Cloris. Cloris Leachman
to coordinate my popcorn consumption with what was happening on-screen: I stopped eating it when something either hilarious or very dramatic was happening.
When I became a teenager, films were even more important to me. Two out of the multitude I saw come into my mind, Waterloo Bridge and Gone with the Wind. Seeing Waterloo Bridge was a deeply emotional experience. I cried through most of it, and still vivid in my mind is the last scene, with that little face peering out of the window.
When I went to see Gone with the Wind, I knew the picture was going to be long, so I brought a pillow. The picture was long. And wonderful. More than wonderful. It is what storytelling is all about. I don’t know if there’s ever been such a spectacular cast assembled. Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Hattie McDaniel—they’re up there in the pantheon of soul shapers. In that dark theater, with my pillow held against me, I was transported to the world of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and they shaped my soul.
Mama never said it out loud, but I think it was her plan that her three girls would go out into the world, gain experience in the performing arts, then come back to Des Moines and create a center for the performing arts. As an early example of that plan, when I was fifteen, I earned a summer radio scholarship to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago. It was intense work, because live radio acting is an art unto itself.
The radio actors stood in a semicircle around the microphone, scripts in their hands, and moved close to the microphone as their cue came up. Some radio actors shielded one ear with their free hand so they didn’t hear ambient sounds as they acted out the drama. The actors had to allow sound effects to come in, anything from a door creaking to galloping hooves pounding to a doorbell ringing to a dog barking or a cat meowing. The script indicated exactly where those sounds and music would come in. They were introduced into the drama at another microphone by the special-effects man. Sometimes the sound and music cues interrupted the scene; sometimes they accompanied it. There was generally an audience, and from what I saw while I was performing on the radio, those audiences tended to get deeply involved. For some, watching a radio drama was a more intense experience than seeing a stage play.
At the end of that summer semester at Northwestern, I had earned my chops. I’d studied everything from voice production—a low register in serious moments, a higher one in comedy exchanges—to the proper distance from the microphone to tonality, to get exactly the right reading of a line. In recognition of my successful efforts, I was awarded the leading role in the final production.
Let me slip back a few years, to when I was eight. A woman named Kate Goldman was directing a play, The Birthday of the Infanta, for Drake University’s Children’s Theatre. It was a dramatization of a story by the same name by Oscar Wilde, a beautiful but terribly sad story.
Courtiers of the king of Spain are roaming the woods, and they come across a hunchbacked dwarf. They are amused by the odd little creature, and the dwarf’s father sells his handicapped son to them. They bring him back to the palace for the amusement of the king’s daughter, the Infanta, who’s having her twelfth birthday. The day of her birthday is the only time she is allowed to play with other children, and of all the festivities provided for her on that day, she enjoys most the dwarf’s performances. He dances with the same fervor he showed in the forest, and he’s unaware that the children are laughing at him.
Because the Infanta has him perform for her again after dinner, the dwarf convinces himself that she loves him. He goes looking for her in the garden and inside the palace, but he finds no sign of her. In one of the palace rooms, he comes upon a hideous creature that mimicks every move he makes. It dawns on the dwarf that he’s seeing his own reflection; he knows then that the Infanta does not, could not, love him. He falls down in convulsions of grief.
The Infanta and the other children come into the room and, seeing the dwarf on the floor, think what he’s doing is part of his act. They laugh and applaud, but his gyrations grow more and more weak, and then he completely stops moving. The Infanta wants the dwarf to continue entertaining them, so a servant tries to rouse him. The servant discovers that the dwarf’s heart has stopped. When he tells the Infanta, she is stunned, and she delivers the last line of the story: “For the future, let those who come to play with me have no hearts.”
I didn’t know the play, but just from the title, I wanted to play the Infanta. I didn’t get the role. Mrs. Goldman chose me to play the hunchbacked dwarf. Although the dwarf is really the leading character, and the story is about him, he has only one line: “Smell the sweetness of the rose.” The rest of his performance is dancing. Mrs. Goldman asked me to make up a dance, and I gave it a major try. I fell flat on my ass. That was pretty serious and pretty embarrassing for a young girl, but I burst out laughing, and that was a breakthrough. I learned something I have never forgotten about acting: It’s okay to fall flat on your behind. You don’t die from it.
One afternoon Mama brought home a cardboard keyboard and set it in front of me. I looked at it and right away began to push the keys. In the days that followed, I was on that thing every afternoon, and I learned to play it quickly. As I played simple songs, Mama would sing the melody. Then I would join in, singing harmony. This singing just came naturally, but it turned into something bizarre. From that time on, instead of singing melodies, I would harmonize with any song I heard. If someone, even a total stranger, was walking twenty feet in front of me and singing, I’d be behind, doing the harmony. It was just plain eccentric. I didn’t learn lyrics and never sang melodies.
After dinner one night, Mama ushered Daddy, my little sisters Mary and Claiborne, and me into the living room. She said that that night she was starting the Leachman Each Week Club. I think I was the secretary, because I had a pencil and a ruler and some paper. We had a little extra money, Mama said, so the question of the day was, should we use it to join the Wakonda Country Club or to pay for piano lessons? Claiborne, my littlest sister, and I joined with Mama and voted for the piano lessons. Daddy and Mary voted for the country club. It was three to two, so our side won.
In a way, my creative life began at that first meeting of the Leachman Each Week Club. Right after it, I started piano lessons with Andy Williams’s aunt, Cornelia Williams Hurlbut. I was first in line because I was seven, and Mary, the next eldest, was only four, too young to begin lessons. She and Claiborne both studied the piano later.
The Piano Filled My Life
When Mama delivered me to Cornelia Williams Hurlbut’s studio to begin my piano studies, the only keyboard I had touched up to that point was the cardboard affair Mama had brought home. So when I came into Cornelia’s studio and saw the grand piano dominating the room, I felt I was entering another world. Mama left me with Cornelia and on that first day, in that first lesson, Cornelia led me into the wonder and majesty of music.
I see Cornelia’s beautiful hands flowing across the keyboard. During our lessons, I always noticed those hands, and in the open way of little girls, I always commented on them. Cornelia would smile appreciatively; she enjoyed that I noticed personal things about her. During the lessons, we talked, sometimes from the beginning of the hour to the end, about everything: school, Beethoven, the bus system in Des Moines, the weather, whatever came into our minds.
When Cornelia gave me a new piece to learn, she would employ pedagogical techniques of her own invention. First, she would have me play the last measure. I’d go over it till I knew it, and then she’d have me move to the previous measure and work on it. With that method, I’d thread my way back through the piece to the first measure, and by the time I got there, I could pretty well play the whole piece. Second, she would excerpt the difficult passages in the piece and make exercises out of them. I would practice them one by one.
At the end of the lesson, Mama would pick me up, and I’d take my new piece home. When we got to the house, I’d get out the special paper we kept in the downstairs closet and make a cover for the new music. I took great care, and when I had the cover properly fitted, I’d write the name of the piece on top. Then I’d carry it over to the new piano that Mama and Daddy had bought for me and begin to learn it.
I was eager and ambitious. I wanted to master the piano. I thought to myself, There are only seven octaves, and each octave has