Then and Now (4 page)

I belonged in New York in a way I never had in Atlanta. Even as a small girl, I had never understood segregation—it literally made no sense to me. Separate water fountains labeled “white” and “colored”? Segregated seating on the bus? When “colored” help came to work in a white person's house, they had to bring their own dishes and glasses if they wanted to eat or drink. This struck me as not only nonsensical, but also completely horrible. So did any racist talk: when I went back to the office where I had been working in order to say goodbye, my boss actually said to me: “I don't want to see you walking down the street with a Nigra or a Jew.” Surrounded as I was by such attitudes, I'm not even sure why my own feelings were so different right from the start. I suspect my father's example was a major influence on my thinking, because I never heard him utter a single racist or anti-Semitic word. In his job as a salesman he reported directly to his Jewish brother-in-law, a man he liked and respected a great deal.

Atlanta is now a far more cosmopolitan city than it was in the 1940s, but some attitudes die slowly; forty-three years after I left Atlanta, I returned in June of 1995 for my fiftieth high school reunion. I was standing at the hotel desk when a classmate gave me a friendly holler from down the hall. We talked a bit about our lives—superficial friendly reunion chatter. My career, my life in New York. Her life in Georgia. Bonds renewed. Until, with a big smile, she casually exclaimed, “Barbara, you talk just like a Jew!” I was left completely speechless.

All the time I had felt I was an outsider who didn't belong in Atlanta, I thought there must be something wrong with me. Now, after years in New York, I came to realize that there was something
wrong with them. That sounds a little more dismissive than I mean it to. I have great friends in Georgia—terrific people. It's just that life there feels right for them, I suppose, but definitely not for me.

My God, when I think what my life might have been like had I not had the courage to stay in New York. There are others who are so very talented but for some reason or other don't have the courage or the strength to take the chance, to put themselves on the line. There's no question that I was putting myself on the line back in 1948—even when I couldn't even locate exactly where the line was.

New York was still amply stocked with grand old movie palaces in those days, and I couldn't stay away. At the Strand or the Paramount you could get a whole evening's entertainment for fifty cents. There would be a first-run movie, and oftentimes one of the truly great big bands—Tommy Dorsey's or Glenn Miller's—and some of the best vaudeville acts in the country. I saw Bill Robinson dance again, and this time was astonished by his gifts. At one performance I attended, Josephine Baker made an electrifying entrance that I'll never forget, slinking onstage dragging a full-length white mink coat behind her. One of the stranger and more memorable acts was a comedienne who came on dressed primly in a smart suit, hat, gloves, and a fur stole. At the end of her act she daintily removed the stole, set it down on the stage, and watched as it walked off—yes, a live dog had been wrapped around her neck the whole time. It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen.

I loved walking down the street, catching snatches of overlapping conversations conducted in an enticing mix of multiple languages. I discovered rice pudding, an exotic delicacy to me—oh, how I loved the taste and texture of it. One day I decided that it was high time I got drunk—another adult indulgence I'd never
tried before. In the apartment where I was staying I found a bottle of Manischewitz, the sweet kosher wine, and one night proceeded to consume it all by myself, just because I could. Some years later, both wine and food would become serious problems for me, but in those exhilarating first days in New York, I was drunk on the city itself.

I WAS ON
my own at last, but with one not so insignificant problem: money. I had arrived in New York with the seventy-five dollars that I'd saved up from my job in Atlanta, and it was quickly being spent on movies, coffee, and rice pudding. As excited as I was about having made it to the city of my dreams, I didn't know how I was going to survive there.

I went to work for Asiatic Petroleum, a subsidiary of Shell Oil, sometime in the summer of 1948. As part of the job I typed lots of letters to Caracas and Maracaibo. Those faraway places seemed dramatic and glamorous to me, although the glamour quickly vanished on the days when I just typed rows and rows of numbers for eight consecutive soul-deadening hours. (In later years I did have a more satisfying temp job reading applications from people applying for a Fulbright scholarship. It was actually fascinating to read about people's dreams. They may not have been show-business dreams, but they interested me mightily.)

When my landlord's sons came back from school, this generous man, understandably enough, needed my bedroom. I answered a classified ad in the
New York Times
and moved in with a mother and daughter whose apartment on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-second Street lay on the northernmost edge of the Theater District. The three of us slept in the one bedroom in three separate beds, until the daughter got married and moved out. That's when I
met Jeanne Meganck, a lovely young Belgian girl who had worked for Sabena Airlines and was now working for Christian Dior. She moved into the apartment, taking over the daughter's bed. I was paying forty dollars a month to my stingy landlady. Forty dollars out of a total monthly pay of $160 from Shell Oil. Of course I still had it better than Jeanne; knowing that Jeanne worked for Christian Dior, the landlady charged her fifty. Did Mrs. Scrooge think we wouldn't share that knowledge?

Jeanne, who was a hell of a lot more worldly-wise than I, summed up the situation pretty quickly, and when the mother went away for a week's vacation, locking the phone before her departure so that we couldn't use it in her absence, Jeanne and I reached our collective breaking point. Jeanne began to look for another place the two of us could share and through a connection at Dior found a beautiful apartment in a brownstone in the East Thirties. She also found a third person to share the apartment with us, another Belgian girl, named Mip VanderWaaren. Mip was nice, but the apartment was spectacular. We couldn't believe our good fortune. There were two bedrooms, a small one for Mip and a larger one that Jeanne and I shared. Oversized windows filled the bedrooms in the back with sunshine, and the front featured a large salon furnished with very beautiful French country antiques. We had struck pay dirt.

Almost every weekend the apartment was filled with Sabena pilots and flight attendants stopping over between flights. The war had ended only three years before, and although everyone wanted to put the war behind them, occasionally the subject would arise.

The bravery displayed during the war by women who were only slighter older than I astonished me. One of the women who visited us sometimes was a childhood friend of Jeanne's who had
lived in Brussels near Jeanne during the war. When, in those days, Jeanne would occasionally ask her where she disappeared to from time to time, it became clear to Jeanne that she was not to ask any more questions. After the war this young woman was decorated by all of the Allied nations; she had saved the lives of many Allied airmen who had lost their planes over Nazi-controlled territory. Those who survived the downing of their planes would be guided to safety by this young woman, undertaking nighttime journeys through Belgium and France to Portugal and safety. Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta began to seem very, very far away.

I quickly felt stuck at Asiatic Petroleum, so I invented a very satisfying escape. I had learned about the old films that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and one afternoon as I was plodding through all of those numbers, I remembered that there was a Rudolph Valentino silent playing at the Modern. I went into the ladies' room, rubbed spit on my mascara and daubed it under my eyes, and, trying to look suitably peaked, told them I was feeling dreadfully ill. Off I went to have my first experience with The Sheik. Heaven.

When I worked for Shell Oil we were on the top floor in one of the tallest buildings in Rockefeller Center. I loved gazing out at the view, taking special note of the light in winter, that deep, rich, radiant blue just before nightfall. There was a sense of camaraderie with my coworkers, and after hours we would wander to a nearby bar and have drinks. I would sit at the bar, singing snatches of arias from opera. I really didn't know much about opera despite all those years of listening to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, but I remember singing “
Una furtiva lagrima
,” the beautiful tenor aria from
L'Elisir d'Amore
just because I thought it was a pretty tune. Ditto for the “Habanera” from
Carmen
. Because I
worked in Rockefeller Center I was eligible to join the Rockefeller Center Choristers and was thrilled when I was accepted. The chorus director said I had the most beautiful voice he had ever worked with; and, starved as I was for a chance to sing, his words came like manna from heaven. The Choristers often sang in the outdoor skating rink under the big statue of Atlas, and sometimes our performances were televised. Nelson Rockefeller visited us during rehearsal one day—such was life in the big city, and I was gobbling it up.

In the fall of 1948 I performed in the Shell in-house review
Shellebrities
. Or to be more accurate, I performed in, choreographed, and directed
Shellebrities
. I grabbed any theatrical work I could. It was a chance to learn.

It was also at this very time that one of the dichotomies in my performing career was beginning to emerge full-blown: as much as I loved to sing, I was terrified of auditioning. On the one hand, I had faith in my talent; but, on the other, I felt extreme anxiety about actually performing. I've always been a nervous human being, so much so that I've often marveled that I ever really got into this business. I was terrified about meeting people, and simply greeting a prospective agent would leave me sweating profusely.

In fact, sweating profusely—
hyperhidrosis
is the medical term—had been a problem for me ever since I was an adolescent. In school I used to have to put a piece of paper over the test paper so the sweat wouldn't drip down and blur my answers. When I was asked to go to the blackboard to work out a math problem, I would be so nervous that the perspiration would run down my arm and drip off my elbow. I remember once having on a short-sleeved sweater and sweating so much that there were puddles at the top of my skirt from the perspiration running down my arms. Even
after I began performing on Broadway, I used to have all sorts of extra material placed underneath my costumes so that the moisture wouldn't show.

But much as I feared auditioning, my determination to succeed proved to be even greater, and when I met a woman named Teddy who gave voice lessons, she helped me put together audition material. It was surprisingly easy to audition in those days: you just looked in the show-business periodicals that came out and then showed up at the time and place indicated.

In the fall of 1949 I was offered a job at a very nice supper club in Boston called the Darbury Room. The owners had something new in mind for their room and I had no way of knowing, nor did they, if this would last. I was scared, but I finally decided to take the job after getting a two-week leave of absence from Asiatic Petroleum. What if the show flopped? What if I lost my job at Asiatic Petroleum? I'm afraid I didn't care one hoot about the problems of Asiatic Petroleum, but I did care about having enough money to pay the rent.

Off I went to Boston, where Erwin Straus, the son of the operetta composer Oscar Straus, had come up with the idea of putting together a revue of songs dedicated to a single musical-theater composer. He was to be the musical director and pianist, and I was one of four singers in the cast of two women and two men. What we did were “tab shows” (short “tabloid” performances) based on the work of a different composer each time: Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. These types of revues are more common now—Broadway shows have been built around the catalogues of Duke Ellington (
Sophisticated Ladies
) and Johnny Mercer (
Dream
)—but it was a fresh idea at the time, and I really lucked out. These shows were all
based on material for which I was particularly well suited. The first show centered on the work of Jerome Kern, and I realized that because his songs were all written for musicals, the format allowed me to perform them as if in a mini–musical comedy, rather than just sing in the usual nightclub style. Audiences loved the shows, which meant that the owners loved the shows. When it became clear that the run would last, I placed a call to Asiatic Petroleum: “I'm afraid I won't be coming back.” Someone else could check those numbers—and play hooky at the Museum of Modern Art. I was now officially working in show business!

I stayed in Boston for nine very happy months doing these shows, and without really knowing it I was receiving extremely valuable experience. I was learning how to connect with an audience, and in the process was singing the very best material ever written for musical theater. With only four of us in each show, we all had a chance to shine. I even received my first, if slightly generic, notice in
Variety
: “Barbara Cook proves an actress as well as a singer and dancer.” Not exactly an ecstatic rave, but I was the first performer mentioned, and it was a nice start. More meaningful to me were the enthusiastic responses from the audiences and my castmates, all of which gave me some much-needed confidence. With each successive revue, I began stretching my range, singing songs it would never have occurred to me to try, like Ethel Merman's songs from
Annie Get Your Gun
. I started to tell myself: “You could really have a shot at this.” I listen back now to some of my early singing, and I did not know how good I was. Good in the sense of having a really pretty sound. Not put-together yet, but really sweet, a very pretty voice. I started to acquire the glimmer of a personal style—an individual way of phrasing.

While in Boston I lived in the Charlotte Cushman Club.
Charlotte Cushman was the first American actress to achieve international renown, at a time when acting was looked upon as a somewhat dubious profession for a young lady. The Cushman Clubs that existed in various cities had been founded so that touring actresses would have somewhere safe and respectable to stay when they were performing in that town. The rooms were tiny, but there was a communal kitchen. Boston was, of course, a big tryout town at this time, so the club was full of women in shows. I remember that the actresses sort of looked down on those of us who weren't in the legitimate theater: “We are of the
theater
, and you're just singing in a
club
.”

When the show at the Darbury eventually closed I hung on in Boston for a little while; I had quit my job in New York, after all, and had nothing solid waiting back in Manhattan. During the run in Boston I'd also had my first television experience when Tommy O'Neal and I were asked to perform on a variety show for WBZ television. Tommy played piano and I sang, and we also shared a few duets. Fear gripped me again at the thought of this entirely new medium, especially since I was required to read the promotional commercials as well, but somehow we stumbled through. Unfortunately the television show soon came to an end and things pretty quickly got tight for me financially. I can recall several weeks at the Cushman Club when I subsisted only on apples and Milky Way candy bars, and I had to wire my father to send some money to tide me over.

Bereft of prospects or not, I eventually had to return to New York. But as luck would have it, I was introduced to the great composer Vernon Duke, who took me under his wing after hearing me sing. Vernon had left Russia as Vladimir Dukelsky and changed his name at the suggestion of George Gershwin. As Vernon Duke,
he had written some of the greatest popular songs of the twentieth century: “April in Paris,” “I Can't Get Started,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” and “Autumn in New York.” Vernon was one of the first people who believed in me, and he liked my voice so much that he asked me to sing at backers' auditions, which are informal performances used to drum up investors for new Broadway shows. He also introduced me to all sorts of exotic experiences—like eating artichokes. Before Vernon, I had never even seen an artichoke, much less learned how to eat one.

It was also Vernon who literally changed my life when he urged me to audition for the 1950 season at Tamiment, the summer resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. My job, along with fellow members of the “social staff,” was to provide entertainment for the guests, most of whom were young office workers from New York who came to the Poconos for their two-week summer vacation. Plane travel was still very expensive in 1950, and Europe and the Caribbean were out of reach for most. At Tamiment, however, these office workers paid one flat fee for their entire stay, and after entering the gate, everything was taken care of—no need to carry any money. There was golf, tennis, swimming, canoeing, archery, and three delicious meals a day, plus snacks. A small orchestra played for dancing in the evening. It was a great deal for the guests, and a terrific learning experience for the social staff.

I don't remember much about my audition for Tamiment, except that it was in somebody's apartment, quite informal, and it was the first time I met Jerry Bock. Jerry was a brilliant composer who went on to write
She Loves Me
and
Fiddler on the Roof
, and also to win a Pulitzer Prize for
Fiorello!
He was the main composer at Tamiment during this period, and, as I would learn, an extraordinary artist with a great gift for melody. He was work
ing at this time with the lyricist Larry Holofcener, and together they, along with George Weiss, went on to write the score for the Broadway musical
Mr. Wonderful
, starring Sammy Davis, Jr. I got the job and, as it turned out, would spend the next two summers at Tamiment, working with an extraordinary group of gifted, indeed brilliant, artists.