When Josh Logan convinced Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that James A. Michener’s collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1948, would form the basis for a musical, they quickly settled on their two leading performers before they had completed the book or the songs. 

Opera singer Ezio Pinza was interested in moving from opera to musicals and he was perfect for the middle-aged French planter Emile de Becque. Meanwhile, Texas-born Mary Martin was a good fit for Southern bigot Nellie Forbush. Both were available and signed on.

One day Mary had an idea. She had seen so many women in movies and the theater say things like they had just washed their hair and now they couldn’t do a thing with it, but their hair looked utterly perfect. What if in one of the scenes, Nellie Forbush actually washed her hair for real right there on the stage?

The idea got passed along and when Oscar heard it, he realized at once that it solved a problem he was having in setting up Nellie’s reluctance to fall in love with Emile. So the song “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was born.

But when the show opened for previews, the song wasn’t getting any response. This should have been Nellie’s big number, well, her first big number, in response to Emile’s “Some Enchanted Evening” and it was only getting very tepid applause.

In April 1976 Mary Martin released her autobiography, My Heart Belongs, and she explained the problem and the solution:

Oddly enough, the one scene in South Pacific which we had to keep working on was my hair washing. It was easier said than done, onstage. It wasn’t difficult to set up the shower stall, or even to get the water supply delivered, though it wasn’t always completely reliable. The real difficulty was that the audience didn’t believe it. They simply did not believe I was really washing my hair up there, because they never had seen it done.

At first I went into the shower stall and pulled the chain on a makeshift shower which the Seabees of the show had constructed with a huge barrel on top of a rickety frame. Each performance that barrel had to be filled with hot water. Then I would wet my hair, dump on a handful of liquid soap to make instant lather, and proceed to wash. It was too instant. The audiences were so skeptical that Josh restaged the number.

In the later version my nurse friend, Roz, handed me a huge bar of Ivory soap. In full sight of the audience I then stepped into the shower and with my downstage left hand rubbed my hair with the bar of soap. In my upstage right hand I used liquid Prell because it made instant lather. Then, just to make the whole point perfectly clear, I emerged from the stall to dance around the stage, flicking soapsuds all over the place.

And that solved the problem and suddenly the song was getting the response it deserved. Right?

Well, perhaps. But I’m not sure that Mary’s explanation for the failure of that number to elicit a response holds water, so to speak.

The following month, May 1976, the director and co-writer of the show, Josh Logan, released his autobiography (or at least the first volume of it) entitled Josh, and he had an entirely different take on both the problem and the solution.