Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
In any other family, she would surely have taken the “most talented” award in a walk. But Mary Rodgers (1931–2014) was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, the legendary composer, who, in Noël Coward’s inimitable phrase, “positively peed melody,” and the mother of the Tony-winning composer Adam Guettel.
A bridge between those two musical-theater grandees, Mary wrote the tunes for the 1959 hit Once upon a Mattress, among other shows, then, in a career pivot, the 1972 children’s novel Freaky Friday, as well as the subsequent screen adaptation. Act III: she became an arts patron and chairman of the board at the Juilliard School.
