The notice was seen as a sign of Hammerstein’s endearing humility, a great joke, and the talk of the town. But years later he confessed that he hadn’t meant it that way at all. “I thought it was quite the opposite and I didn’t mean it as a modest gesture,” he would say. “I really meant it as a rebuke to all the people who had concluded I was through and who were now concluding that I was a genius. Neither was true. I wasn’t through because I had had a succession of flops, and I wasn’t suddenly a different man or a better writer because I was on a wave of successes now. I wanted to remind
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