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Mary Cleere Haran |
 MARY CLEERE HARAN ...dead at 58 |
Sudden End of A Cabaret Affair To Remember
of TheColumnists.com
The shrinking and ever-fragile world of cabaret, which recently absorbed the loss of Margaret Whiting, took another huge, tragic, but totally unexpected body blow when one of its leading lights for 25 years, Mary Cleere Haran, died Friday (Feb. 4) in Florida in a freak biking accident. She was 58. Haran was coming home after delivering a resume to a hotel when her bike was struck from the side by a car backing out of a driveway.
Stunned is the only word to sum up the feelings of cabaret devotees who had followed Haran’s shimmering career in New York, where she was a steady, inspiring source of brilliantly crafted, beautifully sung cabaret shows exploring the work of specific songwriters--two on Lorenz Hart and, most recently, tributes to Johnny Mercer and Doris Day. Her Day show was the last time I saw her, in 2007, at Michael Feinstein’s room at the Regency Hotel, a pricy experience. The food wasn’t worth it, but Haran more than made up for it with her tasty singing and delicious narrative.
Haran was her usual cool, witty, sexy, elegant and beguiling self, chronicling Day’s career and singing songs identified with Day even though she and Doris Day were stylistic opposites. Freckles was about all they had in common. Where Day was warm, perky and determinedly upbeat, Haran was always circumspect, sardonic (part of her Irish heritage) and a little remote. Her idol was Peggy Lee, whose listen-but-don’t-touch aloofness Haran tried to emulate.
Unlike many cabaret singers, Haran feared becoming too schmaltzy and precious, which kept her at a slight remove from fans who adored her but whom she never let embrace her as warmly as some might have liked. Her women fans admired her; her male fans fell in love at first sight of the red-haired singer with the come hither-drop dead air.
Haran was born and grew up in San Francisco in a large Irish family, the second oldest child of a brood of eight; her father was for many years head of the theater and film department at San Francisco City College. Mary went to the Star-of-the-Sea Academy, its second best-known show biz alumna, the first being Gracie Allen, and attended San Francisco State College.
Haran first made her Bay Area mark as a re-vamped Rita Hayworth in “Beach Blanket Babylon,” the loony, long-running musical revue, but soon left it to fashion a career for herself in the cabaret world, first as a band singer in “The 1940s Radio Hour,” followed by a few forgettable off-Broadway shows before striking out on her own in clubs during a golden age of cabaret in the 1980s that also produced Michael Feinstein, Andrea Marcovicci, Wesla Whitfield, Karen Akers, Jeff Harnar, Nancy LaMott, Karen Mason, Steve Ross and others. Haran made her Manhattan debut in 1988 at the old Ballroom.
She was one of a kind. As New York Times cabaret critic Stephen Holden wrote in his obituary, comparing her to women like Myrna Loy, Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert, “Her attitude was not that of a besotted fan but of a modern woman with a feminist sensibility who refracted the past through the present.”
Much as Mary adored the 1930s and `40s, she took its romantic aura with a grain of salt and kidded excesses of the era even as she extolled the time and the great songs it produced. In her 2002 show, she compared the lyrics of Larry Hart and Oscar Hammerstein, saying, with typical Haranian insight, that Hammerstein’s lyrics told us what “we should feel” whereas Hart’s lyrics told us what “we did feel.”
Like Marcovicci and Feinstein, Haran wrote her own carefully, artfully contrived cabaret act, threading the songs on an informed narrative with revealing and amusing anecdotes about the songs and their creators. She was an avid pop scholar as much as a singer, a highly regarded writer-researcher on many TV documentaries -- one on Doris Day, another on Bing Crosby, and Feinstein’s three-part PBS history of the great American songbook. She researched and wrote the latter with her former husband, Joe Gilford, son of the actor Jack Gilford, with whom she had a son. Haran also worked on documentaries about Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong and child movie stars.
While covering cabarets, I reviewed Haran often--in San Francisco at the Plush Room and the City Cabaret, and in New York at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room and the ritzy, defunct Rainbow and Stars, down the hall from Radio City’s Rainbow Room. During that time, we became friends and even exchanged a few letters, debating this singer or song, about which she was both knowledgeable and passionate, if a little dismissive at times..
We bonded in our passion for Rodgers & Hart but, alas, lost touch about 15 years ago. By then I was a friend of her younger sister Brigid and their mother. We first hit it off after I gave Mary a rave review but commented on her wardrobe--a rather garish, most un-Haran like glittering silver lame dress that I wrote “makes her look like a baked potato.” She agreed, laughed about it, and we got on well from then on.
Florida seems such an unlikely place for Haran to end up. She was the ultimate cosmopolitan woman who, tongue firmly in cheek, would address her audience as “fellow New York sophisticates.” She had moved from Brooklyn a year or so ago after her divorce and serious financial problems--maybe the reason she moved to Florida. A friend of Haran appealed on the Internet to her friends and fans for money to help her out. Few singers earn a living singing in cabarets, not even a performer as successful and in demand as Haran, who sustained herself working as a researcher on documentaries and books.
She had a prolific recording career from 1992 on, and her CDs include “There’s a Small Hotel: Live at the Algonquin,” “This Funny World: Mary Cleere Haran Sings Lyrics by Hart” (my favorite of her albums), “This Heart of Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties,” “Pennies from Heaven: Movie Songs from the Depression Era,” “The Memory of All That: Gershwin on Broadway and in Hollywood,” and “Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the `20s”--all worth owning, often for the patter almost as much as the songs. In “An Affair to Remember,” her 1994 show, Holden notes, “Haran deconstructs the decade’s cultural iconography and affectionately chastises its films for their lack of humor”--something Mary never lacked.
It’s impossible to imagine the New York cabaret scene, what there is left of it, without Mary Cleere Haran lighting up its darkened rooms with her insightful singing, her acerbic humor and her savvy savoir faire.
©2011 by Gerald Nachman. The caricature of Gerald Nachman is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Feb. 7, 2011.
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