Then and Now (6 page)

I was so beset by anxiety over my total lack of acting experience that rehearsals continued to be a trial by fire. How did I overcome my fears? I didn't. I simply distracted myself from them by eating. By this point in my life I had already been struggling with my weight for several years, finding it, as most people do, a lot easier to put on than take off. By the time I was in rehearsal for
Flahooley
I had already acquired the habit of knowing exactly what I weighed at any point in my life.
Flahooley
, 136 pounds. A chubby 136 at that. A photo announcing my casting in the show found me looking decidedly more zaftig than the ideal Broadway ingénue.

I found a White Castle burger joint in Philadelphia and made it my secret refuge. Whenever my nerves over my inexperience got the better of me, that's where I ran. I'd tell myself, “You know you shouldn't be doing this. You know you cannot afford to gain any weight.” And then I'd order a sack full of those little White Castle hamburgers. The next night I'd do the same.

The problem became acute. I was a little too big to begin with, and I started getting bigger. And then I heard about a doctor who could help out with this kind of problem, and I was introduced to Dexedrine. At the time it seemed a godsend: here was a little pill that didn't just help curb your appetite, it also put you in a state of great creative ferment. You know how some days you feel particularly creative, your mind is clicking, and you have incredible energy? Energy-to-clean-your-entire-house kind of energy? That's what Dexedrine brought. It was a wonderful thing. Too bad it turned out to be so terrible for you.

As for
Flahooley
, as many lovers of obscure Broadway musicals know,
it
proved to be among the most peculiar shows to open in the 1950s. First, Yip switched the title of the show from
Toyland
to
Flahooley
after the dolls that are at the center of the plot. (Yip once quipped that he chose that kooky title because “it's the only name we could think of that you can't spell backwards.”) The musical was set in Capsulanti, Indiana, where the B. G. Bigelow company manufactures toys. My role was that of Sandy, a puppet operator at the factory, who is in love with the puppet designer, Sylvester, played by Jerome Courtland. Sylvester has created a fabulous new doll for the Christmas season, one that can blow bubble gum, read comics, and let out belly laughs. It will put the fortunes of Bigelow and Sandy and Sylvester into the stratosphere—until a competitor copies the doll and undercuts the price.

Meanwhile, an emissary from Arabia has come to Bigelow to have Aladdin's magic lamp repaired. This is where the singer Yma Sumac entered the picture. Born in Peru—the rumors that she was really Amy Camus from Brooklyn were simply not true—Yma was endowed with a truly amazing voice with an almost unbelievable range. I remember standing in the wings during performances and listening to the astounding things she could do with her voice. She had the amazing ability to slide all the way up to the top of her range and then sing a glissando all the way down. When she did the glissando down she sang two notes at the same time, like double-stops on a violin. The conductor, Maurice Levine, and I could never figure out how she did it. “What has she got in there instead of vocal cords?” I would wonder. She didn't really sing songs—she sang special material that her husband, Moises, would write for her. And there she was, in the middle of Capsulanti, Indiana.

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.