Then and Now

by Barbara Cook

  I’d go out at night with friends, drink to excess, and be lucky to escape without serious injury. The night I remember most clearly? I was out with a group of friends and we were traveling from one party to another. I was packed into a car with a lot of other people, and Farley Granger was following us on a motorcycle. We stopped for a red light and I opened the door—I told myself it’d be easier to talk to him that way. Well, the next thing I knew, I had tumbled out of the car and into the middle of the street. Drunk out of my mind and laughing all the way. Not so funny.

  I was still working at this point and in 1964 I played The Unsinkable Molly Brown for two weeks in stock. Meredith Willson had written a great score, and back in 1960 he had called me in to audition when Tammy Grimes, who was playing Molly, was having trouble with her voice. My audition was sensational, and Meredith was ecstatic. Dore Schary, the director, told me it was the best audition he’d ever seen. However, the producers, Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall, said Tammy had an ironclad contract and it would cost them too much to break it. The talk of my taking on the role went no further. Tammy was absolutely wonderful as Molly, but oh, how I wish I had been the one to open that show on Broadway. It would have put my career on a whole different level. Of course, I am forever grateful for the wonderful shows I did do, but I was never the “big cheese.” I was never “The Music Man” or “Molly Brown.”

  Things were turning sour between David and me, and as our problems began to seem insurmountable, I took to asking myself exactly why I had chosen him in the first place. I actually think I chose him because I knew he would never leave me like my father had. I didn’t realize this at the time, of course, but now, after approximately fifteen thousand years of therapy I do.

  In February of 1965, I took over the lead in the Broadway play Any Wednesday when Sandy Dennis left. It was rewarding to be accepted as a dramatic actress in a straight play. Because I sang well, there was always a tendency to give me short shrift as an actress, which is often true for singing actors. When people expressed surprise at my acting, I always wanted to say, “What the hell do you think I was doing all those years between songs?” The truth is, however, that I missed the music. I missed the excitement of hearing an overture. And I really missed singing.

  As it was, however, when I found out I was being hired for a big hit like Any Wednesday and realized I’d have a nice long run with money coming in, I knew now was the time to finally leave David. We separated in 1965, when Adam was five. Just as I knew would happen, when we stood in the driveway of our house in Port Washington on that last day of our living together as husband and wife, I was the one who had to walk away. When I explained to Adam what was happening, that his father and I would be living separately but that he would still see his father, Adam cried. Just once. He curled up in my lap, cried over losing his father, and then stopped.

  Adam and I moved out of our house in Port Washington into a beautiful penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Thinking now about that time, I remember the butterflies in my stomach—the fear—the oddness of not having anyone by my side to depend on. It was all up to me. I had always brought the money in, but David had been so dependable—“The Rock.” My uncertainty was compounded by the fact that throughout all of this time I was drinking too much. I never drank before I worked—that would have scared the hell out of me. I saved my drinking for after the show, but it began to take a real toll. I grew so irrational that I developed a genuine fear that someone in the audience was going to shoot me while I was onstage. I had become afraid of the audience.

  My mother, of course, was still on the scene, and still as difficult as ever. Right after I moved back into Manhattan, she offered to come over and look after Adam while I continued to unpack boxes. My mother was a terrific baker—in fact when we lived in Atlanta she would bake Christmas cakes for people in order to earn extra money—so when she suggested that she and Adam make a cake together I loved the idea. This, I thought, is a great Norman Rockwell moment. Adam loved helping both his father and me whenever we were cooking, and he went happily off to the kitchen with his grandmother. About fifteen minutes later he came wailing out of the kitchen:

  “Mommy, Mommy, Grandmother won’t let me stir the cake.”

  I went in to see what was going on, only to be greeted by my mother screaming, “He wants to stir the cake to the left. The cake must be stirred to the right!” My mother was screaming like a banshee over how her five-year-old grandson was stirring cake batter in the wrong direction . . . Adam adored his grandmother, and she became especially important to him after my marriage to David disintegrated, yet she thought nothing of saying in front of him, “I’m through with New York! I’m moving to London.” Adam was devastated, and far too young to understand that she had no intention of doing any such thing.

  As we grow up, and older, we have to face the facts that our parents are flawed human beings just like the rest of us. It has taken me years to acknowledge the fact that both my mother and my father, for different reasons, led tragic lives. After my father’s severe stroke in 1952 he was never able to work again. He lived on, sometimes very happily, until he died at the age of sixty-nine, but his life was never easy. It’s sobering for me to grasp that I have already outlived my father by nearly twenty years, and to realize that after he left my mother, even his second marriage was difficult. His wife, Dot, was a severe alcoholic, the kind who will drink shoe polish if that’s all she can find. She finally died of alcoholism, but she was a nice woman and I always liked her. Right after she married my father she gave me a lovely little bracelet, perfect for a young girl: a little gold bracelet with tiny blue forget-me-nots on it. I adored it. It was missing one day, and when my mother saw me searching frantically for it, she told me that she had thrown it away. She owned me, right? She could do anything she wanted, either with me or with things that belonged to me—we were one, weren’t we?

  When David and I finally parted, he was not only free from this consistent strife with my mother, but also seemed to have been unshackled in some way. At first he was living in a grungy little room, but once he started advertising his classes he began making good money, which allowed him to find a really nice place to live, a very attractive apartment. He even hired a decorator, in essence finally giving himself permission to have.

  I was still appearing on television during these years, and sang several times on Perry Como’s popular television show between 1963 and 1965. Perry could be difficult with people, because he liked to keep everyone off balance, but I had no problems with him at all. However, singing a duet with Perry was not easy, because he sang so softly that I had to make an effort to keep my volume down in order to blend with him. Of course that soft relaxed style of his was made for television; the camera and microphone picked up the slightest gesture and inflection, and “Mr. C” was a welcome guest in living rooms across America.

  It was around this time—1966, to be precise—that I experienced the first of what would, unfortunately, be many debilitating panic attacks. There was no warning sign about that first attack—it just appeared like a bolt out of the blue. My divorce had just been finalized and I was playing at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater in Show Boat. The panic attack was not related to the show because I really enjoyed playing Magnolia and singing that magnificent Kern and Hammerstein score. The notices were very good, and in truth the only trouble I had on the show was with my leading man, Stephen Douglass. Stephen was a very good-looking man and his singing was fine, but his acting was not. Our scenes dragged where they should have popped, and I began to resent him. It wasn’t his fault—he just wasn’t up to the demands of the role.

  That conflict aside, Show Boat proved to be a first-rate experience, but when I think about the show now I still think about that first panic attack. I was in the midst of a really difficult time with Arthur, and, knowing deep down that we were not going to be permanently together, I went on a first date with another man—a very nice guy. We went to the Ginger Man restaur
ant, but before we ordered, I said to him, “You know, I just can’t get enough air in here. Can we go outside for a moment? I’m having trouble breathing.” We stood for a minute outside, but it only got worse, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so embarrassed, but I really think I have to go home. I feel terrible.” A few moments after we got in a taxi, I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to take me to the hospital. I have a pain running down my arm and I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  We went to the ER and the intern on duty told me, “You’re okay. You’ve having a panic attack.” He gave me a tranquilizer. I then called my therapist and said I needed to see him immediately. My date then took me to my doctor and waited while we had a little session before taking me home. What a fun date for that poor man. He was extremely nice, but this did not exactly bode well for any great relationship ahead.

  What made the attacks even more frightening was that I could never figure out a trigger. It wasn’t performance anxiety. No, I could be sitting watching television or reading the paper and the attack would just whack me. I didn’t see any help out there, because back when this was happening to me, people didn’t talk about problems like this. Now there are books about it in every bookstore, but at the time I really didn’t understand what was happening.

  I was beginning to gain weight at this time, and I turned down a lot of the scripts that came to me. I did, however, appear in a 1967 production of Funny Girl, and one of the best things about doing that show was having George Hamilton opposite me as Nicky Arnstein. He had recently received a lot of bad press when he was dating President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird, and I didn’t know what to expect when we started rehearsals.

  Well, let me tell you—he is so bright, so funny, so generous, and one of the best raconteurs I’ve ever known.

  He had a very healthy view of what he had to offer as an actor and was one of the hardest workers I’ve ever encountered. I admired him and loved working with him. He recently came to one of my performances and it was great to see him again. I made the mistake of admiring a bracelet he was wearing. “Oh,” he said, “I want you to have it,” and he put it on my arm. So generous.

  Funny Girl also brought me one of my favorite comments I ever received from a fan. Mark Rosen, who had entered my life during She Loves Me, was a very devoted fan, and would come see me in anything I did. We became friends and remain so to this day. Now, if there is any role for which I don’t seem terribly well suited, it would have to be Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. Fanny was a fast-talking Jewish New Yorker from Brooklyn—I was a Protestant girl from Atlanta, Georgia, who loved Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Mark, of course, came to see me in the role, and when the film version came out in the fall of 1968 Mark rushed off to see it. He’d never seen Streisand onstage as Fanny. He called me after he saw the film. I was quite curious: “How was it?” I asked. “How was Streisand?” Mark didn’t miss a beat: “Too thin, and too Jewish.”

  I also appeared on Broadway in Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murders in 1967, which I remember as my first experience with the newly emerging freedom regarding sex and language. I can still remember the first time I heard the word “shit” onstage. It was in the play J.B. by Archibald MacLeish, and in 1959 it was shocking to hear that word uttered on the stage. Now, a mere eight years later, when I appeared in Little Murders, the “shits” were flying left and right. I felt very uncomfortable speaking that way onstage. My character, Patsy Newquist, was also a smoker, and I’d never smoked in my life, so I was very concerned about looking like a real smoker. I found that in order to be comfortable with a cigarette onstage, I had to learn how to handle a cigarette offstage, and also how to curse like a sailor. Hmmm . . . that may have been the beginning of what I have become: a dirty-mouthed old lady.

  Unfortunately our production didn’t work and we closed after seven performances, but Jules’s play is a fascinating one and I’m so glad that a later production did very well.

  By the late sixties and early seventies, rock and roll had permanently altered the musical landscape, dominating the music charts, taking over television, and even trickling down to Broadway, the last remaining stronghold of the Great American Songbook. Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar had opened on Broadway, and everyone talked about Hair as a game-changer in the Broadway musical-theater landscape. The truth is, at the time I was only vaguely aware of this talk because I did not see many of the shows—I had started to drink heavily and my interest in theater had waned, both as an actress and as an audience member.

  After Little Murders I did appear in one more Broadway musical, The Grass Harp, but it ran for only four days in November of 1971. The show was based on Truman Capote’s novel of the same name, and centered on an orphaned boy and two elderly ladies who observe life from a tree. Even though the show was a flop, I remain grateful that I had the chance to meet and work with Truman. He was very nice to me, very much the Southern gentleman: I met him at his apartment and we talked about furniture and literature. On that same afternoon he even introduced me to the joys of Blackwing pencils, the soft lead pencils that Stephen Sondheim uses while composing. When our meeting was through, he insisted on walking me to the elevator.

  While I know that Truman could be difficult with others, he was always very kind to me. I was happy that he liked my performance, short-lived though it was. I actually enjoyed performing in the show, a lot of which took place in the tree where the three leading characters took refuge. The truth is, I fell in love with that great tree. When we closed, as much as anything, I hated to lose that tree.

  Our director was theater veteran Ellis Rabb, and it was Ellis’s idea that none of us would be miked. Carol Brice, Karen Morrow, Rusty Thacker, and I all had big voices, and we filled the theater. It was fun for all of us, but the audiences did not respond. I think it was just too rarified, too precious for a general audience. Although I couldn’t have foreseen it at the time, this show was to be my last appearance in a Broadway musical until Sondheim on Sondheim in 2010.

  I did, however, appear onstage in one other drama, a 1972 production of Maxim Gorky’s Enemies, at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater; it ran for its allotted time of two months, but there was never any talk of an extension. My reputation, of course, is based on my work in musicals, and I’m glad the cast recordings preserve my work not just in hit shows like The Music Man but also in studio versions of classic shows like Show Boat, Carousel, and The King and I. At the same time, however, I wanted to prove that I was an actress, and appearing in Any Wednesday, Little Murders, and Enemies not only challenged me as an artist but also reinforced my acting credentials.

  The problem lay in the fact that during most of my time in those plays I was unhappy because of the turmoil in my personal life. In the beginning of this period, when my drinking problem wasn’t quite as severe and work was still a possibility, I would find something wrong with every script I was sent. When I later saw the plays I had been offered, I realized that they were respectable and I could have made something of them, but at the time I was not thinking rationally. George Abbott—Mr. Broadway—the most important musical director of the time, had one particular show he was interested in me doing, but I put him off, over and over again. I wouldn’t give an answer, so of course he eventually looked elsewhere. Compounding the problem was the fact that I was also now entering the time in an actress’s career that I call “middle-lescence”—too old to play the ingénue, too young to play the wise, feisty older woman. I was nowhere.

  I was no longer appearing in long-running musicals, and Little Murders and Enemies had closed quickly, a state of affairs that led to a financial crunch. With no money coming in I didn’t say to myself, “I have to stop drinking or my career will vanish.” No—in my mind, less money simply meant that I should give up fancy liquor and begin drinking Gallo Mountain Chablis, by the half-gallon. I’d drink almost all of that big jug, pour out whatever was left, and vow I would not do that “tomorrow.” Come four or five in the aftern
oon, I would order another half gallon and off I’d go, day after day after day.

  Adam and I were living in a beautiful three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a penthouse with a wrap-around terrace, working fireplace, major ceilings, large dining room, maid’s room, and good-sized kitchen. It was fantastic. I was penniless when it went co-op, but a friend loaned me the money to buy it; this was 1968, and the apartment cost $15,000. Fifteen thousand dollars wouldn’t even buy a closet now. This apartment was in one of the first co-op buildings in Manhattan, and hard as it is to believe, you could not get a loan on a co-op because banks didn’t give loans for co-ops in 1968. I also had no credit as Barbara Cook, only as Mrs. LeGrant. I couldn’t get a credit card from Bloomingdale’s because I was an unmarried woman.

  I was also unemployed and a drunk—not a nice, ladylike drinker, but a drunk. I just stayed home and got drunk every night by myself. In the kitchen, dirty dishes were piled everywhere. There was a wastebasket underneath the basin in the bathroom that Adam and I shared, and at some point the wastebasket got filled and didn’t get emptied. Next, the floor around the wastebasket got covered and didn’t get cleaned up until the Kleenex was all the way up to the bottom of the basin—the whole corner of the room was filled with Kleenex. I would say to myself, “Why can’t you clean this up?” And then I would think, “Why don’t you just try to move three pieces? Just three.” I just couldn’t do it. I was paralyzed, and that paralysis was both physically and emotionally painful.

  Weekends were the worst because that’s when Adam would stay with his father. The left side of my king-size bed would be piled with books and weeks-old newspapers. As soon as Adam left I would walk to the library to return the previous weekend’s books, and take out as many new books as I could cradle in my arms. I was terrified of running out of reading material because if I could keep my attention focused on a written page—of almost anything—I figured I could get through another weekend.