Carol Channing can’t understand why every review of “Hello, Dolly!” mentions her age.
“Some of them even begin with my age. And they don’t even get it right,” she says ruefully, in that raspy, squeaky, growly, Louis Armstrong-like voice that has been her passport since her first major Broadway hit as Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1950, and her signature since she first opened in “Dolly” in January, 1964. She went on to do 1,273 consecutive performances of “Dolly” on Broadway and on national tour, not missing a single one-as she will tell you without pausing for a single breath-not even with her arm in a sling, or a patch over her eye, or her foot in a cast.
She’s played “Dolly” almost 4,000 times, maybe more; somebody lost count during the 1974 tour.
And she’s just started a 13-month national tour that will take “Dolly” to places like Vienna, Va., and Tempe, Ariz., to Tampa and Cleveland and St. Louis and Philadelphia and San Francisco-before going to Broadway.
And after that to China. Then to Japan. Maybe to Australia.
“And the reviews keep saying I’m 71,” she continues. “And I’m not.”
Oh? Want to set the record straight, Carol?
“I was born into a Christian Science family and they don’t believe in birthdays. They believe that life is a series of plateaus.”
Sure, Carol. But, somewhere, somebody wrote that you were, er, something more like, maybe-73?
“Let’s just say that’s more accurate,” and she launches into an imitation of Tallulah Bankhead and relates how they both used to celebrate their birthdays together because “we shared the same birth date. She ignored the fact that there might be a few years between us. We’d have a party and then she’d take the booze home and I’d take the cake.”
It’s about three hours before showtime at the Shubert Theatre, where “Dolly” plays through Sunday before opening in Atlanta Tuesday.
Channing had performed in two shows the previous day, would perform that night, and would do four back-to-back performances in the next two days.
Each performance is almost three hours long; she’s on stage-acting, singing, dancing, starring-more than two of those three hours.
And here she is in her flower-filled suite at the Palmer House, jaunty in a gold-buttoned blue jacket, slim white pants, all dolled up-as Channing, not as Dolly, except for the inch-long eyelashes she’s already put on for that night’s show. “That’s the biggest problem about getting ready, getting the eyelashes on right. That’s one thing the makeup man can’t do. He doesn’t have ESP. He doesn’t know what I do about Dolly.”
Before she heads out for the theater that evening, she will do a phone interview, she will begin to send “hundreds of thank yous” to people in Denver and Vancouver, where her show has already played.
What? No nap? No cucumbers over the eyes? No rest to store up energy for the grueling show schedule?
Those saucer-eyes widen even more.
Her secret: Never slow down
“People just don’t understand. They wonder, `How can you keep it up?’
“My metabolism’s up to it. It works just like a clock. At 8 every night, whether I’m in a show or not, I’m at my top energy.
“It’s been like that because I’ve never stopped working. As George Burns says, `Once you stop working, Carol, you’re in trouble.’ I’ve never stopped. For the last two years, I’ve been doing a one-woman show with symphonies, and that kind of show requires real endurance,” she emphasizes, intimating that being on stage as Dolly for two hours is akin to a stroll in the park.
“I never even leave the stage to change costumes during the one-woman show and there are nine changes that I do behind screens and while I’m changing I talk about the next character and the last thing I do is put on a hat and come back on stage as a different character.
“I’ve been doing that with the symphonies ever since I did `Legends’ and `Jerry’s Girls.’ I just keep busy. Just keep working. Never stop. Otherwise, you can’t get started again. That’s the trick.”
There’s just a momentary pause. “It matters that you love your work,” she adds.
Channing claims that being raised in San Francisco-“a metropolitan art colony, cosmopolitan, a port city, a lot like Chicago, do you know how much I love Chicago?”-influenced the way she still is today.
All the kids went to museums, to theaters, she says. She trained for the ballet from the age of 6-“until I was 13 and then I was just too big, as tall as I am now (5-foot-9) and the man who did the lifts said he couldn’t lift me anymore.”
But, ever since, she’s kept her body in tune. “My muscles are always ready to be used.”
Walking and more walking
When she’s at home, she walks four miles every morning, “up and down, up and down, these wonderful hills.” She lives in Hollywood Hills with her husband, Charles Lowe, who is also her manager and who travels with her. Their son, Channing, is a political cartoonist for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
In New York, during rehearsals for the show, Channing, accompanied by a dancer or the stage manager, walked 130 blocks a day. “We walked so fast we frightened trucks, and people in front of us were in danger, and we’d just keep walking, just keep walking. I stick around with the dancers and we have to do it, because we sing and dance at the same time and we have to do it to have endurance.”
She laments, though, that she went “to flab” while “Dolly” was in tryouts before reaching Chicago because there was no time for the “violent” walking she so enjoys. She also “banged up” her right foot recently and won’t be speed walking until that heals.
If there’s a banged-up foot or if there’s any flab anywhere, they’re certainly not in evidence when Channing is up on stage. She wears high-heels and she’s plenty agile. She’s trim, 10 pounds thinner than when she did her first Dolly three decades ago.
But, no, she’s not the same Dolly as the 40-something Channing who took Broadway by storm, who won two Tony awards and who received Tony nominations for every Broadway show in which she appeared.
But she dances, she sings, she gingerly tools around the narrow runway that circles the orchestra pit, she gives her audiences everything she has and she does it with such spirit that she has them on their feet applauding and cheering during and after every “Dolly.”
Ah, maybe it’s the applause that’s the great energizer?
“The truth?” she asks. “If you enjoy the applause too much during a performance, the audience doesn’t keep applauding. It’s like laughing at your own joke. It’s fine to enjoy it, but if you take it personally, some kind of a tentacle goes out, something goes wrong. You lose the audience and you never get them back. If you let your mind waver for the least bit, it you let yourself think even for a moment, `Gee, I’m hungry,’ the audience didn’t hear the line you just said.”
A strict regimen
It’s discipline, she says. Mind and body. Discipline.
“Isaac Stern spits on his violin and shines it, blows on his violin and shines it. He carries it himself and he gets a seat for it on the airplane. We actors have no violins. The only way we can tell our stories is through our faces, our voices, our bodies. So we have to treat our bodies like Isaac Stern treats his violin.
“It takes discipline, but I don’t mind. It’s embarrassing to stand in front of all those people and run out of breath and not be able to sing and dance at the same time or have something wonderful in mind to do but not be able to do it. When Laurence Olivier was asked to name the most important quality of a great artist, he said, `Health!’ ” With arm raised high, Channing says, “Health!” with the fervor of a Hamlet at his most dramatic.
So, she tunes her violin. She does aerobics and stomach crunches and she walks. No alcohol. No cigarettes.
She eats no dairy products, because “they make gook in your head and you can’t sing. No wheat, no bran. That fouls up my voice.” She does eat lots of vegetables, fish and chicken “when we can find markets where they don’t put stuff (chemicals) on it.”
That’s not the way it was in the early days when Channing was considered the eccentric because she carried her own prepared foods in Tiffany silver containers wherever she went, even to the then-hallowed Pump Room.
“It all started when Anita Loos, who wrote `Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ had my hair bleached platinum blond. Pretty soon I started to sound like Andy Devine. My voice was like gravel,” she says in a voice that is not milk and honey. It was a Chicago doctor who discovered that she had an allergy to “this little thing in the hair coloring called para-phenylenediamine” that set off a reaction to every chemical she came in contact with, even chlorine in water. She switched to organic foods, and carried them with her because they weren’t readily available. “Once I stopped the chemicals, I was as healthy as a bedbug.”
And she intends to stay that way because she’s got a long way to go. Her mother lived to be 100, says Channing. Friend and artist Al Hirschfield is 92 and “he says his best drawings have been done since the time he was supposed to retire.
“Obviously, I haven’t even gotten myself together yet. I think I’m just a third of the way up the mountain. (Producer) Duncan Weldon in London has four scripts for me. If I’m lucky, I’ll rise again.
“We all peak at a different age. Shirley Temple peaked at 7.
“The prime of life can happen at any time, so I’m hoping it happens soon for me. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
