Do I have to tell you who Barbara Cook is? I hope not. At the age of 88, the beloved Broadway and cabaret star has written, with Tom Santopietro, Then & Now: A Memoir (HarperCollins, $28.99), and her fans will be grateful.
Barbara's optimism and positive outlook pour out, ever when she's talking about "the hard stuff." Boy, there's a lot of it. There was a father she thought deserted her, and a mother who berated and undermined her, even letting her think she had caused her sister's death. So it's no wonder that at the moment of her greatest stardom she sabotaged her career by falling into alcoholism and immense weight gain. Proving the deep reach of its psychological devastation, that Bad Mother thing pops up repeatedly and where least expected. It's a wonder Barbara has the guts to relate it all.
If you're hungering for backstage stories, you'll be satisfied if not sated. Most everything you want to know about her learning and singing "Glitter and Be Gay" is revealed, and she'll tell ya just how sexy she found her Music Man co-star, the wonderful Robert Preston. You'll read about Barbara with Bernstein, Sondheim, and Stritch, and you'll also find out everything that made her cabaret career tick (although for a greater look at the cabaret lives of Cook along with Julie Wilson, Rosemary Clooney, and many others, Deborah Grace Winer's 1996 The Night and the Music is invaluable).
As with Ms. Cook, I doubt Mary Martin needs an introduction. She was not only a great star, whose appeal can be verified by a number of video recordings, but was for some time a resident of San Francisco. And, as a new biography labors to prove without certifiable success, a lesbian.
My introduction to musical theatre was a swift double-play. The telecast of Mary Martin's Peter Pan in 1956 was a wonderment for my eight-year-old eyes. A year later, there was Annie Get Your Gun, also on TV, also with Mary Martin, but yikes, throwing in John Raitt. I was only nine, but the dude awakened me to sex appeal. And though I couldn't name it at the time, to homosexuality. So the two shows seem to be part of my DNA.
But the subject at hand is David Kaufman's new biography of Martin, Some Enchanted Evenings �" The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin (St. Martin's Press, $29.99). Kaufman will be known to gay readers for his excellent biographies of Charles Ludlam and Doris Day. He certainly knows his way around a life, and has mined all the backstage lore about Martin one could hope for. His book is better written and more extensive than an error-ridden and largely uninformative 2008 bio by Ronald Davis.
I am given some pause, however, by his relentless efforts to prove Mary was a lesbian. He dutifully draws inferences whenever he can, however specious, and reels in every rumor about her close relationships to Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor. It does seem strange that one of only two books Mary cited in her own memoir having read as a child was Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. You can file that in your incriminating evidence dossier, but it doesn't make Mary Dorothy's friend. As concerns her husband, well, everyone knew the flaming queen was gay; oh my, all those young male "escorts." Of greater interest is their symbiotic relationship, which Kaufman thoroughly explores. Husband strictly policed Mary's life and handled all affairs so that Mary could concentrate on performing. Which, as the book fondly recalls, is what she did with luminous and effervescent Joy.
Here's a tidbit from the book that's important. At least to me. The full-color broadcast of Peter Pan has been available on DVD for some time. But it didn't match up to my memories of seeing it as a child. Turns out, that wasn't just a trick of memory. Unlike the B&W broadcasts of 1955 and 56, this full-color 1960 broadcast was directed by Vincent Donohue, who attempted but didn't entirely succeed in recreating Robbins' production. "Vincent Donohue," said Sondra Lee, who owned the role of Tiger Lily, "left out all of the little, special moments." So, although it seems poised to result in Peter Pan overkill, it may be worth your time, if you're a Jerome Robbins fanatic such as I, to spring for the VAI issue on one Blu-Ray DVD of both B&W telecasts. The 1956 show is a pretty rough antique, but even in B&W the 1956 performance is the keeper of the trio. You can find the virile John Raitt doing Annie on YouTube, along with many other Martin treasures.