Carol Channing still has plenty of razzle-dazzle

When Carol Channing was in the middle of singing “Hello Dolly” last night, it was one of those moments when time stands still. You have to pinch yourself and say, “Yes, I am sitting here in this room and yes, she is singing that song. This is really happening.’ Miss Channing, 88 years young, performed her cabaret act in front of a star-studded crowd at The Magic Castle in Hollywood and was in terrific form as she mixed stories from her life and career with songs and, a whole lot of humor.

I loved her impersonation of Sophie Tucker who she said gave her this advice about playing in Las Vegas: “When you’re in the casino Carol, it won’t help you to dress sexy. Believe me baby, to the boys around the craps table, a low-cut dress is just another place to lose the dice!”

Since she was in many big Broadway hits, that meant “the traffic of the world goes through your dressing room.” Among those visitors was Talluhla Bankhead who came backstage on opening night of Gentleman Prefer Blondes: “Talluhla had a problem: she couldn’t keep her clothes on! When I talked with her, I learned to never look down. It wasn’t easy.” Channing complained to Bankhead that because of last-minute changes to the show, she hadn’t had any sleep for the last two weeks. Bankhead replied: “Well, take a sleeping pill!” Channing said she didn’t want to become addicted. Bankhead retorted: “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve taken them every night of my life for 36 years, they’re not addicting!”

Channing got one of the biggest laughs of the night when comparing the stage and screen versions of Hello Dolly: “Underneath all of the glorious music and the hilarious writing, well, it’s a comedy. I want you to know it’s a comedy if you didn’t get to Broadway. It’s a hilarious comedy. It was written funny. Well, it was more like Medea I thought when I saw the movie!” Miss Channing, who won a Tony Award for creating the role of Dolly Levi, was famously passed over for the movie and the role given tio a far too young Barbara Streisand. It was even more egregious than Ethel Merman losing Gypsy to Rosalind Russell or Julie Andrews losing My Fair Lady to Audrey Hepburn. Even after the film version came out in the late 60s, Channing enjoyed several successful revivals of the show and ended up playing Dolly well over 5,000 times and never missed a single performance. This, despite the fact that “I’d get a terrible cold or some terrible disease in every city…When you just can’t do the show and you’re deathly ill, you remember that they have all saved their hard-earned money and gotten a babysitter and traveled from great distances and all that and you’re just laying there in bed. You get much sicker thinking of how you’re not there when they went to all that trouble to get there. So you have to do the show and do you know, it’s the strangest thing. You reach to the heavens to get the show out and the heavens answer you. That’s your best performance!”

After the show, we were invited to a post-show reception where Miss Channing was greeted by the likes of Florence Henderson, Lily Tomlin, Donna Mills, Kathryn Joosten, JoAnne Worley and Alison Arngrim.

Florence, there with her real-life daughter, had just seen three of her Brady Bunch children the day before when they were interviewed for a documentary on Brady creator Sherwood Schwartz. I spoke with nearly all of these ladies on the red carpet before the show but due to the lateness of the hour, I’ll share all that with you later in the day.

I invited my friend, Stewart Scott, along because he is a huge fan of Miss Channing and I was so glad they got the chance to meet and chat after the show. I had never been to the castle and before Miss Channing went on, Stewart and I found ourselves being led through the place in a group that included Miss Tomlin and Jane Wagner along with Miss Joosten. It was a hoot!

Miss Channing’s performance was the kick-off of a new monthly series: Cabaret at the Castle. The room is perfect for a nice, intimate show so this is terrific news. But it was also part of her stupendous efforts to get arts back into public schools in the state of California. “I get to talk to the students often and they ask me questions,” Channing said to the audfience. “The first question that they usually ask is, ‘Tell me, how did you ever get started in the theater?’ I never mind being asked that question because I do so dearly love to hear my own answer.”

Oh, so do we!