By Andrea Axelrod
I had a special agenda when our Williams ’75 Oxford reunion group gathered on Monday, June 17th for our welcome dinner at the Ashmolean Museum. An auction of items from the Stephen Sondheim estate was to be held the next day at Doyle in New York, and I wanted to see if classmates would add to my online bid for one particular item: Sondheim’s very first royalty check, made out to him “care of Cap and Bels [sic] of Williams College”. He had never cashed the check. My idea was to donate it to Williams, in memory of Professor Irwin Shainman, who conducted several of us in our 1974 college production of Sondheim’s Company and lectured frequently on Sondheim’s works.
In 1948, when Sondheim was an 18-year-old Williams sophomore – and a founding member of Cap and Bells – he doffed his cap to the then-reigning musical Finian's Rainbow and the then-Williams president James Phinney Baxter III with a musical satire, Phinney's Rainbow. It was Sondheim’s first produced musical, and BMI published three numbers from the 25-song score.
Doyle estimated the royalty check would sell in the range of $100 to $200 (plus premium). I registered a bid for $350, and a handful of classmates brought up our bid to $700.
All day Tuesday, members of our bidding consortium asked me if I had heard anything. As I checked online for auction results throughout the day, I realized the auction was taking an awful lot of time, and the check was one of the later lots.
When I finally saw what the check went for, I reported sadly (and with some incredulity) that we were only off by $15,300.
Plus premium.
That first royalty check was for 74 cents.
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