The Singing Voice of the Stars: Marni Nixon – Part 2

 

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second part of my profile of Marni Nixon, Ghost Singer to the Stars.  As I wrote in the introduction to Part 1 of “The Singing Voice of the Stars,” Nixon was probably the best-known of all Hollywood’s off-camera singers, the artist who dubbed the singing for actors who can’t do their own. 

[Below, I pick up with Nixon’s biography and go on to report some of her activities in her professional life, including those she undertook when she wasn’t singing off-camera in big movie musicals.  You’ll see that she had a very active musical career in many formats, from stage musicals to recordings, from classical music to jazz and pop.

[I found reading about this remarkable artist fascinating, and I hope you have, too.  If you haven’t read the first installment of “The Singing Voice of the Stars,” I strongly recommend that you go back to 27 March and pick up Part 1 before you read Part 2 below.  In the first part of the post, I introduce many ideas that are revisited below, and they won’t make much sense without the initial introduction and definition.]

Marni Nixon was born Margaret Nixon McEathron in Altadena, California, in  Los Angeles County on 22 February 1930.  (“Marni” was a childhood nickname formed from the initial syllables of her first and middle names.  She took the professional name Marni Nixon in 1947 because her childhood peers teased her by mispronouncing her last name as McEarthworm.) 

Nixon came from a musical family.  At 4, she played the violin and by 4½, she was playing in a children’s orchestra.  Her family made up an orchestra of its own, with her three sisters playing clarinet, violin, and cello, and her father, the trumpet.  She even thought of being a concert violinist and an actress—but singing won out in the end when she won $100 in a singing contest at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona.

She was a child actress in tiny roles in the backgrounds of Marx Brothers comedies and the Lum and Abner movies, a comic series of the 1940s starring the radio duo Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, in which she played the “brat parts—you know, huge freckles, knocked knees, and I could cross my eyes really well and scream in high C.”  In one of the latter, though unbilled, Nixon’s character had a name: Angelica Abernathy in The Bashful Bachelor (1942).

The talented little girl was also a soloist with the Roger Wagner Chorale (later the Los Angeles Master Chorale), a world-renowned choir with many illustrious members.  (One of her choirmates was Marilyn Horne, b. 1934, the popular opera mezzo-soprano, who became Nixon’s life-long friend and penned the foreword to her 2006 memoir.)

Nixon made her début appearance on film at the age of 11—three days before her 12th birthday—in the long-forgotten Born to Sing in the unbilled role of Girl at Auditions on 18 February 1942.

Nixon had an extensive classical music education, studying with a series of teachers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts.  Among her teachers were Carl Ebert, Jan Popper, Boris Goldovsky, and Sarah Caldwell.

As a teen, Nixon worked as a messenger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio and frequently did bit parts when children were needed.  That’s how the studio became aware of her remarkable singing voice; Nixon had perfect pitch, a four-octave range, and an unmatched ability to sight-read.  The studio began to use her as a singer.

At 17, She undertook her first assignment as a ghost singer for the movies, replacing the voice of child star Margaret O’Brien in the MGM musical Big City, which opened in May 1948.  (Nixon also had an off-screen vocal part as an angel heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, released by Sierra Pictures and RKO Radio Pictures that November.)  A year later, she again sang for O’Brien in the MGM drama The Secret Garden.  

She was asked to sing “Hindu Song of Love” in the movie, and MGM brought in a Hindu swami to teach her the words.  In the recording studio, armed only with “a mental image of O’Brien in other films in which I’d seen her . . . I became a ten-year-old girl singing a lullaby to her doll. . . .  I had no idea at the time that I was beginning a new career.”

In May 1950, the singer married screen composer Ernest Gold (1921-99), best known for his work on the film score for 1960’s Exodus.  The marriage lasted until 1969 and produced three children.  Their son, Andrew Gold (1951-2011), was an award-winning rock musician, producer, and composer (of the theme song for television’s The Golden Girls, “Thank You for Being a Friend”); daughter Martha Gold Carr (b. 1953) is a psychoanalyst; and Melani Gold Friedman (b. 1962) is a singer, songwriter, and massage therapist.  Nixon also had six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

There were two other marriages following the divorce from Gold.  Nixon wed Dr. Lajos Frederick Fenster (b. 1931), a hepatologist (specialist in the diseases of the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas), in 1971.  The marriage ended in divorce in 1975 and she married Albert David Block (1925/26-2015), a jazz musician, in 1983, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2015.

In the same year she married Gold, Nixon dubbed the singing voice of second-billed Jeanne Crain in the Clifton Webb-Myrna Loy motion picture Cheaper by the Dozen that premiered on 31 March 1950.  Still anonymous to moviegoers, but known to the studios, Nixon was now a go-to ghost singer.

In 1951, Nixon voiced the singing flowers in the Disney animated film Alice in Wonderland—and this time, got screen credit for her work.

Although Marilyn Monroe did most of her own singing in the movie version of the Broadway musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, released in July 1953, Nixon took over the high notes, demonstrating an ability to blend carefully with the actress she was ghosting to create the effect of a single vocal performance.

Sometime during that same year, Nixon made what Variety deemed “may be the strangest film ever offered for theatrical release.”  Dementia was originally released in 1953 but withdrawn after the New York State Film Board banned it as “inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness.”  

The horror-noir-expressionistic movie was re-released with cuts on 22 December 1955.  The film, which has no dialogue at all, just music and sound effects like slamming doors and dubbed laughter, follows a psychotic young woman’s nightmarish experiences through one skid-row night. 

Dementia’s score is by avant-garde composer George Antheil, who was strongly influenced by the Dada movement of the early 20th century (see my Rick On Theater post “Dada,” 20 February 2010).  There are no lyrics as such (it was a vocalise); the jazz-infused music, vocalized by Nixon, is “frightening” and provides “a weird effect,” said the Variety review.

In 1954, she appeared as a guest on the short-lived television series Opera Cameos, which ran on the DuMont Television Network (1942-56).  That same year, Nixon made her Broadway stage début in The Girl in Pink Tights, a musical comedy with music by Sigmund Romberg, lyrics by Leo Robin, and a book by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields.  The play opened in March and ran for 115 performances, closing in June. 

According to Twentieth Century Fox studio logs, Nixon was called in to sing “If I Loved You” for Shirley Jones (b. 1934) in the movie version of Carousel, released in February 1956, although she professed later that she didn’t remember that gig, and Jones, unlike many of the actresses for whom she worked as a vocal stand-in, had an excellent singing voice.  (Aside from the film musicals Oklahoma!, 1955; Carousel; and The Music Man, 1962, Jones appeared in three Broadway musicals—not to forget the 1970s musical TV show The Partridge Family.)

There’s no doubt, however, about her next soundtrack appearance, in another Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation, the June 1956 release The King and I.  Here she took over the singing part for Deborah Kerr.  The soundtrack album, released by Capitol Records, hit number one, remained on the charts for more than five years, and was certified as a gold record, reportedly selling over a million copies. 

Nixon, who received no credit on screen or on the album for her singing, was paid a flat fee of $420 for her six weeks of work (equivalent to about $4,400 today).  The New York Times film reviewer, Bosley Crowther, wrote in his notice that “the voice of Marni Nixon adds a thrilling lyricism to [Kerr’s] songs.”

Three years later, Nixon appeared on stage in San Bernardino, California, as Anna in The King and I wearing the same costumes that Kerr wore in the film.

In April 1957, Boy on a Dolphin was released, with a soundtrack album released by Decca Records.  Nixon stepped in for Sophia Loren (b. 1934) in her American debut.  The Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember opened in July 1957, with a soundtrack album released by Columbia Records.  Nixon received credit on the album as “soprano soloist,” but no royalties.

Nixon made her first actual appearance onscreen as an adult in March 1960 in the chorus of the film version of Cole Porter’s Can-Can.  On 6 October 1961, the ghost singer had her hardest job.  She was hired to dub Ethel Waters for a TV show, the “Goodnight Sweet Blues” episode of Route 66.  Waters was supposed to sing an old, 1926 jazz number of hers, “I’m Coming Virginia,” but, on the verge of 65, she couldn’t sing it anymore.  The great rhythm-and-blues singer, recalled Nixon, “stood over me and told me what to do! 

(Just as there was an imbalance in Hollywood between the many female ghost singers and the fewer males, there was a decided de-racialization of African-American actors by having them dubbed by white singers.)

On 18 October 1961, her most prominent vocal stand-in part since The King and I was released; she dubbed the part of Maria for Natalie Wood in the movie adaptation of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story, a massive hit.  

The soundtrack album of WSS, released by Columbia Records, spent more than a year at number one, selling three million copies.  Nixon was so poorly paid for her contribution to the success of both the movie and the record that Leonard Bernstein, the musical’s composer, gave her a percentage of his own share of the soundtrack’s revenues (which were huge).  The great composer recognized that the film wouldn’t have done as well as it had without her singing.

A year later, in November 1962, she again ghosted for Natalie Wood in the screen version of Jule Styne and Sondheim’s Gypsy.  The soundtrack LP, released by Warner Bros. Records, was a Top Ten hit.  The same month, she began an association with Walt Disney, appearing on the album Great Operatic Composers and Their Stories, released on Disneyland Records.

In this period, the early 1960s, Nixon also appeared on regional stages in major musical roles such as Nellie Forbush in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific opposite Howard Keel as Emile de Becque, and Rosabella in Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella with Ned Romero as Tony.  (In that latter production, Nixon was pregnant with her daughter Melani, born in September 1962.)

In 1964, Nixon worked on several projects that unintentionally shadowed the work of stage star and emerging film star Julie Andrews.  (They shared, coincidentally, a rare personal trait: they both had perfect pitch.)  

Although Andrews had starred in the massively successful Broadway musical My Fair Lady starting in 1956, Warner Bros. studio felt she wasn’t a big enough star to carry the film version, and Audrey Hepburn was cast in the role of Eliza Doolittle instead.  Hepburn, however, couldn’t sing, and so Nixon dubbed her. 

Before the film was released in October 1964, Nixon made her Broadway debut in a limited-run revival of My Fair Lady mounted by the New York City Center Light Opera Company that ran from 20 May to 28 June.  Nixon played Andrews’s original role, the one she dubbed for Audrey Hepburn: Eliza Doolittle.

Nixon was a little unnerved, but Andrews helped Nixon resolve her unease about playing the part.  Later, when Nixon appeared in a small role in the film of Sound of Music, with Andrews playing Maria, the star sought her out on the set and, shaking Nixon’s hand, proclaimed, "I like your work."

That same spring, Disneyland Records released 10 Songs from Mary Poppins, an LP on which Nixon sang songs such as “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious” with songwriter Richard M. Sherman and others, in advance of the upcoming film version of Mary Poppins, which, when it was released in September 1964, starred Andrews (who, of course, did her own singing onscreen).   Nixon voiced the singing geese in the film—unbilled, of course.

Also in May 1964, Nixon appeared on a Disneyland Records LP called The Story of Hansel and Gretel.  She followed in January 1965 with Famous Arias from Aida (And Other Operas).

Nixon’s Disney recordings didn’t garner a lot of attention, but My Fair Lady did.  The soundtrack album, released by Columbia Records, reached number four, stayed on the charts more than two years, and went gold.  

Interestingly, Nixon’s next movie effort found her actually sharing the screen with Julie Andrews.  In March 1965, Andrews starred in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, which went on to become the highest-grossing movie released up to that time.  In a rare screen appearance, Nixon, cast in the small part of Sister Sophia, joined in the singing of the song “Maria.”

The Sound of Music marked the end of Nixon’s film career for the moment, but she continued to work in the popular music realm in other areas.  She vowed only to sing under her own name from then on.  “It got so I’d lent my voice to so many others that I felt it no longer belonged to me,” Nixon explained.  “It was eerie, I had lost part of myself.”  She added emphatically: “No, no more dubbing.”

On 26 February 1967, she sang and lent her speaking voice to an animated musical version of Jack and the Beanstalk on NBC-TV, a version of the fairy tale produced and directed by, and also featuring Gene Kelly (1912-96), with songs by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn.  Nixon sang for Princess Serena, who’s trapped in a harp by a magic spell.  Hanna-Barbera Records released a soundtrack album.

She also continued to work in the classical realm.  In 1976, she earned her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Classical Performance, Vocal Soloist, for her album 9 Early Songs: The Cabaret Songs of Arnold Schoenberg, released by RCA.  

Such albums were usually recorded from concerts in which Nixon performed as soloist with a renowned orchestra, including Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic.  (She was considered by many concert-goers to have been Bernstein’s favorite singer, and they worked together often.)  She sang from the works of many classical composers, but she specialized in the moderns: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Charles Ives.

And she worked on stage.  In 1983 and ’84, she appeared along with Margaret Whiting and Cissy Houston in her Off-Broadway début, the musical Taking My Turn, which ran 345 performances and produced a cast album released by Broadway Ltd. Records.

In 1985, she recorded Marni Nixon Sings [George] Gershwin for Reference Recordings, accompanied by pianist Lincoln Mayorga.  Three years later, she followed with Marni Nixon Sings Classic [Jerome] Kern. In between, she was nominated for the 1987 Grammy Award for Best Classical Performance, Vocal Soloist, for her album [Aaron] Copland: 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson, also released by Reference Recordings.  

She appeared in several productions (including a 1992 Off-Broadway mounting at the Lamb’s Theatre in New York City) of the musical Opal, with book, music, and lyrics by Robert Lindsey-Nassif, and sang on the studio cast album recorded in 1996.  

She appeared in the 1997 film I Think I Do, a screwball comedy about a gay couple at a straight couple’s wedding, written and directed by Brian Sloan.  In 1998, she again lent her voice to a screen character, in this case to Grandmother Fa in the Disney animated feature Mulan.  

In 1997 and ’98, Nixon toured U.S. cities as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret and then she returned to the New York stage for the new millennium in James Joyce’s The Dead, first Off-Broadway in 1999 and then on Broadway the next year.  

In 2002, she stepped in as a replacement for the role of Heidi Schiller in a Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies; the following year, she did the same thing as Guido’s Mother for a Broadway revival of Maury Yeston’s Nine.

Also in 2002, Nixon was in L.A. with Charlotte Rae and Jane Kean in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 70, Girls, 70, and she repeated her performance as Heidi Schiller at the Barrington Stage in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2005, her 75th year. 

In March 2007, the former ghost singer appeared once again in a production of MFL.  This time, then 77, the singer was playing Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Professor Henry Higgins—the one featured character who has no song in the play!  The performance was a concert version by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center.

“I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’ Lament?’” joked Nixon, both men having died in the 1980s.  Kelsey Grammer played Henry Higgins in the production and Kelli O’Hara was Eliza Doolittle.

In June 2013, she spoke in Baltimore and Bethesda, Maryland, about her vocal work on West Side Story before the movie was screened while the score was played live by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to these credits, Nixon also worked periodically in opera, including productions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Rigoletto, and Jacques Offenbach’s La Perichole, as well as such modern operas as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Miss Donnithrone’s Maggot (which she recorded for the Musical Heritage Society) and Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine.

She also appeared as a soloist with orchestras around the U.S. and abroad and toured with her one-woman show, Marni Nixon: The Voice of Hollywood (débuted in 1999).  (“I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life.”)  She also toured extensively with flamboyant pianist Liberace and comic pianist Victor Borge.

She taught at the California Institute of the Arts between 1969 and 1971 and at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, starting in 1980.

She starred in her own children’s television series, Boomerang (1975-80), while living in Seattle, Washington (where she moved after her divorce from Ernest Gold), for which she won four local Emmy Awards for Best Actress.  The show was beloved in the Northwest (reaching homes in British Columbia and Alaska) and won 27 Emmys during its run of over 150 episodes.

In September 2006, Nixon published her autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story (Billboard Books)—written with a ghost of her own, Stephen Cole (for whom she “made sure that she, who never got screen credit for her vocals, gave me co-author credit for her memoirs.  I was ‘the ghost’s ghost’”).

Marni Nixon died in Manhattan on 24 July 2016 at the age of 86.  The cause was breast cancer, which she had battled successfully twice before.

As I’ve reported throughout this look at Marni Nixon’s world of ghost singing, the off-camera vocalist got precious little compensation and no credit.  After the acknowledgment from Deborah Kerr in 1956 and, especially after the Time magazine report in 1964, the recognition status changed a little, but only by word of mouth and among the in-crowd—those in the know and those who wanted to be.

“It was a gradual kind of discovery (that I was doing the singing),” recalls Nixon.  

Deborah Kerr, herself, gave me some credit right away on “The King & I.”  By the time I was doing “West Side Story” a few years later, everyone was questioning that Natalie Wood could sing that well.   By the time I did “My Fair Lady,” I didn’t have to say anything.  You weren’t “in” if you didn’t know it was me.

“The anonymity didn’t bother me until I sang Natalie Wood’s songs in West Side Story,” Nixon told the New York Times in 1967.  “Then I saw how important my singing was to the picture.  I was giving my talent, and somebody else was taking the credit.  People were walking all over me.”

The film of West Side Story was released by the Mirisch Corporation in October 1961 and Columbia Masterworks put out the soundtrack album the same month.  Nixon feels that the artists who do dubbing deserve onscreen credit just like anyone else who helps create a product.  In February 1962, Nixon made a public plea for formal recognition of ghost singers on screen and on soundtrack albums of the movies in which they dispensed their talents and effort.

The New York Times reported her appeal in an article, datelined Hollywood, California, by Murray Schumach, which I’ll excerpt at length:

One of Hollywood’s “singing ghosts” has condemned the trick of concealing names of singers who, unseen, do the vocal chores for stars.

Marni Nixon several months ago [after a court case] won an important victory for her profession by gaining the right to royalties on the recording of the sound track of “West Side Story.”

. . . .

Her resentment is symptomatic of growing unrest among the small group of singing ghosts.

The increasing desire by ghosts for screen credit is the result of three developments in movies:

1.   Musicals, long in disfavor as poor box office, are enjoying a renaissance.

2.   Many dramatic films are using theme songs that are later recorded and sold.

3.   Screen credits are getting long, mentioning names of relatively minor technicians.

“Assistant hair dressers and third assistant directors are getting screen credit,” Miss Nixon said.  “Why shouldn’t they give screen credit to someone who does the singing for a star?  From here on in I intend to insist on screen credit when I sing.”

Movie producers have declined to give credit to ghosts because they claim that if the public knew that the star was not singing it might hurt the box-office appeal of the star and the picture.

. . . .

The singer pointed out she had no trouble getting credit when she sang with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, at Carnegie Hall for the American première of songs by Pierre Boulez.

Her name is printed on recordings of songs by [Heitor] Villa-Lobos, [Igor] Stravinsky and a [Johann Sebastian] Bach cantata.  Her records of nursery rhymes and of songs used in schools identify her.  Her name is also well-known to audiences who have heard her do leads in such shows as “South Pacific.”

That Miss Nixon has received no recognition in “West Side Story” is particularly irksome to her because the job was unusually difficult.

“First of all,” she said, “I was singing a Bernstein score.  You have to have a trained voice for that.  You can’t be just a pop singer.  Then, the whole job was done in a strange way.”

Nixon was fortunate to have had Deborah Kerr’s public acknowledgement of her collaboration on The King and I and her successful negotiations for either credit or royalties on later work on the soundtrack albums.  Once her name was known, she did scores of interviews with the press, on radio and television, and on stages; that ultimately led to her memoir.  This all made her an exception to the common circumstances of her ghostly colleagues.  In most cases, their names and contributions weren’t known until after their deaths.

Nixon never did get screen credit for the work on the movie itself.  That’s changed somewhat since she stopped doing ghost work.  In 2006, singer-songwriter-actor Drew Seeley dubbed Zac Efron’s songs in the first High School Musical.  This one is widely known since he was credited.

“The singing voice of the stars,” Marni Nixon, had a long and eventful career in film, opera, television, recordings, and the legitimate stage, even though movie- and theatergoers had grown more accustomed to her voice than to her face or, for most people, her name.  She dubbed about 50 movies, from a single line to entire roles.  No one in the business ghosted as many major roles or sang as many famous songs.

In addition to her Emmys for Boomerang, Nixon received a nomination for a Drama Desk Award for her Off-Broadway performance in Taking My Turn and two nominations for Grammy Awards.  Her albums of Songs from Mary Poppins and Mulan both went gold.

Nixon was an honorary member of Sigma Alpha Iota International Women’s Music Fraternity.  On 27 October 2008, she was presented with the Singer Symposium’s Distinguished Artist Award in New York City.  In 2011, Nixon was the recipient of the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to American Music.

Nixon’s obituary in the New York Times reported that the former ghost singer to the stars had “became something of a cult figure, appearing as a guest on ‘To Tell the Truth’ [she fooled half the panel] and as an answer to clues featured by ‘Jeopardy!,’ Trivial Pursuit and at least one New York Times crossword puzzle.”  Now, that’s recognition!

The Singing Voice of the Stars: Marni Nixon – Part 1

 

[I watched an old movie about two weeks ago.  I’d DVR’d it off cable some time ago to watch at my convenience, and its turn came up. 

[It was a movie whose title I knew, but had never seen—though I knew about it generally.  It was 1957’s An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, a well-known romantic weepy. 

[I’m not going to give a review or even a report on the movie.  My reason for bringing it up is that in the plot, Kerr’s character, Terry McKay, is a nightclub singer . . . but Kerr doesn’t sing.  So her songs are dubbed by an off-camera singer.

[That’s the point here.  The singer was Marni Nixon, possibly the best-known ghost singer—that’s what they’re called in the biz—in Hollywood. 

[As soon as I learned that fact, I knew I had to write a post about Nixon—of whom even I had heard, even though I didn’t know the name of any other ghost singer.  So that’s what I’ve done.  Here, in two parts—Nixon had a busy and full life (she died in 2016 at 86)—is my profile of Marni Nixon, Ghost Singer to the Stars.]

What do actresses Margaret O’Brien, Jeanne Crain, Marilyn Monroe, Ida Lupino, Deborah Kerr, Sophia Loren, Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood, and Audrey Hepburn all have in common—aside from the fact that they all are or were Hollywood movie stars?

At one time or another, in one movie or another, for one song, a whole score, or a few notes—their singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon (1930-2016), probably the greatest “ghost singer” whose name you may never have heard and whose face you may never have seen.

According to Wikipedia,

A ghost singer is a professional singer who dubs the singing parts officially credited, or billed, to another person, usually the star or co-star of a musical or film, especially those who are cast for dancing or acting skill or for celebrity rather than for singing talent.

Some journalists compare the situation with stunt performers hired to do the physical scenes for movie stars.  Except, as Nixon notes, the stunt people’s work have been getting screen credit for many years now.

The 1952 MGM movie Singin’ in the Rain (written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, produced by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds) tells a story of a novice actress (Reynolds) who voices the film performances of a veteran silent-film actress (Jean Hagen) who can’t talk, much less sing.

In the film—the behind-the-cameras story regarding who dubbed whom and why is a wonderful sidelight to this article—there are several scenes in which various methods of dubbing are shown.  (The technology employed in Singing’ is somewhat more primitive than that used in the 1950s and ’60s because the movie is set in the 1920s, when the new talking pictures were overtaking the silents.  The basic techniques depicted, however, were still used into the demise of dubbing in the ’70s and ’80s.)

In her IMDb bio, Gary Brumburgh quips that Nixon “has ensured herself a proper place in film history although most moviegoers would not recognize her if they passed her on the street.”  That’s a tad ironic, because Nixon bore a strong resemblance to Julie Andrews, with whose career Nixon’s was somewhat intertwined.

The 5'4" soprano became known as a singer’s singer from her work on several movie musicals of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s in which she served as a ghost singer, as they are known, dubbing the singing voices of non-singing stars.  The millions of moviegoers who saw the films and the millions of record-buyers who listened to the soundtrack albums of such popular movies as The King and I (1956), West Side Story (1961), and My Fair Lady (1964) recognized her voice without having any idea to whom they were listening. 

“Marni is one of those unsung heroes (or should I say ‘much sung’ heroes),” added Brumburgh, “whose incredible talents were given short shrift at the time.”  That’s because the Hollywood studios in the middle of the 20th century habitually (and contractually) didn’t publicize the fact that famous actors weren’t singing their own songs on the soundtrack.

Screen credit for the ghost singer was a guaranteed impossibility (until the practice was changed with Nixon’s help).  The studios were so bent on maintaining the deception that even on the published sheet music and soundtrack albums of film musicals, the songs were credited to the actors who appeared on the screen rather than the ghost singers who actually sang the songs.

In her obituary, the New York Times reported that Nixon had told the ABC News late-night television program Nightline in 2007, “You always had to sign a contract that nothing would be revealed.”

Twentieth Century Fox, when I did “The King and I,” threatened me.  They said, if anybody ever knows that you did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we’ll see to it that you don’t work in town again.

Nonetheless, within the entertainment business, Marni Nixon was known; the Times called her work “one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets.”  The beans were finally spilled worldwide in a 1964 Time magazine article, “Hollywood: Instant Voice,” in which Nixon was dubbed “the ghostess with the mostest.”  She became known to insiders and semi-insiders as “the singing voice of the stars.”  (I remember hearing her name in the ’60s when I was in college.)

It's common practice, by the way, for singers on film to dub their own singing voices.  They regularly record their songs, with full accompaniment, before shooting the musical scene, then perform the scene in front of the camera while lip-synching to their own recording.  Few actors actually voice songs on camera for practical reasons.

If you’ve ever scrutinized a singer’s face and, especially, his or her neck, closely while they’re vocalizing, you’re bound to see that it’s not really an attractive look.  The neck muscles are strained and the mouth and lower jaw are contorted; even the eyes, brows, and forehead are clenched in unappealing ways.  On camera, this is exaggerated, especially in close-ups, which are common in musical films.

All this is amplified when there’s dancing involved because not only the movements, but the exertions of dancing make delivering and recording the singing difficult, particularly in the days before wireless mics and directional pick-ups.  Emotional or stressful moments in the scene can also make singing hard.  Location-shooting, especially outdoors, when the acoustics of a soundstage isn’t available, is also problematic.

So movie singers almost always lip-synch to recordings, even when the performers do their own singing.  The methods, however, are technically the same for working with a ghost singer.  There are essentially three techniques of dubbing.  (24 Frames of Silver: A Cinema Blog for the Soul by Lee O. has a post, “A Voice to Match: Exploring the Re-mystifying Role of the Hollywood Ghost Singer,” that provides a detailed examination of the craft of film-dubbing and ghost-voicing and covers both history and methodology.)

“Playback” is by far the most common technique.  This is the method in which the ghost singer pre-records the number which is then played back on the set for the filming and the actor mimes the song to the recorded rendition.  This method is obviously only available when the director knows in advance that the actor on screen will be dubbed.  It requires the actor to match the vocalizing of the ghost in order to look convincing to an audience.

The second most frequently used technique is “dubbing.”  In this method, which can be used when the decision to use a ghost singer’s voice on the soundtrack is made after the director decides the actor’s pipes are inadequate for the task, the on-screen performer sings on camera (or lip-synchs to his or her own pre-recorded singing), and then the ghost singer re-records the song after the filming.  In this case, the ghost has to match the vocalizations of the actor on the screen the same way a foreign-language film is dubbed into English (or vice versa).

The final method is a hybrid technique in which the on-screen actor does the singing for the camera, either on the set or in a studio recording, and then a ghost singer is brought in to “sweeten” or enhance the soundtrack recording in places where the original performer was weak or otherwise inadequate, the way Nixon tweaked Monroe’s high notes in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).  This is called “doubling” and it can be quite tricky for the off-screen singer, who has to make two voices sound like one.

Doubling, Nixon has noted, can require very complicated, close work between the singer and the actor.  “I have to know dramatically what she wants to do, but she has to act in my voice,” she says.  The dubber wears headphones through which she hears the orchestra in one ear and the actress singing in the other so the ghost singer can pick up the actor’s vocalizations and carry it beyond her range.

In most films where ghost singing is employed, all three of these methods may be used—and frequently are.  Today, most movie musicals and films which feature even one or two songs, dubbing by an outside performer is no longer common—except perhaps “doubling.”  Nixon has said that dubbing some songs can take as long as six weeks.

(In this article, I’ll be talking mostly about female ghost singers.  To be sure, the majority of off-screen singers in Hollywood have been women, but by no means exclusively.  Arguably, the best-known male ghost singer was Bill Lee, 1916-80, who dubbed the voices of Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music and John Kerr as Lt. Cable in the movie version of South Pacific.  He also sang on the soundtracks of animated films like Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp as a pirate and a dog.

(There were also Giorgio Tozzi singing for Rossano Brazzi in South Pacific; Bill Shirley, who sang “On the Street Where You Live” for Jeremy Brett in My Fair Lady; Tucker Smith, ghost voice for Russ Tamblyn in West Side Story; and Jimmy Bryant, most famous for dubbing Richard Beymer, also in WSS. 

(The main reasons why male actors are less often ghosted than female is a sort of prejudice.  Studios deem that the men, especially the older, more mature leading men, can get by on screen with talk-singing—think Rex Harrison and Robert Preston—jazzier and less formal singing styles—Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly—or weaker vocals.)

After the 1960s heyday of the big musical film had passed—by the 1970s, the popularity of the movie musical took a nosedive and fewer were made—there was little call of dubbing singers.  When the form experienced a revival in the ’90s and 2000s, a new trend obviated the call for ghost singers: authenticity. 

It was considered an artistic and marketing point for actors, even non-singers, to do their own vocalizing (as well as dancing and other specialty aspects of performance).  Actors wanted to show that they “could do it all.”  Of course, by now there’s pitch correction software like Auto-Tune and other computer manipulations to fix vocal shortcomings. 

By and large, the studios—who meanwhile had lost a lot of their clout in controlling what goes before the cameras—and moviegoers have gone along with this, but it hasn’t always helped in the critical response or at the box office.

The practice of dubbing was chiefly used for movie musicals, either original screen productions, such as 1953’s The Band Wagon directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring dancers Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse (whose singing was dubbed by India Adams, 1927-2020) or film versions of stage musicals, such as those for which Nixon became known.

While film musicals can be conceived, either in the writing or in the filming, to accommodate actors who aren’t really singers, stage musicals are frequently written with professional stage singers in mind—performers like Mary Martin or Alfred Drake, Julie Andrews or Theodore Bikel, or Bernadette Peters or Mandy Patinkin.  The scores often put demands on the actors which most cannot fulfill without singing talent and a well-trained vocal technique.

Oddly, however, ghost singers, as I noted, sometimes even sweetened the vocal work of singing actors like Rita Moreno (b. 1931), whom Nixon helped out on West Side Story in which Moreno famously played Anita.  Nixon dubbed Moreno’s singing in the “A Boy Like That” duet with Maria.

Nixon’s principal responsibility in West Side Story was to dub the singing voice of Natalie Wood, 1938-81, who played Maria, but juggling the soundtrack recording made it possible for Nixon to seem to sing a duet all by herself.

The circumstance here was the collision of an accident of timing and a vocal-range issue.  Moreno was a coloratura at the time of WSS, a soprano voice with a high range.  “A Boy Like That” has some low passages, especially the beginning, that Moreno couldn’t reach.  (Chita Rivera, the originator of the role on Broadway, had a lower range.) 

There was another ghost singer who’d been hired to cover the song, but she caught a cold just when the number was going to be recorded.  So Nixon was drafted to sing both parts.  “I . . . did a duet with myself,” Nixon explained.  “And nobody really knew.  I just changed the quality of my voice.  I tried to do one very dark and one very light.”

That was one of Nixon’s many special abilities that made her so desirable as a ghost: she could adjust her voice to mimic the speaking voice of the singers she dubbed.  Many ghost singers either couldn’t or just didn’t bother with this bit of acting, but Nixon did it habitually.

Nixon was remarkably versatile, so she was equally convincing as the English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens of The King and I, the Puerto Rican teenager Maria of West Side Story, and the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady. 

In a 2004 interview, for example, Nixon explained that when she worked with Deborah Kerr (1921-2007) on The King and I, the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit, “I was brought in and had to follow along with her, getting her diction and acting style.”  Even after the threat 20th Century Fox delivered, Nixon asserted, “I just thought of it in terms of the challenge of really trying to make [my voice] sound exactly like Deborah Kerr.”  Nixon recalled that “each number took a week." 

When she worked with Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) in My Fair Lady, “I sat in on her singing lessons, so I could hear not only the Cockney and the upper-class British, which are two different voices,” Nixon recalled.  “But I also had to get her very unique speech patterns, so I had to listen very carefully so I could catch it.”

Nixon’s technique, which she makes sound simple and straightforward, appears to be more thoughtful and conscientious than the common practice.  She explained the “whole secret of dubbing,” based on her gig singing for Margaret O’Brien (b. 1937): “You extend the actress's speaking voice.  You imagine how the actress would sing if she could sing and be sure to take from her what she wants to do dramatically.”

(An anecdote related by ghost singer Annette Warren, b. 1922, who dubbed Ava Gardner’s voice on  “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” from the 1951 MGM musical Show Boat, reveals that when she sang for Lucille Ball in the films Lured, 1947; Sorrowful Jones, 1949; and Fancy Pants, 1950, Warren’s trained voice didn’t “match the huskiness of Lucy’s speaking voice.”  Nonetheless, says Warren, she didn’t try to make her singing style resemble the voice of the actresses she ghosted.)

In an unusual circumstance for a ghost singer, Nixon even dubbed some of Natalie Wood’s spoken lines in WSS as well.  In Nixon’s account, at the end of a taping session, when the cast and crew had gotten a little giddy from fatigue, Wood bobbled some lines that came after the end of a song.  The ghost singer was brought in to redub them.

As far as I know, WSS was the only time Nixon covered two actors in the same film.  Among other things, it shows how flexible she was, how reliable, and how resourceful.  All without ever becoming famous outside the business.

Nixon did dub the same actor in two different movies three times, however.  The first time was dubbing the singing voice of child actor Margaret O’Brien in Big City (1948) and again in The Secret Garden (1949) when Nixon was 17-18 (and O’Brien was 10-11).  

In 1962, after ghosting for Natalie Wood’s Maria in WSS in the year before, Nixon also sang Wood’s high notes in Gypsy.  (Wood played Louise, better known as Gypsy Rose Lee, the title character.)

After she dubbed Kerr’s Anna in The King and I, Nixon dubbed her again in 1957’s romantic tearjerker An Affair to Remember.  That second film isn’t a musical, but Kerr’s character, Terry McKay, is a successful nightclub singer and sings several numbers on camera—including one in French: “Our Love Affair”/”Ce bel amour.”  (Nixon said she dubbed An Affair to Remember in five different languages.)

It was Kerr who first outed Nixon’s alter-ego as a ghost singer.  An Academy Award nominee for Best Actress in The King and I, Kerr praised Nixon’s work with her on the film in an interview with London’s Daily Mirror in 1956.  This, of course, was the star of the very film for which Nixon was contractually sworn to secrecy regarding her participation.  Nixon’s efforts were also specified in Bosley Crowther’s review of the film in the New York Times.

Nixon’s association with Kerr on The King and I was symbiotic.  Their relationship was professional and co-operative as Nixon mirrored the actress’s movements to create the perfect film illusion.  The ghost singer told the Washington Post that at the same time, Kerr “wanted to also look like she was really singing and wanted to be using the same muscles and the same stretches you do in expressions.”

On NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, freelance arts reporter Jeff Lunden relates that Nixon recalls,

Whenever there was a song to be sung in a scene, I would get up and stand next to her and watch her while she sang.  And she would watch me, while I sang.  After we recorded that song, she would have to go to the filming of it and mouth to that performance.

In a Variety article in which Stephen Cole, Nixon’s co-author on her memoir, describes his work with the ghost singer, whom Cole dubs “the consummate collaborator,” he explains “how Kerr and Nixon trade lines that are spoken and lines that are sung to meld into one fabulous performance.”  He declares that the result was “one voice made by two artist.”

This cordiality wasn’t always the case, however.  Nixon and Audrey Hepburn also worked together harmoniously on My Fair Lady, but her work with Natalie Wood on WSS was fraught.

“In the case of Audrey Hepburn,” recalled Nixon to WaPo, “she was very smart and could say, ‘I know this is not good enough, I want to keep trying myself,’ but she had to accept that it wasn’t quite what it should be.”  In the end, Nixon provided all Hepburn’s singing for MFL.

Hepburn, who’d been training and practicing all during the prep time for filming, was very disheartened when she was told her singing just wasn’t good enough.  She walked off the set in disappointment.

The actress had put herself under a great deal of pressure because she was very aware whom she was replacing in the role.  Julie Andrews (b. 1935) had originated the part of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, becoming an international star from the performance.  She also had a perfect singing voice. 

Hepburn’s casting for the film over Andrews (who would later take over the film role of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music from Broadway superstar Mary Martin, 1913-90), was controversial to say the least.  Her trepidation over the responsibility was recorded by André Previn, who arranged the film adaptation of Frederick Loewe’s stage score (for which Previn won an Oscar) and directed the orchestra, in Barry Paris’s Audrey Hepburn (1996).

But Hepburn returned the next day and apologized for her “wicked” behavior.  Recalled Nixon, “That was her idea of being very wicked.”  Hepburn remained helpful despite her disappointment; she gave Nixon rides to the studio in her limo and helped her master the Cockney accent in which Eliza spoke—and sang.  Nixon and Hepburn became collaborators instead of competitors.

The situation on the WSS set was different, though.  “I don’t think that Natalie Wood’s ego could take that.” Nixon felt.  “Frankly, I think they [i.e., the studio] used to create that kind of attitude too much—allowing them to have the illusion when they knew all along that she wasn’t good enough.”  Wood thought Nixon was brought in to fill in the occasional high notes, as the ghost singer had done for Marilyn Monroe (1926-62).

According to Nixon, Wood’s singing was out of synch with the orchestra.  This was a difficulty for Nixon because if she sang precisely with the orchestra, her words wouldn’t match Wood’s lip movements.  “I had to compromise as best I could,” the singer said.

Nixon said that Wood didn’t know how much of her singing would be done by her ghost singer.  “She didn’t know that [her work] would all be thrown out and that it would be all my voice at that point,” affirmed Nixon.  The studio had kept Wood in the dark for fear she’d pull out of the production, even letting her rehearse with the full orchestra and lip-synch her songs to her own recordings so she wouldn’t tumble to the truth.  Nixon felt the studio was lying to Wood and it made her “very uneasy” to participate in the deception.

[This is the end of Part 1 of “The Singing Voice of the Stars.”  Please come back on Wednesday, 30 March, for the rest of my profile of Marni Nixon.  I’ll start with her bio and go on to discuss more about her work and professional life.]

Edward Hopper

by Kirk Woodward 

[I commenced my art report on Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2007 by confessing, “I’m not really a fan of . . . Hopper.”  In his article on the artist and his work, my friend Kirk Woodward quotes my reasons for that feeling, then goes on to explain why his response differs from mine.

[Curious ROTters will find it interesting to look at my reports on Hopper’s art after reading Kirk’s “Edward Hopper” below.  Meanwhile, I’ll quote something else I wrote in “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960.”  (Cross-references and links to these posts are provided in the afterword below.)

[These are comments I made regarding art and the responses I report when I write about what I’ve seen.  “Art—whether music, poetry, drama, or painting—means to me whatever I take from it, not what someone else tells me I should take from it,” I wrote.  I describe how I felt when I looked at a painting, say one of Hopper’s; I’m not making a definitive pronouncement about the art.

[That means I can’t tell someone else how to respond to a piece of art, either.  My responses are just that: my responses.  As I also said in “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA” (16 May 2019): “[M]y response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know [the] rules in any case, since I’ve never studied art.  It’s purely emotional or psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me feel.”

[As far as different responses to the same stimuli is concerned, this reminds me of something that happened on my 1980 trip to China (subject of my travel journal posted 24 December 2021-5 January 2022).  I explained that our meals in the People’s Republic were served “family style” (bowls of food for each table of 10-12 rather than individual plates).

[At one meal, after we’d begun to serve ourselves from the common bowls, one woman remarked that a particular dish was very spicy.  Another diner, a man traveling with his wife, didn’t think the dish was spicy at all.  I piped up that it was certainly spicy, but not heavily spiced.

[So three of us, eating from the same bowl, each had variant responses to the same stimulus.  Well, that’s what I see going on with Kirk’s and my responses to Hopper’s art.]

Visiting a friend in Norwich, New York, in a rented apartment one night with nothing to do, I picked up and started to glance through a book of reproductions of paintings by the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

I had been cursorily familiar with a few of his paintings, particularly the famous Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), a view of a coffeeshop in an empty urban street with four people inside, illuminated against the darkness. I knew Hopper as a painter of isolation and loneliness.

This is also how Rick sees Hopper. He has written about him three times in this blog (see the list in the afterword below). In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney,” he writes:

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience. 

Our responses to works of art are subjective. As we will see, Rick is accurate about Hopper. We see the same paintings, and the same things in them.

What’s more, Rick has a great deal of familiarity with painting, and I don’t know much more about it than I learned in a college survey course, plus the usual exposure through museums and reproductions. My favorite painter, I may add, is El Greco – when I would go through Washington, DC, I would often go into the National Gallery, look at the El Grecos, and leave.

But up in New York State, looking at the book of Hopper reproductions one night, I suddenly found that they spoke to me in a remarkable way, and I want to try to indicate why that is so. It’s possible that his paintings are a bit like those drawings which if looked at one way show a duck and looked at another way show an old woman. Which do you see?

Absent illustrations, I will try to describe the paintings and their features as best I can, also indicating where they can be seen. Of course there are also a number of books of reproductions of his work, for example Edward Hopper: Masterpieces of Art (Rosalind Ormiston, 2016, Flame Tree Publishing). Seeing the paintings in person, of course, might give a different impression from seeing them in reproductions.

My thesis is that the view that Hopper’s subject is loneliness of the human condition is insufficient – that in fact the opposite may almost be true. However, I admit that a look at Hopper’s biography may seem to endorse rather than contradict Rick’s point of view.

Hopper, according to every description I’ve read, was the opposite of an outgoing sort of person. His life is easily summarized. He was born in Nyack, New York, by the Hudson River above New York City. His mother was an artist, his father ran a store, and both encouraged his interest in art.

He signed up for a correspondence school course in illustration when he was seventeen; his parents felt that being an illustrator offered a career he could fall back on if necessary. As we will see, I consider this early training very important. In any case, the following year he enrolled in the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design, where he did well and actually taught some in his later student years.

Graduating, he traveled to Europe, where he would go three times over the course of his career. He did not claim to be particularly influenced by the Impressionists, but he was clearly influenced by the work of Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and even more by Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

He learned etching, and for some years he made a living on illustration work and etchings, before his paintings began to sell. His career as a painter began slowly; he did not become a major success until he was forty-two. After that his paintings sold well and widely.

Hopper does not appear to have been an unpleasant person, but he was a man of few words, and like some other taciturn artists – Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) comes to mind – he married someone, in Hopper’s case an artist named Josephine (Jo) Nivison (1883-1968), who was as lively and outspoken (and funny) as he was not. She once said, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”

They lived for the rest of their lives in an apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, and when they could afford it they built a second home on Cape Cod, at South Truro. He painted to an advanced age, when his health became precarious.

An outwardly uneventful life, then – but one that produced quite eventful paintings. But of what kind? I want to point out several things that impress me, starting with the fact that he worked for years as an illustrator.

He disliked the work, but did it well, winning a prize for a recruiting poster he designed in World War I. It was titled “Smash the Hun” and showed a muscular worker swinging an enormous sledgehammer. Confronting him are three enemy soldiers, except that all we see of them, on the lower plane of the picture, are three bayonets pointing toward him, the tips of their blades – surprisingly – colored orange.

The lower part of the background is solid blue; then come a varied set of triangles representing heavy machinery, possibly for boat construction; and above them, out of a factory smokestack and into the sky, a vivid, solid, dynamic swirl of smoke.

An illustrator, if talented, learns to make a clear point in a striking way. Hopper disliked his years in the trade, but it served him well in his painting. What’s more, many of the important aspects of his later painting are represented in the poster – the geometric foundation of shapes, the unexpected angle of vision, the dynamic presentation of objects other than human beings (although in this illustration the human figure is also vividly presented).

Hopper’s training as an illustrator gives a special quality to many of his paintings, a kind of dry humor that one wouldn’t expect of him. For example, Gas (1940, Museum of Modern Art) at first glance is a picture of a solitary moment: a gas station at night, with a man – perhaps the owner? – wearing a suit vest but no jacket, doing something with one of three gas pumps lined up in a row.

We can’t see what the man is doing - his hands are hidden behind the closest of the pumps. Why is he there? Impossible to know, but much is going on around him. The windows of the gas station building are brightly lit, and their glow spills out onto the pavement. The three gas pumps are lined up in a row, the closest appearing the largest. Between the pumps and the building is a sign that reads “Mobil Gas.” The sign is more than twice as tall as the pumps.

But look at the painting slightly differently, the same way you might study a multiple image drawing. The three pumps, their tops, like heads, round, with tiny symbols where the eyes would be – and you might easily see three soldiers following a flag. I did, when I looked casually at a reproduction of the picture. The three gas tanks appear to be – sorry – “Mobil-ized.” They look like a little army, following a flag marching ahead of them.

Remembering that Hopper had extensive experience as an illustrator, I do not believe this secondary impression is an accident. Hopper seldom just sat down and painted; he spent a lot of time thinking about the angle of vision of each painting, as well as about its subject and style. Few of his paintings show the “obvious” view of their subjects. There’s always something particular in Hopper’s mind, and often it’s something just out of reach.

A famous example of this is House by the Railroad (1925, Museum of Modern Art). Many will recognize it immediately as the inspiration for the design of the Bates’ house in the movie Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). If you’re familiar with the film, you will recognize the house in the painting at once. To put it mildly, the houses in the film and in the painting both make an impression.

But what, exactly, made the house seem appropriate for such a terrifying movie? There’s nothing odd happening – certainly no people in the picture. But the more you look at the painting, the odder it seems.

The front door is both in shadow and indistinct, and its first floor columns might vaguely make one think of a row of insect feet. The windows seem to have personalities; the panes could be eyes, mostly empty, sometimes dark. Much of the front of the house is in shadow.

Most strikingly, the entire bottom of the picture is completely at odds with the rest – a three layer horizontal swath of dark brown, lighter brown, and red, representing a train track that seems remarkably close to the house. Since the painting appears to look at the house from a slightly lower vantage point, the bottom of the first floor is blocked by the track bed. The effect of the contrast is surprising – one might almost say violent.

My experience is that there’s always something going on in a Hopper painting, something I’d call “dramatic” in the sense that there’s a mystery about it, but a mystery embodied in the painting itself, not particularly in a narrative about people included in it. He has plenty of opportunities to show “human drama;” he just doesn’t want to.

A few examples: in Hotel Room (1931, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) a minimally dressed woman sits on a bed, holding a piece of paper in her hand. A goodbye note? A poem? A map? We can’t tell, and it’s not even clear that she’s reading the paper, which she holds horizontally rather than vertically. What stands out in the painting are about a dozen four-sided blocks of color, the largest two white and yellow, filling the frame; the entire background for the woman’s head is a brilliant white.

Similarly in New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art) a blonde usherette leans against a wall, lit by a three-bulb lamp, biting her fingernail. Visually she is almost entirely overwhelmed , however, by the ornateness of the movie theater.

An indistinguishable movie is on the screen – what is it? Many of Hopper’s paintings have one element in them that raises a question that can’t be answered. But the usherette is not really the center of the “drama” – the movie theater is.

One more example: in High Noon (1949, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio) a slim woman in perhaps an open dressing gown stands in a doorway of a house, which we see straight on from the front. She is looking out the doorway, her head at a slight angle. The house is gleaming white.

However, the sky does not seem particularly bright; in fact, it looks cloudy, although the sun, out of the picture at the left although we can’t see it, is casting a strong shadow. Once we take in the elements of the painting, the effect is one of opposites. But why? The painting maintains its mystery.

My contention then is that there is plenty of drama in Hopper’s paintings, but it is “painterly” drama, arising from the elements of the picture itself and not from a human story of the kind one might write a scene or a short play about.

Some of his paintings illustrate this point easily. One of my favorites, The Mansard Roof (1923, Brooklyn Museum, New York), shows a many-surfaced three floor house framed by trees on the right and left. In the picture it’s a windy day, and curtains are flapping from the second (main) floor balcony.

By the time one has studied the picture from left to right, it has almost become an essay in pure depiction of motion, with a swirl of tree branches that is almost abstract. The painting seems alive. And in one third-floor window is (perhaps) a window shade that, in contrast to everything else in view, is bright yellow. A small mystery.

I used the words “almost abstract.” Hopper claimed not to be interested in Abstract Art, which Wikipedia describes as using “visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.” Nevertheless his work has strong affinities both with Impressionism, as I noted above, and also with Abstraction.

His “abstractions” tend to be firm, not vague, in outline. In Room in Brooklyn (1932, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), for example, we see a woman in a rocking chair, and on a table a vase of flowers. But what attracts – practically overwhelms – the eye are the many geometric forms that make up the window, the floor, the table, the buildings on the other side of the street.

Particularly interesting is a rectangular piece of “sunlight” on the floor in the painting, which stands out and comes as a surprise. Rick writes:                                                                        

He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation. 

I agree with his observation, but obviously not with his conclusion. True, Hopper is greatly interested in light, in its sources and in how it falls, and he makes this a subject (I wouldn’t say a “study”) in his work. Light after all is central to sight, to appearance, even, in physics, to the nature of matter itself. He is particularly interested in the sources of light – where it comes from.

He is also meticulous in his placement of shadows. In fact, in many of his paintings they almost become presences in themselves, as significant as anything else in the painting. He may not emphasize the presence of human figures, although there are exceptions, but he demonstrates that there are other kinds of presences, shadows being one of them.

But Hopper doesn’t as a rule present light in the way the Impressionists would. He gives light not so much texture as shape. Shadows and areas of light in his paintings have structure, solidity, of a remarkable sturdiness. They have presence.

More than anything they remind me of the paintings of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who famously said, “I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums.” I have not found any reference where Hopper acknowledged Cezanne as an inspiration.

But physical objects in Hopper’s paintings are unmistakably there, as they are in Cezanne’s works, and a principal reason is his use of geometrical shapes to a degree close to abstraction. Much in his paintings is a collection of squares, triangles, circles, and so on.

Obviously he is not alone in this. But my point is that in Hopper’s paintings, things are as significant as people. Hopper has a story to tell – not a literal story, a pictorial one – and he tells it through objects. It’s a story told through his chosen medium of painting. His story doesn’t rely on human interrelationships as they present themselves as drama. It’s a story told in and through paint itself.

So my disagreement with Rick is really only with the idea that Hopper’s work is “cold.” It doesn’t seem cold to me – it seems to me to be vibrant in observation, dynamic in construction, deeply appreciative in observation, and alert to the possibilities of human communication, waiting for us to use.

And speaking of communication, one of the features of Hopper’s paintings that is so obvious as to be almost invisible, is the many ways he depicts means of communication. He seldom shows them as alive with drama – he simply reminds us that they exist.

In that sense, his paintings, far from devoid of human communication, are alive with it. In the pictures discussed in this article, we have seen references to coffee shops and stores – places where people gather; automobiles; railroad trains; letters; movies; the Mobil sign.

A quick glance through a book of reproductions of his paintings also shows electric signs; pictures; plays; clocks; window lettering; newspapers; books; telephone poles; antennae . . . in addition to scenes of human interaction, of which of course there are a number.

But, again, the drama is in the painting, not a situation the artist has painted. The colors and shapes that Hopper has put on canvas are integral to his meaning. An artist – in any of the arts – is constantly saying, “Look at that! Look at that!” Through Hopper’s eyes I “see” things I otherwise would not have seen.

In that apartment in Norwich, on the morning we were going to leave, I woke up while it was still dark. The window shade was up, and through the window I saw – a “Hopper painting!” Geometric shapes, a light casting shadows, a street not yet busy with cars, a phone pole with wires stretching out of the “frame,” an unlit sign on a factory wall, not yet readable. There it was, a Hopper. Thank you, sir.

My appreciation of Hopper changed when my perception of his work "clicked” and I saw it for the first time as a depiction not of isolated people so much as of a world waiting for relationships and stories. The result for me has been a greater appreciation of Hopper’s work, and even more, of the world around me.

[This is a perfect example of what I used to tell my writing students was how writing works.  In “Why Write” (4 March 2013), I said:

I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print.  One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on.  That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them. 

[In this case, I wrote something about Hopper’s paintings, and Kirk took what I said and wrote something back.  Now I could take what he said and say something more--or someone else could.

[There are several mentions of comments I’ve written about Edward Hopper and his art on Rick On Theater.  Below are the cross-references to those posts.  First, here are the reports I posted on art exhibits that featured Hopper:

⠂ "Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney," 23 April 2019 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/04/hopper-and-turner-at-national-gallery.html)

⠂ "Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960," 12 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/where-we-are-selections-from-whitneys.html)

⠂ "Short Takes: Some Art Shows," 17 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/short-takes-some-art-shows.html); see the section on Edward Hopper 

[Kirk specifically discusses two of Hopper’s canvases about which I also wrote.  The first is Nighthawks, which I discuss in "Where We Are.”  With respect to the dramatic implications of the paintings, I wrote: “[Y]ou wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.”

[(Curiously, Nighthawks also comes in for a pertinent mention in my report on Three Sisters on 29 April 2012.  In fact, there are occasional references to Hopper’s paintings in a number of my play reports on ROT.)

[In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery” (in the section of that report on the two NGA exhibits) I make similar remarks about New York Movie: “The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?”

[(In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.)

[Kirk also writes about Hopper’s relationship to Abstract art.  I also discuss this in "Hopper and Turner.”  (In the round-up of reviews of NGA’s Edward Hopper, following my report on the show itself, there are further observations by various reviewers and commentators on this subject.)

[Finally, Kirk writes extensively about Hopper’s use of shadow.  I hadn’t recalled this until I skimmed my old posts while prepping this post, but I did, too.  The discussions of Hopper’s paintings that include consideration of his emphasis on shadow are principally in “Hopper and Turner” (including, again, the review survey) and “Where We Are.”]