,” one page, 7.25 x 10.5, personal letterhead imprinted with a line-drawing caricature, June 27, 1944. Letter to Oscar Hammerstein, contemplating the development of a musical about Marco Polo. In part: "Said goodbye to Howard Friday and suggested to him that we tie a string around the Don Byrne story again. I am so glad that your affection for this romance endures. I suppose something must be invented to bridge Marco's departure from Cathay to the Jane Cowl ghost in the glade. Of course we can't have the old Malachi yapping for fifteen or twenty solid minutes telling us what happened in the interim. But, old-fellow-me-lad, don't let's get one of those Tristan and Isolde sailing vessel scenes, static except for the groaning and writhing of the two lovers, with accompanying bedroom noises in the augmented orchestra.
Anyhow, we are certainly going to get together either west or east, preferably the latter, late this autumn. I say preferably because I think both Eva and I need the tonic of some good firm, solid eastern seafood.
Leave us skip lightly then over Little Neck clams and all my cousins and jump to La MacDonald. I am relieved by your sage analysis of Baby Doe, Jeannette MacDonald's lyric diction and ennunciation, Metropolitan wop chorus and all.
And your surmise is right on the button. It was merely tentative courtesy. My old world charm not- withstanding, I was brutal enough to tell her I loathed grand opera with all its fripperies, its outworn traditional creaking machinery, its recitative idiocy in short everything about it except the orchestra pit.
I don't know why either you or I should bother with the damn thing. The time that it would take to go through the mechanics of supplying music and lyrics wholesale for the Met could be more profitably devoted to fashioning the best musical play ever written, which Marco Polo might well be." In fine condition.
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