From Joshua Logan’s memoirs, an anecdote I didn’t mention in my South Pacific series:

Cable had no song to sing after he had made love to Liat in the hut. Oscar studied the scene again and again. He was fascinated by Liat’s waiting for Cable’s boat to come around the bend. One day they took me to the lobby and sang one they had just written. It began:

My friend, my friend 
Is coming around the bend. 

I was so let down that I blurted out my first feelings. “That’s awful! That’s the worst song I ever heard. Good God, that’s terrible!”

They looked at me in shock; no one had ever spoken to them like that before, I’m sure. I’ll never forget Dick’s stricken face. But they were professional enough to go back home and try again. A day later they turned up with another. It was a lilting schottische, the words of which began like this:

Suddenly lucky, 
Suddenly our arms are lucky 
Suddenly lucky, 
Suddenly our lips have kissed. 

When they finished, I was thinking so hard I didn’t speak. Oscar said, “Well, have we passed the test this time, Teacher?”

“You’re close,” I said. “I love the tune, but isn’t that song a bit lightweight for a hot, lusty boy to sing right after making love to a girl who will change his life?”

Dick rebelled. He announced uncharmingly that he was not going to go on writing till “this guy” agrees on a tune. He played a song they had dropped from Allegro. It was then called “My Wife.” The melody was lovely, and I urged them to go ahead. Oscar spent two days writing new lyrics for it and it became the classic and powerful “Younger Than Springtime.”

“Suddenly Lucky,” too, had a reincarnation, for two years later when I heard Gertrude Lawrence sing “Getting to Know You” in The King and I, I knew where I had heard that tune before. . . .

And here’s Mary Martin from her autobiography:

But Gertrude Lawrence, a star with a capital S, a magic woman of whom I was deeply in awe, didn’t have an opening song to establish her character as Anna, the teacher the king had brought out to Siam.

Everybody concerned—Dick, Oscar, Leland Hayward—knew it. After the dress rehearsal in New Haven we got together at Casey’s, a famous restaurant across the street from the Shubert Theater. Because of our long, happy association together we started to talk about the show.

“Any suggestions?” they asked.

I had one. I knew the perfect melody Gertie should have. But I didn’t want to tell them.

“I’m cutting my throat right now,” I said to Dick and Oscar.

“Do you remember that song we had in South Pacific, the soft-shoe number we used about a thousand times in rehearsal?” It didn’t have any lyrics then, and in the end we had so many marvelous songs that Dick and Oscar decided to save the melody for another show.

“You have always promised me that melody someday, but it is exactly the one Gertie needs for the first act,” I said. Then I hummed it, the first two bars.

They all said, “You’re right!”

When Oscar wrote the perfect words to Dick’s lovely music, “my” melody became “Getting to Know You.”

Now it might make sense to have a clip of the “Getting to Know You” number from the show, which has a charming extended dance sequence, but instead I’m going to embed a clip of one of my favorite comedians, Jack Benny, doing a violin duet with Gisele MacKenzie.