"She makes skyrockets look lackadaisical," a short snapshot of her ascent to fame
I'm going through old drafts, and this one has a fair amount of journalist quotes around Barbara Harris' arrival to the NYC limelight. Austin Pendleton also appears, simply the best.
In 1961, Barbara Harris arrived on the New York stage as an uncontainable, indefinable talent whose very presence erased any notion of a mold, even that of a star. When The Second City made their debut, Barbara Harris entered the stage a girl from Chicago and exited a one-of-kind sensation. She was nominated for a Tony Award.
MAX LIEBMAN (producer of “From The Second City”): “Barbara was outstanding even in that bright group. If you asked me what impressed me the first time I saw her, I could only say that—like all the other persons who fall into this category of talent—she is difficult to define. Essentially she is an original. I was seeing something I had never seen before.”
She had already spent a decade honing her spontaneity, inventiveness, and prodigious skill in the becomings of The Second City, turning out “…batches of mad characters as if they were Christmas cookies: old ladies worrying about Peeping Tom’s, pot-smoking adolescents, Bryn Mawr psychology majors.” Harris seemed to possess a downright freaky ability to be different people, making her almost impossible to pin down.
“Miss Harris has managed to wrap up three ages of charm...stimulating woman...uncoordinated, speech-slurring teenager. And in her face is that baby charm that makes adults fuss over 3-year-olds.”
Elfin-face. Doll face. Curtain of bangs. Bambi-eyes. Button-nose. Cherub cheeks that cry out for pinching. “She might be descended from the elves, or perhaps before coming to New York she lived under a bridge with her uncles, the trolls, or in a forest pool.”
Within six months of the Second City debut, Harris was starring as the nymphet babysitter in the off-Broadway production of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In The Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (for which she won an Obie) and signed to star in the first Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner musical that would become On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. Rodgers ended up leaving the partnership, so Burton Lane would assume his role but the two biggest living composers found their idea for their first musical together in her, who six months before was completely unknown.
Jack Gaver: “What has happened to the Chicago-born and reared actress is almost unheard of, if not unique.”
Charlie Rice: “It’s hard to explain what a theatrical record that is. In baseball, it would be like hitting a home run with eight men on base. Or in golf, it would be making a hole in none. She makes skyrockets look lackadaisical.”
As the nymphette babysitter Rosalie, the seductress, Harris bopped around the stage in baby-doll dresses and then slinked around in clingy low-cut slips baring no distinction between innocence and sex. “She’s capable of projecting the kind of character that would have made ‘Lolita’ a credible novel.”
The play’s imaginary exotic dysfunctional Caribbean setting made for zany over-the-top comedy. Harris’ expert portrayal of a dual image of femininity—pure and impure, girl and woman, all wrapped up into one lady, was hailed as nothing short but iconic. She’s trying to seduce Austin Pendleton’s character, a nervous wreck of a stunted boy because his mother is so wildly fabulously insane.
Austin Pendleton (played Jonathan): So Barbara kind of reminds me of Marylin Monroe. I saw Some Like It Hot in the theater recently. It’s brilliant what she does. It’s a cousin of something Barbara would have done with that same part. This intuitive in the moment electricity. This kind of total vulnerability but very active, very communicative. It’s sexy and mocking sexy at the same time. That’s a very particular thing they had in common. I remember the day Marylin died. It was during the run of Oh Dad. The world got news of it on Sunday morning. We had a matinee. Barbara and Jo Van Fleet who were not the same woman were both very upset. Jo gave this fantastically intense performance that day. At the end, she said, “that was for Marylin.”
Stephen Birmingham: “These things emerge straight from Rosalie’s slightly tarnished soul. Rosalie drapes herself longingly over Robert Morse’s lap, and suddenly it is possible for a girl to be chubby and sinuous at the same time. She may be wearing a Rudi Gernreich dress with suggestive peek-a-boo cutouts, but it is not the wardrobe department that provides the hints of interior wiggles, and suddenly her figure is so provocative as to be downright censorable–yet funny. It is not make-up that makes her face full of seduction yet comic. And there is not even an indication that there is an actress here, acting. She doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. Something seems to be doing this to her.
It is that simple, and that mysterious. Barbara Harris disappears. That’s what people literally told me.
The press couldn’t figure out who she was, let alone keep up the breakneck speed of her career which turned the Barbara Harris Folder of Clippings at the Lincoln Center Theatre Archives into a veritable page-turner, a humorous display of not knowing. Largely due to Harris, however, Oh Dad had become such a success because she figured out to communicate to the audience, (which I’ll go into in another newsletter), that they could laugh.
All the same, The Second City to Oh Dad to Rodgers and Lerner—in 8 months? Can she even sing?
Norman Nadel: “Several months ago, Richard Rodgers and I were talking…and I asked why he and Lerner had selected Miss Harris to star in it. Can she sing? I wondered. Rodgers shrugged. She’s taking lessons.”
“When you say,” she told me, “you can’t do it…and they don’t care…”
Jack Graver (Interview with Barbara Harris): “All I know right now is that I’ll be expected to sing. I’ve already started vocal coaching. I’ve never really been a singer although I sang in a couple of the numbers in From The Second City.
Norman Nadel: “…What made you choose her?” The composer smiled: she has a quality…”
Alan Jay Lerner (later): “You care about her.”
Jack Graver (interview with Barbara): “I’ve been in two shows in New York in eight months, one of them still running, and I’ve had nice reviews but that didn’t really make me much of anyone. I was just another busy actress, with one good break in two tries. Then Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Lerner signed me for a show they haven’t even written yet. Overnight, I’m practically famous. It’s bewildering, fantastic, and to a certain extent, so far as my privacy is concerned, inconvenient. But it’s also pretty wonderful.”
I’m finishing this piece about her at AJs Supermarket and will continue to put the four days together that I spent with her. But this snapshot of this moment is fun. “It’s bewildering, fantastic, and inconvenient, but it’s also pretty wonderful.” Okay, she might not have liked all of it, didn’t know what to do with it, she might not have liked the photographer around Oh Dad, she did not want to be interviewed, but this one seemed to go well. I have to read through everything again since, well, her discomfort around fame became somewhat legendary, I think, itself.
Thanks for reading!
Maria