The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (3 page)

Memory often works that way, splicing together its own greatest hits, so that the perfect night is matched with the perfect song, and the perfect moments of physical beauty and family harmony are set side by side. I would like to say that I completely trust myself to remember the details of my own life; but it was also my mother’s life, my father’s, Ted’s, and Rachelle’s, and each of us would tell a different story. But the most important element would be true for us all: there was always singing. Music was language in our house. It was air. Someone was playing the piano; someone else was setting the needle down on a record so that we could listen to the Schubert and Wolf lieder my father loved. It was practicing, teaching, rehearsing, but it was also spontaneous, unstudied, unconscious, as pervasive as the heat blowing up through the vents on the floor to push back the cold New York winters.

 

When did my life in music really begin? With my first curtain call at the Metropolitan? My first Elton John record? Or was it my parents’ meeting at Indiana University in Pennsylvania? They once held hands while reading a bulletin board in the school’s hallway and had their hands slapped apart by an elderly professor who was walking by. “Stop that!” she warned them, but they didn’t listen. They married while they were studying to be music teachers, and the three of us graduated from college together, my mother holding me up with her diploma to smile at the camera, the two of them in academic gowns and mortarboards. My mother had meant to be an opera star, or even a movie star—everyone said she was headed in that direction—but the surprise of a baby put an end to that.

I spent my infancy in a playpen beside the piano where my mother gave voice lessons at home while my father went off to teach music at a nearby high school. I remember her students warbling through their lessons. One girl wore a body brace and sang “When Love Is Kind,” committed forever to my memory in the sparrow-light voice of this girl who stood unnaturally erect in front of my mother in the afternoons.

I have to wonder now what aspect of that exposure would be more beneficial to a baby opera singer: the music itself or the constant repetition, the never-ending drill of practice. My life might have turned out entirely differently had I been born the daughter of ticket takers at an opera house and so had grown up seeing opening nights, glamorous, glittery productions of the sort that would fill a child’s head with big ideas. I count myself lucky to have aligned my own beginning with the beginning elements of music: notes, scales, the constant hunt for the right pitch. I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.

My mother says I was late to talk and early to sing, that she could call out a string of tones and by the age of one or so I could parrot them back to her, which is pretty good for a baby who didn’t have the skills to ask for apple juice. Before I was three, I was standing on the hump in the backseat of the car (having been born in those pre-carseat dark ages), making myself just tall enough to lean into the front seat between my parents while my father drove. Together we sang three-part rounds of “Frère Jacques” and “White Coral Bells.” Learning my part, I planted myself firmly between two wonderful teachers.

So how is it that I had no idea, even at this early age, that I wanted to be a singer? I should have seen it at the very latest by three, when I gave my first solo performance as Suzy Snowflake. I was practically born into the job, and yet somehow it never occurred to me to take it. What I wanted were buckets of approval and love, and to be good. I was a notorious teacher’s pet, a straight-A student. Pleasing the English teacher meant producing a carefully written paper, just as pleasing the music teacher meant singing well. Seeing as how the music teachers were my parents, I sang and sang.

For a child, the desire to please can push almost every other consideration aside. I was naturally shy—doesn’t every actor, dancer, or musician claim a childhood crippled by shyness?—but if I was told to get onto a stage, then that was where I’d go. If left to my own devices, though, I would always find a book. I could read instead of sleeping, read while I walked, read at the table, read in the car. It drove my father crazy after a while, especially when we took long family vacations, a whole world of scenery shooting past my window while I kept my head in the pages of
Black Beauty.
“Look up!” he would say, watching me in the rearview mirror as he drove. “Stop reading for five minutes and look at something! I don’t know why you’d want to spend so much time reading novels, anyway. They don’t teach you anything.” He was an avid do-it-yourselfer, instruction book always in hand.

So I did look up, for five minutes, and the world was everything he promised it would be: beautiful, green, mountainous. But the novels were teaching me something else: the world I really wanted to look at was in those pages, and in my head. I could imagine myself on the back of Black Beauty, galloping in the rain through an English countryside. And that, of course, is a critical element in an actor’s craft—the ability to project yourself into another person, in another time, in other circumstances. No one thought that reading was a waste of my time, just that I was veering toward being a singularly unrounded individual.

My stage triumph as Suzy Snowflake stood alone until Rachelle and I came back as a sister act with
The Ugly Duckling
. In the seventh grade I was cast as the Mother Abbess in
The Sound of Music
. It was a bit of a stretch to play an aging nun in seventh grade, especially after I was nicknamed “Mother Abscess,” but I was the only one who could sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”

At least that nickname was a change from my usual one in junior high, “Miss Perfect.” I wore a stretchy pink headband, three inches wide, to school every day, and that was about as close as I came to making a fashion statement. I longed to be a renegade, to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom and sneak off from school after lunch, but I never had the courage. Instead I kept up my A’s. I entered a competition to write a new school song and won with the inspiring verses:

Perhaps such a wrenchingly earnest child deserves to be taunted and mocked, but I died a little every day when the school bully sang my song over and over again in a high falsetto on the bus going home. I was all orthopedic shoes and slumped posture, secretly wanting to be something very different, something dazzling.

I got my chance in the next school play, a full-scale production of
My Fair Lady
. At twelve I played Eliza Doolittle and sang every note of the role. Ralph Jurgens, a tall, broad-shouldered man who looked more like a cop than an English teacher, rounded up all the even vaguely musical eighth-graders and gave them British accents to play with. Now for the first time I was really learning a part. Or I thought I was learning one—until my mother came to watch a rehearsal a week before opening night. She waited until it was over and we were safely in the car before she announced that we were going home immediately because there was work to do. A lot of work.

There can be no underestimating my mother’s role as a teacher in my life. It was she who first introduced me to the idea of a total performance, that singing did not mean merely standing stock-still beneath a light, closing your eyes, and opening your mouth. She explained to me that the line “Just you wait, Henry Higgins” could not be delivered as if it were being read from a phone book. She taught me how to move, when to look at the audience and when to look away. She would dance my steps and I would dance along behind her. Good student that I was, I had always learned my lines, but under her guidance I came to understand that memorization was not the same as acting.

“Smile!” she told me. “Try to look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

My mother was an incredibly gifted and disciplined performer. Back then, the Rochester Opera Theater was a thriving operation, based at the Eastman Theatre, a gorgeous old auditorium that seats over three thousand people. I was mesmerized by the giant chandelier that hung over the audience like a bright planet. My father, brother, sister, and I would sit in the front row on the nights my mother sang there, stunned by her voice and her beauty, by how she held the audience so intently. When my mother was a little girl who sang at church functions, her grandfather would sit in the back row and promise her a dollar if he could hear her—a pretty clever way to teach projection. Was this really the woman who made us breakfast? Her stage makeup could be seen from the last rows: a black line under the eye, another over the eye, a streak of white at the outer edges, and a red dot in the corner, her false eyelashes sweeping her cheeks like Fuller brushes. Her costumes followed her across the stage in great, billowing folds. Heavy makeup and velvet gowns on your own mother—what could be more glamorous than that? Rachelle and I had the most exotic collection of dress-up clothes that any two little girls in upstate New York dared dream of.

Mother sang Marcellina in Mozart’s
Le Nozze di Figaro
and Fiordiligi in his
Così fan tutte
. In the title role of Puccini’s
Suor Angelica,
she was up there onstage in her nun’s habit, crying over her child who had died, and I kept thinking,
She’s crying for me!
And then I was crying for her. Of course I was mortified by my outburst, for weeping was sure to be met with unrelenting teasing in my family. Still, secretly, I loved surrendering to the pure emotional display, just as I loved having a mother who was a star. I was certain that all the children in the audience were wishing that she was theirs.

But no matter how much I loved seeing my mother perform, I never had any sense of reverence toward her singing. “You were flat in the first part of the third act,” I was telling her by the time I was ten. And while she herself had the tact to take me outside, away from my friends, before critiquing my work, I shared my comments with anyone who happened to be standing around. She was wise enough not to take me too seriously, and even seemed delighted with my precocious musicianship. I know this was the case because of my reaction when my own daughters started critiquing me when they were about eight years old. Even if they were only pointing out that the lipstick I was wearing was not exactly a flattering shade, they made it clear that they were watching me and that they knew a mistake when they saw it or heard it. Like me, they had no intention of letting their mother get away with anything.

 

It was through my reading that I came to believe that happiness was something that required a horse, and because my mother had also always loved horses, my parents, on their very modest schoolteachers’ salaries, decided that I should have one. Her name was Windy, and she lived in the garage for a couple of weeks, until one day she pushed her way into the kitchen, having apparently decided she deserved a more intimate place in the family circle. Finally, someone from the city council came and explained that neither the kitchen nor the garage nor any other part of our tract housing complex was zoned for horses and that Windy would have to go.

My mother and I also fell in love with a spider monkey named Jethro, who made his home in the pet section of Sibley’s department store, and so, on my twelfth birthday, he came home—fortunately, on a three-day trial basis. We soon realized that he was a bit beyond our suburban capabilities. Even if neither Windy nor Jethro could continue to live with us in our split-level on Valencia Drive, I learned a valuable lesson: There was no dream too large or too exotic to be realized.

If my mother typically offered specific guidance regarding the shape of a note or a turn of the wrist, and set an example with her unflagging energy, ambition, and work ethic, what my father taught me about singing came packaged in larger life lessons, and many of those lessons had to do with horses. We moved to a house in Churchville, New York, in order to have a proper place for animals, and ultimately wound up with three of our own horses, four boarders, and three dogs on our five acres of land. It was exactly what I had dreamed of, but my father made it clear that with dreams come responsibilities. “Horses can’t feed themselves,” he’d tell me, and I would be out in the bitter cold mornings before school, breaking the ice in the ten-gallon water buckets, filling them up in the basement, and lugging them back up the steps to the barn. I regularly dragged hundred-pound sacks of grain from the car to the tack room after mucking the stalls. It was hard, heavy, freezing labor, but it was the price of having horses, and horses were what I wanted. I understood that you have to work for what you want, for what you love. Having observed the girls who sang at the piano for my mother, I knew that beauty could occur naturally, but more than likely it was the result of discipline, and so I curried and brushed and picked out hooves. There was no praise for my efforts; hard work was simply what was expected.

Even when we went camping, my mother, who was given to high heels and stockings, packed a vacuum cleaner and a double mattress in the back of the seventeen-foot motorboat that trailed behind our car. When we set up camp for the night after boating to an island, with all of us holding the mattress on board, my mother would ferret out the camp’s single electrical outlet, plug in her extension cord, and then proceed to vacuum off the ground the tent would sit on. That was pretty much the point at which my father bade farewell to sleeping outdoors.

I remember how my mother would teach all day and then have everyone in her family over for a giant meal. We would bake and stew and chop and sauté for hours, serve and pick up the plates and wash them and put them away, then scrub down every inch of the kitchen, and when I stumbled off to bed half-blind with exhaustion my aunt would shake her head sadly at my mother. “Renée’s a little lazy, isn’t she?” she would say.