Read Online Then and Now by Barbara Cook - Free Book Online

recall, did a lot of swanning about while looking important and doing very little work. He was a thoroughly charming man, and incredibly funny and clever. He was, however, not the kind of guy who was going to settle down to hard work in a post office if he could help it.
    I’m not sure how many of those Christmas cards were sorted properly, because as a post office employee I was a great singer. But, it was shortly thereafter that I auditioned for the show that became my first official Broadway credit, the wonderfully strange musical Flahooley . My agent Charlie Baker, a very elegant man who became head of William Morris’s theatrical department and worked as my agent for over twenty years, sent me on the audition for Flahooley . The audition was held at the Martin Beck Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, and I, who feared and hated auditions, had one of the happiest auditions of my life, thanks to E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg.
    I knew Yip’s work, of course, as the lyricist of Finian’s Rainbow and The Wizard of Oz . I auditioned singing “My Funny Valentine,” a piece I often used for auditions. As soon as I was finished, a little man came roaring up onto the stage and threw his arms around me in obvious delight—it was like being given a bear hug by Santa Claus—and that is how I officially met Yip Harburg. He was an adorable-looking man with a great smile—a charming, charming man. A lot of people thought he was difficult to work with but I never found him remotely difficult. He held very strong opinions that were considered pretty radical for the times. He took on racism in Finian’s Rainbow , and his work was almost always socially conscious. Working with the composer Jay Gorney, he wrote the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” about down-and-out men in the Depression.
    In an illustration of how you can’t put people in boxes and always expect them to behave in a preordained fashion, Jay Gorney’s wife, Edalaine, had left her husband and married Yipper in 1943. It proved to be a real scandal at the time, but Eddie, as Yip called her, was a very warm, sweet woman and they had a terrificmarriage. Yip was such a generous, warm man; that’s why my audition for Flahooley was a dream. I had the show the very moment the audition concluded, although I didn’t know it then. To this day it remains the only time an audition unfolded in such a magical fashion for me—and the ease of that experience nearly ruined me!
    In truth, my involvement with Flahooley actually dated back a little earlier, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I had taken to dropping in at a private midtown spot called the Gold Key Club, and Colin Romoff, who was the club’s piano player, would call me whenever Judy Garland stopped by just to sing for friends and her own amusement. Judy was a very big influence on my singing—oh, how I wanted to sing like her, but it was impossible. My voice teacher said to me: “Forget it. You have a completely different voice. You’re a soprano.” But listening to Judy taught me how a song must contain a beginning, a middle, and an end—that it should possess an unbroken line both musically and lyrically, while taking the listener on an emotional journey. To hear her sing “By Myself” in that intimate room was the thrill of a lifetime.
    During her first storied run at the Palace in 1951–52, I went to see her repeatedly. My agent knew Judy and wanted to take me backstage to meet her but I just couldn’t. I thought I would die if I met her—I was simply too much in awe of her. I did eventually meet her later in the run, and she was very cordial, but I remained in awe of her.
    The one other major influence on my singing was Mabel Mercer, who didn’t have much of a voice but used words better than any other singer I can think of. Mabel communicated the richness of good lyrics, the subtext lying beneath