In August 1945, while in the hospital recovering from the Caesarean birth of her second child, Merman was visited by Dorothy Fields, who proposed she star as Annie Oakley in a musical her brother Herbert and she were writing with Jerome Kern. Merman accepted, but in November, Kern suffered a stroke while in New York City visiting Rodgers and Hammerstein (the producers of the show) and died a few days later. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II invited Irving Berlin to replace him, and the result was "Annie Get Your Gun", which opened on May 16, 1946 at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for nearly three years and 1,147 performances. During this time, Merman took only two vacations and missed only two performances because of illness. Merman lost the film version to Judy Garland, who eventually was replaced by Betty Hutton, but she did star in a Broadway revival two decades later at Lincoln Center with Bruce Yarnell, who was 27 years Merman's junior, cast as Frank E. Butler, Annie Oakley's loyal husband and manager.