Читать книгу Cloris - Cloris Leachman - Страница 12

I used the thousand dollars I’d won in the Miss America contest to study voice and piano in New York. I began advanced piano work with Herman Wasserman, one of George Gershwin’s teachers. Mr. Wasserman revealed wonderful things about the major composers to me. Particularly, he taught me some ingenious fingering to tackle the complicated passages in Rhapsody in Blue. Often when I’m alone, I sit down and play Rhapsody in Blue, each time with the deep satisfaction of using everything Herman taught me.

Simultaneously I began singing lessons with Helen Fouts Cahoon, Mary Martin’s teacher. I stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon: all singing teachers seem to have three names. Later, in California, I studied with Lillian Rosedale Goodman. I worked with Miss Cahoon for two years, and in all that time I didn’t sing one song. I don’t know if she was part of some da Vinci code plot to keep me from learning words and melody, but we always concentrated on scales, breathing, and placing the voice.

Around that time I was in a downtown studio, rehearsing for a television show, when I saw a magazine somebody had left on a chair. It was open to an ad that said Rodgers and Hammerstein were looking for someone to play the lead in South Pacific, the part of Nellie Forbush. I thought that trying out for the part would be a good way to test my skills, so I called John Fernley, their executive stage manager, and said I’d like to audition for Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein. John knew my work as an actress and was interested to hear I could sing.

“It’s a heavy score,” he said. “Do you think you’re up to it vocally?”

At that moment something clicked in my memory. I recalled something my ex-husband George’s mother, Mabel Albertson, a theater and television veteran, had told me. “There’s an old saying in show business. Make a good bluff. Then make the bluff good.” So I said, “Oh, definitely I can handle it.”

“Well good, Cloris,” he replied. “Learn ‘A Wonderful Guy,’ and when you’re ready, I’ll arrange for you to sing for Dick and Oscar.”

There was a soft sonic boom. Sing for Dick and Oscar? One phone call and I was going to audition for the two men who had given the world Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific, the greatest musicals produced in America up to that time? And here’s the confounding thing: the only song I knew all the way through was “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” On the way home, I stopped and bought the sheet music for “A Wonderful Guy,” and as soon as I was in the door, I started to learn the song. I worked on it hard for six days.

On the appointed Thursday, I took a cab to the Majestic Theatre, where South Pacific was playing, and entered through the stage door. When I walked onstage, I was dwarfed by the emptiness, the enormity around me. I nodded to Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein and John Fernley who were seated in the audience. There were polite greetings then,

“Ready?” John asked.

“I’m all set,” I said. I nodded to my accompanist in the pit, he turned to the keyboard and played the four-bar introduction to “A Wonderful Guy.” Then, for the first time in public—the public in this case being the two demigods of the American musical theater—I sang a song all the way through.

I sang with everything in me. When I finished, there was the kind of silence you only experience in a cavernous, empty theater. The three men had a muted conversation, I stood waiting. I was so full of the whole event, I was ready to sing an encore. Maybe they’d like to hear “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” My accompanist looked up from the pit and made a circle with his thumb and second finger. “Nailed it,” he mouthed.

“Cloris,” John Fernley called, “could you learn the first scene Nellie has with Emile de Becque and come back tomorrow and do it for the director Josh Logan?”

“Sure, yes, I could, I would, I can, I will,” I replied. I had trouble ending the sentence. I waved to them, turned, and left the stage.

I did exactly what John asked. I went home and learned the scene between Nellie and Emile. Nellie is an army nurse, a country girl from Arkansas, and Emile is a sophisticated, wealthy Frenchman who’s living on this island in the South Pacific because he’s wanted in France for a crime that, he tells Nellie, he absolutely did not commit. He’s invited her up to his mansion, and they’re alone for the first time. The scene leads into dual soliloquies in which, in song, they express their feelings about the other and wonder what the other is thinking about them.

When I came back the next day, I had the scene memorized. This time I wasn’t nervous; I was primed and ready. I read the scene with the assistant stage manager. There’s a moment in the scene where Nellie is interrupted. After the interruption, her line is, “Shall I go on?”

When I said it, Josh Logan stood up and said, “No, that’s enough, Cloris. We want you to play the part.”

Emotions collided in my body. I was going to play the lead in the most honored musical in Broadway history.

“It’ll be for four weeks on Broadway,” Josh Logan said. “John will call your agent to get the business settled. Then he’ll give you a rehearsal schedule. Thank you very much, Cloris. We’re delighted.”

“Yes, delighted,” Mr. Rodgers said.

“Very well done, Cloris. Very well done,” added Oscar Hammerstein.

The next day John Fernley called. “Cloris,” he said, “don’t tell anyone yet that you’re playing the part. We have an understudy who was expecting to have the role, and we’ve got to handle that situation delicately. But you start rehearsals tomorrow. Ten o’clock at the theater.”

Elated is too small a word for how I felt, but there was also a tincture of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking about the routine disappointments in this business, how crushed the understudy would feel when she was given the news. I thought back to a few months before, when I read for the second lead in a play starring Rex Harrison’s wife, Lili Palmer. I got the role, and the next day the producer called and told me they were going to use someone else because I looked too much like Lili.

My rehearsals were with the stage manager, only him and me in a rehearsal studio. He showed me the “blocking,” the physical moves onstage, and then I rehearsed the songs with the accompanist. Not till the afternoon of the night I opened did I rehearse with the whole cast. Now remember, the only other time I’d sung a song all the way through was at the audition for Rodgers and Hammerstein, and here I was, about to sing the entire score of South Pacific. The cast knew what feelings, what confusion, and wonder I’d be experiencing, and with care and support, they guided me through the rehearsal.

I was excited. I was thrilled to be doing what I was doing, buoyant that I’d be singing a Rodgers and Hammerstein score, and performing Nellie Forbush before that large audience. I was even a little bit nervous, but I wasn’t afraid. I’ve never had fear, not then, not anytime before or since.

That evening, when it was announced before the play started that Cloris Leachman would appear in the role of Nellie Forbush, there was a light groan of disappointment in the audience. I was nervous, but I was also determined that by the end of the show, they wouldn’t be groaning. They’d be applauding.

Early in the first act, I had to hold a little cup on a saucer, a demitasse for after-dinner coffee. My hand was shaking so hard, I thought the rattling would stop traffic outside on Forty-sixth Street. But apparently, no one in the audience heard it, and after that moment I settled down. I was inside the skin of Nellie Forbush. At the end of the first act, there was long, sustained applause.

Being in a musical on Broadway is different from any other experience in life. When the conductor gives the downbeat and the orchestra plays the overture a rush goes through you, your emotions come to the surface, you have a sense of being transported. The feeling lasts throughout the whole evening. The love story of Emile and Nellie in South Pacific is so dramatic, so heartbreaking that at the end, every night, I was crying real tears. I can feel them pressing against my eyelids now.

After the performance on the night I opened, Dorothy Hammerstein, Oscar’s wife, came to my dressing room. She stood looking at me, not saying a word. Then she lifted the lapel of her jacket to show me where her tears had fallen.

“Magnificent!” she said. And her tears started again. Mine did, too.

Later Oscar gave me a wonderful compliment. “Cloris,” he said, “it’s as if you were standing beside me when I wrote those words.”