by Barbara Cook
My father had walked out, my mother had already told me that I had, in effect, killed my sister, and when, on the same afternoon that he left I wanted to go out to play, my mother held my shoulders and looked at me sternly. Under no circumstances, she said, was I to tell anyone what had happened. There was still a sense of shame about a broken marriage, and at age six I felt ashamed.
Just to add to the weight of events, my father had recently been in the hospital for a minor hernia operation, and my mother told me that he’d had an affair with one of the nurses taking care of him. An affair right after abdominal surgery? True? Who the hell knows! Appropriate information for a six-year-old? Hardly! And why would anyone convey all that to a very young child in the first place? Later on the night my father left, my mother brought me into her bed. And that never changed. I slept in bed with my mother every night until I was twenty years old and decided to make New York my home.
When my father left, my mother laid another burden of guilt upon me. She said, “If Pat had lived, your father would not have left.” So, according to my mother, Pat could have kept my father with us; I was responsible for Pat’s death; so I had screwed that up as well. After Daddy left, whenever I was going to see him, my mother told me I should beg him to come back to us. If I did it right, she said, I could convince him to come back. Of course he never came back, and I always felt that I had failed miserably again. If I had to give a color to my life during the years before my daddy left, it would all be a golden sunny yellow. After he walked out it changed to a heavy, dull gray.
Although I would see my father often in the years ahead, I didn’t see him in ways that were satisfying. He had remarried and moved to North Carolina for work. My time with him was always short and felt stolen, on the run, while he was in town.
My father couldn’t afford to keep my mother and me in our present apartment, so she decided we would move in with her mother until she could figure out what to do. The truth is that my mother was so devastated from losing my father that she probably was not functioning well enough to make any decisions about how to go on with her life. My father was not coming back, and we were now going to live in a cheerless house at 366 Glenwood Avenue with my grandmother Harwell and three of my mother’s sisters. Very shortly after we moved in, my mother became ill with pneumonia and I remember living with the fear that I would lose her, just as I had lost the rest of my family.
The apartment we were living in when my father left was very comfortable. We had electricity, heat, hot running water, and a comfortable bathroom. When we moved in with my grandmother, we had none of those things. Suddenly I was living with kerosene lamps and ineffectual fireplaces for warmth. If we wanted hot water, it had to be heated on the iron stove in the kitchen. The house was wired, but we couldn’t afford to pay for electricity. This was during the Depression, right in the city of Atlanta.
My grandmother’s house on Glenwood was a two-family gray wood house. Gray in color, gray in atmosphere. My God, what a change for me. With the exception of my mother’s two younger twin sisters, Doris and Dorothy, there was not a lot of love and kindness going on. Five women and me, all living in two rooms without electricity or heat.
My grandmother was a hard woman. Actually, she and my mother were somewhat alike, a fact that certainly helps explain why there was often tension between them. God knows, my grandmother had a hell of a life. She was divorced from my granddaddy, Charlie, and in the 1920s that did not make for an easy state of affairs. She could be ornery and divisive, and as a result there was constant chaos in her house.
My handicapped aunt Dorothy, my grandmother, my mother, and I all slept in two beds in the middle room, the feather beds smelling of urine and God knows what else. My aunts Doris and Margaret slept on cots in the front room—the living room—and in the third, back, room was the kitchen with a kerosene stove along one wall and a black iron woodstove against another. A big round oak table was in the center of the room. Through the kitchen was the door to the back porch, where the icebox lived.
Although a bathroom had been added to my grandmother’s back porch (a big improvement, because they had been living with only an outhouse in the backyard), there was no heat or hot water in the bathroom, and tub baths during the winter proved impossible. Instead, we all washed in the kitchen, dabbing soap and water on ourselves from a big gray pan of water that had been heated on the woodstove. Even in the warmer months a bath could turn into a big project because all the water had to be heated in dishpans and carried out to the porch, pan by pan.
I suppose there were electric heaters of some sort in those years, but even though the wires were in evidence, the electricity had been cut off long ago. It was the Depression, and there was simply no money to pay for electricity. I could deal with the heat in the summertime, but it was cold in the winter, and without heat or electricity the cold stayed in your bones. All six of us were just plain uncomfortable.
We had kerosene lamps and small fireplaces in the two front rooms, and I did my homework by the light of those kerosene lamps. I was not a particularly good student for a simple reason: if the subject didn’t interest me, then I put no effort into it. In my high school years I earned very good grades but failed geometry because I had no interest in it and couldn’t see how it could be of any possible use to me. Honestly, I still don’t.
My mother’s sisters were quite a trio. Margaret was most always angry and didn’t have much to do with me, except to snarl at me from time to time. She had hennaed red hair, very curly, and even with that sour disposition she had a sweet boyfriend who was tall and so thin that everyone of course called him “Fats.” Fats and Margaret were going to be married after the war, but he never came back and she married Horace Poss instead. Her taste was typical of the world I knew in my grandmother’s house. She collected salt and pepper shakers, and I remember very well her favorites: two little boys sitting on chamber pots labeled “Billy Can” and “Billy Can’t.” Lord, help us!
I adored my aunt Doris, who was blond, beautiful, and, to my seven-year-old self, perfect. Only twelve years older than I, she taught me to draw, and from her I learned the words to the songs she loved: “Winter Wonderland,” “Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen”—all the hits of the 1930s and early forties. She taught me the latest dances—the Shag, the Big Apple, the Little Peach—and her kindness provided me a measure of comfort and security. I loved Doris, and it was sad to hear about her eventually sinking into alcoholism toward the end of her life. It’s a stark fact that my mother was one of eight children, four of whom were ultimately alcoholic.
My aunt Dorothy, Doris’s twin, was born with a curvature of the spine, and, according to my mother, it was the doctor’s fault. Dorothy was sweet and fragile—but she was a sweet and fragile tyrant. She could sit up for a few hours in her big wooden rolling chair, but other than that she lay in bed all day, drooling and kicking and flailing uncontrollably. We played Old Maid and other little games and made designs with colorful, shiny little clay beads, and I loved her. When my school friends came to visit they were frightened of her, but I wasn’t. I was used to her. She was a constant strange playmate, a frail tyrant who went crazy if my grandmother even hinted at leaving the house, which made my grandmother a prisoner in her own home. Finally my grandmother just never left the house at all, and it was no surprise when, after her mother died, Dorothy lived for only one more week. She couldn’t exist without her mother.
A very sweet old couple, the Drums, lived in the other half of the house. I was terrified of their huge German shepherd dog, and in their kitchen they kept a mean, screechy cockatoo that scared the hell out of me every time I ventured within sight of its cage. Mrs. Drum tried to reassure me by telling me the bird thought I was a monkey and that that’s why he made that god-awful noise when I came near. She took great interest in me, and loved having me sing to her. It was a blessing to be able to visit with this sweet lady and get away from the other side of the house.
The Great Depression had hit,
but so had my own six-years-old depression. Don’t ever doubt that kids can be depressed. How could I not be? My sister had died. My father had left, even though I had cried and begged him not to go. My mother had been ill with pneumonia. I was scared. Always.
When my mother recovered from her pneumonia, she looked endlessly for work, any kind of work, walking into town in order to save the bus fare. Night after night she’d walk dejectedly back home, the job search having proved utterly futile. My aunts Doris and Margaret did have employment, however, working at the Standard Coffee Company, where their jobs consisted of bagging the beans, hour after numbing hour. Under their skirts they wore long bloomers that had elastic just above the knees, and some of that coffee found its way into their bloomers; other foodstuffs might have been in short supply, but we never lacked for coffee. It was great fun watching them pull the elastic away from their knees and seeing the coffee beans come tumbling out.
My mother was sad and depressed. In hindsight, I understand how fragile she must have felt, but in her loneliness she shared wildly inappropriate information with me. Our house was near Grant Park, with its big lake, and one night when I found her crying, she blurted out her plan to go to the park, walk into the lake, and drown herself. It was 1934 and I was seven years old.
Of course I developed all sorts of nervous fears. I thought that my mother was going to die, just like my sister. Atlanta has always had severe lightning storms during the summer, and when one of those storms came roaring through, I was petrified that my mother would be hit by lightning and instantly die. Storms terrified me, and I remember on one of those terrifying afternoons that Mrs. Drum comforted me by telling me that my mother would be safe from the lightning because the hat she was wearing included a rubber band that would protect her. But it all weighed on me, this constant fear of being lost and alone with no one to take care of me except my tough grandmother. My young life had fallen apart.
It was at this time that a fire-and-brimstone preacher set up a tent in a nearby vacant lot and for several weeks held an old-fashioned revival meeting. One hot summer evening my mother and some of her friends went to one of the meetings, and she took me with her. During the sermon the preacher said that if Jesus had come to us and we had refused him we would burn in hell for eternity. Make that ETERNITY. In my young mind I was thinking that perhaps Jesus had come to me and I hadn’t realized it. I was sure I was doomed. That night began a pattern of my waking in the night, gasping for breath, filled with a dread certainty that I was dying right at that very moment. Now I recognize these episodes as panic attacks, but then I was seven years old, wetting the bed again, and waking up thinking I was dying.
The attacks and the bed-wetting continued, and my mother took me to the doctor. Nobody had connected my panic to the preacher’s fire-and-brimstone sermon, but when the good doctor discovered that the first attack had happened hours after I had gone to the revival meeting, he simply said, “Don’t take her to any more revival meetings.” End of discussion.
Our house was in a constant state of chaos, but there was always food of some sort, and I never went to bed on an empty stomach. It’s striking to realize how many of my childhood memories revolve around food: oatmeal with loads of sugar. Evaporated milk. Peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches when I came home from school. Tea every morning with evaporated milk and so much sugar it remained a sludge in the bottom of the cup.
My daddy’s mom was the best cook in the family, but we were living with my mama’s mother, and she made what she called goulash—elbow macaroni with tomatoes and green peppers. There would be delicious home fries and dripping-with-grease apricot or peach turnovers made in the frying pan. Fried tripe. Salmon croquettes. It sounds sumptuous but it was basic and it had to feed six women. The big meal of the week, which they cooked on the kerosene stove, was Sunday dinner. I actually came to dread those Sunday-afternoon meals on account of the kerosene stove: the fumes from the kerosene were so awful that I couldn’t go into the kitchen without my eyes streaming tears and my throat burning.
We were desperately poor. So often you hear people say, “We were poor but we didn’t know it”—well, I knew it. I felt so deprived. One of my chores was fetching kerosene from the store in a can. The can had lost its cork, so my grandmother had a small sweet potato screwed into the top. I was deeply embarrassed to walk down the street carrying a can with a sweet potato sticking out of it, so I finally refused. The solution was to put the can in a paper bag, which soon got stained from the kerosene; in the end, the paper bag proved to be just as mortifying as the sweet potato.
3 • DISCOVERING SHOW BUSINESS
MY ANXIETY PROBLEMS were not the only ailments I suffered from as a child. When I was about seven or eight it was discovered that I was anemic, but this turned out to be a really good thing. The doctor prescribed exercise, and I talked my mother into letting me have tap lessons. I took to it instantly, and earned the first money I ever made—fifty cents!—performing a little military tap number in between shows at a movie house. That money went a long way in the 1930s: fifty cents would buy ten loaves of bread or ten quarts of milk.
I especially adored movies, spending as much time in movie theaters as I could—the better to escape my unhappiness at home. The movies were a readily accessible, dream-fulfilling way to drift into a different, more glamorous, and altogether more wonderful world. It was actually from the movies that I learned to love classical music: Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were my absolute idols. Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad. Grace Moore. For a poor little girl in Georgia the very names evoked a world of culture and glamour. I had a bedroom with no windows which opened on to an inner stairwell, and I would sit on the floor, light candles, and listen to classical music for hours on end.
At a very early age my Saturday afternoons were given over to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. All the neighborhood kids would be out in the yard playing and I would be inside listening to the opera, utterly transported by the music. Here was grand opera from the biggest, brightest city of them all—New York. So swept away was I by the broadcasts that I didn’t rush out to play with the kids after the program concluded. In fact, if I heard a performance that really impressed me, I couldn’t bear for anybody to speak to me afterward. I wanted to remain inside that experience, become the story or the protagonist myself. I was not, to say the least, the easiest kid to be around.
When I was twelve years old the world premiere of Gone With the Wind was held in Atlanta. You can’t imagine what that novel meant to Atlanta, and the movie was even more momentous. The city staged a parade for the film’s premiere, and I remember standing on Peachtree Street with my mother that evening before scurrying to the Lowes Grand, which had been redecorated with a false façade to look like Tara. And finally, there they were—sitting in the back of their open cars—Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier. WOW! Many years later I was at a party and met Vivien Leigh. I was performing in She Loves Me and she was in the process of winning a Tony Award for her performance in Tovarich, her one Broadway musical. My leading man, Daniel Massey, introduced us and of course I wanted to tell her how much that far-away evening in Atlanta had meant to me; when I broached the subject she all but froze and almost literally turned away from me. I think I’d stupidly told her how old I was that night in Atlanta and she sure as hell didn’t want to hear about that.
Going to the movies consumed the little spending money I had. I would get twenty-five cents to spend on a Saturday: the movie cost ten cents, I’d get a hamburger for ten, and a dill pickle for five. That was my treat. The Temple was our local movie house, and I was sometimes in there longer than the ushers. I’d start with the first show in the morning and see the picture four times in a row. One of my aunts would eventually come storming down the aisle looking for me. I literally had to be dragged out of the theater.
What I loved most of all was any movie that had a stage show at the center of the plot: movies like 42nd Street and all of the
Mickey and Judy “let’s put on a show” extravaganzas. And—at the very top of my list: Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. As a youngster, the idea of being in films seemed outrageous to me—Jeanette seemed like an untouchable goddess—so I fixated on the idea of performing onstage. I remember saying that I wanted to perform in “musical comedy” even before I knew what musical comedy was.
I saw every one of Jeanette and Nelson’s movies ten or twelve times. I just loved them—no, I wanted to be them. I wanted to be both of them. Here’s how much my love for Jeanette impressed itself on my brain: at some point during the 1970s I began telling people, “The most wonderful thing has happened to me. Jim Broderick and I were having lunch at the Russian Tea Room. I looked across the way and there was Agnes de Mille. And guess who was sitting with her—Jeanette MacDonald! I said to Jim, ‘Please excuse me. I have to table hop a second.’ I went over and met JEANETTE MACDONALD!! ‘Oh!’” I’d tell everyone. “‘She was so nice and so beautiful.’” I told everyone this story. There was just one problem: it never happened.
Some years after this supposed meeting I was looking through the latest Theatre World, which is an annual publication about the most recent theater season. And in the front of the book were photographs of actors who had died. And oh my God—it turned out that Jeanette died before I even met Jim Broderick! WHAM!! Something’s wrong here. I talked to Jim Broderick about it. He said to me, “We never had lunch at the Russian Tea Room.” I asked Agnes de Mille, who shot me a look and said, “I never met you at the Russian Tea Room.” I wasn’t lying and it wasn’t a dream—I just completely and totally believed it. So—it looks like you can’t trust anything I say . . .