Then and Now

by Barbara Cook

  Yip had heard Yma sing and been knocked out, so the already crazy plot of Flahooley became a whole lot more complicated in order to include Yma’s character of Najla, an emissary from Arabia. And just how did the Arabs come to Capsulanti, Indiana? Because just as the fortunes of Bigelow are faltering, due to the cheaper imitation flahooleys being produced by a rival, Sylvester puts one of the doll’s hands on Aladdin’s lamp and out pops a genie named Abou Ben Atom. I told you there was a lot of plot . . . Well, the genie promises to grant Sylvester any wish he desires, and the next thing you know the flahooleys are rushing off the assembly line, causing a flood in the market and a subsequent collapse. Unemployment skyrockets in the town of Capsulanti, and soon mobs are burning piles of flahooleys in the town square. Somehow it all ends happily.

  Oy vey, as we used to say on Peachtree Street.

  This was not exactly your average Broadway musical. To tell the truth, while I can relate the basic plot of the show, I didn’t know then exactly what it was all supposed to be about. I was so green that I would just look at my stuff and think, “How do I make this work?” I didn’t and couldn’t see the overall picture. Both Yip and Sammy Fain had pronounced liberal leanings, and just as they had condemned racism in Finian’s Rainbow, Flahooley, too, had a subversive, anticapitalist message embedded within all the whimsy. I don’t think I grasped it fully at the time, but it seemed to have been written with the burgeoning resistance to the atomic power movement in mind, not to mention a desire to comment on the witch hunts beginning to take place as McCarthyism swept through Washington; it was the genie hunts and burning of the dolls within the plot that the creators hoped would speak to this shameful chapter in our country’s history. And, just to make sure no sacred cow was left untouched, Flahooley even took on Christmas! The song “Sing the Merry,” which wasn’t recorded, satirized the rampant commercialization of the holiday. Here’s the last line: “And for Christ’s sake may this nation soon give Christmas back to Christ.” That didn’t make it past Philadelphia.

  I was trying to learn my part, figure out the show, and overcome my overwhelming nerves; but at the same time that I was riddled with insecurity, I also possessed an unwavering core of self-confidence about how I wanted to sing a song. I feared I was going to be replaced at any moment, yet I still had total belief in my approach to a song. Now get this. The first time I listened to the orchestral accompaniment, I heard a recurring saxophone line that interfered with my phrasing. So I asked our conductor to change the sax line. He said, no, we couldn’t do that. So, I said, “Look—they hired me to do my thing, and I can’t do it with that sax interfering.” I fought for it, and whadda ya know? It was changed!

  One day I was once again standing in the wings, nervous as hell, and for some reason it occurred to me that what I had to do was search for the authentic essence of myself and communicate that—find what was intrinsically mine. There’s only one of me, so there could be no real competition with anyone else. If I sang from my authentic self, then I was only in competition with myself, and with the journey I had set for me and the song. Suddenly a great weight was lifted off my shoulders. That moment in the wings marked the beginning of Barbara Cook, the artist, or, more specifically, the artist I was hoping to become.

  Yip was our first director but he didn’t make it past the out-of-town tryouts. It must have been very difficult when Cheryl Crawford, the producer, said, “You’re not directing your show anymore,” but the truth is that I don’t remember much about being directed by Yip. I was in a complete nervous fog most of the time, an absolute nervous wreck over my acting. Cheryl, one of the very few female producers on Broadway at the time, could be a very tough businesswoman, but she was wonderful to me. She would come round and ask, “Are you okay? Have you had any lunch? Can I send out for you?” She was very attentive and sweet. We got along very well, and at one point she mentioned the possibility of my auditioning for Paint Your Wagon, the upcoming Lerner and Loewe show about the California gold rush. That audition never happened and ultimately, Olga San Juan was cast in the role of Jennifer. I think Cheryl just liked the way I sang.

  When it became clear out of town that Yip wasn’t up to directing the show, the producers brought in Daniel Mann. His first order of business became trying to teach me how to act. Jerry Courtland, my leading man, had some experience, but it was clear that we both needed some help. I remember Danny taking the two of us down to the theater basement while we were in Philadelphia and explaining that even though we weren’t the stars of the show per se, the whole musical did in fact hang on our storyline. It was important that we be up to the task, so he spent many long hours in that basement helping us with our scenes, and also teaching us some basic acting techniques. Not only were we learning to act, but we also had to learn to work the marionettes, and at one point I sang to a hand puppet!

  The funny thing was that even with my inexperience and insecurities, and despite the convoluted plot and political overtones, Flahooley received warm notices during our tryouts in New Haven and Philadelphia. The songs were delightful, audiences loved us, and we all thought we were coming into town with a hit on our hands. Well, we weren’t the first to be wrong on that account.

  My mother came up for the opening on May 14, 1951, and was thrilled that I had made it to Broadway. My father flew in later, equally happy for me, but it’s a visit that I remember chiefly because it was the only time my father said anything negative to me about my mother: “Nell is her own worst enemy.” That’s all he said. This was a big trip for my father, because he’d had a heart attack right after I moved to New York in 1948; although he recovered from that and could still work, he was never quite the same. But he wanted to see me in the show, and I remember the two of us having dinner at a steakhouse I used to go to with Herb Shriner. I felt grown up, but oh, I was so young and inexperienced. I felt I was living out a scenario from one of my favorite movies—young girl, determined to make it in New York, lands a big role in a brand-new Broadway musical. She’s discovered and stars in a big smash hit. There was just one problem with that scenario: this wasn’t a smash hit. Or a small hit. It was a complete flop.

  I had actually been unsure of how the show would be received. I knew it was a strange show, but out-of-town audiences had liked it. Now, however, I was about to learn the lesson that there are always two different shows: the show that the audience sees and the show that you’re in. When you’re performing you are standing inside the show and there is no way to be objective. You can’t judge the quality of the show because you’re not seeing it. People talk to me about Candide, and I have to say, “I never saw Candide. I saw where I was but I never saw the show Candide.”

  When you’re in a show you lose perspective. It’s inevitable and happens as soon as you’re immersed in rehearsals. I did a tiny bit of directing once and I was shocked at how quickly I lost perspective. I did see The Music Man, because I went to see it when I was on vacation from the show, and it was quite a revelation. When performing in the show I could never figure out why audiences loved the counterpoint of “Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You?” so much, but when I watched the show I really understood. Oh, that Buffalo Bills quartet that sang “Lida Rose” was terrific—a real barbershop quartet—and Meredith Willson’s soaring melody for Marian (my character) on “Will I Ever Tell You?” provided the perfect contrast. Watching from the audience allowed me to see how genuinely crowd-pleasing the music and staging were.

  Flahooley, however, was another matter entirely, because it didn’t run long enough for me to ever take a day off and see the show. I remember standing in Times Square at midnight reading the opening-night review in the New York Times; Brooks Atkinson, the most influential of all critics at the time, called the show “a tedious antic with no humor or imagination at the heart of things,” which seems a strange criticism for a show which in retrospect seemed to suffer from, if anything, too much imagination. Just to make sure no one missed his point, he added: “The plot is one of the
most complicated, verbose and humorless of the season.” Brooks Atkinson was a first-rate critic, someone who really cared about theater—he would follow people’s careers and try to help them. He liked actors, which is not always the case with critics; but his review obviously spelled big trouble for us.

  Some critics were charmed by the show’s whimsy: John Chapman in the Daily News described it as “a tuneful, extraordinarily beautiful and delightfully imaginative musical.” He also homed in on its political aspects, writing that “it may also be the most elaborately coated propaganda bill ever to be put on a stage.”

  Whether a propaganda bill or not, it wasn’t onstage for very long. With the reviews skewing toward the negative, audiences in New York reacted much less enthusiastically to the show than they had out of town and we closed on June 16th, after just forty performances. We did record the cast album, and I received a tiny percentage for my work. And when I say tiny, I mean very, very tiny. This recording did not exactly sell like My Fair Lady would five years later. (The cast recording of My Fair Lady was an enormous top-of-the-charts hit, and once all that money was made—and paid out to the artists—record companies moved to make it much more difficult for performers to see any money from a cast recording. The record companies didn’t want to share it with the people singing on the record, so subsequently we were simply paid a flat fee—usually one week’s salary—with no provision for royalties on the album’s future earnings.)

  The closing of the show was terribly disappointing after the warm responses we’d had on the road. My first Broadway musical was now behind me, and the immediate future remained highly uncertain. When, later that year, I was singing at the Blue Angel, Orson Bean was also on the bill, and during a sound check he gave me a pep talk: “Oh, Barbara—it’s great. You’ve got it made now. You’ve done a Broadway show and you don’t have anything to worry about.” Orson’s a nice man, but was he ever wrong! It would be over two years before I landed another show.

  In the meantime, however, it was June 1951 and I was heading back to Tamiment for my second summer. That second year in the Poconos would turn out to be a momentous one for me because it was there that I met David LeGrant, the man who would become my one and only husband, and a profound influence on my life in many ways. He was the only acting teacher I’ve ever studied with, a deeply talented man who for unknown reasons was unable to claim his place as a fine director.

  Most important of all, he became the father of my darling son, Adam.

  6 • MEETING DAVID LEGRANT

  RETURNING TO TAMIMENT meant I could earn another five hundred dollars for the summer, so I didn’t just think a return to Tamiment would be nice—I was eager. It meant money, fun, and a summer in the country. I never guessed I might acquire a husband along the way.

  Prior to meeting David I’d had a few dalliances, but none of them was really serious. With David it was the real thing. We met in June of 1951, and while David was not a handsome man by conventional standards, I was drawn to his sensitivity, his superb talent, and a certain gentle quality in his personality. He seemed rooted. Solid. Looking back on it now, I think what attracted me most of all was that he seemed to have a lot of the “answers.” He seemed very sure about the basic issues in life, and just a few weeks into our ten-week Tamiment season, we became inseparable. I don’t remember when we started thinking and talking about the possibility of marriage, but by the time the summer had ended and we returned to the city, we thought we might get married.

  There was one big problem, however. My mother. She had recently come to New York to live with me—in many ways it was inevitable that she would follow me to New York because I was her life. She was, however, dead set against my being with David, much less marrying him, and I think the prospect of our marriage may have been the deciding factor in her move to New York—she really wanted to stop us from marrying. In her view, David was poor as hell, wore tattered clothes, and had no real prospects. I knew about his talent, but even if my mother had been aware of that, it wouldn’t have mattered to her. She just felt he was terrible husband material—he wasn’t handsome, he was penniless, and, worst of all, in her mind, he was Jewish.

  She did everything she could to stop us. At one point there was even a very dramatic scene in the kitchen when she picked up a knife and threatened him. Of course she wasn’t really going to stab David, and she certainly was never physically violent to me when I was growing up, but when you look at photos from our wedding day you can see her anger; she made no attempt to hide her scowl.

  I was in a terrible state. It wasn’t just the ignorance of her prejudice—it’s that it was so dumb on her part. If you want to have any kind of a relationship with a daughter whom you adore, then you sure as hell better find a way to get along with her partner or you’re excluded, which is exactly what eventually happened. A lot of the time she was just excluded from our life together.

  Her blatant anti-Semitism was just continuing a theme that had started all the way back when I was in high school. I was going out with a Jewish boy at the time, and when I’d leave the apartment she would ask: “You going out with the kike tonight?” I had a Chinese friend—same thing: “You goin’ out with the chink tonight?” The casual use of those slurs was so upsetting to me. It bothered me enormously in high school and even more so when applied to the man I was going to marry.

  Equally horrifying was the letter she wrote to David’s mother, who was a really sweet, very naïve kind of peasant lady from Ekaterinoslav, in the Ukraine. Never having met her, my mother still wrote her a letter saying something like “Your lousy stinking Jew black-balled son wants to marry my gorgeous daughter”—and on and on. This poor lady didn’t know how the hell to react. When you think about it, my mother’s horrible letter to David’s mother is a specimen of the following sort: you might be angry enough to write it, but you sure as hell don’t mail it.

  I liked David’s mother very much, and I still have fond memories of driving cross-country to California to meet her for the first time. On that trip, David and I didn’t even have money for restaurant food; we bought a big salami, which we could keep for some time, then a jar of mayonnaise, and a new loaf of bread every day. That was our daily ration, and we made that salami last through half of the United States!

  One memory of that trip which is decidedly more embarrassing revolves around our stops at Native American reservations. I would go out of my way to demonstrate my friendliness—asking these Native Americans, who were total strangers, and whom I would never see again, how they were feeling and what their day was like. This behavior, understandably enough, embarrassed David, but I think the horrible racist attitudes I had encountered growing up simply pushed me too far in the opposite direction. Such inappropriate sentiment was my way of trying to say, “I’m not like the others.” I still cringe thinking about it.

  As I’ve gotten older and gained a little perspective I find myself believing that my mother was not well. The mechanism that keeps most people from acting on their most awful urges, such as writing that hateful letter to David’s mother, was often simply missing in her.

  I understand perfectly well how tricky it is to be a sidewalk psychiatrist, but for years it never occurred to me that my mother might be ill. In the past few years some friends have suggested she might have been bipolar. I tend to doubt that. I’ve shared stories about my mother’s behavior with a friend who is a psychologist and she confirmed my hunch that my mother’s problem was a borderline personality disorder.

  Right at this time of our possible marriage, David and I were both cast in a tab show called Six on a Honeymoon, directed by our friend Herbert Ross. It would be a tour of five or six months, playing some of the better hotel rooms across the country, including the very prestigious Blackstone in Chicago. We decided that it made sense to set out on this tour as a married couple rather than as two besotted people who would have to sneak around to be together; in those days things were not as open and easy as they are now, and spendi
ng the night together could involve all sorts of machinations.

  Deciding to get married was still not easy for me because I had lots of doubts, but I finally decided to take the step, and we were married—twice. We had wanted both Christian and Jewish ceremonies on the same day—that way we would have only one anniversary. The problem was that because the rules regarding marriage were so strict back in the early 1950s, we couldn’t find a rabbi who would marry us, so we were first married in a Christian service. It was about a week after that ceremony, one conducted by a minister, when Eddie Harburg found a liberal rabbi who would marry us, and we happily arranged a little ceremony, which was held right in Eddie and Yip’s Manhattan living room.

  We married for that second time on Sunday March 2, 1952, while we were in rehearsal. We weren’t children—I was twenty-four years old and David was twenty-eight—but I was completely unprepared to assume the responsibility of having another person’s feelings in my hands. With my mother having taken the fortune-teller’s advice about sparing me from any work completely to heart, I had grown up without performing even the most basic household duties—I simply had never had to pull my own weight. Without ever having had to wash dishes, cook a meal, or clean the house, I was ill prepared for life as someone’s partner. I had a lot of growing up to do.

  When we went back to rehearsal the day after our marriage, I remember going into the bathroom, looking in the mirror, suddenly sobbing, and saying out loud to myself that I had made a terrible mistake. I was not prepared to be a wife, and I broke down sobbing. I studied my tearstained face in the mirror and knew there was no way I was going to walk away from this marriage. I would stick with it and make it work. And it did work for a long time.

  I came to love David very much. I came to depend deeply on him—ironically, so, too, did my mother—and he was an ideal husband in many ways. Very responsible. Never forgot to pick up the laundry. Never forgot to buy the loaf of bread. Would much rather be at home puttering around with me than running around with the guys or doing things on his own. Very, very dependable. We never stopped talking—we were both interested in the arts—theater, music, acting, and film. I was emotionally attracted to his talent and sensitivity. I didn’t worry about his not yet making much money—I made money and felt confident that I would continue to do so. We were sympatico in many ways. And . . . I knew that David would never leave me the way my father had.