Lunedi Lunacy

To some she was Lady Peel; to others she was Beatrice Lillie; but at one time to everyone she was simply known as "the Funniest Woman in the World".

Born in Toronto in 1894 she made her way from 86 Davenport Road to Drayton Manor House, Staffordshire with stops en route on the stages of London and New York.   During a 50 year career she appeared in over 40 revues and plays but strangely only one musical - High Spirits by her old friend Noel Coward.  It was her last stage appearance.

She only had a handful of movies to her credit - her style just didn't work that well on celluloid - but her appearances in the early years of television were many.  From variety shows to talk shows her wit and madcap routines made her a welcome - and unpredictable - guest on Jack Parr, Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan.   She had the singular honour of being the only star that Sullivan devoted an entire show to in the 23 years he was on television. 

There are Fairies At the Bottom of Our Garden was a popular children's poem by Rose Fyleman that was set to music by Liza Lehmann in 1917.   By the time she sang this on Ed Sullivan it had long left the nursery, entered the realm of the cabaret and lost all innocence in the process. (And this goes out to my friend Ron with big hugs - its me!)

She was having her hair done at Elizabeth Arden in Chicago when the wife of the founder of the Armour meat-packing company entered, noticed her, and complained loudly that she hadn't' realize there would be chorus girls present or she would not have come. Soon thereafter, as Lillie was leaving and saying goodbye to the manageress in the waiting room, in that voice that carried to the back row of the Schubert, she said, "You may tell the butcher's wife that Lady Peel has finished."

She appeared briefly on Broadway as Auntie Mame taking over from Greer Garson and then played Patrick Dennis's indomitable Aunt in the West End premiere in 1958.   She clocked up 301 performances at the Adelphi in what was her first non-revue performance in many years.

She loved telling this story on her friend Noel Coward:  Noel and I were in Paris once. Adjoining rooms, of course. One night, I felt mischievous, so I knocked on Noel's door and he asked, "Who is it?" I lowered my voice and said, "Hotel detective. Have you got a gentleman in your room?" He answered, "Just a minute, I'll ask him."

In 1924 Queen Bea made her Broadway debut in André Charlot's Revue of 1924 and introduced a number that had been a great success in the West End: March with Me. This clips captures that madcap number as well as a glimpse of the wonderful Ed Wynn.

During the Second World War she was an inveterate entertainer travelling throughout the various theatres of war.  It was while preparing to go on stage one evening in April 1942 that she learned of the death of her son Robert Peel.  He had been killed in action aboard HMS Tenedos in Colombo Harbour.  She refused to postpone the performance saying "I'll cry tomorrow."  And indeed she did and for many years refused to accept the fact that he would not return.

Al Hirschfeld captures the indomitable Bea in one of her funniest sketches:  MiLady Dines Alone. 
She ate the entire meal - corn on the cob, asparagus, lobster without taking her gloves off.

Though she left Toronto while still in her teens she recalled the city with a great deal of affection.  In her book Every Other Inch a Lady she, perhaps with that Irish love of hyperbole inherited from her father, said:  A little bit of heaven had fallen down from the sky onto the shores of Lake Ontario. So they sprinkled it with stardust and called it Irish Toronto.  You have to wonder if her tongue wasn't pushing itself firmly in her cheek while she penned that sentence?

In another passage she recalls being feted by Mayor Sam McBride ("with a brogue as thick as Irish coffee").  At the reception he said: Your singable beauty has endangered you to thousands. "I thanked him from the bottom of my galoshes."

And here's our Bea, one more time, doing another of her signature pieces - sadly without the visual of her perched on a stool with her long string of pearls.  Noël Coward composed this song after he and Beatrice attended a beach party given by Elsa Maxwell in the south of France in 1937 or 1938 and was sung by Bea the the 1939 revue Set to Music.  The lyrics in the first stanza are based on a real life party:  Coward and Lillie were invited to "come as they were," but on arriving they discovered the other guests were all in formal attire.  Perhaps this explains why the singer claims it was hell to "stay as we were".  "Poor Grace" is a reference to opera singer and movie star Grace Moore who was also a guest. 

It was during the making of Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1966 that it became apparent that Bea was suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer's.  She died in January 1989 and the lights in theatres in the West End and on Broadway were dimmed in tribute to "the Funniest Woman in the World!"

February 10 - 1920: Jozef Haller de Hallenburg performs symbolic wedding of Poland to the sea, celebrating restitution of Polish access to open sea.

Mercoledi Musicale

So this was all this to-do this past weekend about an opera singer - AN OPERA SINGER I tells ya! - performing the American National Anthem at a major sports event.   When they weren't otherwise occupied with the uproar over a song about the United States being an all-inclusive country sung in foreign languages the waves were atwitter with silliness about how well/badly this opera singer - AN OPERA SINGER I tells ya! - did.

Sorry but I had to snicker behind my hand - well okay a few times I just outright guffawed - at the way both opera fans and the "common man" were treating this as an unusual, never before in the history of human existence occurrence.

Every Sunday night we tuned in
to Ed Sullivan's "Really big show!"

Damn folks, let cast our minds back to a time, not that long ago, when an opera singer on television wasn't such a big deal just part of normal programming.  In those days opera singers were regular guests on many of the variety and talk programmes - hell at one point NBC had its own opera company and its own orchestra (anyone every heard of a guy called Arturo Toscanini?).   And then there was this guy called Ed Sullivan.  He had a show on Sunday nights - the show where Elvis Presley, The Beatles, MARIA CALLAS, the Rolling Stones, The Supremes, JOAN SUTHERLAND,  Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, RICHARD TUCKER, the Jackson Five and a whole gang of other song birds strutted their stuff before the households of North America. 

From 1948 until 1971 The Ed Sullivan Show was the quintessential variety show and for that hour from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM America almost came to a standstill.  It featured everything from ballet to Broadway and often opera was up there with the best and the emerging best in entertainment.

Roberta Peters as Rosina in Il Barbiere - one of her
signature roles.  Her's was a Rosina for the canary
fanciers - but what an extraordinary canary it was!

The record for appearances on Ed's show is held by two Canadians - the witty and erudite Wayne and Schuster with 58 appearances, followed by comedians Jack Carter with 49 and Myron Cohen with 43.  And right behind them in #4 place: opera singer Roberta Peters with 41!  AN OPERA SINGER I tells ya!  Who would have thunk?

Peters was a real American success story, she made her unscheduled debut at the Met in November 1950 at the age of 19 having never sung on a stage in her life.  At the time Met General Manager Rudolph Bing observed: To be thrown on the stage at the Met for the first time like that is a shock few can survive.  Peters did!.  She not only survived but she went on to become an established star at the Met and sang over 520 performances with the company in New York and on tour.   She was a great favourite there and, it would seem, with the audiences across America on Sunday night too!

Perhaps these two clips will explain, a little, why she was a favourite in both the Big Bad Apple and the heartlands.

In a broadcast from 1955 Roberta Peters sings the Doll's aria from Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann.  I'm not sure but this looks like it could be from The Voice of Firestone, another classic classical television show.

At her audition for the Met Rudolph Bing had her sing the Queen of the Night's vengeance aria from Die Zauberflöte which contains four high Fs.  He had her sing it seven times!  That's 28 high Fs for anyone who's counting.  He was unsure if her voice would carry in a house the size of the old Met and listened from all parts of the auditorium.  It did and would both at the old Broadway house and at the new Lincoln Center Met for the next 35 years.

In 1964 she appeared at the Salzburg Festival as the Queen of the Night in Otto Schenk's production of Die Zauberflöte under the baton of István Kertész.  She subsequently recorded the role with Karl Böhm.  Vocally she is completely in control but that costume and the need to be positioned on the trap seem to literally hobble her dramatic performance.

She was only one of a list of opera singers that included Beverly Sills, Robert Merrill, Franco Corelli, Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Anna Moffo, Lily Pons, Jan Peerce, Marilyn Horne, Dorothy Kirsten, George London Eileen Farrell and Eleanor Steber - all who appeared "right here on our stage"!

While looking up some information I came upon these opening and closing paragraphs from an entry on The Ed Sullivan Show:

The Ed Sullivan Show was the definitive and longest running variety series in television history (1948-71). Hosted by the eponymous awkward and fumbling former newspaperman, the show became a Sunday night institution on CBS. For twenty-three years the Sullivan show fulfilled the democratic mandate of the variety genre: to entertain all of the audience at least some of the time.

.............

The Ed Sullivan Show reflected an era of network television when a mass audience and, even, a national consensus seemed possible. Sullivan became talent scout and cultural commissar for the entire country, introducing more than 10,000 performers throughout his career. His show implicitly recognized that America should have an electronic exposure to all forms of entertainment, from juggling to opera.

Ron Simon

Museum of Broadcast Communications

Encyclopedia of Television

An interesting observation.

February 5 -  62 CE: Earthquake in Pompeii, Italy.