It was not in their nature-particularly not in Mary’s, having grown up in a repressed household.” What I got was Mary and her husband, Henry Guettel, oversharing about Adam and themselves. “I don’t know what I expected,” Green admits, “but it wasn’t what I got. When he first crossed paths with Rodgers, in 2003, Green was a working on a profile of Mary’s son, Adam Guettel, who was then making his first indelible mark in “the family business” musicalizing Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella The Light in the Piazza (which subsequently took the Tony for 2005’s Best Score).

I would say it amounts to one percent of the total of her life.” One reason she kept not being able to write it and finally asked me to help her was because she did want to maintain a tiny bit of privacy.

“As it happens, her memory was extraordinarily good, and I confirmed all of it much as she said it. “It’s not a history, but it needed to be checked, and that took a long time,” Green explains. Green’s goal, he says, was for the reader “to feel as if they were sitting in that living room with me, listening to Mary.” This is easier said than done, but a successful Rodgers-Green amalgam was reached-so successful you may think it is the only way a modern-day memoir should be written: Rodgers takes the upper berth of the page, telling her life story in her unflinching, unfiltered fashion, and Green takes the lower berth, footnoting his research of her stories. You And Me, or her children’s book Freaky Friday which she adapted into the 1976 Jodi Foster movie. Once Upon a Mattress was her Broadway hit, but children of the ‘70s may remember her songs for Free to Be. Rodgers was a songwriter herself, a novelist, and a screenwriter. “I wanted to preserve her voice as much as possible because she was such a delightful talker, so honest and funny.” “I spent hundreds of hours with her, laughing, and I wanted to duplicate that,” Green says. Loud and clear because, basically, the book (all 458 pages of it) is a version of the conversation that she had with Jesse Green, chief theater critic at The New York Times, off and on, for a decade-till her death in 2014 at the age of 83. It speaks volumes for her wit and her generosity-qualities that come over loud and clear in her posthumous memoir published recently by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, SHY: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers. “When your father writes Oklahoma! you can pay for dinner.” That was Mary Rodgers’ stock response whenever a dining companion reached for the tab.

Mary Rodgers (top left), Jesse Green (bottom left), and their conversation in book form (right) Courtesy of the Rodgers-Beaty-Guettel family (Rodgers) The New York Times/Earl Wilson (Green)

Freaky friday book mary rodgers