Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (18 page)

The next time I found myself in New York, Rockwell found a hole in his very busy schedule that corresponded to a hole in Joe Papp’s even busier schedule and took me in a taxi to the New York Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. I still was not very knowledgeable about Papp, and had no idea that he had helped launch a staggering number of fabulous careers, including those of George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Martin Sheen, and Wallace Shawn, and shows such as
Hair
and
A Chorus Line
.

Joe Papp was brilliant and compelling. I don’t say this lightly. I could count on one hand the number of men I have met who exuded his magnetism and competence. There was also his thoughtful, curious, and boundlessly informed intelligence, which could have the effect of a wild tiger at the end of a frayed leash. He listened very politely to my lunatic raving about Colette and wanting to sing on a stage with a curtain, and then went about the rest of his day meeting with the long line of people of infinitely greater ability and importance than me. I doubt that he gave our meeting a second thought.

In 1979 the city cut Papp’s funding for presenting Shakespeare in Central Park that summer—something he had been doing since 1962—and he was angry about it. He decided he wouldn’t do Shakespeare that summer. Instead, he would put on Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta
The Mikado.
He asked the acclaimed director and playwright Wilford Leach to direct it, but Leach didn’t like Gilbert and Sullivan and said he didn’t think he wanted to do it. But, since Papp was very keen on the idea, Leach went to a record store to buy a copy of
The Mikado
and, for some reason, came home instead with a copy of
The Pirates
of Penzance
. This he decided he
did
like, but he thought that the traditional way of performing it was too stiff. Leach wanted to approach it like a brand-new play. Since Gilbert and Sullivan was the pop music of its time, he decided he wanted to use contemporary pop singers from our time.

Leach liked to watch the
Today
show when he woke up in the morning. Coincidentally, John Rockwell had a monthly slot on the program, talking about music. While Leach was in the process of casting
Pirates
, he saw Rockwell on
Today
, talking about me.

Leach liked my voice and decided that I was the person he wanted to cast in the role of Mabel, the soprano ingénue. He went into Papp’s office to tell him his idea, and Papp said, “I’ve met her; she wants to work here.” He asked his assistant to call me at home in Malibu.

The call came while I was upstairs taking a shower. Jerry Brown was sitting downstairs next to the phone, so he answered it. Jerry had seen
H.M.S. Pinafore
when he was in school, and that was what he remembered of Gilbert and Sullivan, so when I came downstairs, he told me that someone named Joe Papp had called and he wanted me to sing in
Pinafore
. I was delighted! During the time that my sister had sung the alto role of Buttercup all those years ago when I was six, I had learned the soprano part of Josephine out of the big book of Gilbert and Sullivan that sat on our piano at home, and I loved her songs. I burst into a chorus of “Refrain Audacious Tar” and then started to sing the little heartbroken ballad “Sorry Her Lot.” This one was my favorite, and I couldn’t believe I might have a chance to sing it!

I picked up the phone and called Joe Papp immediately. I told him I would love to sing
Pinafore
. I was a little disappointed when he said that it was
Pirates
, because I had never
learned those songs, and I wasn’t sure that I would like them as much. He assured me that
Pirates
had a wealth of lovely songs for Mabel to sing, and if I wanted the part, it was mine. I then insisted that I should fly back to New York and audition for them, since I wanted to be sure that he and the director would be happy with the way I would sing it. I didn’t want any unpleasant surprises.

During the flight to New York, I was fretting about my appearance. I was growing my hair out from the really short cut that I’d worn on the cover of
Mad Love
, my most recent record, and the back of my hair was streaked with big chunks of cyclamen pink. It was the beginning of the eighties, and we were just starting to experiment with the wildly unnatural hair colors that I remember first seeing in their most prescient splendor in Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
. I made the mistake of combining the extreme color process with a permanent to make my straight hair curly like Nicolette’s, and my hair simply broke off. The stringy bits that were left made me look like a Polish Crested chicken. I cut them off with my sewing scissors, leaving a mess that my regular hairdresser was unable to repair.

Many actress friends had told me that when they read for a part, they dressed up to resemble the character they were trying to portray.
The Pirates of Penzance
was set in Victorian times. I collected antique clothes and had some very pretty white lace Victorian summer frocks in my closet, but it was early spring and too cold in New York to wear them, so I walked into one of the rehearsal halls at the Public Theater in cowboy boots, jeans, sweater, and short pink hair. I didn’t look very Victorian. Joe Papp was there and introduced me to Wilford Leach and music director Bill Elliott. I liked them both immediately, and that never changed.

I still had never seen a score or heard a recording of
Pirates
,
which they advised was unnecessary until they decided whether to perform the pieces in the original keys or to shift to other keys to accommodate the pop singers. I didn’t like the idea of changing keys, as it can make the sound of the orchestra murky at the very least, but I decided to keep mum until we explored it. We started at the piano, and I asked Bill to show me the highest notes written for Mabel in the score. He played me a D above high C. I was singing the high C in concerts with my band night after night, so I didn’t think the D—one note up the scale—would be a problem. In the show, I wound up singing Mabel’s “Poor Wandering One” in two keys: the original one, plus a lower key to insert a more contemporary flavor into the interpretation. I had a really high voice with an upper extension that I never got a chance to use much in rock and country except for some little flourishes and embellishments, so it wasn’t as strong as the register where I had been belting “Heat Wave” and “Blue Bayou” all those years. This was going to cause me some trouble, but I didn’t know it yet. Also, Bill wrote me a cadenza (a short ornamental solo passage) to sing in the first act and again at the end of the show that went up to a very high E flat in the nosebleed octave, just like Violetta in
La Traviata
. With eight shows a week, that would add up to sixteen E flats—something that frail, consumptive Violetta would never dream of attempting in real opera. But I didn’t know that yet either.

I returned home and repacked my suitcase for a trip to London. I had been invited to perform on TV’s
The Muppet Show
and decided to invite my parents along for fun, thinking that they could see the sights in London while I rehearsed with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the effervescent Muppets cast.

By now I had the score for
Pirates
wedged carefully between layers of pajamas and the vintage Victorian clothes I
planned to wear on the show. I had also transferred the vinyl disc recording to a cassette tape and loaded it into my new pink Sony Walkman, which was the hot portable sound innovation of the time.

We stayed at the Savoy Hotel, which, coincidently, is next to the Savoy Theatre, where the D’Oyly Carte players performed all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s revered operettas in the time of Queen Victoria. I have always loved this hotel for its Victorian design remodeled in the 1930s in the Art Deco style. The suites we stayed in had high ceilings, pretty moldings, coal fireplaces, and buttons you could press to summon the room service waiter. He would appear anytime of the night or day, take the order, and return promptly with a tea cart loaded with steaming pots of freshly brewed loose tea, delicate little tea sandwiches, and hot scones with jam and clotted cream. Yum! There was also a button to summon the maid next to the sumptuously deep bathtub in case one had difficulty reaching the soap. I never used that button, but I loved soaking neck deep in the hot water, taking in all the vintage details of the curved doors, thirties hardware, and freestanding sinks, much of which I copied in a house I remodeled in San Francisco years later. Our rooms had a sweeping view of the river Thames, and the night after my first rehearsal with the Muppets, I dug the new score out of my suitcase and put on my Walkman headphones. While listening to the beautiful duet “Ah, Leave Me Not to Pine,” I could see Big Ben towering serenely in the moonlight. I was hearing the music for the first time in that setting, the very one into which it had been born.

Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the original creators of the Muppets, were tremendous fun to work with. The first time I had ever seen them work was at the 1979 Grammys. I had come in when the Muppets were still rehearsing, so I was able to
watch them from the back and could see the contortionist poses that Henson and Oz had to assume in order to get the puppets to move right for the cameras. They could watch the way the puppets looked from the camera’s viewpoint by looking at small video monitors. I was completely fascinated and impressed by their artistry and have remained a reverent fan of puppetry ever since.

I was excited about getting to work with them and had an idea that I wanted to have a romance with Kermit. I suggested a song, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” which I could sing in a confessional manner to him, and then a rock-and-roll song, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” for after he kissed me. (I was warned severely not to let my lipstick touch his green felt lips, or it would stain, and the Creature Shop would have to construct a new body.) Since Kermit had already made a serious commitment to Miss Piggy, our affair was doomed, and we had to part like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the last scene of
Casablanca.
In a wave of sympathy, the entire Muppets ensemble, including a surprisingly forgiving Piggy, joined Kermit and me in a finale of “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” a 1930s standard that I’d recorded on my album
Living in the USA
. Somewhere in the middle, I sang “Blue Bayou” in the aforementioned Victorian togs and bare feet, with a chorus of frogs chirping along from lily pads floating in an artificial bayou. The set was built to resemble Disneyland’s Blue Bayou restaurant at the entrance to the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. It was ridiculously good fun.

I sometimes wonder what a scientist like Oliver Sacks might discover about how the human brain can compartmentalize if he had watched our rehearsals. During breaks, the puppeteers would sit chatting, speaking as themselves and also chiming in fully in the persona of the one or more puppet characters they
had just been operating. Sometimes the puppets would squabble among themselves, or Miss Piggy would make sarcastic remarks to her operator, Frank Oz, about the script as he was writing it. The effect was a delightful and wonderfully creative bedlam, with people strolling casually into and out of reality for hours at a time and getting paid to do so.

Years later, Kermit and I reunited briefly (much too briefly for my liking) to sing a duet of “All I Have to Do Is Dream” on a Muppets record. After that, he returned to his love nest with that pig, and I never saw him again.

NBC Universal.

Singing the role of Mabel in
The Pirates of Penzance.

14

The Pirates of Penzance

I
RETURNED FROM MY
Muppet Show
experience to the new house I had bought on Rockingham, which had barely any furniture in it, and started to get ready to move to New York for the summer. I had found an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was wondering what life would be like in the truly urban, densely packed, and wildly stimulating environment of New York City.