RE-INTRODUCING HELEN MORGAN BY PETER FILICHIA
Christopher S. Connelly knows how big a star Helen Morgan was during the Roaring ‘20s and beyond.
But he’s now made sure that you know it, too.
Connelly’s provided hundreds of eye-opening details in HELEN MORGAN: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld’s Last Star. The biography proves that he’s a meticulous researcher and entertaining writer who clearly cares about Morgan and wants you to care, too.
How big a star was she? Check out the five-disc set of BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL. Her recording of “Bill” from SHOW BOAT, made while she was appearing in the landmark 1927 musical, is the ninth selection on the first disc. It clocks in at four minutes and one second. Each of the eight songs that chronologically precede it has a shorter run time, even though they were recorded by such superstars as Al Jolson, George M. Cohan, Fanny Brice and Fred Astaire.
The technology of the era could only offer records that comfortably accommodated about three minutes. Somehow, though, the recording engineers were intent on preserving all they could of “Bill,” for it was that significant a song.
Who would have predicted this success for Morgan fewer than 20 years earlier? Connelly informs us that she once thought of entering the convent. For a time, she worked in an underwear factory. Times were so tough that on the type of iron used for pressing clothes, Morgan resorted to frying eggs on it.
Yet she wound up onstage, and quite successfully. Connelly offers a quotation from a critic who said that she “seemed to come right over the footlights and, in a manner of speaking, sit in your lap and tell the song to your inner ear.”
As time went on, Morgan opted to sit in a different location. Singing while ensconced at the top of a piano became her trademark.
(That’s why, when Fosse, Kander and Ebb were preparing CHICAGO as “a musical vaudeville,” they placed Roxie Hart on an upright for “Funny Honey.” It wasn’t an arbitrary choice, but a homage to Helen.)
Connelly also found that Morgan believed “about the only things worth getting excited about are children playing in the sun, a bottle with three stars on the label, and the fish in the sea.”
He details why the first two were of utmost importance to her. Morgan yearned to have a child, almost was able to adopt one, and was devastated when she couldn’t.
As for the liquor, it flowed freely. Once, when she was going away for the weekend, she brought with her not a bottle or two of brandy, but an entire case.
At the end of the weekend, there were many empty bottles.
Morgan’s friends never had to wonder about what to bestow on her for birthdays and holidays. Connelly reports that “90% of the 264 gifts she received in 1928 were alcoholic.”
(Doesn’t Connelly’s citing so specific a statistic make you believe that he’s done his research?)
Flowing just as freely as the liquor was her money. Perhaps Connelly’s most remarkable revelations are ones that show how astonishingly generous Morgan was. The famous cliché of show business – “The bigger they are, the nicer they are” – can certainly be said of Helen.
After she spilled a drink on a woman’s dress, she immediately wrote her a check for $80. You might assume that red wine was the culprit, but it was non-staining seltzer. But to Helen, that wasn’t the point. She made a mistake, and she’d pay for it.
The wife of a cabaret owner did substantially better. Said Helen, “Her husband would never think of giving her a fur coat,” so she did. Trouble is, the husband could never believe that the gift didn’t come from a man; the couple soon divorced.
We could assume that much of the money came from SHOW BOAT, where she played the doomed Julie. But there was a time when those throwing private parties were willing to pay her $500 for each song she sang. Nevertheless, before either of those, Morgan was raking it in, for her name was not on one but two nightclubs.
Alas, this was in the era of Prohibition, an amendment by which Helen did not abide. Soon she found herself on trial in court, where she was judged “Not guilty!”
So grateful was she that she gave each jury member comps to SHOW BOAT.
No, Morgan never lost the common touch. Some in that era sang in male brothels on their way up or on their way down. Helen did so when she was on top.
But she may well be most remembered for that recording of “Bill.” Many have written that it been a P.G. Wodehouse-Guy Bolton song that they and Jerome Kern had written for a previous musical. However, leave it to Connelly to tell us the name of the song that it replaced: “Out There in an Orchard.” Just from the title, it doesn’t sound as if it would have the torch-song power of “Bill,” in which a woman can’t quite understand why she loves this man, but she does.
Connelly quotes one critic who attended SHOW BOAT: “Her inimitable manner of singing lifts the show above most of its contemporaries.” Fine, but this opinion was written after the musical had been playing for one solid year. After 400-plus performances, plenty of performers walk through their roles.
Not Helen. She also said, “I’d cut off a leg and shave my head if the role required it.”
Now that’s a trouper!
During SHOW BOAT’s national tour, producer Florenz Ziegfeld told the cast that they’d have to take pay cuts. Many immediately quit, but not Helen; knowing that she was a drawing card, she said she’d stay to keep the boat afloat, lest so many other employees be out of work.
You won’t be surprised to learn that such largesse resulted in Morgan’s eventually being penniless. And yet, even then, she refused to accept a lucrative job offer from the KKK.
Matters might have been different if she’d married that Hammerstein, who was interested. Granted, it was Reggie, not Oscar, but it may have made a financial difference. Instead, there were several costly affairs as well as a 1933 marriage that lasted around two years.
Six years later, Morgan finally found the right man. But after their marriage in July 1941, she was dead a mere 73 days later from cirrhosis of the liver.
But she regretted rien. As death approached, she said of her life, “I’m glad I lived it as fully as I have.”
Others must have, too. Connelly’s most astonishing statistic is that five thousand came to her wake.
Morgan died just a couple of months before the Japanese pulled the United States into World War II. A host of new stars quickly commanded America’s attention, so Morgan could have been quickly forgotten.
She wasn’t. Connelly relates that in the mid-fifties, not only did a theatrical biopic emerge, but a TV biography did as well. And in 1998 – a full 70 years after she’d recorded “Bill” – the Grammy committee elected it to its Hall of Fame.
Connelly’s penultimate paragraph ends with, “Her charity work was as addictive as the brandy she swilled, but it made the world a better place.” You won’t doubt it after reading this epic achievement. Helen Morgan became famous for sitting atop a piano; Christopher S. Connelly deserves to become famous as a top biographer.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new book – BRAINTEASERS FOR BROADWAY GENIUSES – is now available on Amazon and at The Drama Book Shop.
