[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.
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!
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