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OF 'ANNIE' A THREE-PART SERIES |
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PART TWO: ANNIE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS A In this week's chapter from Nachman's detailed look at an American musical theater classic, the original star of "ANNIE" reflects upon her life to date and the impact her child stardom has had on her over the years.
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Still in search of the role
to top the one of her youth
of TheColumnists.com
The centerpiece
of the entire “Annie” saga remains Andrea McArdle,
whose vivid, earnest, and appealing portrayal of the character
exhumed Annie from the graveyard of forgotten comic strips, breathing
new life into the peppy musical every time she opened her mouth
to sing its twin ballads of hope, “Maybe” and “Tomorrow.”
McArdle is now (yes) 45, with a 21-year-old daughter, Alexis
Kalehoff, who also sings. Last fall the two played mother and
daughter, Fantine and Eponine, in “Les Miserables”
at the Ogonquit Playhouse in Maine; they’ve also performed
together in “Oliver!”
“People expect a lot from her,
due to her pedigree,” says her mother. “Alexis was
fabulous. Unfortunately she wants to do this.” Her grandparents are not so sure. “My wife
doesn’t like it that much, based on the grief that comes
with it,” says Paul McArdle, Andrea’s father. “It’s
a hell of a dose of grief, and you better be able to handle the
rejection. It has nothing basically to do with whether you’re
good or not but just whether you’re what they’re looking
for--a lot of performers confuse that with, ‘I guess I’m
no good.’”
Alexis--as she enjoys reminding her mom--beat Andrea to Broadway
by five years, appearing as Cosette in “Les Miserables”
in 1996 when she was eight. But Alexis was never in “Annie.”
“If she’d wanted to, that would’ve been OK,”
says McArdle. “You want to do whatever makes your kid
happy. She never showed any interest in doing ‘Annie.’
Her mother was Annie so she wanted to do ‘Little Mermaid,”
which spoke to her more. We finally had closure on all that last
fall when we did ‘Les Miz’ together”--the
dual roles put them on separate but equal footing at last. “Eponine
was her ‘Annie.’”
When they called McArdle for the Ogonquit Playhouse revival of
“Les Miserables” it was her first audition in a year.
“I’ve been having trouble getting auditions,”
she admits. McArdle, whose theatrical adventures rival Annie’s,
has yet to find a follow-up role that could turn her into an
adult Broadway diva like Bernadette Peters or Patti LuPone, even
though she’s easily their vocal and performing equal. Cameron
Mackintosh’s general manager, Robert Nolan, told McArdle
she was the best Fantine he’d ever heard--in London, New
York or on any other continent.
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with grown-up daughter Alexis Kalehoff, who's been on Broadway already. |
Now a strikingly sexy, shapely, auburn-haired middle aged woman, McArdle can still pretty much out-belt anybody in the room. But the central frustration of her adult career remains: Why isn’t she as big a star at 45 as she was at 14? Part of the answer is plain bad luck--the right role hasn’t come along--but the more maddening factor is that McArdle remains shadowed by--“shackled to” in Charnin’s phrase--“Annie.” Because of “Annie,” a decidedly mixed blessing, McArdle has become a kind of Broadway orphan, never called upon since that show to open a new musical.
“Annie” was a double whammy: not only did McArdle have to restart her career as an adult performer, she was also indelibly identified as that feisty, perky little girl in a red dress, curly red hair, and patent-leather shoes. Most child stars just have to grow up, but Andrea had to grow up--and out, trying for decades to shed an ingrained image in order to strut her considerable stuff. The title of her 2008 cabaret act, “You Don’t Know Me,” was almost a cry for help.
Right after “Annie,” McArdle was offered TV sitcom roles but, she says, “They weren’t the right ones. It wasn’t Norman Lear and ‘All in the Family.’ It was really bad sitcoms, shows you don’t even want to remember” (one you might remember was “Welcome Back, Kotter,” playing a kid sister). “The TV producers all thought, ‘We’re really failing--let’s bring in the talented hot new kid from Broadway.” Her heart was always on Broadway: “I started in TV but the minute I did theater, that was it. I’m way too A.D.D. to do television--hurry up and wait. What I like about theater is that it consumes you.”
McArdle still works regularly--starring in a national touring company of “Cabaret” in 2001 and, in 1999, playing Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” on Broadway for 2½ years, longer than any other actress in the show. Her first grownup show after “Annie” was “Jerry’s Girls,” a 1984 revue of Jerry Herman songs with Carol Channing and Leslie Uggams, whom she outshone, but when it reached Broadway, raves or no raves, McArdle was replaced by Chita Rivera; the recast revue didn’t last long on Broadway.
“I was devastated. I would love to know what happened as much as you would. I never had an unkind word with Jerry Herman. I was as good then as I am now,” she said.
“Jerry’s Girls” was a pivotal show for her, professionally and personally--her first public appearance as a woman. “I was on the verge of that child/woman phase, making that transition. It was a very delicate time. If you saw me in person I looked more like Annie, but if you saw me in these gowns on stage I looked more like this vixen--which was a very trippy thing for someone who was a late-bloomer like I was.”
She explains, “I was flat-chested until I was 17 or 18, and then it happened in like three months. I looked like a nine-year-old boy and then suddenly I looked like a 25-year-old woman, and when you’re doing all that in front of people, that’s hard. When you’re a success as a child and then suddenly you’re a woman, you have to figure out who you are. Suddenly you’re Miss Musical, this person who’s never at home in her body. I didn’t even take dance lessons and all of a sudden I’m supposed to be Little Miss Show Boat.”
As a mid-teenager, McArdle appeared for two years on the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow,” was featured in Liberace’s Las Vegas show, toured with Bob Hope, opened for Jackie Mason, Shecky Greene David Brenner and “all the cheesy guys,” and much later even did her turn in “The Vagina Monologues” with Karen Black.
Of her patchwork post-”Annie” career, McArdle says, “There are so many interesting things that didn’t happen”--like being passed over for the lead in the highly touted tarted-up Sam Mendes 1998 revival of “Cabaret.” Unaccountably, the Sally Bowles role went to film star Jennifer Jason Leigh, an inexperienced stage actress and uninspired singer with neither presence nor projection. Typically, McArdle was overlooked to replace her and was chosen instead to play the role on tour.
Another interesting thing that didn’t happen: Sir Lew Grade, the British mogul, came backstage at “Annie” and wanted to sign McArdle to a major record deal, but her parents said no. “It was all just a lot for them to handle. There were loads of scary things about it. This was a world they didn’t know. To me, it all just went with the business and I loved the creative side of the business so I put up with it,” even if she wasn’t comfortable with it herself. “How would a kid ever feel comfortable? At that age you don’t even feel comfortable sitting in a room with your parents.”
She says that visiting her agent’s office with her parents “was like a school conference.” Somehow she grew up a normal kid despite some bizarre scenes, like meetings with her agent Sam Cohn. “I’d go into his office and he was so coked out he would actually chew paper and spit it out.” Cohn couldn’t find another star vehicle for her, because she was stuck in the classic awkward age for child actors--the mid-teens. “I wasn’t old enough yet. I didn’t look desirable. You couldn’t put me anyplace. They didn’t have the Disney Channel yet and there was no `Tween Generation so my timing was totally off.” She surmises, “If ‘Annie’ had never happened, I’d be Audra McDonald.”
Thirty-three years after “Annie,” McArdle is still awaiting a Broadway show that will restore her as a star to reckon with equal to Peters, LuPone, and McDonald. (Ironically, McDonald once tried out for “Annie” as a kid in Palo Alto, California, but her sister got the role; she was devastated.)
Three decades later, people still remember Andrea McArdle’s name and she draws curious audiences when she appears in clubs like Joe’s Pub, Freddy’s, Feinstein’s at the Lowe’s Regency, and the Metropolitan Room, where she played last August to welcome-back reviews from critics like The New York Times’s Stephen Holden, who wrote (below a headline reading, “Bet Your Bottom Dollar, She Survived ‘Tomorrow’”):
“She comes across as a brassy, garrulous trouper marinated in sawdust and greasepaint…Ms. McArdle has been very busy since ‘Annie’ but her career-defining role still looms over everything else in her history. Three decades after ‘Annie,’ her defining quality is still a childlike cry embedded in a voice that carries to the rafters…”
There’s nothing remotely childlike about her snappy wisecracks, sexy presence and showbiz history threaded through her act. Elaine Stritch, the definitive Broadway baby, told McArdle she had earned enough stage stripes to sing ‘I’m Still Here.’”
Two days after she left “Annie” in London at 14, McArdle began shooting “Rainbow,” a TV movie about the young Judy Garland that takes Garland up to “The Wizard of Oz.” She was compelling and believable as teenage Judy, despite a disruptive dysfunctional relationship with “Rainbow” director Jackie Cooper. The former child film star, still wounded by a troubled boyhood 50 years earlier, seemed to resent that Andrea was a happy kid with none of the scars of early stardom he still nursed.
Shooting “Rainbow,” she says, “was the biggest nightmare. [Cooper] was the most vile man. He thought I was going to be just like he’d been. His parents had been, like, in the South of France while this kid was working 19 hours a day at home with a nanny. They all went through that--Garland, Temple, all of them.”
Something of a child star expert, McArdle recently read Julie Andrews’ memoir (“It made Judy Garland’s childhood look like a picnic”). She goes on: “When I first met him [Cooper], he said something I’ll never forget - one of those boink-you-on-the-head moments. He said, ‘Ah, man, great to see you up there’ [in “Annie”]. ‘I knew what you were goin’ for and you almost got there!’ Even as a kid, I thought, Wow, this is really weird! The more he started realizing I was a pretty normal kid, the more he turned on me. He thought we were kindred spirits and he was hoping I had more angst and a screwed-up childhood,” to match his.
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as the child star of the early 1930s. director who gave Andrea McArdle hell when she was playing Judy Garland in the TV movie "Rainbow." |
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“He just went after me so viciously and personally. He wouldn’t explain or give me a chance to interpret or act. I wasn’t an experienced actress. It was a very bad experience. Like he wouldn’t tell me when they were filming. He would say, ‘Just keep looking at that spot on the wall. OK, that’s a take.’ He would do things to violate my trust. He was really awful like that. I was horrified and insulted. You show up, you follow the rules, and they treat you like a moron, like they would treat Rin-Tin-Tin. He wrote really bad things in his book about me. I never read it.”
Her accompanist Seth Rudetsky did: “He writes about her very meanly in his book. I’m sure some of it is true. She says she was a brat back then in certain ways. He busted her for being late on the set.”
McArdle’s father recalls that a librarian once asked him, “Did you read that book Jackie Cooper wrote?’ She said he’d made some unkind remarks. The remark in the book was that Andrea never liked Don Murray [who played Garland’s father]. That was utterly ridiculous. I guess he [Cooper] was looking for some controversy to sell books. We saw Don Murray in New York before the book came out, and he waved to her, ‘Hiya Andrea - how ya doin’?”
McArdle was able to keep her acting separate from her offstage life as a girl growing up in Philadelphia. “I was a daughter before I was a commodity, and I had a really normal life, other than this [acting] activity, which I didn’t look at any differently than I would if it was gymnastics or ice skating. Acting took far less time than someone training for the Olympics.”
She grew up in a music-filled home. Her mother was a secretary who sang Bert Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, and Nat King Cole around the house. “My mom is like half Elaine Stritch and half Anne Bancroft. My mother had the look, the brightness, the personality, the spark. She had a Joni James voice; my Aunt Joan had the Barbara Cook voice and was on Ted Mack’s ‘Amateur Hour.’ Music was big in my house.”
She recalls, “I wasn’t particularly good but I just loved it. I was never one to practice, but I loved to sing. I sang along to LPs in my room. I could imitate voices so it was obvious I had a good ear--Bobby Darin, Nancy Wilson, Dionne Warwick, Nancy Sinatra. My singing teacher Russell Faith was my major singing inspiration. He was more than just a teacher--he was like a mentor. We paid him $6 a week.” The McArdles played cast albums but didn’t attend musicals-=too expensive, even then, says her dad.
She auditioned for her first professional job, a Cheerios commercial, but her brother got the role. “I was a cute all-American kid, but he was beautiful--blond hair, green eyes." She was never cast in commercials that called for an adorable kid. “I got the Band-Aids and scrappy little kid things.” The auditioner then sent her to try out for a soap opera. “I got the job over her prize student, who looked like Elizabeth Taylor, because I looked like the mother in the soap.” She first began singing because she liked winning contests. “I loved the competition. That’s how I auditioned for the Cheerios commercial--they wanted a gymnast.” Andrea trained at the Police Athletic League.
“I just literally fell into it, but I loved it immediately.” She began singing at a local rec center when she was seven. “I just loved gymnastics, dancing, anything social in a group. I was hyperactive.” She began going to New York regularly to audition for things, able to ride the train free because her father worked for Amtrak. “I’d go to school till noon, go home for lunch, and then my mother would write a note excusing me to go to an audition.” The double life put a strain on McArdle’s parents, if not her. “Until it [her career] was about theater, my mother and father almost didn’t survive the marriage, because my dad was so against it [TV]. But the minute you’re talking about the theater, he was right there.”
Paul McAdle, says, “My wife was more supportive. I didn’t thwart it--I went to all the shows--but I didn’t encourage it a whole lot. As it progressed, I had visions of Judy Garland--not just Judy Garland, but you’ve read stories about what happened to a lot of child actors. Neither my wife nor I had an experience with this stuff. I wasn’t as avid as my wife, as most mothers are. She wasn’t a stage mother but if that’s what Andrea really want to do… It’s an expensive venture for the average family--you got singing and dancing lessons, the contests, pageant gowns, costumes, travel. It’s very demanding on the family. And the kid liked it. It turned our life upside down. I'd stay home with my son in Philadelphia and then drive up to New York to join Andrea and her mother. Logistics was a very tricky thing.” Once she was cast in “Annie,” “We didn’t know what to expect. We just put one foot in front of the other and went along with it. Phyllis [his wife] stayed with her in New York.” “Annie” librettist Tom Meehan recalls, “It was a thrilling time in Andrea’s life and her parents were really sweet--they were marveling at her.” They still show up at her cabaret shows, as proud as if she was 13.
After “Annie” exploded, Andrea learned how to be a professional celebrity, signing autographs outside the stage door for endless lines of adoring little Annie wannabes. “That part was a chore. You’re hungry and you just want to get out of there. You don’t understand what it’s all about.” Child stars nowadays, she says, can handle it because they grow up in a celerity culture. “They know how to be a celebrity before they know how to read, which is frightening. We were never aware of paparazzi. I remember seeing the same guys from the New York Post and Daily News and they were like, ‘Hey, Andrea, how ya doin’?’ Not like today in LA, thank God; I would hate that.”
McArdle has cheery recollections of her child star days--“It’s fun to be the toast of the town,” with celebrities like Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand and Prince Phillip trooping backstage every night to pay homage). A solid student, she was as normal as a girl can be starring on Broadway at 13, which made her self-conscious at school more than anything. “I was 13 and wanting to be 16 like every other 13-year-old. I was incredibly embarrassed by Broadway. Had I known it was cool to be on Broadway” she would have enjoyed it more. “I wanted to be a pop star. To me and my peers, Broadway seemed like opera.”
Paul McArdle remembers, “She was still a kid. She wasn’t fazed or affected by any of it.” She was on the Mike Douglas show several times in Philadelphia. Once, Douglas arranged for her entire eighth grade class to be in the audience,” totally embarrassing her. He adds, “You get people sniping that she didn’t have a normal life, but she had more than a normal life. A lot of people who try to plant that, it’s sheer jealousy. Andrea would come back to her local school and see her friends, which was as close to normal as you could get.”
Andrea points out, “Being on Broadway just didn’t seem like a huge thing to me. Mostly I remember really wanting to get to rehearsal and be around the entire cast. Usually when you’re part of original cast there are family ties. We all felt that. It was that kind of company. The chemistry was pretty perfect.” She adds, “The reason it was even more satisfying as a child is because there were so many children to share it with. There was this sisterhood. You had a bigger group of friends in the cast than you did at home.”
While she was, by all accounts, a model performer, she was also a major prankster, like the time she and her mother were ejected from Howard Johnson’s on Eighth Avenue during the early days of “Annie” when she dropped water balloons on passersby below. Once, she grabbed Daddy Warbucks’s hand during a tender moment in the show, her palm filled with Silly Putty, and during a “Les Miz” performance she spilled M&Ms on stage and was later reported to the union.
“I’ve been written up so many times!”--for practical jokes. “And my file is sure to get thicker. But it keeps me from going crazy.” She told friends coming to see her in “Les Miz,” “Look for me on the barricades--I’m the only girl on the barricades and I’m gonna do some crazy-ass thing for you!’” As M&Ms rolled all over the stage and into the orchestra pit, the audience laughed, unlike the cast. “They did not take too kindly to that.”
Then there was the time out of town in Washington with “Annie,” when she came to a performance and told director Martin Charnin she couldn’t go on, pulling back her coat to reveal her arm in a cast. “I broke my arm,” she explained, after which the director says he “ran around like a crazy man” because there was no understudy ready to go on. Ten minutes later, McArdle told Charnin it was a joke; he wanted to swat her. Her father says she wasn’t hard to handle. “I wouldn’t describe it that way, but she had spirit.” He adds, “She hasn’t changed much at all--always very outgoing, energetic, liked to be around people.”
Tom Meehan recalls, “She just liked to goof around. She was a little rascal, but I loved that kid. She was full of life and just so real. She never got a big head about being on Broadway. I remember a matinee after she’d brought down the house. I went over to Howard Johnson’s after the show and Andrea started bouncing up and down on the bed, and her mother said, ‘Oh, Andrea, stop showing off all the time!’ But she was just being a kid, jumping on the bed. She was so perky.” When McArdle was nominated for a Tony award but lost to Dorothy Loudon, she was the youngest performer ever nominated for Best Lead Actress in a Musical. Meehan says, “Her attitude was, ‘Oh, well, I’ll get it next time. There’ll be plenty of those coming to me.’” Not yet.
Andrea was a model upstanding child star until the attack of the killer cherries. For eight years, from the age of 16 until her daughter was born, McArdle was an alcoholic. “It’s a family hereditary thing--my grandfather was alcoholic,” she says. “I have the Irish disease,” but it didn’t keep her from working. “The mentality affected my career. I was real young when I quit.” She resumed drinking again for a while after her daughter was born. “It was worse than before. I never drank before I did a show. I wasn’t one of those. It wasn’t a Britney Spears type of thing. The early success had a lot to do with it. I just wanted to be normal. In a sense it was good because it slowed down my life, and my life is never slow.”
She was hooked from her first sip of a concoction called “killer cherries” created by a security guard at Studio 54. “We’d have these giant cast parties under the orchestra catwalk and I had like four of these killer cherries, and mind you I was so tiny, like 60 pounds.” She did her share of partying at Studio 54 with her fellow stage orphans, all well underage, “But that was New York in the `70s. If you walked up to a bar in the `70s and looked even a little Irish… I was never turned down. We used to do it as a joke. I’d say, ‘Watch -- I’ll bet you anything I can do this.’ And that’s what we did. I didn’t know what kind of power I had.”
McArdle admits, “I was a big, big, big, big drinker.” She was shocked into sobriety by the birth of her daughter. “Having a child literally saved my life. If I’d continued on that path I’d be a major alcoholic now. I worked alongside Elaine Stritch and Dorothy Loudon and all these alcoholics, so I saw it up close. It’s ugly and especially ugly on women when they’re a little older and also have physical problems. I know about all that stuff; I’ve seen it in my family. We have the gene.”
She goes on, “You know in Elaine Stritch’s one-woman show when she describes the moment when ‘the bells went off’ for her [when she discovered booze]? I had that same moment, when the killer cherries first happened. I thought, ‘Wow, you’re an alcoholic, too.’ I just knew it. The next day Dorothy Loudon gave me an Alka-Seltzer and helped me, which is what finally bonded me to her. That was the only time in our relationship that she was nurturing. Because she really couldn’t stand kids, especially female kids.”
Loudon was “one tough cookie,” says McArdle, and once “busted” her for moving on stage during a Miss Hannigan moment. “Her [Louden’s] attitude was, ‘I’ve done this all my life, I’m brilliant, and I’ve been in all these flops, and I was a singer with Garry Moore like Carol Burnett but she got her own show.’ She was far more talented than Carol Burnett, though I loved Burnett--her TV show and the Mary Tyler Moore show made me want to be in theater. That was the reason to stay home weekends.”
Yet another interesting thing that didn’t happen: McArdle was unable to spin off her stardom into TV or movies. Because she was drinking, her parents wouldn’t let her go to Los Angeles. “I’m sorry I didn’t segue into films and keep those doors open when I was the hot young thing. I wanted to go to LA and hang and party but my parents felt it would be better to be in New York. They didn’t want me to be in a body bag in five years. It was a very scary time, with all the drugs and stuff.” Paul McArdle said, “She did two pilots. If she had gotten something…but going out there on her own? I don’t know if that was a good idea at 18 or 19.” He figured Hollywood was far riskier than Broadway.
Sobering up had side effects on her career and personality. “It makes you serious for several years, but not always in a good way. Because you’re not this fun person, you’re a neurotic bitch. You’re different--you are, like they say, a dry drunk. You’re not much fun. You’re exhausting to people. And it did effect my performing. In those years all the theatrical performers went out and drank every night. That’s just what they did. We never did drugs. In our business, people drank. That was acceptable. And if you didn’t, it was like, ‘She’s no fun to work with.’”
McArdle desperately longed to be part of the gang. “I always wanted to be accepted because I was always isolated from the get-go. That’s why I wanted to do ‘Starlight Express’--it was almost like my sorority, like being part of a baseball team.” She was among a large cast in the 1987 show, as Smoking Car Ashley, in which her gymnastic skills helped her survive the bruising roller-skating musical.
In “Annie” she never wanted her own private star dressing room. “I always yearned to be in the room with all the girls. I’m better distracted”--before she goes on, so she can’t focus on her own performance until she’s on stage. “If I have an hour to think I’ll get more withdrawn and have more inhibitions rather than less.”
Would she be the same today if “Annie” had never come along? “I wanted to think that it didn’t change anything, but my life certainly changed--not in the way that it would for a kid in a sitcom, but it was hard for me to go anywhere in New York without attracting a load of people, and not just kids.” She was hard to miss with a head of bright red curly hair.
“I don’t think I dealt with it much, but no matter who you are or what your circumstances, you’re going through adolescence and everything bothers you about yourself.” All the attention “made me extremely private. Having that early success made me not so hungry [later] as an actor. It made me want to fit in. Had ‘Annie’ never happened I would probably have been able to guide myself as to what I really wanted rather than already feeling owned not just by theater but, in a way, by America.”
She wishes there had been an “American Idol” then. “It would have given me a great film role and that would have been it--all doors would’ve been open. There was a lot of mismanagement. And my parents weren’t willing to totally throw me to the dogs and let me go, like a Mariel Hemingway. Those things did not seem right for my family. I’m sure I’d be a movie star now had I done five or six different things--nudity, etc. There was a fear factor too--I was a wild child and nobody could ever tell me what to do. My parents did a fantastic job of holding it all together. But if I didn’t want to wear a dress, I didn’t wear a dress. All the reasons that got me that role as Annie”--the tough edge--“that’s 100 percent Andrea the Philly girl. You can’t take the Philly out of me.”
(CONCLUDES TWO WEEKS FROM NOW IN OUR NEXT EDITION JUNE 29)
©2009 by Gerald Nachman. This column first posted June 15, 2009.
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