Along the way, she’s developed an appreciation of vocalists of eccentric range: Her enthusiasms include not only role models such as Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney, but also Jimmy Durante and Lady Gaga. The performer who made the deepest impression, however, was another celebrated cabaret singer: Mabel Mercer. All of these names are linked in Cook’s imagination by the gift she attributes to Jackman: evoking an authentically complete portrait of oneself through song.
She prizes this consummate ease above technique, though many of her idols had that, too. “When I saw Mabel, I bought what she sold immediately. I thought it was thrilling and exciting. And I wanted to do that.” Her inspiration, she says, “all came from Mabel — well, nine-tenths Mabel and one-tenth Judy Garland.”
In the midst of writing a memoir, Cook finds herself rummaging in some less tantalizing corners of her past. She traces a painful relationship with an overbearing mother to a horrible interlude: her sister’s death in childhood from whooping cough, an illness she’d overheard her mother say was contracted from Cook herself — which Cook had long taken to mean she had killed her sister.
About her drinking, Cook says it became a daily ritual for her, in the years after the juicy roles and Golden Age of Broadway musicals disappeared. “Let’s face it, I’d get drunk every night,” she says. And it continued for a spell even after she formed a professional partnership in the mid-1970s with Wally Harper, the composer and musical director who was instrumental in Cook’s rebirth as a concert singer. It was Alcoholics Anonymous that helped her get sober, and her flourishing cabaret life with Harper continued until his death in 2004.
Now, she says, she carries with her a vigorous sense of joy, whether for her own gigs or the performances of people she likes. “I read an article about Baryshnikov giving boxes of videos” of his dancing to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she says, “and he was asked why he didn’t sell them. ‘Selling my life? I do that in the theater!’ he said. That’s what I’m doing. I’m sharing with an audience my life, the good and the bad.”
The sharing goes on and on. This 84-year-old, for goodness’ sake, has just released a CD, “You Make Me Feel So Young.” And can’t get over being elevated to the Kennedy Center pantheon.
“I feel clearly that it’s a validation of my work,” she says. “And because I put my life into my work, I think it’s a validation of my life.”
See the rest of this year’s Kennedy Center Honorees:
• Meryl Streep | photos
• Neil Diamond | photos
• Sonny Rollins | photos
• Yo-Yo Ma| photos
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