Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
money in the 1930s Depression. Her home, when my parents met, was a cold-water walk-up in the poor Italian enclave of East Harlem, where only bookies and tough guys had money.
The year before they met, Ann had won a national voice competition. Her prize was two paid years of opera study in Rome. “My sister needed to sing and have a big, exciting life like she needed to breathe,” Vicky, her younger sister, told me. Two years earlier, she’d won a scholarship to elite Manhattanville College, a school for moneyed Catholics like the Kennedys, but she’d had to give it up when her father lost his job. “She tried not to let me hear but she cried every night for weeks,” Vicky said. “My poor sister had to be an office clerk, the last thing she wanted.”
Second chances like Rome didn’t often arrive in East Harlem. But Ann’s father, usually indulgent of his beautiful daughter, became a raging peasant. “I’ll never forget the day that award letter came,” Vicky said. “I could hear Pop screaming from the stairs. Your mother was slumped at the kitchen table. She’d been crying so hard her eyes were swollen shut. I’d never seen my father like this, ever. ‘You’ll leave this house married,’ he was screaming, ‘or you leave it dead.’”
Larry fell in love with the Village and the arts as an NYU student. Ann wanted out of East Harlem. Two romantics, deeply in love, they had a child to complete the happy picture. But it didn’t take long for them to realize that bohemia and a squalling baby were a bad mix. So was a third competitor for center stage, something neither of these charming but insecure and immature people, already shoving each other aside for attention, could handle. Screaming fights rang through apartment 2B at least once a week as I groped the line between smiles and fury, trying to be a good girl and keep them happy with each other and with me. “Your parents shouldn’t have had children,” Dad’s closest friend, a conductor, told me decades later. “And they should have divorced, forgive me, Donna, for saying so. Singers, especially women, blame anything but themselves if they don’t make it. They say, ‘If it wasn’t for marrying or having kids, I would have been a star.’ It’s terrible. Their delusions ruin their lives.”
It wasn’t all bad. When the three of us were laughing and telling each other funny stories, we were happy. Our unconventional lifestyle helped, too. Given our varied theater schedules, we simply weren’t together all that much except on Sundays. Grandma, Mom’s mother, moving downstairs to apartment 1A in 63 Bank when I was eight, eased things. Visits with Dad’s sisters and their husbands and children at my Florio grandparents’ rambling old house in Staten Island helped too. But my real haven, where I found the affection and approval our apartment lacked, was on Bank Street with the neighbors who became my allies and surrogate family.
• • •
Ann and Larry were charismatic raconteurs, and my arrival was one of their favorite stories. Sally Amato’s younger sister, Annie, and Annie’s husband, John Frydel, both opera singers, were our upstairs neighbors at 63 Bank, and their daughter, Irene, was a year and a half older than me. Irene’s first memory is sitting in a lap, watching my pregnant mother sing, alone in the spotlight on a blacked-out stage, in a white ball gown, celebrating her free life in La Traviata, her favorite role. In late October, eight months along, Ann planned a cast party for Dad’s production of Carmen, opening that night. She’d just stopped performing that week and only because her legs swelled. Even heavily pregnant she could still blast full voice, which astounded her coach.
The supermarket cashier eyed her belly and suggested that the groceries be delivered. “Oh, no need,” Ann told her. “The baby isn’t due for another month.” She pulled her heavy cart home and up the steps. As she prepared the food, I announced my own plans: the first of our many disagreements. She lowered herself to a chair and reached for the phone.
As a kid, I learned to keep out of the way before opening nights. Nervous singers wandered around, humming, practicing scenes. They rolled their eyes if I asked them to play. Stagehands hammered, swearing like pirates. Larry yelled at choristers who still weren’t hitting their marks on time. “People! The prisoners have to be in place by the downbeat!” Ann knew she was breaking a cardinal rule with that call.
“Who is this?” snarled Tony Amato, score in hand.
“It’s Ann. I need Larry. My water has broken.”
“Have you lost your mind? It’s two hours to curtain! For Christ’s sake, Ann, call a plumber!” He banged down the phone.
Ann listened disconsolately to the dial tone. What now? She seasoned the chicken, wondering what to do.
Sally, folding programs, glanced sideways at Dad and sidled out the door. She dodged through the Bleecker Street pushcarts, running hard, and made it to Bank Street in minutes. “We’re taking a cab, Ann,” Sally announced grandly. A taxi to New York Hospital on the Upper East Side was a huge expense, but Sally’s conscience was sore.
Several hours later, in a labor room full of groaning women, as my father finally arrived to pace in the waiting room, Ann was seriously uncomfortable. She called the nurse over, expecting drugs. In the 1950s, American women were typically knocked unconscious and presented with their bundle when they woke up. But her chart had been mismarked “Natural Childbirth.” Staying awake and breathing through labor pains was a radical new idea then, and completely unknown to my mother. When the smiling nurse told her that it was certainly “time to do your wonderful breathing exercises,” Ann was flattered. Oh, well, of course, they know I’m a singer, she preened. She started blasting the scales, trills, and arpeggios that had wowed her coach.
Meanwhile, on Bank Street, Annie and John Frydel had the keys to our apartment. Everyone was jazzed on opening nights, and no one, happy and hungry, intended to let my arrival cancel the party. The Frydels unlocked our door, and John mixed his lethal Manhattans. None of them could cook, but they sure could party. (Several years later, Annie Frydel would hustle Irene and me out of 4B as party guests laughed hysterically: Larry and John were freeing soused love-makers who’d gotten wedged into the bathtub.)
As Ann sang me to life, the cast lit our rickety stove and attempted dinner. The nurse rushed in as the phone rang in the labor room. “Could we speak with Ann Florio, please?” slurred a voice on the phone. The nurse heard voices in the background saying, “Where does she keep the pepper?” and “Ask her how long the chicken bakes.”
The nurse threw up her hands and wheeled Ann’s gurney to the phone. “Talk to them, get them off the phone, and then please shut up. This place sounds like Bellevue.”
The cast got dinner, Ann got drugs, and Larry got a standing ovation when he came home at 4 a.m.
• • •
I toddled around a warm backstage world of Egyptian slaves, French courtesans, and Spanish gypsies. Women in thick white nylon panties and pointy cone bras smiled as they patted on pancake makeup, and then sat me carefully on their costumes, whispering Dr. Seuss and fairy tales as we turned the pages together. “Don’t be scared. It’s only make-believe,” I reassured friends in the audience. I’d learned that lesson out front when Mommy/Madame Butterfly stabbed herself and fell over dead. I screamed myself onto the stage as she scrambled back to life and took her bows with me crying into her kimono.
I made my debut at four, as the love child of Sally’s Madame Butterfly. Everyone fussed as they dressed me in a kimono and flip-flops, telling me that I was the most important part of the show. When Butterfly’s maid took my hand, we walked onstage to Sally, who beamed and held her arms open. There is nothing for the child to sing, but that didn’t matter. Sally, her black wig sparkling with jewels, was a queen, and I was her princess. I felt the hushed attention of the audience as Sally cupped my face and sang her love for me. My parents came onstage, clapping and yelling “Brava!” when I held Sally’s hand and took my first bow at the end of the show. They coaxed me into a snowsuit when we left, but I wouldn’t relinquish the flip-flops, so Dad carried me home with his scarf wrapped around my feet. Opera folks were special magic people, and now I was enchanted too, a tiny planet circling two blazing stars.
• • •
Singing in the children’s choruses