Indeed, it is just such a woman, “Bloody Mary”—a wily, betel-nut-chewing entrepreneur and master of pidgin G.I. slang—who features prominently in “Fo’ Dolla,” the longest story in the book. Making the acquaintance of handsome, young Lieutenant Joe Cable, she spirits him to the nearby island of Bali-ha’i, where the French planters have sequestered their daughters for the war, and where he promptly falls for Mary’s own lovely daughter, Liat. With Mary playing an uncomfortable combination of matchmaker and procurer, Cable is drawn again and again to the mystic island. But despite his deep love for the girl, he knows he can never marry her or take her home to his family in Philadelphia. Bloody Mary’s response as Cable heads off to duty in “Operation Alligator,” a major assault on a Japanese-held island, is unsparing, “Lieutenant one bullshit goddam fool!”

Martin as Nellie Forbush. From Photofest.

Michener summons up a gallery of other compelling characters. There is Tony Fry, a swashbuckling American officer with a penchant for acting outside the regular chain of command. He figures in “The Cave,” one of the most dramatic stories in the collection, about a group of soldiers stationed on a small island, who are trying to keep the Japanese from retaking Guadalcanal. There is Lieutenant Bus Adams, an American bomber pilot who is shot down and whose rescue mission costs the American taxpayers $600,000—”but it’s worth every cent of the money,” Michener’s narrator notes, “if you happen to be that pilot.” There is Luther Billis, a tanned, tattooed Seabee from the navy’s construction battalion, who is obsessed with a ritual ceremony on a neighboring island involving a native boar’s tooth. There is Ensign Bill Harbison, a snappy, ambitious, married officer from Albuquerque who takes a shine to a navy nurse from Arkansas, Nellie Forbush, loses his head and tries to rape her.

And finally there is Emile De Becque, a middle-aged French plantation owner, who falls in love with Forbush and asks her to marry him, in a story called “Our Heroine.” Nellie agrees, until she learns that De Becque has eight mixed-race daughters with four different mothers, two Javanese, one Tonkinese, and one Polynesian. But in the end, Nellie overcomes her fears and prejudices, returns to Emile, and joins his daughters in singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”

It was a lot for a librettist to absorb, and with his usual meticulous attention to detail and his strong eye for plot and character, Hammerstein went through Michener’s book, story by story, underlining bits of dialogue, making red grease-pencil check marks in the margins, suggesting at one point that Cable, who in the book never meets Nellie Forbush, could have a scene telling her all about Bloody Mary’s improbable proposal. On a sheet of yellow legal paper, with page numbers from Michener’s book running down the left margin, he made notes of the characters’ names. Hammerstein’s work gained added impetus—and the whole project got a big shot in the arm—on April 27, 1948, with the surprise news that Tales of the South Pacific had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

For Hammerstein, part of the strong appeal of Michener’s book was its frank treatment of racial prejudice, which was anything but a theoretical issue for his own family. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already re-invented the Broadway musical with their pioneering Oklahoma! and Carousel, which integrated dance, story, and song as never before in the service of realistic drama. Now they were dealing head-on with a ripped-from-the-headlines subject that confronted the social changes and tensions sweeping America. Oscar’s wife, Dorothy, had a sister named Eleanor, nicknamed “Doodie,” who was married to Jerry Watanabe, the son of a British woman—whose father had once been an ambassador to Japan—and a Japanese man who was a director of the industrial-trading firm Mitsui and Company. Jerry had been raised to be the very model of a proper Englishman, educated at Cambridge, and was a fine tennis player and golfer. When the United States entered World War II, in 1941, he was working in the New York offices of Mitsui and, as a Japanese national, was interned at Ellis Island. Even after he was released, he could not find work, so Dorothy hired him to manage the accounts of her interior-decorating business. During Jerry’s internment, Doodie and their daughter, Jennifer, lived for a time with the Hammersteins at their farm, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and when Dorothy and her sister took the girl to be enrolled at the local school, they asked the principal for assurances that she would not face discrimination. “She’ll have to pay the price for her antecedents,” the man answered, and Jennifer went instead to a local Quaker school and then to the George School, in Newtown, Pennsylvania (which the Hammersteins’ son Jimmy also attended, along with a young family friend named Stephen Sondheim).

Hammerstein went through James Michener’s book, underlining bits of dialogue.

Hammerstein made a particular point of combating prejudice. He had volunteered his time for the Writers’ War Board, a privately organized group that worked in close coordination with a raft of government agencies to promote the Allied cause and combat racism and anti-Semitism on the home front. Hammerstein had never been one who could say no to what he saw as a good cause, and was one of the entertainment world’s most stalwart liberal voices. Among his other pursuits: working to end segregation in baseball.