The Wonderful Leveling Off

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It was a heady night for the stage-struck--almost all of the 300-odd guests at the opening-night party at Manhattan's Hotel St. Regis. Some of them were towering eminences whose very names are magical incantations along Broadway: Noel Coward, Ethel Merman, Gilbert Miller, Lily Pons, Billy Rose. Mingling among the great and irradiated by their greatness were the humble and the hopeful--chorus girls and boys from the new show, stagehands and bit players. As Meyer Davis' orchestra blared forth the insistent rhythms of Irving Berlin's Show Business ("There's NO bus'ness like Show Bus'ness . . ."), their lips automatically framed the words:

Yesterday they told you you would not

go far.

That night you open, and there you are. Next day on your dressing room they've

hung a star. Let's GO, on with the SHOW!*

In the center of the ballroom, somebody pressed a six-foot box jammed with 150 long-stemmed roses into the arms of a big, bewildered girl in a rented mink coat. As they watched, Noel Coward and his old friend Producer John C. Wilson suddenly and shamelessly burst into tears. "We just couldn't help it," explained Wilson later. "There on a platter before us was the whole essence of show business."

Through a Microscope. For the past few weeks the emotion of these hard-headed showmen has been echoing all up & down the big middle aisle of show business, proclaiming the ascension of a star named Carol Channing. On Broadway, an authentic new star is almost as rare a phenomenon as it is in the heavens. Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business. In 1938 an impish little brunette named Mary Martin took New York by storm one night when she sang a song called My Heart Belongs to Daddy. In 1930 Ethel Merman stood in front of the footlights in Manhattan's Alvin Theater, bellowed Gershwin's I Got Rhythm in a voice like a fire siren, and blew the audience right out of its seats. Before her, a gawky torch singer named Fanny Brice and a twinkle-toed dancer named Marilyn Miller had enchanted a million-odd playgoers of the '20s. Last week, the new star that glittered over Broadway was novel enough and brilliant enough to make all of show business seem once again like a glamourous, robust legend.

As the gold-digging Lorelei Lee in the new musical version of Anita Loos's famed bestseller of the '20s, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, strapping (5 ft. 9 in., 153 Ibs.) Carol Channing is ludicrously miscast. Her head, topped by an unruly peroxide burlesque of a flapper's hairdo, seems too small for her generous features. Set insecurely on the top of a columnar neck and broad, sloping shoulders wrapped in the shapeless fashions of two decades ago, it gives her the appearance of an amiable performing seal; and like a seal she seems naively anxious to please. Her big voice glides effortlessly from a low moo to an assured squeak; her huge, heavily lashed eyes roll dramatically. In a monstrous travesty of daintiness, she minces across the stage on squarely planted feet. For perhaps ten minutes an audience seeing her for the first time watches with something resembling embarrassed bewilderment. Then Carol Channing slides into her first solo, a tragic history of Lorelei Lee's early disillusionment in Little Rock, Ark.

And some of these days in my fancy

clothes I'm going back home and thumb my

nose

At the one who done me wrong--The one who done me wrong--The one who done me wrong in Little

Rock!*

From that point on, the joke is obvious. Here is no seal clumsily tooting a trumpet and waving a flag in a sawdust ring, but a seal suddenly released into a tank of water --lithe, graceful, confident and effortless. Subtly and with never a false move, Carol's whole expressive body flows with the rhythm of the music. As she sings, every motive in Lorelei's predacious little soul becomes hilariously clear. At the end of her first chorus, both Carol and Lorelei Lee belong to the audience forever. What Author Loos wrote between the lines and accented in the quaint misspellings of her slim novel back in 1925, Actress Channing hurls across the footlights in broad strokes of pantomime and bold, certain, exquisitely comical gestures. Her Lorelei is the little golddigger seen through a microscope, an outsized caricature.

Fabulous Creation. "Happy days are here again," cried the New York Times's scholarly Brooks Atkinson after Carol's Broadway premiere. "Let us call her portrait of the aureate Lee the most fabulous comic creation of this dreary period in history." "Carol Channing," trilled the Herald Tribune's often harsh-voiced Howard Barnes, "serves notice that she has few peers among musical-comedy actresses." Even before these rhadamanthine judgments were pronounced, Carol's out-of-town notices had set the box office of Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater humming with the biggest advance seat sale in theatrical history--a whacking $600,000 worth.

By this week, with her show not yet a month old, Carol Channing's sudden fame was making itself felt in every tributary alley along the main stem. Newspaper columnists and Sunday feature writers were peppering their columns with "items," and plaguing the new celebrity with requests for interviews at the rate of three a day. Anita Loos was planning a new show for her, and so was Joshua Logan. There were plans afoot to star her in a radio program and a television show. There were offers from Hollywood and blueprints for a Blondes comic strip and a Lorelei doll modeled on Carol's lines. Even the glacial captains of cafe society's most chichi saloons, "21" and the Stork, went out of their way to bow effusively and greet her by name. "Everything," said Carol in her own peculiar idiom, "has leveled off just wonderfully."

Cuddly Blonde. For 28-year-old Carol Elaine Channing, the leveling process had taken time. Broadway's newest star, born in Seattle in 1921, was stage-struck early. Before she could talk, her mother insists, she was mimicking family friends who peered into her pink-beribboned crib. From the time she was taken to a play at the age of six, Carol knew what she wanted to be. When other little girls talked glibly of their plans to become "great actresses" or "great dancers" some day, Carol would fall silent; her own ambition was too important to talk about. But always her big, nearsighted eyes were peering into people's faces, studying their mannerisms and gestures.

By the time she got to grammar school, she was a great hulk of a girl whose private preoccupations and unusual size set her apart from the other children. Her mother had always planned on having a dainty little blonde for a daughter. She compromised by spoiling her only child and calling her "Goozie." Her father was an ex-reporter who came back from World War I to work in the Christian Science Church. It was a principle of George Channing's religion to help every individual to realize his own individuality, but in the case of his daughter, that was easier said than done. Everywhere Carol went she seemed more interested in other people's individualities.

At grammar school she kept her fellow pupils in stitches by imitating the teachers. At Aptos Junior High she got herself elected student-body secretary, and caused an uproar among her colleagues by delivering the minutes of each meeting in the precise accents and gestures of the earlier speakers. Her size and her perpetual playacting led most of Carol's schoolmates to think of her as a big, good-natured clown, and Carol played up to the part. But at home, hoping to please Mrs. Channing, Carol did her best to act a dainty, cuddly blonde. Years later, when she was first approached for the part of cuddly little Lorelei, she said confidently: "I've been playing her ever since I was twelve."

Her first great dramatic triumph came in her senior year in high school. She won first prize (a trip to Honolulu for herself and her mother) in a Northern California contest for the best four-minute speech by a high-school student on "What America Means to Me." For Student Channing it was a cinch: "I stood up," she says, "and gave the judges the Girl Scout, the I-am-young-America routine, and right away they saw how wholesome I must be."

Matching Socks. "There are only two things wrong with Carol," says George Channing, who has been First Reader of the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston and is now editor-in-chief of all Christian Science publications but the Monitor. "First, she's sloppy. She leaves her clothes all over the place. Second, she never thinks of anything but the theater."

Classmates at Vermont's progressive, intellectual Bennington College for girls, where Carol went after high school, remember her as sloppy beyond all the fashionable requirements of a fashionably sloppy campus. "I can't imagine her ever wearing socks that matched," says one. In the studious atmosphere of Bennington, Carol herself was even more of a misfit than her socks. After two years, one kind teacher called her in for a conference. "Look, Carol," she said, "I could tell you to go on studying drama. I did, and I'm a teacher now. Why don't you go to New York and try to get on the stage?" Carol fled, breathless with gratitude.

But Broadway was not quite ready to welcome her with open arms. Like many another stage-struck hopeful, she moved into the Y.W.C.A.'s Studio Club and proceeded to work around the outskirts of the big time. She landed a job (at $22 a week) in a mussy little labor play called No for an Answer that ran three performances. "I guess I should have known--coming from Bennington and all--that it had a message," said Carol, "but somehow that never occurred to me." "A most puzzling girl," said the show's author, Marc Blitzstein. "Talking to her was like talking to a somnambulist." Carol next tried her luck in the Borsch Circuit. She signed up as "fourth comedienne" in the Tamiment Summer Theater, and was fired three-quarters of the way through her first season.

What Seldom Happens. Back in New York, she finally managed to land a job as understudy to Eve Arden in Let's Face It. She even went on once in Eve's part. But her brief triumph was soon lost in the confusion of a sudden, impulsive marriage to a brooding young novelist named Theodore Naidish who had trailed her down from the Poconos. "He was a Greenwich Village intellectual," says Carol. "I don't know why I married him. Maybe I was lonely." She had one more brief fling at Broadway--as a Polish peasant in the grim, short-lived war drama Proof Thro' the Night--and did a few turns at village niteries without much success. After three years of idleness, shut away from her family and friends in apartments in Brooklyn and the Village, she renounced both love and the theater in one stroke. "The whole thing," says Carol of her first marriage, "is something that very seldom happens to a girl."

Carol went to California, joined an artists' colony and tried her hand at painting and sketching. She got a job modeling at uppity I. Magnin's. But "I just feel like I'm wasting my time," she wrote her father after a year had passed. A few weeks later she was one of hundreds of aspirants waiting in line to audition for a single opening in a Hollywood revue called Lend an Ear. "I can't show you what I can do without going through at least a dozen numbers," Carol informed the director when her turn finally came. Dancer Marge Champion insisted that this unusual girl be given a chance. After a mere six numbers Carol was hired. "I don't think she realized," said Marge later, "how good she actually was. Up to that time Carol had been afraid of her own ability. She was afraid of doing anything she couldn't pin on another performer. But gradually during our rehearsals the impersonations--of Ethel Waters, Sophie Tucker and the rest --dropped away and Carol became Carol Channing."

$ 1,000 a Week. The new show was a hit, and when it moved to New York last year, Carol herself caused a mild flurry among the critics. The jump from that to the part of Lorelei in Blondes might have been easy if only Carol had had a "name." But she was still a long way from stardom. Only after exhausting all the stellar possibilities (Ethel Merman, Judy Holliday, Gertrude Niesen, June Havoc and a host of West Coast starlets) did Producers Herman (Call Me Mister) Levin and Oliver (On the Town) Smith give Carol a chance at Lorelei. After one reading she was signed. By that time both author and producers were so enthusiastic that her agent Barren Polan was able to demand and get a cool $1,000 a week for his virtually unknown client.

Petite Personality. Since then, Carol Channing's madcap ways have become legendary on both sides of the Blondes curtain. The star has been known to hold up rehearsal while she gave herself an impromptu shampoo with the powdered soap at the sink in the ladies' room. At a party for the cast given by Director John C. Wilson, she happily soaked her tired feet in a swimming pool and only noticed afterwards that she had forgotten to take off her shoes.

But even such little eccentricities were as nothing compared to Carol's novel working methods. She studied her flighty blonde's lines with the earnestness of a Laurence Olivier pondering the nuances of Hamlet. Hour after hour, closeted with Author Loos, she explored Lorelei's character. "She went into the thing in a very deep way," said flabbergasted Director Wilson. "She had theories far beyond mine. Sometimes when I would suggest an inflection or a bit of business, Carol would say, 'How would that affect Lorelei? What would she think of it?' I'd only thought of it as a funny way to read a line." Says Author Loos: "She even developed a petite personality."

In her cluttered backstage dressing room at the Ziegfeld Theater last week, Carol gazed moodily into a big mirror and solemnly pondered her features and her technique. The shelf before her had none of the average young actress's array of paints and creams. Carol dived deep into the recesses of an enormous scuffed leather purse, located a stick of drugstore lip rouge and smeared it generously on the tip of her nose. "I think about character a lot," she said gravely. "It's much more important than timing." She wiped the lipstick under her chin and made two bull's-eyes on each cheek. "The more dead serious you are about a character, even a comic character, the more the audience will like and understand it." Brushing aside a small pile of slightly battered false eyelashes, she peered furiously into the mirror and began furiously to massage the islands of red paint into her white skin. "It has to be serious," she said fervently, "or it won't be funny."

A short while later, her unorthodox make-up perfectly accenting her expressive features, Carol Channing took her place behind the footlights, her solemn technique rewarded by waves of laughter pouring in to her from a packed house. To anyone watching from the wings, it was obvious that the new star knew exactly what she was about.

What She Wants. Now atop the pinnacle for which she has yearned all her life, Carol Channing is thoroughly happy for perhaps the first time. Besides success, she also has a new husband, acquired after a whirlwind courtship in California. Alexander Carson is a big, good-natured bear of a man who spends his winters working as a private detective in New York and the football season playing center on Ottawa's professional team, the Rough Riders. The Murderous Ax, as he is known in his sporting circles, cares little about show business. He trails along patiently in his wife's ascending orbit, watching her diet, cooking her meals, patiently picking up her clothes. As for her career, "the kid's gettin' what she wants," says the Ax. "I don't mind."

Other protectors and detractors were gathering on all sides. Eleanor Holm Rose, who owns a $5,000 piece of Carol's show (given her for their tenth anniversary by husband Billy), had offered to help find (at wholesale) a mink coat suitable to her eminence. Even old friends in high places were paying Carol the new compliment of envy. A famous musical-comedy star who until recently thought Carol was "too cute for words" now greets her with a frosty, feline smile. Carol loves every bit of it. The only real cloud still left on her horizon is the opinion of her dresser, who once worked for impeccable, ladylike Cornelia Otis Skinner. Says Broadway's new star: "She thinks I'm a slob."

*Copyright 1946 Irving Berlin. *Copyright 1949 J. J. Robbins & Sons, Inc.

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