Barbara Cook once observed, “The challenge of performing is to show to an audience what life has done to you.”Just how steep the toll has been is divulged in “Then & Now,” Cook’s new memoir, written with Tom Santopietro, The loss and longing evident throughout the pages make one aware of just what has gone into making Cook one of the most spellbinding cabaret artists of all time. No one exhibits as much naked emotion in performance, a yearning mixed with the bittersweet joy of a woman who has always loved to sing. At 88, Cook looks back on her life and achievements with hard-earned wisdom and a rueful sense of humor.In the 1950s, Cook was a pert blond Broadway ingenue, spreading wholesome cheer in such musicals as “Plain and Fancy,” “Candide,” “The Music Man,” and “She Loves Me.” Two decades later, she was a stay-in-bed depressive, consuming a half-gallon of cheap Chablis a day and so broke that she shoplifted food. Broadway offers had dried up, and she was reduced to touring in musical revues. Redemption came in the form of Wally Harper, a brilliant musical director who at a crucial moment recognized Cook’s unrealized potential.In the early ’70s, with Harper at the piano, Cook began a slow comeback as a solo cabaret singer, first appearing at Brothers and Sisters, an intimate gay bar and nightclub in the theater district. Dressed in a caftan to camouflage her sizable weight gain, she wowed audiences and critics alike with her peerless technique, married to an original and soulful style. The cabaret engagements drew the attention of impresario Herbert Breslin, who presented Cook with the life-changing challenge of her career: a solo concert at Carnegie Hall in January 1975.Cook was hesitant at first. She was still drinking, subject to panic attacks, and shy about her plus size. “But I knew that yes meant a yes to life, and no meant death,” she recalled recently. Standing in the wings of Carnegie Hall that night, she writes, she could feel “a kind of strength coming up from the ground and into me.” The concert was a triumph and led to a series of acclaimed solo performances and albums. That success made her indifferent to what people thought of her appearance and helped her focus on conveying the truth in the lyrics of such pop masters as Stephen Sondheim, Oscar Hammerstein, and Ira Gershwin.Cook’s love of singing, she notes, has carried her through the roughest of times. The emotional turbulence began early on. The Georgia-born singer begins her book with the observation that her mother — a domineering woman with a borderline personality disorder — led her to believe she was responsible for the death of her baby sister, by transmitting her whooping cough to her, and the subsequent abandonment of the family by her father. Cook carried that guilt for years until a therapist pointed out that her sister could well have become infected on her own.The memoir details the love affair that led to Cook’s marriage with actor David LeGrant, another dominating personality, who ruled her life until their divorce in 1965. The split was caused in part by Cook’s liaison with the actor Arthur Hill, best known for creating the role of George in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The lovers were star-crossed — both were married when they met — but Cook writes that Hill, whom she describes as the love of her life, gave her a renewed belief in herself. For so long she’d felt that she needed men to complete and support her. “Turns out I was stronger than all of them put together,” she writes.That strength failed her when it came to alcohol and food. Cook was addicted to both, although she has been in recovery for decades. Her recollection of those dark years is startlingly honest, albeit spiked with wry humor. At one point, Cook writes, she chanced upon a possible solution to her drinking problem and shared it with her fellow tippler the actress Maureen Stapleton. From now on, she said, she was going to imbibe only wine. To which Stapleton replied, “Barbara, do you know how much wine you can drink!”Cook’s drinking led to an estrangement from her son Adam LeGrant. Happily, it was only temporary, but their reconciliation was accompanied by news that distressed her: Her only child came out to her as gay. “I cried for five days,” she recalls. For years she had felt like an outsider, and becoming a wife and mother had, in her eyes, brought her into the mainstream at last. Now she was cast out yet again. In a recent NPR radio interview with Terry Gross, Cook said she came to realize that her son “is not here to plug me into anything. And I am here to try to help him to be the fullest person that I know how to help him be. And then I was OK.”Cook’s self-perception as outsider, of course, has helped make her the artist she is. Watching her perform, one gets the sense that she continues to be, as she describes it, the little Georgia girl “peering in with her nose pressed up against the window pane.” As such, she is the perfect conduit for the floods of feeling expressed in the great American Songbook, a talent that has been acknowledged with a Tony Award (for “The Music Man”) and a Kennedy Center Honor. Hailed by the London Financial Times as “the greatest singer in the world,” Cook maintains that the ultimate reward has been to show to an audience what life has done to her, both the joys it has given and the sorrows it inflicted.Barbara Cook performs on July 21 and 23 at Feinstein’s/54 Below, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan; 646-476-3551, 54below.com.
↧