Another problem was this: Peter and Joe Papp did not hit it off from just about the first minute they set eyes on each other. This situation eventually improved, as both were men of their word and thorough professionals, but in the beginning, it was awkward. Peter’s refined manner brought out Joe’s inner street fighter. I begged Peter to let me do the first round of negotiating with Papp by myself, and then he could close the deal. This, of course, was a preposterous idea, as artists can’t really advocate for themselves very effectively. I told Peter that I just wanted to move with the show to Broadway and wasn’t trying to get rich doing so. He muttered in response that he didn’t want me to get poor, then threw up his hands and let me have my way.
A few days later, Joe came to my apartment to discuss the move to Broadway. He brought along a cigar and a couple of Spike Jones records. Rex and I had been hanging out there for a couple of hours, listening at top volume to Mick Jagger singing “Beast of Burden” on the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls album. Joe immediately imposed order by putting on Spike Jones, the American screwball comedy bandleader of the forties and fifties, and we spent the next hour on the floor howling with laughter. Rex was also a Spike Jones fan. Then Joe lambasted us with puns for another half hour. He was fiendishly good at this. After that, it was time to get down to business, so Rex went home, and Joe got out the cigar.
I told Joe that I was in negotiations to buy an apartment so that I would have a place of my own when we moved to Broadway. The apartment belonged to the actress Liv Ullmann. In addition to acting in my favorite Ingmar Bergman movies, Ullmann had recently sung and danced for Joe Papp in a production of I Remember Mama, and had lived in the apartment while doing so. I figured she must have been making enough to cover her expenses there. Also, though Liv Ullmann wasn’t necessarily a name on Broadway, she was highly successful in another area of the business, so I felt that our two situations were comparable. I won’t even bother to point out the ways in which this was ridiculous logic. Inside, Joe must have been cackling at my naiveté. I asked for the same salary that Ullmann got. Of course, I had no way of knowing what she got, and don’t to this day. To Peter’s and my own utter amazement, Joe wound up making a generous offer that included some perks I never would have thought to ask for in the first place. Maybe he was surprised by my lack of aggression and didn’t want to be thought of as less than a gentleman while conducting business on such an uneven playing field. Anyway, we made a deal.
The move to Broadway was reasonably smooth. There was a cast change, as Patricia Routledge was not available for the Broadway run. Veteran actress Estelle Parsons replaced her and received excellent notices for her portrayal of the daffy nursery maid, Ruth. Previews of the show started in the fall, and we opened officially at the Uris Theatre on West Fifty-First Street on the eighth of January, 1981.
For a period of time during previews, we were rehearsing one version of the show in the afternoon and performing another at night. This was exhausting, as we performed eight shows a week, and with rehearsals added, it was like doing sixteen. In addition to the rehearsals, they added performances on the Today show and Saturday Night Live. This meant getting up at four in the morning for the Today show and staying up till four in the morning to perform on SNL. We played a matinee performance on Christmas Day, and by New Year’s Eve, we were completely fried. We had already done a matinee that afternoon, and in between shows, the pit band went out and got very drunk. (Who could blame them?) Rex and I, painfully sober, were staggering from fatigue around the stage with shredded vocal cords. Exotic, unfamiliar sounds emanated from the orchestra pit. The trumpet player, playing the lead into Rex’s and my tender duet at the end of act one, was either a lot more hammered than the others or more nakedly exposed. He sounded truly awful. And loud.
Giggling is a plague on the nervous system that I believe is hardwired into some people’s physiology and seems to be a reaction to tremendous nerves, fatigue, or self-consciousness. It is rarely a welcome occurrence to the giggler and can feel like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel. Rex and I started to giggle at the horrifying trumpet notes and couldn’t get ourselves under control. The worst sin that an actor can commit is to break character onstage. This shatters the spell for the audience, and it becomes nearly impossible to win them back. Our audience, having forked over their hard-earned cash for tickets to see our now hopelessly unprofessional performance, was not amused. They began to boo. Rex and I, still struggling with our nervous system’s tantrum and meltdown, finished up our songs the best we could and fled the stage.
Backstage, Rex’s eyes were wide with terror and genuine anguish. I was wringing my hands in mortification. Wilford Leach was extremely concerned, and to his credit did not scream at us, though he would have been justified in doing so. He told me to change into my second act costume and, with Rex holding my hand, go out onto the stage before the show recommenced and apologize to the audience. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but it felt like going before a firing squad. I have no idea what I said to the audience, but it paved the way for the second act to begin, and we finished the show without further incident.
Until I went to work in Pirates, I had never had any formal voice training. The show’s vocal demands were considerable, and a wonderful voice teacher, Marge Rivingston, known as “Magic Marge,” was brought in to work with the entire cast. She played mother hen, psychiatrist, and taskmaster to us all, and seemed to always have the right piece of advice, whether personal or professional, to get each of us through the show.
Bill Elliott had the girls’ chorus belting high notes that originally had been written to be sung in the upper extension of the voice—where an operatic soprano sings. It sounded funnier that way, and more like the contemporary pop style that Wilford Leach had envisioned for the show. Eight performances a week of belting high notes could have created serious vocal problems for the chorus were it not for Marge’s careful guidance.
My problem was the opposite. From all those years of screaming over a rock band, I had an overdeveloped belt range and an underdeveloped upper extension. Because my boy soprano brother Peter was my earliest influence, my high voice sounded more like a choirboy’s than that of a grownup lady opera singer. Rex and I, coming from rock backgrounds, had developed the unfortunate habit of muscling our way through difficult vocal territory and, for lack of a better word, yelling. Marge went to work to unravel these problems. The biggest obstacle facing us was that the Broadway schedule allows only one day a week to rest, and that is not enough time for vocal recovery. I was trying to learn a healthier singing technique while I was performing the show, and the new muscles were trying to gain strength but with not enough time to rest. My voice eventually collapsed, and I missed five shows. This is something a Broadway performer tries his or her hardest to avoid. There are a number of reasons to do so: the show loses money from ticket cancellations if the star does not appear, the dynamic between the performers is greatly altered when a new person comes in, and the feeling is that the missing cast member has let down the entire production. I got back on the stage the minute I could squeak. My voice, with Marge’s coaching, eventually gained enough strength to carry me through the grueling schedule. I never missed another performance.
15
Jerry Wexler and the Great American Songbook
In the recording studio with Jerry Wexler, listening to a playback of our illfated attempt at recording standards.
I LOVED WORKING IN Pirates, and loved the fact that I didn’t have to travel every night to a new city, but by early spring 1981, I was eager to explore some new music. I felt that I needed to do some work on my phrasing—the area of my musicianship that I had always felt was my weakest—so that I could be a stronger singer when I eventually returned to pop music. My usual method for trying to improve musically was to study what came before whatever I was interested in improving. The pop singers that came before me were the interpreters of the American standard song. I started thinking about the r
ecords that my father had brought home to play on the big high-fidelity monaural record player he bought in 1957: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duets, Peggy Lee, Chris Connor, June Christy, and Billie Holiday.
While in New York, I had become friendly with Jerry Wexler and his wife, Renee, whom I had known slightly when she worked for David Geffen and Elliot Roberts. Wexler was one of the most respected A&R men in the record industry. He had started out in the 1940s as a writer for Billboard magazine, where he coined the term “rhythm and blues” to replace the unsavory “race records.” Then, in 1953, he became partners with Ahmet Ertegun and his brother, Nesuhi, and together they built the Atlantic recording label, signing culture-bending giants such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Chris Connor, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, and Led Zeppelin. Needless to say, he had a fabulous record collection. One evening I mentioned to him that I wanted to spend some time studying the singers who had reigned before rock and roll changed everything, and he offered the privileges of his vinyl treasury.
In addition to a titanic career, Wexler had a quirky charm, which he leavened with hipster street phrases and penetrating insights. At sixty-four, he spoke like a Jewish bebopper with a Jesuit education. His ears stuck out a little, like an animal on alert, giving one the impression that he was listening carefully. I was keeping steady company with journalist Pete Hamill, and Wexler expressed his wholehearted approval by describing Hamill as his favorite kind of fellow: “an educated cat from a bad neighborhood.” I loved hearing Wexler’s stories about the musicians, composers, thugs, and hangers-on that he had encountered in his long turn at the hub of the business. He was an ideal mentor.
Hamill, too, possessed an impressive collection of records, mostly jazz. He turned me on to players like tenor saxophonist Lester Young and trumpet player Clifford Brown, both of whom I loved for their lyrical playing styles. He had beautiful taste, and when he was writing, he always had something irresistible on his turntable. In addition to jazz, he’d sometimes play songs by the great Mexican composer Cuco Sanchez. I used some of them years later on my Mexican records. He brought me a female rendition of “What’s New,” which was a little closer to my key than the Sinatra version, and a stunning recording of Betty Carter singing “Tell Him I Said Hello,” which I recorded in 2004, with John Boylan and George Massenburg producing. Hamill’s input was indispensable.
One day Wexler and I were wandering together through the recordings of Mildred Bailey, a jazz vocalist from the 1930s, and it occurred to me that I should start making a serious effort to learn the songs. I thought I should put together a rehearsal band so that I could really work on the phrasing. Wexler offered to help me do it. Next thing I knew, we were making a record.
We started on an exploratory basis, working in the afternoons before I had to go to the theater to sing Pirates. Wexler assembled an excellent band of seasoned jazz players, many of whom had worked with the original interpreters of the genre. They included guitarist Tal Farlow, trumpeter Ira Sullivan, and the great pianist Tommy Flanagan. I thought we would go into the studio and rehearse and craft the arrangements as we went along. Wexler had other ideas and hired saxophonist Al Cohn to draw up the charts. Unfortunately, Al, who was a really good arranger, hadn’t had any input from me before he wrote the charts, and I stumbled over some of the songs that were arranged at a brisk tempo, when I had imagined them slow and brooding. Sections of songs I would have preferred to sing rubato were tethered firmly to the rhythm section. “Never Will I Marry,” a song I had wanted to sing for years, moved at such a breakneck pace that there was no room for me to swallow or breathe, let alone phrase. Wexler thought it sounded fine. I began to worry that we were not a good match in the studio, and that maybe I had jumped in too soon. He had an unfortunate habit of leaning on the talk-back mike, interrupting me in the middle of a song to give suggestions about my interpretation. I considered the interpretation to be my exclusive domain, so I wasn’t happy about that, either.
I finished out my run in Pirates and returned to the West Coast. Wexler flew out with our master tapes, and we played the rough mixes for Joe Smith, another legendary record man, then president of my label. Smith and Peter Asher thought the project was a mistake from the beginning and didn’t think the tracks should be released. I agreed with them about the tracks, but I loved the songs and still wanted to record them. Wexler thought the recording was great and argued vigorously in favor of releasing it. He wanted to finish mixing it, and out of respect for his towering position in the business, we agreed to let him, even though I knew it wouldn’t affect our final decision.
What made me certain that our differences were irreconcilable was learning that he meant to leave the mixing process entirely up to the engineer, with neither of us in attendance. The mixing process can fundamentally change the sound and the emotional impact of a recording and is much too important to be left up to someone else. It can’t save a bad recording, but it can destroy a good one. Working with Peter, not only did I have a lot of input into creating the arrangements, but also he and I mixed the records together with our engineer. Wexler was very cavalier about this, and told me that he often listened to the mixes over the phone and gave his final comments. He suggested that I could listen to them over the phone also and make any suggestions I wanted. I was stunned. The telephone can’t begin to carry the full range of sound. One might as well use string and a paper cup. I realized that either he didn’t know the difference, or he thought that I didn’t know the difference. Either scenario was unacceptable.
After talking to some musician friends who had worked on Wexler’s past productions, I realized why he had acted as he did. Wexler was, in the truest sense, an old-fashioned A&R man. In the earlier days of record making, the A&R man might select the material and musical setting for an artist such as, for instance, Rosemary Clooney. He would say to her, “I have this song, ‘Come On-a My House.’ We’re going to record it in this style with this arranger and these musicians.” Rosemary, a wonderful singer with, I assume, plenty of ideas of her own, had very little to say about it. Artists like Bob Dylan and the Beatles changed all that. They wrote or selected their own material and musical direction, becoming enormously successful in the process. David Geffen’s label, Asylum, was founded on the premise that the artist’s vision would be respected and supported.
Wexler was, in the best sense of the word, a great Monday morning quarterback. He could recognize when something was good after the fact. He could suggest and organize a general musical direction, but musical particulars and engineering decisions were left to specialists upon whom he relied heavily. Perhaps more heavily than he realized.
In my case, hindsight shows that his A&R instincts were correct in thinking that I could have success recording standards from the American songbook, but he couldn’t execute the recording in a way that was satisfactory to me or my record label. I had to tell him the album would not be released. He was hurt and angry, and I felt terrible. I was very disappointed that the project hadn’t been successful, and sorrier still to lose his friendship. He and Renee had been very kind to me while I was living in New York, and I liked them both a great deal. Under the circumstances, there was no way to save the relationship.
Peter Asher and Joe Smith, while concerned about the money lost on the record, were relieved that it was not coming out, which would have necessitated, in their opinion, throwing good money after bad. They hoped that I would forget about recording selections from the American standard songbook. I didn’t.
Joe Papp and Wilford Leach had decided to make The Pirates of Penzance into a motion picture, and Rex Smith, Kevin Kline, Tony Azito, George Rose, and I were asked to continue our roles in the film production. We were going to film in London, so the rest of the cast, which included Angela Lansbury, would be British.
We filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, about forty-five minutes outside of London, through the entire winter. Because the days were so short, our schedule landed us inside the st
udio just before the sun came up and excused us just after it had set. I took a room with a coal fireplace at the beautiful old Connaught Hotel and tried to keep warm, washing my clothes in the bathtub on rare days off.
Pete Hamill came and stayed for a time, bringing me a steady stream of books that he bought from a store in Charing Cross. I read them on the set waiting to be called in front of the camera: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola. They provided a richer and more sophisticated context for the clownish Victorian operetta I was singing. It also gave me this wonderful line from Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your everyday life, like a bourgeois, so you can be violent and original in your work.” I’ve never quite managed to match either end of this equation, but it’s something to shoot for.
One day my father called and told me in a tight, gray voice that my mother, who had been ill for some time, had died. On the following day off, when I was washing my clothes in the bathtub, I remembered when I was three, following my mother down the little path to the clothesline, and handing her clothespins while she hung out the family wash. It always included the blue calico dress and tiny white pinafore worn by my Raggedy Ann doll.
As we were moving into spring, I set out one morning in the dark for my usual lengthy commute. Missing my mother and still feeling disappointment about my lost opportunity to sing the beautiful songs I had chosen for the illfated Wexler album, I was listening to a cassette of my old favorite Sinatra album, Only the Lonely. Just as Sinatra was beginning his flawless rendition of “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” the sun, adhering to its new spring schedule, popped its head up over the horizon. The sunlight and the music filled me, a desert dweller stranded in the cold, dark North, with longing and joy. I suddenly became aware that if I didn’t record those songs that I loved, I would spend the rest of my life feeling I had missed an essential experience. I resolved to beg Peter to help me, and, against his better judgment, he agreed.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 13