Cloris. Cloris Leachman
to a few months before, when I read for the second lead in a play starring Rex Harrison’s wife, Lili Palmer. I got the role, and the next day the producer called and told me they were going to use someone else because I looked too much like Lili.
My rehearsals were with the stage manager, only him and me in a rehearsal studio. He showed me the “blocking,” the physical moves onstage, and then I rehearsed the songs with the accompanist. Not till the afternoon of the night I opened did I rehearse with the whole cast. Now remember, the only other time I’d sung a song all the way through was at the audition for Rodgers and Hammerstein, and here I was, about to sing the entire score of South Pacific. The cast knew what feelings, what confusion, and wonder I’d be experiencing, and with care and support, they guided me through the rehearsal.
I was excited. I was thrilled to be doing what I was doing, buoyant that I’d be singing a Rodgers and Hammerstein score, and performing Nellie Forbush before that large audience. I was even a little bit nervous, but I wasn’t afraid. I’ve never had fear, not then, not anytime before or since.
That evening, when it was announced before the play started that Cloris Leachman would appear in the role of Nellie Forbush, there was a light groan of disappointment in the audience. I was nervous, but I was also determined that by the end of the show, they wouldn’t be groaning. They’d be applauding.
Early in the first act, I had to hold a little cup on a saucer, a demitasse for after-dinner coffee. My hand was shaking so hard, I thought the rattling would stop traffic outside on Forty-sixth Street. But apparently, no one in the audience heard it, and after that moment I settled down. I was inside the skin of Nellie Forbush. At the end of the first act, there was long, sustained applause.
Being in a musical on Broadway is different from any other experience in life. When the conductor gives the downbeat and the orchestra plays the overture a rush goes through you, your emotions come to the surface, you have a sense of being transported. The feeling lasts throughout the whole evening. The love story of Emile and Nellie in South Pacific is so dramatic, so heartbreaking that at the end, every night, I was crying real tears. I can feel them pressing against my eyelids now.
After the performance on the night I opened, Dorothy Hammerstein, Oscar’s wife, came to my dressing room. She stood looking at me, not saying a word. Then she lifted the lapel of her jacket to show me where her tears had fallen.
“Magnificent!” she said. And her tears started again. Mine did, too.
Later Oscar gave me a wonderful compliment. “Cloris,” he said, “it’s as if you were standing beside me when I wrote those words.”
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