Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (23 page)

Jerry Brown and I had a lot of fun for a number of years. He was smart and funny, not interested in drinking or drugs, and lived his life carefully, with a great deal of discipline. This was different from a lot of the men I knew in rock and roll. I found it a relief. Also, he considered professionally many issues that I considered passionately: issues like the safety of nuclear power plants, agricultural soil erosion, water politics, and farm workers’ rights. Neither of us ever suffered under the delusion that we would like to share each other’s lives. I would have found his life too restrictive, and he would have found mine entirely chaotic. Eventually we went our separate ways and embraced things that resonated with us as different individuals. He finished his second term as governor in 1983 and went to work with Mother Teresa in India. I moved to New York City and went to work for Joe Papp. Jerry is back in politics now as California’s governor once again and happily married to a woman I like very much. We have always remained on excellent terms.

Photo by William Coupon.

Wearing my Mexican china poblana costume.

17

Sueños

M
Y FATHER CALLED FROM
Tucson. He said that Lola Beltrán, my favorite Mexican ranchera singer since childhood, was going to appear at the 1983 Tucson International Mariachi Conference, an annual event then in its second year. As I had never seen her perform, he wondered if I would like to go. I jumped on a plane and flew to Tucson.

Lola was magnificent. A tall, handsome woman with strong cheekbones, she commanded the stage, her beautiful hands moving so gracefully that they were a show in themselves. Her costumes were exquisitely pretty and finely made, based on regional tradition. She moved her peach-colored silk rebozo into various poses with such elegant style that it made her simple stage production seem elaborate. Her voice was as powerful as an opera singer’s, but she used it in a completely different way. She sang mostly in her huge belt voice but would crack into a soaring falsetto, purposely emphasizing the break in the voice that a classical singer will try to conceal. This is a tradition in Mexican singing, and a difficult one, usually best executed by male singers. Lola handled it effortlessly. She had a tremendous dynamic range, from a whispered, caressing murmur, to an anguished wail that could blow down the walls. Her voice was passionately sorrowful and hurdled over the language barrier to rip your heart out.

I was introduced to her afterward. When told that I was a
singer also, she presented me with the peach-colored rebozo. Later I wore it to the studio when I recorded in Spanish. It gave me courage.

Her show left me wondering where in Los Angeles I might connect with good musicians who could play the ranchera style, plus have the patience to let me hang out with them and learn. I had sung Mexican songs along with the family as a child but usually knew only a few phrases of lyrics and then would hum and “La-la-la” through the parts I didn’t know. To acquire professional competence in this style would be a vertical climb.

While still thinking about the Mexican music, I got a call from Joe Papp. He was going to present Puccini’s opera
La Bohème
at the New York Public Theater in the fall of 1984. He wanted me to sing the role of Mimi. Wilford Leach was going to direct. I said yes. I didn’t stop to consider the difficulty. I had loved
Bohème
since childhood, hearing it frequently played and discussed at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother had a recording with the Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles singing the part of Mimi, still my favorite interpretation. My grandfather would sit at the piano and play through the melodies, with one of my aunts chiming in on part of an aria. It seemed like family music. I was keen to start learning it.

Shortly after that, I was in New York with Randy Newman to film a television special of Randy and his music that included me and Ry Cooder. We were walking in the summer heat along Columbus Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, on our way to have lunch at the Café des Artistes. I loved to eat there so that I could look at the Howard Chandler Christy murals of frolicking nude maidens on the walls.

While we were walking, a police officer ran past us at full speed, breathing hard and trying to catch up with someone we couldn’t see. He pulled several yards ahead of us, and his gun
slipped out of its holster, falling to the sidewalk. We called out to him, but he was already out of hearing range. I reached down to pick up the gun.

“No!” shouted Randy. “Leave it there!”

“What if a child picks it up?” I asked him. “Someone could get hurt.”

“Throw it in there!” he said, indicating a large trash can.

“It might go off and kill the poor garbage collector,” I argued. I decided I would be in charge of the gun and find a way to return it to the police officer who had dropped it. After all, I was a cowgirl from Arizona. My older brother, a police officer, and my father were both master marksmen. I had learned to shoot as a child. Never mind that I am frightened to death of guns and believe in strict gun control. Randy wasn’t a cowboy. He grew up in L.A.

I picked up the gun and immediately spotted two police officers driving along in a squad car. I raised my arm to hail them like a taxi and started to wave the gun in their direction. Randy, who lacked experience with firearms but had a lot of awareness of what happens to people who point guns at NYPD officers, managed to hide the gun from sight while he explained to me as tactfully as he could that I was a reckless moron. He also saved us from being a headline in the next edition of
The New York Times
.

After some rapid negotiating, we agreed to stash the gun in my purse, which was actually a metal lunch box with a picture of Roy Rogers and his faithful horse Trigger on the lid. It was not a vintage lunch box but a reproduction that was a little wider than the one I’d carried in the third grade. The gun fit perfectly. We walked over to the squad car and explained what happened. I lifted the lid slowly and offered the gun in the lunch box as though it were a gift of the Magi. Miraculously, my head was not blown off. I looked down the street and saw the other
police officer, minus his gun. He was looking anxiously along the sidewalk. This added credibility to our story.

We continued on our way to the Café des Artistes. Over lunch, I mentioned to Randy that I had agreed to sing the role of Mimi in
La Bohème
. He looked concerned.

“Oh no, little Mighty Mouse,” he said. Randy called me little Mighty Mouse because I sang so loud. “That might be too hard for you.”

I moved back into my New York apartment and began rehearsals for
Bohème
. I realized that I should have insisted on auditioning for this production too, as it was beginning to dawn on me how difficult the singing was going to be.

I fretted out loud to director Wilford Leach, who had done such a masterful job with
Pirates
. He was used to his artists obsessing about their inadequacies, and told me to stop worrying. He still didn’t like opera singing and hoped we could achieve a more “natural” sound. We almost pulled it off. Again, the rest of the cast was very good. Wilford had them relying heavily on their acting ability to communicate the story, and they were up to the task. Gary Morris, a country singer with an unusually rich voice, sang Rodolfo to my Mimi. His interpretation of the character was honest and touching, his singing natural and unaffected, musically sure-footed, and respectful of the origins of the piece. David Spencer had translated the libretto into English. He approached it like he was writing lyrics for Broadway tunes, and I thought he did a wonderful job.

The result, which opened in time for the holidays, was like a Victorian Christmas card set in motion. The story, which is devastating, and the music, which is nearly indestructible, were still very moving, in spite of the change to English and the reduced
orchestration. Instead of a full orchestra, we had a tiny band of musicians playing flutes, a guitar, some strings, and a mandolin. The idea was that it should have a gritty, street theater sound. Gritty it was. The principal problem, for which I had no solution, was that my voice lacked the training for such a demanding part sung exclusively in the upper extension. Naively, I thought that if I could hear a good opera singer, I could copy the sound. I could copy Victoria de los Angeles’s big sound for a couple of notes, but had not developed the musculature to sustain it through a musical line. It was like having a few words in a foreign language that one can pronounce convincingly, but no vocabulary.

The reviews, some positive, some scathing, did not include a hurrah from the all-important
New York Times
. Frank Rich, a writer I respect very much, wrote, “It’s not consumption that’s killing Linda Ronstadt’s Mimi in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s crazy-quilt production of ‘La Bohème’—it’s abject fear.” He was dead-on.

Joe Papp was at his splendid best when he came in to bolster the stricken cast. Whatever he said gave us the determination to continue to work on our performances and try to perfect them the same way we would have done if the show were a colossal hit and bound for Broadway. “The work is all!” he told us, and then read us a comforting quote from Puccini: “Critics are capable of doing much harm, and very little good.”

Thus fortified, I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of the run. I have always believed that one learns more from failure than from success.

The frustration of not being able to fully realize a musical dream is disappointing and has happened to me more than once. The consolation prize that I received from my experience in
Bohème
was this: learning the part gave me a tour of composer Puccini’s mind that is not available to the mere listener. Having
the chance to be in such intimate company with music of that quality was worth whatever personal anguish it cost me. Now, when I go to the opera house to hear
Bohème
in more capable hands, the intimacy remains. When Rodolfo, Mimi, Marcello, and Musetta stroll onto the stage, I feel like I am greeting old friends I have not seen for a very long time, and have missed. When I hear them sing the beautiful arias in Italian, with their immaculately trained voices, I am delighted.