|
Dixie Carter is somethin' else. Think of the chic Café Carlyle, home
ground for the suave Bobby Short, the sinuous Eartha Kitt, the singular
Barbara Cook. Now consider Dixie Carter, with her Tennessee drawl, creating a medley that combines Kern and Sondeim with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen -- stretching out on top of the piano, singing, clowning, reminiscing, playing the trumpet and harmonica. At the Café Carlyle?
Dixie Carter is somethin’ else because she brings it all off with power
and poignancy, wisdom, warmth and fun, and a natural down-home sweetness that packed the room during her recent March-long run.
Dixie Carter is a multimedia woman. She was the star for seven years of
the CBS Television series, Designing Women, which continues to play in syndication. In theater, she starred on Broadway for five months in the intensely dramatic role of Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class; as Dixie Avalon (in a part written expressly for her) in Taken in Marriage; in Pal Joey, and in productions of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Music Theater at Lincoln Center. She’s recorded two albums: Come a Little Closer and Dixie Carter Sings John Wallowitch at the Café Carlyle. A devotee of physical fitness, she appears in two videos, Dixie Carter’s Unworkout, which went platinum within six moths of its release, and Yoga for You. And she’s the author of an engaging book of personal philosophy and reminiscence -- including details of her face-lift -- Trying to Get to Heaven.
As a college co-ed in her native Tennessee, Dixie entered the Miss
Tennessee competition. Besides beauty, contestants had to fulfill a "talent" demand. Says Dixie "I needed to sing, and I needed help!" It came in the form of an introduction to a Memphis music teacher, Jerome Robertson. "I went to Mr. Robertson," Dixie recalls, "and I sang 'Summertime,' which is what I had been singing at parties around Knoxville. He said ‘Do it again.’ And I did. Mr. Robertson stood across the studio from me, his eyes were sparkling, he was singing with me or sometimes mouthing the words, reaching into me with his eyes, willing me to let the music soar out of me. Every so often he’d stop me and start me on a phrase again. All of a sudden it was all so easy and so joyful! At the end of it, he said to me, ‘Pretty girl, you can sing!’ It was so wonderful!"
Dixie began her lessons. At one of them, a stranger stopped in. Dixie
sang 'If I Loved You,' from Carousel, after which Jerome Robertson stepped out into the hallway with the visitor, who then left. Mr. Robertson returned, and asked, "Would you like to be in a musical, Dixie?" Remembers Dixie, "I’d never even been given a solo, not even a tiny solo, at the university in two and half years! I said, ‘Of course, I’d love to be in a musical.' He said, ‘Would you like to do Julie in Carousel?’ I said, ‘Mr. Robertson, what are you talking about?’ He said, 'That was George Touliatos, who has this very fine theater here, and he thinks you can do it.’ It was an audition I
didn’t know I was having. Jerome Robertson had called him and said, ‘You should hear this girl.'" Dixie soon opened at Memphis’ Front Street
Theater. The production’s Billy Bigelow was a young red-head -- "with a
lyric tenor voice that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck," says Dixie -- named George Hearn, later the star of Broadway’s Sweeny Todd, and most recently, The Diary of Anne Frank.
For the next two and half years, Dixie performed at the Front Street,
singing the leads in such musicals as Brigadoon, Oklahoma, The King and I, The New Moon, Babes in Arms, and The Student Prince "and," she says, "learning how to act."
Among her directors in Tennessee was Gladys Vaughan. When Dixie finished college, she came to New York, where Gladys was then working with Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Said Gladys to Dixie, "I want you to audition for Joe Papp." Said Dixie to Gladys, "No way, José! I’m just a little girl from the South, from musical comedy." Nevertheless, she went to meet Papp, still resisting ("I was young!" says Dixie), telling him, in her best Gone With the Wind style, "Mr. Papp, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout
birthin’ babies and I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout Shakespeare." Gladys and
Papp prevailed, and Dixie read Perdita’s Flower Speech from Winter’s Tale. "I read it through just as fast as I could," says Dixie, "to take away some of the Southern accent." "Sing something," said Papp. "So," says Dixie, "I sang 'How Are Things in Glocca Mora?' -- no piano, no nothing" -- and she was hired. She recreated the role of Perdita, singing two songs written for her by David Amram and she stayed with the group for two seasons.
A concerts manager, Harlowe Dean, suggested that Dixie continue with her singing lessons and recommended a well-known coach and teacher, John Wallowitch, who lived in Greenwich Village. Says Dixie, "As a young girl just up from Tennessee, I did not expect Fourth Street and Eleventh Street to cross one another. But in Greenwich Village they did, and at that juncture, sprinkling his flower garden with a big old-timey watering can, stood a dapper bespectacled young gentlemen who had to be Mr. John Wallowitch. He kept watering as he observed my high-heeled progress across the cobblestones. "Miss Carter," he spoke, "you’re late. Try not to be late again. I charge quite a lot for my time and do not wish to short-change you. Now please come in and sing."
Dixie later recorded her CD featuring 17 of John’s songs. In the booklet
accompanying it, she recounts moment of their first meeting. "I had gotten through the verse and one line of the chorus of 'How Are things in Glocca More'," she writes "when he stopped playing, fastened his blue eyes on mine, and then said something so generous and encouraging that I remember it exactly to this day." However, the booklet never tells what he said. For Cabaret Scenes I asked her. She answered, "I’ve never told a soul, for fear of sounding like I’m bragging. Remember, I was frightened of him because I had been late, and he had reprimanded me." He stopped playing and said (Dixie drops her voice to an intense whisper to imitate John), "My dear, you are a star. Now let’s start at the beginning."
Dixie eventually left the Shakespeare Festival to do two seasons with
Richard Rodgers at the Music Theater at Lincoln Center then later returned to the Shakespeare Festival. And she discovered cabaret. "When I first met John Wallowitch," she recalls, "he took me over to sing, to get some experience, at the Upstairs at the Duplex on Grove Street. After my show we went downstairs. John bought me a glass of wine and we listened to the pianist there. He was singing and playing 'It Never Entered My Mind,' and I said, 'This is it! This is the New York I have dreamed about -- the Village, late at night!'" Later, when Dixie was performing in a revue there, a gentleman offered her a part in a movie. It was Rod Steiger and the movie was No Way to Treat a Lady. At the same time, another gentlemen talked her
out of it. He was Arthur Carter -- and his invitation was marriage. Dixie
declined Steiger, accepted Carter, and retired to raise a family.
After seven years and two daughters, the marriage began to unravel and
Dixie decided to go back to work. "I couldn’t get an agent interested," she
says. "I was almost 35 years old --’too old,’ the message was, the wisdom being 40 was a dropping-off point and I had only five years left to amount to something." She was finally introduced to an agent, Dale Davis, and her career began again. She got a part in a Broadway musical, Sextet, which lasted only a week but brought her a good review from Clive Barnes in The New York Times, "the first signal of positive possibilities," says Dixie. "I have always been afraid to write to members of the press and say thank you for the kind comment that I have received along the way, afraid that it might appear as if I were expecting more praise next time but I have wanted to. Having been fortunate in this respect, I have wondered if the person who
is tippy-tap-typing out a review has any notion of how powerfully important
encouragement, or it’s opposite, can be. Not just as a temporary ego
adjustment. I mean, on the course of a life."
Dale sent Dixie to read for a soap opera, The Edge of Night. "It was the part of an assistant district attorney," says Dixie, "and I tried my best to imitate Bette Davis. Lo and behold, I got that job too. It was very lucky for me that these first two attempts to get work were successful because they gave me a meager measure of confidence, and it was catch-as-catch-can after that." After two and half years on The Edge of Night, Dixie’s role got
written out, and she moved on to the CBS-TV series, On Our Own, which lasted one season. Then came Designing Women, and Dixie’s career was assured.
Dixie continued to act and sing, the latter with the help of composer/musician Michele Brourman. It was Michele who suggested to Dixie, "You should make a cabaret act." The motion was seceded by Dixie’s present husband, actor Hal Holbrook, who told her, "You know how, when you have a party, you practically lock the door, pour the champagne, and make people listen to you? Do it, Dixie! Do it in a club just like it’s your living room. People will love it. You love to sing! Do it!" Dixie and Michele put together an act, which they tried out at the Gardenia in L.A., and later at Freddy’s Supper Club in New York City. It wasn’t until six years later, when Designing Women brought her a national television following, that The Carlyle, realizing she could draw an audience, brought her uptown. "You see the power of the tube!" says Dixie. "I was a hit, thank heavens! And from the first night -- boom! -- it took off." That was a decade ago and ever since, Dixie Carter has returned to The Carlyle for a moth’s engagement.
"It’s my springtime beat," she says. "When I commit to The Carlyle,
it’s unlike any other engagement. Being here involves word of honor, a
handshake. It’s a gorgeous room, and it’s my idea of romance.
"In my Carlyle show," she says, "I’m working to make something that’s
above the regular. Otherwise, I don’t want to do it. When I do it here,
I’m lucky if I break even. I employ the best musicians I can find. And four
pieces is a big band for a small room. So this is not for making money.
This is for love. I want to make something of myself that I give to people.
I’m not interested in standing up and singing a series of songs. And it
isn’t me, in my talking or singing, to say ‘Look what happened to me! Look at how I’ve been through this, or I’ve been through that.’ I want the
listener to say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s just how it is. That’s the way it with me, too.’ What I hope to get is, ‘Oh yes, Dixie, isn’t it the truth!'
"That’s what I’m looking for. Then we’re together and we’ve shared
something. And I’ve given someone, who’s laid out 50 bucks’ cover to start with, something to take along home. That’s what I hope -- and I know when it’s true ‘cause I can read this audience. By the time I’ve been up there an hour, I know who’s out there, I know who’s with someone who’s not his wife. Especially in this show, by the time I get to "Try to Remember," I see in all of the faces, ‘Yes, I remember, when life was so tender that dreams were kept beside your pillow. Yes, I remember, when love was an ember about to billow. I remember that! I remember that! It’s not that way any more but I remember it.’ It’s good to just go back and remember about how we felt, our hopes, our dreams.
"And, if I’m successful at what I’m doing, the audience connects with
each other. The audience leaves united with each other, not just with me.
There’s been a little family created."
Back to Cabaret Press
|
