by Patti Lupone
Northport, Long Island
1949–1968
Early cheesecake.
I remember the day I fell in love with the stage as if it were yesterday.
When I was four, my father was principal of the Ocean Avenue Elementary School, the only elementary school in my hometown of Northport, Long Island. He started an after-school program, and one item on the curriculum was dance with Miss Marguerite in the school auditorium. I was enrolled. At the end of the school year, we performed a recital called “There’s Nothing Like Dancing.” It was June 1953. I wore a black Capezio jazz skirt, leotard, and tap shoes. I was downstage right, dancing furiously. I looked out at the audience, and even though it was mostly the parents of the other kids in the recital, I thought that they were all looking at me. Hey, they’re all smiling at me. I can’t get in trouble up here. I can do whatever I want, and they’ll still smile at me. I knew from then on that I would spend my life on the stage, because in fact what I really fell in love with was the audience.
The way the family tells it, my brother Bobby saw me in a hula skirt, fell in love with the costume, and followed me into dance. He was seven and I was four. I never looked back. In fact, neither of us did.
The night I fell in love with the audience at Miss Marguerite’s recital.
My mother and father were first-generation Americans. My grandparents, the maternal Pattis and the paternal LuPones, came over from Sicily and Abruzzo to start a new life in America. They settled in Jamestown and Dunkirk, New York. Neither set of grandparents spoke English, so a lot of Italian was spoken in the houses, but none was spoken to the grandkids. Both families were boisterous and full of laughter, but the Pattis took the prize for the amount of noise they could make at a single gathering. There were hints of theatrical blood from a few of the adults, but it was when my mother pulled out the Encyclopaedia Britannica and reverently showed me a picture of my great-grandaunt, Adelina Patti, the famous nineteenth-century coloratura, that my voice and my oversized emotional personality started to make sense. I’m small, but the voice and personality are BIG, I thought. Must be in the genes.
There’s a family rumor that Grandma Patti was a bootlegger. They say she hid the liquor under the floorboards of a sewing room and could smell the cops coming a mile away. Grandpa Patti was murdered before I was born, and the other rumor was that Grandma was somehow involved. According to the Jamestown Evening Journal of October 10, 1927:
Awakened by two men early Sunday morning, James Patti, 42, was lured from his home on Lakewood Road and shot to death by gunmen who are being sought by the Sheriff’s Department. Mystery surrounds the motive for the crime, which baffles authorities. The slaying took place on Howard Avenue, near Patti’s home shortly after 5:30 o’clock in a dense fog, which covered the gruesome scene. Patti’s son George with Carmelo Calabrese, who was a material witness, found Patti lying in a pool of blood caused by three wounds in his head.… [In the past] both Patti and his wife have been arrested on charges of bootlegging.… Those who were subjected to the most questioning were Patti’s wife, the son George, the daughter Angelina [MY MOTHER!], and Carmelo Calabrese, their neighbor.… The widow of the slain man and his daughter [MY MOTHER!] were not locked up, but Calabrese and the Patti youth, George, were kept in jail yesterday but last night all were released except Calabrese.
For two people who couldn’t speak a word of English, there was a lot of money in that household. I often wondered just where the money came from. The theory that my grandparents were bootleggers made sense, and personally I loved it. I didn’t find any of this out until after my mother’s death, when I was researching my family history. I asked one of my cousins about the murder. He turned ashen and said he was sworn to secrecy, but confirmed that yes, somehow Grandma was involved.
It didn’t surprise me. My grandmother wasn’t a very warm woman. In fact, she was kind of scary. She rarely smiled and had a tough countenance. Not that she didn’t love us. She did … her way. I remember Sunday-morning phone calls between my mother and Grandma—my mother always ending up in tears. I would ask her why she was crying. She said she missed her mother. I wonder if they were discussing Grandpa’s murder. I’ll never know because they were talking in Italian!
They never did solve Grandpa’s murder. When I was fourteen years old, there was an incident where my mother almost let the cat out of the bag. I was standing at the kitchen sink daydreaming. My mother sidled up to me with a small sepia picture of a shirtless man in swimming trunks with his back to the camera. I looked over and asked, “Who’s that?”
My mother replied, “Your real grandfather, my father.”
“Well, who’s the guy I think is my real grandfather?”
Silence.
I waited, then I asked, “Well, what happened to this guy in the picture?”
“I don’t know,” she responded, then turned and walked away. I was dumbfounded. The Patti household—money and secrets.
My mother and her sisters were fashion plates, beautifully coiffed and dressed, but it was Aunt Tina who wanted to go on the stage. She was the middle sister, dark-haired and beautiful. She took bellydancing lessons and sang whenever she could. With no solicitation from us she would gyrate and start screeching, most times in an apron with flour on her face. My mother couldn’t hold a tune or dance to save her life. She was so devoid of theatrical blood that, later, when Bobby and I were established, she famously said, “I wish you two would stop flitting from job to job!”
From left to right: Tina, Mom, Ann, and Grandma. What a bunch of babes.
“But Ma, the jobs don’t last.”
My mother was not a stage mother in any respect. She was an American housewife until she and my dad got divorced when I was twelve. My dad had had a dalliance with a substitute teacher. My parents had been married for thirty years, and back then nobody got divorced. The rug was pulled out from under my mother, so she threw her energy into her kids. My twin brothers Billy and Bobby and I were all she had left. She felt ostracized from the community, from the school my dad was principal of, and from the Catholic Church, which frowned on divorce. The humiliation was too much for her to take. Her children became the focus and purpose of her life. The divorce freed me to pursue my dream. Dad wanted all of us to be teachers. Mom’s life force was driving us from one lesson to the next. If she was a stage mother, it manifested itself in her pride in her three kids.
I went from dance with Miss Marguerite at the Ocean Avenue Elementary School to the Donald and Rosalie Grant Dance Studio, ending up at the André & Bonnie Dance Studio on Jericho Turnpike in Huntington. André was French, very exotic for Jericho Turnpike, Long Island. He and his wife, Bonnie, created routines for brother-and-sister acts. June and Timmy Gage had a great act. She was a contortionist, so in their routine she was the puppet and Timmy was the puppeteer. Of all the acts that André created, it was my favorite because of June’s ability. The positions she could get her body into were amazing. She was a star as far as I was concerned—if she’d just get those buckteeth fixed. There was also Louella and Vincent Milillo. Their name used to make me laugh. They, however, had no sense of humor. Their act was a tango, as I recall.
Miss Marguerite’s dance class, in costume.
My twin brothers and I did an adagio waltz to “Belle of the Ball.” We were the LuPone Trio. All of us kids were a motley group that performed all over Long Island and Manhattan—Kiwanis clubs, Rotary clubs, the Jones Beach boardwalk, the old Piccadilly Hotel in New York City—and there was Mom, driving Billy, Bobby, and me to our dance recitals. Elaborate costumes were hand sewn, beaded, and sequined if they didn’t come out of the trunk from some French revue that André had brought with him from Paris to Jericho Turnpike, Huntington, Long Island. It was the fifties, but it felt like vaudeville. We were troupers on a circuit, albeit the Long Island circuit.
Bobby and Billy had matching outfits with cummerbunds. I was in a white ball gown. I still hadn’t grown into my lips. We appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur H
our. The television show had a live audience, and although it was a family show and many of the performers were kids, the audience warm-up guy was a very lowbrow comedian. His jokes were filthy and hysterical. It was my first real introduction to professional show business.
The LuPone Trio.
It was also a rude introduction to the world of television. The studio was dirty and the atmosphere was gritty with a no-nonsense “let’s get this done” attitude backstage. I was wearing a little tiara, and during the afternoon rehearsal one of the stagehands walked up to me and sprayed something on it—it was a dulling spray because the tiara was too shiny for the TV lights. He then said, “Open your mouth,” sprayed the same stuff on my braces and walked away. No introduction, no explanation, no apology. I was thirteen.
But that was nothing compared to what happened next. Bobby and I were hanging underneath a stairwell between the camera rehearsal and the live show when we heard somebody from the program tell one of the contestants with a southern accent and his manager that he would win the contest that night. This was before airtime—before we had performed, before anyone had performed and the audience had voted. The two of us looked at each other—we couldn’t believe what we were hearing. We tried not to believe that Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour was fixed. But what other explanation could there be, especially after the kid from Mississippi, who sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” won? Bobby and I ran and told our mother and our dance teachers, but they didn’t believe us, or they didn’t want to believe us. It was quite an experience. I gave up my junior high school prom for The Amateur Hour only to find out that it was fixed. Nothing much changed in my young life, but I added the word “jaded” to my vocabulary … that and “dulling spray.”
I went back to being a student in Northport. For the most part, school was fun but boring. What inspired me was the Northport school system’s incredibly strong music department. I’d started private piano lessons with Miss JoAnn Oberg at seven years old. My mom made me sit up straight and practice one hour every day. I hated practicing, but I loved Miss Oberg. When I turned eight, my third-grade class was led into the Ocean Avenue Elementary School auditorium and told to choose an instrument from the two large posters up on the stage. We were to pick either a band instrument or an orchestra instrument. I said “harp.” There was no harp at our elementary school, but my classmate Kathy McCusker whispered the word “cello” to me, so I started playing the cello. I continued to play it until my senior year in high school.
As a junior, I started playing the sousaphone in the Northport High School marching band. Our bandleader, Robert Krueger, was a graduate of Northwestern University and was able to get the most current Northwestern musical arrangements and marching routines. People came to the football games as much to see the band as to see the football team. We had an all-girl sousaphone line. I wanted in because the marching band went to a summer camp with another high school from Nassau County. It was very sexy. (The camp, not the marching band.) We learned routines during the day, and at night there was a whole new crop of boys. One summer, I was quarantined for a week because of extremely bad behavior. When one of my favorite teachers, Esther Scott, came to my room to keep me company, she laughed her head off because it was full of boys bent on doing the same thing.
In school, what I loved most of all, besides recess, was chorus. I met Esther Scott in junior high. She was the chorus master. When I entered high school, Esther coincidentally made the transition with me. I was incredibly blessed to have her for six years.
When she met my brother Bobby and me, she recognized our talent, supported it, and elevated it. We remain very close friends to this day. While Billy gravitated toward the science department, Bobby and I became her protégés. In addition to nurturing our talent, she also protected us, especially me, because I got into so much trouble in high school. Esther once found me hiding in her office to avoid the assistant principal, who was pacing the hallways of the music department shouting, “Where are you, LuPone? I know you’re here somewhere. When I get my hands on you …!” Esther laughed when she discovered me under her desk—how unusual for a teacher. There was an irreverence about her that was deeply appreciated by all of her students. Oh, and the trouble I would get into as a child and a teenager is the same trouble I get into now as an adult approaching senior status. I rarely turn down a dare. I want to laugh and have fun, however dangerous or rude. “The edge” has always been extremely seductive. All of this equals trouble in my world, but what fun I’ve had.
Esther and me on the football field at Northport High School.
My brother, Bobby, in Jardin aux Lilas, Juilliard Dance Division.
© ELIZABETH SAWYER
I only wanted to listen to Esther. I had no interest in math, science, history, or English. My heart belonged to the music department. It was the only place that I truly studied anything, and it was there that I learned to continue pursuing what I knew was my calling.
Esther helped me expand my horizons far beyond Northport. I attended All-County, All-State, and All-Eastern in chorus. Each of these events made up a single band, orchestra, and chorus. All-County was selected musicians and singers from the high schools in Suffolk County; All-State was again a select few from the high schools in New York State. All-Eastern was the culmination of all of these efforts. We were the best music students from the high schools on the eastern seaboard. You had to audition to participate, and luckily I made it into all three choruses. When I was in the All-Eastern chorus, I was struck by how much talent was out there. During one rehearsal, as I sat in the soprano section, I was humbled and stunned. I stopped singing and started listening. I started asking myself questions: What is this desire I have? What do I need to do to be as good as these people behind me, in front of me, all around me? I went back to Mrs. Scott and talked about my experience.
“You’ve been bit,” she told me. “The rest of your life will be about this investigation.”
I remember that my junior high school guidance counselor asked me what I wanted my high school major to be. I told him music. He told me that was not possible, that I had to major in something academic.
“Then why did you ask me?” I said. “I want to major in music.”
“You can’t do that,” he insisted.
I solved the problem my own way. I don’t know how I graduated from high school. The only classes I remember showing up for were music. To my mind, the department was filled with the most interesting kids—the misfits, the musical geniuses, the math whizzes, and just a few greasers because music was fun. Our teachers loved what they were teaching, and I loved those teachers because of that. How could you not learn? The music department was alive, inspired, and passionate. I was never out of the vicinity of the department. I attended my other classes, but ultimately the only lessons that stuck were coming out of the music department or out of Mrs. Scott’s heart and soul.
Under her guidance, our chorus was selected to sing for NYSSMA, the New York State School Music Association, which was a very prestigious honor. Mrs. Scott was thrilled that our chorus had been selected. She chose an original piece, Arthur Frackenpohl’s Te Deum, and she chose me to sing the soprano solo. The convention was held at the Concord Hotel in the Catskill Mountains. It was December. We drove up from Northport the day before and stayed overnight. The morning of the performance I woke up with a fever. I couldn’t swallow—it hurt so badly every time I did. I didn’t know what was wrong with me and I was too scared to tell anybody except my closest friends. I had several hours before the concert and I continued to get sicker. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to sing, let alone stand through the performance. It was my first test. Would I be able to overcome this illness and sing the solo? Was this just a case of stage fright? Did I have the inner strength to endure whatever lay ahead for me in this business? There was somebody else who could have sung the part if I was too sick, but this was my first big solo. My name was in the program. I couldn’t let myself dow
n. I couldn’t let Mrs. Scott down. I had to tell her that I was sick. To this day I can see Esther standing in front of me. She asked me whether I could do it, and I said, “I think I can.”
“Then do it,” she said.
Before we took the stage, she told us about her son, Gary, who was severely handicapped.
“Would you sing this for Gary?” she asked us. “Music is his joy and the only thing he responds to.” Esther didn’t cry as she spoke about him, but we did because of her simple request and her moving words. That night she instilled something in us greater than our teenage self-absorption. Whenever Esther spoke, everyone sat up straight and listened. Her compassion and wisdom were uplifting and helped us all transcend the petty disputes and mundane occurrences that were part of our daily school lives. She changed us with the music she chose for us, with the experiences she shared with us, and with the experiences she created for us. After everybody stopped crying, the chorus walked out on that stage with a different physicality, a different posture. We simply carried ourselves taller. There was pride, seriousness, focus—something that removed our egos from the equation and let the music soar.
Swallowing was so painful that I didn’t sing a note until I got to my solo. Then I did what I’ve done all my life. I opened up my mouth and sang … “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day” … the opening words. My voice cracked coming off the F above middle C, but I didn’t let it sink me. I did it. We all did it—for Esther and for Gary. At the end of the concert, Esther did something I’ve never forgotten. She acknowledged the applause but for only a brief second. She turned back and gave us the ovation. The pride and the accomplishment we felt was so heady and like nothing I’d ever felt before. It wasn’t the applause as much as it was the feeling of achievement and success. It was an incredible experience and a huge life lesson for all of us.