Then and Now (17 page)

I listen to “He Was Too Good to Me” on that Carnegie Hall recording, and it's fine, but there's a problem: not only was the key too high, but over the years I also began to sing the song much better, with greater depth of feeling. I know that I can't sing like I sang ten years ago, or even five years ago, but without consciously doing so I have begun to compensate in other ways. I probe more deeply into the lyric and now have a lot more courage to keep going, deeper and deeper.

That entire concert held huge importance for me, not just because it marked my first major reappearance in New York City, but also because it was Carnegie Hall. That's the top of the line and you don't want to mess up. You sure as hell don't want to forget the words, which is something I worry about all the time now. I think if I could have a teleprompter it would take a thousand pounds of worry off my back. The really funny thing is that a reviewer once wrote about me, “It's awful that an artist of Miss Cook's stature would stoop to pretending to forget her lyrics.” Pretending?! Who the hell would do that? I've never ever gotten in touch with critics to discuss what they've written about me, but that time I really wanted to.

The Carnegie Hall concert garnered great reviews in the
New York Times
and other major New York press outlets, and led to my playing the concert hall at the Kennedy Center. Another big step. Another great response. Major press. I was in
Time
and
Newsweek
once again. The “C” word started to be used—comeback. The Kennedy Center led to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles and then to the Hollywood Bowl. Big, big venues.

Now, that sounds like it was one triumph after another, but it was still a very hard road. In the beginning there was so little money that Wally and I would have to share a hotel room. In the small clubs I'd be getting dressed in the coat room. We worked like hell to make our way up the ladder.

Audiences who remembered me from
The Music Man
and
She Loves Me
were adjusting to the fact that I had gained a good deal of weight during the intervening years. My weight had always been an issue for me. Ironically, though, until I was fifteen I was quite slim; as a child I was anemic, which is what led me to tap-dancing classes. Somehow when I was fifteen I started gaining weight, and I have a feeling it had to do with beginning to menstruate and becoming a woman. Or, to phrase it in another way, becoming a woman and not liking the idea very much; it was as if I wanted to put some distance between me and the world. That distance turned out to be fat.

Why? Well my mother certainly didn't give me a very good picture of becoming a woman. The message was twofold: “This period you get once a month can be painful. And—look out for men, they're no damn good.”

The weight I had gained at the time of the Carnegie Hall concert was a recent development. It's not like I had put on too much weight as a teenager; by the time I came to New York I was twenty
and chubby, but I weighed no more than 130 pounds—about fifteen pounds overweight. I've got small bones; a really good weight for me was somewhere between 115 and 120.

When weight becomes a concern, however, it colors everything in your life. I had landed in New York, where beautiful thin women seemed to sprout up on every block (and it's even worse in Los Angeles, where the concern with body image can be overwhelming). To this day I can actually remember what I weighed almost every moment of my life. I weighed 136 pounds when I landed the job in
Flahooley
,
and that's when I was introduced to Dexedrine (and also Dexamyl) by a weight-loss doctor. It was wonderful in some ways, but of course ultimately terrible in others. Take that little pill and your creative juices can really flow—you feel ready to take on the world with your creativity. You can have all the energy in the world, but there was just one slight problem—the pill was terrible for your overall health, and the damn thing was addictive.

Actually, it was after I took Dexedrine that I really got my weight down. By the time I got married, in March 1952, I weighed 106. I was slim, got rid of the cellulite, and looked terrific, if I do say so myself. However, after all the years of drinking, by the time I really began singing again in the 1970s, my weight had shot way up.

The problem lay in the fact that eating had become inextricably linked with every event in my life. If something good happened, I ate. If something bad happened, I ate. As happens with so many people, I used food as a mood leveler. Food makes you feel okay—for the moment. Then, after you get on a scale, you want to shoot yourself.

There is no question but that there is a genetic component to weight issues. My mother always had to watch her weight. My father was overweight, as were both of my grandmothers. It's easy
to forget the genetic aspect, because for people who don't have weight issues, they often simply view overweight people as gluttons.

When I was performing in all those Broadway musicals I was able to stay at a good weight because I felt I had to—I wouldn't have had a career if I weren't careful. But—when I started drinking so heavily my weight shot up. Alcohol contains a huge number of calories, and to compound the problem I was also not getting any exercise. Add in my concurrent depression and all of the pieces were in place for a big weight gain.

I was huge by the time of the Carnegie Hall concert in 1975, and I started to feel like that was all anyone was talking about. Despite those great reviews of the concert, even the
New York Times
ran contrasting photos of me—one when I was slender, and one after all the weight gain. I would go on television talk shows and the hosts didn't want to talk about music—they wanted to talk about weight.

Did the weight issues affect my career at the time? Probably, but I'll never know for certain. I do know that Fred de Cordova, the producer of Johnny Carson's
Tonight Show
, did not want fat white women on his show. In other words, forget the talent—he didn't want that look on his show.

Over the years my weight has continued to yo-yo. Of course I'd like to weigh less than I do, and I'm working at it. I eat the same healthy foods on a daily basis. I can't move easily now, so it is much more difficult for me to lose weight. I've been able to keep off the fifty pounds I dropped from my Carnegie Hall weight, and the fact that I don't drink has certainly helped. I haven't completely solved my weight issues, but I'm better. I guess I remain a work in progress.

I've always noticed how much other women weigh—we all do—which led to a very funny incident while I was performing on Broadway in
Sondheim on Sondheim
. One of my costars was Vanessa Williams, and, boy oh boy, does she look terrific. Nearly fifty with an incredible body. Great legs—and, man, does she work at keeping in shape. Anyway, we were onstage singing “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,” and she and I were sitting stage left on a little bench. She had a kind of low-cut dress on and I just happened to notice her décolletage. She's so beautiful, and in a completely nonsexual way I was looking and admiring her cleavage—and forgot to sing part of the song! I was checking out Vanessa's breasts and I forgot to sing.

After the Carnegie Hall concert, I began working my way up the ladder and played a small hot club in New York City called Reno Sweeney (named after the lead character in Cole Porter's
Anything Goes
). In order to generate publicity, my manager at the time decided that we should have “celebrity night” on Mondays and Tuesdays, in hopes that their appearances would generate column mentions. I remember that James Beard came one night, but the truth is that we ran out of celebrities pretty quickly. And that is when Lillian Hellman reentered my life. That was one of the great things about Lillian—she showed up. She had terrible emphysema by then and leaned heavily on the arm of her escort, but by God, she came. And very put-together. She didn't have to show up, but she did. After the show, she came back to the crowded little office that served as my dressing room. She asked me if she could smoke. Most of the time I said no to people, but I just couldn't say no to her. What an incongruous sight. Lillian Hellman in that stupid little room where I changed my clothes and had to do my makeup. I was so moved that she had come to be there for me.

I know Mary McCarthy hated Lillian and said that every word she wrote was a lie, including “a”, “and”, and “the”, but that's not the Lillian I knew. Not only did I admire her writing—it just flows, you never see the effort—but I loved her spirit. During that time in the 1950s when a lot of very respectable people like Jerry Robbins were not behaving honorably, Lillian put herself on the line in a very public fashion: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions” was her defiant reply to the HUAC. What a beautiful and powerful statement in the midst of a very difficult time.

When, after Carnegie Hall, I really started working in earnest, Herb Breslin was managing me. Unfortunately we were just not a good fit. He was a classical music guy and I was now a cabaret and concert performer. I realized that Wally was not going to help me out of this jam with Herb because Wally was the least confrontational person in the world. His way of handling any problem was to just walk away. He couldn't handle the discord. He'd never get angry with anyone—except the people to whom he was really close. Instead, he would just up and leave. In this case, I was with Wally at Herb's office, and Herb kept saying, “Are you going to sign for films?”

“No.”

“Are you going to sign for concerts?”

“No.”

I said no to every single proposal, until I finally said, “Herbert, I'm sorry. It's just that we come from two different worlds, and I think it's not going to work.” He was devastated and didn't speak to me for years. Some time later we finally made up and repaired our relationship. At the time, however, he was furious and the relationship was totally ruptured. But I had to trust my instincts, and I
just knew it was all wrong for me; I remember that Herbert had negotiated a recording deal that promised something like $5,000, and Aaron Russo, Bette Midler's manager at the time, took over and negotiated a deal for me that was five times as large: $25,000. But in telling Herb that our business relationship wasn't going to work, the real life lesson for me was that I found myself being the strong one and standing up for myself. Once again, it wasn't the men who stood tall. Wally sat silently while I told Herbert it was over.

I now realize that this has been a recurring motif in my life: women of my generation generally married and were taken care of, but I never fit that pattern. When I was growing up in Atlanta, a young girl felt she had to make a good marriage—that that was the most important thing she needed to accomplish. Women often didn't work outside the home and they typically depended on a man for their security. I, on the other hand, have never depended on a man financially. Never. I think there is a lot to be said for women who have learned to take care of themselves.

Conversely, I did depend on men emotionally—very much so. This was the case with both my husband and with Wally, and although I was stronger than both of them, I didn't realize it at the time. Nowadays I fully realize that I can take care of myself, because I did so through some very bad times and still emerged intact. Even during my darkest days with alcohol, when I just couldn't stop drinking, I absolutely knew somewhere deep inside me that I would be okay.

As I started working in better venues, Arthur Cantor handled publicity for me, but things really took off in 1979, when I joined forces with Jerry Kravat, who began to serve as my personal manager. Arthur had been doubling as my manager, but Jerry now wanted to fill that position, and I spent quite a bit of time mulling
this question over. I'm a cautious person, and I wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. But—it sounded right, and Wally and I agreed to give it a try. For a while that meant paying two separate commissions to two different managers. That lasted through several gigs, but then Jerry took over the managerial role completely, and brought my career to an entirely different level.

The problem remained, however, that even after the Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center triumphs, I was still drinking. My mother had died after a long and difficult illness, and that illness had only exacerbated my own problems: the sicker she became, the more I ate and drank. The net result was that I became sicker as well. I knew I was on a terrible downward track but I simply couldn't seem to gain any control over it. Everything was falling apart.

In February of 1977 I was in Los Angeles, playing a club called the Back Lot, when my body decided it wasn't going to take it anymore. I was in such bad shape that just shampooing my hair before the show took all my energy. I'd shampoo and then have to lean against the shower wall to get my energy back. By the time I was ready for the show I was exhausted. Compounding the problem was the demanding schedule: I was working six nights a week, two shows per night. That's twelve shows per week for two weeks, a total of twenty-four shows. I think of the twenty-four scheduled shows, I only made something like fifteen. I canceled the rest because I just couldn't do it. The capper came when, with two more days to go on the gig, I had a major panic attack. I thought I was dying, because that's how I always felt with a major panic attack. I was debilitated after nearly ten years of heavy drinking, and my body was saying “no more.”

As the panic attack fully blossomed, Wally put me in the car
and we tore off to the emergency room at ninety miles per hour. They gave me a tranquilizer and said I was not having a heart attack, but rather, a major panic attack. Heart attack or not, I was really frightened. The doctor I saw also mentioned the possibility of adrenal gland cancer, and I froze, but he wasn't through: “You're very close to diabetes. Your body is shutting down. You have to stop drinking. Now.”