Читать книгу Cloris - Cloris Leachman - Страница 9

When Mama delivered me to Cornelia Williams Hurlbut’s studio to begin my piano studies, the only keyboard I had touched up to that point was the cardboard affair Mama had brought home. So when I came into Cornelia’s studio and saw the grand piano dominating the room, I felt I was entering another world. Mama left me with Cornelia and on that first day, in that first lesson, Cornelia led me into the wonder and majesty of music.

I see Cornelia’s beautiful hands flowing across the keyboard. During our lessons, I always noticed those hands, and in the open way of little girls, I always commented on them. Cornelia would smile appreciatively; she enjoyed that I noticed personal things about her. During the lessons, we talked, sometimes from the beginning of the hour to the end, about everything: school, Beethoven, the bus system in Des Moines, the weather, whatever came into our minds.

When Cornelia gave me a new piece to learn, she would employ pedagogical techniques of her own invention. First, she would have me play the last measure. I’d go over it till I knew it, and then she’d have me move to the previous measure and work on it. With that method, I’d thread my way back through the piece to the first measure, and by the time I got there, I could pretty well play the whole piece. Second, she would excerpt the difficult passages in the piece and make exercises out of them. I would practice them one by one.

At the end of the lesson, Mama would pick me up, and I’d take my new piece home. When we got to the house, I’d get out the special paper we kept in the downstairs closet and make a cover for the new music. I took great care, and when I had the cover properly fitted, I’d write the name of the piece on top. Then I’d carry it over to the new piano that Mama and Daddy had bought for me and begin to learn it.

I was eager and ambitious. I wanted to master the piano. I thought to myself, There are only seven octaves, and each octave has only eight keys in it, plus the sharps and flats, so all in all, how difficult can it be to learn to play it? I made the decision that nothing was too difficult. I was going to master this instrument.

By the time I was eleven, I was quite accomplished. I was able to play some important pieces, pieces that have stayed with me all through my life. Even today, even this morning, I played Chopin’s Polonaise. Rhapsody in Blue was a special project. Cornelia said most everybody played just the main melody, but she wanted me to know all of it. Under her tutelage, I learned Gershwin’s complex rhapsody from beginning to end and could play it confidently.

When our five children were a little bit older and able to learn instruments, I remembered what I’d learned from Cornelia. My husband, George, and I procured teachers for them. Adam began with the flute, then switched to the guitar. Bryan played the trombone. When he was six years old, his trombone was longer than he was, so we got him a trumpet. Then his taste evolved into what really magnetized him, the drums. He became a brilliant drummer.

When Georgie was four, I handed him a tambourine. He shook it around, and I played the piano, and we had a little two-person band. That was fun. Later, when Georgie was in seventh grade, he did poorly in music class. He was bored. Then, one day, his teacher played recordings of all the instruments in the orchestra, and when Georgie heard the oboe, he fell in love with the instrument. He came home and told us about it, so we went out and rented one for him. He played it night and day and, with the teacher we found for him, gained mastery over it.

But Bryan wouldn’t let Georgie be in the band unless he played a different woodwind, the sax, so Georgie learned the sax, all three iterations of it, the baritone, the alto, and the soprano. He also plays the piccolo and the recorder. Georgie’s musical talent is to me, amazing. I could be overstating the case when I say he is the finest sax player in America—I could be—but if I am, it’s not by much.

Later, when the children and I had moved from the mansion in Brentwood to the lovely cottage in Mandeville Canyon, we had separate rooms to practice in. It took me a year to complete the move to our cottage. When I was a little girl, I heard the word cottage and I loved the sound of it so much, that from then on I always wanted to live in a cottage.

I would be in the living room, playing the piano; Georgie would be in the studio, which was originally the garage; down the hall Morgan would be in his room, playing his guitar and singing; Dinah would be working on songs in her room; and Bryan would be in the living room, playing his drums. Behind every door you opened was a different kind of music. Our house was filled with music.

At Christmas we would have our annual recital, and the children and their friends would each do a performance. They’d sing or play an instrument or recite a poem or deliver a dramatic monologue. I don’t play the kind of piano where everyone stands around it and sings. I play classical music, so I’d rattle off something demanding, like Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

All right. I’m leaving their childhoods and returning to mine. Mama was always watching my progress, not only on the piano, but in life. So it wasn’t really surprising when at breakfast one Saturday morning in the early summer of my fifteenth year, she said to Daddy, “Buck, take Cloris downtown, and don’t bring her back till she’s got a job.”

Mama could be the cuddliest, most enthusiastic playmate, but she also knew when it was time for me to move forward in my training. Daddy took me downtown, and I did what I was supposed to do, I got a job. I came home that evening a new employee of a jukebox store, where I would make labels for the records. Three weeks later, I was holding down three jobs. The second was at the radio station where later I would have my own show, and the third came out of my piano playing. I had advanced so far that Cornelia turned some of her students over to me.

One of the students was my cousin Barbara Leachman. My sisters and I hadn’t ever been close to Barbara. We really hardly knew her. I found out just before I started teaching her that she had a very sad story. When she was three years old, she and her friends were playing with matches, and she caught fire and was badly burned. When she became my student, the brutal burn scars were still visible on her sad little body. She was also somewhat retarded because of the fire experience. I felt for her, and I wanted to give her special care. I was happy to be of help.

As an example of what she might eventually be able to do on the piano I played Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” I talked as I progressed through the piece about how in this section the heavens were dark and black clouds were out and the moon was hidden behind them. The music was down low to portray this landscape and I played it accordingly.

Then, in the beautiful way Debussy composed the movement, the moon rises from behind the clouds, and the music swells to tell of it. So did my narration. I played “Clair de Lune” in the most emotional way I could to summon Barbara’s feelings. She sat there listening, the experience of what she was hearing and feeling vivid on her face. When I finished, we were silent a moment, and then she said she had been inspired. Her words were a reward of the very best kind.

In teaching Barbara that day, I learned in a new way how affecting music can be, how it can resonate across the whole range of human emotions. Barbara and I shared a rare joining of souls that afternoon as together, we followed the moon through Debussy’s nocturnal journey.

This way of thinking, of presenting basic emotions, became part of my acting. From playing the piano, I learned that the clear, truthful reporting of human behavior could stimulate laughter, sadness, fury, hope, whichever emotions the actor wanted the audience to feel.

The fire that damaged Barbara when she was three tightened its grip on her. She died when she was twenty-three from the awful burns she had suffered. She had never been able to function normally after she was burned. I don’t know the precise cause of her death, but she didn’t kill herself.

I have thought of Barbara often in the years since then, of the pain she endured, of her life so abruptly cut off, and always I feel blessed for the hours we spent together at the piano. Etched in my mind is the afternoon when we shared the beauty of Debussy’s moon emerging from the darkness.

Cornelia was a member of the Iowa Federation of Music Clubs. When I was fifteen, she chose me to represent her at a statewide competition the federation was holding. At the time, she considered me her best student. It was an exciting assignment. I’d be playing before a large crowd. Mama invited Grandma Leachman to come, she’d represent the musical side of the family, and we all went to Ames, Iowa, where the competition was to take place. The participants did not compete against each other; rather, a jury judged them on the basis of their individual skills.

Mama suggested, and for sure she was right, that it would be wise for me to have a practice session before my performance. She found a studio just across the street from the hall where the competition was taking place, and she and I dashed over there. It was a barren rehearsal studio with a much-used piano in it. Mama took a chair by the wall, and I went to the piano bench and sat. I leaned toward the keyboard, assuming my beginning position, my fingers slightly curled and ready—and went totally blank. I couldn’t remember what the first note was, what happened in the first four bars, what the melodies were, and how they transitioned from one to the other, and I had absolutely no clue as to how the piece ended.

“Cloris, begin,” Mama said. “We’ve only got a couple of minutes.”

“I know,” I replied, staring at the keys, terror going up my neck and into my brain.

“Then go ahead. Play it splendidly, the way you know how.”

“Mama…I don’t remember it.”

“What, darling?” asked Mama. The tone of her voice said she didn’t want to believe she’d heard the words she’d just heard.

“Could you hum it, Mama? Just the first part, to get me started?”

“Hum it?” It was as if we were suddenly enveloped in a tropical disease. “I don’t think it can be hummed. It starts off with that run up the keyboard and all those tricky notes…and now there’s no more time. You haven’t played a single note, and there’s no more time. We have to get back to the concert hall. Come on.”

Shaken, out on some far tundra, I followed Mama back across the street and into the hall. I found my place among the competitors and, still in an otherworldly state, sat down. I listened to the performances of those who went before me, and when my turn came, I stood, walked to the stage, sat at the piano, leaned forward…and played the piece faultlessly, without a single mistake. As I walked back up the aisle, I saw that Mama’s face was filled with disbelief, laughter, and tears. I waved and gave her a look that said, “Well, wasn’t that what you expected?”

I won the competition. That was the goal, but I think what was even more important to me was that I’d appeared before such a large audience and done well. That competition prepared me for the times, not too far in the future, when I’d be acting before thousands of people. The competition was valuable in another way, too. It showed me what was inside me. It solidified the idea that no matter what had gone before, when it came to the performance, I would be at my best.